Piercing and lingering, the tones of the pipes flowed into his veins, tingling, warring with the numbing poison of the currupira’s song.
Dalton was no musician but it seemed to him then that an ancestral instinct was with him, guiding his breath and his fingers. The powers of the monster were darkness and cold and weariness of living, the death-urge recoiling from life into nothingness.
But the powers of the pipes were life and light and warmth, life returning when the winter is gone, greenness and laughter and love. Life was in them, life of men dead these thousand generations, life even of the craftsmen on an alien planet who had preserved their form and their meaning for this moment.
Dalton advanced of his own will until he stood beside Thwaite—but the other remained unstirring and Dalton did not dare pause for a moment, while the monster yet bellowed in the blackness before them. The light of the flare was reddening, dying….
After a seeming eternity he saw motion, saw the rifle muzzle swing up. The shot was deafening in his ear, but it was an immeasurable relief. As it echoed the currupira’s voice was abruptly silent. In the bushes ahead there was a rending of branches, a frantic slithering movement of a huge body.
They followed the noises in a sort of frenzy, plunging toward them heedless of thorns and whipping branches. The flashlight stabbed and revealed nothing. Out of the shadows a bass croaking came again, and Thwaite fired twice at the sound and there was silence save for a renewed flurry of cracking twigs.
Along the water’s edge, obscured by the trees between, moved something black and huge, that shone wetly. Thwaite dropped to one knee and began firing at it, emptying the magazine.
They pressed forward to the margin of the slough, feet squishing in the deep muck. Dalton played his flashlight on the water’s surface and the still-moving ripples seemed to reflect redly.
Thwaite was first to break the silence. He said grimly, “Damned lucky for me you got here when you did. It—had me.”
Dalton nodded without speaking.