The Line Between

I might have lain there for a little while — I don't know. It cannot have been long, because the body was abruptly snatched off mine and flung back and away, like a snug blanket on a winter's morning, when your mother wants you out feeding the jejebhais. The Goro hauled me to my feet.

«Him," it said, and nothing more. It made no menacing gesture, uttered no horrifying threat; none of that was necessary. Now here is where the foolishness comes in. I had every hysterical intention of crying, «Lord, lord, please, do not slay me, and I will lead you straight to where he hides, only spare my wretched life.» I meant to, I find no disgrace in telling you this, especially since what I actually heard myself say — quite politely, as I recall — was, «You will have to kill me, sir.» For that miserable, lying, insulting, shapeshifting old man, I did that, and he jeered at me for it, later on. Ah, well, we begin as we are meant to continue, I suppose.

The Goro regarded me out of those eyes that could neither blink (though I saw a sort of pinkish membrane flick across them from time to time) nor reveal the slightest feeling. It said, «That would serve no useful purpose. You will take me to him.»

As I have said, it raised no deadly paw, showed no more teeth than the long muzzle normally showed. But I felt the command, and the implacable will behind the command — I felt the Goro in my mind and my belly, and to disobey was not possible. Not possible … I can tell you nothing more. Except, perhaps, that I was young. Today, withered relic that I am become, I might yet perhaps hold that will at bay. It was not possible then.

«Yes," I said. «Yes.» The Goro came up to me, moving with a curious shuffling grace, if one can say that, wrapping that tail around its haunches as daintily as a lace shawl. It gripped me between neck and shoulder and turned me. I said nothing further, but started slowly toward the farmhouse that was not a farmhouse — or perhaps it was? What did I know of anything's reality anymore? My ribs were so badly bruised thai I could not draw a full breath, and there was something wrong with the arm that had killed the Hunter. The half–moon was setting now, silvering the shadows and filling the hard ruts with shivering, deceiving light and it was cold, and I was a child in a man's body, wishing I were safe back in that place.

Nearing the farmhouse, the Goro halted, tightening its clutch on my shoulder. Weary and bewildered as I was — no, more than bewildered half–mad, surely — I studied the house, looked at it for the first time, and could not imagine anyone ever having taken it for anybody's home. The dark waiting beyond the sagging door sprang out to greet us with a stench far beyond stench: not the smell that anciently abandoned places have, of wood rotted into black slush, blankets moldering on the skeleton of a bed, but of an unhuman awareness having nothing to do with our notions of life or shelter, or even ordinary fear. The thing's camouflage — how long in evolving? how can it have begun to pass itself off as something belonging to this world? — might serve well enough from a distance, on a dark night, but surely close to…? Then I

glanced back at the Goro.

The Goro had forgotten me completely, though its paw remembered. Its eyes continued to tell me nothing, but it was staring at the farmhouse–thing with an intensity that would have been rapture in a human expression. It lisped, much more to itself than to me, «He is in there. I have run him to earth at last.»

«No," I said, once more to my own astonishment. «No. It is a trap. Believe me.»

«I honor your loyalty," the Goro said. It bent its awful head and made a curious gesture with its free paw which I have never seen again, and which may have meant blessing, or merely a compliment. I try not to think about it. It said, «But you cannot know him as I do. He is here because what he stole from me is here. Because his honor demands that he face me to keep it, as mine demands that he pay the price of a stolen dream. We understand each other, we two.»

«Nonsense," I said. I felt oddly lightheaded, and even bold, in the midst of my leg–caving, bladder–squeezing terror. «He has no honor, and he cares nothing for your dream, or for anything but his continual false–hearted existence. And that is no house, but a horror from somewhere more alien to you than you are to me. Please — I am trying to save you, not him. Believe me, please.»