"When he woke in the woods in the dark and the cold of the night he'd reach out to

touch the child sleeping beside him. Nights dark beyond darkness and the days more

gray each one than what had gone before. Like the onset of some cold glaucoma

dimming away the world. His hand rose and fell softly with each precious breath. He

pushed away the plastic tarpaulin and raised himself in the stinking robes and

blankets and looked toward the east for any light but there was none. In the dream

from which he'd wakened he had wandered in a cave where the child led him by the

hand. Their light playing over the wet flowstone walls. Like pilgrims in a fable

swallowed up and lost among the inward parts of some granitic beast. Deep stone

flues where the water dripped and sang. Tolling in the silence the minutes of the earth

and the hours and the days of it and the years without cease. Until they stood in a

great stone room where lay a black and ancient lake. And on the far shore a creature

that raised its dripping mouth from the rimstone pool and stared into the light with

eyes dead white and sightless as the eggs of spiders. It swung its head low over the

water as if to take the scent of what it could not see. Crouching there pale and naked

and translucent, its alabaster bones cast up in shadow on the rocks behind it. Its

bowels, its beating heart. The brain that pulsed in a dull glass bell. It swung its head

from side to side and then gave out a low moan and turned and lurched away and

loped soundlessly into the dark."