Beautiful Blood

“You’d be putting your horse at risk.” Cerruti chewed, swallowed. “I reckon leaving him out there until night, you’re not going to find nothing but bones and the head. But if you’re willing, it’s all right with me.”

Thankfully, because of Cerruti’s laconic style, Rosacher did not feel it necessary to make conversation and, while his host busied himself with household chores, he tried to work on a plan of attack against Mospiel, given that Temalagua’s involvement could be circumvented. The heat, however, overwhelmed him and he nodded off, drowsing through the long afternoon. He woke late in the day, about five o’clock judging by the rich golden light, and was clearing away the cobwebs, considering how to pass the hours before dusk, when he heard, from near at hand, a vast animal rumbling that raised the hair on the back of his neck. He jumped up from the chair, fumbled for his rifle, and said, “What in God’s name is that?”

Cerruti sat opposite him, sharpening his knife on a whetstone—in the dim light, his hair half-obscuring his face, he seemed for the moment a wildly romantic figure and not an uneducated yokel. “Don’t get all lathered up,” he said. “That’s just Frederick having a dream.”

Rosacher let this sink in. “I thought Frederick was a man.”

“He is. ’Least he says he is. You can make up your own mind.”

Warily, Rosacher took his seat, but did not fall back asleep, his mind racing, alert to every noise. At twilight there came a renewed rumbling from without, louder and more extensive than before, and the sound of something big moving through the grass. Once again Rosacher shot to his feet and caught up his rifle.

“Easy, man!” Cerruti put a hand on his arm to restrain him. “Frederick don’t care for rifles much, so you’d do well to leave it here.”

Full of trepidation, Rosacher followed him out onto the plain, but saw nothing of Frederick. After the staleness of the house, the air felt fresh and cool. The sun was down behind Griaule’s mountainous body and, except for a faint redness in the west, the plain was immersed in a purplish gloom, resembling in that crepuscular light pictures of the African veldt in books that Rosacher had thought exotic as a child, yet now seemed, in conjunction with the scene before him, to prefigure some occult menace.

He scanned the plain, searching for any object or movement that might signal Frederick’s presence and saw in the distance a great dark shape flowing through the high grass, going very fast, much faster than a creature of its apparent size should be capable. It was speed without apparent purpose—the thing ran back and forth, and then in loops and circles, describing a variety of patterns that remained visible thanks to the flattened grass in its wake. Rosacher recognized that there was something playful about its exercise, like the running of a young dog that has been pent up for a while.

“You’re a lucky man,” Cerruti said. “Frederick’s in a good mood. There’s times he’s right intolerant of strangers.”

“That’s Frederick?” said Rosacher, pointing at the dark shape, hoping for a negative response.

“In the flesh.” Cerruti made a choking noise that might have been a laugh. “So to speak.”

Rosacher wondered at the cause of Cerruti’s amusement, but was so mesmerized by Frederick’s to-and-fro dashes across the plain that he failed to inquire further. “I’ll bring him over,” Cerruti said. He did not call out or whistle or wave, yet Frederick abruptly changed course and came toward them at a good clip, growing in the space of three or four seconds from a dark shape a hundred yards away to a black featureless mound half the size of a full-grown elephant that settled in the grass a mere twenty feet away. Rosacher stumbled backward, terrified by the thing, by the chuffing of its breath, loud as a steam engine, and by its size and unstable surface—its substance, the stuff of its body, appeared to be in constant flux, a glossy black like polished onyx flowing across who-knows-what sort of structure, be it only more of the same blackness or a skeleton of sorts or something else, something completely implausible. It put Rosacher in mind of those oddments occasionally thrown up by the sea, a glob of protoplasm, a relic of some obscure life unknown and perhaps unknowable to man, a shapeless fragment broken or bitten off from a greater shapelessness…and yet as its breathing subsided, reduced to the level of a smithy’s bellows, it seemed to flirt with a shape, to verge upon the animal, to assume for a fleeting instant the curves and musculature of an enormous sloth, or a bear with an elongated head and snout, and acquiring, too, a gamey odor that waxed and waned in accordance with the degree to which that shape was realized. Rosacher trembled before this monster, understanding death was near, but Cerruti, calm as ever, said, “Frederick wanted to know if that’s your horse out there by the tail. I told him not to eat it.”