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have before me a fresh bouquet of flowers, brought in by a young relation who knows I like them. They overflow the neck of a slender, transparent glass vase and gently nod their heads with the movement of my fingers.
It is some consolation to rest my eyes on their vividly colored forms of lemon yellow and aquamarine—to describe the curve of their leaves with my glance and be lost in the youthful ebullience of their collocation. It is, above all, a relief to touch them, although the hand that feels recalls by its own appearance the scenes of monstrosity and ruin just passed.
Months after the event, I am called upon to make a formal deposition. But I have no will to set upon public dispute or shape testimony for that purpose. My hours are alternated between lucid pain and benumbed incoherence, and the minutes of mingled clarity and relief are too few to squander in an officious report of destruction. Therefore, I will remember as I can remember. And if this account is left incomplete, stopped with the hand that supplies it, then nothing more is lost than another among those already consumed.
I will preface my account by a few preliminary facts, less to inform the public than to deliberately exclude speculation—that no one may attribute to me after my death opinions or experiences that are not my own.
On the 12th of August, an event took place in West Virginia, north of I‑64 and south of Quinnimont. The earliest extant video footage shows a black cloud spreading between and over the hills with great speed. A heaviness, too, is suggested by the inclination of the cloud to move along the lay of the land—along the valleys—passing over the hilltops only when forced by the sheer accumulation of vapor. It was accompanied by a low rumbling and crackling, noises that were constant and only diminished with the slackening of its speed.
We know from the successive locales engulfed that the speed of its expansion increased in the early hours. Several notable videos depict the advance of its outer wall from the horizon to the point of observation in a matter of seconds. And more than one commentator observed the impression of crawling—as though the whole body of black fog were carried on a multitude of indistinct appendages that struck out at the ground—dissolved, reformed and struck out again—at every moment of its progress.
If the cloud was not explosive in origin, it nonetheless gave off heat, since subsequent examination of the relevant region of West Virginia showed plainly the incineration of the landscape. But the heat lessened with the cloud’s progress, consistent with the decrease of sound. And most of the region engulfed was covered silently, with no mark of burning or dessication, although wind damage from hurricane-force winds prevailed through all but the outermost parts.
The cloud remained aloft for several days after the cessation of its progress. During this time, it put forth evanescent tendrils or limbs that dissolved as quickly as they were formed. To those who approached, no sound was perceptible from within beyond a low hissing. And even this ceased as the cloud’s form stabilized, subsided and slowly settled to the ground.
My city was evacuated three hours after the event and long before the cloud ceased to expand or even slow its pace. I escaped north on I‑65 for a quarter-hour before traffic slowed to a stop. A combination of accidents caused cars to stall or become hopelessly wedged together. Tempers flared and some drivers tried to ram their way through those ahead of them.
I left my car amid the noise of crunching steel, blaring horns and shouts, and clambered over the cars that separated me from the embankment. From there, I made my way to a subdivision, where I wandered aimlessly for nearly an hour through the abandoned and unfamiliar streets before coming to a rest under a tree. What happened to the others on the interstate, I never saw. No person appeared. And once under the tree, I soon fell asleep—a thing that may seem incredible until you consider the stress of the situation. I was lost, without transportion and in the path of a catastrophe that I then understood to be vaguely connected with nuclear, biological or chemical weapons.
To this hour, I have no idea how long I slept. It may have been only a minute, although I thought on waking that the light had subtly changed. But sleep had done me good and I soon found my way to a major thoroughfare and started walking north.
As I continued, I called my family. They had left the city somewhat earlier than I and were travelling well north of the jam that had stopped me. When they asked where I was, I lied. I said that traffic moved slowly but steadily and that it would be a while before I caught up to them. I saw no point in saying anything else; if they returned for me, it was not certain that they would be able to make their way back again—and judging by the last broadcasts I had heard on the radio, there was little time before the cloud reached the area where I stood.
Soon it would come rolling over the horizon. Perhaps I would hear it before I saw it—would hear its rumbling, turn my head and see the black wall bearing down upon me just as I was encompassed by its shadow and subsumed in the fire or poison it concealed. There would certainly be nothing to do but watch its approach. Its speed was then calculated at better than 90 miles per hour (although that later proved inaccurate) and I had no hope of outrunning it.
I saw storefronts abandoned. Not even one brazen looter was to be seen. I was alone in my walk and only looked back now and then in expectancy of the cloud’s appearance. From the last word I spoke to my family, perhaps five minutes passed. Then there was a noise, slight but continuous, that for a while might have been only the soughing of the wind. It became louder and more distinct. A car appeared around the bend of the road and tore down rapidly in my direction. I stepped to the curb, waved my arms and shouted.
With perfect surprise, if not actual disbelief, I watched the driver slow, come gently to a stop and throw open the passenger door. I crossed to the open door and got inside.
This person’s name and circumstances are not necessary to relate. And I hesitate to say much of him, since his account may differ from mine, however subtly and for understandable reasons. I have not seen him since we parted and have no time now to track him down to confer. I am not sure he still lives, since he has likely suffered the same sickness of residual fumes that has afflicted me. But he preserved my life so far as to reunite me with my loved ones and touch these flowers which yet suffer the touch of my misshapen hand.
He drove, and I sat for several minutes without being capable of speech. The streets appeared and died away behind us, and the rear view mirror was undarkened by the cloud. As much as the previous hours had been nightmare, this now—if only for a while—seemed like a dream, as though the road would appear forever before us as the sun and clouds stand motionless overhead.
We were speeding down a long, unswervingly straight country road, while trees and occasional houses passed by on either hand. I wondered, but did not ask, where he was going or what was his plan.
He turned down a gravel drive and continued under a canopy of trees until we came to a white clapboard house. Behind it stretched a large mown field. He gave me a set of keys and told me to take the few belongings stowed in the back seat to a large barn that stood a hundred yards off. I did so, and discovered that it contained a single-engine plane. Without waiting for him to return, I climbed up, loaded the few bags and jugs, then went to the door to wait for him. He returned carrying a solitary rucksack and two more jugs of water, which he subsequently squeezed behind and between the two seats of the cockpit.
Another moment, and we were bumping down the length of the field, the jolts increasing in rapidity if not in violence for what seemed a full minute. And then there was nothing but the interior sensation of lift, the face of the hills falling below the dash and the deep blue, slowly darkening sky.
During the hours that followed, we spoke little. The sky slid impassively by, while the cloud’s advancing front remained hidden by the southern horizon. Distinct awareness did not return to me until I realized that we were flying in a circle. Below us lay a small airstrip, little more than a clearing with a few buildings beside it. The sky was dim with the coming of night, but I could see before we touched down that the place was deserted.
It was, he said, the property of a friend. He found keys to open the house and a small hangar, and refueled the plane while I watched television and gathered the latest news. When we were done, we decided to stay for the night, taking shifts to follow the news and track the cloud’s proximity.
For the next two days, we remained. The cloud’s expansion had ceased and we agreed that no good could be accomplished by moving further north. We made phone calls and spoke to our families and friends—and had long, worried conversations about the ones we could not reach.
These conversations, together with a steady diet of news, made us feel our helplessness but also made us eager to act. And when we learned that the cloud’s nearest perimeter was receding from a point just north of Lafayette, Indiana, we made plans to fly back and investigate.
He warned me that, although reports were reassuring as to the cloud’s subsidence, he could in no way guarantee my safety—that he was in no position to offer significant assistance to those we found—that were we to find any great number waiting for us, he would not land. We would take pistols, in case of looters. We would take breathers and gloves, and avoid touching anything, in case of poisonous residue.
We waited one more day, during which we received no news of consequence. Everyone was warned to stay clear. Many refugees continued moving north.
Of our flight south, there is little to say. Little was visible but the everlasting trees that passed like an ocean beneath us. As we approached Lafayette, I saw abandoned vehicles on Highway 43 but nothing else.
We landed without trouble at Purdue University Airport, which was silent and had evidently been abandoned in an orderly manner. We made our way on foot to a railroad track, followed it to Newman Road, then went east on Newman to State Street, which led through Purdue University into town.
As we entered the campus, we took closer notice of our surroundings. Upon everything lay a thin gray film. It struck us first and most forcibly in the case of signs and windows, where it obscured words or muted reflections. But it was observable also on plants. In rubbing the leaf of a tree, the residue came away with a partly dissolved layer of the leaf itself—a minute green liquescence. I thought that the cloud must have had some corrosive effect. And when I saw, here and there, a few blades of grass stuck together as though melted and resolidified at their point of incidental contact, I took it as confirmation of my guess without making more of it. We both wore breathers, the common sort of masks worn in paint shops, and imagined that they would be effectual in filtering out any harmful elements that might remain in the air. And there were the gloves to protect our hands.
It is difficult to describe the silence. I can enumerate the things we didn’t hear—voices, cars, the hum or burr of the multitude of machines that animate the civilized world. There was not even the song of birds. If we neither spoke nor walked, we heard only a faint soughing of air through the streets and over the land. It was such a silence as must have been the earth’s in a primordial age, when over a shallow sea could be heard only the machinations of atmosphere and earth. And had we looked on such a scene, it might have been less strange. Among the crowded buildings of the university, it was an unnatural suspense and desolation.
The university and city must have been largely abandoned, and we had much to be grateful for in that respect. But many remained, although their reasons for doing so will never be known. Perhaps they didn’t hear the warnings or disbelieved them—or curiosity held them to a fatally late hour when it was impossible to outrun destruction. All that can be said is that we found the places where they moved and broke forth.
One of the upper windows of a dorm was shattered, but no body lay on the lawn below. My companion pointed it out and we decided that someone, living or dead, must remain inside. We marked the position of the window and entered the building.
Of all things, we had not thought to bring flashlights. And since the sooty film muted the windows, we walked in thick darkness, feeling our way along the walls and creeping up the black stairwell with excruciating slowness.
We counted the doors until we came to the one that matched the place of the broken window. It was unlocked and we went inside.
The apartment consisted of a large sitting room with two small bedrooms attached. In the latter, nothing was disturbed. But in the former, objects were scattered around everywhere. A table was overturned, shelves were thrown down—books, beer cans and plates were intermingled and pushed against the walls as though a Zamboni had passed helter-skelter through the room, clearing the center and throwing everything else in confusion to the margins. But even where the floor was cleared, it was not clean. I knelt and touched the boards. They were coated with a transparent slime. I briefly lowered my breather and smelled it; it was evidently odorless although a kind of animal smell hung over the room as a whole. The same substance also coated the windowsill.
There was no one, living or dead, in the apartment although the leavings of food (lying on the floor with the books and plates) indicated recent occupation. And my companion noted by chance that a stereo in one of the bedrooms was turned on, its volume dialed halfway to its maximum level—although it was of course silent, since the whole town was without power. With those unsatisfactory observations, we left the building and continued our exploration of the campus.
We had half-crossed the university when we found a bird lying in the road, the first we had anywhere observed since landing. In retrospect, I suppose it must have suffered only marginal exposure to the cloud or had entered the area after its recession, as we had done. It was a robin, still alive, twitching now and then as if it meant any moment to struggle to its feet and fly away.
The motions of the wings and legs were purely secondary, incidental to that of other, inchoate and largely undefined limbs that seemed to spring from the decay of the body. One of the wings had lost its feathers, had become gray and oily, and was putting forth tendrils that groped tentatively before fastening on some portion of flesh or bone. And elsewhere on the body, we found the same process further advanced—tendrils reaching from one spot to another and spreading in their reach the same gray oiliness as appeared on the wing. The whole creature was in the grip of a transformation, but one that (even after watching several minutes) assumed no distinct form.
After rummaging around on the ground floor of a nearby building, we found an empty five-gallon paint bucket. We put the bird inside, poked holes in the lid for air (we could hardly avoid the impression that the poor creature was still alive) and left it in the middle of the street to recover on our return.
As we continued down State Street, I was harrassed by the sound of the wind. It might have been the memory of the bird working on my imagination but the fitful soughing through the empty streets set my teeth on edge. I said nothing about it—we had more important business at hand—and to this hour I can’t be sure that the noise I heard was anything more than what it seemed. But I felt that it had changed since our arrival. It seemed to drag itself around us through the vacancies and susurrate more stridently than before. It was as though nature itself groaned against our visitation—as though it hated our existence. And I was sensibly relieved when we approached the edge of campus and the noise diminished.
We came to the bridge that passed over Wabash River into downtown Lafayette. The river’s music was soothing, a mark of normality. It ran on its appointed course where all else was stopped. But I thought also of what poison might now be carried with it and pursue the survivors of the tragedy to their safe havens.
I had no more than formed the thought before my companion called my attention to a car abandoned halfway along the span. It was empty, keys in the ignition and still in gear. Heaps of belongings were left piled in suitcases and duffle bags in the back seat. The front seats were empty but covered with a film of transparent slime like that of the dorm; and the same substance coated the driver’s side door, inside and out. Nothing more than these presented itself (although there might have been a faint trail on the ground, washed over and made invisible by a larger one that came afterward) and we passed on.
Leaving the bridge behind us, we entered the oldest part of town, a circumstance that heightened my sense of the scene’s unreality. Here, under the clear light of the morning sun, loomed the eldest speciments of the city’s past. Century-old Italianate and Gothic structures leered with shaded eyes as though in triumph of having outlasted the tenancy of their makers. But we did not enter them. It seemed too evident that, despite the cars here and there to be found, the town had been evacuated in good order and that most or all of its inhabitants had escaped.
It may be that my sense of the city’s unreality, of the combined age and impressive vacancy of the buildings we passed, was shared by my companion. The memory of the bird being driven for the moment from our thoughts, we now gazed stupidly at the ornate county courthouse which formed the downtown’s most notable feature. We walked down first one side and then another—stared up at the exaggeration of the high and narrow dome—scrutinized the vague silhouettes of statues—lost ourselves in myriad columns and bas reliefs—and were hypnotized by the ponderous doors that muffled the unattended darkness within.
We were dreaming. Armed with weapons that were useless, shielded ineffectually against poison, we were nonetheless in awe of the signs of danger, in thrall to the disorder that threatened, entranced by open doors, darkened windows—by the simple detritus blown by the wind and the re-echo of our footsteps when the wind was dead and silent.
We were passing along the third side of the courthouse when we came to a bank. A glance at the entrance told of its forcible entry and we thought it might still be occupied by the thieves who had broken in. Upon entering, we found no one in sight. But the damage done to security cameras confirmed our first assumption, so we continued to search. The glass doors at the entrance were shattered and one broad shaft of light plainly illuminated a space just beyond the foyer. Reflections of this light outlined but did not embellish the room around us. We saw a kiosk with its chained pens still standing neatly upright on their bases—two desks as neatly arrayed as the kiosk—the doorway of an office that proved to be empty—and the long central counter that gave access to the tellers. The lower half of the counter, to a height of four feet, was of wood; but the upper half, running to the ceiling, consisted of panes of two-inch thick bullet-resistant glass. At the end of the counter a door stood open.
The normally transparent panes over the counter were nearly as begrimed with residue as windows that fronted the street. Wiping at the residue with our gloved hands only smeared it into a more impenetrable opaqueness. So we started for the door that led behind the counter, to look in and be sure that no one was inside.
I was following my companion to the door when he slipped and fell. He let out a shout that must have been heard by anyone in the bank, were there anyone to hear it, but it was followed by no other noise than our own. Meanwhile, I tried to help him to his feet but almost fell myself. The floor where we stood was covered by something wet that we could not make out. We half-walked, half-clambered back to our former station by the entrance, where we examined our hands and shoes by the light of the sun. They were covered with the same substance as we had found on the abandoned car at the bridge. Here, as before, it was sticky, viscous and transparent. But the discovery of it in the bank and the absence of any answer to my companion’s shout embolded us and aroused our curiosity. The silence disabused us of the notion that we would find a survivor but it also made us feel confident in pursuing the mystery of the strange substance—which we now saw led in an unbroken trail from the entrance, where it was partly dried by the wind and intermingled with fragments of glass, to the doorway that led beyond the counter.
Moving carefully now and groping our way along the wall, we re-approached the door. Along the glass partition was a row of chairs and computers; along the opposite wall were miscellaneous shelves, desks and potted plants. But the trail continued without deviation past these into the broad, dark doorway that led to the vault. The vault was largely undamaged. Some ineffectual cutting had been attempted with a gas torch. But the torch itself looked as if it had been thrown around. The tank was dented, the nozzle bent, the hose actually snapped. And fragments lying in their midst drew our attention to the shattered condition of the fluorescent light fixture overhead, which had been smashed as thoroughly as though it had been beaten with a sledgehammer. Even the walls of the hallway were hacked to pieces—the wallpaper torn away with chunks of drywall and a framed print of a thatched Tudor cottage (set among sunlit country that was the idyllic inverse of all we now saw) was thrown down on the floor with the rest. And most disturbingly, we found a few fragments of clothing. There were buttons, singed and torn scraps of polyester and denim, and a belt buckle without the belt.
But our fatal turn came when we re-emerged from the bank and noticed what we had not seen before. Where the trail passed out of the entrance on to the sidewalk, it made a faint outline on the concrete. It was visible, too, where it moved out onto the asphalt of the street. In fact, now that I noticed it, I felt sure I had seen similar trails before but had not paid attention to them because I had not conceived their origin. In this case, it was two feet wide and passed down the street out of sight.
Why we continued is a mystery to me. We must have had some inkling of what had happened to the thieves—of what had happened and was still happening all around us. But I think that we were still hypnotized and unbelieving—still walked the streets as though the paths of a netherworld.
We could not guess how far we were behind the movement of the thing that had left the trail, but we followed it for many hours. We followed it over lawns where we often lost sight of it and had to search the perimeter for its emergence. We followed it into ditches, where the trail disappeared into the water and continued for half a mile before we saw it once more, running plainly against the concrete of the opposite slope.
That is how I remember so much of that day. We were walking through the city, its suburbs and the surrounding country. But we walked with expectancy, with eyes so alertly interrogating what we saw, that an infinity of ordinary objects were raised to prominence, as though engraved with a stylus and comprising clues to a vast mystery, whose theater was the silent, empty earth. Every building, window, yard and street was new and distinct. Every garden was prodigious with signs and every vitreous surface was alive with suggestion.
The trail also became prodigious. It entered a quaintly decorated house through a window in the kitchen and passed from there (where pineapple upside-down cake remained undisturbed on a dish beneath a glass lid) to the living room and up the stairs (by the foot of which was an endtable bearing issues of the Saturday Evening Post in a neat stack) to what must have been an equally quaint bedroom before the cloud came with its obscure terror, and caused the walls and furniture to be smeared with the inexhaustible slime.
Likewise, the trail led us to a child’s room in a delapidated apartment building, to a heap of scattered belongings on the slope of an underpass, to a tent and the cold remains of a campfire in a field. It led us also to dog pens, pastures and trees. But wherever it went in its long purposeful course, it was grew steadily wider as it merged into other trails no less purposeful in their wanderings than the one they joined.
The longer we walked, the more we saw that the whole area was overlain with a barely perceptible network of alien motion, ever-consolidating their routes and increasing in magnitude. More and more, our path was accompanied by sights of collateral damage—of chainlink fences battered down and glistening, doorways shattered and tree limbs cracked and hanging limply overhead.
The trees were as unsettling as the signs of movement. The place where a limb was broken was partly reformed but not with the look of bark or wood. And the leaves, as we watched, dripped with thick decay and spattered black droplets at our feet. Every living thing had an evil look. The trees, grass, weeds, even the flowers, showed in the entanglement and liquescence of their stems, branches and leaves that a rapid deterioration was taking place. But the unequivocal sign of our danger came in the form of a bird and squirrel (late visitors to the desolate region) that struggled together in the grass, grotesquely fused—beak, teeth, fur and feathers hopelessly scrambled in a more than hippogriffic alliance. And these, as with the bird we had seen before, were mingled with and overtaken by the gray, oily flesh.
The trail became fresher as we followed it and the ooze, thicker as we walked along it. We threw our gazes far ahead of us, although what we expected to see we neither discussed nor properly imagined. All we saw when we scanned the horizon was the increasing agitation of the trees waving at the sky with the buffeting of wind. The movement of branches brought with it each time a fresh hail of black droplets. And the trees became more sluggish in their motions—swung more ponderously and in wide arcs from side to side—even as the wind increased.
All afternoon, dark clouds had been gathering on the horizon. They now reared up like a bulwark, throwing a long shadow toward us as they came on. Their first appearance had filled me with a sense of déjà vu, as though the whole disaster were about to repeat itself. But their cause was more ordinary. They showed neither great speed nor that uncanny, crawling propensity to land that we had seen on the news.
It was with the nearness of the storm and the approach of dusk that we decided to turn back and realized how far we had wandered. Lafayette is not a very large town and would not probably have given us any trouble to navigate under other circumstances. But our sudden realization of the closeness of night and the storm threw our disorientation into sharp relief. We might have retraced the trail, but we knew its route was long and convoluted, turning often upon itself and making wide discursions. So we made our way by the sun until we came to a gas station, where we smashed a window and took a map from which we charted a more direct line to the bridge.
As we went, we crossed several late windings of the trail. We judged its recency by its great width as much as by the freshness of the slime that we could no longer avoid walking in. On a narrow street, it covered the pavement between the buildings and glistened from the red bricks of the walls—made their redness so lurid that they seemed smeared with blood.
With every mile, the city seemed to die and quicken. The grass was black. And the trees, although we avoided them, showed us now and then the sudden drooping of a limb (audible in its decline) or the horrible sloughing off of bark and leaves as they fell or slid to earth. Only the stern rigor of the streets seemed safe anymore—the solid sidewalks and the fixed angles of the buildings. And there we suffered ourselves to cross and recross some new, ever-larger perambulation of the thing we had followed.
We reached the bridge and saw that the trail had preceded us. The whole span from rail to rail was wet and shimmering in the redness of the evening sun. We stared dumbfounded, then looked before and after us at the dead and silent city, with its black grass, falling trees and deformations of animals—and at the university campus, no less still and silent but somehow more malignant and unknowable than before. I scanned the buildings at the other end of the bridge and imagined I saw a shadow moving among them. And perhaps I did see it. But it wavered so much in the flashes of lightning and the red light of dusk that I could distinguish nothing more than darkness—before it disappeared into the depths of remoter streets.
We crossed the bridge. And I was relieved when we reached the end and saw the trail turn aside from State Street. But now the unsettling windlike noise returned with its insistent, strident voice. It was louder than before, much less like wind and more a huge, capricious tide washing through the streets and breaking in its ebb and flow the windows, signs and cars before it.
We remained ahead of the clouds and heard no rainfall but there was lightning and, with it, thunder. It rolled gigantically over us, violent and horrible, but gratefully drowning out for short intervals that obdurate soughing that seemed at every recess of thunder to be nearer at hand.
I no longer believed that it was the wind. I urged my companion onward. I reminded him of the approach of night and the coming storm. Even when we came to a place where everything around and above us dripped with a fresh, thick layer of the transparent slime, I urged him on. But in the midst of that glutenous mess, he saw the bucket in which we had left the bird and I couldn’t keep him from stopping to look inside it. It was crushed flat and the lid had been dragged down the street and lodged in a drain. But of the bird, there was no sign.
At last, I brought him away. It was almost too late. At the next intersection, I saw it. It was three blocks from State Street and moving in our direction. We were transfixed, watching its movements, trying to discern its form and face—to give some identity or intent to the thing.
But there was nothing. The lashing bands of flesh showed articulation but no order. And its sheer mass as it towered beside and often overshadowed the buildings that flanked it caused its outline to be confused in a writhing wall of shadow. All we could see with any clarity was its heaving upper parts that throbbed in semisolid confusion, glistened red with the reflected aura of the guttering sun, and raised a thick veil of steam that bleared the sky and obscured the street.
We turned and ran, while even the thunder could no longer conceal the noise of its pursuit. We passed several blocks and heard it suddenly increase—heavy and undulent—and I turned my head to see it half-drag, half-pour itself out behind us onto State Street. And when the lightning flashed upon it, filling its mass with detail for the briefest of seconds, I stopped and stared. I felt my companion lay a hand on my arm. I heard him shouting. But I couldn’t move. I had seen someone. I thought there were people behind us. I knew that I had seen a face. But we would be high in the air before I brought myself to understand that it had been too large, distorted, stretched, to be the face of anyone that could be helped. And the accompanying arms and legs were diversely struck out at odd angles around it. Nevertheless, during the moment of illumination, the face moved and I thought it spoke to me.
Some time was lost after that. I only remember running along the railroad track toward the airfield, watching the plane grow nearer as I ran, and climbing aboard without looking back. As we rolled down the runway, I glanced once to the side. The creature was clambering over the buildings that lay between us and the track. The lightning flashed more persistently and caught its movement in vivid frames while the darkness between them was filled by the thunder and the grating of metal. The limbs of the thing rose and fell with awful energy over the roofs as it poured itself onto the tarmac and came flailing toward us.
Then I felt that interior sinking that told me we were in the air. We steadily rose, revolved on our course and were soon away. But we were still over the airfield, still in the midst of our revolution, when the lightning gave me a last glimpse of the creature that reared itself beneath us. All but shapeless, it reached after the plane with one of those inchoate limbs that steamed with metamorphosis. But it had no head, no eyes of its own, unless it looked at us from the multitude of faces that stared out all over its body among the congestion of disorganized parts. It bore on every surface the many still imperfectly assumed limbs and features of the survivors of the black cloud.
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