A few dozen miles from the mountains, the people of the village awoke just a little before midnight. They hadn’t heard anything yet, or seen anything yet, no, and there were no stories that had reached them and told them that something was coming. The whole village simply awoke, all at once, as though someone had come into each and every house, and shaken each and every person back into the world at precisely the same moment— they felt it coming.
It was not with their bodies, though, that they felt it. It hadn’t come near enough, yet, for the ground in the village, all the buildings to begin to tremble— no, the night here was silent and still, for the moment, but the villagers felt it— vibrations along the soul of the Earth. Panicked tremors of the planet, they felt it like too-cold water in the pits of their stomachs. And then they smelled it. The air of the village began turning sour, citrus, and then rank, spoiled. Bitter and sour, fecund. The people of the town came out into the night streets, whispering to each other, their families and friends and neighbors, everyone whispering about the smell, and that feeling, that feeling that something was coming. And then, now, it was near enough for the ground to begin trembling, and the buildings. The trembles came in twos of twos, “thoom-thoom, thoom-thoom!”, quiet, “thoom-thoom, thoom-thoom!”— a bit stiffer each time, each time the people of the village felt the trembles rising up a little further into their bodies, from the arches of their feet to their ankles, to their calves, to their knees, to their hips, and by the time the trembles were rattling their ribs, they could hear it now, too, what was coming. Footsteps— “thoom-thoom, thoom-thoom!”— something was walking towards them. Something enormous. Something titanic. “Thoom-thoom, thoom-thoom!”— the stench was growing stronger, the panic was soaring, soaring, in the air and among the people. They did not whisper, now, they screamed to each other in terror, they begged each other for answers they knew nobody had— what was coming? What was it going to do to them when it arrived? Children wept and howled and clung to their parents, husbands and wives clung together. The leader of the village stood silent and still, paralyzed by the madness. He was the first person to see the approaching nightmare cresting the distant horizon.
“Thoom-thoom, thoom-thoom!”
An hour later, the shadow was past the village. Of the hundred-or-so-people gathered out on the streets, nearly all were still breathing and intact. Nearly all of the houses and other buildings, too. Only six people had been killed, and only because they hadn’t moved aside fast enough as the shadow came and went. The thing hadn’t snatched them up and torn them to ribbons, or burned them away with the heinous poison of its drool. It had simply stepped on them, because they were standing where its foot was coming down. It was simply passing through. They had simply been there as it had come. It may not even have stepped on them at all if it had noticed.
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There was an order to this. An order to follow, an order to be kept. Their place on the list hadn’t come yet.
The stench hung in the air for hours, hours, long after the shadow had gone. Only six people had been killed, and nearly all of the buildings of the village were still in one piece. But even so, the villagers, that night, they gathered up all their things, each and every person, each and every family. They packed everything they had, and they left, to go and live somewhere else, away from here— away from so much as even the memory of that shadow, of that… none of them could say quite what it was, that they had seen, that had stepped through their lives, that had loomed over them, its belly a hundred feet up as it passed. None of them could say how many burning-red eyes they had counted. None of them could say quite how many heads they had counted, on how many necks, how many teeth in how many mouths, or how many tails. It was a cursed thing that they had seen. It had tainted this place, by passing through here, forever, it had tainted all the people who had seen it. Everywhere that its saliva had dropped was a dead spot, now, all the grasses and flowers and mosses upon the rocks instantly withered away to dusty yellow-brown husks of nothing, scoured. These spots would grow back, in time, the life of the Earth would fill in its missing parts as always it did, but there was something else that had been lost that would not so easily come back.
They people packed away everything they had, and they left. The people could not stay.
Families clung to each other— they carried on clinging to each other, just as they had been clinging to each other as the thing had come, and as the thing had gone. Parents and children, husbands and wives. But aside from this, all the people of the village went their separate ways, just as they meant to. Even for all the bonds of the place, none of them wanted to so much as see any of the others again, so long as they lived. They could not look upon a face from that village without feeling the trembling in their hearts again. They drowned, from nowhere at all, in the smell. The real sight of the world faded and the only thing they could see was the shape, the teeth, the mouths, the heads, the tails, the night’s own darkness gnarled into configurations that things down upon the Earth were not meant to behold. They could not stand to be near one another, and so they all went out in all different directions, as far as they could go, and for every moment until the end to things, they tried to forget that great shadow that they had seen.
None of them had seen the smaller shadow riding atop it as it lumbered by, onwards and onwards and onwards, towards the mountains. And he had not seen them. He had not seen this village the last time he had come here, either— that time from the West, and this time from the East. Last time, he had come alone, silently; no one had heard him coming, seen him coming. Last time, he had come from downwind.
He was long past the point, now, of bothering with that.
