Peter Beagle - The Line Between

«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.»

The Goro looked at me. I have no more idea now than I did then of what it can have been thinking, nor of what it made of my warning. Did it take me seriously and begin silently altering its plans? Had it assumed from the first that, as some sort of partner of its old enemy, nothing I said must ever be trusted for a moment? All I know is what happened—which is that out of the side of my eye I saw the fox burst from the shadows that the farmhouse was real enough to cast in this world, under this moon, and come racing straight toward the Goro and me. In the moonlight, he shone red as the Hunter's blood.

He halted halfway, cocking his head to one side and grinning to show the small stone held in his jaws. I did not notice it immediately: it was barely more than a pebble, less bright than the sharp teeth that gripped it, or the mocking yellow eyes above it. The Goro's crystallized dream, the cause of the unending flight and pursuit that had called to me from a wagonload of manure. The fox tilted his head back, tossed the stone up at the sinking moon, and caught it again.

And the Goro went mad. Nothing I had seen of its raging power, even when it was battling the two Hunters, could possibly have prepared me for what I saw in the next moment. The eyes, the lidless eyes that I had thought could never express any emotion … I was in a midnight fire at sea once, off Cape Dylee, when the waves themselves seemed alight to the horizon, all leaping and dancing with an air of blazing delight at our doom. The Goro's eyes were like that as it lunged forward, not shambling at all now, but charging like a rock – targ, full–speed with the second stride. It was making a sound that it had not made before: if an avalanche had breath, if an entire forest were to fall at once, you might hear something — something — like what I

heard then. Not a roar, not a bellow, not a howl — no word in any language I know will suit that sound. Flesh never made that sound; it came through the Goro out of the tortured earth, and that is all there is to that. That is what I believe.

The fox wheeled and raced away, his red brush joyously, insultingly high, and the Goro went after him. I stumbled forward, shouting, «No!» — but I might as well have been crying out to a forest or an avalanche. Distraught, battered, uncertain of anything at all, it may be that I was deceived, but it seemed to me that the shadow of the farmhouse–thing reared up as they neared it, spreading out to shapelessness and reaching … I knew the fox well enough to anticipate his swerving away at the last possible minute, but I miscalculated, and so did he. The shadow's long long arms cut off his escape on three sides, taking him in mid–leap, as a frog laps a fly out of the air. I thought I heard him utter a single small puppyish yelp, not like a fox at all.

The Goro went straight in after him, never trying to elude the shadow's grasp — I doubt it saw anything but the little dull pebble in the fox's jaws. It vanished as instantly and completely as he had, without a sound.

Telling you this tale, I notice that I am constantly pausing to marvel at my own stupidity. Each time I offer the same defense: I was young, I was inexperienced, I had been reared in a stranger place than any scoffer can possibly have known … all of it true, and none of it resembling an explanation for what I did next. Which was to plunge my naked hands into the devouring shadow, fumbling to rescue anything from its grip — the fox, the Goro, some poor creature consumed before we three ever came within its notice, within range of its desire. Today I can only say that I pitied the Goro, and that the old man — the fox, as you will — was my guide, occasionally my mentor, and somehow nearly my friend, may the gods pity me. Have to do, won't it?

Where was I? Yes, I remember — groping blindly in the shadow on the chance of dragging one or the other of them back into the moonlight of this world. My arms vanished to the wrists, the forearms, past the elbows, into … into the flame of the stars? Into the eternal, unimaginable cold of the gulfs between them? I do not know to this day; for that, you must study my scarred old flesh and form your own opinion. What I know is that my hands closed on something they could not feel, and in turn I hauled them back, though I could not connect them, even in my mind, with a human body, mine or anyone else's. I screamed all the time, of course, but the pain had nothing to do with me — it was far too terrible, too grand, to belong to one person alone. I felt almost guilty keeping it for myself.

The shadow fought me. Whatever I had seized between my burning, frozen hands — and I could not tell whether it was as small a thing as the fox or as great as the Goro — the shadow wanted it back, and very nearly took it from me. And why I did not, would not, allow that to happen, I cannot put into words for you. I think it was the hands' decision, surely not my own. They were the ones who suffered, they were the ones enti–tled to choose — yes, no, hang on, let go … I was standing far — oh, very far indeed — to one side, looking on.