from Shadows Bend by David Barbour and Richard Raleigh

Just then another flash of lightning cast the black shadow starkly against the curtains, and in the deafening peal of thunder that followed, the living room window exploded into a million pieces, inward, scattering splinters of glass and wood. They all shielded their eyes and turned away, so it was only in the afterimages, at first, that they saw the thing that leaped in through the yawning hole in the wall. The wind dashed the curtains left and right, obscuring the thing’s face, and it ripped the fabric away from itself with a black claw, revealing not a face, but the eerie absence of one.

Glory stood there wide-eyed, like a stunned animal. No, she thought, no, never, could such a thing exist. If the earth had ended by some calamity that had produced the most horrid abominations, if the gods had played a game of chance to see which of them could most cruelly insult nature, then perhaps this thing could be. He stood there, looking like some huge, freshly killed thing, his coloring an odd, flat, lamp black, and yet his fur gleamed with the sheen of the best-groomed Angus cattle. There was something oddly noble about him; she could not explain it, but he exuded authority. His bloodred tongue lolled down as he noticed her, undulating like an eel. He hissed at her and slowly approached.

The thing towered over Glory, even at that distance, and he radiated a cloud of foul odor— his hiss, as he stepped closer, sounded like a snake with the throaty undertone of a lion. The sound and the odor overwhelmed her, and Glory felt as if she were falling—she did fall. Down on her knees, she grabbed for the edge of an end table to raise herself and knocked over another one of Beatrice’s overflowing ashtrays. She knew, with an odd certainty, that she was going to die, and the tranquility of this knowledge soothed her. Death awaited her like a safe refuge that the creature could not enter, and a flood of memories from her past began to flash before her as if she were drowning. When she was ten, still a little girl, she’d had nightmares of standing on a high precipice. She would stand there and consider, too rationally, the cost of living versus the cost of dying. She must have been a philosophically minded girl, rather high-minded for a ten-year-old. She knew this to be true, even through the fog of confusion that overwhelmed her at the moment. On that precipice, she had decided to jump because, after all, there was no God, and if she were dead, she would simply cease to be conscious, and she would feel no pain and know no regret—know, in fact, absolutely nothing, as if she had never existed. But just before she stretched her arms out like wings of flesh, she had looked out into the distance—it was the east, and the faint rosy colors of the dawn were touching the horizon. And it was so breathtakingly beautiful, like nothing that could have come from the mind or the hand of man, and she had suddenly felt the kindness of some creative force. Suddenly she had remembered the beauty of the total eclipse of the sun she had seen in Nova Scotia, the calm quiet of the craters of the moon, the myriad colors of the stars that come out at night. She had decided to live then, if only to experience such beauty in order to divine whether some extrahuman power must have created it all. And she had awakened in a cold sweat in her bed, shaking with the lingering terror—not of having nearly leaped to her death, but of having compromised her faith in the absence of God. And now she was on this weird quest with two men who were little more than strangers to her; she had nearly been devoured, in the night, by desert animals that had surrounded their laughable one-wagon train. How the mighty are fallen, she thought. If she hadn’t fallen into hard times, she might have been someone like her sister, but after she lost Gabriel her heart had solidified into rock.