Appearing on the emerging hillcrest was a spiral chain of figures arranged in a kind of military formation, he presumed-but what kind he could not say. A severely worrying kind. There were Indians-Sioux and other tribes he could identify. There were also Negroes, but not dressed as any he had ever seen. They wore bones… and bright colors… and… there seemed to be some women, too. Various colors and races. He had never seen females arrayed for battle-if that was what this was.

But there were others… people like he had never seen… hairy and dressed in animal skins. They held implements in their hands that he did not want to know about. He wanted to know less than nothing about those who were beside them. These could not be said to be standing, because they seemed still to be forming, as if out of mist. They had a human form, but it did not hold steady. There was an ungodly transparency to them… and a profound blackness, too, like empty portions of the night sky called coal sacks. While he could make out individual outlines, these seemed to oscillate and blend, so that there was a forbidding aura of compositeness about them-like a crowd made of fog and glass that became something else. Something whole.

What stood grouped beyond them-this was more than his mind could take. They were not human and never would be or had been human. Some he might have said were creatures from the past-beasts that he at least could imagine having roamed the land long ago. Others he could only think were creatures from a dream. Or a nightmare.

The one fragment of Army-trained thinking that remained was the slack-jawed, goggle-eyed question “What kind of troops could march against this?”