They were all around him-he knew it, but their illusions screened them from his eyes as he prayed that his own covered him. He felt their stirring, though there was nothing that he could fix his eye upon-just a gleam of starlight on something that pulsed wetly and the sudden glitter of acid on chitinous claws. There was a buzzing, humming sensation in his brain... a drift of wind that stank of rotten blood...

Then suddenly it was above him, a delirium-vision of an obscene, squamous bulk, fifteen feet from the tucked, slobbering tentacles of that drooling mouth to the wriggling tip of the spined cable of tail. Huge, clawed legs dangled down, like the feet of a wasp; from them, acid dripped to smoke on the snow.

Rudy shut his teeth hard on a scream. Sweat was freezing on his face, and every muscle in his body fought to remain still against the instincts that shrieked at him to run. The effort and the revulsion at the nearness of that filthy dripping thing brought nausea burning to his throat. More than its evil, more than the terrible danger that breathed like smoke over him, he was filled with sickened loathing of its otherness -its utter alien ness to the world of the visible, the material.. the sane.

Then it was gone. The wind of its departure kicked a stinging gust of snow over him as he slowly folded to his knees in the drifts.

How long he knelt there in the darkness he didn't know. He was trembling uncontrollably, his eyes shut, as if to blot out the memory of that hideous, slobbering bulk swimming against the stars. Stupidly, he recalled a night last spring, a warm California evening, when he and his sister had been headed down the Harbor Freeway in downtown Los Angeles, and the old Chevy had a blowout in the fast lane of the interchange.