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Show 396 * * * * * * No one but himself knew what it was like there, a silent ice-blue twilight world where small shrivelled things gibbered under rocks with their hands over their mouths. There was no wind, and the sun was a cold chip in the empty bowl of the sky. Here time folded like taffy and vanishing-points overlapped and blurred. He had been here before. The canyon floor where he stood was a desolate and rumpled plain, and the cliffs lining it were foul with pictures. Even from a distance he had recognized the orange and green stew and the broken lute, and when he passed along the base of the range and found himself dwarfed by the other details, the goblet of seeds, the silver comb and brush, the statue, he was consumed by chagrin. Even allowing for the distortion of angle and the mendacious light he could see in the grains of the frozen rock a clumsiness of design that his unfinished realization, at the time he had stopped work on it, was only beginning to approach. Crumbs of ash lay on the shifting surface of the ground and cast long thin strands of blue shadow. He wandered for days, eaten by the cold that never changed, wishing he had someone to talk to who would tell him it was all right. He had always been afraid of the dark because things came up and touched you in the dark, but the twilight was terrible in a peculiar way. There were floating, wispy things in the twilight that were not there when you turned your head. Once he lashed out behind him and caught one and felt the thrill of revulsion at the viscous mess that clung to his spread fingers like a cat's cradle and dripped down his wrist. He saw one flit past sometime later, but the next instant it had merged with the contours of the ground and unless it moved again it would remain invisible. |