She was about to step off the ledge when a rattling noise came from below. The road ceased to be a comforting sign of civilisation, and became full of menace. Who or what was travelling on it? Could it be the creatures from her nightmare? No, she thought, that was too horrible to contemplate. Forcing herself to look, she saw that the road went around a bend behind a rocky outcrop to her left. That was where the noise was coming from - the unmistakable sound of rumbling wheels and horses’ hooves. Her heart beat wildly as she stared at the place where the road emerged from behind the outcrop. Something was slowly, creakily approaching, and she had the clearest feeling that she did not want to meet it. Then whatever it was stopped, still out of sight.
Another sound came from behind her. She spun around. There, not more than fifty paces away on the hillside, was a tall man silhouetted against the deep blue sky; a huge man, it seemed to her, his bearded head covered with a hood. He was calling out, in a voice of urgent command, but in a foreign language. She heard a word that sounded like ‘ducktrabbla,’ then (she thought) an English word: ‘enemy.’ The man was holding a long staff with a nasty knob on the end of it, pointing with it, first at her, then the road, and wildly waving a thin, bony arm apparently expecting her to come to him. Instead, she turned and ran from him in a panic, jumping off the ledge, landing on loose stones, tripping and skinning her knee, tumbling and scrambling down the rocky slope. She tripped over a rock and fell headlong onto the road. The dust and grit stuck to her wet clothes and her skinned knee as she began to painfully pick herself up.
At that very moment her phone decided to work. The text message alert tinkled the frantic little tune she had set it to. ‘Thank God it was just a dream, I’m waking up now,’ she thought. ‘This’ll be Anna. Maybe I fell and hit my head following that horse, and now I’ll be rescued, if I can just text back…’
She looked at the display, and her heart did a flip. The message was not in English. The first letters were a jumble, then it got clearer. It read something like this:
KRKMDAMANARKPHKEWAUBVVZ
SDPHLW…..KORMAN
TIDAK ARCRATINE
TIDAK AGRAK KORTANA
TINE AGHMAATH
Then there were several more lines of jumbled letters, followed by these words:
KORMAN ESTAMON EAYA
EIM AROVORA
AXPAGLAB OKA KOR
URPAMA PAGYOKA EAM
AINENIA
‘This is really random,’ she thought. As she puzzled over the text, forgetting in her amazement the strange man still waving at her from the hillside, a shadow passed over her. A chill ran down her spine. She slowly rose to her feet, staring wide-eyed at the creature towering over her: the long thin feet, yellowish-white and scaly like a bird’s, ending in long sharp claws of pearly white; the heavy black robes; the pale, hooded face peering down at her – an alien face, unless the pointed shape of it was only armour (please God let it be, she prayed). But it looked very alien, sharp and menacing, like the pointed helmets of the medieval suits of armour she had seen in Mark’s military books. She had an impression of a horrible gap where the throat should be. Then she saw that the head looked more like a giant seedpod – of some giant thistle perhaps – with spiky segments like sharp petals, pearly like the claws on the feet, as if they were made of hard shell. The segments were parted slightly, pointing down at her, and there were dark wide-set eyes glittering within, blinking slowly. The face had a set expression like a smile. The head was swaying slightly from side to side like a snake’s, and she saw that it was held up on a long thin snaky neck which curved at least two feet back before joining the shoulders – but then these, what she could see of them inside the heavy robes, were more like a writhing junction of pale, gnarled roots emerging from a dark, bulbous taproot.
All this flashed before her in a second while her insides felt as though they were turning to water. Fear and horror oozed through her body. She knew what this thing was. It was one of the thorn creatures from her dream.