Mostly Harmless - Douglas Adams [58]
She turned her torch on. Almost at the same moment a fork of lightning ripped across the valley into which she was heading and startled her considerably. As the darkness shuddered back around her and a clap of thunder rolled out across the land, she felt suddenly rather small and lost with just a feeble pencil of light bobbing in her hand. Perhaps she should stop after all and open the parcel here. Or maybe she should go back and come out again tomorrow. It was only a momentary hesitation, though. She knew there was no going back tonight and sensed that there was no going back ever.
She headed on down the side of the hill. The rain was beginning to pick up now. Where a short while ago it had been a few heavy blobs, it was setting in for a good pour now, hissing in the trees, and the ground was getting slippery under her feet.
At least, she thought, it was the rain hissing in the trees. Shadows were leaping and leering at her as her light bobbed through the trees. Onward and downward.
She hurried on for another ten or fifteen minutes, soaked to the skin now and shivering, and gradually became aware that there seemed to be some other light somewhere ahead of her. It was very faint and she wasn’t certain if she was imagining it or not. She turned off her torch to see. There did seem to be some sort of dim glow ahead. She couldn’t tell what it was. She turned her torch back on and continued down the hill, toward whatever it was.
There was something wrong with the woods, though.
She couldn’t immediately say what it was, but they didn’t seem like sprightly healthy woods looking forward to a good spring. The trees were lolling at sickly angles and had a sort of pallid, blighted look about them. Random more than once had the worrying sensation that they were trying to reach toward her as she passed them, but it was just a trick of the way that her light caused their shadows to flicker and lurch.
Suddenly, something fell out of a tree in front of her. She leapt backward with alarm, dropping both the torch and the box as she did so. She went down into a crouch, pulling the specially sharpened rock out of her pocket.
The thing that had fallen out of the tree was moving. The torch was lying on the ground and pointing toward it, and a vast, grotesque shadow was slowly lurching through the light toward her. She could hear faint rustling and screeching noises over the steady hiss of the rain. She scrabbled on the ground for the torch, found it and shone it directly at the creature.
At the same moment another dropped from a tree just a few feet away. She swung the torch wildly from one to the other. She held her rock up, ready to throw.
They were quite small in fact. It was the angle of the light that had made them loom so large. Not only small, but small, furry and cuddly. And there was another, dropping from the trees. It fell through the beam of light, so she saw it quite clearly.
It fell neatly and precisely, turned and then, like the other two, started slowly and purposefully to advance on Random.
She stayed rooted to the spot. She still had her rock poised and ready to throw, but was increasingly conscious of the fact that the things she had it poised and ready to throw at were squirrels. Or, at least, squirrellike things. Soft, warm, cuddly squirrellike things advancing on her in a way she wasn’t at all certain she liked.
She shone her torch directly on the first of them. It was making aggressive, hectoring, screeching noises and carrying in one of its little fists a small tattered piece of wet, pink rag. Random hefted her rock menacingly in her hand, but it made no impression at all on the squirrel advancing on her with its wet piece of rag.
She backed away. She didn’t know at all how to deal with this. If they had been vicious, snarling, slavering beasts with glistening fangs, she would have pitched into them with a will, but squirrels behaving like this she couldn’t quite