The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [130]
"Stop! Please! I don't understand! You've seen it before, haven't you?"
"Our first glimpse of the Gabbleratchet was as long before the dawn of life on your world, as the dawn of life on your world is before the present moment."
Never dying, never tiring, gorged with bloodlust, chasing day and night. The Gabbleratchet surged on, faster than anything I had ever seen. "How do you think I can outrun that?"
"You can't. But you are more nimble; you must outmanoeuvre it."
I saw Cyan on one of the leading horses! She rode its broad back, decaying ribs. Her blonde hair tussled. Her fingers clutched the prongs of its vertebrae, her arms stiff. She looked sick and worn with terror and exhilaration. I tried to focus on her horse; its withers were straps of dark pink muscle and its globe eyes set tight in pitted flesh. The hounds jumped and jostled each other running around its plunging hooves.
On the backs of many other horses rode skeletons human and non-human, and corpses of various ages. They were long dead of fear or hunger but still riding, held astride by their wind-dried hands. Some horses had many sets of finger-bones entwined in their manes; some carried arms bumping from tangled hands, but the rest of the body had fallen away. They had abducted hundreds over the millennia.
The Gabbleratchet arced straight above me and plunged down vertically. White flashes in the seething storm were the teeth of those in lead. The moonlight caught eyes and hooves in tiny pulses of reflection.
I had never seen anything fly vertically downward. It shouldn't be able to. It wasn't obeying any physical rules.
Cyan clung on. I wondered if she was still sane.
"Run!" shouted the Vermiform.
The Gabbleratchet's wild joy seized me. I wanted to chase and catch. I wanted the bursting pride of success, the thrill of killing! Their power transfixed me. I loved them! I hated them! I wanted to be one! I tasted blood in my mouth and I accepted it eagerly. My open smile became a snarl.
The dogs' muzzles salivated and their baying tongues curled. They were just above my head. I saw the undersides of the hooves striking down.
"Run!" screamed the Vermiform.
I jumped forward, sprinting at full pelt. The hunt's howling burst the air. Its gale blew my hair over my eyes and I glanced back, into the wind to clear it.
The lead beasts plunged into the ground behind me, and through it. The air and ground surface distorted out around them in a double ripple, as if it was gelatinous. The whole hunt trammelled straight down into the earth and forked sparks leapt up around it, crackling out among the grass. It was a solid crush of animal bodies and bone. I saw flashes of detail: fur between paw pads, dirty scapulae, suppurating viscera.
The corpses the horses were carrying hit the ground and stayed on top. They broke up, some fell to dust and the creatures following went through them too. Cyan's horse was next; it plunged headfirst into the earth, throwing her against the ground hard. She lay lifeless. The stampede of manes and buttocks continued through her. The column shrank; the last few plummeted at the ground and disappeared into it. Two final violet sparks sidewound across the plain, ceased. All was eerily quiet.
The Vermiform emerged beside me but its voices were awed. "It'll take a minute to turn around. Quick!"
I ran to the area the Gabbleratchet had passed through, expecting to see a dent in the frozen soil but not one of the grass blades had been bent; the only marks were my own footprints. The hairs on my arms stood up and the air smelt chemical, the same as when I once visited a peel tower that had been struck by lightning. There was no reek of corruption or animals, just the tang of spark-split air.
I turned Cyan over carefully. She had been flung against the ground