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“What?” Benny was beyond more complex questions, which was fine, because I had no complex answers for him, and neither did Dana.
“It stopped moving,” she said. “For a few seconds. ”
“He stopped moving for a few seconds. And now he’s coming towards us, isn’t he?”
“Something is. Or someone, if you like it better that way. ”
She didn’t need to say it. We could all sense it by the way the static hummed harder in our ears. It came before him, like a force around him, pouring itself through the trunks and along the winding riverbank. We could feel him. Even Benny could feel him coming for us.
“Sentry. ” I used the word because it drew him. When I said it, the static swelled, a pulse or a wave answering me.
“Eden,” Dana said, but whether she was warning me or asking what I was doing, I couldn’t tell.
The last rays of daylight slid behind the mountain, and we passed the point of almost dark. Benny and Dana held their lights aloft, and they beamed them left and right, trying to pin down the source of the sound. I left mine in my pocket still. I think I forgot about it. I think I didn’t care.
I am coming.
He spoke, and we heard the words before we saw him. They had a timbre not terribly different from the EVP we collected. It wasn’t terribly like the EVP either, but there was so little to compare it to that nothing else was even close.
I am coming.
“He’s coming,” Benny said, and it was the closest thing to a sob I’d ever heard him make.
Dana kept the coolest head; she snared her camcorder and slid her right hand under the strap to hold it anchored against her palm. “Shit,” she grumbled. “Shit,” she said again, because it refused to switch on. “He’s doing this. For God’s sake, turn on,” she ordered, but it failed her.
And he came to us, as promised. Through the trees, and into our personal space he oozed, or glided, or manifested. We hadn’t made it to a clearing, or to any kind of open space at all. We were surrounded on all sides by the trunks, and by this brilliant-eyed creature who towered over us all.
“Hello,” I whispered.
Up close, he was even more remarkable than I remembered. He must have been nearly eight feet tall, and even with this estimate I got the impression he was crouching slightly to better meet our level. His shoulders were drawn in, and his hands hung long at his sides. The things at the tips of his fingers were not claws, exactly; but they were long nails, and they were yellowed and dirty, a filthy amber. He could’ve stood up straight and still scratched his knees with those thick, long-nailed fingers. A dense curtain of brownish hair fell vertically over his apelike arms; the ends trailed down around his hips.
When first I’d seen him, I hadn’t gotten close enough to catch his face, or I hadn’t seen it clearly beyond the tart-bright eyes. But here he stood and he stared down at me, as if he were awaiting some order—because I was the one who had said his name.
The face that gazed from such a height was a construct of fantasy nightmares.
Beneath the famously gleaming eyes, a flattened nose with wide nostrils hunched. He had no upper lip to speak of, but a wide mouth all the same; and from each corner two huge, bony fangs curled up from his heavy lower jaw to protrude and crease his cheeks.
“Whoa. ” From the corner of my eye I saw Benny, his own smaller jaw hanging open. Dana did not speak, but I saw her hand moving slowly in her pocket. When she pulled her hand out again, it held the tape recorder.
“Sentry,” I addressed him, because it was a sound he recognized and claimed.
He nodded, and like every other gesture of his, the movement looked massive.
I am here.
“Thank you. Thank you for coming. We hoped…” I looked over at my friends, and they were staring too hard to speak. “We wanted to talk to you. ”
His mouth—that fearsome straight line punctuated with teeth at either end—moved and constricted, as if he meant to smile or grimace, but lacked the facial muscles for either. I couldn’t tell if he was glad or if he found us annoying.
“Please,” I said, since talking kept him at a polite distance. “Are you the Sentry of the battlefield—the one that’s south of here?”
His enormous, hair-draped head dipped again, but he offered no further information on the matter.
Introductions seemed in order, so I offered them. “I’m Eden. This is Ben, and Dana. Is there, um, some name you prefer? I don’t know what to call you except by that title. ”
Sentry.
“Okay. Sentry it is. ”
