'Eventide' fragment

   The sketch before them appeared as old as the paper itself.  Faded to the point where squinting was essential, the picture was beyond bizarre.  All three men systematically brought their candles and torchlight closer to the article, an image that was as bewildering to the eye as it was displeasing.  It resembled a dark but contained explosion of tusks, fangs, spikes and claws.  It was a spherical splintering of black nightmarish fancy manifestly formed by a mind set to snap.  Although discoloured and timeworn, the picture still maintained a level of breeding unease that had already left the page and permeated the wits of those now looking, now speechless, now cold in a rapidly cooling room.

   A minute passed, and then another until the very silence itself begot restlessness, siring a sense of inexplicable fear that tormented each of them in the deathly quiet, which was interrupted only briefly by a circulating draught that seized and slaughtered the breath from their lungs.  Each man fought the quiet and lost before succumbing to its conquering and accompanying chill.  This thing, this object, this faint and terrible monstrosity had already wedged itself into the coming dreams of approaching nights.

   "What is it?" asked James nervously after an uncomfortable breeze seemingly hailed from nowhere and dispersed beneath his skin.

   No one answered.

   "Is it a thing? I mean... is it or, rather, was it alive?"

   Still there was no answer.

   "Is that a tail hanging beneath it?" he asked as he brought his face closer to the page.  "I think it's a tail."

   James was now talking merely to hear the sound of his own voice and to disrupt the festering silence.

   "Could be," answered John as James puffed a sigh of relief.  "It looks braided, though, like a cable or something."

   "You think it's a wire?" asked James.  "Perhaps the whole thing is some kind of machine," he postulated.

   "Well if it is it's unlike any machine I've ever seen," John stated.

   "It looks like a sea urchin to me," added Benson.  "I stood on one when I was a child.  We were in Spain and..."

   "An interesting story for a more dreary time I'm sure, Officer," John mumbled as Benson halted his dialogue before sporting an accompanying sneer.

   The attachment did indeed appear wired to the barbed object and dangled beneath like some inanimate spine, a dark pendulum affixed to a concealed clock face.  John began biting the inside of his lip, a custom he had inherited from his father whenever his wits were challenged.  He bit hard.  Had he been alone, he would have most likely reached inside with thumb and forefinger to tear loose the flesh from his mouth until it bled profusely.  It was cathartic, a temporary release and reminder that he was still in control of a body that already had begun to sweat even in such a chilled environment.  He restrained himself and allowed his hand to linger just inches above the image.  Never before had he sustained so many injuries to nerves that suddenly felt exposed and threadbare.  He experienced tremors in his fingers as they turned the page slowly.

   The following images were met with the same forbidding silence...