He didn’t know how long he could keep this up. The faster he ran, the louder the footsteps seemed to get. He wondered what would happen if he were to just stop, let it catch up to him. A quick end might be easier than this eternal hellish flight.
The beast had changed. All the times before it had made itself known by its low menacing growl, the sound of something brutish and unnameable. But this time it had laughed. “How can a beast laugh?” he wondered. Maybe it had its own feral version of a sense of humour. He had a crazy thought that if he could just turn around and tell it a joke, get the punchline out of his throat before said throat was ripped from his body, then it might spare him.
He started wracking his brains, trying to think of a short joke. He had heard so many, many jokes in his life. All he needed now was one, and he would not end up as beast-meat.
He realized to his horror that he couldn’t think of a single joke.
The laugh came again, closer this time, and he realized that it was more of a murmur. A distinctly unbestial high pitched murmur. This was new. It almost sounded as though it were calling to him, saying his name. Then at last he felt the dreaded touch upon his ankle, and girded himself to scream at the grip of the fatal claw.
But it was not a claw. Impossibly, it felt like fingers – long fingers. A beast with fingers – calling to him!
“Clayton,” it said, rather distinctly, and the sheer surprise of this shocked him awake.
Francesca looked down upon her friend. It had taken quite some time to shake him awake. “You poor dear, you must have been so exhausted.
Clay blinked, for a moment seemingly unaware of his surroundings. She waited until the could see his eyes focus on her face, until he was fully in the here and now. “Hello Francesca.”
She smiled. “Good morning, my dear. I am happy that you have partaken of the restful and restorative powers of sleep.” She didn’t notice his wry half smile in response.
“I have, as they say, the news that is good and the news that is bad,” she continued. “I have pieced together all of the letters. The good news is that there is indeed a message here.”
“Fantastic! What’s the bad news?” Clay asked, picking himself up out of the chair.
“The message is still incomplete.”
“Incomplete!” he said, followed by a word he rarely found himself using in the company of ladies. “Sorry Francesca,” he said.
“My dear, I have heard far worse. The inventiveness of the descriptive phrases employed by some of my comrades in the Movement would have embarrassed even you, my friend. To say nothing of their sheer anatomical implausiility.
“But to continue. The message is incomplete because it contains only a subset of the needed words. Everything is in place, yet remains tantalizingly out of reach. It seems that we have in our possession the verbs, the adjectives, adverbs and participles, but are missing all of the nouns.
“You mean…” he started, already seeing where she was going.
“Yes Clayton. It would appear there is a third box.”
“Well, I’ll be damned. Um … I mean darned. No, damn it, I mean I’ll be damned.”
“I certainly hope not, my dear. But it looks as though we will need to have a rather frank conversation with a certain convalescing patient.”
Clay nodded. “My thoughts exactly.”