Encounters with Enoch Coffin
W.H. Pugmire and Jeffrey Thomas
Matter of Truth and Death
I. The cry of the beast was the combined final roar of every last dinosaur at the moment of mass extinction. The forlorn moan of a pod of sperm whales dying on the floor of the ocean. The howl of a hurricane at its vertex of strength, before its long diminishment. The long, single cry of the beast was all of these sounds at once, and yet even those comparisons could not capture its haunting resonance, its unearthly essence. He had no idea how large the creature was, but it must be colossal, and yet there was something skeletal, wasted, in its aspect. It rested on all four weirdly-bent, bony limbs, its emaciated body the same color as the rock upon which it was perched; a grayish-green, as if it were a chameleon that had changed its hue to blend in. The only other color was a white cloth or gauze wrapped around its hairless head, completely concealing its face. But as it called out, the depression of its elongated open mouth could be seen through the material that bound and blinded it. The roughly-shaped block of green stone the beast squatted upon was the last in a string of similar blocks of varying sizes. He was not sure how many of these crude blocks there were, but all of them hung in the sky in defiance of earthly law, like fragments of an exploded moon in orbit around a globe. Yet above and below, instead of the blackness of
3