Even as Hiero recalled all this, a hideous, croaking bellow rang out somewhere ahead of them. It drowned the normal noises of the night, the constant hum of the swarms of insects, and the chorus of small frogs by sheer vibration.
Klootz jerked to a standstill, and ahead of them in the dark, Gorm halted like the grotesque shadow of a distorted pointer, one foot raised, dripping from a pool of dark water. For a moment they listened and then, when no other sound came, began to move cautiously onward. Hiero’s face and hands were now smeared with an insect-repelling grease, but the cloud of bugs still penetrated his clothes, and it was a sore trial not to be able to curse wholeheartedly. They had gone only a hundred feet or so when the grunting roar again broke out in the moist dark ahead of them. With it came a prodigious “splat,” as if some vast platter had been slammed down hard into soft mud. The myriad small animal voices of the marsh, the night birds, frogs, and other things fell silent. Only the humming drone of millions of mosquitoes and gnats went on. The three again paused, but this time not for so long.
Behind them another awful bellow exploded in the night. The sheer volume of the second cry had to make the bulk of its owner simply enormous. And it seemed to be closer than the one in front.
Hiero looked desperately about. They were in shadows on the edge of a big patch of open, shiny mud, well lit by the bright stars above and the half-full moon. To their left and in front was only the mud, but to their right, some dark clump of vegetation rose against the stars.
Get to the right quickly, he sent to the bear and the morse. Into those bushes or plants and lie down again. We can’t face these things!
They had barely begun to move when the growth parted on the far side of the mud patch and a face out of nightmare leered over and down at them from a hundred feet away. Dimly, Hiero could see, the scientist still operating in his mind, that a frog or a three-quarter-grown tadpole might possibly have been its remote progenitor. The great opalescent eyes were set ten feet apart on the blunt, slimy head. The thing squatted many yards off the mud on monstrous, bowed forelegs, and horny claws tipped the giant toes. The incredible gape of the jaws now gleamed with lines of giant fangs, teeth such as no frog ever had, like a forest of ivory needles, each a foot long, glistening in the moonlight.
