Free The Beyond by Jeffrey Ford

continued to hold the rifle close with both hands. After the first mile, they slowed to their normal pace.
    From a great distance, he saw them shining in the late-afternoon light, and knew from their reflection that they were not boulders. Although he meant to avoid them, for some reason he continued on a path leading directly into their midst. Three more skeletons of the Sirimon creature lay clustered together in the ankle-deep grass. Two of the specimens were perfectly preserved—tail, ribs, and skull intact. The third had broken apart, its skull lying on the ground with a purple wildflower growing up through the left eye socket. He did not stop to touch them. In fact, he increased his pace. When he looked back and saw Wood sniffing the remains, he yelled angrily for him to hurry. For the miles that followed into evening, the ground they crossed was littered with fragments of skull, short lengths of spinal column still supporting a rib or two, and even one sharp tail end, sticking straight up out of the dirt.
    Night was upon them when they made camp in a spot that might have been any other at which they had stopped since entering the plain. He removed the harness from the dog and wondered, for the first time, if they would ever escape the flatland.
    During the day’s march, they had seen and killed only one rabbit, and that they found sitting out in the open, shivering and confused. When Wood barked, the sorry creature did not even run but waited for Cley to remove the bow from the sled and nock an arrow into place. The ease with which he killed it made him suspicious, but there was no other meat.
    â€œLike a painting,” he said, considering the stillness of the landscape.
    The fire was built, and they ate the confused rabbit along with some roots of the kierce blossom he had collected on previous days. For all of his uneasiness about it, the food tasted fine. Wood moved up close to Cley after the meal, and they read a few pages about the energy in nature that linked all individual souls together. “What a poozle,” he said, and laughed in the midst of his reading. The dog growled quietly, as if to say, “Read on, you fool.”
    When he bedded down beneath the open sky, his errant thoughts brought him images of the Sirimon, slithering through the grass. The night, though, was as static as the day. When he finally held in check his imagination and really listened, he heard nothing. Still, he drew the loaded rifle closer to his side.
    While they slept, the half-moon that had cast a silver glow on the plain disappeared behind a bank of dark clouds that moved without a breeze, flying, as if of their own volition, in from the west. Eventually, the stars were also obliterated from view. Early in the morning, just before sunrise, a fine misty drizzle began to fall. Cley tossed and turned in the dampness, deep in a dream of Doralice, the prison island upon which he had once been incarcerated. He stood on the shore, close to the breakers, staring out to sea, and beside him was the monkey, Silencio. When the waves crashed, the spray washed over the pair, and this spray stood in for the soaking Cley took in reality from the weather of the Beyond. The monkey pointed out to sea at a ship in the distance, opened his mouth wide as if to scream, but instead there came an explosion that blasted the hunter into consciousness.
    He cleared the water from his eyes in time to see a bolt of lightning tear the western sky. Thunder quickly followed, and, with it, the rain began to fall in torrents. He looked around for Wood and saw him already cowering in submission to the storm. Cley’s first thought was to pitch the tent he had made. They had used it only twice when first entering the plain and then not against rain but cold night winds. He felt well rested and wanted desperately to find a way out of the flatland. “We are going to get wet anyway,” he thought. “We might as well move on.”
    They