The Green Face

The thing under the sheet stood up. It did it awkwardly, the way a figure of straw is stood up, and for a moment it stood there swaying between the table and the fire, the sheet still over it, like a tent with no one inside.

Then the drover found his voice. He screamed, and the scream woke the other three as nothing else could have done. They came up out of their sleep shouting, and the room was suddenly full of men on their feet and the noise they made.

The thing did not rush at them. It stood still, and the sheet fell from it in a heap upon the table, and the red light of the dying fire fell at last upon the face of the innkeeper's daughter.

It was not a face any mother would have known. The skin had gone the color of bronze left out in rain, the green of old copper, and it was stretched tight across the bones as though something underneath had swollen to fill it. The eyes were open and filmed. The mouth hung a little open, and did not move when the rest of the face did.

It began to walk. It did not run; it walked, with the slow, certain walk of a thing that has all the time in the world. It came down from the table, and its bare feet made no sound on the packed earth of the floor, and it turned, the way a dog turns when it chooses which man to follow.

The drovers broke for the door. The oldest among them was the first to understand that the door would not hold, and the second to understand that the thing in the middle of the room was faster than it looked. He caught the nervous drover by the arm and threw him toward the wall, and then the four of them were scattering in four directions.

The storm outside had left the yard white, and the door stood open onto it. Two of the men made the threshold and flung themselves out into the snow. The thing did not follow them. It had chosen, as it always chose, the one who moved last. The nervous drover, who had meant to be ready all his life, moved last.

He did not get the door. He got as far as the step, and then the thing was behind him, and he felt its hands on him, and he made a sound that the two men outside would hear in their sleep for the rest of their lives. They ran. They were not brave men. They ran across the snow and did not look back.

The oldest drover, who had stayed inside because his leg would not let him run, climbed. There was a tall tree beside the inn, an old locust, its branches bare and black against the last of the storm. He went up it hand over hand, the way he had climbed trees as a boy, because it was the only thing left to do.

Below him, the thing turned from the door and saw him. It came across the yard at its slow walk, the green face upturned, the mouth still hanging open. It did not hurry. It never hurried. It came to the foot of the tree, and it reached up, and it took the lowest branch in both its hands.

The drover climbed higher. He was three branches up, and he thought himself safe, because no dead thing climbs trees. He had time to be wrong. The thing at the foot of the tree set its feet, and put its weight on the branch, and began to haul itself up after him, not with hands alone but with the terrible patience of a thing that will not rest.