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confronts the last dog on a
sandbar, a huge brute composite of mastiff and Irish wolfhound. As
the dog's teeth close on his throat the coon's deadly claws go to
work. He leaves the dog spinning in circles and snapping at
intestines as they spill out. The old coon walks fifty feet and drops
dead bleeding from twenty-three wounds ... That
coon weighed fifty pounds.

    And Kim was trying
to re-create a story he had read somewhere years ago ... he
couldn't remember where or when, title or writer, just a flash
of pulp paper and lurid illustrations. The hero, John, was on a
mining expedition somewhere in Central or South America. They cross a
frontier ... a twang like an invisible
bow that vibrated through him with exquisite pain...
    He and his
companions find themselves in a beautiful lush landscape, flowering
shrubs, vines, and trees, rivers and meadows, but there is
something overripe, a whiff of rottenness and corruption, a dark
undercurrent of menace and evil. His companions, it seems, are
utter dolts, crude grasping creatures rooting about for gold and
gems. He hears strange wild music. And now a creature bursts into
view with a horrible unknown stench. It is a man from the waist up
and below that a giant spider covered with red hairs. The
creature looks about, grinding its mandibles in panic. Now the
Hunters appear, led by the Lords in red satin robes with gold
threads. They float just above the ground. The spider man is hiding
behind some bushes on the edge of a great cliff. One of the Lords
takes an ivory wand from his belt. The wand twitches like a dowser
stick pointing to where the spider man is hiding. The Lord
glides forward and touches the spider man with his wand,
dislodging the creature's hold, and the spider man plummets into the
abyss with a despairing scream that raises the hair on our hero's
head. Then the Lord turns and looks at him. The face is smooth and
yellow like amber, encrusted with layers of cruelty and
corruption and a cold dead evil that freezes the blood.
    Now the beautiful
lady appears wrapped in an orange cloak that glows with cold fire.
    "The Lords have
lived here since time began. To go on living one must do things
that you Earth people call 'evil.' It is the price of immortality."
    They walk on and
come to a vast ruined amphitheater. John hears a sound like bees. The
guide whips out a wand.
    "Stay close to
me. I cannot save your companions."
    John can see in the
air transparent creatures with humanoid heads and black insect eyes.
A long pink proboscis protrudes from each mouth. They hover on
vibrating rainbow wings, jabbing their proboscises into his
three companions, who swat and scream and run.
    "I am sorry,"
she says. "But they are already dead...Worse than dead. They are
already eaten."
    "Eaten?"
    "Eaten. Body
and soul. The same would have happened to you had I not been here."
    At the center of the
amphitheater is a huge golden Moloch that seems to stir with slow
metal peristalsis. His three companions rush toward the idol in
a shambling run, grunting like animals. They clamber up the idol
and dissolve into gobs of liquid gold.
    John somehow gets
back to present time. "It is better so," she tells him
gravely. But in the end he plans to return: "No danger to body
or soul can keep me from her."
    (Kim will change her
sex of course.)

    Kim was walking
along the edge of a cliff with a drop of three thousand feet to the
valley below. Looking down through the clear still air he could see
the glint of water, cities of red brick, trees and moving figures,
but no sound reached him. On the other side away from the cliff,
he saw woods and glades and rolling hills. His step was very sure and
light and he moved in slow effortless strides, taking ten feet
at a step. The path was strewn with wild flowers and flowering
shrubs, and vines grew along its edges overhanging the cliff. The air
was heavy with perfumes that swirled about him as he moved.
    He catches the sound
of distant flutes and horns growing