Then came what I had been waiting for, what I knew would come, what I knew deep down I'd hear again ever since that first night I'd heard it in Northville. The tractor motor of Big Mike starting up, rumbling into life, vibrating and throbbing! The first sounds of the treads turning over as they scraped and bruised the earth, coming toward my window. Sounds no less horrible because I denied them and at the same time tried to drown them out with my own screams. The deep-throated combustion of Big Mike's engine was deafening now. It reverberated beneath me on the porch ceiling, which was also my own floor.
Then a new sound, a tautening of cables, the winch crying, steel against steel as the shovel part extended delicately and felt, felt through the darkness for what it wanted.
I prayed for unconsciousness and perhaps my prayers or my mad, frenzied struggles to get loose from the restraining sheet that held me caused me to become suddenly light-headed and faint. As I lay limp with a deeper blackness than of night exploding inside my eyeballs and head, there was still the last edge of consciousness, of life that registered crystal clear the thunderous sounds of Big Mike. The tearing, ripping shock of the shovel teeth at the wood under my bed, the close-by growl and the snarl of this immortal monster, the sudden sickening feeling of crashing impact . . . of being scooped upward at great speed . . . and then . . . nothing!
Homecoming
The Daemon said that he would take me home
To the pale, shadowy land I half-recalled
As a high place of stair and terrace, walled
With marble balustrades that sky-winds comb,
While miles below a maze of dome on dome
And tower on tower beside a sea lies sprawled,
Once more, he told me. I would stand enthralled
On those old heights, and hear the far-off foam.
All this he promised, and through sunset's gate
He swept me, past the lapping lakes of flame.
And red-gold thrones of gods without a name
Who shriek in fear at some impending fate.
Then a black gulf with sea-sounds in the night:
"Here was your home," he mocked, "when you had sight!"
