There had been a conflict of wills since moonrise, a battle that had kept the ghost to one end of the bridge, Parl Dro at the other. Only very gradually had each been able to beat a way through the other’s aphysical defences. Only very gradually had each been able to draw nearer to the other and thus to the ultimate fight which would decide between them. Dro was certain that the psychic link was to be found somewhere at the centre of the bridge, the spot at which the ghost generally laid hold of those who came there, biting at them with its long teeth from which the gums had shrivelled away, clawing the organs out of their bodies. For hours, since moonrise, Parl Dro had been wrenching his way toward that area, while trying simultaneously to hold the ghost off from it. The ghost roared and sizzled its rage and sick hurt as it fought him. The man, drenched in sweat and psychosomatically bruised as if from a physical beating, fought back. It had been like climbing a vertical precipice while in the crisis of an unremitting fever. Now, he was a mere three inches from the tilted plank where he had reasoned the link must be.
To summon the final strength to rip the plank away and come at that link, brought a new dimension of horror and strain, which sent a whirling piercing nausea through him, body and soul. Nevertheless, he felt his hand grab hold of the wood, the muscles of arm and shoulder activated as if by remote and magical control. He tore up the plank, and his fingers thrust through the soft rot beneath and touched the single bone embedded there. It had belonged to the ghost, when the ghost had been a man, mislaid on the bridge when the ghost had violently died there. Through the concrete essence of that bone, the ghost, unwilling to depart, had kept its hideous link with the condition of life. A hundred persons had since died because of it. It had exulted in their screams of terror and agony. It would have killed the rest of the world if it could. Now it was as approximate to extinction, or at least to metamorphosis, as Parl Dro’s two hands were approximate to each other. For one hand now held the bone, and the other the small but lethal vise which would crush that bone into a thousand meaningless splinters.
But in those instants, when all Dro’s considerable powers had been focused on securing the link, the deadalive thing had found the space to win through.
Even as Dro raised the bone toward the jaws of the vise, the ghost was on him. Made corporeal by its long pseudo-existence, it had the energy to drag him down and to fling him over.
Dro heard the clamour of shattered timbers far off, at the same time as thunder passed through his skull. He realized dimly, as a storm of water spat in his eyes, that the ghost had smashed him bodily through the rotten struts of the bridge. Now he hung upside down, but still miraculously caught by knees and calves in the wood above. His body rocked against one of the stony pylons from the gush of the river, which every fourth breath or so went over his head, blinding him and causing him to swallow its fluid. He somehow had not lost the bone, for he could feel it embedded in his hand, but the vise was gone; he had let go of it in the shock of falling.
It seemed a year, but it was less than a minute before he came to understand the brittle texture of the bone, the hard surface of the pylon against which the river was ramming him over and over again. His head was full of choked water, his very brain seemed full of it, and the drumming of his own blood. He swung like a dead crow from a post, into and out of pain, unconsciousness and drowning, but he still remembered enough to start to hammer the brittle psychic bone against the stone of the pylon.
Ridiculously, stunned, he had forgotten about the creature he was fighting. When the blade of a new torture went through his left leg, he stupidly wondered if it was broken.
The dead who lived, like the mirror image, right hand in reverse, tended to attack leftward or sinister. Which made the hearts of men very vulnerable to them. It occurred to Dro quite abruptly that the ghost had fastened its teeth and nails into the calf of his left leg, ripping and gnawing at him.
Knowledge of the true facts of the pain made it unbearable. He began to utter strange long-drawn hoarse hymns of agony. Through these, the ghost kept up its labour upon his flesh, and he, mindless and screaming, clubbed the bone again and again into the stones of the pylon, his hand with it, till both were gaudy with blood.
The bone splintered suddenly, but the agony in his leg did not go away. He thought the ghoul still gnawed on him long after he had destroyed it. And long after the men had carried him away from the bridge, with a white sun scalding in his eyes, he thought so.