From the Mountains to the Sea
an excerpt

Things after that are a little confused. I know we emptied our pistols into the fragile chest of the mummy, enough slugs to disintegrate an elephant, but all it did was wave its hands apologetically and cry stop! stop! I think I – or maybe it was Miller or Philips, I couldn't say for the life of me – threw the lamp at it while we were falling down the ladder and tearing through the front door. There were red flowers growing from the vines covering the roof as we shot down the stairs, plants tearing at our faces, slithering and falling as often as not, and behind us the gentle voice of the mummy came through it all, through the dull cracking of the spreading fire and the snapping of branches and the slapping of the river. Wait, it pleaded. Please wait! Nothing's wrong, please wait, please! But there was nothing on the earth that would have made me turn back, and if I was first to the canoes it wasn't by much. We hurtled from the docks and shot down the river as fast as we could paddle, the sooty red anger of the bungalow snapping at our heels. We didn't stop paddling until exhaustion forced us, then collapsed into sleep in the canoes. It wasn't that we trusted the river to be safe – we knew, we knew that the rapids and the falls were somewhere just ahead – and it wasn't that I didn't think about pulling aside and making camp for the night, but it was simply not possible. There was no reason in this fear, no caution, no thought of anything but flight, endless flight, until death or sleep caught us in mid-stride. What came after us wasn't simply the corpse of one harmless old man, but the maddening face of Death itself, rudely stripped of the comforting veil of crude matter. With Eckenstein alone we could have contended; with even his corpse we could have vied. Death, in a normal sense, was familiar to us. We had killed hundreds of things since we had first made landfall, after all, and the fear of corpses was well-gone by then. But this unlife that galvanized his corpse, and, worse by far, the withering nothing that stared out of the holes that used to be his pupils... no. That we couldn't fight, or even face, and so we ran headlong until we collapsed, and no more could have stayed that headlong flight than we could have lifted the moon in our hands.