Cirrus@Austlit

'"What is it, Gran?" Peter demanded, pulling urgently at her sleeve. "What's the matter?"

'Meg didn't answer. She was staring down at the book they had been reading together, a shocked expression on her face. For there on the page she had just turned was a picture of the thing itself. Not a photograph, naturally, that would have been impossible. This was merely an artists' impression. Still, there was no mistaking what she was looking at: the self same creature she had encountered all those years before, when she had been not much older than Peter.

'What a long time ago that was! Over forty years, and in all that time she hadn't mentioned what she had seen to anyone. She had thought about it often enough, though. And now, confronted by the creature once more, here in the pages of a book, she almost felt that the long years had never passed. Those ancient eyes, gazing up at her from the painting, seemed to plunge her back in time, back to the lonely country road which ran between school and her grandmother's farm. It was as if she were actually here, surrounded by the sounds and smells of the bush; as if she were a fourteen-year-old girl once more, hurrying through the dusk towards that first unsettling moment of contact . . .'

Source: Publisher's blurb.