Drome/Chapter 36
Chapter 36
Gorgonic Horror
Almost that very instant I heard it, that low, rustling sound made by something moving through (as I thought) the fern growth, ceased. My companions! What had happened to them?
I began moving forward, every second that passed enhancing that horrible fear which chilled my heart. For each step took me nearer to, though not directly toward, that spot from which had come that mysterious sound.
Just as I was passing between those great tree-trunks, came a sound that fetched me up in my tracks, came a sudden low voice: "Oh, Bill!"
I gave a smothered cry and dashed forward. Rhodes was safe; at any rate, he was alive. A second or two, and I burst from the fern-growth. Surprize, amazement brought me up, and the next instant an indescribable horror had me in its grip.
The surprize, the amazement will be explained when I.say that there before me stood my companions, every one of them, safe and sound. There they stood, moveless and silent as so many statues, gazing, as though held in a baleful charm, upon that horror before them. Rhodes was the only one that moved as I burst into the scene.
"I wondered, Bill, why you didn't come."
"And I wondered why you all were so silent—after that exclamation and scream. I understand it now."
Shuddering, I pointed with my alpenstock.
"In the name of the Gorgons, what is that?"
"I wish that I knew, Bill."
A silence of some seconds followed, and then I remembered—that rustling sound.
I turned, and another shudder went through me. Drorathusa was standing very near that spot from which that rustling sound must have come.
"What is there?" I asked, pointing.
Rhodes whirled in the direction I indicated.
"Where?"
"In the ferns—behind Drorathusa. I heard something in there, something moving."
"When?"
"Some moments ago—just before you called."
A wan smile flitted across the face of Milton Rhodes.
"That was Drorathusa herself moving through that tangle of flowers."
"But I tell you that it was moving toward me!"
"It was Drorathusa," said Rhodes. "You only thought that the sound was moving toward you, away from us. No, Bill; it was Drorathusa. There was no other sound. To that I can swear."
So my imagination had tricked me! And yet how could I be sure that it had? For, in such a moment, with such a sight before him, Rhodes himself might have been the one deceived. In that case, any instant might see Death come leaping into our very midst.
"Who gave that scream?" I asked.
"One of the girls, when we broke out of the ferns and she saw that. Delphis, I believe."
This turned me again to that thing of horror. No wonder that that piercing, terrible scream had broken from the girl!
The spot into which we had stepped was, for a distance of perhaps one hundred and fifty feet, almost free from undergrowth. The twisted trunks and branches had a gnarled and savage aspect; the light had faded, and what with the gloom that had fallen and the weird shapes of the trees and the branches, the scene was a strange and terrible one. A fitting setting truly for what we saw there in the midst of it.
For, sixty feet or so distant, still, white and lifeless, naked save for a skin (spotted something like a leopard's) about the waist, the toes four or five feet from the ground, hung the body of a man.
That itself was horrible enough, but what we saw up in the branches above—how I shudder as that picture rises before me! It was a shape amorphous, monstrous, of mottled green and brown, with splotches of something whitish, bluish.
There were splotches, too, upon the branches and upon the ground beneath. It was like blood, that whitish, bluish stuff, and, indeed, that is what it was. In the midst of that amorphous mass were two great eyes, but they never moved, were fixed and glassy. One of the higher branches had been broken, though not clean from the trunk, and, wound around this branch, the end of which had fallen upon those in which the monster rested, were what I at first took to be enormous serpents. They were, in fact, tentacula. There was a third tentacle; it hung straight down. And it was from this, the coils wrapped around the neck, that the body of the unfortunate man hung, white and lifeless, like a victim of the hangman's noose.
"A tree-octopus!" I cried.
"I suppose one might call it that, only it seems to have but three tentacles. And that scream we heard last night—we know now what it was."
I shuddered.
"No wonder we thought that the sound was unhuman—in the grip of that thing, the coils around his neck! So near, and we never stirred to his help!"
"Because we never dreamed. And, had we known, Bill, we could not have saved him. Life would have been extinct, crushed out of him, before we could have got here and cut him down."
"I thought of some dreadful things," said I, "but never of a monster like that."
"A queer place, a horrible place, Bill," said Milton Rhodes, glancing a little nervously about him. "But come."
He started forward. The Dromans hung back, but I moved along after him, whereupon the others followed, though with great apparent reluctance and horror.
"What I don't understand, Bill, is this: what happened?"
"Why, the poor fellow was passing beneath the branches, the octopus thrust down its tentacle, wound it around the victim's neck and started to pull him up."
"All that is very clear. But then what happened—to the octopus?"
"The limb to which the monster had attached itself broke under the added weight, and down it came crashing into those branches in which we see it."
"That too is clear," said Rhodes. "But what killed the thing? The fall itself, it seems to me, could not have done so."
The next moment we halted, a few yards from the spot where hung the still, white body of the Droman.
"I see it now," said Rhodes, pointing. "As the monster came down, it was impaled upon that swordlike stub of a branch. See it protruding upward from the horrible body."
This, there could be no doubt, was what had happened. And that Gorgonic horror, in the shock of the fall and its impalement, even in its death throes, had never loosed the grip on its victim.
"We can't leave the poor devil hanging like that," I said.
"Of course not. And to give him burial will mean the loss of time probably more precious even than we think. This is a wood horrible as any that Dante ever found himself in!"
"We must risk it. We can't leave him like that, or the body lying on the ground for the beasts to devour."
Rhodes and I still had our icepicks, and we at once divested ourselves of the packs and started the grave. And, as we worked, try as I would I could not shake it from me—the feeling that, concealed somewhere in the trees, something was lurking, watching us.
Thumbra, mounted upon the shoulders of Narkus, cut down the victim. It took three strokes to cleave his sword through the tentacle. Along it ran two rows of suckers, like those of a devil-fish. So powerful was the grip upon the victim's neck, we could not remove the severed end of the tentacle; and so we buried the poor Droman, in his shallow grave, with those coils around his throat.
Forthwith we quitted the cursed spot, though Rhodes, I believe, wanted to climb up into that tree and subject the monster to a scientific scrutiny!
And, as we pushed on through that dreadful wood, it was as though some sixth sense bore to my brain a warning vague but persistent, sinister:
"It is following!"