“My God! that accursed burial-pit! There was no trouble finding it. The pavement above had broken through quite recently, I think. A big tree had pried with its boa-like roots between the yard-deep flagstones that were buried beneath centuries of mould. One of the flags had been tilted back on the pavement, and another had fallen through into the pit. There was a large hole, whose bottom I could see dimly in the forest-strangled light. Something glimmered palely at the bottom; but I could not be sure what it was.
“I had taken along a coil of rope, as you remember. I tied one end to a main root of the tree, dropped the other through the opening, and went down like a monkey. When I got to the bottom I could see little at first in the gloom, except for the whitish glimmering all around me, at my feet. Something broke and crunched beneath me when I began to move—something that was unspeakably brittle and friable. I turned on my flash-light, and saw that the place was fairly littered with bones—human skeletons lay tumbled everywhere. They must have been very old, for they dissolved into powder at a touch.
“The place was a huge sepulchral chamber. After awhile, as I wandered about with the flash-light, I found the steps that led to the blocked-up entrance. But if any treasure had been buried with the bodies, it must have been removed long ago. I groped around amid the bones and dust, feeling pretty much like a ghoul, but couldn’t find anything of value, not even a bracelet or a finger-ring on any of the skeletons.
“It wasn’t until I thought of climbing out that I noticed the real horror. I didn’t mind those skeletons so much: they were lying in attitudes of repose, even if they were a little crowded and it seemed that their owners must have died natural deaths—natural, that is, as we reckon such things.
“Then, in one of the corners—the corner nearest to the opening in the roof—I looked up and saw it in the webby shadows. Ten feet above my head it hung, and I had almost touched it, unknowingly, when I descended the rope.
“It looked like a sort of weird lattice-work at first. Then I saw that the lattice was partly formed of human bones—a complete skeleton, very tall and stalwart, like that of a warrior. I wouldn’t have cared if it had been hanging there in any normal fashion—if it had been suspended by metal chains, for instance, or had merely been nailed to the walls. The horror lay in the thing that grew out of the skull—the white, withered thing like a set of fantastic antlers ending in myriads of long and stringy tendrils that had spread themselves on the wall, climbing upward till they reached the roof. They must have lifted the skeleton, or body, along with them as they climbed.
“I examined the thing with my flash-light, and found new horrors. It must have been a plant of some sort, and apparently it had started to grow in the cranium. Some of the branches had issued from the cloven crown, others through the eye-holes and the nose-holes, to flare upward. And the roots of the blasphemous thing had gone downward, trellising themselves on every bone. The very toes and fingers were ringed with them, and they drooped in writhing coils. Worst of all, the ones that had issued from the toe-ends were rooted in a second skull, which dangled just below, with fragments of the broken-off root system. There was a litter of fallen bones on the floor in the corner, but I didn’t care to inspect it.
“The sight made me feel a little weak, somehow—and more than a little nauseated—that abhorrent, inexplicable mingling of the human and the plant. I started to climb the rope, in a feverish hurry to get out, but the thing fascinated me, in its abominable fashion, and I couldn’t help pausing to study it a little more when I had climbed half-way. I leaned toward it too fast, I guess, and the rope began to sway, bringing my face lightly against the leprous, antler-shaped boughs above the skull.
“Something broke—I don’t know what—possibly a sort of pod on one of the branches. Anyway, I found my head enveloped in a cloud of pearl-grey powder, very light, fine, and scentless. The stuff settled on my hair, it got into my nose and eyes, nearly choking and blinding me. I tried to shake it off as well as I could. Then I climbed on and pulled myself through the opening …”
As if the effort of coherent narration had been too heavy a strain, Falmer lapsed into disconnected mumblings, some of which were inaudible. The mysterious malady, whatever it was, returned upon him, and his delirious ramblings were mixed with groans of torture. But at moments he regained a flash of coherence.
“My head! My head!” he muttered. “There must be something in my brain, something that grows and spreads; I tell you, I can feel it there. I haven’t felt right at any time since I left the burial-pit… My mind has been queer ever since…. It must have been the spores of the ancient devil-plant…The spores have taken root…the thing is splitting my skull, going down into my brain—a plant that springs out of a human cranium, as if from a flower-pot!”
The dreadful convulsions began once more, and Falmer writhed uncontrollably in his companion’s arms, shrieking with agony. Thone, sick at heart, and horribly shocked by his sufferings, abandoned all effort at restraint and took up the hypodermic. With much difficulty, he managed to inject a triple dose into one of the wildly tossing arms, and Falmer grew quiet by degrees and lay with open glassy eyes, breathing stertorously. Thone, for the first time, perceived an odd protrusion of his eye-balls, which seemed about to start from their sockets, making it impossible for the lids to close, and lending the drawn, contorted features an expression of mad horror and extravagant ghastliness. It was as if something were pushing Falmer’s eyes from his head.
Thone, trembling with sudden weakness and terror, felt that he was involved in some unnatural web of nightmare. He could not, dared not, believe the story Falmer had told him, and its implications. The thing was too monstrous, too fantastic; and, assuring himself that his companion had imagined it all, had been ill throughout with the incubation of some strange fever, he stooped over and found that the horn-shaped lump on Falmer’s head had now broken through the skin.
Increasingly, with a sense of unreality, he stared at the object that his prying fingers had touched and revealed amid the matted hair. It was unmistakably a plant-bud of some sort, with involuted folds of pale green and bloody pink that seemed about to expand. The thing issued from above the central suture of the skull; and the thought occurred to the horror-sick observer that it had somehow taken root in the very bone; had gone downward, as Falmer had feared, into the brain.
A nausea swept upon Thone, and he recoiled from the lolling head and its baleful outgrowth, averting his gaze. His fever, he felt, was returning; there was a woeful debility in all his limbs; and he heard the muttering voices of incipient delirium through the quinine-induced ringing in his ears. His eyes blurred with a deathly mist, as if the miasma of some equatorial fen had arisen visibly before him.
He fought to subdue his illness and impotence. He must not give way to it wholly; he must go on with Falmer and the Indians, and reach the nearest trading station, many days away on the Orinoco, where Falmer could receive aid.
As if through sheer volition, the clinging vapor cleared from his eyes, and he felt a resurgence of strength. He looked around for the two guides, and saw, with a start of uncomprehending surprise, that they had vanished. Then, peering further, he observed that one of the boats—the dugout used by the Indians—had also disappeared. It was all too evident that he and Falmer had been deserted. Perhaps the Indians had known what was wrong with the sick man, and had been afraid. Their apprehensive glances, their covert whisperings, their patent unwillingness to approach Falmer, all seemed to confirm this. At any rate, they were gone, and they had taken much of the camp equipment and most of the provisions with them.