Chapter 36
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 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 exclamation and dashed forward. Rhodes was safe; at any rate, he was alive. A second or two, and I burst from the fern-growth.
Surprise, amazement brought me up instanter, and the next instant an indescribable horror had me in its grip.
The surprise, 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, motionless and silent as so many statues, gazing, as though held in a baleful charm, upon that thing before them. Rhodes was the only one that moved as I burst out into the scene.
"I wondered, Bill, why you didn't come. I was just about to call out to you again."
"And I wondered why you all were so silent, after that exclamation and that scream. I understand it now."
Shuddering, I pointed with my alpenstock at that thing before us.
"In the name of the Gorgons, what is that?"
"I wish that I knew, Bill. What is your name for such a monstrosity as that?"
A silence of some seconds followed, and then I remembered something, 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 in there?" I asked, pointing.
Milton Rhodes whirled to the direction that I indicated.
"In where?"
"In those ferns, behind Drorathusa. I heard something in there, something that was moving."
"When?"
"Some few moments ago, just before you called to me."
A wan smile flitted across the face of Milton Rhodes.
"That was Drorathusa herself moving through that thick tangle of flowers."
"But I tell you, Milton, that it was movingtowards 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 sawthat. Nandradelphis, I believe."
This turned me again to that monster and its victim. No wonder that that piercing 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. Tall trees, looking very much at a first glance like Douglas firs, rose up all around, but there were other growths; there were twisted trunks and branches that had a gnarled and savage aspect; the light was pearly, misty; all made a fitting setting truly for that which 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 two or three feet from the ground, hung the body of a man.
That itself was shocking enough, but what we saw up above—how I shudder, even at this late date, as that picture rises before me! It was a nightmare-shape, of mottled green and brown, with splotches of something whitish, bluish.
There were splotches, too, upon some of the leaves 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 shape, were two great eyes, but they never moved, were fixed and glassy. One of the higher branches had been broken, though not clean through, and, wound around this branch, the end of which had fallen upon that on 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, a coil around the neck and two around the left arm, 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 most people would call it that. It has but three tentacles, however, and so is a tripus. And that scream we heard last night—well, we know now, Bill, what it was."
I shivered.
"No wonder," I said, "that we thought that the sound was unhuman! In the grip of that thing, the tentacle 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 ever we could have got here and cut him down."
"I thought of some dreadful things," I said, "but never of a monster like that."
"A queer place, this forest, a horrible place, Bill," Milton Rhodes said, 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.
"What I don't quite 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 just what happened to the octopus?"
"The limb to which the monster had attached itself—see where the limb has been struck, perhaps by a falling tree, and weakened—well, it broke, and down the monster came crashing onto that branch on which we see it."
"That too is quite clear," said Rhodes. "But what killed the thing? The fall, it seems to me, could not have done it."
The next moment we halted, a little distance from the spot where hung the still, white body of the Droman.
"Oh, I see it now," said Rhodes, pointing. "Why didn't I see that before? As the monster came down, it was impaled upon those sword-like stubs of branches, one going through the body, the other out through the face. Face! The thing seems to be all face. And the human aspect of that visage! How like the big face of a fat man!"
That, 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 it. 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 ice-picks, 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 off from me—the feeling that, concealed somewhere in the trees, something was lurking, was watching us.
Zenvothunbro cut down the victim. Along the tentacle, ran two rows of suckers, like those of a devil-fish. So powerful was the grip, we could not remove the thing; and so we buried the poor Droman, in his shallow grave, with those coils still gripping him.
Forthwith we quitted that cursed spot, though Milton, I believe, wanted to climb up and subject that 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!"