Read Online Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror by Joyce Carol Oates, Nancy Kilpatrick, Caitlin R. Kiernan, Storm Constantine, Molly Tanzer, Lois H. Gresh, Gemma Files, Karen Heuler - Free Book Online Page B

they had been a few moments previous.
    After that he sat watching them in a sort of baleful hypnosis. The illusion of the plant's visible growth and freer movement increased upon Tefere. Arpad, however, did not stir and his parchment face appeared to shrivel and fall in, as if the roots of the growth were draining his blood, devouring his very flesh in their hunger.
    Tefere wrenched his eyes away and stared at the river shore. The stream had widened and the current had grown more sluggish. He tried to figure out their location, looking vainly for some familiar landmark in the monotonous dull-green cliffs of jungle that lined the margin.
    His mind began to wander with an odd inconsequence, coming back always, in a sort of closed circle, to the thing that was devouring Arpad. With a flash of scientific curiosity he found himself wondering to what genus it belonged. It was neither fungus nor pitcher plant, nor anything that he had ever encountered or heard of in his explorations. It must have come, as Arpad had suggested, from an alien world: it was nothing that the earth could conceivably have nourished.
    He felt, with a comforting assurance, that Arpad was dead. That, at least, was a mercy. But even as he shaped the thought Tefere heard a low, guttural moaning and peering at Arpad, he saw that his limbs and body were twitching slightly. The twitching increased and took on a rhythmic regularity, though at no time did it resemble the agonized and violent convulsions of the previous day. It was plainly automatic and Tefere saw that it was timed with the languorous swaying of the plant. The effect on the watcher was insidiously mesmeric and once Tefere caught himself beating the rhythm with his foot.
    He tried to pull himself together, groping desperately for something to which his sanity could cling. His illness returned: fever, nausea, and revulsion… But before he yielded to it utterly, he drew his loaded revolver from its holster and fired six times into Arpad's quivering body. He knew that he had not missed, but after the final bullet Arpad still moaned and twitched in unison with the swaying of the plant, and Tefere, sliding into delirium, heard still the ceaseless, automatic moaning.
    There was no time in the world of seething unreality and shore-less oblivion through which he drifted. When he came to himself again, Tefere could not know if hours or weeks had elapsed. But he knew at once that the boat was no longer moving; lifting himself dizzily, he saw that it had floated into shallow water and mud and was nosing the beach of a tiny, jungle-tufted isle in mid-river. The putrid odor of slime was about him like a stagnant pool and he heard the strident humming of insects.
    It was either late morning or early afternoon, for the sun was high. Lianas were drooping above him from the island trees like uncoiled serpents and orchids, marked with mottling, leaned toward him from lowering boughs. Immense butterflies went past on sumptuously spotted wings.
    He sat up, feeling very giddy and lightheaded, and faced again the horror that accompanied him. The thing had grown incredibly: the three-antlered stems mounting above Arpad's head had become gigantic and had put out masses of ropy feelers that tossed in the air, as if searching for support. In the topmost antlers a prodigious blossom had opened—a sort of fleshy disk, broad as a man's face and white as leprosy.
    Arpad's features had shrunk until the outlines of every bone were visible. He was a mere death's head in a mask of human skin and beneath his clothing, his body was little more than a skeleton. He was quite still now, except for the communicated quivering of the stems.
    Tefere wanted to hurl himself forward in a mad impulse to grapple with the growth. But a strange paralysis held him back. The plant was like a living and sentient thing—a thing that watched him, that dominated him with its superior will. And the huge blossom, as Tefere stared, took on the dim semblance