young. From outside, nothing of the building's interior could be made out, for a screen of dense shadow blocked the oval opening. Kial hung back, shivering, as Alston strode to the doorway. 

"Wait here if you like," he said. "At least till I look around inside. There have been changes since I was last here. All this growth is new...."Panic shrilled through her as she glanced about at the grotesque shadow-shapes.

"I'll go with you," she said quickly. "I'm afraid to stay out here alone."

Alston nodded, with a surge of rough sympathy. "Suit yourself. But stick close in case of trouble. We may be just imagining things."

Her voice was hollow and awoke strange echoings among the dry, murmurous rustling of the vines. "How dared you ever come here before, alone? There is something dreadful...."

"It was different, then."

Alston plunged boldly into the shadow, the girl following reluctantly.

Inside, the air was warm, humid, stifling, full of the fetid odors of a hothouse. Silence stunned the ears. Even the restless stirring sounds of the vines faltered and died away. There was complete absence of sound as different from ordinary stillness as death is from life. Something tangible was gone from the very air. Withdrawn. Breathless, waiting hush, lifeless as a shroud, pervaded the somber interior.

There was light of an eery sort, a flickering play of shadows shot with pearly ghosts, lambent as moonflames, which hung in thick layers like drifting smoke or moved in shifting planes like faintly glowing draperies.

Slowly their eyes became accustomed to the dimness and they perceived the dimensions of the place. It was a vast circular space, like some tremendous hall that might have been a temple, above soared vague immensities of a vaulted dome, and the paved floor was strewn with the rubble of titanic collapse. Before them, in terraced crescents, like a giant's staircase crumbling into ruin, the flooring fell away into a central depression.

Here were rank on rank of noxious, ugly tree-growths, jutting from displaced paving blocks--each plant a gnarly, jointed trunk crowned with clusters of motionless tentacles. Ranged about the terraces, they parodied the attitudes of worshippers within some unholy temple. Each massive wall was thickly tapestried in matted hangings of the ophidian vines, 

 Prev. P 24/32 next