Her hands drew back from his face. Her eyes pierced brighter, brighter, eating down, down into the dregs, the dreary twisted depths of his mind.

He was running, running as before, always as before. But this time his pursuers were very near. He was running in a sticky bog. With infinitely slow agony he drew each foot out of the slimy muck, sat it down, drew up the other foot. Around him was a thick blanket of cold clammy fog. And he knew it was an endless fog—that if he ran forever he could never escape it. But he also knew he wouldn't run forever, or even very long. His pursuers were too close.

His pursuers!

He looked back. A sense of profound horror sickened him. He recognized them now. For the first time they were near enough for him to identify them.

He sank down on his knees. He began to crawl through the stinking ooze. Then he felt their nearness. They were surrounding him. He couldn't escape. He saw a ring of cold green faces. Hands, innumerable hands, reached out, tickling him with a branch of small blue nettles.

They had caught up with him at last!

He screamed. The poison fangs of the bombi-vine. The final agonies of the damned. The bombi-vine! Death would be infinitely preferable to the sting of the bombi-vine. It was unendurable pain, indefinitely prolonged. It directly effected a mysterious distortion in the nervous structure. Science had no cure, had never found the cause. Men who stumbled onto the nettles of the bombi-vine sought a quick and merciful death as the only escape.

Without death, the victim lived out a full lifetime of raw, shrieking pain....

His screams as he awoke silenced the giant tree-toads who hung heavily from the five-hundred foot crinoids. But before he left for Vencity through the darkness, he had suppressed the stark horror of the dream.

Once more he had drowned his hell in Stith.

He crawled out of the decrepit tractor, on the outskirts of Vencity. The city's lights glowed eerily through the night-thickened blanket of fog, as Owen found his way cautiously through rotting vegetation, then hesitated before entering Swamper Swhin's Dive. Tinny music came from the native band inside the smoky interior as it played the incomprehensible "music." A few Earthmen and women sat inside at the small oblong tables—tourists getting a morbid thrill from 

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