Twice they paused for brief rest periods. It was around mid-afternoon when the tree women scouting in front began to fall back, joining the main party. Ahead, the humans could see a much brighter light, and they knew the edge of the forest must be here at last.
Gorm, to whom the whole situation had been carefully explained, halted, sat up, and then sniffed the breeze. Dirty air, came from his mind. Something long dead, but not-dead, up there in the light.
Long dead but not-dead! The Metz drew in a deep breath and exhaled long and hard. On his palate now lay a faint film of corruption, an evil stench of some vileness or other. Drifting through the sweet scents of the forest it came, a wavering miasma of rotten life and seething putrescence, unnatural simply because it was alive and not dead, as anything so decayed long should have been. The odor of the House!
We dare go very little closer, came Vilah-ree’s message. We have lost many of our people, whom the House somehow caught and held unmoving while they watched from the forest edge. Then, those things you saw came—and fed!
Now Hiero began to put into effect the plan he previously had worked out with the others. He advanced with caution, his mind probing for any sign of reasoning life, though not neglecting any lesser creatures either. With him the bear went prowling, and the priest could feel his strange mind also reaching out, feeling for alien or inimical contact of any sort.
It had been agreed that this would be the order of their approach, if not of actual battle. Remaining behind them with Vilah-ree, Aldo and Luchare would link minds and prepare to aid if they were needed. But this first move was intended to be a reconnaissance, nothing more.
“Still, we may get drawn in by this thing,” Hiero said, when they had discussed the possibilities. “Gorm and I are old veterans now, but we still really know nothing of this House creature, not even what it is, let alone what it actually can do. Remember, it can detect the tree people, by their minds apparently, and we can’t! That’s enough to make one cautious.”
“Then why can’t I come, too, and help you? I won’t be left in back!” Luchare was furious.
“Listen, love, we’ve been over this a dozen times. You haven’t the mental training, although you’re learning. You know that Gorm can use his mind better. Brother Aldo has to stay here to help try and anchor our minds if we need him. And you can help only there, by adding your mental energy store to his.” His voice was patient, since he knew the sole reason for her anger was fear of his going into danger without her. Eventually, with Aldo helping, she had been argued into acquiescence, however unwilling. The plan made so much sense that she could really argue no longer.
As man and bear slowly advanced over the moss and through the undergrowth which ringed the great tree bases, the sunlight grew steadily. Hiero paused, seeing for the first time at close range the shrouded skeleton of a forest giant, bulging with repulsive growths, through a gap in the yet living trees ahead. There were no large animals in the area, not even small ones detectable by his mind. The exceptions were a few enormous greenish flies, their plump bodies shining in the sun with iridescent hues as they buzzed over the plants about them. Hiero brushed one away, a fluttering, pulpy thing almost three inches long, which hovered near his face for a moment.
Still his mind met nothing. Whatever lurked out there in the foul profusion of rot was quiescent. Cautiously, the two went on, their thoughts neatly overlapping as they spread wider and wider, like ripples in a pool.
As they approached the actual border of the living forest, the dead trees, each festooned with horrid growth, became more evident. For some time, the reek of the strange fungi had been growing in their nostrils, and now Hiero switched over to breathing through his mouth alone, so foul and purulent had the odors become. No warning of any attacker could penetrate that frightful stench, so why not cut it off at the source? Noses were no good here.
The great flies were still common, indeed seemed to be increasing in number, but nothing else moved. At last, unable to go further, they paused behind the last living tree near them and stared out over the awful panorama spread before them.
Directly in front, a vast puffball, its pocked, white circumference many yards in diameter, reared up in bloated isolation. To the left, a forest of monster toadstools, sterns brown and broad, mottled umbels a sickly orange, stretched out of sight, broken only by the pulp-covered columns of the dead trees rising in their midst. On the right, the dead trees thinned, for here a finger of the outer desert had long ago crept closer to the woods. But now an uneven mound of various smaller fungi, of all shapes and ocherous and bilious colors, extended into the middle distance. There was no normal growth in view, not even grass, nor any bare ground not covered by some slime or smear or leprous muck.
No sound, save for the muted buzzing of the flies, broke the silence. Under the great heat of the afternoon sun, they saw faint steams and moist clouds rise at intervals from the surface of the noxious growths.
Slowly, ever so slowly, they edged closer to the border of crawling horror that was the blight. Still nothing stirred out in the nightmare world into which they looked and also sent their roving brain impulses.
Then—having lured its prey as close as it could by sheer inaction—the House struck! And it was the man who took the brunt of the blow.
Never in all his varied experience had Hiero felt anything quite like it. An actual chill seemed to settle through his body, paralyzing his will and numbing his nerve endings. Though his personally devised mind guard had been kept at full strength, the attack passed through his screens as if they were nonexistent. Yet not quite. The very last one, the one which guarded the control of his own mind, was untouched. But though he could see and hear, no muscle of his body could so much as twitch. Through eyes which happened to be looking half that way when the sweeping assault came, Hiero could see Gorm frozen, one forefoot raised. He knew that the bear was equally helpless, and in so knowing, he despaired.
For with the attack of the House there came knowledge of the attacker. And that knowledge chilled not the body, for that indeed was already numb, but the very soul, the inner being. Steeped in evil and all vileness and cruelty were the adept wizards of the Unclean. But they were nevertheless of human, ancestry, and thus, malign though they were, they yet preserved a tincture of humanity.
But the House was other. Somehow, after The Death, but in the ancient past, a strange and awful mating had taken place, triune perhaps, between a mycelial spore, an amoeboid slime, and, somewhere, somehow, an intelligence. Or perhaps the intelligence grew from the slime and gained the spore, then took a different direction from all other life. Whatever had happened, the result was abnormal, beyond normality in fact. In some ways like the Dweller in the Mist, that seeming embodiment of total evil, yet even further from the upward path to reason and logic was the House.
Fiercely, Hiero strained to free his limbs. At the same time, he tried to link his mind with Brother Aldo and Luchare, back in the forest. Neither effort was successful. He could not move and he seemed enclosed in a curious, icy mental shell, so that any outside contact was severed and cut off. His link with Gorm had vanished as soon as the attack began. His brain was still clear and unhampered except by the screen, yet he could neither move his body nor communicate with others.
Through the screen about him, now another attack, if that was what it was, began. The House was revealing itself. As the image of Vilah-ree had first appeared in his mind, despite any real method of communication, so now the misty outline of the thing itself began to build on the beslimed earth fifty yards in front of him. He knew it was not real, but only what he was being willed to see; that the physical body or structure, he did not know what, actually, of the House was nowhere near, but well hidden, somewhere out in the depths of the foul world it had built for itself. But stay—was that world so foul? Even as the wavering shape of the House began to condense and apparently solidify before his eyes, so too a new thought crept into his mind. The House was alien, different, yes. But was that enough to make it evil? Had it too not a right to live? The siren message infiltrated his own thoughts very, very subtly. His inner screen was not so much pierced, for the House seemed incapable of doing that, as persuaded, soothed, and his mind was thus ensnared. Yet not quite.