I found the seventh tier a dark and gloomy place, the floors littered with rubbish, the walls covered with green mold. The air here was not only dead and vitiated but also steamy and rank with vile odors, like the foul miasma that rises from the scummed waters of a swamp.
On the sixth floor I found—horror!
It was darker here than on the floor above, and the floor underfoot was carpeted with slimy mosses. Huge fungoid structures rose about me as I crept cautiously down the ramp—bloated and unhealthy fungi of enormous size, glazed with putrescent moisture, splotched with huge discolorations.
As I stepped to the bottom of the ramp my ankle was caught suddenly in a tenacious grip. I voiced a cry of astonishment and struggled to free myself. But the most violent contortions failed to loosen my foot from the green and furry tentacle that had ensnared me.
I had earlier found a scalpel-like implement of transparent metal in one of the cupboards of the suites above, which I had secreted about my person under the abbreviated tunic the science magician had given me to wear—an effeminate, silky thing, colored a repulsive lavender, which left my brown legs bare to the upper thigh. Now I snatched the glassy blade from its hiding place and slashed at the ropy tendril which wound ever tighter about my foot. The blade sawed through the ropy substance as through a vine, and to my surprise and consternation the thing that gripped my foot bled greenly—like sap from a living branch!
In a moment I had freed myself from the clinging tendril. As I kicked loose from its clutches, I got a good look at it for the first time. It was hard to make out in the dim green gloom, but the thing which wriggled and writhed across the mossy carpet for all the world like some manner of serpent was—I now realized with horror—a species of vegetable life, no reptile at all!
It was, in fact, a vine—complete with a hairy cilia of rootlets, twigs, and even flowers!
As it threshed madly about, shedding green, sap-like gore, I perceived other such vegetable horrors slithering toward it from the further aisles of the fungi grove. In an instant they had coiled about their injured fellow, insinuating their bristling rootlets into its open wound, and clung to it, feeding like vegetable vampires.
Thus I escaped without harm from my first experience with the dread crawler-vines.
Circling the place where the vine monsters lay entangled, feeding gluttonously on the vegetable gore of their fallen fellow, I continued my cautious descent of the Scarlet Pylon.
I knew now that the warnings given to me by Sarchimus were neither idle nor fallacious. But such was my determination, that I refused to turn back. With a wary eye out for more of the slithering vines, I prowled the aisles of bloated and enormous fungi, located a descending ramp thickly and loathsomely carpeted with grisly mold, and cautiously followed it down to the fifth tier.
Here there existed a mere ghost of light—a dim aura of corruption that flickered about the nodding heads of the swollen fungi.
Here, too, I found horror beyond belief.
A vast bulk shouldered through the stalked fungi and blundered toward me. It was an oddly unformed creature, shaped rather like an immense worm, but it progressed in a sort of lumbering charge on several pairs of short, stumpy feet which ended in thick pads. The thing had a heavy, fatty skin or hide which was of a pallid and repulsive hue, sickly yellow banded with white, and was splotched with green-gray mold. Its head was a bulging and featureless mass of fleshy leaves or petals, like cabbage leaves, but thicker and more meaty. It had no visual or auditory organs that I could clearly see, but I saw with a thrill of indescribable horror sprouting from amid the thick, wet petals of its visage two flowers growing, red and baleful, flowers whose extended and vibrating stamen and pistils seemed to taste the air—swiveling clumsily toward me, as if the flowers were eyes!
I shrieked and turned to flee, but the lumbering worm-thing was upon me in the same instant. The thick wet petals of its face slapped and clutched at me like deformed hands, and I saw that the underside of each petallike flap was tined with prickly thorns. These tore at my flesh, drawing blood, and sunk in, clinging to my bare shoulder and upper arm.
The huge, blundering thing stank of mold and corruption and rotting flowers. It slobbered and fumbled loathsomely at my flesh and, yelling like a demented thing, I struck again and again, driving my glassy scalpel deep into its broad breast. The fatty tissue off its flesh was pulpy and soft, and I carved it into ribbons without finding a vital organ.
Suddenly, I thought of those flowerlike eyes and slashed at them, severing one at the stalk, whereupon the monster squealed and shuddered, its thorny facial petals releasing me so that I fell to my knees in the slimy mosses. One organ of sense left unimpaired, however, the vast worm-thing squirmed toward me again in a multilegged rush and would have trampled me underfoot had not a miraculous intervention saved me from my own folly.
For suddenly the green gloom was split apart by a knife of stabbing electric fire!
The fattish breast of the worm-thing exploded, slabs and gobbets of wet tissue splattering about. The stench of ozone was sharp in my nostrils, together with a curious succulent odor my Terrene memory somehow identified as frying mushrooms.
The thing squealed and squirmed and fell on one side; writhing and coiling sluggishly, stumpy feet pawing clumsily at the air, its breast gouged in a smoking, blackened pit.
I looked up, dazedly, into the solemn, expressionless features of Sarchimus the Wise who stood there, his crystal blasting-wand clutched in one hand.
And then I think I fainted.
The magician had entered the lower levels by means of a wall panel which disclosed a lift. He bore me back into the upper tiers and to safety again. I feared his wrath, having disobeyed his instructions, but I suspect that Sarchimus was a being of pure intellect into whose peculiar mode of existence the emotions had little or no role to play.
“Now, boy, you perceive the wisdom of my counsels, which were not given on mere whim or through intent to deceive, but for your own good,” he said gravely.
I nodded humbly, begging his pardon for my violation of his precepts, which was occasioned or so I told him, through unendurable curiosity and no desire to go against his wishes.
“Very well; this time I will overlook the transgression. But in the future be more careful, and obey my strictures to the letter, for they are derived from sources of information you can know naught of. The lower tiers of this structure are the haunt of terrible monstrosities, as are the streets of the city itself, and the other buildings. You have narrowly escaped from the death-fungus; had you just brushed against it, it would have released a cloud of deadly spores which would cling to the membranes of your throat and lungs, feeding thereupon, and growing until in instants you would have been suffocated. That was on the seventh level. The crawler-vines, a species of vegetable vampire, you have already encountered—but the saloogs are the deadliest of all, and you could never have survived the attack, armed only with a knife for they lack any vital organs whatsoever and are unkillable, save by such weapons as my death-flash,” he warned. He indicated the crystal rod capped at both ends with glinting metal, which he bore in his right hand; the hand went gloved in metallic fabric which, I assume, insulated it from contact with the captive lightnings of the zoukar.
I questioned him in a faint voice as to the nature of the unkillable brute which had attacked me in the lower levels of the tower, the thing he called a saloog, and learned that such beasts are weird half-animal, half-fungoid predators. They roam the deserted and ruin-choked avenues of the Dead City, and like the crawler-vines and the death-fungus and yet other even more horrible brutes, are the hybrid spawn of the city itself, the results of evolution gone mad.