He remembered the smooth skin on young Lilly’s neck, and the harsh red wounds that marred it, but he felt no revulsion at the injury. Rather, he found his passions rising for the girl and the scarlet holes nestled there beneath her chin.
These dark desires were wrong—he was her doctor, and yet the yearning swelled within him. It rose as the black fog climbed his legs, and caressed the knife gripped in his hand.
And with this obscuring dark came red fantasies. Fantasies where blood spurted from the wounds on Lilly’s neck, and washed down over her naked breasts.
Breasts he wished to touch...
She was not yet 20, but the scientist understood how girls matured faster than men—a well-known fact.
Lilly was old enough to take a man for a mate! Had she not already? The body beneath her nightclothes was ripe; it was perfection. Yes, he’d taken a peek, a lingering look, really—what man would not?
And Van Resen was a man.
More of a man than Phillip Holmes! That young whelp deserved a beating—and why stop there? He slashed the air with his butcher knife. A spoiled little mama’s boy! How dare he...
But Van Resen was a man! A perfect man for Lilly—and for that haughty governess too! How he had yearned to take them both, take them and lie with breasts in hand, in his mouth, as he stroked their flaring hips!
Van Resen shuddered as the fog rose higher still, and washed over his tingling thighs.
“Stop!” he whispered in the shadow, his eye catching the pale glint of light upon the knife.
But dark imaginings now overwhelmed his mind. Violation and bloody murder cut into the perfect flesh of Lilly Quarrie and sundered the not-so-prim Miss James.
He squinted at the gleam of light upon his flashing blade as he slashed at the air around him.
“Joseph!” he wept the word, but it did not stop a tide of ugliness that reduced him to tears.
He was a scientist—a trained biologist—all but impossible to shock with the truth, but the carnal images and depraved acts that flooded his mind colored him to the hairline—made him ashamed to call himself the name of civilized man.
Van Resen raised his free hand quivering and brought it hard against his sweat-streaked cheek. Again he did this, and again, until he staggered back!
So he struck himself again, and still again!
Until his mind reformed around the stinging pain, and with his returning self control the polluting images shattered and drained away as a black torrent to pool at his feet with the fog.
He was left standing with heart pounding in the shadowed grove.
“Remarkable,” he whimpered, setting his teeth before peering around, seeking the way he had come in. A thrill of terror went through him.
He could not see any path or the clearing beyond. Nothing looked familiar there. Nothing but the shadow, and the strange flickering light that had returned with the stink of decay.
Until a sudden breeze blew from somewhere outside the grove, and with a woody click and knock of high dead branches a tangle of limbs shifted aside momentarily to show the lambent field within the many angled openings formed by the action.
“And yet, the path I took was straight,” Van Resen said aloud, which contradicted the sight he now beheld.
The scientist oriented himself to face the center of the forest and groaned to see that it was darker there—that the fog lay deep among the oldest trees; and just as he considered time itself deforming within the murky wood, a flicker of blue-green light and then another floated up over first one and then more distant trees.
These glimmerings diminished as they came near the heights, but those that followed were brighter, and some larger, all of them growing more human in shape as shadows or spirits.
“A trick of the eye, Joseph,” he warned himself, before pausing to peer down into the dark fog at his feet.
He gasped, for through the misty black he could see his shoes, but twisted within the swollen tangles of gray roots beneath them were yellow bones broken and split, and the skeletons they’d once comprised had been torn to pieces and were all but impossible to identify other than by the broad stroke as classification: one round and sharp toothed, the skull of a carnivorous beast; another long and hoofed, the leg of a gazelle; and still another was narrow and bowed, the arching rib of a shuffling beast unknown—a diseased man or ape.
All of this he saw as the fog grew more agitated, and its touch more chill. Like the ghost of a pond was it becoming, sloshing at his knees as he moved forward pushing spectral white rivulets and waves aside that crested and washed the greasy tree trunks as it churned.
And as this fog thickened, so too had the trees grown older, their trunks broader and scabrous bark more decayed; until ahead he saw standing center to the whirling tide of shadow the largest moringa tree, its sickly bark shining with disease and slime, and running with yellow corruption like pus.
The old trees closest leaned out from its trunk, forming angles around a central depression, and about this washed the sickly fog.
Girding his courage with denials of what stood plainly there before his eyes, Van Resen hurried forward through the ghostly lake, his feet plunking heavily as he moved.
The blade of his butcher knife had gone gray in the dark. He seemed to be going blind—no more tricks.
And then beneath his feet many bones shone dully with an inner light, but they required no more illumination for the doctor to identify. Human bones by the thousands were sunk there at his feet, and yet his boots passed through them.
Forward Van Resen struggled, until he drew near the greatest moringa. There the mist stank of a hundred corpses where it smothered the deep tree roots. Climbing over the closest buttress, the scientist found himself
