* * * * *

Those arcs and changing curves of the branches as they neared were
sketching lines of pure horror whose meaning he still could not
understand, save that they deepened in dreadfulness as he neared. For
the last time that urgent wonder burned up in his mind why--_why_ so
simple a thing as this fabulous Tree should be infused with an
indwelling terror strong enough to send his innermost soul frantic with
revulsion. For the last time--because in that trembling instant as he
waited for their touch, as the music brimmed up with unbearable,
brain-wrenching intensity, in that one last moment before the
flower-mouths seized him--he saw. He understood.

* * * * *

With eyes opened at last by the instant's ultimate horror, he saw the
real Thag. Dimly he knew that until now the thing had been so frightful
that his eyes had refused to register its existence, his brain to
acknowledge the possibility of such dreadfulness. It had literally been
too terrible to see, though his instinct knew the presence of infinite
horror. But now, in the grip of that mad, hypnotic song, in the instant
before unbearable terror enfolded him, his eyes opened to full sight,
and he saw.

That Tree was only Thag's outline, sketched three-dimensionally upon the
twilight. Its dreadfully curving branches had been no more than Thag's
barest contours, yet even they had made his very soul sick with
intuitive revulsion. But now, seeing the true horror, his mind was too
numb to do more than register its presence: Thag, hovering monstrously
between earth and heaven, billowing and surging up there in the
translucent twilight, tethered to the ground by the Tree's bending stem
and reaching ravenously after the hypnotized fodder that his calling
brought helpless into his clutches. One by one he snatched them up, one
by one absorbed them into the great, unseeable horror of his being.
That, then, was the reason why they vanished so instantaneously, sucked
into the concealing folds of a thing too dreadful for normal eyes to
see.

The priestess was pacing forward. Above her the branches arched and
leaned. Caught in a timeless paralysis of horror, Smith stared upward
into the enormous bulk of Thag while the music hummed intolerably in his
shrinking brain--Thag, the monstrous thing from darkness, called up by
Illar in those long-forgotten times when Mars was a green planet.
Foolishly his brain wander