Page 51

The monstrous eye was beautiful... but it wasn't perfect.

Even as the crackling sounds increased from below her- signs of a mouth forming around her feet- Dee spotted the tiny dark speck clinging to the top edge of the glowing orb like a cockroach perched on fine china.

The speck drew her attention... and for a moment Dee's mind struggled within the hypnotic effect. Memories of who she was, where she was, and of something vaguely important tucked in the inner folds of her backpack crowded her mind.

"What the-"

The tiny speck moved. The cockroach became a spider, sliding down an invisible web... zipping downward along the surface of the giant glowing eye, trailing behind it a single strand of...

Blood?

The world convulsed around Dee, and the spell was broken.

The massive... thing... on which Dee stood shuddered.

The entire creature.

All of it.

Limbs and tentacles and unidentifiable appendages contracted as one, like a giant making a fist while she stood perched on the back of his hand. The 'ground' shot upward below her, nearly sending Dee and Treach spinning into empty space. For an uneasy second she was airborne, then the familiar foul spongy surface rushed up to meet her again. There was nothing to hold on to, so Dee just screamed as everything spun around her.

Before her, the giant eye-stalk whipped wildly back and forth, nearly dislodging the tiny speck that was just now slicing across the mid-point of the eye.

The Scarecrow.

He must have been clinging to the shaft wall. When the eye presented itself, he'd leapt atop it, sank his blade into the hypnotic orb, and slid down... cutting the eye in two as he descended. The man and his blade were tiny in comparison... but size of the bee doesn't really matter if its stinger is buried in your eyeball.

Dee made a mental note to wince later, if she survived.

Whatever this creature was, it felt pain. And it was feeling lots of it right now. That's what had saved her life. The creature was now flailing wildly, and the appendages that anchored it to he wall... weren't. Dee saw several of them pull free (or snap in half) and retract into the shuddering central mass. The walls themselves seemed to be crumbling, and Dee saw several large boulders fall past it...her...them... on their way to whatever waited at the bottom of the Blight's heart. Dee didn't hear the rocks hit anything; only the crumbling of more stone below.

And something else. A distant buzz, and a series of metallic sounds-

"ST... ..EAR!"

The buzzing grew louder, then it took on a wet, muffled quality-

This wasn't going to end well.