Lamont felt the urge to go and comfort her, but he hesitated. Did she deserve to be comforted? She had tried her best to save the native, but she had also shot him in cold blood! Who was this mercurial creature?
Rosemary’s attempts to revive the native became increasingly violent. A storm of emotion passed over her features as she forcefully pumped the small man’s chest, leaning down every few seconds to blow a puff of air into his gaping, blood-laced mouth. “Breathe!” She whispered. “Come on, you bastard!”
Captain Carter turned from his place between them and the other natives, addressing the young medic with stiff formality, though the expression in his eyes was deeply piteous. “Miss Wells, stop.”
Rosemary obeyed, rolling back on her heels. Tears flowed freely over her cherubic cheeks, her shoulders shaking with silent sobs. She looked very small just then, and Lamont felt the urge to go and comfort her, but he hesitated. Did she deserve to be comforted? She had tried her best to save the native, but she had also shot him in cold blood! Who was this mercurial creature?
Instead, he voiced the other question that was on his mind. “Why are they chanting?” He whispered to Francis, bobbing his head toward the unknown number of natives, mostly women and children, who were clustered in the deep shadows between them and the entrance to the caves. “Death ritual?”
The sound they made was a low tonal hum, deeply harmonious, punctuated by grunts and clicks. It reverberated hauntingly in the nooks and crannies of the cavern.
“Perhaps,” Captain Carter said. “Or perhaps it has something to do with her.”
Lamont looked at the kneeling form of Rosemary, but the captain’s eyes weren’t directed at her. They looked beyond her, toward the entrance to the deeper caves. There, the centipidal guide stood, for lack of a better term, with one third of its segmented body raised up. The complex assemblage of organs on its soft underside pulsed and quivered as, with silent purpose, it moved toward them on the locomotive appendages that were mostly hidden beneath the shell of its lower third.
As it came closer, the small humans began to stir, the men in the group slipping out in front of the women and children. Lamont tensed, thinking that they were about to attack the creature. Then, with shock, he realized that the opposite was true: First the men, and then the others, were dropping anything they held in their hands and lowering to their knees, prostrating themselves as their chanting continued.
“They—they worship these creatures!” Francis exclaimed in a whisper.
He and Lamont watched, frozen in place, while the creature made its way to where Rosemary was silently crouched between the two dead bodies. As if just now emerging from her state of revery, the young woman looked up with red, tear-filled eyes at the creature. At that moment, a cluster of thin, pale tendrils emerged from the complex folds of the creature’s midsection and snaked languidly toward Rosemary, wrapping like vines around one of her wrists.
Next: The Miracle