Terror triumphed. He spun away from the pool but the choking rain was up in walls he could not penetrate, arching unbroken into an opaque dome overhead. He could not break out.

He looked into the pool, and it seemed to him that the shapes in it were not tall weeds, but tongues. One was larger than the rest, nearer; it was a gross tubular tongue that came up blindly casting for flesh. It would sense him soon, and slap its way in his direction.

He fled, feet skidding. But from the opposite direction some other thing was coming, something dense and lateral, a massive spike, and there was no escape.

Aton spread himself with his back to the slippery wall, raised his eyes to the arching bowl above, and forced himself to think. He thought not lucidly and not well, the appetite of his intellect gagging on the sickening stuff before it, but digesting enough to save his waning strength and make his world stand still for just a moment.

This impasse, this horror is somehow of my own making. It cannot be real, in a physical sense. Only in Chthon are such things literal.

My mind has clothed its tumult in some frightening allegory, as it has done before. It has dramatized my mental conflict, forcing me to solve it now, or give up the pretense of sanity. I am standing on the bank of the swamp pond, and there is no monster in it, no wall around it; there is only the incipient blight and the steady rain. There are no reduplicating figures closing in on me, no terrible spike from the other side; only the woman I love and must hate, the alluring minionette.

But the conflict, he knew, was real, and his moment of decision had come—whatever the elements of it might be, and whatever its resolution might mean. He was trapped by a web spun long ago, when he had followed the half-heard melody into the wood and became its slave. Throughout his life he had been unable either to complete it or to escape it. Chthon itself had not resolved that dilemma. Now he had to face the ghastly alternatives himself, and embrace the rigors of that choice.

The marching column of women represented Malice, in all her forms: ubiquitous, but unable to accept direct love. His normal emotion was a sword, wielded against the minionette. Should he slay her with that love?

Or should he wait for the dread spike closing from the other side: the obscene inversion of their relationship? Impaled on it, he would become a creature of perpetual hate, a minion, his self-identity and integrity buried in sadism. She would flourish; her song would be complete. But he—