Dark and darker for three days. We are lost and cannot find our way to the light. The Cappan still pursues the gray caps, but they remain flitting shadows against the pale, dead glow of the fungus, the mushrooms that stink and writhe and even seem to speak a little. We have run out of food and are reduced to eating from the mushrooms that rise so tall in these caverns we must seek sustenance from the stem alone—maddeningly aware of succulent leathery lobes too high to reach. We know we are being watched, and this has unnerved all but the strongest men. We can no longer afford to sleep except in shifts, for too often we have woken to find another of our party missing. Early yesterday I woke to find a stealthy gray cap about to murder the Cappan himself, and when I gave the alarm, this creature smiled most chillingly, made a chirping sound, and ran down the passageway. We gave chase, the Cappan and I and some 20 others. The gray cap escaped, and when we returned our supplies were gone, as were the 15 men who had remained behind. The gray caps’ behavior here is as different as night is to day—here they are fast and crafty and we hardly catch sight of them before they strike. I do not believe we will make it to the surface alive.

Tonsure’s composure is admirable, although his sense of time is certainly faulty—he writes that three days had passed, when it must still have been but a single night, for Manzikert I was found in the library the very next morning. Another entry, dated just a few “days” later, is more disjointed and, one feels, soaked through with terror:

Three more gone—taken. In the night. Morning now. What do we find arranged around us like puppet actors? We find arranged around us the heads of those who have been taken from us. Ramkin, Starkin, Weatherby, and all the rest. Staring. But they cannot stare. They have no eyes. I wish I had no eyes. Cappan long ago gave up on all but the idea of escape. And it eludes us. We can taste it—the air sometimes fresher, so we know we are near the surface, and yet we might as well be a hundred miles underground! We must escape these blind staring heads. We eat the fungus, but I feel it eats us instead. Cappan near despair. Never seen him this way. Seven of us. Trapped. Cappan just stares at the heads. Talks to them, calls them by name. He’s not mad. He’s not mad. He has it easier in these tunnels than I. And still they watch us …