Grey and white, forming silver, were his beard and the hair that straggled limp as corn tassels from his head over his cheek. Grey too were his eyes, nearly white in the paleness. Though open, they saw nothing. Bony hands with fingers like claws had not even torn at the tunnel floor; he had been dead even as he fell. Open too was his mouth in a rictus that had been a gasp or cry.

The hovering mist lowered. Wraithy tendrils of transparent blue-grey touched the corpse, as though the amorphous haze-thing was putting forth exploratory pseudopods.

One of them entered the open mouth of the dead man.

Swiftly then, like smoke somehow filtering into a bottle, the haze entered the corpse.

Then all was quiet and still, and none was there to measure the passage of time. Minutes, or hours, or days, or weeks or months… they were as nothing to the dead-and to the mist-thing.

The seagreen serpent lay dead, and it began to rot. Well away along the twisting corridor beneath the earth, the robed man lay dead. And the mist had vanished, as silently and hazily as it had appeared, from one corpse and into another.

The body of the robed man did not swell, or rot.

Then, in that silence and motionlessness of death, there was movement.

It was fingers that twitched; the fingers of the right hand of the dead man.

They curled, clawing inward and leaving trails in the dust of the ancient cavern. Hardly more than bone, these fingers straightened again. And curled once more.

A ripple flowed through night-dark fabric as the dead man’s left leg moved, only a twitch like the rigour after death-but he had been dead far too long for that.