His speed leveled out at a still body-rending velocity as the insane Mandy hugged him with arms, legs and numerous creeping tendrils that searched for gaps in his hazmat suit—little had he suspected that she was an infiltrator, that the mission had been doomed from the outset as soon as he had insisted on bringing her along, not knowing that this continent-wide organism had sent her back to lure him into its folds for its own purposes.

The gap in the fifth and highest canopy of this stupendous forest opened to receive them and they slowed. A buzzing above drowned out the whine of the now distant winch. He looked up to see the giant bumble bee, and felt her nuzzle him, kissing his suit with her powdery lips. As she did little clovers sprouted all along his shoulders in the form of her prettily puckered lips.

She looked into his eyes, her green ones deepening to a purple hue.

There descent slowed again, as many vines sacrificed themselves by reaching out heroically to seize the falling cable only to be shredded into ribbons of pulp.

He looked into her eyes as the subdued sun that lit the sky above now seemed a mere moon, drenching the world of the fourth canopy in a silvery hue. She shed tears for the tendrils dying in their thousands to break their fall, and her eyes shown mauve in the silver light of the deepening night.

She was beautiful.

He did not wish to leave any longer, wanted only to visit the Idol and then lay down in her arms, covered by her petals and caressed by her…

He was jerked awake at the end of the cable, his calculations having been correct after all.

She looked into his eyes with eyes of ghostly hue, silver as seen from the bottom of a pool. There was a crazed inhuman light about them and she sprang from him onto the low sweeping branch of a tree, which had a trunk that rivaled the body of his zeppelin, which he could see, bobbing on the night breeze far above, tethered at the end of a flowering garland hundreds of meters long.

She crouched there cat-like, glaring at him with hungry menace, her many vines playing along the great polished branch, as if things of the night had paraded out upon this sweep of tree limb for ages, to look upon the regal object of his petty ambitions.

All about, waving on the necks of iridescent stalks towering 20 meters and more, danced in languid profusion, a legion of pale-petaled night flowers, swaying—not according to some breeze—but under their own collective power, stirring a rhythmic breeze of their own generation.

The moonlight barely reached to the faces of the shortest flowers, the moss-covered and spongy loam of the ground beneath only illuminated by their stalks that seemed to cast off a feint residue of sunlight, painting the world beneath in a lurid amber glow.

He spun at the end of the winch cable, and came face-to-face with the Idol, sad-faced, droopy-lidded, worn of cheek, split of lip, nose pitted and ruined by the ages, and a chin cracked in a frown to end all frowns.

The lids of the Idol were caked with the detritus of flowery ages, the right lid to Able’s left entombed under a cancerous lump of calcified matter.

The right lid was barely closed, held by some kind of sap that was attracting fallen leaves.

The cracked lips exposed yellowed teeth that must surely be the oldest ivory to have survived the ages. Able was perhaps, the size of the Idol’s thumb, where it could be seen wrapped around a petrified shaft to the right, the top of which was carved in the symbol for addition.

As he dangled, and considered the great fist resting upon the other knee, he wondered at the power that had once resided in this nearly ruined mass of carved black stone, whose feet were lost beneath mossy lumps, barely visible below in the golden-hued gloom.

“Hello,” he said, softly.

There was no echo, no response.

He then looked more closely and saw that the great wrists were enwrapped in arm-thick vines, as were the ankles of the massive legs, giving the impression that, overall, this image of an enthroned king of some elder race seemed more a prisoner of the jungle that had engulfed nearly everything.

Something creaked, but barely.

He looked ahead of him and saw a tremorous shudder of the eye on the right, the Idol’s left eye. The great lid was apparently of flint, and was straining weakly against the glue that held it.

“Would you like to open you eye, to move? Do you need help?”

Silence

Then, with a cavernous whistle of breath, the idol exhaled through the remaining nostril of the ruined nose and the gapped teeth of the cave-like mouth, sending out a stream of cold dusty air that spun Able about at the end of his cable.

“Don’t worry,” Able said, “I came prepared. I have a hatchet and a mini-saw.”

Able swung himself up to the Idol’s cracked, crag-like chest, and got a foothold. A hiss then sounded from his left, where Mandy crouched ghost-eyed on the vast sweep of the ages old tree limb.

“Don’t worry, Mandy. I will not harm him. He just wants to be free, can’t you see?”

Her rage was coldly palpable. Then came a whispering whipping sound as the cable unhitched from the zeppelin, which came to life with a distant buzz and ascended into the face of the strange moon that did not seem to travel across the heavens, but remained suspended over this cleft in the forested continent like a lamp. The cable could be heard whipping around, plunging earthward. He wondered if it would cut him in half or drag him to a bone-breaking fall. Then the cable got hung up in the fourth canopy some hundreds of meters above. He was just below the first canopy, where the Idol’s shoulders were brushed by velvety leaves from particularly soft-looking branches of a strange pliant nature.

Despite her hisses, Able unhooked the cable from his harness and let its heavy weight fall to the soft ground below.

He was soon on the collarbone—a slab of worn basalt about as thick as he and as long as he was with arms and legs outstretched. The hatchet worked nicely on the crusted stuff that bound the meter-wide lid to the weathered cheek.

He was soon, as sweat ran down the inside of his hazmat suit, lifting the lid slightly, assisting the ossified stone giant. As a hiss came to his ears he now looked upon an alien—though familiar—intelligence, in the form of a great white pearl of an eye set with a dilated pupil of black glass.

“Hello, in there. How are you?”

The entire Idol shook with a sigh that seemed sinking in nature.

“Do you want me to free your limbs? It will take awhile, but I have extra saw blades.”

The great eye creaked like a marble grinding a pea in a glass bowl. The jaw then clenched, grinding the ivory teeth together, causing dust to spill out over Able’s boots and roll down the chest.

And then, the great chin dipped in the affirmative.

“I will work my way down. Let’s begin with your free –well, it should be, and will be, soon—hand so that you might help me. You have a death grip on that staff, so I think you’re stuck with it.

Able made his way down to the great knee where the free hand was clenched in a fist. The fingers were not confined with anything more than a light lichen coverage that Able carefully scraped away with the hatchet. The fingers even ground together expectantly as he began sawing the old heavy vine that wrapped around the wrist and the leg.

“I will saw it in segments and then I should be able to break them away.”

As he said this a breeze, cold as a winter night, blew up from the night flowers below, which all started at him with one wicked hiss, straining against their roots to reach him.

He turned to Mandy, “Tell them I won’t hurt him.”

But Mandy looked ever less like Mandy, as she coiled in green profusion, and reached out one ever-lengthening hand to grasp his saw. Her strength was too much, and he found himself losing his grip on the one tool that he had in his kit that might permit him to free the Idol.

He strained with all of his might against the long pale arm that wrestled with him over the saw, even as her other arm broadened and rooted itself to the tree limb upon which she crouched, and her flowery head cast fourth a swarm of needle-nosed butterflies, as deeply red in color as her eyes now were, as they glared at him across a gulf of separation which he somehow knew was unbridgeable.

“Mandy!”