The air is sweet on his tongue, a greenish haze growing more dense in the air. It's coming from the mushrooms, from the strange growing pods, from hollow, broken-off boughs that seem to exhale. The caverns are breathing, and now suddenly they're twisting, too. The spores worm their way into Jeff's being and show him a network of being spiraling down, down, down, down..

The old man stops. He turns to face Jeff, and he smiles, showing teeth. Those teeth start growing long and needlelike, the man's whole smile too large, too wide, as his whole being starts to stretch and contort and expand. His fingers twist out into branches of branches of branches, fractals ever-growing, while his eyes multiply as fungal stalks, each of them still somehow capable of blinking in an asynchronous shudder of movement. His flesh rises like a tidal swell, splitting to reveal a tangle of roots and moss and mycelium, a magnificent beard of hyphae cascading from an etched-bark approximation of a face. And all the while, that mouth is opening wider, wider, wider...