The disabled and bound creature rolls along barrel-fashion before Klokulf's booted foot.
STOREROOM
Klokulf reaches the storeroom and sees the unexpected mystery stair leading up into the attic through gap in the ceiling.
He hears noises from the floor. Thump…thump…
Katrin is looking up the stairs.
Benn is glancing at the trap door, a worried look on his face.
Raen, too, seems distracted by the thumping noises from under the floorboards.
Klokulf squats and moves to open the trapdoor, cautiously reaching out with his left hand as he hefts his mace in his right. It won't budge!
Kneeling close to the cleric, Raen lifts the hatch with ease--but not far, just a couple of inches.
Alain has joined the party, bringing his magic light with him.
Peering through the gap in the floor, Klokulf sees a recumbent form, partly filmed over with black and partly lit with flickering dull red patches. The woman in the cellar is near death. Another passing minute and she may be beyond his powers to help.
He blinks as Alain's light comes closer to him. Additional details emerge within the gloomy, shallow cellar. The woman's pale face is half-hidden by her tangled, dark hair and by patches of red-brown grime. Three chests covered in rust-colored slime and fuzzy stuff occupy part of the floor just beyond her, obstructing his view of part of the farther, dimmer cellar space.
She groans softly.
Her disheveled clothes bear more red-brown gunk, which stands up in hairy clumps, swaying as if in a draft.
What he at first took to be a tattered carpet under her appears to be a patch of mold on the floor, the same stuff growing on the chests.
It's moving...
The woman coughs violently, and as she does so, the mold in the cellar exhales a red cloud of dust.
Delight is to him- a far, far upward, and inward delight- who against the proud gods and commodores of this earth, ever stands forth his own inexorable self.
-from Moby Dick (Hermann Melville)