Mulvaine, who had slept through the experience of being half eaten alive by a claw-caterpil, started moaning and shifting as soon as they moved his body. He tried to turn over, muttering. Tighe examined the wound at the end of his thigh; it was covered in some sticky saliva-like substance, which was presumably what prevented it from bleeding out. Perhaps the monsters especially relished blood, Tighe thought; their spit kept their victims from bleeding dry. Tighe then – although it made his stomach turn over – plucked the severed bottom of Mulvaine’s leg from the cradle made by the material of his trousers. He held it in both hands: a naked human leg, bloody at one end. There was a strange smell to it, not merely the blood, but a fiercely pungent and foetid smell at the wound. The skin near the top looked green and was starting to decompose, although the foot looked so exactly like a human foot, down to the horny toenails and the tiny hairs growing out of the tops of the toes, that it was somehow deeply saddening.
