Miss Zorah laid a pallid hand on my arm, startling me from the rapt attention I was paying the speaker. Looking to her, I could see the warning in her eyes, even through the veil shrouding her tantalizing features. Just then, Dr. Newstead rose from his chair in a halting fashion, and began pacing, marionette-like, his voice rising in pitch. “Yes, yes, oh, the irony! How they frolicked so horribly in orgiastic furor at the sight of the aurora australis! How they shook in frenzies when the katabatic winds would blow! Yet they reserved their most singular festivals for the touch of Zeus’ fury open the ice, and it was this that spelled the doom of the last of their race. A certain windblown spore, a little thing, as one might catch in the fold of one’s clothing, much like Derby did, or Dr. Bishop, or, in the end, all the others, that grew and grew in the presence of an electrical current. Dr. Bishop, the poor fool, he was the one to call it the Thorian, seeing it's reaction to the batteries of our torches. The vines! The vines soon overtook these final Protheans, infesting them, then bursting forth in an explosion of growth to claim their ruins.
“That last night among the ruins, as that aurorae blazed above us, and the lightning struck the earth, oh, the horror of it all!” The explorer nearly shouted now, his arms gesticulating spasmodically. “I saw their end, you know, but I thought I had escaped! Yes, yes, I took precautions, slaying the dogs before my return to McMurdo, divesting myself of all I wore and burning it, yes, burning! Even after my return, I suspected, and laid plans. There are several carboys of sulphuric acid in the coachhouse for just such an eventuality. But suspecting, and knowing, ah, different things entirely. Do you wonder why the grounds are so overgrown? Or just what that groundskeeper saw amidst the greenery? Or why I cannot escape?"
Dr. Newstead shivered in the grip of another fit of unsurpassed severity, but remained standing. Staring, aghast, I imagined that his very skin writhed and lifted, as if tendrils moved beneath it. His hair and beard seemed suddenly shot through with green, surely a side-effect of the poor light provided by the banked fireplace. "The Thorian! Even now it infests me, controlling me, compelling me! But it cannot stop my voice, no! And it cannot escape, for without the final measure of electricity, it cannot produce spores. And I--!"
Here he unleashed a pained howl, and reached for me, hands bursting in an awful spectacle into a mad riot of snaking vines. He might have seized hold of me, and to what end I shudder to even consider, but for Miss Zorah. She sprang from her seat, knocking the maddened professor to the ground. In the tumult, I heard a low, fearsome growl, like that of a she-lion, but perhaps this was another mad utterance by Dr. Newstead or whatever he had become. As he rose from the floor again, visage completely obliterated by the horrific, curling growths, I made to flee, but found the study door locked from without! Suddenly, however, came the thunderous report of a revolver discharging all six cartridges, and I behold Miss Williams, pistol in hand, standing over the grotesquely deformed but now unmoving form of the pitiable Dr. Newstead. It transpired that she carried a concealed pistol among her belongings against the danger of looters that might plunder the dig sites she frequented, a fact for which I am eternally grateful.