Invasion of the Body Snatchers by Jack Finney Page B

and as he snapped on the flashlight in his hand, I walked down the stairs after him.
    We crossed the basement, the leather of our soles gritting the hard dust on the floor; then Jack twisted the wood latch of the coal-bin door. The bin was in a corner of the basement, walled off from the rest of the room by ceiling-high planking, and it stood empty and unused now, washed out and hosed down since I'd installed gas heat. Jack opened the door, and the beam of his flashlight moved across the floor, then steadied, an oval of light on the coal-bin floor.
    I couldn't get clear in my mind what I was seeing, lying there on the concrete. Staring, I had to describe to myself, a bit at a time, just what I was looking at, trying to puzzle out what it was. There lay, I finally decided, what looked like four giant seed pods. They had been round in shape, maybe three feet in diameter, and now they had burst open in places, and from the inside of the great pods, a greyish substance, a heavy fluff in appearance, had partly spilled out onto the floor.
    That was a part of what I saw, my mind still busy trying to sort out impressions. In a way - at a glance - these giant pods reminded me of tumbleweed, those puffballs of dry, tangled vegetable matter, light as air, designed by nature to roll with the wind across the desert. But these pods were enclosed. I saw that their surfaces were made up of a network of tough-looking yellowish fibres, and stretching between these fibres, to completely enclose these pod-like balls, were great patches of brownish, dry-looking membrane, resembling a dead oak leaf in colour and texture.
    "Seed pods," Jack said softly, his voice astonished. "Miles… the seed pods in the clipping."
    I just stared at him.
    "The clipping you showed me this morning," he said impatiently, "quoting some college professor. It mentioned seed pods, Miles, giant seed pods, found on a farm west of town last spring." For a moment longer he stood staring at me, till I nodded. Then Jack pushed the coal-bin door open wider, and in the moving, searching beam of his flashlight we saw something more, and stepped inside the bin to squat beside the things on the floor for a closer look. Each pod had burst open in four or five places, a part of the grey substance that filled them spilling out onto the floor. And now, in the closer beam of Jack's light, we saw a curious thing. At the outer edges, farthest away from the pods, the grey fluff was turning white, almost as though contact with the air was robbing it of colour. And - there was no denying this; we could see it - the tangled fluffy substance was compressing itself, and achieving a form.
    I once saw a doll made by a primitive South American people. It was made from flexible reeds, crudely plaited, and tied off in places, to form a head and body, arms and legs protruding stiffly from it. The tangled masses of what looked like greyish horsehair at our feet were slowly spilling out of the membranous pods, lightening in colour at their outer edges, and - crudely but definitely - had begun forming themselves, the fibres straightening and aligning, into the rough approximation, each of them, of a head, a body, and miniature arms and legs. They were as crude as the doll I had seen - and just as unmistakable.
    It's hard to say how long we squatted there, staring in stunned wonder at what we were seeing. But it was long enough to see the grey substance continue to exude, slowly as moving lava, from the great pods out onto the concrete floor. It was long enough to see the grey substance lighten and whiten after it reached the air. And it was long enough to see the crude head- and limb-shaped masses grow in size as the grey stuff spilled out - and to become less crude.
    We watched, motionless, our mouths open, and occasionally the brown membranous surfaces of the huge pods cracked audibly - the sound of a brittle leaf snapping in two - and the pods crumpled steadily, slowly collapsing a little at a time,