This whole void-area—and this area only—seemed to crawl with mad phantasms ... lunatic life-forms like none that Man had ever seen before. Out of nowhere, they materialized aboard the Cartel's sphere-ships. Here, on Hyperion; Titan, too.
Those were the facts. Now, suddenly, they took on form and pattern.
For in his delirium, Boone knew he'd had nightmares of this specific slime-drenched horror.
Awakening, his fever gone, he'd faced the hideous thing on reality's plane.
And the Helgae could play strange tricks with human minds....
The Helgae—they were the correlating factor!
The Cartel had come and raped their silent cities for the sake of mekronal and chandak.
So lacking the power of discourse, words to protest, they'd struck back in their own dark way.
Somehow, they'd reached into men's deep subconscious and dredged up monsters—the paranoid delusions of fevered brains.
Then, as the mediums of another day had claimed to give spirits ectoplasmic body, so now the Helgae materialized nightmares into life!