The Weird Fiction Megapack Page 20

  “Well, papa, there was one—or didn’t I see it?”

  “Look!” said the old man, seizing his arm and shaking it.

  The buzzard had suddenly reappeared, beating its wings so violently that to the five astonished men it sounded like a waterfall. The frantic bird uttered hoarse, terrified cries, thrashing the air heavily. It was apparently working to lift some tremendous weight. The cries ceased abruptly, as the bird seemed to erupt above the foliage. It was heavily laden with what could only be a vine, which was entangled in its claws and dangled with many lively twists, dropping earth from the curling, whipping roots as the bird circled wearily higher and higher above the woods—higher and higher, till the silent, gaping circle of watchers strained their eyes to see. And then, when the great black buzzard, like a living kite with its grotesque tail, was almost beyond vision above them, the vine dropped away. It fell as though weighted, roots first. Behind its downward plunge trailed a little flurry of leaves that had been torn away. The vine plummeted into the trees with a distant, leafy uproar in almost precisely the same spot from which it had issued. And when the five gaping watchers looked again into the sky the great buzzard was nowhere to be seen.

  * * * *

  From the central chamber of the laboratories a watcher commanded at least a fifteen-mile view across the plains. This morning a tall, gray man was standing at the windows, looking out thoughtfully with keen blue eyes. From where he stood he could just make out the group of men now straggling away from the front of Sholla’s house. He was smiling tolerantly.

  “What cheer, fellow citizen?” said a voice behind him.

  “Oh, hello, Schommer,” said Haverland, turning around. “Why, it’s those confounded birds again. They don’t seem to like these woods at all. I can’t imagine what the devil has got into ’em. We’ll have to beat them up one of these days and see whether there’s a hungry critter or two down there. Set traps.”

  “Yes,” said Schommer, blinking away the dregs of sleep. “Why, I haven’t seen even a squirrel around here since—well, since poor Keene got his.”

  That was three months ago. Haverland remembered it with regret and a great deal of embarrassment. To his complete shame, whatever it was that Keene, the senior engineer, had been working on—and those projects of his were remote enough—Haverland had destroyed. When Keene had been electrocuted, Haverland and the newcomer, Harriss, had been assisting in his experiment. Schommer stood just back of Keene. There was one peculiar aspect of the affair that Haverland thought of afterward as a remarkable, if peculiar, conception of his own. At any rate, it seemed to have been a phenomenon witnessed only by himself.

  Keene had stretched forth a lean hand, and the bare wire had crossed his wrist. And then there was light, like a halo.

  From where Haverland stood, watching through the poles of two huge electrodes, between which was fixed a bulb of one of the inert gases, Keene’s body seemed to be aflame. He stood there like a waxwork, moments after Haverland had disconnected the current. Phosphorescent fires chased up and down his arms, and the exposed flesh of his breast and face seemed to be burning. The soft radiance brightened gradually. Harriss and Schommer, apparently blind to this aurora of light, gaped at their chief fearfully. The radiation of light was now sharply brilliant, and as Haverland gasped at its brightness there was a violent explosion of radiant energy from Keene’s head that shocked him into temporary blindness.

  It was a stupid, an unforgivable thing to do; it irritated Haverland to think he could be capable of such carelessness. That bulb of gas, in which had appeared a deposit of transparent, flowing crystals, might have had some important bearing on the nature of Keene’s mystical and complex experiments. One almost dared suppose that the impossible was sometimes possible, and that perhaps in this one case the inert gas, or combination of inert gases, that Keene had been working on was active after all.

  Still, who would know the subtle ways of Agnes, the laboratory cat? It was all chance: that it was high noon when Keene died, that the hungry cat was mewing on the central table, and that when Haverland set the mysterious bulb with its more mysterious contents on the table the affectionate Agnes pawed it, caused it to roll into the sink compartment and shatter. All chance, and yet Haverland could only blame himself for a fool’s negligence.

  But that radiation of light from Keene’s dying body was something to be considered. In Haverland’s own idiom, it was “one for the books.” Halo. The legendary gods of Greece and Rome, robed in light. The death light. The ancient gods of India, the primitive deities of all countries, even unto Christ and the Christian saints, all enhaloed. Tradition somewhere originates in truth, and in the time-forgotten genesis of that shining legend, the legend of the halo, was the simple function of a physical law, a mystery once visible. Haverland shook his head. There were more fools with their follies….

  As he entered his own private laboratory, leaving Schommer to luxurious yawns, he thought again of that curious, inexplicable deposit of crystals in the bulb of stable gas—crystals that seemed to be composed of microcosmic glass beads by the billion, and that surely had an involved, slow, endless motion of their own. Haverland felt that he was peering into the unknown, and again and again the sensation of his personal connection with the death of Keene filled him with uneasiness and with shame, as though he had committed some vast error.

  He noted something unusual in the condition of his room, and stopped short. At the end of the laboratory table the window had been broken, possibly by a vine which passed through the opening. The vine twisted along the table top, and was entangled in Haverland’s microscope. A pile of glass slides was knocked down. Several had fallen to the floor and shattered.

  Haverland toed the fragments irritably. A great deal of damage had been done. He started to untangle the vine from the microscope and crowd it back through the window, swearing mildly to himself, then dropped it and pulled absently at his lower lip, perplexed. It struck him suddenly as being very, very odd that a clumsy, meandering growth like this tortuous creeper should have worked so much of itself into the room.

  Some four or five days later Haverland experienced a moment of pure fright. The window had been repaired, but was now open. Haverland sat on the sill, looking over rolling country that was farmed by the hunkies of South. He could see a fan of men spreading through a distant plowed field, for what, he didn’t know. As he watched, he was aware of something crawling along his bare forearm. A small beetle, a fly. He brushed it off, then froze in position, panic-stricken. The beetle was not a beetle at all, but a tendril of the vine that grew outside the window. In one eternal minute he took account of many things: of the fact that the vine, which had never been any more remarkable than any of its kind, was now unimaginably luxuriant, hanging from the side of the building in a vast cloud of leaves; of the fact that a pungent, unpleasant odor moved about and among this cloud; and that a small tendril of this inexplicable new growth was visibly insinuating its way along his forearm.

  * * * *

  Haverland had watched the slow unfolding of the cereus, but this thing crept along like a wooden worm vested in leaves. It was encircling his arm deliberately. The delicate shoots seemed to be freckled with infinitesimal suckers, and wherever they touched they clung. Haverland plucked at the thing and it resisted. Suddenly it seemed to grow into his flesh. With the shock of pain the engineer snatched it violently from his arm and flung it out. The thing had been sucking his blood.

  Vegetable vampires!

  All along his arm were tiny red beads, like a perspiration of blood, as though he had been pricked with a thousand needles all at once. At this moment there was an impatient rapping at the door. It was Schommer.

  “Grave-robbers,” he said shortly, and with an expression on his face that Haverland was not to forget.

  “What?” he said, astonished.

  Schommer’s blue eyes glared.

  “They’ve dug him up,” he said furiously. To which he added, meeting Haverland’s
blank look, “Keene.”

  Keene had been buried at the bottom of the hill according to his own often-expressed wish. Schommer and Haverland, hastening toward the small cleared plot that contained his grave, could see nothing until they reached the place because of the foliage-banked iron grillework around it. Then Haverland stopped dead, dismayed, while Schommer watched him grimly, almost accusingly, thought Haverland. The grave was torn up. Plowed up. A few bars of the grille were bent, and impaled on the spears of these bars was Keene’s body. It had apparently been so displaced for some time, vines having partially enwrapped it and broken into the flesh.

  “When did you discover it?” asked Haverland, appalled.

  “Only this morning. My wife reminds me to put flowers on the grave once a week.” Schommer pointed to a scattered bunch of flowers on the ground—fresh flowers, and the dried stalks of the past. “Now, who would do this thing?” he said bitterly, looking at Haverland. Then he was silent.

  Afterward, though, the whole horror of it seemed to be crystallized in something almost irrelevant. When the body was removed to the cemetery in town, it had first to be disengaged from those horrible vines. The trained eyes of Haverland and Schommer were alone in seeing that the flesh in nearest conjunction with the vines presented a most remarkable appearance. It looked raw. Haverland thought of the word “digested.” Schommer was staring at him. And Haverland looked at Schommer, while the disgusted deputies of South’s coroner quickly practiced their trade.

  The potentialities of the vine. Vines that climb, and vines that hang. Creepers that find their ways upward to the sun. Tough vines that bind, vines that clutch and choke, that gripe the best life out of the vegetation that gives them foothold. The gleaming, wholly denuded skeleton of a squirrel, still intact, entangled in the vine that girdled the body of Keene.

  Keene’s death seemed in some way to have laid a curse over the woods and the small game that inhabited them. The three months afterward were a chronicle of desertion, the small cries of birds and the chuckling calls of wild things decreasing in number day by day till there were only long silences, broken by sounds that could not be identified. The quick, flying skip of a rabbit was as rare now as the cadenced flight of the jay and the gull. The pleasant, frightened movement of wild things disturbed and the splash of leaves had given place to queer, long, meaningless rustles; rustles that marked the insinuating course of large snakes, or perhaps the rustles of heavy vines, that, overweighted, were dropping by degrees from their places among the oaks, the birches, and the cottonwoods. Continuous movements unseen. The threat of invisibles.

  * * * *

  Except when some problem kept him in the building overnight, Haverland habitually rode into the city with Schommer. And both men were thankful for Schommer’s car. It was a good three-quarters of a mile from the laboratories into South, and the dense woods, denser now with this monstrous new growth of underbrush, overhung the road all the way. A lonely walk, at night.

  “Not even an owl,” said Schommer. “Used to be a lot of them.”

  He was driving slowly, and now stopped the car to listen. Not a sound of bird or beast. He looked at Haverland, who had his lean gray head cocked forward listening intently.

  “This place is like a cellar,” Schommer continued, in his peculiar clipped style of speech. “Nothing moving; not a sound. Even a beastly smell.”

  His broad lips curled with displeasure as he released the brake and the car began to move.

  “Wait!” said Haverland, gripping his arm.

  Schommer looked at him inquiringly, then thrust his head farther out of the window to listen also. There was never a sound; the woods were deathly still.

  “Hear something?” he asked skeptically. “Only living thing I’ve seen around here in three months was our friend the buzzard this morning. C. a. septentrionalis, and for such a big one even he didn’t stay long.”

  “Listen!” said the sharp-eared Haverland, and with so commanding a voice that Schommer obeyed, opening the door and stepping outside the car. At once there was an explosion of sound in the woods near by. The air was filled with outburst after outburst of agonized cries, cries that seemed to be neither brute nor human.

  Schommer snatched a flashlight from the pocket of the car and plunged through the brush at the side of the road, Haverland following. They had scarcely entered the woods, the beam of light playing through the leaves ahead of them, when the uproar terminated in a cutting scream. They advanced through the woods hastily, still hearing an unaccountable, wild thrashing sound close at hand.

  When they found the origin of the disturbance not fifty feet within the woods, they stopped, gasping with horror. All about them were trees hung with vines. Directly in front of them was a large specimen at the foot of a huge cottonwood, in movement. It was thrashing about like a whip. The end of it was wound tightly about some object, which, as they watched it thrown bloodily against the trunks of the cottonwood and the surrounding trees, they saw was a dog.

  Schommer ran forward for a closer view.

  “Stop, you fool!” shouted Haverland instinctively, and at that moment a creeper on the ground entangled itself in Schommer’s leg and tripped him headlong. He tried to get up and found himself tied hand and foot. Tender young vines enwound his wrists and ankles like steel wires; he wrestled with them, grunting with pain.

  Cannibalism. Kind eating kind. Haverland stood there nerveless, and felt, sickeningly, that he was looking again into the unknown. When Schommer fell, the light had been thrown from his hand, and now shone directly on the base of the cottonwood. The vine moved slightly, like a tentacle, as though the dog somewhere off in the darkness were still struggling to free itself, slowly. Schommer was still trying to raise himself from the ground, the great veins of his neck and forehead standing out darkly in the oblique light of the flash.

  “I’m caught!” he said helplessly, and then cried out with terror as a creeper cut into one fleshy wrist and made a bracelet of spouting blood.

  “Help! Help me!” he screamed. At which Haverland, nervously aware of black, black shadows banked on shadows blacker still among the depths of the tall trees, stumbled blindly forward, produced a knife from his pocket and flicked it open. The vine holding the dog was perfectly still then, and Schommer suddenly managed to free himself; upon which, having brushed off his clothes, he proceeded to bind up his wrist with a handkerchief. Then, feeling highly resentful, and perhaps a little foolish because of the wholly deserted character of the still woods, he picked up the flashlight and directed it toward the ground at his feet.

  “Well, that’s funny,” he said, taking up the vine that had tripped him and dropping it again. “Did you ever see any wood like that?”

  The vine was limp, flabby, and draped along the ground like a leafy rope. Schommer stepped on it, and grimaced as it gave under his heel like flesh.

  “Ugh!” he exclaimed. “What the devil do you suppose it is? Never saw anything like it!”

  Haverland examined the root of the vine, and was about to draw his knife through it. But there was a windless rustle in the trees, and the vine, which had been lying as loose as a newly dead snake, and as cold, was now rigid and hard in his hand. He caught the fleeting impression that he was the object of eery, unearthly attention. He felt that he was threatened. The woods were now completely still, watching, waiting; the silence was a tangible menace, suffocating him, moving against him.

  “Shall we take it along?” asked Schommer. “Might have to get a spade, unless—”

  He stooped over and gripped the vine at its base, now quite limp, and tried to pull it out by the roots. Haverland held the light. Schommer was generously built, and his contorted face showed tremendous exertion, but the vine wouldn’t give an inch. As he straightened up, nursing his wrist and swearing softly, Haverland saw the root of the creeper withdraw fractionally into the ground, for all the world like an earthworm.

  “Hm-m,” said Schommer, clearing his throat. “Queer vine, that
. How about the other one?”

  “Let’s go see,” said Haverland, and walked carefully through the dark litter of brush toward the big cottonwood, holding the light before him.

  The vine that had trapped the dog was a large climber. Closely involved in its foliage was the dead, mangled animal, which he stooped to examine. Schommer grasped the main stem of the plant and shook it experimentally; it seemed to have the character of any other vine, but when he turned aside to toe the battered, bloody ruin of the dog, the vine wobbled drunkenly.

  Compact, gnarled arms of fiber that thought. Intricately contrived, sap-carrying tubes, sap that pulsed, sap that beat through wooden arms. Arms that looked about for supporting trees and moved deliberately like the tentacles of a land octopus. Haverland shivered with the thought. He received the uncomfortable impression that he had entered a stranger’s house by some freak, or had the dubious privilege of wandering through the devil’s own garden, of being tolerated in that journey.

  “Let’s get out of this, Schommer,” said Haverland. “We can look this thing over in the daytime.” He tried to make his voice sound casual, but the words came out harsh and knotty.

  Schommer joined him, and as the two picked their way back to the car he said:

  “What the devil do you suppose happened to that dog?”

  “Looked like some cat’s work,” Haverland lied; “probably the beast that’s been accounting for all the game that’s disappeared. Got away before either of us saw him.”

  Schommer shook his massive, leonine head. No cat in the country was big enough to kill a dog so horribly. Why, the thing he had touched with his foot was no more than shreds, a red puddle of flesh and splintered bones. No, it was a stronger, more savage beast than a cat. A beast so thorough and so subtle in its destruction that it absorbed living things into itself without its existence being suspected.