Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/68

Rh 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.

AVERLAND 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 practised 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