Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/69

340 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.

XCEPT 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