Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/71

342 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.

LIGHT breeze moved through the woods as the two engineers approached the car, a moist, muggy breeze, and the grove of cottonwoods below the laboratory was filled with sound. The majestic trees were scarcely distinguishable against the black sky, but fireflies illuminated the foliage here and there, and briefly showed vast and looming walls of leaves and branches, in whose enclosure the two men at the car seemed to be at the bottom of a well of shadows. The effect was that of a great beast lying prone and still which had suddenly commenced to breathe. There was no freshness in the air, rather the effluvia pouring out of a boundless swamp. The sensitive Haverland harkened to the sound of the night breeze through the leaves, and noted the peculiar leatheriness of their motion and collision with each other. The familiar, fresh sound of the wind playing through poplars and cottonwoods had taken on the character of a confident, jubilant, multitudinous handclapping.

He remembered that sound. Later, among the realities of his home in the city, those engulfing shadows flocked about him and marched endlessly through his dreams, through dreams of leafy cordings and living ropes, dreams of phosphorescent foliage and vines enhaloed, all sounding before the violence of cyclonic winds that blew the radiance into flame.

Hurried, harried by dreads and he knew not what, next day he busied himself with an apparatus which he had set up in his rooms a day or two before. This consisted chiefly of a microscope and a common broad beaker. In the beaker, and filling it to the brim, was a pulpy mass in which could be discerned indisputable chlorophyl; leaves ground into a kind of rough paste; macerated vines with their foliage, which he had clipped from the creeper outside the window (the writhing, the leaping, and the voiceless fury). Near the microscope was a delicate, graduated instrument used for some kind of measurement. Alongside the