Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/74

Rh in a heap. And we were directly beneath it."

"Looks as though someone were wishing us a lot of bad luck," said Schommer, laughing nervously. "Now, if I were superstitious——"

AVERLAND said nothing, but he was subdued as he tramped back to the car with Schommer. He had seen what Schommer had not seen, just before the vine had fallen. That vine had a most unnatural surface of flexible, wrinkled wood, all covered with a kind of unholy sweat. The crevices of the bark were thickly packed with parasites, countless numbers of small insects which conceivably could only be battening on the vine itself. These insects were lice, uncommonly large, well-fed lice in great numbers. He considered this phenomenon judiciously and humorously as the car left the grader behind (with the panting, exhausted Eric) and mounted the drive to the garage behind the laboratories. Half-way up the drive his restless eyes saw something new.

"We're late," he said, breaking the silence. "That's sloppy work, too."

"Eh?" Schommer was surprized out of a mood of his own. When he had locked the car and issued from the garage with Haverland he looked at his watch.

"As a matter of fact, Charlie," he said, "we're early. Only ten minutes to."

Haverland verified the time with a glance at his own timepiece. Then he looked mystified down the hill and said,

"Plumbers are early, then. They've dug in."

"Where?" asked Schommer, puzzled, as he loaded his pipe. Haverland pointed toward an oak near the bottom of the hill, where the ground was spaded up.

"Something clogged up the drain," he said. "Probably the roots of that tree. Looks as though they've used a plow, doesn't it?"

Schommer squinted at the tree without recognition. The turf was broken all the way down the lawn, so that clods formed a rough ditch running from the walls of the laboratory directly into the tree.

"Sloppy work," repeated Haverland, shaking his head.

Schommer removed the pipe from his teeth and followed the course of the ditch with troubled eyes. Something beyond the tree attracted him; he walked a few paces down the lawn. The ditch continued on the other side of the tree, to the extreme bottom of the hill. Curious technique—as though the plumbers were hunting for the tree and couldn't find it. Haverland, slowly taking his place beside Schommer, saw the loose flesh of Schommer' s face harden, tighten, till he seemed ten years younger.

Schommer raised his arm and pointed at the tree with his pipe as though it were a target and the pipe a gun. Then he looked at Haverland with eyes whose perplexity had something also of terror.

"Wonderful!" he ejaculated. "Charlie, that tree wasn't there before!"

"What?"

"No! The hill has always been clear. That tree is a good twenty paces up!"

"Schommer——" said Haverland through his teeth. Then he checked himself; no need yet for the wild statements he could make. After all, no one could be really sure, really certain that the fantastic things he suspected had any basis in fact. He was silent. Schommer only regarded him curiously, placing the pipe again between his teeth. Then he drew hurriedly against the almost dead fire in the bowl as Haverland proceeded farther down the hill. An oak tree, that looked all of a hundred years old. Immovable