Page:Weird Tales volume 24 number 03.djvu/76

Rh speaking angrily through the cottonwoods. A handful of glossy leaves swept up the hill, and a creeper which had been torn from the side of the building blew across the walk and was shaken against the steps. Haverland locked the door and walked slowly back to his table.

Mysterious. Something grimly facetious about the whole business. All the earmarks of a practical joke on a grand scale. Trees that move. Vines that plummet down fatly from trees that hold them like great green spiders. Game gradually and wantonly slaughtered; skeletons and splintered bones scattered all through the woods. Something in the woods concealed, foul-smelling enough to attract a ranging turkey buzzard. Vines, spongy with sap, blowing around in the road with the slightest breeze. A laborer's fear of still, disinhabited woods, and his flight from them. A vine had tripped Schommer, and so held him that he became frightened. Vines clustering along the road that provided the only means of approach or retreat to the laboratories. Blowing across it. The way Haverland came to work and went home. Vines tough enough to stop a road grader. The voice of Eric Shane, saying, "Wery juicy."

Vines.

Anger filled him again, and he exclaimed aloud, "It's a lie!"

But the walls of the building flung the shout into a trail of echoes; from some remote corner of his brain he plucked out the impression of a bulb cf sliding crystals, that Agnes, the laboratory cat, had broken into the sink. Down the sewer, down the hill, into the woods. A thirsty oak, mounting the hill along the sewer, using its roots like the tentacles of an enfoliaged devil-fish, a wooden mole. In this whirl of half-thoughts he found the skeleton of the cat outside his own window, the bones completely disarticulated, but still recognizable. He heard the voice of Eric Shane say.

"I hear' a cat scream—one time, two times, up those hill'."

There was something deadly in the woods. A killer that worked ceaselessly, stealthily, that was not caught in any trap set for it.

In the meantime the first few drops of rain were being flung against the windows with smart rappings like thrown sand. The vine that had been torn from the walls thrashed against the building and occasionally struck the windows in the central chamber with that brittle, short sound peculiar to glass.

Haverland hesitated only a moment as pale violet lightning flickered among the clouds, then turned to the microscope on the table. He prepared a slide cleverly, like a magician's trick, and slipped it under his lenses. One certain test. He adjusted his focus, found something, and rigged up the delicate, graduated instrument that was apparently intended for some occult measurement. There he sat, hands on hips, peering, his face as grim as death. His thin lips recited some ritual without sound.

"Yes, Schommer," he heard himself saying, "those are mighty queer vines; you can tell me nothing. Do you know there's salt in their sweat, eh? Did you know their sap clots? That it takes a blood count, like your blood and mine? Ever hear 'em talking to each other at night in those cursed woods with their damned clicks, and rubbings, and whispers? What do you suppose they talk about? Death!"

But Schommer was far away in the city, asleep by now. Haverland leaped to his feet and knocked the microscope crashing to the floor. He had a grim purpose in mind, but even now was arrested by the second ringing of the bell, which