Weird Tales volume 24 number 03 (13 page)

It was the thing that had nearly got Schommer. Vines gone soft; vines turned animal. Vines as flexible as rubber. Vines whose wooden hearts had been turned into some kind of unholy flesh,

vile with rich, putrid yellow sap. Those tendrils remaining in the door writhed spasmodically; there was a heavy scraping sound, and they were withdrawn through the crack with a powerful jerk, leaving a leaf or two in the room. Haverland still held the piece that had broken off. It was quite limp, like a rounded, dirty strip of flesh, and was bleeding that sticky, pale yellow sap into his hand. He flung the thing away across the floor and walked unsteadily back to his rooms, drawing the palms of his hands heavily down his cheeks. He could hear vines beating against the door and grinding along the walls, unimaginable vines, foul things that were hosts to billions of lice. There was something definite and malicious in their movement as they worked along the window-ledges, tapping at the panes that were now streaming with moisture.

In the downpour outside, the trees in the woods arched and lashed the air with foliage. Haverland listened bewildered to the stunning impact of barrage after barrage of thunder, and fancied that the living voices that issued from the grove of cottonwoods were many times multiplied. Then the lights throughout the laboratories brightened unbearably. As the engineer approached the end of his table the lights went out. The wires had gone down in the storm.

He stumbled over some rope-like thing on the floor, and noticed wildly as he fell that the window was open. Something had come in. He reached out in the darkness, however splintered with lightnings, and found it, pulled at it. Clutching it was like squeezing the compact, corded flesh of a squid. A long, eel-shaped thing that passed through the window into the outside.

At that moment ragged lightning seemed to tear the southern sky in two,

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answered by an eruption of light in the north. As the following thunder battered the place with sound, Haverland stood up thrilling. He had a brilliant vision of the dying Keene; for indeed, this again was the legendary halo. The two colossal charges of electricity in the sky seemed to serve as electrodes," each bolt a pole, the laboratory between; and in this room the halo appeared once more, just as Haverland had seen it over the tube of gas three months past. There was a full, mysterious effulgence throughout the room. A pale, thin radiance flowed out from the thing on the floor and filled the room with a glory of soft light. By this illumination the engineer saw that it was really a denuded length of vine, now more like a hideous, tapering worm; saw, too, that there was scarcely a leaf remaining on the tangle of vines at the window. In the glory of the halo these boneless arms serpentined in a terrible dance; every tentacle glittered with sweat in small beads, that winked at the lightning like innumerable eyes. The vine in the room began to raise itself from the floor.

And now, having formed a towering, closed palisade about it, and accompanied by the sound of shouting leaves and colliding trunks, the vine-hung grove of cot-tonwoods was advancing on the house. It was the sound of earthquake; the hill shook, and metal clanged in the central chamber of the laboratories. Followed a stupendous crash. Haverland hurried to the door, half stunned.

Through the broad windows of this central chamber one commanded a view of the entire countryside. The hill itself was just high enough to permit sight over the foliaged heads of the oaks and cotton-woods. Haverland, looking down at the trees, saw the entire woods bathed in cold flame. The grove was one vast phos-

phorescence. The tree-trunks glowed, and the masses of leaves shone like soft, burnished metal. All the great vines were alive with light, and hung from the trees in waterfalls of flame. It was a thing seen in a nightmare or read in a fairy-tale. Another Birnam Wood, that was coming by degrees, but surely, toward the central point that was the laboratories. The laboratory hill seemed to rise from a chasm whose walls were solid light. Trees and vines in motion. Before their advancing trunks and stems the earth was rolling away in waves. Then, dark off in one end of the chamber, the engineer saw that the oak on the hill had already entered the building. The end generator had been shouldered aside and crashed through the floor into the basement. Commotion was in the air. The storm entered the chamber with the oak, and rain beat on Haverland's face.

And still it was not too late. The engineer whirled and retreated through his own laboratories, leaping the handful of twining creepers in his way. In the back of the building he picked up a sledgehammer, then raced back through the smother of rain to the garage, in which stood three full drums of gasoline. He ran up the incline on which the drums rested, and worked rapidly with a wrench. He stepped back a little, swung the sledge in one heavy blow. The drums, released, tumbled booming down the runway, spilling their contents as they went, and bounded out the doorway to go careering down the hill.

Haverland waited, dripping with rain and perspiration, then produced a box of matches. As he was about to strike a light the heavens gaped and a volcano of flame plunged cracking and thundering into the woods like the finger of God.

Haverland flung himself out of the garage in time to escape the arm of fire

WEIRD TALES

that leaped up the hill. From the back of the laboratories he watched a tower of flame boom up in the declining storm. Above low thunders he heard three successive explosions as the gasoline drums went. There was enough of it, he felt, to suffocate, if not to consume. A shift of wind carried the sound of crackling and hissing vegetation, and carried into the engineer's nostrils the charnel stench of all the pyres of history. Sickened, he stumbled back into the laboratories.

THE following day dawned calm and clear. Roman Sholla came out early and stood on his front lawn, smoking his pipe deliberately and looking up at the hill. A crew had appeared several hours before, and were making much noise as they repaired the damage done to the laboratories by a falling oak. There had been a strong, unpleasant odor in the air all morning, which likely enough came with the shift of the wind from the packing-plant in the city. The members of the crew, as one occasionally came down into South, found the work distasteful, the stench seemingly worse the higher one got up the hill.

One man alone in the building, the chief engineer, Haverland, had escaped serious injury when lightning had touched off three drums of gasoline in the garage and burned it. The South woods had suffered heavily, with a number of the trees and the extraordinarily large vines that grew here either totally burned or badly charred. The famous oak that had taken a journey away from Sholla's own yard, though not burned, was now dead, its leaves already withered.

Eric Shane came out presently, scratching his head and blinking cautiously. He and Sholla were joined shortly by little Fred Yanotsky and Papa Freng. Sholla, situated as he was nearest the laboratory,

took on some importance. He told how the storm had wakened him. The woods had caught on fire somehow, and three explosions ("when those gasoline go off") illuminated the room he slept in.

"It was one big bonfire," he said, holding out his arms.

He told of seeing the lightning strike.

"Big," he said helplessly, shaking his head. The bolt was indescribably huge. He could tell of the sharp burned-leather and ozone smell in the air afterward, though, and did. But the thunder, ah! They all remembered that sound of cataclysm when the big bolt struck, but that could not be described either.

Sholla's three friends were silent. They had said nothing yet, and seemed very much satisfied about something as they looked up at the crew busy at the shattered masonry and twisted metal above them.

"Well, Fred," said Sholla, "what you think of it, eh?"

"I t'ink," said dark little Yanotsky, "maybe it vas a good t'ing if all the plant fall in. Never, no good come of machines."

"Ah!" said Sholla contemptuously. "Always the same. Crazy stubborn like your father. You should go to school, Fred Yanotsky!"

"This morning," said white-haired Papa Freng, "a squirrel came to my window for nuts. He was very tame, and the first I have seen in a long time." His eyes were fixed on the dreaming distance. As he spoke, something moving near by brought him to sharp attention. With something of eagerness in his voice he exclaimed, "Look!"

He pointed up the road. A small cottontail, pursuing a rather aimless course of exploration or foraging, was proceeding along the ditch, nibbling at green

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shoots. Its way was blocked presently by a creeper that lay along the road and sagged under its own weight. It was remarkable in being almost totally leafless. The rabbit, in skipping over it, suddenly froze, as beast does in the presence of beast. But if the grotesque old Keene had been responsible for the mockery of sentience in these singular growths of

South, his ghost must have rested at last. The watchers saw the rabbit pass carelessly, unmolested, over the stiff tangle of vines and disappear among the ruins of the South woods. Roman Sholla walked the few paces up to the vine, and, toeing its snarled trunks and leafless ten-drills, said, "Dead."

able Revery

(Written to music) By ROBERT NELSON

Black roses sprout across the sky, Pipes sing insensate 'neatfi the sea, The clamant heads of madmen fly And shatter with a dark outcry, As tones transpose to deeper dye And leaves whirl wild with jubilee Through themad organist's rambling brain; In the disordered sepulcher A lady's dead eyes strive to stir, She dares to laugh, but all in vain; Three-fingered hands paint a far frieze With the black blood of vanquished devils, Who sway and slay the music-breeze In their daft and dying revels.

Now ebon fluids 'gin to flow And drip with waxen candle-men; Black disks of stone are trundling low; From the organ's bosom fuming slow, Fouler and sadder perfumes blow To drown the bourns of demon ken; Skulls flown from swarthy corpses kiss

And feed upon the organist's soul, Which ne'er doth cease to toll and roll Bell-like within this dusk abyss; Fell plants and flowers writhe in wombs Of blighted worlds remote from morn, And musty myrrh exhales from tombs Whirling in utmost stars forlorn.

Swart suns on sounding waters swell The turgid notes to direr din, And murky spirits soar from hell To flap their cerements palpable In the wild player's face, and tell Jet jewels into his mouth, and spin Mad gossamers amid his hair; Swift raven locks entwine his throat, His eyes no longer glare and gloat; As from a tower high in air, The console wakes a weirder fear; His flaming, fitful fingers chill; One tear he weeps, a dead man's tear: The sable revery is still.

Uhe

GJ

rail of the Cloven Hoof

By ARLTON EADIE

"One look was enough. I snapped off my flashlight and fled."

A startling weird mystery story, of strange deaths on the desolate

Moor of Exham, and the mysterious creature known as

"The terror of the Moor"

The Story Thus Far

WHILE on a tramping vacation on Exmoor, Hugh Trenchard discovers an old recluse, Silas Marie, lying unconscious after having been attacked by a mysterious thing which, though speaking with a human voice, leaves behind it a trail of footprints shaped like a cloven hoof.

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Seeking help at the nearest house, a private hospital, Hugh meets Professor Felger, the proprietor, a sinister figure whose features are hidden beneath a surgeon's gauze mask. The professor tries to prevent Hugh phoning the police, but he gets the message through by a stratagem, afterward making his escape.

Ronnie Brewster, a former fellow-stu-

W. T.—S

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dent of Hugh's, is called in to attend to Silas Marie's injuries, and one night Ronnie and Hugh are astonished by the arrival of a strange girl, Joan Endean, apparently half dead with cold and exhaustion. She recovers with suspicious suddenness the moment she is alone with Hugh, and to his unbounded amazement informs him that she has just made her escape from Professor Felger's institution, which is really a private mental hospital. So convinced is Hugh of her sanity that when Dawker arrives to take her back, he resolutely refuses to give her up.