Haggopian and Other Stories

From my prone position I looked down the garden toward the tree. The clatter of my fall onto the gravel of the path must have disturbed the thing. It was straining in my direction with the same horrible eagerness it had displayed towards Old Cartwright. I got painfully to my feet and, as I turned to go into the house, saw that the tree was already swaying away from me to point up the road in the direction of Old Cartwright’s place.

“What’s bothering the thing now?” I wondered, going inside and locking the door again. I sat on my bed and tried to work it all out. Thank God for the draught-strip! I had been threatening all summer to remove it because hardly a day went by that I did not trip over it. “Just as well I didn’t,” I muttered to myself, unknowingly understating the fact. My meaning was simply that if people had seen me walking down the country road in the middle of the night dressed only in my pyjama bottoms—well, it just did not bear thinking about. The Marske villagers probably already thought me a bit queer because of my collection—Old Harry was a real gossip at times.

The night was perfectly calm and hardly a breeze disturbed the warm air. It was when this stillness was broken that I awoke once more. I had heard the iron gate to the garden slam shut. Thoroughly disgruntled by the night’s disturbances I leapt out of bed and threw open the window. Old Cartwright was in the garden beside the tree. His eyes were wide open and staring at the thing, which was leaning toward him in that horribly familiar fashion.

Though I was surprised that the old boy was out there I was doubly astonished to note that he was attired only in his nightshirt. Could it be that he also was walking in his sleep? It seemed so. I opened my mouth to call out to him—but even as I did so I saw something which caused the breath to whoosh out of my lungs as my body constricted in a sudden agony of horror.

Something was happening to the ground around the plant’s base! My first thought was molehills sprouting up about the trunk of the freak from the heath and around Old Harry’s feet.

But the things coming up out of those little mounds of soil were not moles!

Roots!

My mind went numb with dreadful terror, a gibbering evil gripped my brain as I stumbled from the window to reel away across the room. I tried to cry out, to scream, but my throat seemed completely paralysed. The weirdness of the tree’s mobility and the queer nocturnal gropings of its roots aside—I had finally recognised in Old Cartwright’s actions an exact replica of my own earlier that night!

I lurched drunkenly down the hall to the door and unlocked it with fumbling, dead fingers. I tottered out into the night knowing that something monstrously unnatural was happening, aware that but for pure good fortune I might have been in the old man’s place. As the night air hit me I regained control and ran down the garden yelling to the old man to get away—to get well away from the tree, the glowing horror…

But I was too late!

His naked feet stuck out from under the bright monster’s branches—branches which were all folded downwards, covering his body. Then, as I went down on my knees in shock and disbelief, I saw that which twisted my mind and blasted my nerves into these useless knots that they have been ever since.

I had had the right idea about the tree—but I had looked at the problem in the wrong way! The thing was a freak, a mutation caused by radiations from another world. It had no parallel on Earth; and I, like a fool, had tried to compare it with the fly-traps. True, the thing from the blasted heath did draw its nourishment from living things, but the manner of its feeding was nonetheless the same as for most other soil-sprouted plants—it fed through its roots!

Those slender roots, hidden from above by the way in which the branches had folded down, were all sharply thorned—and for each thorn there was a tiny sucker. Even as I watched, hypnotised, those vile roots were pulsing down into Cartwright’s open mouth…until his lips began to split under the strain of their loathsome contents!

I began to scream as I saw the veins in the trunk and branches start their scarlet pulsing, and, as the entire plant commenced throbbing with a pale, pinkish suffusion, I passed into a merciful oblivion. For Old Cartwright’s entire body was jerking and twitching with a nauseating internal action which was not its own—and all the time his dead eyes stared and stared…