And then something—perhaps simply the touch of the colder North—had acted to cancel the natural limits on its growth; for each time he’d seen it, it had been obvious that it still was growing rapidly. And though it apparently lacked solid parts that might resist decomposition after death, creatures of its present size, which conformed to no recognizable pattern of either the vegetable or the animal kingdom, couldn’t very well exist anywhere without drawing human attention to themselves. While if they grew normally to be only a foot or two high, they seemed intelligent and alert enough to escape observation in some luxuriant tropical forest—even discounting that inexplicable knack of turning transparent from one second to the next.
His problem, meanwhile, was a purely practical one. The next time he grew aware of the elusive hothouse smell near the camp, he had a plan ready laid. His nearest neighbor, Pete Jeffries, who provided Hogan with most of his provisions from a farm two miles down the road to town, owned a hound by the name of Old Battler—a large, surly brute with a strong strain of Airedale in its make-up, and reputedly the best trailing nose in the county.
Hogan’s excuse for borrowing Old Battler was a fat buck who’d made his headquarters in the marshy ground across the bay. Pete had no objection to out-of-season hunting; he and Old Battler were the slickest pair of poachers for a hundred miles around. He whistled the hound in and handed him over to Hogan with a parting admonition to keep an eye peeled for snooping game wardens.
The oily fragrance under the birches was so distinct that Hogan almost could have followed it himself. Unfortunately, it didn’t mean a thing to the dog. Panting and rumbling as Hogan, cradling the shotgun, brought him up on a leash, Old Battler was ready for any type of quarry from rabbits to a pig-stealing bear; but he simply wouldn’t or couldn’t accept that he was to track that bloodless vegetable odor to its source. He walked off a few yards in the direction the thing had gone, nosing the grass; then, ignoring Hogan’s commands, he returned to the birch, sniffed carefully around its base and paused to demonstrate in unmistakable fashion what he thought of the scent. Finally he sat on his haunches and regarded Hogan with a baleful, puzzled eye.
There was nothing to do but take him back and tell Pete Jeffries the poaching excursion was off because a warden had put in an appearance in the area. When Hogan got back to the lodge, he heard the telephone ringing above the cellar stairs and hurried towards it with an eagerness that surprised himself.
“Hello?” he said into the mouthpiece. “Hello? Julia? That you?”
There was no answer from the other end. Hogan, listening, heard voices, several of them, people laughing and talking. Then a door slammed faintly and someone called out: “Hi, Whitey! How’s the old man?” She had phoned from the liquor store, perhaps just to see what he was doing. He thought he could even hear the faint fluttering of her breath.
“Julia,” Hogan said softly, scared by the silence. “What’s the matter, darling? Why don’t you say something?”
Now he did hear her take a quick, deep breath. Then the receiver clicked down, and the line was dead.
The rest of the afternoon he managed to keep busy cleaning out the cabins which had been occupied. Counting back to the day the last of them had been vacated, he decided the reason nobody had arrived since was that a hostile Whitey Allison, in his strategic position at the town bus stop, was directing all tourist traffic to other camps. Not—Hogan assured himself again—that he wanted anyone around until he had solved his problem; it would only make matters more difficult.
But why had Julia called up? What did it mean?
* * *
That night, the moon was full. Near ten o’clock, with no more work to do, Hogan settled down wearily on the lodge steps. Presently he lit a cigarette. His intention was to think matters out to some conclusion in the quiet night air, but all he seemed able to do was to keep telling himself uselessly that there must be some way of trapping that elusive green horror.
He pulled the sides of his face down slowly with his fingertips. “I’ve got to do something!”—the futile whisper seemed to have been running through his head all day: “Got to do something! Got to . . .” He’d be having a mental breakdown if he didn’t watch out.
The rumbling barks of Jeffries’ Old Battler began to churn up the night to the east—and suddenly Hogan caught the characteristic tinny stutter of Julia’s little car as it turned down into the road from Jeffries’ farm and came on in the direction of the camp.
The thrill that swung him to his feet was tempered at once by fresh doubts. Even if Julia was coming to tell him she’d forgiven him, he’d be expected to explain what was making him act like this. And there was no way of explaining it. She’d think he was crazy or lying. No, he couldn’t do it, Hogan decided despairingly. He’d have to send her away again. . . .
He took the big flashlight from its hook beside the door and started off forlornly to meet her when she would bring the car bumping along the path from the road. Then he realized that the car, still half a mile or so from the lodge, had stopped.
He waited, puzzled. From a distance he heard the creaky shift of its gears, a brief puttering of the motor—another shift and putter. Then silence. Old Battler was also quiet, probably listening suspiciously, though he, too, knew the sound of Julia’s car. There was no one else to hear it. Jeffries had gone to the city with his wife that afternoon, and they wouldn’t be back till late next morning.
Hogan frowned, flashing the light on and off against the moonlit side of the lodge. In the quiet, three or four whippoorwills were crying to each other with insane rapidity up and down the lake front. There was a subdued shrilling of crickets everywhere, and occasionally the threefold soft call of an owl dropped across the bay. He started reluctantly up the path towards the road.
The headlights were out, or he would have been able to see them from here. But the moon rode high, and the road was a narrow silver ribbon running straight down through the pines towards Jeffries’ farmhouse.
Quite suddenly he discovered the car, pulled up beside the road and turned back towards town. It was Julia’s car all right; and it was empty. Hogan walked slowly towards it, peering right and left, then jerked around with a start to a sudden crashing noise among the pines a hundred yards or so down off the road—a scrambling animal rush which seemed to be moving toward the lake. An instant later, Old Battler’s angry roar told him the hound was running loose and had prowled into something it disapproved of down there.
He was still listening, trying to analyze the commotion, when a girl in a dark sweater and skirt stepped out quietly from the shadow of the roadside pines beyond him. Hogan didn’t see her until she crossed the ditch to the road in a beautiful reaching leap. Then she was running like a rabbit for the car.
He shouted: “Julia!”
For just an instant, Julia looked back at him, her face a pale scared blur in the moonlight. Then the car door slammed shut behind her, and with a shiver and groan the old machine lurched into action. Hogan made no further attempt to stop her. Confused and unhappy, he watched the headlights sweep down the road until they swung out of sight around a bend.
Now what the devil had she been poking about here for?
Hogan sighed, shook his head and turned back to the camp. Old Battler’s vicious snarling had stopped; the woods were quiet once more. Presently a draft of cool air came flowing up from the lake across the road, and Hogan’s nostrils wrinkled. Some taint in the breeze—
He checked abruptly. Greenface! Greenface was down there among the pines somewhere. The hound had stirred it up, discovered it was alive and worth worrying, but lost it again, and was now casting about silently to find its hiding place.
Hogan crossed the ditch in a leap that bettered Julia’s, blundered into the wood and ducked just in time to avoid being speared in the eye by a jagged branch of aspen. More cautiously, he worked his way in among the trees, went sliding down a moldy incline, swore in exasperation as he tripped over a rotten trunk and was reminded thereby of the flashlight in his hand. He walked slowly across a moonlit clearing, listening, then found himself confronted by a dense cluster of evergreens and switched on the light.