Read Online Manly Wade Wellman - John the Balladeer 02 by After Dark (v1.1) - Free Book Online Page B

reckoned a man had better know where he'd be a-going from one part of
the settlement to the other. But the Shonokins must surely know, and men didn't
belong there.
                 I
walked down the other steep side of the rise, and stepped off the track where
it came to its end. Right when I did that, the humming and jangle left out of
me, and I was glad of their going.
                 I
stood there and studied the houses. No movement amongst them, nor in the dark patches that might could do them for
windows. No smoke went up from the houses. When it comes to that, I saw naught
on air roof that looked like a chimney. I made out growing things in the yards,
but those weren’t plants like what I’d air seen before; and I recollected that
vine that had grown beside the track, the one with the unchancy flowers. Though
there were flowers on some of these plants. I stood and studied.
                 Chiefly
there seemed to be sort of shrubby growth. I was close in enough to the nearest
house to make plants out. They had thick, slobby leaves with red veins, like as
if blood flowed in them. What at first I’d thought were blossoms had more the
look of tags of pink meat, more or less hand-shaped. The breeze stirred them, I
told myself; but just then there wasn’t a breeze, so they must be a-stirring of
their own notion. They had spiky edges like fingers, that halfway opened and then halfway closed like sure enough fingers.
                 I
didn’t feel a call to come too close to such things, agrowing there in clumpy
beds. Because I had the notion that they might could get hold on you like real hands; drag you down, even. And
then what? Eat you? Gobble you up, like as if you’d fallen into a penful
of mean hogs? I couldn’t reply myself exactly, though I had ideas—scary,
chilling ideas. Plants like that had the look of something able to suck the
blood out of you and then the meat off your bones. Who knew, who could rightly
say? Maybe them it had happened to were past all saying about it.
                 Here
and there such things grew up, up above the rest of them, taller than a man.
Almost like trees. On them, the hand-flowers hung down and looked ready set to
grab hold of aught within reach.
                 That
nearest house, amongst plants like that and others near about as strange, was
more or less a plumb ruin to see. It looked bent thisaway and that by time’s
heavy hand, though when it came to that the folks hadn’t left out of Immer so
many years back. I put my eyes on the house. It didn’t show logs in the
building of it; it was smooth, like brown plaster. What had at first look
seemed to be shingles on the roof weren't like the shingles I rightly knew.
More like flattened-out lumps, to remind me of the lichens you see a-growing
out on dead trees and rocks. They could have been some kind of wood slabs, they could have been grass bundles, or either
something else. And the whole roof, instead of squared-off lines, had a sag to it, a roundness to the edges of it, more or less
like the cap of a toadstool. And, as I've said, no chimney on
it. The windows weren't like windows, either. More like eyes, drooped under crossbars like eyelids. Secret eyes you
can't see into.
                 But no movement, not a flick of it whatsoever, that I could make
out round the houses or in the yards. I had a lone feeling right then,
like the last man left on earth. I made myself walk on closer.
                 In
the nearest yard I could make out other sorts of plants beside those bushes
with the hand-flowers. On the ground there looked to be little blades of stuff,
no bigger than the tines of dinner forks. Then, a row of stalks like com, but
with clusters on it instead of ears, purplish- colored. And,
twined round the stalks, vines with fruit, pure down strange-looking fruit, all
shapes and sizes.
                 The
house, I made out to see by now,