“What do you mean, plant?” asked Archer. “It can’t be a plant, Sir Harry. It’s perfectly flat, for one thing.”
“Have you touched it?”
Archer sniffed.
“Not very likely,” he said.
Discreetly, the butler cleared his throat.
“It’s on the floor, gentlemen,” he said.
The three looked down at the thing with reflectful expressions. Its longest reach was now a little over four feet. “You’ll notice,” said Harry, “that the texture of the carpet does not show through the blackness, therefore it’s not like ink, or some other stain. It has an independent surface.”
He stooped down, surprisingly graceful for a man of his size, and, pulling a pencil from his pocket, poked at the thing. The pencil went into the darkness for about a quarter of an inch, and then stopped. He jabbed at another point, this time penetrating a good, full inch.
“You see,” said Sir Harry, standing. “It does have a complex kind of shape. Our eyes can perceive it only in a two-dimensional way, but the sense of touch moves it along to the third. The obvious implication of all this length, width and breadth business is that your plant’s drifted in from some other dimensional set, do you see? I should imagine the original spot was its seed. Am I making myself clear on all this? Do you understand?”
Archer did not, quite, but he gave a reasonably good imitation of a man who had.
“But why did the accursed thing show up here?” he asked.
Sir Harry seemed to have the answer for that one too, but Faulks interrupted it, whatever it may have been, and we shall never know it.
“Oh, sir,” he cried. “It’s gone, again!”
It was, indeed. The carpet stretched unblemished under the three men’s feet. They looked about the room, somewhat anxiously now, but could find no trace of the invader.
“Perhaps it’s gone back into the dining room,” said Sir Harry, but a search revealed that it had not.
“There is no reason to assume it must confine itself to the two rooms,” said Sir Harry, thoughtfully chewing his lip. “Nor even to the house, itself.”
Faulks, standing closer to the hallway door than the others, tottered, slightly, and emitted a strangled sound. The others turned and looked where the old man pointed. There, stretching across the striped paper of the hall across from the door was:
“This is,” Archer said, in a choked voice, “really a bit too much, Sir Harry. Something simply must be done or the damned thing will take over the whole, bloody house!”
“Keep your eyes fixed on it, Faulks,” said Sir Harry, “at all costs.” He turned to Archer. “It has substance, I have proven that. It can be attacked. Have you some large cutting instrument about the place? A machete? Something like that?”
Archer pondered, then brightened, in a grim sort of way.
“I have a kris,” he said.
“Get it,” said Sir Harry.
Archer strode from the room, clenching and unclenching his hands. There was a longish pause, and then his voice called from another room:
“I can’t get the blasted thing off its mounting!”
“I’ll come and help,” Sir Harry answered. He turned to Faulks who was pointing at the thing on the wall like some loyal bird dog. “Never falter, old man,” he said. “Keep your gaze rock steady!”
The kris, an old war souvenir brought to the house by Archer’s grandfather, was fixed to its display panel by a complicatedly woven arrangement of wires, and it took Sir Harry and Archer a good two minutes to get it free. They hurried back to the hall and there jarred to a halt, absolutely thunderstruck. The
was nowhere to be seen, but that was not the worst: the butler, Faulks, was gone! Archer and Sir Harry exchanged startled glances and then called the servant’s name, again and again, with no effect whatever.
“What can it be, Sir Harry?” asked Archer. “What, in God’s name, has happened?”
Sir Harry Mandifer did not reply. He grasped the kris before him, his eyes darting this way and that, and Archer, to his horror, saw that the man was trembling where he stood. Then, with a visible effort of will, Sir Harry pulled himself together and assumed, once more, his usual staunch air.
“We must find it, Archer,” he said, his chin thrust out. “We must find it and we must kill it. We may not have another chance if it gets away, again!”
Sir Harry leading the way, the two men covered the ground floor, going from room to