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They sure looked like bones. That might even be a half-buried skull.

It was a skull: some large dog, or something. Those were its ribs. That was a chunk of flesh to the side, and through it twisted the quick, snake like tendrils of the slimy roots.

She put her hand up to her mouth to stifle a scream. This horrible plant was devouring whatever it had caught right before her eyes. Whatever horror that created was quickly tripled by the feeling of something sliding around her foot. In a snap of fibroid movement she was immobilized. Her calves were pierced with twisting, sharp spikes. She got out one scream before the paralyzing venom, released as they burrowed in, did its work. Her eyes were all the movement she had, rolling in terror as she fell to the ground and within reach of those wriggling white devourers.

The fact that Sarah Donnelly has been ensnared, twisted until her back broke and finally gobbled up by the plant in her backyard is hardly a surprise. Her neighbor Jerry Newman has been watching the damned thing snarf down everything from birds to dogs for the past few weeks. He has even tossed some roadkill in to see what would happen.

One night he went on safari to cut off a sample. The sneaking into the yard was exciting. Once inside, though, he had started to shiver. He sliced off his sample and dashed back like a boy outracing buckshot. The pod oozed bile from its cut. It felt like skinless meat and he was sure it twitched in his hand. He cut it open in the bathroom and flushed it almost immediately. Then he vomited.

The next day he noticed the tendrils of roots coming up from under the fence on his lawn. That scared him. Without explaining anything to anyone, he put the house on the market. He quietly cleaned out his belongings and sent his wife and kids to stay with her mother while he took care of things here.

Taking care meant a constant fight at the edge of his property, burning and cutting the roots, salting the area and then paving it to look like a barbeque platform. It meant throwing every dead carcass he could find over the fence as far as he could every night to keep the monster happy where it was.

He had been almost ready to start killing for it. But a buyer has turned up. He is almost clear of this whole nightmare, and now Miss Donnelly is going to keep it sated at least long enough to get the papers signed and get him on his way as far out of state as he can get. His review mirror proves the working theory he had developed on this botanical nightmare. It grows according to the amount of meat it gets. The stinking stalk now towers over the fence. It even might be starting to crest over the roof of Sarah Donnelly's house. Its pods wave in the wind, spreading their revolting stink, and the squirmy, white, maggoty pollen they harbor, all around the subdivision. It is definitely time to move.