Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, May 10, 1995 TAG: 9505100025
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BEN BEAGLE/
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
You can make a chain out of daisies - although I've never done that - but you wouldn't want to do such a thing with this horror.
You could do a pretty good science fiction flick with this growth:
Bruce Willis is standing at the window of his house, which has a good Los Angeles address, and he sees this eerie stuff beginning to grow down by the pool.
"Alice," he says to his wife, "there's something frightening going on down at the pool."
Anyway, the stuff continues to grow and eats the air-conditioning system, which allows Bruce to run around naked to the waist as he fights to stop it before it gets to Alice .
The plant eventually gets into the house and drains all of Alice's blood and so forth. Don't ask me why I see Pia Zadora playing Alice.
Nothing that interesting ever happens on Happy Highfields Road, but the greatest station wagon driver of them all and I are into serious scientific studies that will soon identify this loathsome intruder and make it rue the day it fooled with the Beagles.
We hunch over large and dusty garden books, trying to name this terrible thing, a clump of which I have torn from the lawn. There is no wind, but if there was, it would be screaming in the chimney.
(Meanwhile, as Stephen King would imagine, the evil keeps growing in the side yard.)
"There's no doubt," I told the driver. "It's barnyard grass, according to this picture in your book. Strange, isn't it? We don't have a barn or a barnyard."
I couldn't be sure, but I thought I heard one of those bursts of organ music from "The Phantom of the Opera."
"It looks like sandbur to me," the driver said.
"Sandbur, eh?" I said. "Well, I suppose we'll have to wait for a full moon and bury a dirty dishrag in the back yard. At least, my Aunt Sadie said that got rid of warts."
I was going to say that we also didn't have any sand around - except for that bag of mortar mix for setting posts that has been in the Cherokee since 1986 - but the driver left. She always does that when I suggest burying dirty dishrags under a full moon.
Meanwhile, we're watching the side yard closely and avoiding any kind of panic.
I can live with the stuff as long as it doesn't attack the lawn mower the way it did poor Pia.
by CNB