SOURCE: "The Seed From the Sepulcher" by Clark Ashton Smith (Weird Tales, October 1933)

DESCRIPTION: "Thone wanted to hurl himself forward in a mad impulse to grapple with the growth. But a strange paralysis held him back. The plant was like a living and sentient thing-- a thing that watched him, that dominated him with its un- clean but superior will. And the huge blossom, as he stared, took on the dim, unnatural semblance of a face. It was somehow like the face of Falmer, but the lineaments were twisted all awry, and were mingled with those of something wholly devilish and nonhuman. Thone could not move-- he could not take his eyes from the blasphe- mous abnormality.By some miracle, his fever had left him; and it did not return. Instead, there came an eternity of frozen fright and madness in which he sat facing the mesmeric plant. It towered before him from the dry, dead shell that had been Falmer, its swollen, glutted stems and branches swaying gently, its huge flower leering perpetually upon him with its impious travesty of a human face. He thought that he heard a low, singing sound, ineffably sweet, but whether it emanated from the plant or was a mere hallucination of his overwrought senses, he could not know." ("The Seed From the Sepulcher" by Clark Ashton Smith

NOTES: The Fleur de mal is a plant that invades a human or animal body, making it a vessel of the plant.

HISTORY: The killer plant story is not new even in Weird Tales in the 1930s. See Purple Terror, Blood-Sucking Vines and Strange Orchid. Brian W. Aldiss would take the idea to its extreme in Hothouse, where all the creatures are plants of one sort or another.