The House of the Vegetable

by Frank Lamour

  Beppe headed out and Don got up and dragged himself back through to the living-room, collapsing back down into his now favourite armchair.

  Beppe seemed to have been gone a while—Don thinking he might even have a snuck in a microsleep—before the kid tromped back down the stairs carrying an old blanket and coverless pillow and dropped them down on the couch.

  “I’m having a drink,” the bowl-cut kid said. “You want?”

  “Um, thanks,” Don said, half asleep. After a week of relatively clean living, the prospect of some booze now sounded amazing.

  “You can clean up in that bathroom if you want, there some plasters and shit there. Maybe not so good to get blood on the fucking pillowcase.”

  Don mumbled something in the affirmative while sending a reflexive hand up to his ear. The pain wasn’t too bad. Weren’t there minimal amount of pain sensors in the earlobe? He wasn’t sure. It burned and stung but when his mind wasn’t on it he seemed to forget about injury. He didn’t at all feel like bothering with cleaning the wound, but managed to gather himself up again and headed through to the bathroom in the front hall.

  Don stared at himself in the mirror above the sink. He was indeed bloodier and dirtier than he’d thought. The blood mostly dry now, but still a bit tacky at his ear. There was a loose string of flesh dangling at the back the ear. Looking at the wound in the mirror now Don thought he felt the pain increase.

  He supposed he was somewhat disfigured now, but realised it definitely could have easily been worse.

  Don peeled off the hemp outfit and washed the blood off his face and neck as best he could. Most of the blood coming from the ear. One knee and an elbow were also skinned. The bump on his forehead was tender but at least the skin wasn’t broken there. There was a bump as well on the back of his head where he’d slammed into Thornapple’s door.

  Don cleaned up as well as he could, splashing his face with some soap and water, before finding some Savlon to disinfect the wounds and then slapping a couple of large size plasters over the ear, squashing the loose thread of flesh down into place.

  Don now heard the loud noise of rotors over the house. He stood listening. His heart slowed again as the sound passed over finally growing fainter. Was it even anything to do with him?

  After drying himself off, Don picked up the hemp outfit again. It was filthy and bloody but at least the blood was dry. Beppe hadn’t made any offer of a change of clothes and Don was just too bothered to mission. He’d ask in the morning. Just get that fucking drink and get some sleep.

  He slipped the filthy shirt and pants back on, half feeling some comfort in them, as if they’d brought him luck—at least by getting him this far.

  Back in the living room Beppe was now sat in Don’s favourite chair. Two stout glasses of amber liquid sat on the table. At least it wasn’t Beppe’s wine, maybe the kid had raided Lesley’s liquor cabinet.

  Don crashed down into the couch. The fat cat did not appear to have moved and Don idly wondered if it were not perhaps just a fine example of taxidermy.

  “Who the characters in the hippy van?” Beppe asked

  “It’s a long story,” Don said. “Maybe you need to ask Lesley.” He picked up his glass off the table and took a sip. It tasted awful, some really cheap stuff, or maybe, he thought, his week of clean living had just made him more sensitive?

  He took another slug, cheap or not it would still do the same job in the end.

  “You think they’ll be back?” Beppe asked.

  “I don’t know,” Don said, he was feeling really tired now. He knew the mission wasn’t over. He was just too damn worn out to think.

  “If they come back I’ll just press the panic button and we’ll call security.” Beppe stared off into space for a moment. “And we’ve got the shotgun. Just in case.”

  Don nodded. “They’ve got a rifle. Old one but it works. With the bolt thing on the top.” Don made a motion as if reloading the weapon.

  Beppe nodded, though not really seeming to be listening.

  The two sat in silence, drinking. Finally Beppe, not finishing his drink, but just picking it up, got up. “Take it easy,” he said. “I’ll see you in the morning.”

  He stood as if sizing Don up for a moment—Don shifting uncomfortably in his seat—before heading back to his room.

  Chapter 27

  It was about 6:30am when Pinchas Tabachnik got a visit from possibly the only person he was aware of, that he truly, profoundly, feared.

  He had been turned away from his desk, leaning back in his luxury Aeron office chair, staring out at the forested view from the second-floor window of his reasonably palatial home on the top of the Westcliff Ridge, when the call came through from downstairs.

  It was a familiar name he had thought he was done with.

  He now waited in a state of not inconsiderable, unease as Tjaart de Pooter, a.k.a. Thornapple, was shown up to the office.

  ◆◆◆

  Pinchas had met de Pooter about two years back at a Jay Gatsby-level party at a sprawling estate in the billionaire suburb of Houghton.

  It had been already late into the night and Pinchas was feeling burnt out. He had never been one for enjoying this kind of thing and tonight the marching powder was not doing its usual job of masking the complex of inadequacies he felt.

  He mainly attended these events to network and maintain business contacts. Also, he supposed, to keep the wife happy, but it was a chore. Much of him was always feeling he never fit, especially with the good-looking crowd at a party like this.

  After having been deprived of oxygen for some time during a difficult birth, the infant Pinchas had emerged with a very short set of malformed legs. A childhood of endless, lonely hospital stays and painful operations had enabled him to now get by with only a set of callipers (or orthotics as the doctors now preferred to call them), a cane and minimal pain.

  Despite his mobility he would always though remain small and misshapen—and age now had kindly added a weird patchy balding pattern to the mix. And even though he’d had good success in business, he still, deep down, believed he’d never properly assimilate with the world around him.

  Tired, with his legs hurting, Pinchas had hobbled out of the heaving manse, looking for somewhere to sit. Maybe he’d check his emails on his phone. Just do some work, balance books—if only in his head.

  He might have already left but his wife, Sarah, was still into it and he thought he’d just try wait out a few more hours, just to keep her sweet. He had been lucky to find her, he thought. He had a bit of money, yes, but he often thought that surely a beautiful woman like her could just as easily hook up with a handsome as well as rich guy if she wanted.

  Stumbling out into the fairy-lit and landscaped lawn Pinchas passed several, no doubt respectable during the week, but now thoroughly debauched, characters laid out on the grass.

  Paying them little mind, he pushed past, and finding a nice, high-backed concrete garden bench, lowered himself down onto it.

  Pinchas’s cover, what he told people he did, was events organiser. And he did do this, but the job’s main purpose was as a front so he could move his product. At the moment he had dozens of operatives around his neck of the Northern Suburbs supplying everything from mushrooms to embalming fluid. Business was good, and he attributed a large amount of its success to marketing.

  Proud of his access to the widest range of psychoactive substances, he wanted to the public to be aware of what was available and what all the various drugs did. Uppers, downers, psychedelics, dirty drugs and spiritual drugs.

  Back in the early days of the Internet, Pinchas had gotten into the social potential of the medium, using it to advertise and promote underground events. At these parties he’d then hire dealers to push for him—whatever was more suited to that particular scene. It had taken off. A community formed and soon also a code, methods of communicating that enabled those in the know to get what they wanted without being hassled by local law enforcement. Pinchas had
many cops in his pocket—at least in the area—so he was not too worried about that side of things, but thought it still always good to be careful.

  Pinchas’s train of thought had been broken when a seeming giant had emerged from the shadows and had begun making his way toward him.

  The man had, despite the chill, been dressed in shorts, t-shirt, espadrilles and a giant Native American headdress—and had been puffing a long, ornate pipe. Looming surely well over the six-and-a-half-foot mark, the feathered headgear sending his silhouette into the stratosphere. Pinchas felt vertigo just looking at the guy and his feeling of unease was not soothed by the man’s eyes, wide and staring, the whites visible around the iris now locked on Pinchas.

  The tall man had pointed with the pipe to the space alongside the seat next to Pinchas.

  Pinchas nodded non-commitally. He considered making a crack about cultural appropriation but thought the guy looked like he could easily use him as a bowling ball and thought better of it.

  “I like your hat,” Pinchas said.

  The tall man had then removed the headdress, and had begun very carefully and methodically folding it up.

  Feeling increasingly awkward, Pinchas had followed up with, “What’s in the pipe?”

  “Iquitos,” the tall man said.

  Pinchas thought that was the name of a town somewhere in South America, but decided to let it pass.

  The tall guy then offered him a puff.

  Pinchas wasn’t sure whether it was the stuff in the pipe or the weird guy but after a short time he began feeling decidedly strange.

  Coming to himself after a short period of mind-wandering, he now saw the guy had the headdress in his hand and was extending it out to him. “Here,” the tall guy said. “Take it.”

  The headdress looked finely crafted and authentic not like the ones you saw people normally wearing at fancy dress do’s. Pinchas had protested but had eventually ended up accepting the gift.

  This now led to him feeling obligated to ask follow up questions about the provenance of the item. The giant had seemed happy to enough to answer all questions but with a weird, flat, almost hypnotic affect.

  Throughout the course of the conversation had learnt, at least according to the guy, that he’d been over in Peru doing, by what Pinchas could gather, some kind of apprenticeship involving psychedelic plants.

  The giant, who’d introduced himself as Tjaart de Pooter, told Pinchas he’d studied under a shaman over there for over a year, had learned the various rituals and icaros, or spiritual songs, and was now authorised to conduct ceremonies locally.

  “You got a business card or something?” Pinchas had asked filling an awkward gap of silence once the man had finished.

  “No give me your card,” Tjaart had replied. “Think about it. If you decide to join, I’ll give you a call.”

  Pinchas had taken a moment to process this, but had smiled obligingly enough anyway and handed the guy one of his cards.

  It wasn’t something he might have normally considered, especially the bit Tjaart had detailed about the throwing up, the facing the shadow self, etcetera, but he was intrigued, and hated not knowing, especially when it came to something that might impact his business. He did like to know what the kids were into these days.

  About a couple of weeks later, Pinchas, having almost forgotten the encounter, had been at his local Exclusive Books, looking for the latest music magazine, when the girl working there told him his book had come in.

  Pinchas, puzzled, not having ordered anything, or even ever ordered anything at Exclusive Books, was even more baffled when handed it. A book on Iquitos.

  It had got him thinking again about the meeting with Tjaart and although he wasn’t, at that point, much into synchronicity and all that shit he couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that it was a sign.

  The next morning Tjaart had called him. And that had basically sealed the deal.

  Although having tried a number of different hallucinogens, the drug, the medicine, whatever, was definitely off the charts one the stranger things he’d done. But it did seem to work. The coincidences might have just been coincidences, but it did seem to work.

  Returning home after his first ceremony, he’d told Sarah that it was like years of therapy compressed into a few hours. She, not particularly interested, had appeared to just mark it off as another one of Pinchas’s singular and usually short-lived obsessions.

  Oddly, Pinchas thought, he’d also begun having better ideas as to how to expand his business. He’d begun to feel, now more than ever, that his drugs were needed in the world. He wasn’t just doing it for the money now. It was something like a calling. He wouldn’t have thought that such a supposed pure and spiritual medicine would guide one towards the peddling of crack and Cat, but, well, he reasoned, the Lord was known to work in mysterious ways and the path to salvation not always either direct, clear or easy.

  Back then Tjaart had been holding a ceremony, or purge, every month or two and Pinchas had attended all—and all had been going relatively well.

  Over the course of the year or so he’d been attending, Pinchas had begun to notice increasingly strange and erratic behaviour from the tall man.

  Initially it was small things like starting to wear only green, the forbidding of any cell phones—on or off—anywhere near the house, or his constant bringing up of the issue of fucking mind parasites. This, as well as, insisting on being called “Thornapple” and assigning plant names to the attendees (Pinchas had been given the name Kola Nut, but had not fancied that all, and had done his best to nip that in the bud.)

  Pinchas (Kola Nut) though, thought he was basically still okay with all of this. It was only when Tjaart had begun mucking about with the brew that things had started to go wrong.

  Arriving as usual one evening for the purge, one of the regulars, Thato (recently having been given the plant name Acacia), had let it slip that the brew was different.

  Thato or Acacia was one of Tjaart’s more serious attendees. He had, on meeting Tjaart for the first time, realised that his scar basically covered the same spot as Tjaart’s grey streak. Not exact maybe, but close, close enough and Thato then discovering that the date of his sustaining his wound—in an unfortunate lye incident—apparently corresponding to the date of Tjaart’s birth.

  What that was all supposed to mean was unclear, but it was just another one of the weird synchronicities that seemed to manifest whenever Tjaart de Pooter was in the vicinity, and in the end it had sealed the deal on another committed devotee.

  “He said he’s been directed on what to add and the quantities,” Thato had told Pinchas, looking nervous about spilling the beans, but also clearly a little unsure about the changes.

  Apparently Tjaart had, over the last few weeks, been frantically acquiring a whole bunch of other ingredients, among others, marijuana, datura, iboga, synthetic DMT, blue lotus, ketamine, various psychedelic mushrooms and possibly even some frog poison.

  God knew what.

  The problem was, at that point, Pinchas had still trusted Tjaart. He’d trusted the man so far and so far had been rewarded with multiple enlightenments. And so had chosen to drink.

  The night had gone fine. The ceremony, not that different to normal and the tea—although he did seem to black out at times, and there did seem to be a lot more wandering during the night—was not too much crazier than normal, which, to be fair, was usually pretty mind-bending.

  But coming down, early morning, he felt, at least, still in one piece.

  That morning, as the sun rose and the regulars clustered, quietly discussing their trips, Thornapple had stood and begun to pace and had shortly delivered a very uncharacteristically long and rambling speech.

  “I have made a new contact in the spirit realm. But I need a commitment. He needs a commitment!” His voice was now booming and there was something Pinchas didn’t like about it. “We’ll live together, here. Pool our resources. This is why I was given the house. What the fuck is m
oney good for when you die having squeezed out life of quiet desperation? There is only one type of work. The great work!”

  It went on like that for a while, but Pinchas had already decided he wasn’t coming back. He had more resources than all these characters combined and had no intention of “pooling” it with any of them. He planned to slip out after the speech and just not return.

  And Pinchas might’ve made it out clean without bumping into the big guy if he hadn’t made the mistake of stopping to take a leak on his way out.

  As Pinchas had been exiting the bathroom, wiping his hands on his chinos—not having been prepared to touch the filthy hand towel on offer, he passed Tjaart, who was leaning in the doorway to the ceremony room, like he’d been waiting for him.

  “Next time,” Pinchas had said as casually as he could.

  “So you in?” Tjaart said.

  Pinchas paused, turned. “I don’t think so.”

  Tjaart stared at him silently, inscrutably.

  Pinchas continued wiping off his hands on his pants, switching the cane to the hand that wasn’t wiping.

  “You told me you were committed,” Tjaart said. “When we were standing under the oak. The morning after you first drank.”

  Christ, Pinchas had no fucking memory of that. Yes, committed, but what did the fucking guy expect? Not like for fucking ever and ever.

  Pinchas hadn’t responded, simply headed on down the passage down to the car waiting for him.

  From behind him he heard Tjaart now say, “In the words of Colin Fluxman, ‘Keep ‘em peeled,’”

  It was a weird thing to say, Pinchas thought, but then Tjaart, or Thornapple now, whatever, was always saying some weird shit. I mean who the fuck was Colin Fluxman anyway?

  Back home, Pinchas found the house was quiet. The staff mostly off and he remembered, vaguely, his wife telling him she was going out with friends. When he did his plant thing, she was out usually doing her booze thing.

  Pinchas had finally gotten to sleep sometime mid-morning after watching some random TV—staring vacantly at the screen.