The Nightmarchers

by J. Lincoln Fenn

  “Is mental illness a flaw?”

  “Of course it is. And one day either pregnant women will be able to tell whether their fetus is carrying the gene for mental illness, and they’ll chose to give birth, or not, or we’ll be able to correct the gene in utero, thereby preventing the pain and devastation that follows. Which is eugenics, by the way. They’ll give it a spiffier name, though, something along the line of ‘designer babies,’ ” says Aunt Liddy, balancing the empty teacup on her lap.

  “That sounds frightening.”

  “My dear, you, a test tube baby, shouldn’t be so dramatic. Glass houses and stones, etc. There was quite an uproar just getting that through. The first IVF family was inundated with hate mail.”

  At first Julia thinks she misheard, but then realizes she didn’t.

  Her consternation must be visible, because her great-aunt says, “You didn’t know?” She raises her cup and coolly sips from it. “Oh my goodness, I thought . . . Well, they tried for years, you know. They were desperate to have a child.”

  Julia can’t help it; her mind spins off in different directions. Is it true? Why didn’t her mother ever tell her? Or her father? Where was it done? Were there other fertilized eggs still out there, frozen, an embryonic sisterhood?

  “And look at you now! Two arms, two legs, a robust intellect, and repairable teeth.” There is the faintest hint of an evil twinkle in Aunt Liddy’s eyes as she says this.

  Oh, she’s good, says Ethan. She’s very, very good.

  “But you didn’t come all this way to hear an old woman prattle on,” she continues, reaching over and patting Julia’s leg. “We have business to discuss, do we not? Perhaps you wouldn’t mind a bit of fresh air while we talk. You didn’t get a chance to tour the greenhouse, did you? The last time you were here?”

  Not a question, a directive, but best to make it look like a choice. Still reeling, Julia tries to keep her voice even. “If I remember correctly, that was off-limits too. But I’m always up to explore.”

  “Excellent. You won’t be disappointed,” Aunt Liddy says, placing her empty cup on the table. “You can see what mischief I get up to when I’m left to my own devices.”

  CHAPTER 4

  JULIA OPENS THE FRENCH DOORS, letting in a wall of hot air that barely stirs the gauze curtains. She’s grateful for the chance to refocus. Settle herself for a moment. Outside, there’s a long, rectangular pool next to a gazebo shaded by ivy, several brick patio spaces separated by raised garden beds filled with tropical palms and flowers, classical balustrades. The orchard at the back of the property is still there, and the air does smell of orange blossoms. Ten degrees cooler, and it’d be paradise.

  The wall is monstrous, though. The neighbors’ roofs barely peek over the edge; something oppressive, like a prison, about it. To keep something out, or to keep something in?

  An even, sloping cement walkway leads down to the Victorian greenhouse; sunlight glints off the glass panels, making it hard for Julia to look at the structure without squinting.

  “The water bill is astonishing,” says Aunt Liddy.

  “I can imagine.” Julia takes her assigned position behind the wheelchair and pushes her great-aunt carefully through the doors.

  “Occasionally they try to restrict my usage, but generous campaign contributions usually settle things quickly.” Aunt Liddy doesn’t bother to hide the note of pride in her voice.

  It’s on the tip of Julia’s tongue to say, It must be nice to get away with corruption, but she thinks better of it. Instead she closes the doors behind them and says, “It must be hard to keep it up.”

  “It is a constant battle. Los Angeles yearns to be a desert again, and perhaps one day we’ll lose the war effort and all have to emigrate north. I hope to be dead by then. Unlike Irene, I never missed Devon. I enjoy the sun. The heat.”

  Julia pushes her great-aunt down the walkway toward the greenhouse. It’s almost two stories high, supported by an ornate, ironwork frame. A cupola at the top, with a lazily rotating rooster weather vane.

  “I didn’t understand Irene’s fascination with plants. They seemed so benign, so placid. Beauty often is. What do you think of my garden?”

  “It’s lovely.” She wonders why Aunt Liddy doesn’t have an electric wheelchair. Probably does. Everything has been thought through, carefully choreographed, even this walk. Something Julia can’t afford to forget.

  “Yes, lovely. A very forgettable word—I’d hoped you might come up with something more interesting. It’s only lovely because it’s tamed. But the truth is, every garden is a war. Every plant a soldier, trying to perpetuate itself, vanquish the enemy. People think we have to preserve nature, like it’s a fragile blossom that won’t survive without our divine intervention. What we have to save is ourselves. Every living creature is ruthless, and vicious, and self-preserving, without a whit of sympathy.”

  Julia wishes she would just get to the point. “Being a little overly anthropomorphic, don’t you think?”

  “I’m being as clear and calculating as the wild tobacco plant,” Aunt Liddy says. “When it’s attacked by the hawkmoth larva, the plant releases volatile compounds into the air, signals insects that enjoy munching on hawkmoth larva where to find it. The enemy of my enemy is my friend. That’s quite a strategic calculation for something regarded as barely more sentient than a rock. The eucalyptus uses chemicals to inhibit the growth of competing plants.”

  “Are you saying it’s thinking?”

  “Define thinking. I bet you can’t—no one can. Define communication. That wonderful smell of freshly cut grass, do you know what it really is?”

  Play along, Julia. “No.”

  “It’s the smell of grass screaming. A chemical distress signal. Who needs cell phones when you have chemistry at your disposal? In many ways, we are surprisingly less sophisticated than weeds.”

  They finally reach the greenhouse. “Press the brake, there,” says Aunt Liddy, pointing to a lever by the wheel.

  Julia pushes it with her foot, grateful for something to do. The door to the greenhouse is shaded by an arched ironwork portico. She knows that somewhere inside will be the place and the moment when Aunt Liddy tries to close the deal, probably toward the end of the tour. A grand finale. I just have to suffer through the pitch. The most important thing is to avoid looking eager or desperate herself. Among the wealthy, desperation is death.

  “Irene sensed there was more to plants, their devious nature, long before it was substantiated by science. I thought she’d chosen a boring field. I couldn’t have been more wrong.”

  Julia approaches the greenhouse. There’s a copper plaque to the right of the door, engraved. Look like the innocent flower, but be the serpent under’t. She can see Aunt Liddy’s reflection behind her in the glass—an intense expression, something like barely contained triumph touched with fury. A strange mix.

  “So maybe it’s guilt,” her great-aunt says, “that I’ve created this. A way to appease her ghost. And my conscience.”

  “Has it worked?”

  “No, of course not. The dead never forgive. Or forget.”

  Julia reaches for the door handle—

  “Wait, my dear. Lift the plaque, otherwise you’ll set off the alarm.”

  Julie does, and finds a numeric keypad beneath with a red, blinking light. Security for a greenhouse?

  “Six-four-eight-seven-nine-two-one-eight-four-three,” says Aunt Liddy. “Be quick about it, this direct sun is trying.”

  Julia asks Aunt Liddy to repeat the numbers and then enters them—there’s a beep, a click, and the light turns green. She cautiously opens the door wide, and finds another world.

  Every inch inside is green: palms, ferns, and shrubs, tall trees covered with lichen, Spanish moss hanging from their branches, a pond with massive water lilies and purple lotus flowers, ivy creeping along and through the arching ironwork, a profusion of wildflowers, waist-high grasses, and colorful lilacs. Something wonderfully abandoned about it,
like it all sprung up organically.

  And then, for some unknown reason—was it a sound? A smell? Her entrance?—the air fills with green leaves. They flutter up toward the cupola—up—and collect like a flock of birds.

  For a moment, it’s hard for Julia to breathe. She was supposed to be impressed, and, against her better instincts, she is.

  Aunt Liddy rolls up behind her. “Oh, that’s not even the interesting part. Come, my dear, let’s be quick and close the door before we introduce them into the environment. Some are endangered, quite a few are toxic, and I can just imagine the ruckus from my neighbors if their cats ate them and started dying en masse. I’d never hear the end of it from the mayor.”

  Julia steps aside and Aunt Liddy wheels herself in. Julia quickly shuts the greenhouse door behind her, hears a click and a beep. There’s a wide, even pathway of concrete that curves, serpentine, to the right and left, enough of the vegetation cut back to allow them through. The leaves settle back into the dense foliage, although a few swirl in their general direction.

  “I’m going to ask you to push me again,” says Aunt Liddy, looking extraordinarily pleased at Julia’s reaction. “I can manage short spurts, but my deteriorating muscle strength is problematic for longer distances. Let’s go right.”

  Julia swallows the obvious question, What are they?, and gets behind her great-aunt’s wheelchair, grateful for the privacy it will give her. One of the green leaves spirals down out of a nearby tree, lands on her shirt. It has eyes, six legs, antennae. Stares at her curiously.

  “Katydids,” says Julia. “They’re just katydids.”

  “So much for my big reveal. You’ll find other insects here, all invested deeply in camouflage. A very successful strategy for avoiding predators. The thing that hides itself in plain sight, that’s always the thing you have to watch out for.”

  A meaning here she can’t quite fathom, but Julia gets the sense it will have something to do with whatever it is her great-aunt wants from her. The katydid climbs up her sleeve, settles onto her shoulder as she pushes Aunt Liddy. Going along for the ride.

  “So, great-grand-niece, how do you think this garden differs from the one outside?”

  Julia pushes Aunt Liddy past a cluster of orchids. “It feels more organic. Less designed. But that probably means every inch of it’s designed.”

  “In more ways than one. Very good, I’ll add the two points back that I detracted when you called the outside landscape lovely. Every specimen you see here is perfect. Absolutely, utterly perfect, the best expression of its genome. Not a single chromosome flaw. Every plant here would win any horticulture contest. No question.”

  “Is that why there’s an alarm?”

  “Not entirely. Although this is a Garden of Eden even God himself would envy.”

  Another katydid trills from the cover of a fern, and the one on her shoulder jumps away.

  “I see you don’t struggle with self-doubt,” says Julia.

  “It’s a futile exercise, my dear, best left to people under sixty.”

  Julia smiles, in spite of herself. She’ll have to watch that, the other side of her great-aunt’s blade. Charm. Something Ethan had no deficit of either. In fact, she imagines they’d get along well. She pushes Aunt Liddy around the next corner. A raised flower bed on their right, filled with tropical succulents, red blooms with needlelike petals.

  “Oh, here’s one of my favorites. Kahili flower,” says Aunt Liddy. “A kind of protea. The flowers and seedpods contain hydrogen cyanide. A compound that’s flammable and poisonous.”

  “Lovely.”

  “Now you’re being funny. Two bonus points. But I will say don’t touch anything without checking first.”

  There she goes, testing again. Julia senses Aunt Liddy listening closely, trying to gauge if this scares her. She decides the best approach is dark humor.

  “I wish I’d known you before my divorce.”

  Aunt Liddy claps her hands. “Oh yes, we could have made short work of all that.” They approach a shrub with bell-like flowers. “Like you, I understand loss all too well. I sent my sister to an island in the South Pacific and all I got back was a trunk. By then Annabelle was gone, Mother was in the institution, and Father . . . well, Father was Father. And poor Irene . . . she had been struggling for years to recover from a personal tragedy. A devastating fire. Her husband and baby girl perished. She’d suffered from survivor’s guilt. I was so certain a change of scenery would do her good. I wish . . . Ah, it’s too late for wishes. I thought, before she left, that I’d known pain. I’d barely tasted it.”

  Confiding invokes trust. A tactic Julia has used herself on more than one occasion, to get a source to reveal more than they were comfortable with. But inside the truth was always a subtle, manipulative idea, a push. Too late Julia had realized this worked on her as well. I’m a great disappointment to my father, Ethan had said the first time they met, at some kind of forgettable charity event she’d been pulled into at the last minute when the reporter assigned to cover it had gotten ill. Ethan had revealed a wound that night, one she’d eventually thought she could heal. It was a shock when, at their wedding reception, his father had offered a toast about how proud he’d always been of his son.

  The path here twists again, revealing palms sprouting well over six feet, and the earthy smell of an old-growth forest.

  “Irene was a fierce botanist,” Aunt Liddy continues. “I say fierce because you had to be, at the time, if you were a woman with scientific aspirations. I’d run across some intriguing reports about an island that was still untouched by Western scientists, and began to have delusions of grandeur. Finding my own personal Galapagos, discovering some new, revolutionary organism. And Irene desperately needed something else to occupy herself. I thought a complete change of scenery might do her some good. Oh my dear, do watch the hogweed.”

  Julia pauses just inches from brushing against a flower she’d assumed was Queen Anne’s lace.

  “Hogweed was brought over in the eighteen hundreds as an ornamental plant, if you can believe that. Its sap burns the skin and can even cause blindness.”

  Something like a note of admiration in Aunt Liddy’s tone.

  “Why didn’t you go with Irene?” Julia asks.

  “Adventure is hard to come by when you’re confined to a wheelchair.”

  Julia stops, surprised.

  “Yes,” Aunt Liddy says. “Most people assume it’s the decrepitude of old age. I liked my horses on the spirited side when I was young, and paid a dear price for it. If the eugenics movement had taken off the way my father hoped, I probably would have been sent to a gas chamber myself.”

  Julia doesn’t detect even the faintest hint of anger or resentment. “That’s harsh, don’t you think?”

  Aunt Liddy shrugs. “I’m sure I was upset at the time, but now it’s like something that happened to a character in a novel I read long ago. If I didn’t have a few photos I don’t think I’d even be able to remember Father’s face. And when I die, it will all be gone anyway.”

  “I’m sure people will build off your research,” Julia says.

  “Thank you for your pity. It will be sad to me, if to no one else, when microbes eat all my ingenious chromosomes. Even this Eden here is destined for annihilation. The plants will die, or they’ll reproduce with other, imperfect specimens, and ruin all my work.”

  The twists and turns have confused Julia’s sense of direction, although judging by the cupola, she guesses they’re almost halfway through.

  “You could donate your research.”

  “And let someone else take the credit? I think not. Plus . . . an opportunity has presented itself. One that might link my name with a discovery that lives on forever. I’m starting to like that word more and more. Forever.”

  Julia smiles. “Isn’t that just another way to avoid—how did you put it—the complete annihilation of death?”

  “Oh, you do have a reporter’s memory. I never said I’d overcome my ow
n fears. Immortality has been, and always will be, the Holy Grail. Now stop here—there’s something I want to show you. A couple of things, actually.”

  Julia does, next to a raised bed with a small, rather uninteresting flower that looks like a purple puffball with fernlike leaves. There’s a rusting metal stool under the bed.

  “Have a seat so I can see you.”

  And here we go. The ask will come soon.

  Aunt Liddy pulls a battered, leather notebook out from underneath her blanket while Julia settles on the stool. “Here,” she says. “Take this. It was Irene’s. It’s hard for me to look at.”

  Julia accepts the notebook. The cover is worn, the binding loose. A sheaf of letters in the front. She looks to Aunt Liddy for permission, which is granted with a nod. Gently, she opens it. April 3, 1939. It was a longer journey than I’d expected. . . . There’s a very good illustration in the side margin, a prop plane descending through cloud cover, a sharp mountain peak in the background.

  “How did she die?” Julia asks.

  “That’s what I’m hoping you will help me discover. You’ll see her version of events inscribed there, and tucked away in the back is a letter with a different version. A backhanded accusation of suicide. It doesn’t fit my sister. Something was . . . covered up.”

  Julia continues to turn the pages. Sketches of plants and flowers, each labeled in beautiful cursive script. The illustrations are very detailed, down to the root structure and fine veins on the leaves. A number of plants there are no names for, just a question mark beneath. Something primeval about them. They remind her of the images in her college paleontology textbook, the fossil on one side, the artist’s rendering on the other. A lost world revealed.

  “But if mental illness runs in the family . . . she really might have committed suicide.”