Later on, when I had time and cause to relive that moment a thousand times, I would reflect on how impoverished our vocabulary is when it comes to the olfactory senses, despite the importance of scent in our lives. Fifty million brain receptors are assigned to the sense of smell, and when they fire, they zap the same set of neurons that stimulates the canyons of our brain that Evolution has made the seat and source of pure emotion. Later on, I would have plenty of time and motivation for studying ‘aromacology’, and I would even learn the clinical term for what I experienced at that moment: ‘hypersomia’, the condition of being overwhelmed by scent.
At the time, however, I felt both disoriented and curiously, embarrassingly, aroused; as though I were bathed in an erotically charged kind of aromatic music, a rich, many-layered chord of scent that seemed to blend, in perfect proportion, the essence of every ingredient of a perfect spring afternoon. I breathed in the tawny gold of sunset, a meadow-sweet hint of new-mown grass and hay, an overripe syrupy hint of gardenias, and a hundred other blended essences: rustic, sultry, powdery, pollinated, fungal, pheremonic, resinous, roseate - sharps and flats, bold flourishes and subtle harmonic progressions. My senses grew overloaded to the extent that I verged on an out-of-body climax, as disturbing as it was seductive. Some tiny part of my rational mind ruefully admitted that it was a good thing there was no traffic on this old highway, for I was surely Driving Under the Influence . ..
I knew I had found The Gardens. Too curious, and too close to stoned to continue driving, I coasted to a place where the shoulder of the road levelled out. I was barely aware of opening the car door and gave no thought to locking it. At that time, in that part of the state, people seldom bothered even to lock their front doors. Then I began walking slowly away from the road into a dense maze of shrubbery, pine trees, and wild flowers. I followed the current of scent like an inner-tube drifter on a lazy, spiralling river. The profusion of flowers and herbs around me was luxurious, baroque and seemingly haphazard, yet I sensed there was order to it, on some larger scale than the one I could perceive at ground level. Perhaps if I had been able to rise above it in a helicopter, some great rococo symmetry would have become obvious.
I could no longer see the car, but knew I could home-in on its location when I needed to. Despite the dizzying opulence of the foliage and its myriad scents, I was moving as purposefully as a compass needle swinging north. After some moments I arrived at the edge of a rutted dirt driveway. As I paused to catch my breath, I was startled by the sound of movement, a rustling in the underbrush on the other side.
As soon as she stepped forward into full view it was apparent that she had been aware of my presence, or at least my proximity, long before I had become aware of hers. She gazed at me, unflustered by my sudden appearance, appraising me with eyes of cool, dark hazel. She had pale, roseate skin, fine-grained as expensive vellum; high cheekbones, a generous mouth the colour of strawberries, and a cascade of cornsilk golden hair. She wore no make-up, and needed none. Her cotton dress clung to her in a sudden breeze, outlining long, coltish legs and sprightly apple-sized breasts, and she clasped in front of her a large wicker basket overflowing with herbs and flowers of many kinds. I judged her to be, at most, seventeen.
She smiled. ‘Hello. My name’s Virginia.’
I stammered my own name and stepped forward awkwardly. I had been driving past, I explained, when I suddenly felt compelled to stop and explore these gardens, these groves...then I stopped - there was no more of an explanation. But she only smiled more warmly, as if to reassure me.
‘People come here all the time,’ she said.
‘What sort of people?’
‘Every now and then, people like you, who see the sign and get curious. But mostly folks from around here, who already know about the place.’ She shifted her basket to her left hand and stepped closer. We shook hands. Her touch was quietly electric. She tilted her head to her left, away from the highway. Sunlight brushed her hair and was at home there.
‘Why don’t you come up to the house? You look like you could use something cool to drink, and Mother always keeps a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge. It’s the best you’ll ever taste.’
I fell in beside her and we walked along the dusty driveway. The grounds on either side now took on a more orderly appearance: I was fleetingly aware of tended groves, small plots of exotic herbs and flowers, shade-giving canopies of plastic sheeting, small greenhouses, and occasional clapboard sheds, not unlike small tobacco-curing barns. These things seemed to radiate out from an as-yet-unseen central point.
Which was, of course, her home: a rambling old country house, many-windowed, framed by a broad and comfortable porch with wicker rocking chairs, dignified by a number of white columns. No matter how numerous my subsequent visits, I never could see the entire outline of the building, so hidden were portions of it by vines and shrubs and thickly matted trellises.
I never could recall what we talked about during the ten minutes or so it took to walk the length of the driveway to the front steps of the house. I only remembered how easy and pleasant it was to converse, and how we had already become friends by the time she ushered me into the long, shadowy front hall and led me into the kitchen. The lemonade, as promised, was delicious.
‘This is so good.’ I said, after my second tall glass. ‘I’d like to thank your mother. Can I meet her?’
There was something sad in her smile, although at the time I attached no significance to it.
‘Mom’s a little bit shy. She has a throat condition, you see, that makes it hard for some people to understand her. That’s why I’m the one who takes care of our visitors. Please don’t think she’s being rude if she doesn’t come out to meet you - I’m sure she knows you’re here and I’m sure it’s just fine. Here, take another glass and we can sit on the front porch and talk.’
And just like that, we did. Reflecting later, I guess I understood from the beginning that this was the strangest household I had ever visited, but when I was with Virginia, when I was under the spell of the place, it seemed more natural than any of the upper-middle-class homes I had known when I was growing up. The Gardens was a place apart, evolving to its own rhythms, governed by its own natural laws. Virginia, through her warmth and innocence and sweetness, eased my passage into her world and made me feel at home there.
This property, she explained, had been in her family since before the Civil War; each generation had improved and added to the gardens, planting new species, crossbreeding, patiently learning the secrets of flowers and herbs, leaves and mosses, even fungi. It was the same with the house - each patriarch had added a wing or a room, a greenhouse or a shed, until the original configuration of the building was hidden like the nub of a pine cone.
In the early decades of the century, Virginia explained, the family had been quite large, but now there were only herself and her mother. Some of the men had died in wars; many of their wives had borne few, if any, children. She also alluded, briefly, to an unidentified illness that had shortened lives. At the time, her recitation of family history seemed not so different from the kind of generational ups and downs that could afflict any large family that, by habit or choice, relied on a fairly restricted genepool to replenish its ranks; such genealogies were not rare in the rural South. To me, the saga seemed deliciously Faulknerian, even though her speech and manners were not those of a typical Red Clay rustic. In the space of one afternoon, I had already mythologised her into a rare wild flower, a beautiful child of nature whom I had somehow been destined to discover.
As twilight thickened around us, and The Gardens became shadowy, more mysterious, I began to sense a change in the diapason of scents that surrounded me. Aromas of sunlight and photosynthesis began to fade, replaced gradually by heavier, darker scents. Some I recognised -gardenia, mint, sage - many others eluded recognition. The Gardens were composing their own nocturne.
So what, exactly, was the family business?
‘We sell plants and flowers
, just like any other gardeners,’ she replied. ‘But the family has always focused its attention on scent. Certain aromas have certain effects, on people and on animals. We mix aromas like pharmacists mix medicines. There are compounds that cure hay fever and diminish the effect of allergies, and others that cure depression. There are mixtures that make livestock more fertile, that help chickens lay more eggs and cows give more milk. When folks around here have a problem, they come to us. We have a large inventory of specific mixtures - after all, we’ve been doing this for more than a century - and if we don’t have a remedy, Mother and I try to develop one. Everything we create is organic; natural oils and essences. Mother says they contain the Life Force. We can’t help everybody, but we succeed more often than we fail, and people in these parts have come to trust us.’
Not until twenty years later, when New Age concepts came into vogue as the last spiritual refuge of ageing hippies, would I encounter the term ‘aroma therapy’, but Virginia and her clan had been practising its precepts for generations and, through trial and error and intuition, had actually created an extraordinary olfactory pharmacopoeia.
Sitting there on her darkened porch, listening to the sultry music of her voice, immersed in rare, exotic and evocative scents, everything she told me seemed to make perfect sense. I was young, romantic, ready to believe in the evidence of my senses. The coming of night made me feel simultaneously disembodied and filled with an earthy vitality. As the last saffron glow of sunset faded in the treetops, fireflies began to glow. With the coming of full night, they began to gather in vast multitudes, more than I had ever seen before, so that their illuminations pulsed in silent waves, bright enough to read by, like atoms of moonlight.
‘Isn’t it a bit early for fireflies to be out?’
‘Their mating season peaks in June, yes. But here in The Gardens, they always show up early. Mother says that this is the place where all the fireflies in the South start their seasonal cycle - they radiate out from here in a great spiral. Something about the place gets them charged-up. It’s funny to think of firefly lust, I guess, but I have this lovely image in my mind of a great vortex of living light, gathering energy here like a cyclone, then spreading all that beauty across the land.’
Suddenly, her hand was in mine and its softness, its warmth, the grace of her long, elegant fingers, evoked a thrill of intimacy in my whole body.
‘Come with me,’ she whispered, ‘and we’ll walk in the heart of The Gardens. On nights like this, it is very beautiful.’
What followed was dreamlike. Neither on the morning afterwards nor on any of the many times I tried to reconstruct the episode in detail, could I summon more than an Impressionist memory of the walk I took with her. Anchored to my flesh only by the touch of her hand, I followed her around the house and into a great expanse of orderly groves and fields, each with its own whirlpool of scent. Thousands of fireflies swarmed around us, escorting us, making the very leaves and vines and night-blooming flowers phosphorescent. I had never seen anything more beautiful or more mysterious; the very air we breathed seemed to be imbued with some undiscovered sensory dimension. Virginia herself appeared to glow softly, as though her flesh were kin to the nocturnal blossoms whose now-soothing, now-arousing scents flowed over us as we explored.
How many hours passed, I cannot say. Nor can I remember the names and properties of the orchids, vines and nectars she described for me. Not only time, but also the world beyond this place had ceased to exist for me. And try though I later did, obsessively, I could never remember the exact moment when we first embraced, when I first tasted the rich, nocturnal sweetness of her mouth.
I only know that, if someone had asked me during the week that followed, if I believed in Magic, I would have answered, passionately, ‘Yes!’
At some point, we ended our circumnavigation of The Gardens and I could see the dark outlines of her house again. Dim light showed in several windows, and the back door was open. Suddenly, a thick, soft, oddly distorted voice uttered a single word, not loud, but curiously penetrating: ‘Virginia?’
Instantly, she squeezed my hand and let go. The spell that had surrounded us faded quickly, leaving me again disoriented, suspended between two worlds.
‘That’s Mother, calling me in. I have to go now.’
‘I’ll come in and meet her,’ I stammered, reverting to the middle-class manners I had been taught. ‘I don’t want her to think I’m rude.’
Virginia put her hand to my lips and stared at me with luminous eyes.
‘It’s all right. She understands. But she’s shy. Perhaps some other time.’
I was suddenly desperate to stay near her. ‘Can I come back? Can I see you again?’
‘Of course. Come back a week from tonight.’
‘I don’t know if I can wait that long. What about tomorrow night?’
She shook her head. ‘Mother and I have a lot of work to do this week. She’s experimenting with some new things, exploring some new directions. I’m the only help she has. But I will be waiting for you, a week from tonight.’
And with that, she blew me a kiss and went inside. Stumbling like a drunk, I groped my way back to the front of the house, found the driveway, and eventually regained my car.
I returned to The Gardens one week later, at twilight. Virginia was waiting on the front porch when I parked. The sight of her, gracefully gliding down the front steps, rewarded a week of mounting anticipation, during which I could hardly keep my mind on classwork. There was just an instant’s hesitation when I got out of the car and faced her, then she came into my arms and I smelled the sunlight lingering in her hair and the evocative woody aroma of whatever herbs she had been working with earlier.
She led me into the kitchen, where her mother - nowhere in sight, but that did not surprise me any more - had put out a lavish supper for the two of us. I remember lamb chops grilled with herbs, fresh corn, biscuits, and, predictably, a monumental salad whose strange and subtle flavours bespoke the local origin of its ingredients.
It was dark by the time we finished. I helped her wash and dry the dishes, effortlessly falling into a domesticated routine, just happy to be standing beside her. As she finished putting away the last plate, she turned and said: ‘Would you like to see where I do my work? It’s my lair, really, my own private mad scientist’s laboratory.’ Of course I did; if she wanted to spend the evening playing canasta, that was fine with me.
So hand in hand we threaded through the foliage to a secluded corner of the grounds until we stood before a surprisingly large building. Inside were numerous boxes, pots, and trays filled with plants and flowers, some of them bathed in the light of fluorescent fixtures hanging from the ceiling. The far wall was lined with shelves and cabinets, all filled with gardening tools, glassware and stoppered, labelled jars. Nearer the entrance was an area furnished like a study, with desk, bookshelves, even a bed. Of course I noticed the bed right away; in retrospect, I think I was supposed to.
Virginia gave me a tour, and I hung on every word. Inside the jars were exotic essences, powders and oils from all over the world, imported or grown here in The Gardens under special conditions: coriander oil from Russia, lavender from England, sandalwood from India, nutmeg oil and patchouli from Indonesia, bergamot oil from Sicily, bitter orange from Egypt; anise, valerian, chamomile, lemon, spikenard, clove, champak and ylang-ylang ... I remember but a few of the names of what she showed me. The commingled scents, until you got used to them, were close-to-overwhelming, a fugue of such complexity that its individual strands overloaded the ear. From their effect, and from the nearness of the girl herself, I became intoxicated, transported to the same dreamlike state I had experienced on our first nocturnal walk, when we had watched the fireflies weave their sarabandes of light.
Her study shelves were lined with notebooks and esoteric volumes, some of them, I supposed, quite valuable. Their titles had an arcane ring to them: Libellus de Distillatione Philosophica, Garcia da Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples
and Drugs of India (Goa; 1563), Giovanni Roseto’s Secreti Notandissimi dell’Arte Profumatoria (Turin; 1555), and so forth. Some were modern reprints; others were antique leather-bound tomes. All bristled with bookmarks, showing that they were consulted (or had been, by her forebears) on a regular basis. I was impressed, and told her so.
‘It’s our family calling; what else could I devote my time to? You really don’t need a fancy laboratory, or research grants - just seeds and patience and time. My mother says that we’ve been successful because there aren’t any courses in aromacology, no textbooks, no rules, no dogma. And thus no inhibiting roadblocks from the conscious, verbal mind. No critical static. We do what we do and find out what works, we distil, we blend, make powders and elixirs, write our own recipes; above all, we’re patient. There are hundreds of formulas in those notebooks, and I’m adding some new ones from my own research.’
She looked up at me with those wide, pure eyes and seemed suddenly to get an idea. ‘Can I show you something I’ve been developing? It’s a compound that relaxes you physically but also makes you mentally alert. No drugs, no FDA approval needed, just Mother Nature’s own ingredients. I’m rather proud of it.’
Dark Terrors 5 - The Gollancz Book of Horror - [Anthology] Page 58