“The show was not yet over. My uncle giggled as he tapped the stem of the flower. It bounced backwards and forwards suggestively; and before quivering to a stop, it exuded a few drops of viscous honeydew with a heady perfume.
“I can’t describe the scent, only its effect—more potent than any combination of claret and brandy. Elaine felt it too: the melting ice-maiden turned to me moist-lipped. Her hair was streaming. Perspiration and the atmosphere had drenched her clothes until they clung to every curve. She was making little animal noises.
“Dizzy with the perfume, I grabbed her and she clung to me. Murmuring incoherent excuses to my uncle we lunged from the cellar. I dimly remember him holding the cellar doors open for us, and his laughter cackling behind us. We left a trail of scattered garments all the way up the stairs to our bedroom. From then on we threshed about in an ecstatic frenzy until first light, when sheer exhaustion brought us down to earth and we crashed into sleep.”
Harry fell silent, savouring his drink and perhaps the memory. We could hear the midwife purposefully busy. Harry gestured vaguely in her direction with his glass, as though emphasising the link between the drama in the next room and the bedroom farce some nine months past.
“Good for Uncle’s potted plants,” I murmured, quickly refilling my glass before the bottle was quite empty. Between the glow of the fire, the sighing of the wind, and Harry’s reminiscent drawl, I was losing a battle against lethargy.
Another cry from Elaine. I sat up with an expletive, and with one stride Harry was over to the door. It opened as he reached it. The freckled midwife, firm of bosom and bicep, shook her head.
“Early yet,” she hooted. “Back to your bottle and dinna’ fash yourself. I promise ye’ll be the first tae ken when the bairn appears.”
She disappeared, shutting the bedroom door with the speed and efficiency of a cuckoo returning to its clock.
Harry ambled back to his chair, nursed his empty glass for a minute, then began to talk again. It passed the time.
“That wasn’t the only occasion,” he went on. “She’d come panting to bed, eager as a wild colt for a gallop, and I’d know it had been blossom-time again. Luckily some of that perfume seemed to cling to her. Her fingers would be covered with red pollen. One sniff, and I’d be bucking like a bronco. At first, after these bouts we’d go back to our old sterile ways, but gradually we began to grow towards each other. Nothing madly shattering, of course, but at least giving us a new interest in life. I’m more grateful to Uncle for that than for his thousands.”
More silence from Harry.
“A sudden bereavement?” I hazarded.
He sighed, as Adam might have sighed, looking back on lost Paradise.
“It was the onion seller,” he said simply.
I waited for what must follow.
“Uncle was undisturbable down in the cellar, and Elaine was soaking up the ultra-violet, when the onion seller appeared at the kitchen door. He was a slight man, kippered by wind and sun. Little black eyes had taken in every item of kitchen equipment between his question and my reply. In point of fact, he only seemed to know one word, which was ‘onions’—an easy one, because it’s almost the same in French as in English. I replied, ‘Non’—showing off a bit—waving a hand at the deep-freeze, the micro-wave oven, and the washing-up machine, conveying the information that food in these parts was practically untouched by human hand. We just didn’t need such items as old-fashioned onions. So off he trundled, bundles of onions swinging from his shoulders.
“He had a poor sense of direction because, instead of turning towards the front gate, he headed for the greenhouses. I had to swivel him round and point him in the direction he ought to go. He paused before going on to his next customer, and looked back at the house—not casually as one does at a gate, but intently as though searching for something which ought to have been there that he’d missed.
“I remember telling myself that the poor bastard wasn’t going to do much business in this area, with at least two miles between us and the next house. Then I went on to consider he must have been pretty stupid, because even an unlettered clod must have seen there were no other houses down this lane, and no houses meant no sales. Finally I recalled that I hadn’t seen an onion seller for years. He was an anachronism, like a muffin man ringing his bell around Earl’s Court.
“By way of pleasantry I mentioned this to Uncle half-way through dinner that evening. He didn’t find my joke very funny. In fact, it put him off his food. He set down his knife and fork very precisely, cogitated for a count of forty, then fired a stream of questions at me like an interrogating commissar.
“He wanted to be told exactly what the man had looked like, exactly what he had said, every detail of time, place, and scenario until he knew as much about the encounter as if he’d been there. When all that information had been gathered in, he pushed abruptly from the table, and whisked from the room without waiting for coffee, muttering something that sounded like ‘Now, now, now.’ He spent the rest of the night down in the cellar.
“He surfaced half-way through the following morning, just as I was massaging sun-tan oil into that awkward spot halfway up Elaine’s spine. He wanted her assistance with a tricky process below-stairs. Knowing Elaine’s limitations whenever anything practical is involved, I offered my services but was brushed aside. Uncle wanted Elaine and Elaine alone. I fastened her halter top and retired gracefully.
“My meditations were interrupted by the return of the onion seller; this time without the pretence of onions. In the twenty-four hours since our last encounter his vocabulary had improved remarkably. He still had a marked foreign accent but expressed himself forcefully. Making enquiries in the neighbourhood, he had been informed that an old gentleman lived alone on these premises. Encountering me yesterday, he had assumed he must have taken a wrong turn. However, a conversation last night with a taxi-driver convinced him that he had been right first time. He wanted my uncle. What’s more, the expression on his face and the tone of his voice did not encourage me to call for the old man.
“Fortunately the cellar door was closed, and the stranger’s darting glances failed to spot the vital panel. However, my formal reply that Uncle was not at home to callers was clearly not believed. The bright black eyes came to rest almost lovingly on a gleaming butcher’s cleaver hanging with other equipment on the kitchen wall. I don’t know why it was there: I’d never seen it in action. The foreigner, though, was obviously considering a use for it.
“Suddenly he changed his tactics. With a smile, intended to be warm and friendly, he promised m’sieur that if m’sieur knew everything m’sieur would understand everything, and if the worse came to worst, perhaps even forgive everything. It was a long story, but I did not interrupt because while the chap was talking; he was not molesting Uncle. My main fear was that Uncle himself might come popping out in the middle of the narrative. Luckily he didn’t.
“It seemed that, in his own village, the onion seller once had a son—black hair, black eyes, and a lithe body brown as a nut. In the boy’s thirteenth year an old man had come to live nearby. This old man was rich enough to indulge his hobby of raising peculiar plants. Some of these could only have been conceived by the Devil, but the boy was fascinated. As months passed, he began to spend all his spare time in the hellish garden created by the Englishman. He was occasionally paid for doing odd jobs—not overpaid, because the very rich understand the value of money, but money changed hands.
“Because of the money rumours started, but there was no truth in those stories. Truly those two were not interested in each other but only in the loathsome specimens. The boy was warned to stay away, but he defied authority, even enduring beatings.
“There came a time when the boy did not come home at all. His father went up to the house of the crazy plants, intent on a reckoning. The old man had suddenly decamped. The boy was there, though.
“The stranger’s voice was flat and unemotional as he described how the young
body had been found tangled with a vine. Quite dead, of course. What else could have been expected? After being impaled. Did m’sieur understand? A great shoot of the plant had been thrust up inside the victim. Tendrils of the vine had held him fast while he perished in agonies—that Thing inside him.
“The man could spin a yarn. I slumped back on the kitchen stool as he helped himself to the cleaver. After that I was quick to take evasive action, putting the length of a table between myself and that shining steelware. I fancy I babbled something about not being responsible for my relation’s misdeeds. However, the cleaver was not required for immediate bloodletting. Only for breaking the windows of accursed greenhouses.
“I didn’t try to stop him. After all, glass is replaceable—I am not. A minute or so later I heard a crashing and tinkling like a mad comedy act.
“My next inclination was to brief Uncle on these developments. It says something for the intruder’s narrative powers that, until I opened the cellar door, all my attention had been focussed on the poor devil’s sufferings. Only when I stood at the top of the stairs did I begin to put two and two together. I didn’t like the total. Uncle was down there with Elaine—and the vine. I was soon down there too. Quicker than I had intended, because I missed my footing and bounced half the way. But I didn’t feel the bruises. Scrambling to my feet I crashed open the double door. Thank heavens, the old devil had been so sure of my behaving myself he hadn’t troubled to lock it
“The first thing to hit me was the perfume, now so concentrated it had passed beyond sweetness into a stink. The vine, covered with red blooms, might have been dripping blood. Elaine was spread-eagled over it, tendril binding her body in a Saint Andrew’s cross. Her head drooped. She was unconscious.
“I hurtled over to her and tried to pull her free. Uncle did his feeble best to stop me, but I sent him spinning with a well-aimed if unsporting kick to the groin. He needn’t have bothered because, before I realized what was happening, the vine had got me too and I was struggling with a thick green coil around my middle.
“Uncle and I screamed obscenities at each other. I won that round on points, because in barbed phrases I described what was happening upstairs to the rest of his collection. He howled like a creature possessed and fled, leaving me to wrestle on.
“The plant had an unfair advantage. I had only two arms and two legs, whereas it seemed to produce fresh thongs at will. My resistance grew weaker as it bound me firmly to itself. Was all that an inbuilt natural reaction, or did it have a mind of its own?
“I lost count of time but eventually felt a cool draught on my face and realised that the heavy scent was drifting away. In his hurry Uncle had left both doors open. The grip of one of the tendrils relaxed and I was able to free a hand. Slowly I disengaged myself. I don’t know whether the sudden drop in temperature was affecting the plant, or whether, having done what it was intended to do, it would have died anyway.
“Once I had disentangled myself, I released Elaine. As I lowered her to the cellar floor, her eyelids fluttered. At least she was still alive.
“Filled with hot fury against the monsters that had treated her with this indignity, I fell upon the vine, tearing great bunches of flowers from it. By now it was a defenceless object, visibly wilting, and eventually I realised that I would be better employed in rendering my uncle limb from limb.
“It says something for the incoherence of my reasoning that I left Elaine lying there while I surfaced, calling down damnation on that gibbering little ape.
“I found parts of him in the ruins of the carnivores’ hothouse. The onion seller had fed the rest to various plants. On seeing me, the boy’s father smiled, bowed, and walked away. The police caught up with him on the outskirts of Poole. Indisputably insane, he was never brought to trial.
“None of the plants survived. A chap from the botanical gardens at Kew was quite cut up about that. Not as cut up as Uncle, of course. Fortunately there was enough left of him for identification and a respectable funeral ...”
Silence again, except for the wind and the snow.
“Is that all?” I asked after a while.
“I don’t know,” replied Harry. “You see, when I’d calmed down somewhat, and had Elaine properly sedated and tucked up in bed, something was found.”
“Something?” I prompted after another long silence.
“Where Elaine had been lying. A long, limp, dirty-brown object. Rather like a flabby bean pod, only it had never had beans in it.”
“What was it?”
Harry took a deep breath and was about to answer when he stopped.
In the next room the midwife had started to scream.
LUNA by G.W. Perriwils
G.W. Perriwils is actually two people, being the pseudonym used for collaborations between Huntsville, Alabama writers, Georgette Perry and William J. Wilson.
Born in 1930, Georgette Perry has lived in Alabama all her life. She writes: “In 1971, after eighteen years in a chemistry lab, I dropped out and became a middle-aged hippie. I’ve had poetry in many literary magazines but except for a few confession stories, ‘Luna’ was my first fiction.”
William J. Wilson, whom Perry describes as “the right-brained half of G.W. Perriwils,” was born in 1929 and grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. Since 1960 Wilson has lived in Huntsville, participating actively in NASA’s quest for the moon. A computer scientist by profession, he has written light and serious verse as well as fantasy and science fiction.
G.W. Perriwils’ most recent story, “Bedlam V” in Owlflight, deals with mad life forms sequestered to safe houses scattered through the galaxy. It struck me while reading “Luna” that not too many years ago this story would have been considered science fiction as well as fantasy. Instead, it is fantasy within a contemporary framework, and proof that a high tech society is no barrier to the supernatural.
Edward Kossum did not know he was dreaming. The landscape of his dream was as real as any he’d ever seen. It was deep night. He stood alone in a dense forest. Overhead, branches of oaks, firs, poplars wove a black canopy. Through breaks in the trees he could see remote mountain slopes bathed in the brilliance of a full moon. The chill mountain air stung his nostrils with aromatic forest odors. He breathed deeply, almost gasping, wincing from the painful whiteness of the distant peaks and drawing back into his dark covert as if to quell some undefined fear. Far off, barely pricking the silence, a sound began—the baying of hounds ...
With a start Kossum wrenched free of the dream, his heart pounding. He lay crosswise on the bed as if flung that way, his damp face pressed against the rumpled sheet. Reality came shakily into focus as he remembered the pad and pencil on his bedside table and Dr. Alton’s admonition.
In Dr. Alton’s cool presence Kossum felt somehow disheveled and clumsy, as if he had stumbled in by accident. The psychiatrist, dark-eyed and bearded, was slightly theatrical in appearance, in contrast to his highly restrained manner. Slowly he perused the dream record.
“We have a little more to work on this time,” he said, looking up at Kossum. He spoke in a precise, emotionless voice that admitted of no interpretation. The forest dream is basically the same one you reported last time. This time we have more details.”
“I never used to dream at all,” said Kossum.
“That’s really not true. Everyone dreams. The sleep researchers, Dement and the others, have never yet found a subject who doesn’t dream. Some people just forget very quickly. By the time they’re fully awake, they can’t remember a thing.”
“I—I hate to dream,” said Kossum.
“On the moon flight, do you remember having any dreams?”
“I don’t think so,” Kossum said slowly, envisioning the moon, its bright surface looming in the viewport on their approach. A troubling thought, a wisp of dream or false memory, hovered on the periphery of awareness. He saw the nude figure of a lovely woman, her hair drawn back in classic style. Her face, turning toward him, grew cold with anger. But he wasn’t sure.
“I don’t remember any dreams,” he said.
“What about earlier in your life?”
“Nothing. Even when I first came to you, I thought I was just having trouble sleeping—you know, night sweats, palpitations, all the rest. I didn’t really know what was going on. Now that I do know, I wish I didn’t. If I could just take something to blank the dreams out—”
“I don’t think that would be wise now. You’re getting in touch with a part of yourself that’s been suppressed. We can learn a great deal from it.”
“But it’s the same dream over and over,” Kossum said with irritation. “It’s happened twice more. I quit writing it down because each time it’s the same thing. I’m in the forest at the foot of the mountain, scared as hell. The last time it lasted longer. When I heard the dogs barking I started to run. I ran for miles, and the dogs were gradually gaining. I knew they were after me. The terrain was wild, thickets and gullies and streams, almost impassable. When I realized there was no escape, that’s when I woke up.”
Dr. Alton watched him thoughtfully. “What do the feelings of the dream mean to you?”
“Being helpless, afraid ... nowhere to hide.”
“To be hounded and hunted—that doesn’t fit your image of yourself.” Dr. Alton’s puzzled words hung in the air like a question. After a moment he continued, “You’re human like the rest of us, Kossum, even though everyone knows you as the hero, the perfect man. They remember how you handled the thruster malfunction when you were coming off the moon. I’ve listened to the tapes and read your medical file from NASA. O’Shea was coming apart, but you were cold as ice.”
The Year's Best Horror Stories 10 Page 15