The Laughter of Dark Gods

by David Pringle - (ebook by Undead)

  “Did I not?” said Armand, quizzically. But then, after a moment’s hesitation, he threw the shutters wide again. “You are right,” he said. “I did not—and I surely never will.”

  Armand attempted to put Gaspard Gruiller out of his thoughts for the remainder of that day, and returned with a new will to the study of a book he had found which had much to say about the tenets of the Old Faith. He tried not to dwell on the matter of the garden, but could not help pausing whenever he found a reference to flowers, lest he find some clue regarding the nature of the unknown blooms which he had seen upon the trellis in the hidden garden. But there were far too many flowers mentioned in connection with the worship of the Old Faith, with far too little in the way of description to allow them to be easily identified.

  The next night, and the next, he slept very fitfully. Once or twice he was convinced that he heard the nearby flutter of wings, but nothing tapped at his shutters and nothing scratched the wood. He did not dream—indeed, it seemed that whenever he was about to escape from anxious wakefulness into the comfort of a dream he was snatched back from its brink so that he might continue to toss and turn upon his pallet.

  By day he tried to tell himself that he had done everything he could to fathom the mystery, and must be content to let it alone. Indeed, he came close to convincing himself that he had had enough of Gruiller’s garden, and did not care about it anymore. But this was a mere sham, which could not stand the test of temptation.

  Three days after his expedition onto the roof Armand and Philippe were walking in the street, intent on their conversation, when they suddenly found their way blocked. When they looked up to see who had accosted them, they were most surprised to discover that it was Gruiller.

  “You are Carriere’s son, are you not?” he said, addressing Armand, after directing a brief but polite smile at Philippe. “Vou are my nearest neighbour, I believe. You are interested in my garden.”

  All the colour had drained from Armand’s cheeks, and he was too surprised to reply.

  “I would like to show it to you, now that the proper season has come,” Gruiller continued, amiably. “The birds love to visit it, as you must have observed.”

  Armand still did not seem disposed to reply, so Philippe intervened, saying, rather uncertainly: “You are kind, sir. Armand and I would be pleased to see your flowers.”

  Gruiller responded with a little bow. “The time is not exactly right just yet,” he said. “I think you will see the blooms at their very best in three days’ time. I would like you to see them at their very best.”

  “Shall we come at noon?” asked Philippe.

  “That would be perfect,” replied the other, bowing again and walking on.

  “Well,” said Philippe proudly to his silent friend, “here is something to set your mind at rest for once and for all. We will see his garden, and the mystery will be extinguished. But I do think you might have spoken to him yourself—he seems a pleasant enough fellow, after all.”

  Armand seemed to be about to disagree, but in the end he simply nodded, and said: “Perhaps it is all for the best. We will go together, and see what there is to be seen.”

  At the appointed hour, Philippe and Armand made their way up the path to Gaspard Gruiller’s door. Armand had told his father about the invitation, and had asked again what he knew about his neighbour, but the elder Carriere had simply shrugged his shoulders and said that tradesmen had no right to pry into the affairs of others unless their credit was suspect, and that as far as he knew, Gaspard Gruiller had no significant debts.

  When Armand knocked he was promptly answered, and Gruiller took them through his house to the side door which was the entrance to the garden. The rooms through which they passed were well-furnished, the quality of the rugs and wall-hangings suggesting that Gruiller was not a poor man, but there was no clue to his occupation. They did not linger in the house, passing rapidly into the garden.

  As they came through the garden door such a sight met their eyes that Philippe drew in his breath very sharply, and Armand released a gasp of surprise.

  As they had already discovered, the centre-piece of the garden was a rectangular trellis-work erection, which formed a kind of tunnel, arching over a path which led from the doorway of the house to the open space at the garden’s further end. This tunnel now extended before them, so that they saw it from the inside. It had many open spaces like small windows in the top and the sides, and because the sun was high in the sky the ones set in the roof were admitting distinct shafts of sunlight slanted from the south, which made a pattern on the paving stones beneath the bower, as if to mark out a series of stepping stones.

  There were no green leaves or coloured flowers inside the tunnel. Its walls were matted with dangling tendrils, which were white or pale pink in colour. The great majority of these tendrils lay limp and still, though some trembled even though they were not busy. The minority, however, had a most curious occupation, for they were wrapped tightly around the still corpses of birds, writhing ceaselessly as they played with their prey and passed the shrivelling bodies slowly along the wall.

  While they watched, Philippe and Armand saw a tiny bird come from without to perch upon the rim of one of the windows, peering into the tunnel with evident curiosity, as though wondering whether it had somehow stumbled upon a paradise of edible worms. But then it began fluttering its wings in panic, trying to launch itself back into the air, as it became aware that its tiny feet had been caught and held. Within thirty seconds the tendrils had pulled their victim inside, away from the window, and were dragging it across the inner face of the tunnel.

  Its struggles were short-lived, though Philippe could not tell precisely how it had been killed.

  Gruiller said nothing at first, but simply watched his guests, smiling at their confusion. Eventually, he said: “I know that you have not seen their like before, my friends. There is nothing like this in any other garden in Parravon. But this is not a pretty sight, and I am sure that you would prefer to look at the lovely flowers.”

  He led the two youths to the outside of the bower, where they could see the woody trunks of the climbing plants embedded in the soil, and the pale green leaves which surrounded the huge blossoms. The nearest flowers grew just above head height, and there was little foliage close to the ground because that part of the bower never caught the sun at all. The growth was lush, but the pattern of the trellis-work could clearly be seen from without, whereas it had been masked within by the sheer profusion of the clinging tendrils.

  There were many birds fluttering about the garden. They were all—as Armand had lately observed from the roof of his house—perfectly ordinary. They wandered aimlessly about, as though they too were visitors invited for a leisurely inspection, come to enjoy the beauty of the blooms. They went unmolested as they perched on the outer stems and branches; only when they alighted by the windows, within reach of the pale tentacles, were they seized and pulled inside, without so much as a cry of alarm.

  The flowers, as Armand had reported, were of many different colours, but all of one shape. Each flower was the size of a man’s head, shaped like a bell, with a bright waxen style which rather resembled (Philippe could not help but notice) a male sex organ—but there were no stamens gathered around the styles, unless they were confined to the most secret recesses of the bells.

  “These flowers are very rare,” Gaspard Gruiller assured them. “You will not find their like anywhere in Bretonnia, save perhaps for the deepest parts of the wild forests. Nowhere in the world, I think, are so many gathered in any one place, for these plants are usually solitary. The bower is my own design, and I am proud of it—I knew that unusual steps would have to be taken if these beautiful things were to be persuaded to grow in such profusion as this. Perhaps Parravon is the only place in the world where it could be done—where else could one find so very many silly birds?”

  Neither of his guests knew how to reply, but this time it was Armand and not Philippe who found
his tongue. “They are very beautiful,” he admitted. He reached up to touch one, and ran his finger around the rim of the bell. Then he touched the tip of the style—which Philippe would have been embarrassed to do, given its shape—but took his hand away suddenly, with a slight start of surprise. He looked at the tip of his finger, where there was a tiny droplet of liquid, red as blood.

  “Do not worry,” said Gaspard Gruiller. “When the flowers are at their best, they produce wonderful nectar.” He reached upwards to another blossom, so that his sleeve fell away from his unusually thin arm, and Philippe was surprised to see that his hand was slightly deformed, and that the fingers were like the claws of a bird. Gruiller did as Armand had done, and brought his finger away from the flower-head with a drop of red liquid on its horny tip. He put the finger to his mouth, licking away the drop with the tip of his tongue.

  “It is sweet,” he said. “Please try it. It will do you no harm.”

  Armand hesitated, but then put out his tongue and touched the liquid to it.

  “Oh yes,” he said, with evident surprise. “Very sweet indeed.”

  They both looked at Philippe, inviting him to try the experiment for himself, but he looked away and pretended not to notice.

  While this occurred they had been walking along beside the flowered wall, and now they came to the further end of the bower, to the open space which separated the trellis from the hedge. Here there grew in a ragged circle five remarkable things which looked like giant toadstools, each one with a thick chitinous pedestal and a wide cap coloured black and silver. This colour was so odd that Philippe thought at first they might be carved from stone, but when he came closer he saw that they had the proper texture of fungal flesh.

  He did not want to touch one merely to make sure, but Armand was not so shy, and placed his hand upon the nearest one.

  “It is warm!” he said, in surprise.

  “An ugly thing,” said Gruiller, apologetically. “But not everything rare and precious is beautiful, and these are no more common than my lovely blossoms. They are not so attractive to birds, but they have their own place in the scheme of Nature, as all things have.”

  This little speech reminded Philippe of Armand’s earlier conviction that Gruiller was known to the followers of the Old Faith, and he wondered if the man might be a druid spellcaster, who cultivated these strange things because of some virtue which they had, but it was not the sort of matter which could be raised in polite conversation, and so he held his tongue.

  As Gruiller led them back to the house he said: “I am sure that you will think my garden odd, and so it is. Perhaps you will think it cruel to raise flowers which feed on birds, but they are very beautiful flowers, are they not? And Parravon has no shortage of birds, as you must certainly agree. There is room in the great wide world for many different gardens, and many different kinds of beauty.”

  Afterwards, he watched them as they walked down the path towards the town, but he had gone inside by the time they turned the corner to walk around the foot of the ridge, returning to the house where Armand lived.

  Philippe was eager to discuss what they had seen in Gaspard Gruiller’s garden, but Armand was disinclined to accommodate him. It had surprised Philippe to learn that Armand’s wild surmise about the fate of the birds which visited the garden was actually correct, and it seemed to him an item of gossip worth spreading (for Gruiller had not asked them to keep silent about what they had seen). Armand, on the other hand, seemed only to desire solitude and the company of his books, so Philippe soon left him alone.

  When night fell, Armand closed and locked the shutters of his window as usual, and went to his bed in a state of some exhaustion, having slept so badly of late. This time, however, sleep came very quickly to claim him, and he did not toss and turn at all. He was later to tell Philippe that he believed he had slept dreamlessly for a long while before he was visited by a very dreadful nightmare.

  The nightmare began, as had his peculiar dream of some days earlier, with the sound of something attempting to gain admission at his window—first by rapping as though to demand that he open the shutters, and then by tearing at the edge of the wood with clawed fingers.

  In the end, Armand explained, his dream-self had risen from the bed and gone to the window, unlocking the shutters and throwing them open. There, hanging upside-down from the eaves like a great bat, was a monstrous creature with brightly-coloured feathered wings and a manlike face with thick, rubbery lips. Its body resembled a plucked bird, the skin all puckered and dappled, and its limbs (of which there were four in addition to the wings) were like the limbs of eagles, scaly and taloned.

  This creature snatched at Armand’s dream-self, and lifted him as though he weighed hardly anything at all—but this action was not hostile, and almost seemed protective, for as the daemon launched itself into flight it hugged Armand to its bosom as a mother might clutch a child. Fearful of falling, Armand wrapped his arms about the waist of the peculiar creature, as though accepting and returning its embrace. He reported that as they flew he could feel the beating of the great muscles in the daemon’s breast, where his face was pressed against the wrinkled skin.

  There were, he said, no teats upon that breast at which an infant could suck.

  The flight was but a short one, for it took him only to the further end of the ridge, where Gaspard Gruiller’s house stood, with the facing window wide open and brightly-lit, as though the tower were a lighthouse for the insidious things which haunted Parravon at night.

  Armand was delivered by his carrier into the garden beside the house, and found himself in the space between the end of the bower and the five great toadstools, which did not form a circle—as Armand now perceived them—but a pentacle.

  Inside the pentacle stood a creature like the one which had brought him, but bigger by far, standing almost as tall as that strange high hedge. Its vast wings were feathered like the legendary firebird, glowing from within, all glorious in red and gold. Its capacious arms were stretched aloft, with the claws widespread as though to catch the silver light of the bountiful stars. Its slender legs had flattened feet like those of a fowl, so that it could stand upon the ground instead of searching for a perch, as its smaller companions must.

  The expression on its face, as it looked at Armand, was paradoxical, for the face—so Armand said—was uglier than he could ever have imagined, with horrid bloodshot eyes and a nose like a huge serrated beak, mounted above a mouth crowded with sharpened teeth.

  And yet, said Armand, the gaze of those foul eyes was not predatory but fond; and the black tongue which crawled in serpentine fashion between the cluttered teeth was not licking the outer lips as though in anticipation of a meal, but teasing him with its little motions as a mother might tease her child with friendly grimaces.

  When his dream-self had borne this inspection for a few long minutes, Armand felt himself taken up again, and lifted to the roof of the bower where the brightest and the best flowers grew, and he was tenderly placed among them, in the middle of a crowd of perching daemons.

  He already knew what to do, and bowed his head immediately to a succulent bloom, taking the central style into his mouth as all the others were doing, sucking greedily at the milk which was within, carefully prepared by the wondrous flowers from the tender flesh of captured birds.

  The taste, so Armand said, was sweeter than he ever could have imagined—though his father’s table, at which he had feasted throughout his life, had been as well-supplied with sugary delicacies as that of any tradesman in the city of Parravon.

  When Armand related this dream to Philippe he told him that there had been more, and that his wild adventure must have continued for several hours, but that the rest of it evaded his waking memory, and could not be recalled.

  Philippe was more impressed by this dream than he had been by the first which Armand had related. He was almost ready to believe that there was something truly awful about the garden which they had seen, and that Gaspard Gr
uiller might actually have signed some dire pact with the daemons of Parravon. And yet, he told himself as he listened to Armand’s feverish recital, a dream is only a dream, and the shutters at the window had never in fact been opened—nor were there any additional scratches to be seen upon their outer face.

  With these doubts in mind, Philippe told Armand that his nightmare, however frightening it may have been, could not be taken seriously as a revelation.

  Perhaps, he suggested, the dream had been a kind of release, by which all the anxiety Armand had been storing up had at last been discharged.

  Armand dismissed this explanation out of hand.

  “There is more,” he said, excitedly, “for when I woke this morning, and went to my book I discovered at last the passage for which I have been searching—the passage which helps to explain what manner of things these monstrous flowers are, and what dreadful harm they can do.”

  So saying, Armand placed the open book before his friend. But Philippe could not read, and Armand was forced to say aloud what was written there.

  “The followers of the Old Faith,” he quoted, “believe that every living element of the natural world is properly destined for the nourishment of others.

  “As the flower feeds the bee which will make honey for the bear, so the leaf feeds the worm which will later take flight as a brightly coloured thing, which will feed the bird which feeds the hawk, which will fall in time to earth, as the bear falls also, to feed the tiny things which crowd the fertile soil, where the roots draw nourishment to feed the flower and the leaf.

  “So it is that everything which lives is born from the soil and the sea and the air, and must return in time to soil and sea and air, so that all may be renewed, forever and ever without pause or end.

  “But the followers of the Old Faith say also that there is an evil in the world, which seeks to pervert the weave of destiny. There is an evil which alters the flower or the leaf to become the nourishment of daemons, so to spread the seed of Chaos within the world.