“What do you expect me to do, exactly,” I asked, “except stick them in bloody soil and hope? There are only seven—that’s not nearly enough for any kind of disciplined experimentation with different environmental regimes. Hell, if I slice one up with a microtome to examine its cellular structure under a microscope I’ll already be fourteen per cent down...although I’ll need to do that if I’m to attempt any kind of tissue-culture.”
“Do what you have to,” he said. “You don’t have to grow all seven to maturity. One will do, though more would be better. Nobody expects miracles.”
He meant that they didn’t expect miracles, but they were unnamable, even as “they.” For the time being, they were “nobody.”
I was going to have to know, though. I couldn’t just do it and not understand. I was an officer—I’d even caught up in rank with Oates. I was a botanist too. For those reasons and others, I had to understand...to the extent that understanding might be possible. Unnamable was one thing, unthinkable was something else entirely.
“Do you remember those blacks in the north, back in ’08,” I said, “who told us tales of jungles where there were vampire flowers that drank the blood of humans? Not that they’d ever seen a jungle, mind—we’d seen more jungle than they had—but they had their fingers on the pulse of local folklore. Are these the seeds of those vampire flowers, do you think?”
“No,” he said, bluntly. “They’re from much further away. I don’t know what they’ll produce, but I don’t think you have to worry about roses with narcotic scent and bloodthirsty petals, or carnivorous trees whose branches are clawed arms or snakes with avid fangs. Tentacles, maybe...probably...anyway, I don’t think that’s the kind of danger they’ll pose, if you really can grow them to maturity.”
“But they do pose some kind of danger?” I queried.
“Of course,” he said, colorlessly.
“I have a wife and child. Not to mention three lab assistants, four ground staff and eight domestic servants—a whole bloody colony, in effect. How much danger?”
“I don’t know,” he said. If he’d said that he wished that he did I wouldn’t have believed him. Instead, he added: “I’m sorry, Linny.” I wasn’t entirely sure that I believed that, either.
“What if I say no?” I asked.
“You’ll miss out on an unprecedented experiment,” he told me, coldly. “You’ll miss out on a mystery. You’ll miss out on the danger. If you’d found one of those vampire plants of legend in Africa, I know full well that you’d have gone to any lengths to get their seeds back to a controlled environment, where you could grow and nurture them, study and marvel at them....even feed them, if you had to. These are real, and any kind of blood will probably do. They’re from...I’m not entirely sure that another world is the right expression, but somewhere or somewhen exceedingly strange. Can you say no?”
His face had deteriorated again briefly, but the armchair—and everything that went with it—seemed to be doing him good. He was adapting to his environment, soaking up its warmth, its atmosphere, its homeliness. He was collecting himself, becoming more Oatesy than...but I didn’t have a name to put to that, either. He now seemed more alive than dead, at any rate.
Oates, I remembered, with a conscious effort, was a hero: a man who had at least tried to lose his life in a Quixotic gesture, after trying and failing to go where no man had gone before. He had walked into a whiteout, and fallen...where? Or, given his last hint, when? In time, presumably, he would tell me—provided that I agreed to nurse his seeds.
Could I say no? Yes. Would I? Not in this lifetime, or in a million years.
After all, he’d come back from the dead to give me the opportunity, even if he hadn’t quite made it all the way back, as yet. I owed it to him to do what I could. He was my friend, my oldest friend. There had been too many friends—brothers, even—for whom I hadn’t been able to do anything at all. If any one of them had come back, dead or otherwise, to ask me for a favor, however absurd or dangerous, I’d have been glad to do it. At least, I’d have been glad if I’d still been capable of gladness. I’d have been determined to do it. Desperate, even.
I squinted at him, trying to make out his features—or, at least, trying to figure out why I still couldn’t quite do it, even though I knew it was him. “What if I fail?” I said. “This price....”
“Don’t worry about it, Linny,” he said. “Just try. That’s all any of us can do.”
He’d finished his brandy. I was taking my pick, judiciously, from the thousand obvious questions that temptation was offering me, when the door to the study opened and the brat came in.
She hadn’t realized that I—we—had a visitor. She didn’t know that she was interrupting. So she had burst in, taking it for granted that I’d be as pleased to see her as I could be, even if I were busy.
Whatever it was she’d intended to say died on her lips. She came to an abrupt halt, and stared. Children do that. The poor mite wasn’t old enough to understand “conduct unbecoming.” She was too busy just becoming. Oates looked better, but he still looked bad—not quite as dead, but still possessed of a face that even a mother would have had difficulty loving.
It seemed best to act as if everything were normal. What alternative was there?
“This is my daughter Mary,” I told Oates. “We call her Mercy. She’s seven. Mercy, this is an old friend of mine from the army, Captain Oates.”
“Were you hurt in the war?” Mercy asked the dead man, mildly.
I realized that the mildness wasn’t feigned. She honestly and truly wasn’t frightened, or even shocked—much less so than I had been, at any rate.
In the latter days of the war Helen, under the compulsion to do her bit, had allowed the east wing of the house to be turned into a military sanitarium for men who’d been badly hit in more ways than one. Mercy had seen too much for a child her age, and had earned her nickname. She had seen men who had been burned and men who had been blasted. She had played ball with some of the on the lawn. She had no real notion of the possible range of human injury; she just knew that it was possible to be horribly disfigured. She simply didn’t know that what had become of Oates’ face was any more improbable than what had become of others she’d seen.
“I was shot in the leg in Africa,” Oates told her, deliberately misunderstanding the question. “One of my legs is shorter than the other now.”
It was irrelevant. He was sitting down; she hadn’t seen him limping. The answer sufficed, though. Mercy was used to not getting straight answers. She nodded, sympathetically. It was okay. Oates’ being here was okay—with Mercy, at least
Helen came in then, chasing Mercy but way behind, as usual.
“Sorry, Tom,” she said, automatically. Then she stopped.
For a moment, she almost stared, because she did know the difference between a war wound and what was afflicting Titus, but she was made of exceedingly stern stuff now. She wasn’t the same wife that she had been before. She was familiar with the horrible, the inexpressible and the paradoxical. She was horrified, but she just looked at me for guidance, and she looked at Mercy protectively. She knew, then, how she had to conduct herself.
Oates had stood up, hoisted by an ancient reflex, an instinctive politeness that had survived even the Mountains of Madness. He bowed politely, a trifle lop-sidedly.
“I’m sorry,” Helen said. “I don’t know we had a visitor. I’d better tell Hollis that there’ll be an extra setting for dinner.” Her voice implied that it wasn’t the only thing she’d have to warn him about. If she was hoping that I, or Oates, was going to tell her that he wouldn’t be staying for dinner, she gave not the slightest sign of it.
“Better tell him to have a bed made up in one of the spare rooms, too,” I said. “Helen, this is Captain Oates; Oates, my wife Helen. You’ve heard me mention Oates, Helen—I knew him at school, and in Africa, in the dragoons.”
She knew perfectly well who “Captain Oates” was, and knew perfectly well t
hat he was supposed to be dead, but she’d done her bit, looking after the walking wounded, the walking dead, and wounded men who’d never walk again, or ever have faces to show. She knew she wasn’t looking at a ghost. In fact, Oates looked better now than he had done just before the door opened. Mercy and Helen were part of the environment too, and by far and away the best part. Their mere appearance was helping him to get a grip.
He tried to smile, and almost succeeded.
“I’m delighted to meet you, Captain Oates,” Helen lied. “I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Poor Oates had never heard a word about her, so he couldn’t reply in kind. He bowed again. “I hope that it’s no trouble,” he said, “but I had to ask a favor of your husband.”
“No trouble at all,” she said, recklessly lying again, seemingly blithely unaware that the Day of Judgment must be close at hand, since the Resurrection had begun. “I hope we can help you.”
Silently, I thanked for that we. She was a hero.
“We’ve had other men here with spoiled faces,” Mercy put in, helpfully. “We do our best. I played ball. An American taught me baseball.”
“You’re very kind,” Oates told her.
* * * *
Helen wasn’t quite so understanding, of course, once Oates had gone to bed. He’d retired early, because he was very tired, but not before Helen had spotted that he was in great pain and had demanded to see his feet and the wound in his thigh. He would have had to change the dressings himself if nobody else had helped, and she now prided herself on being a trained nurse who had “seen everything.”
Not everything, as it turned out. Not even almost everything.
“How long have they been like this?” she had asked, helplessly.
“Seven years,” he had told her. That was incredible, of course, but Helen took it in her stride. She gritted her teeth and changed the dressings, but the expression on her face when she looked at me was far too readable for comfort. Perhaps mercifully, comfort and I had been strangers for quite a while. My frostbite was metaphorical, and didn’t look any where near as disgusting as Oates’, but I had my twinges when people said the wrong thing, or even looked at me in certain ways.
Afterwards, Helen came to the study, where I was examining the seeds with a magnifying-glass. “Captain Oates?” she said, incredulously. “The Captain Oates?”
“One and the same,” I confirmed. “Insofar as any of us is the same, any more.”
“He didn’t die in the Antarctic?”
“If he did,” I said, content to state the obvious, “he’s come back.”
“Why?” That was my Helen. Always cut to the heart of the matter.
It was my turn deliberately to misunderstand. “He wants me to grow some seeds for him.”
She wasn’t content with the evasion. She wasn’t an officer, and didn’t really need to understand, but she was a hero, and couldn’t be content not to, except when no understanding was possible. At the very least, I had to convince her of that.
“Apparently,” I went on, “he told someone that I might be able to do it—talked me up a bit, I suspect. It was the only way he could get back here for any length of time. I don’t think he really believes that I can do it, but suggesting that I might be able to do it was the only way he could get a furlough from...wherever. Or whenever. I don’t really understand, and it hurts him when I ask, but given time...if he can explain it to me, I’ll explain it to you.”
“It’s impossible,” she told me, flatly.
“I know.” I tried to remember the last time I had been amazed by the impossible, when it happened in front of me, but I couldn’t. Africa had desensitized me even before I’d been recommissioned. Now I’d brought it home...but there was a sense in I which I’d already brought everything home, because I hadn’t been able to leave it behind.
Helen gave up on the Inquisition. She knew how to be patient. During the war, she’d been very nearly the only person left on the estate, except for the vicar, who could read fluently. Even before the sanitarium, she’d had to make rounds, to read letters and telegrams to women who didn’t understand, didn’t want to understand, and prayed every night for the impossible. They hadn’t wanted the vicar, they’d wanted her, because they knew she was a mother, like them, and thought she was an angel, unlike them. She’d had to pretend to be an angel; it was a mere matter of adaptation to her environment.
“Is he going to be here long?” she asked, angelically.
“I hope so.”
That was too much, even for an angel “You hope so? Why?”
“Because I’m pretty sure that it’s a lot better that where he’s been,” I explained. “He needs rest, recuperation. He needs that bleeding wound in his thigh to scar over again, and those ruined toes to heal, if that’s possible. He needs to warm up as much as he can. Did you notice how cold he is?”
“Those toes aren’t going to heal, Tom. I don’t know why they aren’t gangrenous, but they’re certainly necrotic. Whatever state the rest of him is in, those toes are dead. I can’t do anything for his toes, except perhaps call in a surgeon to amputate them.”
Her heroism was showing again. She was focusing on the toes in order not to have to cope with the rest, although she’d done a good job with that, even to the extent of drilling the servants. She thought that she couldn’t do anything for Oates’ toes—but the way she’d phrased that judgment implied that there might be things she thought that she could help him with. Whatever he had was likely far worse than shell-shock, but his mind obviously wasn’t dead. There was something in him that could still be nursed, and might benefit from nursing. Except that it might be dangerous....
“Leave him to me,” I told her, trying not to make it sound like an order, because I knew she’d resent it if she thought it was. “We’ll be in the greenhouse most of the time, or the lab, or here. I’m going to put a padlock on the tropical house, by the way. Controlled environment—can’t have people coming and going willy-nilly.”
“Just you and the girls,” she observed, tonelessly.
Helen didn’t really think that I was having an affair with one of the assistants helping me in my work. She knew that the only reason they were female was that the drastic shortage of men in that kind of employment. Before the war, the notion of female ground staff would have seemed utterly alien, but now...not that my horticultural assistants were ground staff, strictly speaking. Anyway, Helen had no anxieties of that sort, for all that we now had separate bedrooms, whereas before the war....
“Just me and Oates,” I told her. “The girls will have to look after the cereals and potatoes for a while. The tropical house will be off limits to them too. The trees don’t need much in the way of care, and it’ll only take me a day or two to train Oates to help with the routine data-collection. That way, I’ll be able to concentrate on the new task.”
I picked up one of the “seeds” and held it up, hoping that its relatively innocuous appearance, combined with my casual manner, would help to reassure Helen that everything was fundamentally okay, and that the “task” was something I could take in my stride.
She wasn’t convinced. She took the object off me, and frowned at its coldness. She turned it over and over, sniffed it, sat held it up close to get a good look at it. She knew enough botany to see that it wasn’t really a seed, in the strict sense of the word, or even a spore, but she couldn’t put a name to it either.
She handed it back. “What are you going to do with them?” she asked. “Grow a magic beanstalk and go giant-hunting?”
Jack had actually been golden goose hunting; the giant had simply been in the way—but I didn’t bother to correct her. They weren’t beans, and I hadn’t even had to sell the family cow to get them, so the analogy was a non-starter anyway.
“I’ll slice one of them up,” I said. “I’ll use the microscope to examine the cellular structure—if it has a cellular structure—and I’ll try to start some tissue-cultures. I’ll try to develop a couple
of them in the hydroponic tank, and the rest in pots, using slightly different regimes. Hopefully, I’ll be able to pick up some clues along the way that will help me optimize the conditions. I’m not convinced that any of them will actually develop, and if any of them do, it’s highly likely that some won’t. I’ll keep you up to date.”
“If not a beanstalk,” she said, stubbornly, “what?”
“I have no idea, yet” I said, a trifle impatiently. “The external structure suggests that it isn’t just a bag of storage-protein, but I can’t tell for sure until I cut it open to see whether there’s a minuscule embryo tucked inside, waiting to begin consuming the bulk. Appearances suggest that it’s more like a pupa than a bean—but appearances can be deceptive when you’re dealing with something new. Whatever it is, I suspect that our ready-made categories of plant and animal might not be entirely appropriate to it.
Helen didn’t want to give up just yet. “Where did he get them?” she demanded.
“I don’t know,” I replied, honestly.
“How did he get them here with his feet in that condition?”
“I don’t know. I asked—but there are some questions he can’t answer. Not yet, at least.”
She changed tack. “Can you get them to grow?”
I didn’t know that, either, but repetition is so tedious. “I’m sure as hell going to try,” I assured her.
This time, she didn’t ask why. She thought she knew why. She thought that growing things had become my last redoubt, my final defense, the only activity in which could really absorb myself, to find a measure of peace and solace. She would have preferred it if my last redoubt had been the house—no, more narrowly than that, the household: the family—but she knew that I couldn’t help it. She didn’t doubt that I loved her, and Mercy, any more than she doubted that she and Mercy loved me, but she knew that escape from the present circumstances required more than that. She forgave me for my needs, as I forgave her for hers, and we both hoped that things would get better, with Mercy’s help. From her viewpoint, Oates was a complication she could do without—but she suspected, as I did, that from my point of view, he might be something of a godsend, and that even if he’d been sent by the Devil instead, he might have something I needed: the seeds of hope.
The Legacy of Erich Zann and Other Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos Page 17