“Fine,” she says. The word leaves her throat reluctantly; she has not spoken aloud since she cloistered herself in this room two days ago. “My work is pedestrian. Derivative. Uninspired. But that only means you’ve been neglecting your duty, doesn’t it?”
(Her defiance would serve her well, if only it were coupled with talent.)
The Muse is perfectly capable of responding in English, but she will not sully her tongue by doing so. She answers the brazen charges with a single, insultingly simple image, which elbows its way effortlessly into the woman’s thoughts: a great, Niagara-like torrent, and a child’s outstretched hand bearing an empty cup hardly bigger than a thimble. The cup has only to touch the water and it is ripped from the tiny fingers and lost forever. The message is clear: My inspiration is for those with strength enough to endure it and talent enough to contain it.
This frank assessment has reached the woman in a way that past criticisms have not done; it takes over her entire consciousness, leaving no room for dissenting thoughts. When it finally passes, her confidence and certainty do not return. She sags against the desk, eyes cast downward. Her only comfort is that the Muse is done with her, that she is alone again; but when she looks up once more, she is denied even this consolation.
The Muse has not departed; her singular expression – divine consternation is quite a thing to behold – suggests that she cannot depart. She is evidently confined to the circle of bare floor where she has been standing; in attempting to cross this boundary, she resembles almost precisely a mime trapped in an invisible box. The discarded papers forming the circumference of her prison apparently function in the manner of Faust’s infamous pentagram, binding her within – or so it seems to the woman. She will never actually know, but she is certain of one thing: the comical tableau before her has dissipated whatever remaining awe she may have felt at keeping company with goddesses.
The tide thus turned, the woman addresses her captive. “Inspire me, and I’ll break the circle.” Once again she sees the raging waters in her mind, but the image has lost its potency. “I’ll take my chances. Inspire me.”
The Muse makes no further response; she is immortal, and patience will avail.
Emboldened by the shift in circumstances, and the realization that immortality does not imply invulnerability, the woman considers how she might take that which the Muse will not give.
She tests the circle with an outstretched foot, careful not to disturb the papers which make up its edge, and discovers that she can enter and leave the Muse’s prison unimpeded. As the woman advances, the goddess retreats – not in fear, but in distaste at a mortal daring such proximity – until her back rests against the invisible barrier. When the woman reaches out and grasps her by the arm, she does not resist – a vulgar scuffle does not become her – but remains defiantly passive. For the woman’s part, she is unsure how to proceed now that the Muse is in her clutches.
Simple perseverance assures the Muse’s eventual escape. Papers decay; buildings fall. The circle will be broken, and the Muse has, quite literally, all the time in the world. Therein lies the woman’s conundrum: she cannot hope to outplay her captive in the waiting game. She must act, immediately and decisively. But how to draw forth that which she desires, that intangible treasure bound up in the Muse’s very essence?
The phasing of the question itself precipitates a possible solution, and the woman leaves her home for the first time in days.
When she returns, she half-expects the room to be empty, but the Muse is still there. What, she wonders, does a Muse think about, left to herself?
She attacks in one quick motion, stepping into the circle, seizing the Muse’s arm once more (noting in passing how coarse her palm feels against that smooth, cool skin), searching for a vein.
There is no reason the Muse’s anatomy should mirror that of human beings, and no reason it should not. In any case, the vein is there; the woman draws a syringe (unwrapped outside for purposes of stealth) from her coat pocket, pierces the vein, draws the plunger outward. The blood comes: a bright, clear red. The Muse will not dignify this imposition by reacting to it.
The woman places a single drop of the blood on her fingertip and rubs it with her thumb; rather than smearing, it remains whole, like a bead of mercury. Its fragrance is floral, not metallic; it is sweet to the taste. But when she inserts the needle into her own arm and pushes the plunger home, it is as if she has pressed a hot iron to the spot.
She is sure she has poisoned herself, but the piercing heat in her limb quickly diffuses throughout her body, diluted to a pleasant, tingling warmth. She is considering repeating the procedure when suddenly the efficacy of a single dose demonstrates its sufficiency.
It is as though a great mass has collided with her mind and jarred it free of some impediment: her consciousness, in the space of an instant, expands to near-infinite breadth and depth. Her vocabulary – now increased a hundredfold – is no longer a set of child’s blocks, to be clumsily rearranged without thought; words suddenly have color, pitch, texture, and scent, and their proper, organic relationships have become obvious to her. Stray tatters of thought, once consigned to oblivion, now join together into vital, original concepts. Insight piles upon insight, with geometrically-increasing complexity. It is a state of pure inspiration.
It is not the overwhelming surge she was expecting, but a gentle, insistent pressure within her, whose relief will come only through expression. She must write.
She makes a mad dash for her desk but is immediately brought up short. At first, she thinks the Muse is somehow hindering her, but a frantic probing reveals that the circle is barring her progress.
Courtesy of her newly-acquired powers of discernment, understanding comes at once. In taking the Muse’s substance into herself, she has altered her own essence irrevocably. She and the goddess are now of like natures, and whatever force has imprisoned the one, now imprisons both.
When the barrier fails to yield to her fists, she rams it halfheartedly with her shoulder instead, but as the pointlessness of the exercise makes itself evident, she sinks wearily to the floor. A single, desperate hope – that she may have acquired the Muse’s immortality along with her blood – flickers into existence and is abruptly extinguished; the ache in her hands and shoulder, and the hunger pangs that until now she has ignored, are all too human.
With trepidation she gazes up at the Muse’s countenance, hoping to see an expression of commiseration, or at least pity; but there is only a devastatingly spiteful smile.
It is a small, but real, mercy that thirst takes the woman before she is driven mad by the continuous onslaught of ideas that she can never purge. Her landlord discovers her body. An unimaginative sort, he cannot see the other personage standing nearby; his experience of the Muse is limited to an uncanny, elusive sensation worrying at the outer edges of his awareness. The feeling persists until he disturbs the circle, whereupon it vanishes as though it had never been, and is soon forgotten.
The Flowering of the Strange Orchid
H.G. Wells
The buying of orchids always has in it a certain speculative flavour. You have before you the brown shrivelled lump of tissue, and for the rest you must trust your judgment, or the auctioneer, or your good luck, as your taste may incline. The plant may be moribund or dead, or it may be just a respectable purchase, fair value for your money, or perhaps – for the thing has happened again and again – there slowly unfolds before the delighted eyes of the happy purchaser, day after day, some new variety, some novel richness, a strange twist of the labellum, or some subtler colouration or unexpected mimicry. Pride, beauty, and profit blossom together on one delicate green spike, and, it may be, even immortality. For the new miracle of nature may stand in need of a new specific name, and what so convenient as that of its discoverer? ‘John-smithia’! There have been worse names.
It was perhaps the hope of some such happy discovery
that made Winter Wedderburn such a frequent attendant at these sales – that hope, and also, maybe, the fact that he had nothing else of the slightest interest to do in the world. He was a shy, lonely, rather ineffectual man, provided with just enough income to keep off the spur of necessity, and not enough nervous energy to make him seek any exacting employments. He might have collected stamps or coins, or translated Horace, or bound books, or invented new species of diatoms. But, as it happened, he grew orchids, and had one ambitious little hothouse.
“I have a fancy,” he said over his coffee, “that something is going to happen to me today.” He spoke – as he moved and thought – slowly.
“Oh, don’t say that!” said his housekeeper – who was also his remote cousin. For ‘something happening’ was a euphemism that meant only one thing to her.
“You misunderstand me. I mean nothing unpleasant…though what I do mean I scarcely know.
“Today,” he continued, after a pause, “Peters’ are going to sell a batch of plants from the Andamans and the Indies. I shall go up and see what they have. It may be I shall buy something good unawares. That may be it.”
He passed his cup for his second cupful of coffee.
“Are these the things collected by that poor young fellow you told me of the other day?” asked his cousin, as she filled his cup.
“Yes,” he said, and became meditative over a piece of toast.
“Nothing ever does happen to me,” he remarked presently, beginning to think aloud. “I wonder why? Things enough happen to other people. There is Harvey. Only the other week; on Monday he picked up sixpence, on Wednesday his chicks all had the staggers, on Friday his cousin came home from Australia, and on Saturday he broke his ankle. What a whirl of excitement! – compared to me.”
“I think I would rather be without so much excitement,” said his housekeeper. “It can’t be good for you.”
“I suppose it’s troublesome. Still…you see, nothing ever happens to me. When I was a little boy I never had accidents. I never fell in love as I grew up. Never married…I wonder how it feels to have something happen to you, something really remarkable.
“That orchid-collector was only thirty-six – twenty years younger than myself – when he died. And he had been married twice and divorced once; he had had malarial fever four times, and once he broke his thigh. He killed a Malay once, and once he was wounded by a poisoned dart. And in the end he was killed by jungle-leeches. It must have all been very troublesome, but then it must have been very interesting, you know – except, perhaps, the leeches.”
“I am sure it was not good for him,” said the lady with conviction.
“Perhaps not.” And then Wedderburn looked at his watch. “Twenty-three minutes past eight. I am going up by the quarter to twelve train, so that there is plenty of time. I think I shall wear my alpaca jacket – it is quite warm enough – and my grey felt hat and brown shoes. I suppose –”
He glanced out of the window at the serene sky and sunlit garden, and then nervously at his cousin’s face.
“I think you had better take an umbrella if you are going to London,” she said in a voice that admitted of no denial. “There’s all between here and the station coming back.”
When he returned he was in a state of mild excitement. He had made a purchase. It was rare that he could make up his mind quickly enough to buy, but this time he had done so.
“There are Vandas,” he said, “and a Dendrobe and some Palaeonophis.” He surveyed his purchases lovingly as he consumed his soup. They were laid out on the spotless tablecloth before him, and he was telling his cousin all about them as he slowly meandered through his dinner. It was his custom to live all his visits to London over again in the evening for her and his own entertainment.
“I knew something would happen today. And I have bought all these. Some of them – some of them – I feel sure, do you know, that some of them will be remarkable. I don’t know how it is, but I feel just as sure as if some one had told me that some of these will turn out remarkable.
“That one” – he pointed to a shrivelled rhizome – “was not identified. It may be a Palaeonophis – or it may not. It may be a new species, or even a new genus. And it was the last that poor Batten ever collected.”
“I don’t like the look of it,” said his housekeeper. “It’s such an ugly shape.”
“To me it scarcely seems to have a shape.”
“I don’t like those things that stick out,” said his housekeeper.
“It shall be put away in a pot tomorrow.”
“It looks,” said the housekeeper, “like a spider shamming dead.”
Wedderburn smiled and surveyed the root with his head on one side. “It is certainly not a pretty lump of stuff. But you can never judge of these things from their dry appearance. It may turn out to be a very beautiful orchid indeed. How busy I shall be tomorrow! I must see tonight just exactly what to do with these things, and tomorrow I shall set to work.”
“They found poor Batten lying dead, or dying, in a mangrove swamp – I forget which,” he began again presently, “with one of these very orchids crushed up under his body. He had been unwell for some days with some kind of native fever, and I suppose he fainted. These mangrove swamps are very unwholesome. Every drop of blood, they say, was taken out of him by the jungle-leeches. It may be that very plant that cost him his life to obtain.”
“I think none the better of it for that.”
“Men must work though women may weep,” said Wedderburn with profound gravity.
“Fancy dying away from every comfort in a nasty swamp! Fancy being ill of fever with nothing to take but chlorodyne and quinine – if men were left to themselves they would live on chlorodyne and quinine – and no one round you but horrible natives! They say the Andaman islanders are most disgusting wretches – and, anyhow, they can scarcely make good nurses, not having the necessary training. And just for people in England to have orchids!”
“I don’t suppose it was comfortable, but some men seem to enjoy that kind of thing,” said Wedderburn. “Anyhow, the natives of his party were sufficiently civilised to take care of all his collection until his colleague, who was an ornithologist, came back again from the interior; though they could not tell the species of the orchid, and had let it wither. And it makes these things more interesting.”
“It makes them disgusting. I should be afraid of some of the malaria clinging to them. And just think, there has been a dead body lying across that ugly thing! I never thought of that before. There! I declare I cannot eat another mouthful of dinner.”
“I will take them off the table if you like, and put them in the window-seat. I can see them just as well there.”
The next few days he was indeed singularly busy in his steamy little hothouse, fussing about with charcoal, lumps of teak, moss, and all the other mysteries of the orchid cultivator. He considered he was having a wonderfully eventful time. In the evening he would talk about these new orchids to his friends, and over and over again he reverted to his expectation of something strange.
Several of the Vandas and the Dendrobium died under his care, but presently the strange orchid began to show signs of life. He was delighted, and took his housekeeper right away from jam-making to see it at once, directly he made the discovery.
“That is a bud,” he said, “and presently there will be a lot of leaves there, and those little things coming out here are aerial rootlets.”
“They look to me like little white fingers poking out of the brown,” said his housekeeper. “I don’t like them.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. They look like fingers trying to get at you. I can’t help my likes and dislikes.”
“I don’t know for certain, but I don’t think there are any orchids I know that have aerial rootlets quite like that. It may be my fancy, of course. You see they are a little f
lattened at the ends.”
“I don’t like ’em,” said his housekeeper, suddenly shivering and turning away. “I know it’s very silly of me – and I’m very sorry, particularly as you like the thing so much. But I can’t help thinking of that corpse.”
“But it may not be that particular plant. That was merely a guess of mine.”
His housekeeper shrugged her shoulders. “Anyhow I don’t like it,” she said.
Wedderburn felt a little hurt at her dislike to the plant. But that did not prevent his talking to her about orchids generally, and this orchid in particular, whenever he felt inclined.
“There are such queer things about orchids,” he said one day; “such possibilities of surprises. You know, Darwin studied their fertilisation, and showed that the whole structure of an ordinary orchid flower was contrived in order that moths might carry the pollen from plant to plant. Well, it seems that there are lots of orchids known the flower of which cannot possibly be used for fertilisation in that way. Some of the Cypripediums, for instance; there are no insects known that can possibly fertilise them, and some of them have never been found with seed.”
“But how do they form new plants?”
“By runners and tubers, and that kind of outgrowth. That is easily explained. The puzzle is, what are the flowers for?
“Very likely,” he added, “my orchid may be something extraordinary in that way. If so I shall study it. I have often thought of making researches as Darwin did. But hitherto I have not found the time, or something else has happened to prevent it. The leaves are beginning to unfold now. I do wish you would come and see them!”
But she said that the orchid-house was so hot it gave her the headache. She had seen the plant once again, and the aerial rootlets, which were now some of them more than a foot long, had unfortunately reminded her of tentacles reaching out after something; and they got into her dreams, growing after her with incredible rapidity. So that she had settled to her entire satisfaction that she would not see that plant again, and Wedderburn had to admire its leaves alone. They were of the ordinary broad form, and a deep glossy green, with splashes and dots of deep red towards the base He knew of no other leaves quite like them. The plant was placed on a low bench near the thermometer, and close by was a simple arrangement by which a tap dripped on the hot-water pipes and kept the air steamy. And he spent his afternoons now with some regularity meditating on the approaching flowering of this strange plant.
Supernatural Horror Short Stories Page 78