Weirdbook #43. Darrell Schweitzer
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which visibly writhed in the air. It may have been his imagination, but perhaps the thing even made a faint sound, like a teapot whistling in another room.
“Then you appreciate what this is,” said Freddy.
“Yes, I do.”
“It’s not totally without precedent, you know. There is a certain amount of literature on the subject.”
“But—Wells, Collier, Clarke—I thought that was all fiction.”
“Not entirely, old boy. Not entirely.”
“Where did you get it?”
All Freddy would say to this was, “We collectors of such things have connections. It’s an old system.” No more than that. There are some things the English will not reveal to foreigners, even if they happen to be close friends. It is the famous English reserve, you know.
As Freddy pulled on some quite ordinary gardening gloves and picked the thing up, fondly, gently, as if he were holding an infant—almost as if it were his own child, a thought my dad found decidedly disquieting—its tendrils reached up toward his face, but he pulled back before it could touch him.
My dad found it increasingly repulsive.
“It looks like it’s from outer space,” he said.
“It quite well could be,” said Freddy, and without further ado, he planted it, and then watered it with a watering can.
Some while later dinner was served in the great hall. One did dress for dinner. Freddy’s valet had laid out appropriate attire for my dad. They sat beneath rows of stuffed animal heads, many of which Freddy himself had shot; some of the others dated back to the late Middle Ages. There were suits of armor in the corners, shields and pole arms alternating with portraits of ancestors along the walls, and if a couple ghosts had tittered softly up in the dark above the heavy beams overhead, it would only have been appropriate. This was the kind of place where if there isn’t a ghost or two, you have the right to ask why not. Sitting there, my father realized, he could well have slipped back in time. This could have been 1900, or 1800, or even 1600, and if gentlemen in Tudor costumes accompanied by Queen Elizabeth the First had come thundering into the room, Dad might have been at a loss for the proper etiquette, but not wholly surprised.
The dinner was of course superb, and the evening very pleasant. They were the closest of friends. They reminisced for a while about their previous adventures. Lord Cheebleford—Freddy—inquired tactfully about my dad’s future plans, and when he said he expected to return to America soon and get married, Freddy congratulated him heartily. As for his own plans, Freddy expected to live here at Cheebleford Hall, as the place was called, cultivate plants and tenants (for in this part of England, the old sense of noblesse oblige was not a thing of the past) and take his father’s place in the House of Lords.
It seemed, my father began to suggest, that their adventuring days were over.
But Freddy’s attention was suddenly elsewhere. He was listening to something his guest couldn’t hear.
After dinner, they carried their drinks into the Conservatory. Freddy was all too eager to see how his prize plant was doing. My dad thought this a bit obsessive. How much could a plant have grown in just a few hours?
About five feet. When they got there, it had shot up several greenish yellow stalks in all directions, of a rather ghastly, unpleasant color somehow, but Freddy looked on the thing as if it were his darling and his treasure. He was even more interested in the bulbous area in the center, which had swelled into a mass like an artichoke waiting to open, only about three feet high.
Pale, greenish-white tendrils floated on the air, extending out from the artichoke.
My dad should have run screaming into the night at that point, and I am sure no one would have blamed him if he had, but he was no coward, Freddy was his close friend, and in any case Freddy didn’t seem the slightest bit alarmed.
Maybe it was just nerves. Delayed combat fatigue or something.
In fact, Freddy had become obsessed. In earlier times—1600 or so—they might have said he was bewitched.
By a plant.
In the days that followed, Freddy and my father went through the usual round of activities. They toured the countryside, visiting everything from Neolithic sites and Roman ruins to Norman churches, since my father was interested in that sort of thing. They called on the neighbors, who lived the castle across the valley, and even participated in a traditional fox hunt, for all my dad didn’t ride a horse very well and struggled to keep up. (“But I thought all you Americans were cowboys,” someone said. He reminded them that he was from Philadelphia. There are no cowboys in Philadelphia.)
But whenever he could, Freddy spent his time in the Conservatory, seated in front of the plant on a folding chair. Soon its bulbous center was over six feet tall. The tendrils could reach almost to the edge of the room. And there was no question that the plant was making noises, first whistling sounds, then something that sounded disturbingly like music, and finally like speech.
My dad tried to draw him away. He asked to be shown this or that local sight, and maybe he even came close to wearing out his welcome a couple times, but of course Freddy remained properly polite and accommodating. Sometimes, though, there was no help for it. Freddy was in the Conservatory with the plant, while my dad either wandered the grounds or sat in the library, looking for answers in some of the very curious volumes the lords of Cheebleford had accumulated over the centuries.
By the time he thought to take Blodgers, the butler, into his confidence and express his growing sense of alarm, it was too late.
The two of them discovered the inevitable result one morning, in the Conservatory. They found the folding chair, broken, and Freddy’s shoes, and the remains of his trousers, but that was all.
“Oh my God,” my father said. “We’ll have to call the police, or maybe the army, or MI5.”
“I don’t think that would be appropriate, Sir,” said Blodgers.
Dad looked at the plant with loathing. He reached for the shovel. “Well the least we can destroy the damned thing!” He swung the shovel into the field of waving tendrils, which caught hold of the shovel and yanked it out of his hands with surprising force and tossed it aside. Blodgers wrestled him away, into the corridor, well back among the more conventional greenery.
“Sir,” he said firmly. “You are a guest here, so I must ask you to observe certain proprieties. Nothing may be changed, much less destroyed, without the permission of Lord Cheebleford. His Lordship’s effects cannot be touched without specific instructions.”
“But your master has just been eaten by that goddamn cannibal plant—”
“Not, strictly speaking, ‘cannibal,’ Sir, I shouldn’t think, since it does not devour its own kind.”
“And you have time to worry about propriety, or even grammar.”
“More the correct vocabulary—”
“But your master has been eaten by the plant!”
“That is, admittedly, a bit awkward, Sir. He was unmarried, you see.”
“I know that!”
“That means he had no direct heir.”
“I know that!”
“Which means the ownership of the estate, and the preservation of Cheebleford Hall itself could be tied up in the courts for quite some time, during which time…where would the servants go?”
My dad stared at him in amazement. “Do you mean to tell me, that after your master has met what was no doubt a hideous fate, and all England, maybe even all the world may be in danger, you’re worried about your job?”
Very stiffly, he said, “There’s more to it than that, Sir. You Americans would not understand.”
And before my father