The Plant. Part 14

"And the date? Was that-"

I nodded. "The day he died, right. Of course none of this is top secret. The woman could have found out. Mediums wow their marks by knowing stuff they're not supposed to know, and in the end it turns out to have been nothing but research and legwork. But-"

"You don't believe it. I don't, either." Roger tapped the letter. "'Bring the Water-Boy if you want to.'"

"I wondered about that," I said.

"When I was in high school, I went out for the football team. I was serious about it, fool that I was. I only weighed a hundred and thirty pounds, but I had visions of...I don't know...being the Reading High School version of Knute Rockne, I suppose. I was serious, but no one else was. They just about killed themselves laughing. The team, the cheerleaders, the whole student body. Coach along with the rest of them. I ended up being the team waterboy. It became my nickname. It's even in the yearbook. Roger Wade, Cla.s.s of '68, Drama Club, Glee Club, Newspaper. Ambition, to write the Great American Novel. Nickname, Waterboy."

For a moment neither of us said nothing. Then he picked up the letter again. "She seems to imply that Iron-Guts Hecksler is still alive. Do you think that's possible?"

"I don't see how he could be." But I did see, at least sort of. It had been a fire, after all. Nothing left but ashes and a few teeth. It could have been done. It suggested a degree of cunning I didn't much like to think of, but yes-it could have been done.

"She wants us in Central Falls," Roger said, turning off his typewriter and standing up. "Let's give her what she wants. Still plenty of time to s.h.a.g a.s.s over to Penn Station and catch The Pilgrim. We can be in Rhode Island by noon."

"What about the joke book? What about The Devil's General?"

"Let those three deadbeats do a little work for a change," Roger said, c.o.c.king his thumb at the short corridor which opens on the editors' cubicles.

"You're serious?"

"As a heart attack."

And he was. At 9:40 we were stepping onto Amtrak's Pilgrim in the bowels of Penn Station, armed with magazines and bagels; at 12:15 we were stepping off in Central Falls; at one o'clock we were getting out of a taxi on Alden Street, in front of the Central Falls House of Flowers. The place is a rather shabby New England saltbox rising behind a dead lawn still dotted with clumps of melting snow. To the rear is an absolutely huge greenhouse which does indeed stretch all the way to the next street. Outside of the Botanical Gardens in D.C., it's the biggest d.a.m.ned greenhouse I've ever seen. But unlike the Botanical in D.C., this one is filthy-the windows are grimy, some mended with tape. We could see little shimmers of heat rising off the top-the apex, if you'll pardon the word. During the weird Mardi Gras of the original Detweiller craziness, someone referred to it as a jungle-I don't remember who, probably one of the cops-and today Roger and I could see why. It wasn't just the heat rising off the gla.s.s panels and into the gray March chill; mostly it was the dark bulk of the plants behind those panels. In the dull light they looked black rather than green.

"My uncle would go bonkers," Roger said. "If he was still alive, that is. Uncle Ray. When I was a kid, he'd always greet me with 'Hey, I'm Uncle Ray from Green Bay.' To which it was my job to reply, 'Hey, Ray, what do you say?' And he'd come back with 'Can ya stay, or do ya have to leave today?'"

I suffered this rather bizarre reminiscence in silence. The fact was, I couldn't take my eyes from the dark, crowding bulk of all those plants.

"Anyway, he was an amateur horticulturist, and he had a greenhouse. A little one. Nothing like this. Come on, John."

I thought, being in a rhyming mood, he might add a verbal flip of the hip like Let's get it on, but he just resumed walking up the path. The porch steps were stained with a winter's worth of salt. Beyond them, in a window by the door, was an FTD placard, the one with winged Mercury on it, and a sign reading COME IN, WE'RE OPEN! The words were flanked with roses.

When we reached the steps I stopped for a second. "I just remembered-you said you had something to show me, too. Back at the office. But you never did."

"Just as well. I believe it may be better shown when we get back."

"Does it have anything to do with Riddley's room?" I don't know where that came from, exactly, but once it was out I knew I was right.

"Why, yes. It does." He looked at me closely. Standing there at the foot of the steps with the collar of his overcoat turned up, framing his face, and a little color in his cheeks, it occurred to me that Roger Wade's a pretty good-looking guy. Better-looking now, probably, than a lot of the fellows who made fun of him back in high school, calling him Waterboy and G.o.d knows what else. Roger might even know that, if he's been back to any of his cla.s.s reunions...but those voices from high school never quite leave our heads, do they? Maybe if you make enough money and bed enough women (I wouldn't know about those things, being both poor and shy), but I doubt if they leave even then.

"John," he said.

"What?"

"We're delaying."

And because I knew it was true-neither of us wanted to go into Carlos Detweiller's erstwhile place of employment-I said, "Delay no more" and lead the way up the steps.

A little bell jingled over the door when we went in. The next thing to hit me was the smell of flowers...but not just flowers. The thought that crossed my mind was Funeral parlor. Funeral parlor in the deep south, during a heat wave. And although I've never been in the deep south during a heat wave-have never been in the deep south at all-I knew that was about right. Because there was another smell under the heavy perfume of roses and orchids and carnations and G.o.d knows what else. It was meaty smell, bordering on rancid. Unpleasant. Roger's mouth twitched downward at the corners. He smelled it, too.

Probably back in the forties and fifties, when the place had been a private home, the room we stepped into had been two rooms: the entry and the small front parlor. At some point a wall had been knocked down, making a large retail area with a counter running across it about three-quarters of the way in. There was a pa.s.s-through panel in the counter, now raised, and beyond it an open door leading into the greenhouse. It was from there that the worst of the smell was coming. The room was very hot. Behind the counter was a gla.s.sed-in coldbox (I don't know if you call that kind of thing a refrigerator or not-I suppose you must). There were bouquets of cut flowers and floral arrangements in there, but the gla.s.s was so fogged up-from the temperature difference between the two environments, I suppose-that you could barely tell the lilies from the chrysanthemums. It was like looking through a heavy English mist (and no, I've never been there, either).

To the left behind the counter, sitting under a blackboard on which various prices had been marked, was a man with the Providence Journal held open in front of his face. We could just see a few wisps of white hair floating like milkweed over an otherwise bald skull. Of Ms. Tina Barfield there was no sign.

"h.e.l.lo!" Roger said heartily.

No response from the man with the paper. He just sat there with the headline showing-REAGAN WILL PULL THROUGH, DOCTORS VOW.

"h.e.l.lo? Sir?"

No movement. A queer idea came to me then: that he wasn't really a man but a mannequin posed with the newspaper upraised. To foil shoplifters, perhaps. Not that shoplifters would frequent flower shops in any great numbers, I wouldn't think.

"Pardon?" Roger said, speaking even louder. "We're here to see Ms. Barfield?"

No response. The paper didn't so much as rattle.

Feeling a little like a creature in a dream (although I hadn't completely parted with reality yet-that part I'll be coming to shortly), I stepped forward to the counter, where there was a bell beside a card reading PLEASE RING FOR SERVICE. I banged it smartly with my palm, producing a single sharp ding! I had a crazy urge to call "Front, please!" in my best snootyNew-York-desk-clerk voice, and suppressed it.

Slowly, very slowly, the paper came down. When it did, I wished it had stayed up. The descending Journal disclosed a face I had seen before, in the "Sacrifice Photos." There it had been distorted with pain, horror, and incredulity. Now the face of Norville Keen, author of such pearls as "Why describe a guest when you can see that guest," was utterly blank.

No. That's not right.

s.h.i.t- (later) I've been sitting here in front of this lousy little Olivetti for almost five minutes, trying to think of what le mot juste might be, and the best I can do is slack. The man's face not just being devoid of expression, you understand, but seemingly devoid of muscle tension as well. It had probably always been a long face, but now it seemed absurdly long, almost like a face glimpsed in one of those trick carnival mirrors. It hung off his skull like dough hanging from the lip of a mixing bowl.

Beside me, I heard Roger draw his breath in. He told me later that at first he thought we were looking at a case of Alzheimer's, but I believe that was a lie. We are modern men, Roger and I, a couple of lapsed Christians in the big city who go through our days under the rule of law and the a.s.sumption of...how shall I put this? Of empirical reality. We don't believe that reality to be benign, but we don't find it actually malignant, either. Yet we have our secret hearts, of course, and these are closely attuned to the organs of our brute instinct. Those adrenal-fed organs slumber most of the time, but they're there. Ours awoke in the office of the Central Falls House of Flowers and told us the same thing: that the man looking at us from those dusty black expressionless eyes was no longer alive. That he was, in fact, a corpse.

(later) I haven't had any dinner and don't want any-perhaps appet.i.te will come back when I've finished this. I did go around the corner just now for a double espresso, however, and it's perked me up. Put a little heart back in me. And yet-tell the truth, shame the devil-I found myself more or less scuttling from streetlight to streetlight, not liking the dark, feeling watched. Not by any one person (certainly I didn't sense Carlos Detweiller lurking, perhaps with a pair of nice, sharp pruning shears at the ready) but by the dark itself. Those organs of instinct I mentioned are now fully awake, you see, and above all things they don't like the dark. But now I'm back in my cozy kitchen, under plenty of bright fluorescent light, with half a cup of hot, strong coffee by my right hand and things are better.

Because, you know, there is a good side to all this. You'll see.

All right, where was I? Ah yes, I know. The lowered newspaper and the blank stare. The slack stare.

At first neither Roger nor I could say anything. The man-Mr. Keen- didn't seem to mind; he just sat on his stool by the cash register and stared at us with the newspaper crumpled in his lap instead of in front of his face. The pages he was open to appeared to be a double-spread ad from a car dealership. I could see the words REFUSE TO BE UNDERSOLD.

Finally I managed, "Are you Mr. Keen? Mr. Norville Keen?"

Nothing. Just those staring eyes. To me they looked as dusty as stones in a dry ditch.

"You live in Carlos's building, right?" I asked. "Carlos Detweiller?"

Nothing.

Roger leaned forward and spoke very slowly and clearly, like someone addressing a man he believes to be deaf, mentally r.e.t.a.r.ded, or both.

"We're...looking...for...Tina...Barfield...Is...she...here?"At first there was nothing in response to this, either. I was about to try my luck (all the time thinking somewhere in the bottom of my mind that it was no good trying to get information from the dead, people had been trying that for years without success), when, very slowly, Mr. Keen raised his hand. He was wearing a short-sleeved white shirt, and the muscles on his upper arm hung lax, sort of dangling off the bone. He pointed one long, yellow finger, and I thought of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, pointing relentlessly at Ebeneezer Scrooge's forgotten grave. It wasn't a grave Mr. Keen was pointing at, but the open door to the greenhouse.

"In there, is she?" Roger asked in an insanely hearty tone of voice; it was as if we'd all shared a mildly funny joke. Q. How many dead men does it take to run a greenhouse? A. Just Norv.

No response from Mr. Keen. Except for the pointing finger, that is. It's impossible to convey how uncanny he was. I have asked myself again and again if he was breathing, and I just don't know. It's the pointing finger I remember best-the nail at the end of it was jagged and splintered, as if he had gnawed it. And his eyes. The dusty, expressionless stones of his eyes.

"Come on," Roger said, and started for the raised pa.s.s-through.

I began, "Do you really think that's a good..." but Roger obviously thought it was a good idea, because he kept on walking. Or maybe he'd just decided it was the only idea. And, not wanting to be left under Mr. Keen's unblinking gaze, I followed him.

I hurried through the gap in the counter with my head slightly lowered, and as a result I ran right into Roger's back and almost knocked him over. Something had stopped him cold about ten feet into the greenhouse, and when I raised my own head to look, I saw what it was.

And here, I find, John Kenton's powers of description are totally inadequate to the task of reporting what we were looking at in that d.a.m.ned place. I got A's in all my comp courses, I've published a good many sensitive stories in a good number of sensitive "little magazines" (none lately, however, as editing the Macho Man and Windhover series of books seems to have blunted my own writing appet.i.te considerably), and at Brown I was considered to be a leading contender for one of America's literary lion spots in the final years of the twentieth century (not least of all by yours truly). One can go on feeling that until one is tested. Today I was tested, and tonight I am found wanting (most of all by yours truly). Yet I think that if a Mailer or a Roth or a Bellow had been with us this afternoon when we stepped into the greenhouse which runs between Alden Steet and Isle Avenue (where it abuts on a high board fence covered with NO TRESPa.s.sING signs), any of them would have found himself similarly daunted by the task of describing what lay on the other side of that door. Perhaps only a poet-a Wallace Stevens or a T.S. Eliot-would have really been up to the task. But since they're not here, I'll have to do my best.

The strongest sensation was of having stepped over the border into another world, a nightmarish ecosystem of gigantic ferns, prehistoric trees, and lush alien greenery. I'm not telling you that I didn't recognize any of the plants, because I did. Bordering the central aisle, for instance, crowding it so that walking in anything other than single-file would have been almost impossible, were what I took to be common ferns, although grown to uncommon size and height (Roger confirmed this, saying that they were overgrown Boston and maidenhair ferns, for the most part). Besides fringing the aisle at whose head we stood, their questing offshoots-rhizomes, if I remember the word Roger used-went snaking across the cracked and filthy orange tiles like hair-tufted tentacles of some sort.

Beyond them on both sides, towering in some cases all the way to the dirty gla.s.s panels at the peak of the greenhouse roof, were palm trees, banana trees (in some cases complete with tiny bunches of hanging green bananas that looked like insect coc.o.o.ns), and great shouting bursts of rhododendron, mostly green but every here and there blooming out in convoluted clots of azalea. These huge clumps of growth were somehow frightening in their vitality; their packed greenery seemed to threaten, promising to awaken every winter-dormant allergy in your head and your sinuses...before enveloping you and crushing you to death, that was. And it was hot. It might have been only eighty or so in the office, but out here it was ninety or maybe even a hundred. Steamy, too, the air oozing with humidity.

"Whoa," Roger said in a tiny, almost breathless voice. He took off his overcoat with the slow motions of a sleepwalker, and I imitated him. "Good Christ, Johnny. Good Christ almighty." He began to walk down the aisle, brushing the overhanging branches of the great ferns with his coat, which he'd draped over his arm, and looking around with wide, unbelieving eyes.

"Roger, maybe that's not such a good idea," I said. "Maybe we should just-" But he wasn't paying any attention, so I hurried after him.

About thirty feet in, a new aisle crossed the one we'd started on. As if to add the final surreal touch, there was a street-sign planted in the dirt on our side of the intersection. An arrow pointing straight ahead was marked HERE. The ones pointing both ways along the crossing aisle were marked THERE and YONDER. It would have been nice to believe that someone had a sense of humor, perhaps inspired by Lewis Carroll, but I did not, indeed, believe that. The signs seemed somehow deadly serious. (Although I freely admit that this might have been just my perception-I wasn't in a state of mind to appreciate wit.) I caught up to Roger and again suggested we should go back. He again seemed not to hear me. "This is unreal," he said. "Johnny, this is absolutely unreal."

I couldn't decide if I liked being called Johnny or not-it's a nickname I haven't heard much since junior high. As for the unreal quality of Ms. Barfield's greenhouse, that seemed to me to require no remark. It was evident-not just before us, but now all around us. I'd already sweat through my shirt, and my heartbeat was booming in my own ears like a drum.

"Heliotrope there," he said, pointing. "Hibiscus growing next to it and behind it. Absolutely flourishing, the whole works. Can you smell the 'biscus?"

I was getting hibiscus, all right, plus a dozen other floral and/or herbaceous scents, some as soft as dusk in Polynesia, some sharp and bitter. A squat hemlock and a large yew tree were growing catty-corner from where we stood, seeming to reach for us with their stiff branches. But beneath all the mingled odors was that other one, that meaty mortuary smell.

Heatwave down south, I thought. First the train-wreck, then the power failure. Now there are forty bodies down there, mangled and beginning to stink. Even with all the flowers. Some of the corpses with their eyes open, dusty and blank, like stones in a dry ditch- "Roger-"

I looked back from the tangle of yew and hemlock (I couldn't imagine why anyone would want to grow such trees in a greenhouse, but there they were) and Roger was gone. I was alone.

Then I saw just a swirl of his overcoat down to my right, along the aisle marked THERE. I started to hurry after him, then stopped, reached into my pocket, and brought out a crumple of paper. It was, in fact, my copy of Harlow Enders's memo, the one with the maniacal demand that we pull three New York Times bestsellers either out of thin air or from our own a.s.ses, whichever happened to be the more productive. I tore a piece from the bottom of it, crumpled it up, and tossed it into the center of the intersection of HERE, THERE, and YONDER. I watched it bounce to a stop on the dirty tiles, then hurried after Roger. I felt absurdly like Hansel forsaken by Gretel.

On THERE Street, the ferns and the Boston ivy crowded even closer; the leaves made an unpleasant whispering sound as they brushed the cloth of my increasingly damp shirt. Up ahead I saw another swirl of overcoat, and one of Roger's shoes before he turned again, this time to the left.

"Roger!" I bawled. "Will you for G.o.d's sake wait for me?"

I tore another piece of paper from the Enders memo, dropped it, and trotted along the new path in Roger's wake. Here the way was flanked not by ferns but by overgrown cacti, bright green at their bases, fading to an unpleasant yellow shade at their tops, branching out in crooked arms, all of them armored with thick needles that ended in nasty blunt tips. Like the branches of the ferns, these seemed to reach into the path. Brushing the cactus arms wouldn't just produce a nasty low whispering sound, though; if you brushed these, blood would flow. If they grew any closer, a person couldn't get through, I thought, and then it occurred to me that if Roger and I tried to return this way, we'd find the aisle barred. This place was a maze. A trap. And it was alive.

I realized I could hear more than just the beating of my heart. There was also a low, muted smacking sound, like someone without much in the way of manners sucking at soup. Only this sounded like a lot of someones.

Then another idea occurred to me: that wasn't Roger up ahead at all. Roger had been s.n.a.t.c.hed into the jungle, and I was following someone who had stolen his topcoat and one of his loafers. I was being lured in, lured to the center, where some gigantic, flesh-eating plant awaited me, a venus flytrap, a pitcher-plant, perhaps some species of homicidal vine.

But I came to the next corner (a sign marked this three-way intersection as OVER, BACK, and BEYOND) and Roger was standing there, coat now sagging from one hand, shirt plastered to his back in a dark tree-shape. I almost expected to see him standing on the bank of a jungle river, a sluggish tributary of the Amazon or the Orinoco running smack-dab through the middle of Central Falls, Rhode Island. There was no river, but the smells were denser and spicier, and that undersmell of spoiled flesh was even stronger. The combination was bitter enough to make my nose sting and my eyes water.

"Don't move to your right," Roger said, speaking almost absently. "Poison sumac, poison oak, and poison ivy. All growing together."

I looked and saw a ma.s.sed bank of shiny leaves, most green, some a baleful scarlet, all seeming to almost drip their poisonous oils. Touch that s.h.i.t and you'd scratch for a year, I thought.

"Johnny."

"We need to get out of here," I said. Then added: "If we can find our way, that is."

Why had we come in here to begin with? Why, when the fellow who had pointed our way had been so obviously dead? I had no idea. We must have been bewitched.

Certainly Roger Wade seemed bewitched. He spoke my name again- "Johnny"-as if I hadn't said anything.

"What?" I asked, looking mistrustfully at the shining ma.s.s of mingled poison oak, sumac, and ivy. That s...o...b..ry smacking sound was a good deal closer now. The man-eating plant, no doubt, anxious for its meal. New York Editors tartare, how yummy.

"These're all poison," he said in that same dreamy voice. "Poison or hallucinogenic or both. That's datura, there, common name jimson weed-" Pointing to a nasty snarl of green growing from what looked like a pool of stagnant water. "-and darlingtonia...joe-pye weed...there's nicotiana and nightshade...foxglove...euphorbia, the dangerous version of poinsettia... Christ, I think that one's a night-blooming cereus." He was pointing to a huge plant with its blooms tightly folded in against the dim gray light. Roger turned to me. "And stuff I don't know. Lots of it."

"You recognize the anthurium, of course," said an amused voice from behind us.

We wheeled around and there stood a small woman with a mannish face and a stocky body beneath short, graying hair. She was wearing a gray suede beret and smoking a cigarette. She didn't look hot at all.

"That one's not dangerous, although of course the leaves of the rhubarb might interfere with your digestion- permanently, I wouldn't be surprised-and the pods of the wisteria are also quite nasty. Which of you is John Kenton?"

"I am," I said. "And you're Ms. Barfield."

"Miss," she said. "I don't buy that politically correct s.h.i.t. I never did. You fellows shouldn't be out here on your own."

"I know that," I said dismally.

I might have said something else, but before I could, Tina Barfield did an amazing thing. She raised one foot, shod in a sensible black shoe, snuffed her cigarette, and held it out to her side, where a branch heavy with pods of some sort overhung the path (I could no longer think of it as an aisle, even though it was floored with the cracked remains of orange tile; we were in the jungle, and when you're there it's paths you follow, not aisles...if, that is, you're lucky enough to find one). One of the pods split open, becoming a small, greedy mouth. It ate the still-smoldering cigarette b.u.t.t out of her hand and then sealed itself shut again.

"Good G.o.d," Roger said hoa.r.s.ely.

"It's a kind of catchfly," the woman said indifferently. "Silly b.u.g.g.e.r will eat anything. You'd think it would choke, but nope. Now that you're here, let me show you something."

She brushed past us and strode on down the path, not even looking back to make sure we were following...which we were. She turned left, right, then right again. All the while those arrhythmic smacking sounds grew stronger. I noticed that she was dressed in a cranberry-colored pant suit, every bit as sensible as her shoes. She was dressed, I thought, like a woman who has places to go and things to do.

I can remember now how scared I was, but only in a vague fashion. How sure I was that we'd never get out of that horrible steamy place. Then she turned a final corner and stopped. We joined her.

"Holy...s.h.i.t," I whispered.

Ahead of us, the path ended. Or perhaps it had been overgrown. The plants blocking the way were a filthy grayish black, and from their branches flowers sprouted -I think they were flowers-the pinkish-red of infected wounds. They were long, like lilies on the verge of blooming, and they were opening and closing slowly, making those smacking sounds. Only now that we were upon them, it no longer sounded like smacking. It sounded like talking.

There comes a point where the mind either breaks or shuts itself down. I know that now. I was all at once filled with a species of surreal calm I've never felt before. On one level I knew that I was there, looking at those hideous, slow-talking blossoms. But on another, I rejected that completely. I was at home. In my bed. Had to be. I'd overslept the alarm, that was all. I wasn't going to beat Roger to the office as I'd wanted to, but that was okay. More than okay. Because when I finally did wake up, all of this would be gone.

"What in G.o.d's name are they?" Roger asked.

Tina Barfield looked at me with her eyebrows raised. It was the expression of a teacher calling on a student who should know the answer.

"They're the Tongues," I said. "Remember the letter? She said some of the Tongues had begun to wag."

"Good for you," the woman said. "You're maybe not as stupid as you acted when Carlos first got in touch with you."