“That’s sickening,” said Dave. He leaned forwards to examine a boxed specimen at closer range. “Ugly critter!”
“Not everyone would agree. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.”
“Not this beholder,” he said firmly. “They’re all ugly as hell.” He pointed at another nearby plant, a Flytrap. “Just like that sucker.”
“Oh, lighten up, dear!” said Martha. “Hollywood even makes movies based on these types of plants. Remember The Little Shop of Horrors or Day of the Triffids?”
The plant’s blood-red centre featured a large open mouth ringed, top to bottom, with sharp, flexible teeth. It quivered slightly under a mild breeze from an overhead roof vent, creating the appearance of conscious life.
“Damn thing’s moving,” declared Dave. “It’s alive!”
“It is alive in one sense,” said Martha, “but not in the sense that animals are.”
Dave took a nervous step back from the plants. “Are they…dangerous?”
“Only to the prey they trap and devour.”
“Well, that’s comforting to know. But still…” His voice trailed off.
“There are others here that also qualify as major predators,” Martha stated. “If you’re a fly or cricket, that is.” She moved along the line of boxes. “This one”—nodding toward a spiny red-and-yellow specimen with sinuous, tentacle-like shoots—“he’s a nasty little baby.”
A slow surge of glistening sap oozed from its centre stem, which was covered with a hard-shelled, bark-like substance.
“Very nasty,” said Dave.
“Next we have the ‘Tiger Lily’. Called that for the shape of its head.”
Bulbous, swollen, fanged, its snake-like head was speckled in bilious green. It drew a grunt of revulsion from Dave.
The adjoining box contained a plant whose fungoid leaves formed a hooded funnel.
“It’s very effective,” said Martha. “Insects are weakened by its narcotic nectar. They fall into the funnel and are consumed.”
“How charming,” said Dave.
She kept moving along the line. “Then we have this little rascal. Imported from China, and quite an efficient predator.”
It brandished sword-sharp leaves with lithe tendrils protruding from its central stem, and was notably larger than the other plants. Dave found it grotesque.
“I must admit this one’s a little creepy,” said Martha. “It can paralyse and swallow animals as large as a baby rat.”
“Ugh!” Dave shook his head. “You sure seem to be up on all this…plant stuff.”
“Botany, babe, botany! It was one of my best subjects.”
“Uh-huh,” said Dave. “Well, it sure ain’t mine!”
Martha glanced down at the silver watch on her left wrist. “Oops! Feeding time for the gang.” She took one of the odd-shaped bottles from her purse, handing it to Dave. “You do the honours.” Impish grin. “You need to bond with our leafy friends.”
Dave held the bottle of orange-pink fluid up to the light. “Christ! There are all kinds of bugs floating in this thing!”
“Perfectly normal,” said Martha. “It’s what they eat.”
“I’ll tell you what it perfectly is—it’s perfectly disgusting.” He handed the bottle back to her. “You feed ’em. I’m outta here.”
Stepping swiftly away, he exited the greenhouse.
Just after midnight. Dave was deep into a first edition of Oliver Twist when Martha entered the library. She kissed him on his cheek.
“Time for my début,” she said. “My leafy audience awaits.”
Dave scowled at her. “You don’t actually mean to sing to a bunch of plants?”
“It’s in our contract,” she reminded him. “Three songs after the midnight feeding. We agreed to it.”
“I can’t believe you’re doing this!”
“Believe it.” She smiled. “I have a rather good voice. Sang in the school choir. It’ll be fun.”
“You have a weird idea of fun.”
“Care to join me for my audition?”
“No thanks, I’ll pass. I’ll stick with Dickens.”
“Your choice,” she said, kissed him on the cheek again, and left.
As the night deepened, Dave heard his wife’s lilting contralto drifting to him from the dimly lit greenhouse. The song was ‘In the Sweet Bye and Bye’.
He put his book down and moved to the window where he could see the greenhouse, enjoying his wife’s singing.
“She’s not half-bad—gotta give it to her.”
With each rise and warble of her voice, he noticed that the orange-pink glow under the doorframe of the greenhouse intensified; when she stopped to take a breath, the glow lessened considerably. He observed that the seam around the door to the lab did the same, as though there were more moss inside it.
“Well, I’ll be. That’s plain weird. Gives me the damn creeps!”
Four months later, the phone rang.
Martha answered. “Oh, Ms. Fanning…what a nice surprise to hear from you…Yes, yes, all the plants are fine…I assure you we’re been taking excellent care of them…They certainly are hungry little fellows…” A pause. “Of course we’ll be ready to leave…all right then…”
Martha put down the phone. “That was—”
“I heard,” nodded Dave. “She still in Europe?”
“So far as I know. Says she’ll be out of touch until her return. She’s in the woods somewhere hunting fungus.”
“What a nutty old dame.”
Martha sighed. “Been so lovely being here, the wonderful weather and all. I’ll miss it.” Another sigh. “I hate going home!”
“Sid called from the store. Things are looking up. Seems we made a smart move investing in vinyl. It’s making a big comeback. Hot with the younger set.”
“That’s nice,” said Martha. Her tone was strained.
“What’s wrong?” Dave asked. “You look worried.”
“That’s because I am,” she confessed. “The plant food’s getting low. We’re almost out of bottles and now I’ve realised I can’t reach Ms. Fanning again.”
“Gonna be all right,” he told her. “We’ve probably got enough until she gets back.”
“I hope so,” said Martha. “I really hope so.”
The following weekend found Martha coughing violently, breaking loose chunks of orange, glowing phlegm; the accompanying stabbing headaches sent her reeling to bed.
Dave called a local doctor, a sallow-faced man named Sutter, radiating authority, who agreed to examine Martha at the house.
“Your wife is suffering from a severe bronchial infection of some sort,” Sutter declared. “Running a high fever. She needs to be hospitalised.”
“It’s that serious?”
“Yes, Mister Burns, it’s that serious.”
After Sutter left, Dave stood at the living-room window, staring numbly into the darkness. The soft glow of the moss coming from the greenhouse and lab put him on edge. His fists were clenched, his heart racing. What the hell’s wrong with her? Is that damn plant food radioactive or something? My God, what if something happens to Martha? It would be the end of his world.
The ambulance arrived for Martha Burns that same night. Dave gently stroked her fevered cheek as she was placed inside. “You’ll be just fine,” he told her. “I’m right here with you, and everything’s gonna be fine.”
Later, Dr. Sutter told Dave that, thanks to antibiotics and an antifungal to treat her infection, his wife was much improved but needed to remain in the hospital for another seven to ten days.
Dave was greatly relieved and made frequent visits. Each time she asked him about the plants. Are they okay? Is he feeding them on schedule? “Yeah, and it’s a bummer. Stinks in there. Hate feeding those damn things. And I sure don’t sing to them!”
“What about their bottled food? Is it holding up?”
“Not really. Been stretching it by feeding ’em smaller amounts, but we’re running out fast.”
>
She frowned, eyes clouded with concern. “There must be more food! Try the lab. She might be keeping some extra bottles there.”
“But she warned us not to—”
“I know, hon, but this is an emergency.”
“Okay then, I’ll pick the lock and have a look inside.”
“Can you do that?”
“No sweat. Used to practise magic when I was a kid. Locks are a cinch.”
Martha relaxed back into her pillow.
“Can I get you anything? Do you need anything?”
“Thanks, hon, but right now all I need is sleep.”
Her eyes closed.
It was the last time they were together.
At the lab, Dave had no trouble picking the ancient lock.
It was late afternoon, and the sun had dropped below the horizon. Dave’s long shadow preceded him as he scanned the area. The interior was jammed with filing cabinets, glass beakers and the usual laboratory equipment. It was overrun with thick moss—but no bottled plant food.
A circular metal ring in the middle of the lab floor caught Dave’s attention. When he pulled back a trapdoor laced with cobwebs, a gust of extremely cold air billowed up from the darkness below. Was this a storage area? Maybe the bottles were kept there.
Damp concrete steps led downward to a brick-walled, night-black cellar. Dave descended into the chilled darkness, using a small pocket flash he’d taken from the house to illumine the moss-covered walls. It cast a thin beam of light ahead of him. No food bottles; all the shelves were empty.
Then he saw it—an orange glowing mass of choking moss huddled in a far corner. Dave centred the flash beam on the shape. To his horror, it appeared to be a man covered in rotted vines and thick, viscid leaves. Not entirely a man, but something that had once been a man—something that was no longer human.
Dave drew in a tight breath. So this was Viola Fanning’s infernal manifest-ation—the deformed end product of a twisted mind. Was this her dead husband? Some insane science project gone awry, now locked away in the lab? Dave found a wall switch by the stairs and snapped on the overheads. The dark figure stirred into life, awakened from its hibernation by the sudden burst of light. A long, furry tongue unfurled like a fiddlehead from a hole in what seemed to be a ruined face. Leafy creepers looped its body, and barbed, razored thorns thrust out from the torso, which appeared to be comprised of woody vines and bone that had fused together under a tight skin of smooth bark. A mass of throbbing feelers knit together to form the misshapen head; a reeking growth of grey fungus obscured half of its bulk.
The thing’s gelatinous eyes, seeping sticky resin, fastened on Dave Burns; its voice was hollow and rasping: “Need…feed friends…hungry…you not feed enough!”
This creature sensed the plants’ unabated hunger—perhaps linked to them by some unifying psychic force—plant to plant-thing.
The angry creature advanced, gnarled hands outstretched.
Dave knew he had to act. Scooping up a three-legged metal stool, he smashed it across the creature’s head. Pus-coloured fluid spurted from the wound, as the thing surged forwards to encircle Dave’s body in its spiny arms. As moss encircled his legs, trapping him, Dave’s ribs cracked audibly—and he cried out in sharp agony as his backbone snapped. Pain, like blazed lightning, engulfed him. Then it was over.
Dave Burns would never feel pain again.
A hedge trimmer had been placed, along with other garden tools, on a high shelf in the lab. Viola Fanning had used it to trim the box hedge. The creature grasped the metal saw awkwardly and switched it on, hovering over the broken body now glowing and oozing at its feet; Dave was already being ingested by the moss enveloping the lab, causing the weak orange glow to intensify as the plants fed on his body. It did not take long to reduce Dave Burns to small pieces with the trimmer. Very small pieces. His remains filled a canvas sack that the creature dragged into the greenhouse.
Time to feed itself—and its hungry friends.
Martha had phoned Dave to pick her up at the hospital, but had been unable to reach him. After Dr. Sutter had signed her medical discharge, she took a taxi back to the Fanning house.
Martha keyed open the front door, calling out to Dave: “Hon, I’m home!”
No reply. Silence.
Maybe he was out in the yard, she told herself. Hadn’t heard the phone ringing. Ought to be back inside by now. Maybe he’s in the library, deep into some first edition. She checked there. Empty. No Dave. The gazebo then? Maybe taking a morning nap in the shade. No, not there either. Puzzled, she tried the greenhouse. Why would he be here considering his marked distaste for plants?
Martha never found her husband.
What she did find stunned and revolted her: pieces of a human-like creature straight out of her worst nightmares. Gummy plant nectar covered what remained of the slimed body parts, glistening wetly from a canvas sack in the shafted sunlight. The plants had also overgrown their containers, spilling out onto the sides of the table, commingling with the abundant overgrowth of glowing moss, which was now spreading away from the greenhouse so much that she could actually see the tendrils and vines slithering away from the building, through the yard, and up the trees at the neighbour’s place in a thick, ropy display.
Martha screamed.
“Thought I’d heard everything, but I just can’t figure this,” declared Sheriff Nelson Brock, taking her statement at the police station. He was a tall man, big in girth, eyes hidden behind mirrored glasses. “Don’t make no sense. Never heard nothing like it. Oh, I can figure your mister plain taking off somewhere on his own, for God knows what reason, but this…”
Martha Burns, still badly shaken, her eyes swollen from lack of sleep, stared at the big man.
“The plants,” she whispered. “They’re taking over—please do something before it’s too late!”
Outside, a hard rain began.
ANGELA SLATTER
A SONG OF DUST
ANGELA SLATTER’s debut novel, Vigil, was published by Jo Fletcher Books in 2016, with the sequels, Corpselight and Restoration, following in 2017 and 2018, respectively. She is the author of nine short story collections, including The Girl with No Hands and Other Tales, Sourdough and Other Stories, The Bitterwood Bible and Other Recountings, Black-Winged Angels, Winter Children and Other Chilling Tales and A Feast of Sorrows: Stories.
Her work has been adapted for the screen, and translated into French, Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, Russian and Bulgarian. The author has won a World Fantasy Award, a British Fantasy Award, a Ditmar Award, an Australian Shadows Award and six Aurealis Awards.
“Editor Mark Morris had asked for a story for the first volume of New Fears,” she recalls, “and I’d been reading a book about jewelled saints, Heavenly Bodies: Cult Treasures & Spectacular Saints from the Catacombs by Paul Koudounaris.
“I’d used the idea before in a story set in the ‘Sourdough’ universe, but I wanted to add something more to it—hence the idea of the bewitched death jewellery to help keep the dead beneath. I wanted to have an early St. Dymphma’s poison girl as my main character, and to revisit the Misses Meyrick and Hepsibah Ballantine. And I also wanted to plant an ancestress for Cordelia and Bethany Lawrence, who feature in the third ‘Sourdough’ cycle mosaic, The Tallow-Wife and Other Tales.”
ISOBEL HESITATES OUTSIDE the grand door to the chamber she’d thought to share with Adolphus. It’s a work of art, with carven figures of Adam and Lilith standing in front of a tree, a cat at the base, a piece of fruit in transit between First Man and First Woman so one cannot tell if she offers to he, or otherwise.
Her recent exertions have drained what little strength she had, and the food she’d found in the main kitchen (all servants asleep, the odour of stale mead rising from them like swamp gas) sits heavily in a stomach shrunk so very small by a denial not hers. The polished wooden floorboards of the gallery are cold beneath her thin feet—so thin! Never so slender all her life. A little starvation will do wonders, she
thinks. As she moved through the house, she’d caught sight of herself in more than one filigreed mirror and seen all the changes etched upon her: silver traceries in the dishevelled dark hair, face terribly narrow—who’d have known those fine cheekbones had lain beneath all that fat?—mouth still a cupid’s-bow pout and nose pert, but the eyes are sunken deep and, she’d almost swear to it, their colour changed from light green to deepest black as if night resides in them. The dress balloons around her new form, so much wasted fabric one might make a ship’s sail from the excess.
How long before the plumpness returns? Before her cheeks have apples, the lines in her face are smoothed out? She can smell again, now, but all she can discern is the scent of her own body, unwashed for so long. A bath, she thinks longingly, then draws her attention back to where it needs to be: the door.
Or, rather, what lies behind it.
She reaches out, looks at the twiggish fingers, the black half-moons of dirt beneath the nails, how weirdly white her hand appears on the doorknob shaped like a wolf’s head, so bulbous she can barely grasp it properly. She takes a deep, deep breath, and turns the handle.
Isobel woke with a weight on her eyes, cold and dead.
Her mouth, too, was similarly burdened: lips pressed down and thin metallic tendrils crept between them. Her forehead was banded by something chill and hard, a line running the length of her nose, her cheeks and chin encased; as if she wore a helmet she had no memory of applying before bed. She had no memory either of going to sleep. Her throat and arms were mercifully free, but chest, abdomen and hands were encumbered. Not a cage, then.
Remain calm, she told herself, slow your breathing. She’d been taught at St. Dymphna’s to assess situations carefully; easier said than done when you couldn’t open your eyes.
Rings, she thought. Rings on my fingers and bells on my toes. She tried to wiggle her feet, found them unwilling to respond, still quite numb; pins and needles were beginning, however, so some sign of hope. Wrists encircled, entrapped by…bracelets and bangles. She twitched her digits; only one finger bore a reasonable burden, a thin metal ribbon. Her husband’s family, no matter their wealth, always insisted on a wedding band as plain as day. For love, they believed, must be unadorned.
Best New Horror 29 Page 27
