by Clive Barker
But wish in one hand, spit in the other, as his daddy would have said. Things were what they were, and he was just going to have to sit down and do some Big Thinking about it. He would—
God, he had been rubbing his eyes!
That was the first thing he did every morning when he woke up, rubbed the sleepy seeds out of his eyes. It was the first thing anybody did, as far as he knew. You wiped your left eye with your left hand and your right eye with…with…
Jordy bolted for the living room, where there was a mirror bolted on the back of the closet door. He stared into his eyes. He looked for a long time, even going so far as to pull the lids away from the eyeballs. He did it with his left hand.
They were okay.
A little bloodshot, and scared for damn sure, but otherwise they were just Jordy Verrill’s blue forty-six-year-old peepers, a little nearsighted now so he had to wear specs when he read the seed catalogue or one of his Louis L’Amour westerns or one of the dirty books he kept in the drawer of his night-table.
Uttering a long sigh, he went back upstairs. He used half a package of Red Cross cotton carefully bandaging his fingers. It took him quite awhile, working only with his left hand, which was his dumb hand.
When he was done he knew it was time to sit down for a spell of Big Thinking, but he couldn’t face that yet so he went out to look at his meteor.
He groaned when he saw it; he couldn’t help it.
The white stuff was all gone. The steam was gone. So was the burned crescent of ground. Where the burn had been there was now a fresh growth of dark green tendrils, already as high as clipped grass. It had begun to rain in the night, and the rain had brought it along fast.
Jordy shuddered just looking at it. The fingers of his right hand itched insanely, making him want to turn around and run back to the shed and turn on the faucet and rip off the cotton and stick his fingers under its cooling flow…
But that would make it worse. Look what just a little rain had done to this here.
He crept a little closer to the clear line of demarcation between yellow hay stubble and new green growth. He hunkered down and looked at it. He had never seen any plant that grew so thick, not even clover. Even with your nose practically touching the stuff you couldn’t see the ground. It was the exact color of a flourishing, well-tended lawn, but the plants weren’t blades. They were round instead of flat, and tiny tendrils sprouted from each stalk like branches from the bole of a tree. Except that they were more limber than branches. What they really reminded him of were arms…horrible boneless green arms.
Then Jordy’s breath stopped in his throat. If anyone had been close enough to see him, they would have been reminded of that old saying, he had his ear to the ground. In this case it was literally true.
He could hear the stuff growing.
Very faintly the earth was groaning, as if in a sleep filled with pain. He could hear it being pulled apart and riddled by the strong thrust of this thing’s root system. Pebbles clunked against pebbles. Clods crumbled into loose particles. And woven through these sounds was another: the rubbing of each tiny round stalk pushing itself up a little further and a little further. A grinding, squealing sound.
“Christ have mercy!” Jordy whined, and scrambled to his feet. He backed away. It wasn’t the sound of plant growth that frightened him, exactly; once, long ago in his youth, he had heard the corn making. Nowadays the smartasses said that was just a story the rubes told each other, like holding frogs would bring on warts and stump-liquor would charm them off. But when the summer was just right, hot every day and heavy showers at night, you could hear it. In August you could hear it for maybe two nights. Jordy’s father had fetched him out of bed and they had stood on the back porch of the old place not even breathing, and sure enough, Jordy had heard that low, grinding rumble from their cornpatch.
He could remember the low, red-swollen moon casting dim fire on the broad green leaves, the jumbled scarecrow that fluttered and dangled on the fence like a horrid and grinning Halloween treasure, the sound of crickets. And that…that other sound. It had scared him then, although his daddy said it was perfectly natural. It had scared him plenty. But it hadn’t scared him like this.
This sound was like an earthquake whispering deep down in the earth, working itself up through bedrock, shunting boulders aside, moving the ground, getting ready to make plates waltz off their shelves and coffee cups tap-dance from counters to shatter on the linoleum. It was at the same time the smallest and the biggest sound he had ever heard.
Jordy turned and ran back to his house.
Now you can explain why a smart man will do something, because a smart man goes by the facts. If a smart man gets car trouble, he goes to a service station. If he gets wasps in his house, he calls the exterminator. And if a smart man gets sick somehow, he calls the doctor.
Jordy Verrill wasn’t a smart man. He wasn’t feeble or retarded, but he sure wasn’t going to win any Quiz Kid award, either. When God hands out the smart pills, he gives some people placebos, and Jordy was one of those. And you can’t predict what a man will do in a given situation after he reaches a certain degree of dumbness, because the man himself doesn’t know if he’s going to shit or put his fingers in the fan.
Jordy didn’t call another doctor, not even after lunch when he looked into the mirror on the back of the closet door and saw the green stuff growing out of his right eye.
There was another doctor in Cleaves Mills besides Dr. Condon. But Jordy had never been to Dr. Oakley because he had heard that Dr. Oakley was a son of a bitch. Dr. Condon never acted that way, and Jordy like him. Also, Oakley was reputed to be fond of giving shots, and Jordy still retained his childhood fear of being injected. Doc Condon was more of a pill man, and usually he would give you the pills free, from samples. Paying up, that was another thing. Jordy had heard that Doc Oakley had a little sign on his waiting room wall that said IT IS CUSTOMARY TO PAY CASH UNLESS ARRANGEMENTS HAVE BEEN MADE IN ADVANCE. That was hard scripture for an odd job man like Jordy Verrill, especially with the hay as poor as it had been this year. But Doc Condon only sent out bills when he remembered to, which was rarely.
None of these are smart reasons for not going to the doctor, but Jordy had one other, so deep he could never say it in words. He didn’t really want to go to see any doctor, because he was afraid to find out what was wrong with him. And what if it was so bad that Doc Oakley decided to stick him in the hospital? He was deadly afraid of that place, because when you went in it was only a matter of time before they lugged you out in a canvas bag.
Still he might have gone to Doc Oakley if the answering service had said Doc Condon wasn’t going to be back for a week. But just until tomorrow, that wasn’t so bad. He could call Doc Condon tomorrow and get him to come out here, and not have to sit in anybody’s waiting room where everyone could see that revolting green stuff growing out of his eye.
“That’s the ticket,” he whispered to himself. “That’s what to do.”
He went back to the TV, a glass of rum in a water glass by his hand. Tiny green fuzz was visible, growing on the white of his right eye like moss on a stone. Limber tendrils hung over the lower lid. It itched something dreadful.
And so the eye, of course, resorted to its old tried-and-true method of cleansing itself, and that’s why Jordy, had he been a smart man, would have gotten over to Doc Oakley’s office just as fast as his old Dodge pickup could travel.
His right eye was watering. A regular little sprinkling can.
He fell asleep halfway through the afternoon soap operas. When he woke up at five o’clock he was blind in his right eye. He looked in the mirror and moaned. His faded-blue right eye was gone. What was in the socket now was a waving green jungle of weeds, and some of the little creepers hung halfway down his cheek.
He put one hand up to his face before he could stop himself. He couldn’t just rip the stuff out, the way you would hoe up the witchgrass in your tomato sets. He couldn’t do that because h
is eye was still in there someplace.
Wasn’t it?
* * *
Jordy screamed.
The scream echoed through his house, but there was no one to hear it because he was alone. He had never been so dreadfully alone in his life. It was eight o’clock in the evening and he had drunk the whole bottle of Bacardi and he still wasn’t schnockered. He wished he was schnockered. He had never wanted so badly to be out of sobriety.
He had gone into the bathroom to piss off some of the rum, and that green stuff was growing out of his penis. Of course it was. It was wet down there, wasn’t it? Almost always a little bit wet.
Jordy went just the same but it itched and hurt so much that he couldn’t tell which was worse. And maybe next time he wouldn’t be able to go at all.
That wasn’t what had made him scream. The thought of having that stuff inside him, that had made him scream. It was a million times worse than the time he had gotten the bat caught in his hair while he was insulating old Missus Carver’s attic. Somehow the green plants had picked the two best parts of him, his eyes and his pecker. It wasn’t fair, it wasn’t fair at all. It seemed like Jordy’s luck was always in, and you spelled that kind of luck B-A-D.
He started to cry and made himself stop because that would only make it grow the faster.
He had no more hard liquor but there was half a bottle of Ripple in the ice box so he filled his tumbler with that and sat down again, dully watching the TV with his good eye. He glanced down at his right hand and saw green tendrils had wriggled out from underneath the cotton…and some stalks had pushed right up through it.
“I’m growin,” he said emptily, and moaned again.
The wine made Jordy sleepy and he dozed off. When he woke up it was ten-thirty and at first he was so muzzy from everything he had drunk that he didn’t remember what had happened to him. All he was sure of was that his mouth tasted funny, as if he had been chewing grass. Awful taste. It was like—
Jordy bolted for the mirror. Ran his tongue out. And screamed again.
His tongue was covered with the fuzzy green growth, the insides of his cheeks were downy with it, and even his teeth looked greenish, as if they were rotting.
And he itched. Itched like fire, all over. He remembered once when he had been deer-hunting and he had to take a squat right that minute, or else. And he had gone and done it right in a patch of poison sumac—Jordy’s luck was always in. That had been a bad itch, the rash he had gotten from that, but this was worse. This was a nightmare. His fingers, his eye, his pecker, and now his mouth.
Cold water!
The thought was so focused, so steely, that it didn’t seem like his own at all. Commanding, it came again: cold water!
He had a vision of filling up the old clawfoot bathtub upstairs with cold water, then ripping off all his clothes and jumping in, drowning the itch forever.
Madness. If he did that it would grow all over him, he would come out looking like a swamp-log covered with moss. And yet the thought of cold water wouldn’t go away, it was crazy, all right, but it would be so good, so good to just soak in cold water until the itch was all gone.
He started back to his chair and stopped.
Green stuff was sprouting from its overstuffed right arm. It was all over the worn and stringy brown fabric. On the table beside it, where there had been a ring of moisture from his glass, there was now a ring of green stalks and tendrils.
He went out into the kitchen and looked into the trash-bag. More of the green stuff was growing all over the Bacardi bottle he had dropped in earlier. And a Del Monte pineapple chunks can next to the Bacardi bottle. And an empty Heinz catsup bottle next to the Del Monte can. Even his garbage was being overrun.
Jordy ran for the phone, picked it up, then banged it back down. Who could he call? Did he really want anyone to see him like this?
He looked at his arms and saw that his own sweat-glands were betraying him. Among the reddish-gold hairs on his forearms, a new growth was sprouting. It was green.
“I’m turnin’ into a weed,” he said distractedly, and looked around as if the walls would tell him what to do. They didn’t and he sat down in front of the TV again.
It was his eye—what had been his eye—that finally broke him down. The itching just seemed to be going deeper and deeper into his head, and creeping down his nose at the same time.
“I can’t help it,” he groaned, “Oh my Jesus, I can’t!”
He went upstairs, a grotesque, shambling figure with green arms and a forest growing out of one eye socket. He lurched into the bathroom, jammed the plug into the bathtub drain, and turned the cold water faucet on full. His jury-rigged plumbing thumped and groaned and clanked. The sound of cool water splashing into the tub made him tremble all over with eagerness. He tore his shirt off and was not much revolted by the new growth sprouting from his navel. He kicked his boots off, shoved his pants and thermals and skivvies down all at once. His upper thighs were forested with the growth and his pubic hair was twined with the limber green tendrils that sprouted from the plants’ central stalks. When the tub was three-quarters full, Jordy could no longer control himself. He jumped in.
It was heaven.
He rolled and flopped in the tub like some clumsy, greenish porpoise, sending water sheeting onto the floor. He ducked his head and sloshed water over the back of his neck. He shoved his face under and came up blowing water.
And he could feel the new growth-spurt, could feel the weeds that had taken root in his body moving forward with amazing, terrifying speed.
Shortly after midnight, a slumped, slowly moving figure topped the rise between Jordy Verrill’s farm and Bluebird Creek. It stood looking down at the place where a meteor had impacted less than thirty hours before.
Jordy’s east pasture was a sea of growing green weeds. The hay was gone for a distance of a hundred and sixty yards in every direction. Already the growth nearest the creek was over a foot and a half high, and the tendrils that sprouted from the stalks moved with a twisting, writhing movement that was almost sentient. At one point the Bluebird itself was gone; it flowed into a green marsh and came out four feet further downstream. A peninsula of green had already marched ten feet up the bank of Arlen McGinty’s land.
The figure that stood looking down on this was really not Jordy Verrill anymore. It was hard to say what it might be. It was vaguely humanoid, the way a snowman that had begun to melt is humanoid. The shoulders were rounded. The head was a fuzzy green ball with no sign of a neck between it and the shoulders. Deep down in all that green, one faded-blue iris gleamed like a pale sapphire.
In the field, tendrils suddenly waved in the air like a thousand snakes coming out of a thousand Hindu fakirs’ baskets, and pointed, trembling, at the figure standing on the knoll. And on the figure, tendrils suddenly pointed back. Momentarily Jordy had a semblance of humanity again: he looked like a man with his hair standing on end.
Jordy, his thoughts dimming with the tide of greenness that now grew from the very meat of his brain, understood that a kind of telepathy was going on.
Is the food good?
Yes, very good. Rich.
Is he the only food?
No, much food. His thoughts say so.
Does the food have a name?
Two names. Sometimes it is called Jordy-food. Sometimes it is called Cleaves Mills-food.
Jordy-food. Cleaves Mills-food. Rich. Good.
His thoughts say he wants to bang. Can he do that?
What bang?
Don’t know. Some Jordy-thing.
Good. Rich. Let him do what he wants.
The figure, like a badly controlled puppet on frayed strings, turned and lurched back toward the house.
In the glow of the kitchen light, Jordy was a monster. A monster in the true sense, nearly as ludicrous as it was terrifying. He looked like a walking privet hedge.
The hedge was crying.
It had no tears to cry, because the growth was mercilessly abso
rbing every bit of moisture that Jordy’s failing systems could produce. But it cried just the same, in its fashion, as it pulled the .410 Remington from its hooks over the shed door.
It put the gun to what had been Jordy Verrill’s head. It could not pull the trigger by itself but the tendrils helped, perhaps curious to see if the bang would make the Jordy-food more tasty. They curled around the trigger and tightened until the hammer dropped.
A dry click.
Jordy’s luck was always in.
Somehow it got the shells from the desk drawer in the living room. The tendrils curled around one of them, lifted it, dropped it into the chamber, and closed the slide mechanism. Again they helped to pull the trigger.
The gun banged. And Jordy Verrill’s last thought was: Oh thank God, lucky at last!
* * *
The weeds reached the edge of the highway by dawn and began to grow around a signpost that said CLEAVES MILLS, TWO MILES. The round stalks whispered and rubbed against each other in a light dawn breeze. There was a heavy dew and the weeds sucked it up greedily.
Jordy-food.
A fine planet, a wet planet. A ripe planet.
Cleaves Mills-food.
The weeds began to grow toward town.
Cemetery Dance Publications
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Contents
The Departed
Red Rover, Red Rover
Breakbone
The Storybook Forest
Simple
Born Dead
The Baby Store
