And then the door was open, and I was in the world again.
But not free of that place. There was an investigation, of course, and the policeman who came insisted that I come with him. This was the following day, for I had fallen into a deep sleep from which I didn't wake until late into the night. While asleep strange dreams had assaulted me, with pale purple, delicate flowers caressing me as a lover's fingers might; and, just before waking, there was another caress, this one harsher and more lasting, which made me cry out and awaken.
A Detective Molson had taken my call, just before he was slated to go off duty; and, once I had convinced him that I was not a crank, and that, indeed, a man was missing, he made me promise to meet him at the glass house in the morning and then hung up.
The day was cloudier than the previous one had been. For some reason this made the greenhouse, perched on its grassy hill, less ominous-looking. Perhaps the presence of the policeman's car parked next to it also added to its ordinariness.
Molson, on seeing me approach by foot, got out of his car and waited for me. He proved to be a tall, angular man with a sallow face and thinning, blond-gray hair: he looked as though he had gotten little sleep the previous night, or any night for quite some time.
I thought he would shake my hand but he didn't. I knew he was studying me with his deep-set, tired eyes.
"You say you work just down the hill?" He flicked a finger in the direction of the Angerton Institute, the low, wide, rectangular brick building that, despite its squatness, and its location in a valley, managed to dominate the landscape.
"Yes, I do," I answered noncommittally.
His eyes rested laconically on the Institute.
"Grow flowers there, do you?"
"Study them, actually. It's an Agronomical Research Center. We make organic plant hybrids and such."
His tired eyes showed mild interest.
"Like cloning carrots?"
I looked for a flicker of smile on his pale face but found none.
"No, detective," I explained, "we don't clone anything. We haven't even bothered to try. Actually, we're dedicated to cross breeding within the various species of violets. There are five hundred of them, you know—species, that is—and we've been combining the better traits of the hardier varieties and seeking to—"
His grunt of disinterest cut me off, and now he indicated the greenhouse with a slight movement of his head.
"So the conservatory here is full of violets?"
"Yes."
"Let's have a look, then."
He made a movement toward the metal door, and I froze.
With his hand on the door he turned to regard me, and again I saw a flicker of interest on his features.
"You coming, Mr..." He checked his notebook: "...Corman?"
''I..."
For a moment I couldn't move, thinking of that slim green hand on my arm, but then the immediate image of the policeman, his curiosity aroused, supplanted it and I nodded.
"Of course."
I entered behind him, and moved aside as he insisted on closing the door behind me.
"Wouldn't want to let the hot air out, would we?" he said, mildly.
"I suppose not."
It was stifling in the glass house—worse than it had been the day before. And now a sickly-sweet odor topped the other aromas of fecundity—an odor that hadn't been present yesterday.
Molson had detected it, too.
"Smells like human death, Mr. Corman," he said, moving off toward the tangle of flowers in the back of the building.
Hands trembling, I followed.
But we found nothing. There was not the slightest trace of Lonnigan—not his body, not his clothing or his watch. I stood by while Detective Molson acted like a policeman, poking here and there and looking for whatever he expected to find, but in the end Molson stood up slowly, turned his wan, unreadable face to me and said, "Are you sure you saw Lonnigan disappear in here, Mr. Corman?"
"Yes, I did," I said.
"Did you actually see him come to bodily harm?"
"No, I didn't. As I told you on the phone last night, I heard him scream—"
"You heard him scream? That's all? You saw no body, no weapon, no assailant?"
"As I told you—"
"Mr. Corman, I was very tired last night. I worked two shifts back to back, and then I went home to an empty apartment because my wife left me three weeks ago. All I remember you telling me last night was that you were sure that this man..." he consulted his notebook, "...Lonnigan, is dead."
There was annoyance in his tired eyes now.
"Can you tell me for sure that this fellow is dead, Mr. Corman?"
"I suppose not," I said.
He closed his notebook, and, shaking his head and stepping around me, moved toward the door at the far end of the building.
"There's really nothing else I can do now, Mr. Corman," he said, not turning around to speak to me. He opened the door, brushing aside the tangle of stems that seemed to have grown up suddenly near the knob, and walked outside.
He called back, "Telephone me in forty eight hours if he doesn't show up, and we'll file a missing persons report."
Then, yawning once, he folded his lanky body into his car and drove away.
I stood for a moment in the middle of the hothouse, shaking with fear, watching that small tangle of stems which Detective Molson had pushed aside twist and turn upon itself, before I bolted for the door and into the comforting gray air outside.
"Tell me this again?" Marsha Reed said sternly. Compared to Administrator Reed, my interview with Detective Molson had been a pleasure.
Behind her neat wide desk, she sat prim and straight, her white lab coat, always worn, as starched and pressed as if she had put it on just before my knock on her office door. She was a small woman who nevertheless loomed large, and her dark brown eyes, magnified behind overlarge glasses, were as filled with quiet fire as Molson's had been with tiredness.
I repeated to her what had happened with Lonnigan, and with the policeman.
"And this Detective Molson was allowed into the nursery, without my permission?" Reed said.
I noticed that her small hands, with their small fingers and short-trimmed nails, had not moved an inch from their place on her blotter, where they rested folded in front of her.
"This happened yesterday, after hours. And I thought it best to call the police last night. As you know, I don't have your home phone number. .
There was a tinge of red on her cheeks.
"Mr. Corman, what you did was inexcusable. And I won't excuse it. At the next board meeting, which is tomorrow, I will recommend that you be either suspended or expelled from Angerton Institute."
She waited for my reaction, and I gave none, except to say, holding my temper, "This has been coming for a long time. Now you have your excuse."
Now her cheeks grew red with anger, and she unclasped her hands and pounded her small fists on the blotter.
"Get out!"
"Gladly," I said. "But before I go, I want it on the record that I turned down your advances toward me only because I didn't think it was proper to become involved with you in the workplace. It wasn't that I wasn't attracted to you—"
"Out!" she repeated, nearly choking on the word, and it gave me secret pleasure to see the redness deepen on her cheeks, and in the hollow of her throat.
In the lab, Eagleton and Smyth were slightly more sympathetic to my plight.
"Cow," Smyth muttered, under her breath. She was cow-like herself, large and slow, but not without somber wit. She was a wonderful darts player, and knew how to drink a pint.
Eagleton laughed his high, cackling laugh. But his features, even paler and thinner than detective Molson's, regained their solemnity.
"What do you really think happened to old Lonnie-pooh?" he said, referring to Lonnigan, with whom he had never gotten along.
"I don't know..." I said. "I don't want to know."
"He was doing rotten work
," Smyth said curtly, without looking up from her microscope. "Weird and rotten."
"He was definitely using his grant work for other things rather than what it was apportioned for," Eagleton said. His pale head nodded in satisfaction. "I told him, but of course he screamed at me to keep to myself."
"He was a cow, too," Smyth said.
Between them, I said, quietly. "I thought I saw the violets in the greenhouse move."
Eagleton snorted, and for a moment Smyth showed no reaction, but then she looked up from her eyepiece to stare at me.
"What?"
"I said, I thought I saw the violets in Lonnigan's greenhouse move"
"As in, wiggle?" Smyth said, and I knew she was ready to either laugh or scoff.
"Skip it, then."
"No," Smyth said, suddenly serious. "Tell me."
"Did they dance, Corman?" Eagleton laughed. "A little conga line, perhaps?"
"Shut up, James," Smyth said, continuing to regard me. To me she said, "Tell me what you saw."
"I saw.. .what I thought was a hand. A green hand. Lonnigan brought me out there to show me something, and said that no matter what happened I should stick with him. He was acting very strangely. Also, I had a premonition that something terrible was going to happen, and I felt he wanted to pull me into it with him. He was not himself at all. You know the way he was, nearly always arrogant and rude. He wasn't like that at all yesterday evening. He pulled me from my bench, nearly pleading with me to come with him."
"What did he say? Exactly?" I was a bit nervous at the seriousness of Smyth's face.
"Not. . . much at all. He merely said I had to come into the violet room with him. He was very insistent."
"And when you got out to the greenhouse?"
Eagleton laughed. "That was when the dance began, of course!" Ignoring Eagleton, Smyth kept her eyes on me.
"When we got to the greenhouse he rushed in ahead of me, and then started moving deeper into the room. A... shadow seemed to fall, though it was still before twilight. And then he disappeared into the violets at the far end of the nursery, and I heard him scream, and when I turned to run it got very dark. And as I reached for the doorknob I thought a hand held me back. A green hand."
Smyth stared at me for a further moment, then nodded and turned suddenly back to her microscope.
"Interesting," she said.
"Is that all you have to say?"
She ignored me, and Eagleton started tittering then.
As I turned to leave Smyth said after me, "Don't worry about Administrator Reed. I've got a few things on her that will keep her quiet."
But I was not thinking about Marsha Reed as I left, but about that green hand, and those twisting vines.
Detective Molson was back the following day, with two blowzy looking uniformed men with shovels. After consulting with Administrator Reed, the three policemen went into the greenhouse with the Administrator in tow. Through the small window in my office I could see her shouting at them, and I watched as they disappeared into the glass building.
They were out there a long time, but finally Marsha Reed emerged, followed by Detective Molson and the two lumbering, unhappy-looking uniformed cops behind him. The two blowzy fellows were dirt-stained and sweaty, and I saw Molson wave them back to their car while the detective followed Administrator Reed, who looked quite angry, back down toward our building.
Inside, I heard the administrator stop outside my door, shout, "Here it is!" and march off.
There was a knock at the door.
"Come in," I said, unenthusiastically.
Detective Molson, as expected, entered, closing the door behind him. He looked slightly better rested than the day before.
"Mind if I ask a few more questions, Mr. Corman?" he said. He did not make a move to sit down in the chair opposite my desk, but rather leaned against the closed door, perhaps to prevent my flight.
"I thought you wanted me to ring you up in forty-eight hours if Ralph Lonnigan didn't show up?" I said.
He shrugged, and pulled a cigarette pack from his coat pocket. He shook one out into his hand and lit it without asking my permission.
Around cigarette smoke he said, "I thought a bit on what you said, and decided there was more to it than I thought."
"Oh?"
He nodded. "For instance, I'm very curious as to why you waited so long to call the police." He pulled his notebook out and flipped to the page he wanted. "You told me yesterday that. . . you fell asleep on getting home, and then called when you woke up." He cocked an eyebrow at me. "Is that correct?"
"Yes."
He paused to blow smoke. "I find it odd that you fell asleep after such a fright. How do you account for that?"
I thought about this, and realized I had no answer that would make him happy.
"I. . . can't account for it. Perhaps I was in shock."
"In shock? A man in shock would not be able to call the police at all."
"I was upset."
"So upset that you slept?"
"Look..."
Suddenly I realized that I had been burdened with an overwhelming sense of tiredness after the touch of that violet stem, which I had taken for a slim hand...
"I don't know what to say."
Molson harrumphed.
"I mean," I continued, "That's what happened, but I don't know how to account for it to you."
Suddenly he shrugged, flipping a page of the notebook.
"Be that as it may, Mr. Corman, could you tell me a bit more about what Mr. Lonnigan was doing out in the greenhouse with you to begin with?"
"He asked me to come out to see something with him. Something he was working on."
"And that was...?"
"I don't know."
Now his un-tired eyes became hard as stones.
"Do I have this right, Mr. Corman—you say Mr. Lonnigan asked you to come out to the greenhouse with him but he didn't say why?"
"He was very secretive about his work, Detective Molson."
"Can you tell me what Mr. Lonnigan was working on at this time?"
"In general terms I can."
"In general terms, then."
I was aware of his scrutiny, which was meant to unnerve me. To some extent, it did, but I plowed on.
"He was working on genetic mutations in the perennial sweet violet. It is also known as V. odorata. It's a species of violet with stemless flowers—in other words, the flowers grow on stems separate from the leaves."
I turned to rummage in the wreckage of my desk, producing a copy of Palmer and Fowler's Fieldbook of Natural History. Flipping through the pages, I stopped at the appropriate page.
"Here," I said, as Molson bent down to look at the flower my finger pointed to. "That's what it looks like. Notice how the petals have veins, and the bottom is possessed of a spur."
Molson straightened.
"I fail to see—"
For some reason, my patience had worn thin. I nearly blurted out the first thing that came to my head at that point—which would only have gotten me in trouble—but instead I said, "The point is, detective, that Ralph Lonnigan was supposed to be working on making a hardier, more productive version of V. odorata, whose oils of essence is used to manufacture perfume. Two million of V. odorata yield scarcely a pound of oil. But Lonnigan was doing something else with his violets."
"And what was that?"
"I have no idea."
Molson closed his notebook with a snap.
"I don't mind telling you, Mr. Corman, that I don't believe you. And I can be a very persistent lad when I want to be."
Something about his continued prodding, his developed meanness, made me snap.
"I know why you don't like me, detective. It's because I saw you vulnerable yesterday. You told me your wife left you and now you resent me because you appeared weak. Well, I don't care. I've got my own problems, detective, and I have little enough time to think about yours."
His eyes became even harder.
"I'll
be back, Mr. Corman," he said, nodding at me. "You can count on that. And I'll be back again and again, until I break this thing or you." "Fine," I said, suddenly only wanting him to leave.
I turned back to my desk, and in a few moments when I looked back, the door to my cubicle was still open, but Molson was gone.
I stayed late that day, watching twilight turn to darkness as I straightened my affairs on my desk, and somewhere after the moon rose I saw a large figure, who I recognized as Abigail Smyth, leave the building to the right of my window and make her ponderous way up the hill. I saw her silhouetted against the red rising moon for a moment, and then she walked to the entrance of the nursery and went in.
I watched her silhouette make its way through the glass panels, and then, as she moved deeper into the greenhouse, she was hidden by a wall of leaves.
I went home; and it was only as I began to drift off to sleep that I realized that the spot where I had seen Smyth vanish into the tangle was a spot that had been cleared of flowers the week before. I knew because it had been one of my own projects that had been there, and I knew that the panels of glass on that side were now clear straight to the other side of the building.
I rose out of the dreams, veined, stemless flowers holding me in their grip, to the sound of loud knocking on the door to my flat.
"Just a minute!" I called, rising and throwing on a robe.
Even as I reached the door, sleep was yet leaving me; but my dreams and slumber left me altogether as I opened the door to find Detective Molson, stern-faced and with his two beefy gravediggers, standing at my threshold.
"Detective—"
"Mr. Corman, I'm going to have to insist that you come with me." "Of course," I said. "But what—"
"Just get dressed, please."
I nodded and pulled myself into clothes, while the two uniformed policemen moved into the flat, fingering my things. One of them tittered over a statuette my mother had given me, a reproduction of Rodin's "Thinker." "Look a' this, Willie!" he said, holding it up for his friend's scrutiny. "It's a fellah on a toilet bowl! And wiffout anythin' to read!"
Hornets and Others Page 16
