I wrote the following short story for Herself to read out (in abridged form) at the
Dark Door: Ghost Stories larp this weekend. This is the full version.
The Thing in the Shrubbery
By DOROTHY
VAN TASSEL
Hailing from Raleigh, N.C., Dorothy van Tassel is a
regular contributor to WEIRD TALES magazine. Her published work includes ‘The
Toads of Zhered-Na’, ‘Captives of the
Space-Kaiser’ and the popular ‘Brick Ridley, Detective Boxer’ series.
IT
was early summer when I moved in to the old Belknap place, having taken a
position at the prestigious university across town. The post came with a more
than ample salary, affording me the opportunity to forego my customary habit of
taking rooms in a lodging house in or near to campus. And so, though my
possessions were few and my needs simple, I indulged myself by purchasing a
property that was far more suitable to a family or at the very least married
couple, with space enough for live-in help.
The
Belknap place was a sturdy two-story house built in a style typical of the area
some hundred or so years ago. Its wooden shutters and roof shingles showed
signs of a little rot and were in need of replacing, and the walls were grimed
with the decades-long growth of ivy and moss which had taken virulent hold of
the building’s exterior, lending it a curiously organic cast, as if the entire
structure had grown out of the hill on which it stood.
But the
construction itself was sound enough, and the agent from whom I purchased the
property assured me that such repairs as were necessary were no more than
superficial. And as soon as I could arrange for electricity and mains water to
be installed, I would be living like a country squire of old, up on the hill on
the edge of town.
If truth
be told, it was not the house that attracted me so much as the grounds in which
it stood. The gardens had long since run wild with tall grasses, weeds and
young trees, but the ghost of what it had once been was still visible to those
with an eye to see. And as a keen amateur horticulturist, I could not help but
speculate, even fantasize, as to what transformation I could wreak in my spare
hours.
True, it
would be long and back-breaking work clearing the scrub, re-laying lawns and
trimming back the wild ivy that encroached upon the windows on every side, but
the result, visible in my mind’s eye as an homage to nineteenth century design,
would be more than worth the effort. The arbor and trelliswork would be
restored, the ornamental beds replanted, and that thick, dark mass of shrubbery
on the north side would be trimmed back to a more manageable and aesthetically
pleasing proportion.
There was
something about that shady shrubbery, that impenetrable thicket of thorns and
tightly packed bushes, which seemed to suck in the light even in the noonday
sun. It was tall too, reaching high above a man’s head, and deep enough to
cover a barn-sized patch of the property, like a remnant of some antediluvian
vegetation when vast forests covered the surface of the Earth long before Man
arose to tame and cultivate the land.
Strangely,
though the spring had been mild and summer yet to reach its peak, the shrubbery
was in somewhat poor health. Even a cursory glance as I inspected my new
surroundings showed its outer foliage to be dry, brittle and spotted brown, as
if fall had already arrived, or some parasite taken hold. I resolved, when time
permitted, to revive that darksome plot of vegetation to its former glory and
made a note to test the quality of the soil and drainage.
Had I
only known, had I but sensed by some preternatural power that some claim to
possess but which has ever eluded me, that the source of the shrubbery’s ill-kempt
condition was something far stranger, far more malevolent, than any mundane plant
disease.
* * *
WITHIN
a couple of weeks I had moved myself in, occupying the more habitable rooms on
the second floor while repairs were made downstairs by two local handymen,
brothers by the name of Japhet and Gomer Rudge. They were a taciturn, brutish
pair, barely speaking to me from the moment they arrived each morning to their
departure as the sun set, and no more than grunting at each other in a debased
form of English that I had heard spoken by the older families in the area.
Still, the Rudges did a decent enough job of working on the old place, though
more skilled tasks like running electrical and telephone wires up the hill and
replacing the ancient oil lamps that hung on every wall I would need to leave
to specialists, as and when the basic structural repairs were completed.
In the
meantime I busied myself at work, getting used to the bustle and thrust of
university life, and spent the long summer evenings in my new gardens, hoe or
fork in hand, hacking at the overgrowth, trimming back climbers, digging up
weeds, and steadily amassing a sizable heap of trimmings which I resolved to
burn once it had dried out. I relished the opportunity to use my hands, to make
those first crucial steps in recapturing the former beauty of the Belknap
place.
The work
was as much a restoration as it was a simple gardening project. As I trimmed
back the grass on one side of the house, I discovered an old patio, long
overgrown and covered by a layer of dirt and old vegetation. When cleared, it
proved to be a delightful stone veranda laid in alternating pink and white,
where a man might entertain friends for a summer soiree, or sit upon a cane
chair and survey his land, pipe in one hand and a glass in the other. Elsewhere
I unearthed the edges of long-abandoned rose beds, stumps of once great elms
and maples and even a small herb garden, now grown wild and chaotic with errant
sweet parsley and dogthyme.
As the
grounds were gradually cleared and the accumulated greenery of decades of
neglect was uprooted, sawn, pruned and ultimately transferred, barrow by laden
barrow, to my ever-growing heap, I began to see ever more vividly what the
gardens once had been, and could be again. Neat lawns with ornamental beds of
rose, stepped terraces and sun traps, shady arbors and dappled trellises. It
would take time, years even for some of the plants I had in mind to truly
settle in, but it would be worth it.
Fortunately
there appeared to be little or no animal infestation on the property, save
insects and other small invertebrates. No molehills were to be found, nor the
telltale signs of rat, mouse or other vermin in and around the house and
gardens. Indeed there was precious little evidence of birds making the most of
the ample roosting opportunities either in the eaves of the neglected roof or
even in the boughs of the surviving trees. I thanked my stars that I would not
have to contend with pests any larger than greenfly as I labored in my grand
endeavor.
If I had
but thought more deeply on that seemingly innocent stroke of luck. Had I but
examined the curious absence of animal life from the Belknap place!
* * *
BY
mid-July, much of the basic garden work had been accomplished, largely by my
hand alone. I had on occasion dragooned the terse Rudges into some of the
heavier tasks, such as sawing logs, heaving stumps out and holding the ladder
steady as I carried out some long overdue lopping of branches, but on the whole
they seemed reluctant to spend much time on such outdoor activities, preferring
to confine themselves to the immediate environs of the house itself. I put this
down to some innate aversion to gardening; perhaps they saw it as woman’s work,
or else simply favored laboring on their own rather than mixing with the
‘master of the house’ as I amusingly thought of myself. To be sure, I had
noticed they acted ill at ease while assisting me outside, muttering darkly
under their breath as they worked and hastening back inside as soon as I had no
further need of them.
I also
noticed that the brothers trudged up the rutted path to the house with heads
held low every morning and fairly hustled back down the selfsame route each
evening, though they had been hard at work all day. It was odd that they kept so
assiduously to the path, for it wound back and forth several times, the better
to accommodate the approach of horse-drawn carriages long since gone. It would
have been simpler for them to have cut straight down the north side of the hill
to the lane and be on their way home. But for whatever reason, perhaps a
respect for the future flower beds and bushes with which I planned to line the
slopes, they avoided the more direct route, dominated by the darksome shrub
that I had yet to address.
So it was
that when the time came to approach the looming shrubbery, shears in hand, I
was quite alone. It seemed even taller up close, thick and wiry with years of
unrestrained growth. Clearly it had grown far beyond the original owner’s
intentions and I resolved to cut it back a good yard or so all round, the
better to see in what state the shrubbery as a whole might be, and what could
be salvaged from it. I set to work with vigorous intent, pruning carefully at
first, then with increasing enthusiasm as I settled into a sort of rhythm,
steadily accumulating a great ring of trimmings as I worked around the shrub in
a circle. Thorny twigs and stems gathered at my feet, snapping neatly between
the shears’ stainless steel blades.
It was a
strange plant, one that at first bore a resemblance to some strain of hawthorn
or Himalayan cotoneaster, but where one would expect to see tight clusters of
small red berries, this instead bore hard, dark brown nutlike pods, as if there
hadn’t been enough rain to sufficiently water the plant into fully fruiting.
Yet that
could not be the case, for elsewhere in the gardens the weeds grew in lush
abundance, there being no shortage of rainfall this year. But here the great
shrub seemed, as I had noticed earlier, quite dry and brittle. Even the
surrounding earth was hard and cracked, leeched of all moisture. Drainage could
have been the culprit, but looking again I saw that the gardens both above and
below the shrub were green and well watered. No, there was something else at
work. Some yet-to-be identified factor that had sucked the vitality from this sorry
patch of land.
Panting
with exertion, I stepped back to survey my work, my boots crunching on brittle
twigs. The shrub looked neater now, its edges trimmed to a uniform depth, but
the revealed growth was if anything less healthy than the outer layer that now
lay in heaps on the earth. More twisted, thorny twigs, matted even tighter, and
where the outer shoots had a semblance of greenness to them, these had leaves
that were more brown than verdant, and bore clusters of those curious nutlike
pods that were even more wizened. On closer examination, they caught the
sunlight in a such a way as to resemble tiny pea-sized shrunken heads, echoing
the savage practices of certain uncivilized tribes of the Amazon. I pocketed a
cluster, thinking to show them to a colleague who taught botany at the
university. Perhaps he would be able to identify this strange shrub, and could
recommend a remedy for whatever ailed it.
I peeled
off my thick leather gardening gloves and was about to return to the house for
a welcome glass of lemonade when the afternoon sun’s rays shone on the dark
thicket. Deep within, far, far out of reach, something caught the light. There
was a suggestion of shape, of outline, that did not match the surrounding wiry
growth. Something dark and solid. Any more than that I could not tell, even
though I leaned in to getter a better look, pushing the stems aside as best I
could, unconscious to the tiny pinpricks the thorns were inflicting on my
exposed palms.
Pressing
into the shrub like this, the sun’s heat diminished almost entirely. I felt a
chill along my face and forearms, and my fingers almost prickled with cold even
in the height of summer. The shape deep in the heart of the shrub remained an
indistinct something far beyond my grasp. I shivered involuntarily, seeing my
breath misting before me, and became aware that my hands had gone a little
numb. With a heave I righted myself and stepped back out of the shrub, my
clothes snagging on the pricks as I withdrew. The lowering sun felt welcome
against the exposed skin and I turned gratefully toward it, feeling warmth
restore feeling to cheeks and fingers.
I
collected the shears and gloves and returned to the house, feeling the icy presence
of the shrub at my back, the nape of my neck almost prickling with the
chillsome memory.
* * *
I chose to avoid that part of the garden for more than a
week, telling myself that I should concentrate on the restoration of the herb
garden and rose beds, but in truth the incident had unnerved me more than I
cared to admit to myself at the time. Of course I had not shared my experience,
not with friends and certainly not with the brutish Rudges, though in hindsight
I can believe that they sensed a change in my demeanor; a certain lessening of
my enthusiastic zeal for the grand gardening project that even they could not
help but notice. I caught them muttering conspiratorially more than once in the
days that followed, beetled brows furrowed, thickly muscled necks inclining their
heads to that part of the grounds that they so determinedly avoided. I did not
think to engage them on the matter, as much a victim of our mutual social gulf
as I was reluctant to put into words that which I had experienced, for fear of
giving substance to my creeping discomfort.
It was by
chance that I wore my old gardening jacket to the university one day, and came
across the nut-pods that I had pocketed with a thought to identifying them. My
spirits somewhat restored in the intervening period, I sought out my botanist
colleague Danvers and showed him the desiccated samples.
“Strange,”
he said, squinting at one of the tiny brown pods, his spectacles on his
forehead as was his custom, “This appears to be a distant cousin of the
hawthorn as you surmised Farley, but these pods are like none I’ve seen growing
in these climes. A transplant, no doubt, in all likelihood brought from
overseas by the original owners.”
“From
where?” I asked my friend, proffering the suggestion that it was some sort of
Himalayan strain, perhaps used to higher altitudes and thinner air.
He rubbed
his chin, considering, then turned to consult the shelves of botany books
behind him. Danvers pulled out a great leather-bound volume from a lower shelf
and heaved it onto his desk, scattering term papers. Humming to himself, with
me at his shoulder, he quickly leafed back and forth through the old pages,
flicking past sketch after sketch of plants, until at length he came across the
one he was after.
“There,”
he proclaimed, stabbing the page with an ink-stained finger.
I craned
closer to look at the drawing of a wiry, thorned stem bearing small nutlike
pods, identical to the sample I had showed him. The long-dead artist had even
caught the suggestion of shrunken head in those wizened pods, like tiny cartoon
faces caught in mid-shriek.
“Crataegus monica, also known as Monk’s
Hawthorn, among other names,” began Danvers, reading from the text. “It’s
extremely uncommon in this region, though some examples are said to survive in
areas where the early colonists settled. Presumably they brought them over for
some reason, though it doesn’t say here what for. Clearly it wasn’t for fruit,
or any medicinal property that I can see. And it certainly wasn’t for its
decorative value!”
He
laughed at his own joke, but seeing my troubled face, trailed off awkwardly.
I thanked
Danvers for his time and promised to bring him over to the Belknap place, once
it was in a fit state to receive guests. He asked to keep the samples that I
had brought him, so that he might do a little more digging in some of the
university’s older texts as time allowed. I was grateful that my friend had
showed interest in the curious plant and yet at the same time, the information
he had uncovered only served to raise more questions. Why would anyone bother
to bring such an unlovely, seemingly purposeless plant over the ocean? Monk’s
Hawthorn, he called it. A strange name.
* * *
BY
August the house was in a decent enough state that I could entertain, and I
wasted no time in inviting a few select acquaintances to join me in a light
supper. With fresh floorboards, newly papered walls, thick rugs and worn but
comfortable furniture scavenged from a variety of house sales and antique
stores, the refurbished dining room, living room and study were all handsomely
fitted out and I felt a quiet pride as I welcomed my fellows from the
university into the hallway.
The
evening passed most pleasantly, with the good food and illicit brandy serving
to loosen all our tongues a little more than normal. Frank opinions on absent
colleagues flowed, often followed by raucous laughter, and the atmosphere of
comradeship filled me with conviviality.
As night
fell, my guests made their farewells and departed, leaving just myself and
Danvers, lounging in well-worn armchairs. He brought up the subject of the
shrub.
“So
where’s that damned strange bush of yours, old man? I’d like to get a look at
it with my own two eyes.”
Emboldened
by the occasion and not a little brandy, I rose to my feet and led him out onto
the north side of the house where, flashlight in hand, I indicated the dark
mass of the shrub a little downhill from us. Some trace of hesitance lingered though,
and I made no move to venture any closer in the twilight. But Danvers paid this
no heed and stepped forward, peering into the gloom.
“Come on
and bring the flashlight up. I can hardly see a thing.” He gestured to me
without looking over his shoulder as he approached the shrub, cursing once as
he stumbled slightly on the uneven ground.
Reluctantly,
I followed, the carefree mood of my fellow lending me courage, though I dared
not admit the unnameable fear I had begun to feel whenever I drew close to this
dreary patch.
In the
darkness, the shrub was an indistinct mass, its upper and outer edges trailing
off into the night so that it occupied my vision entirely. Slowly, I brought
the beam of the flashlight up to illuminate the thicket rearing up mere feet
before us. The great curve of its shorn stems, trimmed so enthusiastically by
myself not so long before, gave it the impression of a mighty wave, frozen in
the instant before it would come crashing down upon our heads.
Oblivious
to my disquiet, Danvers began to poke about in the nearest part of the shrub,
urging me to bring the light in closer. He had an academic’s natural
inclination toward lecturing, and I drew close to him, the better catch his
muttered commentary.
“Hm, yes,
definitely crataegus monica, as we presumed,”
He had twisted off a few twigs and was examining the nut-pods and thorns up
close. “It’s a hardy, if unlovely, strain. Doesn’t need much in the way of
tending, just the bare minimum of sun and water, and really any sort of soil
will do, which is just as well. Look at the earth here!”
He
stooped to scratch around at the edge of the growth, scooping up a handful of
dry chalky dust which he proceeded to rub between his fingers. “Completely
barren, not an ounce of nutrients. This shrub is probably the only thing that
could grow here, given the poor conditions. But given the size of it, it must
have been planted decades again, certainly last century. Hello, what’s that?”
Danvers,
still squatting down, peered deeper into the thicket as the beam of my
flashlight wavered around. He gestured for me to hold it steady and leaned in,
his nose almost brushing the brittle foliage, unconsciously mimicking my
selfsame actions from my own first encounter with the shrubbery. I made to hold
him back, but my hand hesitated inches from his shoulder, and with some
embarrassment I shoved my hand into a pocket to keep it from shaking.
“Farley,
there’s something deeper in, can you see? Blasted hard to see without more
light.” His hand emerged from the thorns and held it out, palm up, in mute
request for the flashlight to be passed to him. I complied and now I was left
in darkness as fractured illumination waved around inside the hedged growth.
He had
his entire head and shoulders deep in the thorny growth now, the mass of
entangled stems quivering and rustling as he used his hands to pry them apart,
straining for a clearer view. From my vantage point behind, I could see nothing
but Danvers’ rear end, protruding almost comically from the wall of vegetation
in the blackness.
“Danvers,
perhaps –” I began, my inexplicable disquiet overcoming my usual reticence, but
my colleague didn’t hear my soft words, such was the thrashing noise he generated
in his efforts to crawl in. His body wriggled further in, leaving only the
soles of his shoes clear of the shrub, and then even they disappeared.
“Yes, I
can definitely make something out. It’s a few more yards in. Must have been
swallowed up as the crataegus grew
over the decades.” His voice was muffled now, not just by the sound of his own
movement, but as if the plant matter itself was soaking up his voice. He
sounded much further off than the scant distance he had crawled in, as
evidenced by the fragmentary flashlight flickering inside.
“By God
it’s chilly,” he muttered, “when did it get so cold?” Despite my nervous state,
the August evening air was quite pleasant where I stood, but I recalled my own
sense of chill within the shrub and again my agitation grew.
“Danvers,
I really think you should come out now. The thorns are quite sharp. Let’s leave
this for the morning.”
“Nonsense,”
came the reply as if from far away, “I’m almost there now. It’s probably
nothing but an old tree stump or –”
His voice
cut off as abruptly as the thrashing of the growth caused by his passage. I felt
a wave of cold envelope me, as if it were the outbreath of some frosty spirit.
I heard Danvers mutter something indistinctly, though it sounded like a
question. Then he screamed.
* * *
I remember little of what took place immediately after
that. I think perhaps I must have pulled Danvers out, given the many cuts and
scratches over my face and hands and my torn clothing. Somehow I must have
overcome the atavistic instinct to flee the second he began that terrible
screaming, and had instead thrust myself into the shrub in his wake, guided by
his shrieks and the madly careening beam of the flashlight. Though this is all
surmise, for in truth I recall precious little until I had dragged his poor
form out onto the dusty earth and continued to heave his weight all the way up
and into the house, where I collapsed panting and drenched in perspiration.
Danvers
lay in a terrible condition on the hallway rug. He was covered in blood from long,
deep scratches inflicted by the bush’s thorny stems, much as I myself had
received, and looked ghastly pale under his wounds. His skin was cold as ice to
the touch and his breath came fast and shallow, misting as he exhaled. But
worst of all was his face. Eyes that did not blink bulged fit to pop, and his
jaw hung agape in a rictus of utmost horror. He would not speak, nor did he
respond to me in any way.
Eventually
I summoned the strength to lurch over to the newly installed telephone in the
study. I summoned help from the faculty’s physician across town and before long
help had arrived to spirit the stricken Danvers and myself away to the
university hospital for treatment.
When
pressed to explain the source of the calamity, I found myself unable to answer
with anything but the vaguest of replies. Perhaps I had been afflicted with a
degree of the hysterical muteness that had so struck my poor colleague. A
natural reaction to the bloody shock of the evening, perhaps. My feeble
response that he had ‘fallen downhill into some bushes’ which I had then pulled
him out of hardly did justice to the extent of his injuries, nor did it explain
the awful state of shell-shock that had been induced in the botanist. But
evidently my own muttered replies and haunted expression were enough to suggest
that I was in no fit state to answer any further questions this night, and I
was duly given a sedative. Before long I slipped into a mercifully dreamless
sleep.
* * *
I was declared fit to leave the hospital the next day,
superficially battered but nothing that wouldn’t heal in a week or two, or so the
doctor assured me. Danvers however was a different matter. His wounds too had
been treated and his severe blood loss addressed, but his underlying state of
mind was little better come morning. When they allowed me in to see him, the
man appeared to have aged ten years overnight. His face was haggard and sunken,
his hair thin and starting to gray. It was as if that damn shrubbery had sucked
the life out of him, much as it must have done to the very soil on which it
grew.
Mercifully
though, he had regained some semblance of his wits, though he still did not
speak. His eyes, though retaining that wide haunted stare, at least blinked
now, and my friend obviously registered my presence at his side. As I looked on
him with dismay, his lips began to move.
I could
hear nothing, and had to bend in close.
“Book,”
he whispered in my ear, little more than a quavering breath, “fetch… book.”
Listening
carefully, I extracted from him the name of some old botany text which I
promised to have sent over from his rooms. I hoped that returning to the
familiar pages of his beloved subject would give him some peace of mind and so
speed his recovery. For my own part, I foresaw no restoration of equanimity until
I had dealt with that loathsome shrub on the northern slope of the Belknap
place. I would not spend another night there with that malevolent growth
squatting on the hillside. I would have it expunged down to its roots.
* * *
THEY
took some coaxing, but eventually I was able to engage the Rudges to destroy
the shrubbery. At first they flat out refused, then, when I pressed them, they suggested
a ridiculous estimate for the work; an estimate which I met, heedless of the
cost, much to their surprise. Finally, with the additional offer of a sizeable quantity
of alcohol, they grudgingly agreed to the work, on the strict understanding
that they would be done and away from my property long before sundown. I shook
each of their meaty hands gratefully and led them up the hill to begin
immediately.
They
worked slowly but steadily, urged on by my constant prodding. I dared not leave
the brothers to it for fear of them slacking and leaving the job half-done. I
shivered inwardly at the thought of being left alone with that darkling shrub
come nightfall. I would well be rid of it, and already began sketching out
plans in my head to replace it with a pleasant lawn edged with hardy but
decorative native flowers.
As the
brutish Rudge brothers continued to hack away at the great bush with saw and
axe, I carted away the refuse to the heap of trimmings that had been
accumulating all summer. By now it was a great mound of dead vegetation,
tinderbox-dry and well suited to my plans to dispose of the wicked thicket once
and for all. I deposited load after barrow-load on top, piling it high with twigs
and stems from the shrub. In the bright daylight, the lengths of thorns and
nut-pods looked quite mundane, little more than old brown twigs. One could
almost believe there was nothing strange, nothing malevolent at all about this shrub,
this Monk’s Hawthorn. Perhaps I had imagined much of what I had felt, the
victim of my own fanciful conjurations. The chill could have been just the
coolness of the shade after all, those mischievous faces in the nuts a mere
trick of the human mind’s ability to give meaning to the random fruits of
nature.
But
Danvers’ screams, and his face – no, I could not dismiss those memories so
easily. Something foul was at work here, and that shrub was the rotten heart of
it. Academic I may be, but a deep primitive sense, such as might have guided
our forefathers to shun certain remote places and bolt their doors against queer
visitors after dark, told me that I was right; evil had bedded down in the
gardens of the Belknap place, and if I was to make it truly my home, then it
would have to be torn out, and burnt down to the roots.
As midday
moved into afternoon, I saw that the Rudges had done well. The shrub had
already lost a good portion of its bulk on one side as they hacked and hewed it
down. I realized that at this rate we would have the heart of the damn thing
cut down well before evening came, and resolved get the bonfire going at once.
* * *
THE
heap crackled merrily, blazing with a glad intensity as it consumed the dead
off-cuts. Eagerly, I shoveled more into the flames and marveled at how quickly
it ignited, yellow tongues of fire fairly racing along the length of each stem,
the nut-pods blackening and popping open with tiny pops of air, the thorns
resisting longer but inevitably succumbing to the furnace. I stood back and
admired the bonfire with satisfaction, then turned to once more urge the Rudges
in their work.
To my
dismay, I saw that they had stopped work and were sat down some distance from
the remaining shrub, which now looked as if some giant had taken a great bite
out of it. They mopped perspiration from their heavy brows, and made it clear
in simple terms that refreshment would be welcome about now, as agreed.
Irritated by this cessation of their work but powerless to budge them until I
complied with the terms of our agreement, I went inside to fetch some cheap
bottles of beer from the bottom drawer of my desk in the study. When I returned
outside, they fairly snatched the drinks from me, cracked lips smacking with
thirst. Slugging back mouthfuls of the stuff, Japhet assured me that he and his
brother would now certainly be able to get the job done in time, and the two
resumed their chopping with gusto.
As I
stepped back inside to refresh myself, I started at an abrupt trilling sound
from the study. It was the telephone. So caught up was I in the great
undertaking at hand, it had taken me quite by surprise. I snatched it up and
answered. It was Danvers.
“Farley,
listen quickly, I haven’t much time.” His voice was weak but insistent, and I
heard much of my friend’s old self in his tone, though he was clearly agitated.
“Are you
out of hospital already?” I inquired, “When I saw you this morning I was sure
the doctors would have you confined to bed for at least a week.”
“I’m at
the university library. The doctors wouldn’t let me leave but I had to find
something out.” There was an energy to his voice, an insistence as he rushed
through the words. “Listen, that book you had sent over earlier, it was an old
compendium of plants and their uses, dating back centuries, as much folklore as
botany. I’d never give it much credence before, but the shrub, what I saw…”
He
trailed off, and I could hear another noise on the telephone line, thumping and
muffled shouts, as if from behind a door. The thumping mirrored the steady
chock-chocking of an axe outside, and I glanced out of the study window to see
the Rudges deep within the shrub, great swathes of chopped brush piled behind
them. Soon they would have the heart of that bleak bush cut out and piled on
the still crackling bonfire.
I didn’t
ask Danvers what he saw, fearful of what he might say, but instead pressed him about
the book.
“Monk’s
Hawthorn, that’s just one of its names. It has other, older names, going back
to the middle ages. Names like Witchbinder.”
I didn’t
understand.
“The book
says that Witchbinder is a poor plant, bearing neither fruit nor flower, save
for its hard nut-pods that have faces like old men. But it is a long-lived and
sturdy shrub, and its densely packed thorns make it ideal as a sort of
hedge-enclosure.”
“For
penning livestock, you mean?” I couldn’t see where he was leading with this
lecture, but clearly there was a purpose, for he began to speak ever faster. I
could hear the banging on the line getting louder, and I was sure I heard
voices shouting his name.
“No
Farley, you don’t understand. The Witchbinder was planted by folks in the old
days to keep out evil. They grew it as a safeguard against… things.” The emphasis on the last word
was unmissable, and again I couldn’t help but wonder what it was he had seen
last night. “Witches, devils, creatures from the dawn of time – the Witchbinder
kept them out. And in some cases…” Again he trailed off with a catch in his
voice. I heard something click on the other end of the line. Something
metallic, mechanical. “Sometimes they planted it on top of things, Farley, things that couldn’t be killed, only
trapped.”
In an
instant I understood what Danvers meant. The truth of the shrubbery.
“I worked
out the growth rate of the shrub, Farley. They must have planted it over two
hundred years ago. Two hundred years
it’s been there. The shrub’s not an evil growth, it’s a prison. And the prisoner – it’s been trapped inside all that time –
not dead, waiting! Waiting to be freed!”
In
horror, I turned my head to look out the study window once again. The Rudges
were no longer in view, and the chopping sound had ceased.
“I – I
saw it. In there. It looked at me, Farley, looked right at me. My God, what a
terrible thing.”
The
shouting on the line was a little clearer now. They were calling Danvers’ name,
pleading with him to open the door.
“I’m
sorry. I can’t keep seeing it in my head. I just can’t,” his voice was so close
to the telephone now. “Whatever you do, do not go into that shrub. Leave it
alone, leave it alone. Goodbye old man.”
There was
a loud crack on the line, followed by a heavy thud. I dropped the receiver.
Stunned,
I looked outside. I could see something lying over the great pile of trimmings
which had formed the mighty shrub’s bulk, its armor, its shield between the
world of men and things that should not
be. I realized I was looking at the body of Gomer Rudge. He appeared to be missing
his lower half. Of his brother, there was no sign.
Numbly, I
saw that the earth by Rudge had been disturbed. It was torn up, as if by
something heavy and jagged, and formed a filthy dirt-strewn track or a trail of
sorts, leading from the deepest recess of the shrub, across the lawn and over
the pink-and-white patio to the house. I let out a shuddering breath. The
window pane misted.
There was
a scratching at the study door behind me.
END
