Tales of Terror from the Tunnel's Mouth Read online

  ‘Oh,’ I said with a nod, and looked out of the window.

  ‘Do you have an interest in botany?’ she asked.

  ‘Botany?’ I said, deliberately nudging the Bishop to no effect.

  ‘The study of plants,’ she said, tapping her fingers together again as if she had just described something utterly thrilling.

  ‘Not really,’ I said with a slight curl of my lip. ‘Does that matter?’

  ‘Not in the least,’ she said. ‘Not in the least.’

  g

  The Glasshouse

  Oscar had not seen his father for nearly two years and they sat together as virtual strangers in the morning room, the slow, insistent beat of a hammer audible in the background. His father linked his long fingers together in his lap, tapping the thumbs in time with the hammer.

  ‘How is school?’ he said with a broad smile that Oscar found unaccountably annoying.

  ‘School is well enough, Father,’ he replied.

  His father’s smile quivered a little at the coldness of Oscar’s response, but only momentarily. Algernon Bentley-Harrison had faced down tigers in the forests of Bhutan and fought off the enthusiastic attentions of headhunters in New Guinea; cheerfulness in the face of adversity was his stock-in-trade.

  ‘Well enough?’ said Mr Bentley-Harrison. ‘Don’t you have anything to report at all?’

  ‘I’m not a scholar, sir,’ said Oscar, ‘if it is academic achievements you are hoping to hear about.’

  ‘Nonsense. You’re a very intelligent boy.’

  ‘I didn’t mean to say that I was not intelligent, Father. I just meant that I do not have whatever love of words, of books and numbers, it takes to be a scholar. My interests lie elsewhere.’

  ‘As do my own, my boy,’ said his father with a conspiratorial nod. ‘I share your impatience with the confines of the classroom. There is so much more of interest in the world than can ever be contained in even the most comprehensive of libraries. That is what takes me to the ends of the earth, Oscar. It is the search for knowledge! It may seem a rarefied species of knowledge, certainly – but when you are of an age to accompany me, you too will see the importance of the botanical collections I have –’

  ‘But Father,’ interrupted Oscar with a sigh, ‘I have no interest whatsoever in flowers.’

  If Oscar had slapped his father round the face, it could not have had a more profound effect. Flowers were Mr Bentley-Harrison’s life, his passion.

  Mrs Bentley-Harrison had once joked at a dinner party that she was not at all sure which her husband would rush to save first should there be a fire – his wife and son or his precious orchids. The guests had laughed, but there was a bitter aftertaste to the joke for the Bentley-Harrisons; they both knew there was no doubt about it: Algernon would save the orchids first.

  ‘No interest in flowers?’ said Mr Bentley-Harrison. ‘But . . . but . . . I do not understand. You’ve always been interested in them in the past.’

  ‘No, Father,’ said Oscar, shaking his head but looking away with a sullen expression. ‘I’ve tried to tell you often enough, but you wouldn’t listen.’ He turned to look at his father. ‘You never listen, sir.’

  Mr Bentley-Harrison’s fingertips moved to his temples and began to describe concentric circles in his pale skin.

  ‘But it has long been my dream that you and I –’

  ‘That’s just it,’ said Oscar. ‘It has been your dream, Father. It was never mine. You’ve never once asked me what I want to do with my life!’

  This last sentence came out a little more loudly and a little more aggressively than Oscar had intended, so he was surprised when, instead of chastising him, his father merely stared silently into his lap and solemnly lowered his hands.

  ‘Father?’ said Oscar, when Mr Bentley-Harrison had still not responded after what seemed like several minutes.

  ‘And what is it that you would rather do with your life?’ said his father, without looking up. Oscar had never heard him talk in that way before. His voice sounded cold and mechanical. ‘Eh? Come, let us hear what it is you intend as your life’s work.’

  ‘I should like to start my own business,’ said Oscar. ‘I should like to open a shop like the one Grandfather had when he started out.’

  ‘A shop?’ said Mr Bentley-Harrison slowly, as if he were trying a strange and foreign word for the very first time. ‘A shop?’

  Algernon Bentley-Harrison’s father had owned a shop. Algernon had been forced against his will to work there until he had begged his mother to allow him to go away to university. His refusal to follow his father into the business had been a terrible disappointment to the old man. It looked as though the Fates were finally going to punish Algernon Bentley-Harrison for his disloyalty.

  ‘Grandfather and I talked often about me starting up the old business. He gave me lots of good advice. I shouldn’t need a great deal of money, Father, and we have so very much.’

  Mr Bentley-Harrison looked at his son. It was true that the old man had taken a special interest in the boy and infected him with his commercial zeal. It was also true that since the old man had died and Algernon had sold the business, they did indeed have an awful lot of money. But he was not about to see it used to such pedestrian ends.

  ‘I’m afraid I need the money, Oscar,’ said his father. ‘The new glasshouses are very expensive, both to build and to maintain. They have to be constantly heated to very specific temperatures, you see.’

  ‘But Father –’

  ‘And I have earmarked most of the money to finance further expeditions in search of new species with which to stock the new buildings, expeditions I had hoped you might accompany me on, Oscar.’

  ‘You’re spending all of Grandfather’s money on yourself?’ said Oscar, his voice now as cold as his father’s.

  ‘It is my money now, Oscar,’ he replied. ‘But in answer to your question, I am spending my father’s money on the quest for knowledge, on the advancement of science. There can be no finer use to which it could be put.’

  Father and son looked at each other for some moments before Oscar scraped back his chair and got to his feet.

  ‘Excuse me, Father,’ he said as Mrs Bentley-Harrison entered the room. ‘I have some school work to do.’

  ‘Oscar?’ said his mother, seeing his tight-lipped expression. ‘Is everything all right?’

  ‘Quite all right, Mother,’ he replied.

  ‘Algernon?’ she said, turning to Mr Bentley-Harrison as her son walked out of the room.

  ‘Everything is well, my dear,’ he said with a bitter smile. ‘Please don’t fuss so. The boy is old enough to understand that he cannot have everything he wants.’

  He picked up the copy of The Times on the table and began to read, while his wife remembered how, long ago, she too had learned that particular lesson.

  Oscar had told her that he was going to inform his father of his desire to open a shop, and she could sympathise only too easily with Oscar’s lack of enthusiasm for Algernon’s obsession. She had no interest in botany either.

  This would have shocked her husband even more than his son’s admission, for she had feigned an interest for nearly twenty years now, hoping that if she shared his passion, their marriage might become something more than the loveless match it truly was. In the end, she had settled for being an invaluable assistant and attentive audience. Love was for books, she had concluded. Love was for other people.

  Oscar, meanwhile, had gone to his room, striding with a fury that burnt like ice, and stood at the window, staring out. He could see the builders milling about as they put the finishing touches to his father’s monstrous glasshouse in preparation for the precious plants that would soon arrive.

  Oscar had a vivid image of his father showing his fellow botanists around his new realm, waving his hands this way and that, while his audience sighed approvingly and muttered jealously. Suddenly Oscar knew that the only thing in the world that mattered to him was to make that image a fantasy
, to stifle his father’s smug grin before it was even born.

  g

  A week later and the work was complete. The windows dazzled in the sunlight and a simulacrum of a jungle coiled and billowed in the Turkish-bath steam-heat inside the glasshouse.

  Oscar saw less and less of his parents once the builders had left. Plants his father had been forced to grow elsewhere due to their size had been delivered and dragged and carried across the lawns and placed with care and attention he had never received.

  Oscar’s mother followed his father everywhere among the cast-iron columns, ceaselessly jotting in a huge notebook as she was given instructions on the needs of each plant. Oscar’s needs had never been so assiduously noted or tended to.

  These plants were like cuckoo chicks in the nest. Oscar hated them. He feared them. He imagined them growing and multiplying in the tropical heat of the glasshouse, growing and spreading, their coiling tendrils twitching and trembling.

  To make matters worse, Oscar’s father seemed to have a particular fondness for plants of the most revolting appearance. Only the previous day, he had shown Oscar a plant that he had discovered on his trip to the jungles of South America the year before.

  ‘Have you ever seen anything like it?’ he said.

  ‘No, sir,’ Oscar replied. He had not. The plant was spectacularly ugly.

  ‘I have never come across another plant that grows so fast and with such vigour. Why, I think that if we stood here long enough, we might almost see it growing with our own eyes.’

  The plant was already huge. It had a fat central stem topped by a bulbous crown. The plant was dark green, but Oscar noticed that it also had thin blood-red veins running through it. There was something so utterly repulsive about its appearance that he had to quell a desire to back away.

  The plant had sent out tendrils to coil and climb through the branches of neighbouring trees, and from each of these hung a curious dull-green sphere.

  ‘Are they fruit or flowers?’ said his father as he pointed them out. ‘We just don’t know. We shall have to wait and see, shan’t we, eh? I can’t even be certain what phylum of plant life this is. I know you say you have little interest in botany, my boy, but surely this must whet your appetite. It’s fascinating, is it not?’

  Oscar did not share his father’s curiosity, but at least this plant was merely ugly. Others were poisonous, and the glasshouse positively bristled with needle-sharp thorns and saw-like serrations. He couldn’t wait to get out of there and away from his father, away from those revolting plants.

  His feelings of resentment for his father’s obsession, his disgust at the plants and the fetid, stultifying atmosphere of the glasshouse surged together into a kind of nausea.

  If Oscar was to be denied what he wanted in life, then he would see how his father enjoyed having his dreams crushed.

  g

  Oscar was feeling rather pleased with himself. He had surprised himself with his own ingenuity. He felt a little taller now that he had taken charge of his own fate. He was sure that his grandfather would have been proud of him.

  He had discovered that just a small amount of salt in the water used to spray the leaves of his father’s precious plants would have the most disastrous effect.

  And there was such a delicious pleasure in seeing his father actually spraying the poison on to his own plants.

  Mr Bentley-Harrison was inconsolable when his prized orchids shrivelled and died mysteriously. The symptoms did not quite match anything in his books. He was baffled. He was wretched. Oscar had to stop himself gloating.

  And if he ever felt the slightest ounce of remorse he simply had to remember his father’s cold refusal to even discuss his desire to go into business.

  Oscar was clever. He did not overdo the salting of the water and made sure that he added the salt only before the watering was done.

  Watering cans and spray pumps were washed out and then new ones bought, but still the mysterious withering continued. Plant after plant succumbed. Oscar’s father grew more and more despondent.

  He refused any of the gardeners or servants access to the glasshouse and forbade Oscar or his mother to touch the plants in case they were inadvertently transmitting some as yet unrecorded disease. Oscar did not need to be asked twice. He had no desire to touch those disgusting plants.

  It became harder to salt the water now that his father had taken personal control over every aspect of watering and feeding, but that just made the accomplishment of the task all the more rewarding.

  Some days had passed since his last salting trip and Oscar was keen to get into the glasshouse to carry out his work. He had not seen his parents since breakfast. His father had taken even less interest in Oscar as he devoted himself utterly to trying to resuscitate his precious plants.

  Oscar assumed they were in the glasshouse and waited impatiently for them to reappear so that he might slip in and wreak some more damage.

  But no one could spend so much time in that sweathouse without a break. Oscar had sat near the door for hours now. They must be elsewhere. In any case, all he had to do was check.

  Oscar wandered into the glasshouse, trying very hard to appear carefree. Almost as soon as he did so, he was struck by the fact that the air seemed even more oppressively humid than usual.

  But it was more than that. There was a smell: a sweet, intoxicating smell he could not place. It was a rich and heady perfume, a perfume he did not recognise but which pulled him on, like a bee to a rose.

  Turning a corner, he saw his parents and muttered a curse. They were standing beside the huge, ugly plant his father had shown him weeks before. His father had his back turned to him.

  It was not until Oscar went closer that he noticed that his father’s feet did not quite reach the ground. He appeared to be levitating, hovering about two or three inches from the floor. Then Oscar noticed a six-inch length of thorn sticking out of his father’s back.

  He stepped forward and saw that both his parents were skewered by huge thorns which seemed to have leapt from the earth and killed them both.

  The thorn that had murdered his mother had driven itself through her notebook, pinning it to her chest. She too dangled a few inches from the air, held aloft by the thorn.

  Both parents stared ahead, eyes open, mouths agape – a look of shock on his mother’s face, a look more like wonder on his father’s. Limply hanging in front of each of them was one of the plant’s strange fruits or flowers, but now they looked like split and deflated balloons.

  Oscar’s heart thundered in his chest. He was shocked. Horrified. But he was surprised at how quickly these feelings began to disappear.

  Oscar would never have actually wished his parents dead. Absolutely not. But neither, he was suddenly sure, would he miss them so very much. And any sadness he felt would be eased by the knowledge that Grandfather’s money would now pass to him in its entirety and he would fulfil his dream of opening a shop.

  There was something rather wonderfully ironic about his father falling victim to one of his own stupid plants. Despite all his mollycoddling, despite all the money he had lavished on them, still these plants did not return his love.

  g

  g

  Oscar looked at his mother again and was shocked to see that inside her open mouth a tiny shoot was emerging. He shivered. The plant was growing inside her. Was she feeding it?

  Oscar didn’t want to think about it. He would call a servant and fetch the police or a doctor, or whomever one called in a situation like this. Then he saw his mother’s eyes flicker and blink. Good God: she was still alive! Perhaps his father was too.

  Oscar instinctively took a step forward but checked himself. No. No. He must not go near that plant. Too dangerous. She might be alive but she was beyond help, he told himself. They both were.

  He would fetch a servant. In a little while. No purpose would be served by hurrying. Oscar tried unsuccessfully to stop himself thinking of the shop he would open with the money he would i
nherit, money that now would not be wasted on these hellish plants. He backed away and something touched the back of his head.

  He spun round, expecting to see the horrified face of one of the servants, but saw instead one of the strange green fruits.

  Before he had to time to register that this one was intact, it burst, releasing a fine dust of spores into his face – his nose, his mouth, his eyes.

  Something in the spray of spores was paralysing him, but while he could still move his arms, he reached out to the tendril from which the fruit hung. It was covered with long white hairs. As soon as he touched one, there was a noise like a whip being cracked, and a powerful blow hit Oscar in the chest, just below his heart.

  In spite of its force, the blow did not knock him over, because it had been dealt by a two-foot-long thorn that sprang up from the roots of the dreadful plant with startling speed and with the shocking snap of a mousetrap. The thorn impaled him and then held him in its grip.

  Oscar wondered fleetingly whether he was dead, but he knew that he was not. Neither was he in pain. Something in the spores or the thorn had anaesthetised him.

  But though he did not feel pain, he was, however, aware of the tendril that had already begun to emerge from the thorn, a tendril that in only a matter of hours would emerge from his mouth and, as he already saw, looking towards his mother out of the corner of his eye, would open up into a small and rather lovely flower of a deep and iridescent blue.

  *

  When the story came to an end I gasped involuntarily. I felt as firmly held in its grip as Oscar had been by that terrifying plant, as paralysed as he and his poor parents had been.

  I had a horribly clear picture in my mind of that last fateful scene. I seemed to feel the oppressive heat and stale atmosphere of that glasshouse. I could see every leaf and tendril of that murderous plant and smell the scent from its blue flowers.

  I also had the distinct impression that there was someone else present – someone in the dappled shadows of the glasshouse. But as sharp as the image had been, it disintegrated in seconds and was gone, like a drawing inscribed in sand and washed away by the incoming tide.