Blodgers. Quite right. You may go.”
In the few minutes while my father’s back was turned and he confronted Blodgers, the plant had grown perhaps another five or six feet, because now it towered over both of them. Dad turned back around and saw that the artichoke section was now at least ten feet tall and it was starting to open. At the top, inside a greenish-yellow, pulpy mass, was what was at least a startlingly realistic replica of the face of the late Frederick Darblethwaite, briefly Lord Cheebleford.
Maybe not so late.
It opened its eyes.
“Jim,” it said. “I know how this appears, but things are not quite what you think.”
“Really? What makes you say that?”
“If you will just come a bit closer, I will explain.”
Dad stepped closer, just a bit. The stalks rattled. The outermost tendrils brushed against his face. Instantly he hurled himself backwards.
“Oh, Jim, old chum, if only you were where I am now, it would be so much clearer. You would understand.”
“Well I don’t intend to be where you are,” he said. “Never.” He looked around for the shovel, but Blodgers, before leaving as instructed, had removed it.
That was the beginning of a tug-of-war of sorts, as my dad was before long just as bewitched or obsessed by the plant as his late friend had been. Because he was less and less sure his friend was entirely “late.” He got another folding chair and sat just outside of the reach of the tendrils, for hours, while the plant-thing tried to lure him closer. Blodgers, as long as the thing spoke with his master’s voice, considered it to be his master, and therefore took orders, saw to the running of the estate and the direction of the servants, and, to hear him tell it, all was placidly right with the world.
My dad listened endlessly, and spoke with the thing, as they went over old times and their old adventures. It knew all his jokes. It knew things he had confessed in intimate moments when they were such danger together that it seemed unlikely they would ever see another dawn. Even more strangely, it began to look more and more like Freddy. The face became clearer. Then as the artichoke-thing opened wider, the entire head emerged, and then his shoulders and upper body.
It was about that point that my dad had a very close call. He fell asleep in the chair, and while he slept the tendrils had grown even longer, wrapped themselves around the chair, and were ready to yank him into the thing’s gaping gullet, when he suddenly awoke and leapt free, and crashed into a table of potted plants, sending them spilling onto the floor. He lay half stunned and only slowly did he realize what the plant-thing that looked and spoke like Freddy was actually saying. It was repeating numbers, formulae, top secret stuff, the very things the two of them had worked on during the war, on which the security of the Free World now depended. So, for all he had yet another perfectly justified excuse to run screaming into the night in the conventional manner, it was his duty to stay here, for security reasons, to make sure that those secrets didn’t get out.
Shortly thereafter, the artichoke-like section opened all the way, and Freddy stepped free, onto the stone floor.
It wasn’t him, of course. It wasn’t human. It was green, and dripping, and comprised of fibers and leaves and tendrils, like one of those Renaissance paintings in which the human form is made up from fruits and vegetables, but it spoke with Freddy’s voice, and when Blodgers discovered it, he sent for the valet, and the two of them got the thing cleaned up, and touched up with a little makeup, and dressed in the proper clothes, and before long it could more or less pass, at least in a dim light, as Lord Cheebleford.
My dad had dinner with it on several occasions. There was a lot more meat on the menu than there had been previously. Freddy had been somewhat of a vegetarian, a preference he’d picked up in India. But now, it was meat and more meat, served almost raw. But he gradually came to look more human. The tendrils and fibers on his face blended together into something that looked more like skin, particularly if powdered with a bit of talc.
The tenor of the conversation changed. It was no longer about past adventures, or military secrets. Now, quite openly, the thing spoke of the trans-human condition, how, once he’d “passed over” Freddy had come to understand things from an entirely new and broader perspective. It spoke of conditions on other planets, and of vast intelligences which waited for us, out in space, and of the secrets soon to be revealed. It even conversed in alien languages, which no human ear had ever heard before, but which my father, perhaps more telepathically than through intellectual effort, was able to understand. He of all living men actually heard the haunting poetry of the Yh’ghai, which dwell on the outer three planets of star so far away it hasn’t even a name that you can find in astronomy books. There was much that I could not follow after that, as the tale was told to me, something about a mystical union of all intelligences in the cosmos and the awakening of a second “inner soul,” whatever that was, and so much more. I am sure that my dad would have been pulled in eventually, that he would have finally walked hand-in-hand into that Conservatory with the creature that had perhaps once been his friend Freddy, and confronted the plant-thing, and let it have its way with him. He knew his resistance was giving way. He could not escape. It was only a matter of time.
But, miraculously, he was saved, and the instrument of his deliverance was a telegram, from my future mother. It said simply:
WHY HAVEN’T I HEARD FROM YOU stop ARE YOU GOING TO MARRY ME OR NOT stop.
Dad could only show this to his host, who may have been a plant, but was still a gentleman. He said, “You’ve given her your word, haven’t you?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Well you can’t go back on your word. You’ll have to leave.”
So he left. He returned to America and married my mother, and a few years later produced me, the humble teller of this tale. He never returned to England for the rest of his life, though he told me much about it. He even confided some of the really strange things that he’d heard toward the end, though once he was out of the immediate proximity of Lord Cheebleford he could no longer call to mind a single word of the alien languages, or very much of what had been revealed. Yes, he made inquiries, and passed certain warnings through proper channels, and I when I got older could tell that he was on edge much of the time, and frustrated, very likely because he was not believed, or else there was some kind of conspiracy to cover up the truth. Despite this, we used to get Christmas cards from England, from Lord Cheebleford, and I even got some addressed to me, from “Uncle Freddy,” but I was not allowed to answer them, and my parents never answered theirs. Shortly before he died, Dad told me what he could, and I think what haunted him most was that, just before he left the estate, he had seen the plant one last time, and the artichoke section had blackened and collapsed in on itself, while the outer stalks had all quite definitely gone to seed.”
* * * *
Somebody started to laugh while sipping his drink and snorted.
There were a few polite murmurs as I finished my tale, and then the Club Skeptic tore into me.
“Now wait a minute,” he said. “What happened?”
“Apparently very little.”
“You would have us believe that sometime in the 1950s England was invaded by intelligent plants from outer space and nobody noticed?”
“Well there are certain accounts,” said another member. “Wyndham and all.”
“But those are fiction,” someone said.
“Yes, definitely, they are,” I put in. “It wasn’t like that at all.”
“Well then,” said the Skeptic, “how do you explain the incongruities between your account and the condition of Great Britain today? How do you account for it?”
Maybe this was where I made my fatal mistake. I paused, then held up my empty glass. The waiter filled it with whiskey. I took, not a sip, but a good stiff gulp. Yes, I think the whiskey was at fault. It clouded my judgment. It caused me to overestimate