No Sharks in the Med and Other Stories (43 page)

But the old boy had noticed it, certainly; and right there and then on that garden path, suddenly I could feel it, too…I felt the strangeness, like an alien cloud hanging over everything. Oh, it was very obvious. And the colonel had had it dead to rights the day he’d told me, “It’s not right—doesn’t feel the same—not like
my
garden at all!” Dead to rights, yes.

But where was Sellick? I jumped twelve inches when a hedge cutter burst into clattering mechanical life. And there he was, the colonel: under a small mountain of
Clematis vitalba
, traveller’s joy, where his garden shed had used to be. Hell no, where it was now—a considerable wooden structure—but buried deep in the clematis! What in the name of…? Why had he let it get so rank, so out of hand?

Anyway, as a great swath of it was sliced through and toppled to the ground, he saw me framed in the gap and switched off his machine. Then, stumbling over a heap of cut growth as dense as box hedge, finally he confronted me. Grimy, dishevelled, and with sweat rivering his dusty face, he panted a hoarse, resentful greeting and continued, “Meteorite? No, that was more than just any old meteorite. It was the green hand of God, advising us to go easy on the GM stuff! And for the last fortnight I’ve been fighting this…this green jungle that you bloody scientists…and
botanists
,” (he literally spat that last word in my face,) “have conspired to make of my garden!”

“Colonel, I—” I began.

But waving his hedge cutter at me until I fell back a little, the old boy almost literally cut me off. “My roses are far bigger, and more beautiful than ever before,” he snarled, “but their thorns are inches long, and for all that I keep trying I can’t dead-head ’em. You know how you’re supposed to nip their withered heads off to encourage new growth? Well, these things are like bloody rubber: they stretch but they won’t break. And as for encouragement—I swear they don’t need any! What? They don’t even like being touched!” He showed me his arms, his new wounds criss-crossing a great many old ones.

“Gordon—”

“And look at this!” He hurled a bloodied arm to point at his shed where it leaned under the weight of rampant clematis. “Would you believe—
could
you believe—I cut this lot back just three days ago? You’re lucky with your garden, which I’ll admit I’ve long despised: all those flagged paths between segregated beds, more like a piece of fancy tatting than a garden proper! Lucky? Oh, yes: because you don’t have half the damned greenery that I’ve got! Eh, what? Why, right now you haven’t a tenth of it! And as for the grass…now tell me, what do you make of the bloody grass?”

“Gordon,” I tried yet again. “I mean, am I to be allowed to speak, or what?”

He didn’t answer, just stood there glaring at me, or if not at me at the world in general; stood there with his chest heaving and the sweat of his uneven fight running down his neck and staining his shirt.

But now that I was able to answer him I could find nothing immediate to say, except: “Grass? What on earth are you talking about?” Where we were standing there was a little grass—a few tufts coming up between the chinks in a small paved patio area—but apart from the fact that it was coarse and needed tending it looked normal enough to me.

“You haven’t noticed?” He stared hard at me, then relaxed a little. “Ah, no, but then you wouldn’t, would you? You’ve not got enough of the bloody stuff, not in your pallid little horticulturist’s paradise!”

Now I was annoyed and told him so. “You’re taking all your anger out on me,” I said, “insulting me. But I didn’t cause any of this and I don’t much care for your accusations. Oh, I agree something is wrong with the vegetation—but the problem isn’t special to you and your ‘
bloody’
precious garden! Weird looking plants, seeds, and fungi are arriving at Kew daily, and there’s been some strange stuff happening in gardens all over the southeast. It seems we’re right in the middle of this…this
infestation
, whatever it is. And it could well turn out that you’re right and our extraterrestrial visitor was its source. I can’t guarantee that, mind you. But I do care about what’s happening; while on the other hand I
don’t
much care for this tongue-lashing from a cranky old soldier! God, I only came round to see if you were okay! I missed you at the pub last night.”

At that, whatever sort of fury—or funk?—he was in, the colonel snapped out of it at once. “Good Lord!” he said. “Oh my good God! Eh, what? But that wasn’t like me at all! No, not one little bit. Not to a friend. And you’ve been a very good friend. But…” He gave a helpless, frustrated shrug. “It’s the garden. I mean, it’s really getting me down. I’m sorry. What more can I say or do?”

“Well, for a start, you might want to flush it out of your system!” I told him. “And first off: what’s all this about the grass? Yes, as I’ve already allowed, there seem to be some serious problems with all sorts of greenery, but to the best of my knowledge no one’s so far mentioned anything about grass!”

“Come,” he beckoned. And as we walked, skirting the sprawling undergrowth—the rose tangles, and the overgrown brambles that not too long ago were cultivated blackberries—he inquired, “You don’t have a lawn as such, do you?”

“No,” I told him. “At the front I have a wide gravel drive, ornamental pools and fountains, two chestnut trees over clover, and floral borders—all of it walled. At the back: well, it’s pretty much as you described it, except it too is walled, protected. As for grass: grass means work, and it isn’t especially interesting…er, from my point of view, that is.” (I didn’t want to start him off ranting again.)

“But I
do
have a lawn,” he said, “or I used to.”

“Used to?”

“Just here,” he nodded, grimly, “to the side of the house.”

But as I went to turn the corner he caught my arm. And: “Go careful, my friend,” he told me, very quietly, and in that same moment I thought I felt a shudder running through his hand into my arm. “I think we should go very carefully!”

I frowned at him, glanced around the corner of the house, and saw little or nothing that might be considered extraordinary or dangerous. A square, flagged path surrounded a lawn some ten by ten yards; and central in the lawn a white plastic table supported a floral parasol and was flanked by a pair of folding chairs. After a moment, I looked at the colonel enquiringly.

He gave an impatient nod of his head and said: “The grass—look at the grass.”

The grass…was green, even, and looked in good health. I couldn’t understand why he’d let it grow so long—a good eight or nine inches—but other than that…

“I cropped it last Thursday,” he told me then. “Just a few days ago; cropped it as short as a bloody billiard table!
Nothing
normal grows that fast or that even. Every single blade is the same length. No meadow, no golf course or bowling green was ever so uniform. And there’s something else. Something really—I don’t know—macabre?”

He stepped round the corner of the house onto the path, and I followed in his footsteps, urging him: “Well, go on—what is it?”

“You see that mound,” he said. “Near the far corner there?”

The ground had a small but definite hump where he was pointing. We followed the path to the corner in question, and as the colonel halted, crouched, and stared hard at the mound, I said, “Yes, I see it. What of it?”

“Look closer.”

I did, and saw something of what he was getting at. Deep in the grass, the last six inches and scraggy tuft of a cat’s tail stuck up out of the ground. And a few inches away, a furry paw, claws extended, was also visible.

“You buried a dead cat there,” I said. “But not nearly deep enough.”

“I did no such thing.” He shook his head. “I buried nothing there—but the grass did! Let me tell you about it:

“Yesterday, I was battling with the garden, as usual. Hell, it’s
my
bloody garden, after all! But working late, I was just too tired to bother going down to the pub. As the shadows lengthened I went upstairs; I would have an early night, and get an early start this morning. But looking from the window up there, I saw this manky old moggy come out of the shrubbery. I really hate cats because they piss on every-damn-thing in the garden! Anyway, this one appeared to be on his last legs: he was stiff and scraggy; his eyes bulged; he could hardly walk. But he made it this far before collapsing. I thought: ‘Well, in the morning he’ll either have moved on or he’ll be dead—eh, what? And if the latter, then I’ll bury him.’

“But this morning…I didn’t have to bury him. The grass had done it for me.” He nodded at the mound. “I found him like that, which was when I began attacking the foliage again. Damn it all, I refuse to be intimidated by bloody greenery!”

I shook my head. “Gordon—” (I rarely called him by his forename, though he’d years ago invited its use) “—the grass couldn’t possibly have ‘buried’ this cat. He’s actually
under
the soil—most of him, anyway.”

“Under the soil, yes,” he answered, “but very shallow, as you’ve already pointed out.” The colonel’s voice had fallen to a mere murmur, as if he were talking to himself rather than to me. “And there’s a reason for that, why it’s so shallow.”

“A reason?” Truth to tell, I was beginning to wonder about the old boy’s reason. He probably sensed it or heard something in my voice and frowned at me.

“Eh, what? You think I’m losing it, do you? Well, just you step back a few paces and yank some of that grass there. Go on, pull a few blades up by their roots.“

I did as he suggested. The grass came out easily enough in my hand, and the roots were white.

The old boy nodded and stepped onto the grass close to the mound. And he too pulled grass…from directly over the spot where the cat was buried. Then, again nodding his head—knowingly now—he held the tuft out for my inspection. At which I drew back from him, wrinkling my nose in disgust.

The roots of the grass in his hand were red! And:

“You’re the botanist,” he said, very quietly. “Now tell me, what kind of weird morphology is it that uses blood as chlorophyll? What kind of bloody vampire is this—eh, what? I mean, how does it photosynthesize
that
, for God’s sake?”

I could only shake my head…but I glanced hastily down, to make sure that I was still on the path.

“And look,” he went on. “Look at my feet.”

He was wearing tough wellington boots and had been standing up to his lower calves in the grass by the burial mound for two or three minutes, no more. But already the grass had curled inward, over his boots, and as he moved his feet the grass broke, so that his feet carried some of the severed blades back to the path with him.

Where he had been standing, the earth was almost bare, the grass
visibly
drawing down into the soil. It was like trying to watch the movement of the minute hand on the clock in the village clock tower—the motion was barely discernible—but the grass
was
moving!

I backed away down the path and tried to say, “Gordon,” but all that came out was a gurgle. At my second try I managed, and said, “Gordon, it’s time I made a few phone calls. In fact it’s long since past the time! So if you’ll excuse me now…”

He nodded and said, “And me, I must get back to killing all of this damned stuff. I’ll turn it all to compost, start again. That’s what I’ll do—eh, what?”

“Whatever,” I told him. And then I got out of there…

The near-distant jackhammers, silent for a while, resumed their clamour, their vibrations stronger than previously. Jarred back to the present—as the generators coughed and electric lights flickered, and rills of dust jitterbugged down from the ceiling—I gave a small start, blinked once or twice, let my audience, my troops, float back into focus.

There, seated in groups, I saw about half of them: some two hundred men, and as many still to come. They’d been arriving in a steady trickle, quietly thinking their private thoughts, automatically assembling with other members of their sections and platoons. Clad in grey coveralls and carrying grey, protective gloves, they were grey as can be and gaunt-faced to a man.

I recognized one of them sitting central in the front row. Yesterday he’d been squad leader of a spore patrol out towards Watford. The fern forest had been making big inroads, mutating as it came. Ignoring the season and propagating like crazy, it was hurling its spores before it, “galloping” over the fields, making exploratory forays up roadside verges and central reservations, and taking root wherever there was soil. Yesterday the winds had been fanning north-west out of London: ideal for the flamers. Whoever could have foreseen or imagined the day would arrive when we’d be burning our fields, our woodlands? And not only the Green but whatever doomed, terrified species of wildlife remained in it.

So there he sat, this squad leader: his hair crisped, hands gnarled and blistered from the heat of the flamethrowers, weary arms a-dangle. Now and then his thin frame would shudder, prelude to wracking fits of coughing. All of that burning must have leached the air from his lungs and seared them to so much blackened leather. So I thought—

—Until, once again, my thoughts went elsewhere…