Wyndham, John (7 page)

“Anybody who has had a great treasure has always led a
precarious existence,” she said reflectively.

“I’ll go on bearing that in mind henceforth,” I told her.

“It’s already very well impressed on mine,” she remarked. We
sat listening to the uproar from the other pub for a few minutes.

“And what,” I said at last, “just what, do we propose to do
now?”

“I must get back home. There’s my father. It’s obviously no
good going on to try to find the doctor now—even if he has been one of the
lucky ones.”

She seemed about to add something, but hesitated.

“Do you mind if I come too?” I asked. “This doesn’t seem to
me the sort of time when anyone like us should be wandering about on his or
her own.”

She turned with a grateful look.

“Thank you. I almost asked, but I thought there might be
somebody you’d he wanting to look for.”

“There isn’t,” I said. “Not in London, at any rate.”

“Im glad. It’s not so much that I’m afraid of getting caught
again—I’ll be much too careful for that. But, to he honest, it’s the loneliness
I’m afraid of. I’m beginning to feel so—so cut off and stranded.”

I was beginning to see things in another new light. The
sense of release was tempered with a growing realization of the grimness that
might lie ahead of us. It had been impossible at first not to feel some
superiority, and, therefore, confidence. Our chances of surviving the catastrophe
were a million times greater than those of the rest. Where they must fumble,
grope, and guess, we had simply to walk in and take. Butt here were going to be
a lot of things beyond that.

I said: “I wonder just how many of us have escaped and can
still see? I’ve come across one other man, a child, and a baby; you’ve met
none. It looks to me as if we are going to find out that sight is very rare
indeed. Some of the others have evidently grasped already that their only
chance of survival is to get hold of someone who can see. When they all understand
that, the outlooks going to he none too good.”

The future seemed to me at that time a choice between a
lonely existence, always in fear of capture, or of gathering together a
selected group which we could rely on to protect us from other groups. We’d be
filling a kind of leadercum-prisoner role—and along with it went a nasty
picture of still uncomfortably elaborating these possibilities when Josella
bloody gang wars being fought for possession of us. I was recalled me to the
present by getting up.

I must go,” she said. “Poor Father. It’s after four
o’clock.”

Back in Regent Street again, a thought suddenly struck me.

“Come across,” I said. “I fancy I remember a shop somewhere
here

The shop was still there. We equipped ourselves with a
couple of useful-looking sheath knives, and belts to carry them.

“Makes me feel like a pirate,” said Josella as she buckled
hers on.

“Better, I imagine, to be a pirate than a pirate’s moll,” I
told her.

A few yards up the street we came upon a large, shiny saloon
car. It looked the kind of craft that should simply have purred. But the noise
when I started it up sounded louder in our ears than all the normal traffic of
a busy street. We made our way northward, zigzagging to avoid derelicts and wanderers
stricken into immobility in the middle of the road by the sound of our
approach. All the way heads turned hopefully toward us as we came, and faces
fell as we went past. One building on our route was blazing fiercely, and a
cloud of smoke rose from another fire somewhere along Oxford Street. There were
more people about in Oxford Circus, but we got through them neatly, then passed
the B.B.C., and so north to the carriageway in Regent’s Park.

It was a relief to get out of the streets and reach an open
space—and one where there were no unfortunate people wandering and groping. The
only moving things we could see on the broad stretches of grass were two or
three little groups of triffids lurching southward. Somehow or other they had
contrived to pull up their stakes and were dragging them along behind them on
their chains. I remembered that there were some undocked specimens, a few of
them tethered, but most of them double-fenced, in an enclosure beside the zoo,
and wondered how they had got out. Josella noticed them too.

“It’s not going to make much difference to them,” she said.

For the rest of the way there was little to delay us. Within
a few minutes I was pulling up at the house she showed me, We got out of the
car, and I pushed open the gate. A short drive curved round a bed of bushes
which hid most of the house front from the road. As we turned the corner,
Josella gave a cry and ran forward. A figure was lying on the gravel, chest
downward, but with the head turned to show one side of its face. The first
glance at it showed me the bright red streak across the cheek.

“Stop!” I shouted at her.

There was enough alarm in my voice to check her.

I had spotted the triffid now. It was lurking among the
bushes, well within striking range of the sprawled figure.

“Back! Quick!” I said.

Still looking at the man on the ground, she hesitated.

“But I must—” she began, turning toward me. Then she
stopped. Her eyes widened, and she screamed.

I whipped round to find a triffid towering only a few feet
behind me.

In one automatic movement I had my hands over my eyes. I
heard the sting whistle as it slashed out at me—but there was no knockout, no
agonizing burning, even. One’s mind can move like lightning at such a moment;
nevertheless, it was more instinct than reason which sent me leaping at it
before ii bad time to strike again. I collided with it, overturning it, and
even as I went down with it my hands were on the upper part of the stem, trying
to pull off the cup and the sting. Triffid stems do not snap—but they can he
mangled. This one was mangled thoroughly before I stood up.

Josella was standing in the same spot, transfixed.

“Come here,” I told her. There’s another in the bushes
behind you.”

She glanced fearfully over her shoulder and came.

“But it hit you t” she said incredulously. Why aren’t you

“I don’t know. I ought to be,” I said.

I looked down at the fallen triffid. Suddenly remembering
the knives that we’d acquired with quite other enemies in mind, I used mine to
cut off the sting at its base. I examined it. “That explains it,” I said,
pointing to the poison sacs.

“See, they’re collapsed, exhausted. If they’d been full, or
even part full I turned a thumb down.

I had that, and my acquired resistance to the poison, to
thank. Nevertheless, there were pale red marks across the backs of my hands and
my neck that were itching like the devil. I rubbed them while I stood looking
at the sting.

“It’s queer,” I murmured, more to myself than to her, but
she heard me.

“What’s queer?”

“I’ve never seen one with the poison sacs quite empty like
this before. It must have been doing a hell of a lot of stinging.”

But I doubt if she heard me. Her attention had reverted to
the man who was lying in the drive, and she was eying the triffid standing by.

“How can we get him away?” she asked.

“I’m afraid we can’t—not till that thing’s been dealt with,”
I told her. ‘Besides—well, I don’t think we can help him now.

“You mean he’s dead?”

I nodded. “Yes. There’s not a doubt of it—Eve seen others
who have been stung. Who was he” I added.

“Old Pearson. He did gardening for us, and chauffeuring for
my father. Such a dear old man—I’ve know him all my life.”

“I’m sorry—” I began, wishing I could think of something
more adequate, but she cut me short.

“Look! Oh, look!” She pointed to a path which ran round the
side of the house. A black-stockinged leg with a woman’s shoe on it protruded
beyond the corner.

We prospected carefully and then moved safely to a spot
which gave a better view. A girl in a black dress lay half on the path and half
in a flower bed. Her pretty. fresh face was scarred with a bright red line.
Josella choked. Tears came into her eyes.

“Oh! Oh, it’s Annie! Poor little Annie,” she said.

I tried to console her a little.

“They can scarcely have known
it,
either of them,” I
told her. “When it is strong enough to kill, it’s mercifully quick.”

We did nor see any other triffid in hiding there. Possibly
the same one had attacked them both. Together we crossed the path and got into
the house by the side door. Josella called. There was no answer. She called
again. We both listened in the complete silence that wrapped the house. She
turned to look at me. Neither of us said anything. Quietly she led the way
along a passage to a baize-covered door. As she opened it there was a swish,
and something slapped across the door and frame, an inch or so above her head.
Hurriedly she pulled the door shut again and turned wide-eyed to me.

“There’s one in the ball,” she said.

She spoke in a frightened half whisper, as though it might
be listening.

We went back to the outer door, and into the garden once
more. Keeping to the grass for silence, we made our way round the house until
we could look into the lounge hail. The French window which led from the garden
was open, and the glass of one side was shattered. A trail of muddy blobs led
over the step and across the carpet. At the end of it a triffid stood in the
middle of the room. The top of its stem almost bushed the ceiling, and it was
swaying ever so slightly. Close beside its damp, shaggy bole lay the body of an
elderly man clad in a bright silk dressing gown. I took hold of Josella’s arm, afraid
she might rush in there.

“Is it—your father?” I asked, though I knew it must be.
“Yes,” she said, and put her hands over her face. She was trembling a little.

I stood still, keeping an eye on the triffid inside lest it
should move our way. Then I thought of a handkerchief and handed her mine.
There wasn’t much anyone could do. After a little while she took more control
of herself. Remembering the people we had seen that day, I said:

“You know, I think I would rather
that
had happened
to me than to be like those others.”

“Yes,” she said, after a pause.

She looked up into the sky. It was a soft, depthless blue,
with a few little clouds floating like white feathers.

“Oh yes,” she repeated with more conviction. “Poor Daddy. He
couldn’t have stood blindness. He loved all this too much.” She glanced inside
the room again. “What shall we do? I can’t leave—”

At that moment I caught the reflection of movement in the
remaining windowpane. I looked behind us quickly to see a triffid break clear
of the bushes and start across the lawn. It was lurching on a line that led
straight toward us. I could hear the leathery leaves rustling as the stem
whipped back and forth.

There was no time for delay. I had no idea how many more
there might be round the place. I grabbed Josella’s arm again and ran her back
by the way we had come. As we scrambled safely into the car, she burst into
real tears at last.

She would be the better for having her cry out. I lit a
cigarette and considered the next move. Naturally she was not going to care for
the idea of leaving her father as we had found him. She would wish that he
should have a proper burial—and, by the looks of it, that would be a matter of
the pair of us digging the grave and effecting the whole business. And before
that could even be attempted it would be necessary to fetch the means to deal
with the triffids that were already there and keep off any more that might
appear. On the whole, I would be in favor of dropping the whole thing— but then
it was not my father..

The more I considered this new aspect of things, the less I
liked it. I had no idea how many triffids there might be in London. Every park
had a few at least. Usually they kept some docked ones that were allowed to
roam about as they would; often there were others, with stings intact, either
staked or safely behind wire netting. Thinking of those we had seen crossing
Regent’s Park, I wondered just how many they had been in the habit of keeping
in the pens by the zoo and how many had escaped. There’d be a number in private
gardens too; you’d expect all those to be safely docked— but you never can tell
what fool carelessness may go on. And then there were several nurseries of
things and experimental stations a little farther out.

While I sat there pondering I was aware of something nudging
at the back of my mind, some association of ideas that didn’t quite join up. I
sought it for a moment or two, then, suddenly, it came. I could almost hear
Walter’s voice speaking, saying:

I tell you, a triffid’s in a damn sight better position to
survive than a blind man.”

Of course he had been talking about a man who had been
blinded by a triffid sting. All the same, it was a jolt. More than a jolt. It
scared me a bit.

I thought back. No, it had just arisen out of general speculation—nevertheless,
it seemed a hit uncanny now.

“Take away our sight,” he had said, “and our superiority to
them is gone.”

Of course coincidences are happening alt the time—but it’s
just now and then you happen to notice them. ...

A crunch on the gravel brought me back to the present.
A
triffid
came swaying down the drive toward the gate. I leaned across and screwed up the
window.

“Drive on! Drive on!” said Josella hysterically.

“We’re all right here,” I told her. “I want to see what it
does.”

Simultaneously I realized that one of my questions was
solved. Being accustomed to triffids, I had forgotten how most people felt
about an undocked one. I suddenly understood that there would be no question of
coming back here. Josella’s feeling about an armed triffid was the general one—
get well away from it, and stay away.