The black river flowed slowly down the hill, winding between its bluebell-clad banks. Loofah stepped nervously onto the turgid plastic surface, uncertain whether the syrupy tarmac would take his weight. It did. A rubbery car wobbled past tooting a cheery greeting and he set out for the far shore. As he reached the top of the steep bank opposite, he turned to wave. Now a tiny blob of creamy violet, Mrs Fulbright lifted a friendly foreleg and then scuttled away to finish preparing her employer's meal before he woke.
But before setting off himself, Loofah again fingered the pig's gift, a red silk scarf that was clinging sinuously to his neck. It was exactly the same as the other—he had surreptitiously checked the Galliano label—though this one, Mrs Fulbright had assured him, had no hidden features. How odd, he thought as he proudly stroked the fine Chinese silk, that the porcine official and treacherous Frenchman should share a taste in outfit accessories.
Once away from the road he was back in woodland, open and bright, where cathedral pillar beech trunks soared up through the liquid air to their dizzyingly high vaulting overhead, and where the sunlight was shattered into gold and emerald splinters that scattered like luminescent confetti over the lapping bluebell waves. The path wound among towering stands of holly, lethal sculptures of glossy darkness which expanded into the echoing space, moulding and shaping the trilling oscillations of a thousand invisible songbirds.
Loofah slid swiftly along the path, moving like a skater, banking gently into the turns and skirting smoothly around the holly bushes and the beech trunks. A fresh optimism pumped now in his heart. The pig hadn't been quite the treasure-trove of information that the New Zealand flatworm had seemed to imply, but now he sensed he was onto something, something really big. The Holy Shepherd in Person. The very words sent a shivering thrill down his spine—his search for the double woman had now become infinitely more meaningful than the prosaic fulfilment of some government objective.
Something flashed over the path ahead: the sunlight broken by the canopy, glinting off the smeared lenses of his spectacles. Temporarily dazzled, he missed a malicious tree root that caught the toe of his shoe and, cursing violently, he stumbled into the vicious embrace of a holly bush.
As the pain of a thousand needle-stabs gradually abated, he took off his spectacles and polished them, using the end of his Italian designer scarf as a cleaning cloth. As he did so, something moved in the unfocussed blur, coming quickly across the blue fog of the forest floor. Loofah snapped his glasses back in place. A tiny homunculus, no bigger than a Barbie doll, was scampering through the bluebells towards him.
It ran in a zigzag path apparently without purpose, blindly tumbling through the bluebells and bumping into tree trunks, while emitting a continuous stream of tiny vegetable squeaks. As the thing got closer, Loofah could see that its diminutive body was enclosed in what looked like a dark suit with some sort of black hat pressed onto its head—and a weird coldness slithered over his skin like a swamp miasma. A moment later a second of the things appeared, identical to the first, scuttling out from behind a dark mass of holly to the left of the path, quickly followed by a third and a fourth. Smelling danger in the viscous air, Loofah crouched to the ground and headed towards the bank of holly.
When he reached the cover of the glossy foliage, he got down onto his belly and started creeping forward, commando-style, to reconnoitre. Suddenly, with a tirade of squeaks, another of the baleful little homunculi leapt up in front of his face. Strangling a shriek, Loofah cringed away as the thing bumbled into the bush and impaled itself on the nail-bed of leathery leaves. He watched with horrid fascination as it squeaked and thrashed itself deeper into its trap; a dozen needles pierced the aubergine-shiny skin and tiny droplets of clear sap oozed from the puncture holes. At close range, he could see that it was a half-formed foetal parody of a human being—a business suit mimicked by black vegetable skin, a face formed by dimpling on pale rind, tiny arms no more than ridges down the side, still fused to the body—and a nameless revulsion squirmed in his skull like a dying toad.
Then, as Loofah carefully lifted a lethally armoured branch to peer forward, another cry gagged in his throat. Two more of the plant-creatures scuttled past but these he ignored, for he now saw that his premonition had not been unfounded. Ahead of him, in a wide area of open woodland, was a figure he recognised: a full-sized (well, almost full-sized) human being standing beside a large shrub, tucking in his shirt tails and zipping up the front of his suit trousers. The familiar bowler was slightly askew and the briefcase and umbrella were laid neatly beside a clump of bluebells.
Long time no see, thought Loofah, his lip curling into a half-sneer, half-snarl. In view of his recent encounter with the mistress, it was no real surprise to find that her fat little emissary was in the vicinity, no doubt hunting for him. Hunting but not catching: the sneer-snarl transformed itself into a wry smile.
The shrub with which the little fat man shared the clearing was also strangely familiar, with its welcoming leaves of glossy leather, its curling, beckoning tendrils, and its flowers, those drooling gashes of livid pink. This specimen, however, was displaying an additional feature—nestling among the leathery leaves were several green bulbous fruits, like over-large figs, some of which seemed to be the active process of ripening, visibly swelling to gravid fullness and darkening to a deep blood red. Then, even as Loofah watched, a fruit at the edge of the bush, now pumped up to full turgidity, broke free from its slender stalk and fell to earth with a heavy thud. On impact, the heavy sections of the fruit case split and fell away, liberating the tight ripe seed inside—which scrambled to its tiny feet and, with the clamouring vegetable squeaks of the new-born, scampered unsteadily away.
As the fat man completed the adjustments to his attire with a quick straightening of his bowler, another fruit fell. This time the released doll-seed stumbled blindly in the direction of the suited figure, as if the little fruit was being drawn to its own master template. Seeing this botanical mockery of himself coming towards him, the fat man stepped forward and, with what appeared to be a mixture of embarrassment and malice, brought down a polished shoe to snuff out the new life in a crunch of pith and juice. Then, with a furtive glance around the clearing, he picked up his briefcase and umbrella, and scuttled quickly away into the woods with the guilty look of a schoolboy who has just committed some despicable little sin.
While Loofah waited for his enemy to depart, another of the manikins came stumbling towards him, squeaking like wet fingers on the tight skin of a marrow. Then, when it was no more than ten feet away, a dark shape swooped down from above, smothering the doll-seed with a pair of glossy black wings. The jackdaw paused for a moment, ogling its prey with a black jewel eye, then hammered down with its poleaxe beak, splattering the tiny head like an overripe grape.
Another two jackdaws now dived between the trees and, with a chorus of triumphant cawing, fell on a pair of the freshest homunculi in the bluebells near the mother-plant, but the next bird—this one with electric blue wings and a blood red body—snatched up its prey from the ground and carried it up to a nearby beech branch. At first the parrot just held the squeaking and ineffectually struggling homunculus in one of its claws, as if showing off its prize to its rivals. Then, with slow deliberation, it took the twitching little head in its hooked-vice beak and squeezed; sticky green juice dribbled through the viscous air onto the shiny backs of two jackdaws that were fighting over a half-shredded homunculus on the ground below.
Once the dark suited figure had vanished into the trees, Loofah got to his feet and emerged from his hiding place. The dancing light of the clearing was now flashing with metallic blue and patent leather black as lurid parrots and glossy jackdaws gathered to feast on the crop of tiny vegetable men. At first he stood staring blankly at the carnage as squawks and caws swam and dived around him like shoals of angry minnows. Then, slowly but inexorably, his gaze was pulled across the glade to where the mother-bush shimmered in the submarine light. And, as if responding to his attention, she began to open up in welcome, spreading her leathery leaves to embrace, uncoiling her stiffening tendrils to grip and to hold, and parting the turgid petals of her drooling flowers, to delight and to tempt.
Like coral reef fish, birds swam through the liquid air of the clearing that echoed with their raucous caws and jungle squawks, and the botanical squeaks of their dying prey. Across the lapping blue surface of the bluebells, they fought with each other in slow motion scrums of glossy black and luminous colour, ripping and tearing at the feebly thrashing dolls-seeds.
Something deep within him struggled to resist the plant's temptation, but was slowly swamped by the rising wave of sticky sweetness. And so, as if reeled in by some invisible fishing line, he was pulled across the clearing, through the aquarium of swooping, fighting birds and vegetable death.
The air was warm honey trickling over his skin, the birds were tiny thrills shivering through his flesh. The world began to sway, the colours and sounds to run like wet paints—parrot-wing electric blue blurred gently into vegetable death-squeak, glossy holly leaf blended seamlessly with jackdaw caw—to form a flowing vortex of melting colour and sound which swirled slowly around the hub of the mother-bush, with her welcoming leaves and tendrils and her liquid-sticky, pink-lipped flowers.
He pushes against the water and slides forward, an eel through warm jelly. He is in the deep blue depths of a tropical sea, among the few feeble beams of emerald sunlight that have managed to percolate down from far above. Other fishes flit past: some neon blue and vermilion, some as black as night, fish-shaped holes of nothingness in the ink-dark sea. As the viscous liquid slides easily over his naked scaly skin, he breathes the sweet stickiness of the warm water, and then rolls over and flaps his fins, playing tag with an elusive sunbeam. The soft caress of the water is in him and around him—he is of the warm sweetness and the warm sweetness is of him. Hot pleasure slithers through his flesh and he quivers with piscine delight.
Then three fish, different from the others, emerge from the indigo. At first they swim towards him but then stop and hang still in the water, watching him silently. They are of a species he half recognises, but not quite: one is an adult—a female—accompanied by two silver fingerlings. Like a newly invigorated parasite something strange squirms in his belly and his pleasures scatter like a frightened shoal of fry. For an era nothing moves, as if their icy gaze has frozen the sea to a solid block. Then the adult turns slowly away, followed by her offspring.
As the three fade back into the darkness, he is released from his paralysis. The squirming discomfort becomes a sharp stab of loss. He goes to follow them, but when he pushes at the thick water with his fins and tail, nothing happens—because he hasn't got fins or a tail, he has hands and feet. He is not a fish after all.
Suddenly he feels the tonnage of warm water crushing down on him. He goes to breathe—and inhales sweet stickiness. He gags—suddenly the sweetness is inside him and around him, clogging and cloying in his throat, suffocating and nauseating. Blind panic explodes in his skull with the force of a cobalt bomb—he is drowning.
Just as his lungs were about to implode, Loofah made one last desperate kick at the thick water and burst through the surface of the blue waves, hauling liquid air into his tortured chest, and spluttering out a mouthful of—bluebell flowers.
The soft blue waves lapped against his body as he gazed up into the black and dazzle vaulting of the canopy waiting for the last vestiges of his dream to trickle away. There was a foul bitterness in his mouth and he rolled over to spit out the last shreds of crushed flower. His hands were sticky with juice from the fleshy leaves that he still gripped.
When at last he was fully awake, Loofah got to his feet, smearing his palms on the front of his jeans. He sensed an uncomfortable hollowness inside, a hollowness that he could not explain but that he wished wasn't there. A flash of electric blue and red glinted through the distant trees. A fish?—no, a parrot. And then, in a rush like a breaking wave, it all came back to him: the parrots, the jackdaws, the horrid little homunculi. He looked quickly around the clearing—there was no sign of the doll-seeds now, just a few shards of black rind scattered among the bluebells. It was then that he noticed the bush—and something cold and unpleasant slithered over his flesh.
The leathery leaves now hung limply and the tendrils were draped, as if exhausted, across the forest floor. The flowers too were weak and flaccid, still dripping with their runny nectar but spent, satiated. Scattered over the ground around the base of the bush were piles of empty fruit case sections, like the morning-after empties of some debauched party. The unpleasantness inside him slithered around his belly. He shook his head vigorously, as if trying to disrupt an unwelcome memory that was trying to form itself from the squirming mess in his skull.
Something caught his eye, a movement across the clearing. A single little homunculus was tumbling erratically towards him through the bluebell waves. This one, however, was different from the others—for over the legs the vegetable skin was pale blue with fawn tips and, though the upper body was black, there was a greenish stripe down the front, with some luminous orange mottling and a vermilion collar around the tiny, wax-shiny neck.
Loofah reached up to finger his own silk scarf as a glob of cold horror trickled down his neck. No, surely it wasn't possible—he couldn't, he wouldn't—would he?
'My friend!' called a familiar voice, and Loofah started violently.
A figure in a terracotta jacket and yellow chinos had appeared from behind a shallow ridge and was gliding swiftly in his direction. As Loofah grinned and raised an awkward hand in greeting, a horrid thought slapped him hard in the face: what if he sees the botanical manikin? He glanced at the hideous little half-vegetable squeaking happily through the bluebells then back to the approaching Frenchman, with embarrassment writhing in his brain like a nest of caterpillars. But then, just as all seemed lost, electric-blue and scarlet flashed suddenly through the liquid air and with a squawk of greedy triumph a parrot swept down between himself and the surprised Dentressangle.
'This oiseau, it was carrying un petit homme,' said the Frenchman, as he slipped the polite little tin of polish back into his pocket.
'Just a doll, Norbert, just an ordinary child's doll,' said a much relieved Loofah, as his psittacine saviour flapped away through the distant trees.
'A parrot with a doll? This is surely very—how you say?—étrange.'
'Not at all,' said Loofah, 'It was a girl parrot—all perfectly normal, nothing untoward whatsoever.' He was guessing that Dentressangle was not a stickler for political correctness.
'But the doll, he seemed to be dressed like—.'
'Norbert, you do look well, I must say!' cried Loofah quickly.
'Ah, oui?' exclaimed Dentressangle, taken aback by the interruption.
'Oh, yes. A vision of health and vigour.'
In fact, in his rushed effort to distract, Loofah had been distinctly economical with the truth—for the Frenchman actually looked tense and drawn, as if some dreaded enemy were hard on his heels.
'And what a lovely jacket—it really suits you.'
Another white lie—in reality the full-bodied earthy red contrasted starkly with Dentressangle's skin, for once ashen and untanned. Also, normally immaculate to the point of perfection, his clothes now had a slightly crumpled, grubby look, as if they had recently been slept in.
'Hugo Boss,' said the Frenchman, listlessly fingering a lapel, 'And chinos by DKNK. I find the fitting around the cheeks of the derrière to be most… '
Dentressangle didn't finish his sentence, his attention having been caught by something over Loofah's shoulder. A plucked eyebrow twitched quizzically up the wan forehead. Loofah spun round—and came face to foliage with the bush, all limp and drained like an exhausted courtesan.
'You surely don't think—?' he spluttered.
The beginnings of a grinning leer crept slowly across the Frenchman's haggard face.
'No, no, it wasn't me, really it wasn't,' Loofah blurted, 'It was somebody else. Somebody else was here before me—and it was him.'
'Quelque person—else?' said Dentressangle, with amused scepticism.
'Really, Norbert—there was somebody else here. He's gone now, but he was definitely here.'
The Frenchman's grin began to falter. 'This is so?' he asked slowly.
Loofah nodded vigorously in affirmation.
'But who?' asked Dentressangle, now with a tiny edge of anxiety in his tone.
'I think you know him—the little fat man, the one who works for…'
The Frenchman gasped in sudden horror as the last traces of his smirk fled in terror. An unearthly dread spread across the pale features and the lizard eyes hollowed out.
'You are meaning…?'
'Yes, I'm afraid so. He left just a few minutes ago.'
'And what was the ballon de graisse doing ici?' asked Dentressangle, very quietly.
'Well, um, he was, you know, with the plant…' began Loofah, and then stuttered into silence as a caterpillar squirm wriggled across his belly. For he had just noticed, nestling among the limp leathery leaves of the bush, a single fruit. Obviously late in ripening, this was now making up for lost time and was swelling rapidly. Loofah looked back to Dentressangle and grinned awkwardly—the other's eyes narrowed with dark suspicion.
'You have been telling him the things, have you not?'
The Frenchman advanced menacingly, his left cheek beginning to twitch. On the shrub, the pendulous orb distended to full gravidity and began to redden.
'Sorry?' asked Loofah distractedly.
With a maniacal glint in his dinosaur eyes, the Frenchman grabbed Loofah's lapels.
'What have you been telling to the little fat froglet?' he hissed, the teeth-rimmed jaws snapping in Loofah's face, 'About le cheval de pluie? About la femme double?'
But Loofah's attention was elsewhere—he was watching with fascinated horror as the fruit, now darkened to purple fecundity, began to swing down on its frail stem, about to fall and burst, about to reveal its incriminating seed.
'You have betrayed me, you treacherous morceau de dog merde. And no-one is betraying—.'
'Norbert! Look—over there!' Loofah seized the Frenchman's sleeve and pointed away into the woods. Dentressangle swung round, animal panic flaring across his face.
'What? Where?'
'In the trees, beside that holly bush!' cried Loofah. With the other distracted, he reached out, grabbed the seedpod and wrenched it off its stalk.
'But I am seeing rien!'
With a rush of relief, Loofah slid the gravid fruit into the secure womb of his jacket pocket.
'You're right,' he said, 'There's nobody there. Sorry, I thought I saw someone.'
'Who? Who is it that you thought you have seen?'
Velociraptor claws still gripped the front of Loofah's jacket and the re-assuring fear was beginning to fade from the predatory eyes. The incriminating pod was now safely hidden away, but this still left him with the problem of the now dangerously suspicious Frenchman.
'Tell me! Tell me now who you thought you have seen!'
The claws clenched against Loofah's chest and the reptilian face loomed close to his. But then, from nowhere, something popped into his reeling consciousness—small but perfectly formed, it was a possible solution to his little problem.
'Um, I'm not altogether certain. But it could have been someone who looked rather like…' he replied, but deliberately allowing his answer to trail away.
'Rather comme—qui?' Dentressangle now asked, with quiet dread.
'Well—rather like you, to tell the truth.'
Loofah felt the Frenchman's tremor through his scrunched lapels and the already pale lizard skin managed somehow to blanch further.
'Actually, Norbert, I'm beginning to think there was someone there after all.' The claws gripped tighter. 'To be frank, I'm almost sure of it.' A gasp of fright and the dinosaur jaw trembled. 'I wonder where he could be now?—maybe he's just hiding from us.' Terrified eyes scanned the trees. 'In fact he could be creeping up on us—even as we speak.'
With a squeal, Frenchman released his jacket and crouched away, anxiously glancing this way and that like a hunted beast.
'Perhaps you should go, Norbert—just in case.'
'Yes, yes, I am thinking you are in the rightness,' said Dentressangle, in a quavering tone, 'I will be going—I will be going tout de suite.' He paused. 'So—give to me the scarf,' he then added.
Like the sharp jab of a pin, the unexpected demand popped the fragile bubble of Loofah's growing confidence.
'You want—the scarf?' he said lamely, reaching a protective hand for the pig's gift.
'Yes. The scarf that I have given you, the one that even now you are wearing around your neck.'
The Frenchman held out his hand for his invertebrate henchman—who, unbeknown to its master, was in the final stages of alimentary dissolution in another part of the wood.
'You mean—this scarf?'
Dentressangle nodded impatiently, keeping a nervous eye on the nearby undergrowth.
'Sorry, Norbert, you can't have it,' said Loofah, pulling away.
The Frenchman frowned with impatience.
'Come, my friend, do not be the silly stallion. Give to me the scarf. I am wanting him just for a small number of minutes, then you can have him back.'
'But I'm still cold,' said Loofah, 'I'll catch pneumonia if I take it off.'
'My friend, you are beginning to get my sheep.' The predatory face loomed close, a growing deadly malice now mixing with the fear in the reptilian eyes.
'What's that?' hissed Loofah, again pointing away into to the trees. The malice-fear balance shifted and Dentressangle cowered away.
'Where? Where?'
'You should go now, Norbert, you really should. You don't have a moment to lose.'
'Yes, yes—I will go, I will go!' cried the now terrified Frenchman, 'But please—the scarf.'
'I'll give it to you later, I promise. Ah! Something moved, I'm sure of it—just behind that bush.'
The Frenchman leapt into the air, eyes darting hither and thither. But still he hesitated.
'My friend, you must be coming with me. It is ici too dangerous.'
'I'd love to, but I can't. You see, I'm, er, meeting someone. An official, a very important official—a close associate of the Horse of Rain, in fact.'
'Un autre official? To be talking about—her?'
Loofah nodded.
'Peut-être then I should be staying,' whimpered Dentressangle, with beads of cold sweat glistening on his taut skin.
'No need, Norbert. Don't forget that I'm still wearing this,' said Loofah, patting the scarf with a reassuring smile.
After a moment's puzzled wavering, Dentressangle sighed with obvious relief. But just as he turned to go, the Frenchman paused yet again.
'I do not wish to be personable, my friend,' he said, pointing as Loofah's crotch, 'But you are driving a car without a licence.'
After an era of skin-crawling embarrassment, the fire in his cheeks was at last beginning to dampen. He was checking his zip for the twentieth time when the breeze in the high canopy whispered faintly across the clearing.
'We were friends once, you know, he and I.'
The bluebells shimmered and twisted as if bent by an invisible lens that was drifting towards him across the clearing, a lens in the familiar shape of a top-hatted Victorian gentleman.
'But that was long ago,' the half-voice quivered forlornly, 'Long, long ago, when we were young. He was different then, of course—a golden youth, unspoiled and fresh.'
They watched together as the hunched terracotta back vanished among the distant trees. Loofah felt the sharpness of the other's loss, as if he too had once known the now vanished unspoiled youth.
'But he changed. Like the rest of them he could not be satisfied with what he had, like the rest of them he wanted more.' The rustle of the holly leaves was now tinged with bitterness. 'And like them his greed rotted him, eating him out from inside like a maggot.' The spiked leaves bristled with rancour. 'He tried to take more than his due, you see, he tried to take what wasn't his.'
'Is this when he betrayed you?' asked Loofah, almost tasting the sour acid of its resentment.
For a time the only sound was the inarticulate melody of distant birdsong. Presently, however, the notes moulded into a definite shape.
'We became enemies long ago, we became enemies when we were still one, before the Great Schism. The betrayal—the real betrayal—came later, much later than that.'