Blood Test

Next to the roses was a collection of carnivorous plants. Venus’s-flytraps, pitcher plants, others I couldn’t identify. All were larger and more robust than any I’d seen. Green maws hung open. Sap oozed from tendrils. On the table was a rusty kitchen knife and a slab of beef cut into tiny pieces. Each cube teemed with maggots, many of them dead. One of the flesh-craving plants had managed to lower its mouth to the table and snare some of the white worms with it’s deadly-sweet exudate. Nearby were more goodies for the carnivores — a coffee can heaped to the brim with dried beetles and flies. The heap shuddered. Out crawled a live insect, a wasp-like creature with a pincer mouth and swollen abdomen. It stared at me and buzzed off. I followed its trajectory. When it had flown out the door, I ran over and slammed it shut. The glass panes vibrated.

And all the while the steady drip-drip from the pipes overhead, keeping everything nice and healthy...

Weak-kneed with nausea I walked on. There was a collection of bonsai oleanders, leaves ground to powder and stored in canisters. The granulate had apparently been tested on field mice for poison content. All that remained of the rodents were teeth and bones enshrouded in flesh tanned by rigor mortis. They’d been left to their terminal agonies, paws begging stiffly. The droppings had been used to fertilize trays of toadstools. Each tray was labeled: Amanita muscaria. Boletus miniato-olivaceus. Helvetia esculenta.

The plants in the next section were fresh and pretty but equally deadly: hemlock. Foxglove. Black henbane. Deadly nightshade. An ivylike beauty identified quaintly as poisonwood.

There were fruit trees as well. Acrid smelling oranges and lemons, pruned and twisted to nothingness. An apple tree laden with grotesquely misshapen tumors masquerading as fruit. A pomegranate bush slimy with mucoid jelly. Flesh-colored plums harboring colonies of gyrating worms. Mounds of fruit rotted on the ground.

On and on it went, a stinking, repulsive nightmare factory. Then suddenly, something different:

Against the far wall of the greenhouse was a single tree in a hand-painted clay pot. Well-shaped, healthy, and obtrusively normal. A hill had been formed from the dirt that floored the greenhouse and the potted tree rested on it, elevated, as if an object of worship.

A lovely looking tree, with drooping elliptical leaves and fruit resembling leathery green pine cones.

Once outside I gulped fresh air greedily. Behind the greenhouse was a stretch of barren land ending at a black wall of forest. A good place for hiding. Using the flashlight beam for guidance I made my way between the massive trunks of redwood and fir. The forest floor was a spongy mattress of humus. Small animals scampered in the wake of my intrusion. Twenty minutes of searching and prodding revealed no trace of human habitation.

I walked back to the house and switched off the greenhouse lights. The padlock on the back door was fastened to a cheap hasp that yielded to a single twist of the crowbar.

I entered the dark house through a service porch that connected to a large cold kitchen. Electricity and water had been shut off. The greenhouse must have run off a separate generator. I used the flashlight to guide me.

The rooms downstairs were musty and stingily furnished, the walls devoid of paintings or photographs. An oval hooked rug covered the living room floor. Bordering it were a thrift shop sofa and two aluminum folding chairs. The dining room was storage space for cardboard cartons full of old newspapers and bound cords of firewood. Bedsheets had been used for curtains.

Upstairs were three bedrooms, each containing crude, rickety furniture and cast-irons beds. The one that had been Woody’s bore a semblance of cheer — a toybox next to the bed, superhero posters on the walls, a Padres banner over the headboard.

Nona’s dresser was blanketed with cut-glass perfume atomizers and bottles of lotion. The clothes in her closet were mostly jeans and skimpy tops. The exceptions were a short rabbit jacket of the type Hollywood streetwalkers used to favor and two frilly party dresses, one red, one white. Her drawers were crammed with nylons and lingerie and scented with a homemade sachet. But like the rooms below, her private space was emotionally blank, unmarked by personal touches. No yearbooks, diaries, love letters, or souvenirs. I found a crumpled scrap of lined notebook paper in the bottom drawer of the dresser. It was brown with age and covered, like some classroom punishment, with hundreds of repetitions of the same single sentence: FUCK MADRONAS.