Dark Terrors 5: The Gollancz Book of Horror

WILLIAM R. TROTTER Honeysuckle

The green-eyed coed had written a slick little story about teenage angst in a small southern city in the late 1980s, tagged with a politically correct ending that put yuppie greed in its place. Halfway through the story she had included (quite calculatingly, I suspected) a startling sex scene. True, there have been sex scenes in about half of the stories I’d read for this workshop, but there were turns of phrase and allusions in this girl’s treatment that hinted of interesting personal proclivities.

Now she was staring at me expectantly, waiting for me to make a pass at her, in the guise of literary criticism, or for me to tell her how gifted she was; I suspected that in the yeasty crucible of the mind crouching behind that Cosmopolitan-cover face, the two were intertwined. I knew what my lines would have to be if I wanted to score with her, and for an instant my 49-year-old ego was tempted. She’d probably been told, by more than one English instructor who wanted to get into her pants, that she was very talented, and if tonight was the night she got to Fuck a Famous Writer, some degree of confirmation would be hers, some small professional magic transferred by the act.

Suddenly feeling mulish and weary, the only thing I wanted to do was slap her perfectly made-up cheeks with the cold mackerel of reality. Somewhere along the way, whether from reading too many articles in Writer’s Digest or from the encouragement of too many horny professors, this young woman had become convinced that she would be able to earn an actual living by writing proper little stories like the one that lay on the table between us. She could churn out stories like this by the dozen, I was sure, and as long as she stayed in graduate school, she would thrive. Out in the great marketplace, however, this kind of MFA-realism was a debased currency.

‘It’s a good story,’ I began.

Her face fell, then snapped back into the same lacquered smile. Good teeth, sweet breath, a satiny tongue — I was probably going to miss her by the time midnight rolled around.

‘But…’ she encouraged, grittily determined to show that she could Take Criticism.

‘But nothing. It’s a good story. Polished, effective, self-assured. Technically speaking, it’s one of the best I’ve read during this workshop.’

‘But I sense you’re still holding something back,’ she prompted, leaning forward.

‘Well, this is a purely subjective reaction, you understand, but it’s just like a thousand other stories that writing students are grinding out all over the country. God knows I’ve read enough of them. You’ve been told to “only write about what you know”, and the problem is that you and all the others who write like this have taken that advice literally… and I’m afraid you all “know” the same stuff.’

Say this for her: she didn’t give up easily. Changing the subject, she leaned back and threw out a question as big as a fishing net. ‘So, then, what advice would you give to somebody who wants to write as much as I do?’

‘Don’t.’

‘I beg your pardon?’

‘Don’t. Not to the exclusion of having a real life and a real job. Learn computers, get a licence to sell real estate, or find somebody rich to marry. Just don’t leave this university thinking you’re going to earn a living writing short stories. It will not happen.’

‘I think I have what it takes,’ she fired back.

‘Maybe you do. What you don’t have is any real conception of what the odds are against you, how big a part blind stupid luck is going to play, and how vast the competition is when it comes to the kind of stories you write. At least learn a tolerable trade, my dear, because the market for short stories is microscopic and the kind of magazines that print them usually pay in free copies. You might consider broadening your range to include romance novels, advertising copy, travel writing, or some such thing that will enable you to pay the bills while you practise your craft.’

That tore it; she wouldn’t go to bed with me now on a Vegas-sized bet. She gathered up her manuscript, thanked me for my time, and sashayed out of the conference room with enough of a swing in her fine tennis-playing ass to let me know I had just talked myself out of something memorable.

Still, I was more relieved than regretful when she snapped the door shut behind her. Her story had been the last one in the pile and this had been the last conference of the week-long workshop I had contracted to give at my old Alma Mater. I’d presented my obligatory lecture the previous afternoon and coped — graciously, I think — with a book-signing in the student union and a two-hour cocktail party afterwards, where I had listened to a lot of senile drivel from antique professors who swore they remembered having me in their classes, along with a surfeit of trendy educational babble from middle-aged academics of my own bewildered and increasingly irrelevant generation. God save me from ex-radicals with tenure; they are equal to the worst of Stalin’s commissars.

Now the afternoon stretched before me like a blank page. I repacked my briefcase, downed the last inch of tepid coffee in the Styrofoam cup I’d been nursing for an hour, and left, for the last time, the office the college had loaned me for the duration of my four-day sojourn. My plane didn’t leave until tomorrow morning, and I had turned down all offers for dinner and drinks. As I left the building and stepped into the bright spring sunlight. I had some vague notion of buying a bottle of bourbon and spending a monastic but tranquil night in my hotel room, surfing the premium channels for a decent movie or just enjoying the luxury of reading something I wanted to read.

It was one-thirty in the afternoon, most of the kids were in class, so the campus was pretty much deserted. As I started to walk to the parking lot where my rented Taurus waited in a VIP slot, I was suddenly cold-cocked, nearly overwhelmed in fact, by a sneak-attack wave of nostalgia. Although Davidson College had doubled in size since I had graduated in 1965, gone coed, loosened the hammerlock of Calvinism that had made the school conservative even by the standards of the Bible Belt, the campus itself had not lost the remarkable beauty of its nineteenth century landscaping.

Even during my moments of deepest discontent with its stiflingly reactionary curriculum and hypocritical ‘traditions’, I had always loved the look of the place: beautifully groomed lawns, roomy sidewalks, groves of towering elms and seasonally magnificent magnolias which created a palette of Turneresque light-effects at twilight; and the stately, if slightly pompous, façades of its Greek Revival architecture. Few places in America, in the mid-1960s, could have looked and felt so protected from the turmoil that had begun to rack the nation elsewhere.

And this was one of those picture-perfect late-spring afternoons that seemed to distil every enduring beauty of the North Carolina Piedmont into a kind of sensual banquet potent enough to slow the very tides of Time: mellow and generous sunlight, warm enough for shirtsleeves yet still hinting of the evening cool to come. Every random sound — a dog barking, the rustle of a squirrel leaping from one tree to another, the lazy but purposeful footsteps of students heading for the library, a distant whoop of sheer youthful exuberance from one of the dormitories — was made vivid and full of significance by the specialness of the springtime air I breathed. The intensity of the moment was unexpected, and it opened a vault of long-suppressed memories.

For about five minutes, I just stood there, rooted, in the centre of the quadrangle, breathing slowly and letting the mood take possession of me. Enlightenment quickly came: I knew that I was going to spend the rest of the afternoon in its grip. I had tricked myself, it seemed; subconsciously, I had arranged things, including, probably, my unnecessarily rude remarks to the girl, so that just such a fallow period of time would be available to me. I accepted the possibility I had tried to put in the back of my mind: I would, after all, make the pilgrimage I had sworn to myself I would not make.

Once behind the wheel, I went on autopilot; the little town that surrounded the campus had not grown all that much. Beyond its limits, I ignored the signs pointing west to the big new highway that led to Charlotte and turned in the opposite direction, on to an old New Deal-era two-lane country road that meandered through the cornfields and woods to the east.

The memory of the first time I had travelled this road came surging back so vividly that, for an instant, my youthful self seemed to merge with my middle-aged persona, so that I could see and hear and smell with senses that had net become brittle, selective, guarded.

It was on a May afternoon in my Junior year. I had just taken my final exam in a required course I detested, and I was still bristling from forty-eight hours of Dexedrine and coffee-fuelled cramming. Too wired to sleep or even relax, I climbed into my ratty old ‘58 Chevy and started driving aimlessly. The big highway to Charlotte was still six or seven years in the future, and so when I found myself at the first significant intersection, I turned towards the country, for no more compelling reason than the fact that I had not ever driven in this particular direction before.

The instant I did so, I experienced a remarkable sense of having done exactly the right thing, as though I had subconsciously caught a scent or felt the tug of an importuning current. There was little traffic — two or three cars passed going the opposite way, but otherwise the road was all mine. Cornfields stretched out in both directions, tenderly green, bordered by stands of trees close to the road, so that I passed through alternating bands of sunlight and shade, which created a soothing rhythm. Exactly where I was going or how long I would be driving, I did not know, nor did I particularly care. The wind streaming over my bare arms smoothed out those exam-time tensions.

After perhaps twenty minutes, I saw a sign announcing the imminent appearance of a place called ‘Haynesville, Unincorporated; pop. 500.’ The name was not unknown, though I had never actually been there; just a dot on the road map, one of those tiny Piedmont farm towns one drives through on one’s way to a larger dot on the map. Don’t blink as you pass through or you’ll miss it. A couple of gas stations, a feed-and-hardware store, a cinder-block post office, some tree-shaded houses set back from the road. A single four-way intersection with a yellow blinking light defined the centre of town. I scrupulously maintained the speed limit and made sure to come to a complete stop at the intersection — this place looked like the very archetype of a rural speed trap.

Which way to go? I was about to continue in the same direction when I saw, half-obscured by weeds, a small hand-painted sign: an arrow pointing left towards something called ‘The Gardens’. The sign could not have been placed there to get the attention of travellers or tourists — of whom there were precious few on this half-forgotten old highway; rather it seemed to be a reminder to local people who presumably already knew what The Gardens were.

Responding once more to that subconscious magnetic tug, I made a slow left turn and decided to check out The Gardens. For the first two or three miles, I saw nothing but more farmlands, pine groves, hedges, and gently sloping fields flowing with a late-afternoon patina of dusty gold.

Then, quite suddenly, the car seemed to enter a cloud of aromas so dense, so overwhelmingly rich, that my first inhalation made me as dizzy as the first toke I’d ever taken of really good pot. At first, the dominant scent was that of honeysuckle. That’s what hooked me, I guess. Growing up in Charlotte in the 1950s, I had experienced a secure, comfortable childhood, long before the city became a sprawling, traffic-choked Atlanta-clone. Every family I knew had a house with a big backyard, and the lazy summers were blissfully endless. Aside from the generic hormonal changes and confusions, even my adolescence had been a savoury, romantic time. And if there was one sensory input guaranteed to land me in a dewy-eyed trance of nostalgia, it was the sweet, seductive smell of ripe honeysuckle blossoms — in that aroma was distilled the essence of a thousand summery afternoons and lingering twilights.

At that moment, I felt as though I had suddenly driven into a river of honeysuckle, so thick and narcotic was the scent, and without realising it, I slowed the car to a crawl, leaned my head into the slipstream, and drank it in gratefully. Several intoxicated moments went by before I grew accustomed to the honeysuckle smell and began to register the complex symphony of other scents it had initially masked.

Later on, when I had time and cause to relive that moment a thousand times, I would reflect on how impoverished our vocabulary is when it comes to the olfactory senses, despite the importance of scent in our lives. Fifty million brain receptors are assigned to the sense of smell, and when they fire, they zap the same set of neurons that stimulates the canyons of our brain that Evolution has made the seat and source of pure emotion. Later on, I would have plenty of time and motivation for studying ‘aromacology’, and I would even learn the clinical term for what I experienced at that moment: ‘hypersomia’, the condition of being overwhelmed by scent.

At the time, however, I felt both disoriented and curiously, embarrassingly, aroused; as though I were bathed in an erotically charged kind of aromatic music, a rich, many-layered chord of scent that seemed to blend, in perfect proportion, the essence of every ingredient of a perfect spring afternoon. I breathed in the tawny gold of sunset, a meadow-sweet hint of new-mown grass and hay, an overripe syrupy hint of gardenias, and a hundred other blended essences: rustic, sultry, powdery, pollinated, fungal, pheremonic, resinous, roseate — sharps and flats, bold flourishes and subtle harmonic progressions. My senses grew overloaded to the extent that I verged on an out-of-body climax, as disturbing as it was seductive. Some tiny part of my rational mind ruefully admitted that it was a good thing there was no traffic on this old highway, for I was surely Driving Under the Influence..

I knew I had found The Gardens. Too curious, and too close to stoned to continue driving, I coasted to a place where the shoulder of the road levelled out. I was barely aware of opening the car door and gave no thought to locking it. At that time, in that part of the state, people seldom bothered even to lock their front doors. Then I began walking slowly away from the road into a dense maze of shrubbery, pine trees, and wild flowers. I followed the current of scent like an inner-tube drifter on a lazy, spiralling river. The profusion of flowers and herbs around me was luxurious, baroque and seemingly haphazard, yet I sensed there was order to it, on some larger scale than the one I could perceive at ground level. Perhaps if I had been able to rise above it in a helicopter, some great rococo symmetry would have become obvious.

I could no longer see the car, but knew I could home-in on its location when I needed to. Despite the dizzying opulence of the foliage and its myriad scents, I was moving as purposefully as a compass needle swinging north. After some moments I arrived at the edge of a rutted dirt driveway. As I paused to catch my breath, I was startled by the sound of movement, a rustling in the underbrush on the other side.

As soon as she stepped forward into full view it was apparent that she had been aware of my presence, or at least my proximity, long before I had become aware of hers. She gazed at me, unflustered by my sudden appearance, appraising me with eyes of cool, dark hazel. She had pale, roseate skin, fine-grained as expensive vellum; high cheekbones, a generous mouth the colour of strawberries, and a cascade of cornsilk golden hair. She wore no make-up, and needed none. Her cotton dress clung to her in a sudden breeze, outlining long, coltish legs and sprightly apple-sized breasts, and she clasped in front of her a large wicker basket overflowing with herbs and flowers of many kinds. I judged her to be, at most, seventeen.

She smiled. ‘Hello. My name’s Virginia.’

I stammered my own name and stepped forward awkwardly. I had been driving past, I explained, when I suddenly felt compelled to stop and explore these gardens, these groves… then I stopped — there was no more of an explanation. But she only smiled more warmly, as if to reassure me.

‘People come here all the time,’ she said.

‘What sort of people?’

‘Every now and then, people like you, who see the sign and get curious. But mostly folks from around here, who already know about the place.’ She shifted her basket to her left hand and stepped closer. We shook hands. Her touch was quietly electric. She tilted her head to her left, away from the highway. Sunlight brushed her hair and was at home there.

‘Why don’t you come up to the house? You look like you could use something cool to drink, and Mother always keeps a pitcher of lemonade in the fridge. It’s the best you’ll ever taste.’

I fell in beside her and we walked along the dusty driveway. The grounds on either side now took on a more orderly appearance: I was fleetingly aware of tended groves, small plots of exotic herbs and flowers, shade-giving canopies of plastic sheeting, small greenhouses, and occasional clapboard sheds, not unlike small tobacco-curing barns. These things seemed to radiate out from an as-yet-unseen central point.

Which was, of course, her home: a rambling old country house, many-windowed, framed by a broad and comfortable porch with wicker rocking chairs, dignified by a number of white columns. No matter how numerous my subsequent visits, I never could see the entire outline of the building, so hidden were portions of it by vines and shrubs and thickly matted trellises.

I never could recall what we talked about during the ten minutes or so it took to walk the length of the driveway to the front steps of the house. I only remembered how easy and pleasant it was to converse, and how we had already become friends by the time she ushered me into the long, shadowy front hall and led me into the kitchen. The lemonade, as promised, was delicious.

‘This is so good.’ I said, after my second tall glass. ‘I’d like to thank your mother. Can I meet her?’

There was something sad in her smile, although at the time I attached no significance to it.

‘Mom’s a little bit shy. She has a throat condition, you see, that makes it hard for some people to understand her. That’s why I’m the one who takes care of our visitors. Please don’t think she’s being rude if she doesn’t come out to meet you — I’m sure she knows you’re here and I’m sure it’s just fine. Here, take another glass and we can sit on the front porch and talk.’

And just like that, we did. Reflecting later, I guess I understood from the beginning that this was the strangest household I had ever visited, but when I was with Virginia, when I was under the spell of the place, it seemed more natural than any of the upper-middle-class homes I had known when I was growing up. The Gardens was a place apart, evolving to its own rhythms, governed by its own natural laws. Virginia, through her warmth and innocence and sweetness, eased my passage into her world and made me feel at home there.

This property, she explained, had been in her family since before the Civil War; each generation had improved and added to the gardens, planting new species, crossbreeding, patiently learning the secrets of flowers and herbs, leaves and mosses, even fungi. It was the same with the house — each patriarch had added a wing or a room, a greenhouse or a shed, until the original configuration of the building was hidden like the nub of a pine cone.

In the early decades of the century, Virginia explained, the family had been quite large, but now there were only herself and her mother. Some of the men had died in wars; many of their wives had borne few, if any, children. She also alluded, briefly, to an unidentified illness that had shortened lives. At the time, her recitation of family history seemed not so different from the kind of generational ups and downs that could afflict any large family that, by habit or choice, relied on a fairly restricted genepool to replenish its ranks; such genealogies were not rare in the rural South. To me, the saga seemed deliciously Faulknerian, even though her speech and manners were not those of a typical Red Clay rustic. In the space of one afternoon, I had already mythologised her into a rare wild flower, a beautiful child of nature whom I had somehow been destined to discover.

As twilight thickened around us, and The Gardens became shadowy, more mysterious, I began to sense a change in the diapason of scents that surrounded me. Aromas of sunlight and photosynthesis began to fade, replaced gradually by heavier, darker scents. Some I recognised — gardenia, mint, sage — many others eluded recognition. The Gardens were composing their own nocturne.

So what, exactly, was the family business?

‘We sell plants and flowers, just like any other gardeners,’ she replied. ‘But the family has always focused its attention on scent. Certain aromas have certain effects, on people and on animals. We mix aromas like pharmacists mix medicines. There are compounds that cure hay fever and diminish the effect of allergies, and others that cure depression. There are mixtures that make livestock more fertile, that help chickens lay more eggs and cows give more milk. When folks around here have a problem, they come to us. We have a large inventory of specific mixtures — after all, we’ve been doing this for more than a century — and if we don’t have a remedy, Mother and I try to develop one. Everything we create is organic; natural oils and essences. Mother says they contain the Life Force. We can’t help everybody, but we succeed more often than we fail, and people in these parts have come to trust us.’

Not until twenty years later, when New Age concepts came into vogue as the last spiritual refuge of ageing hippies, would I encounter the term ‘aroma therapy’, but Virginia and her clan had been practising its precepts for generations and, through trial and error and intuition, had actually created an extraordinary olfactory pharmacopoeia.

Sitting there on her darkened porch, listening to the sultry music of her voice, immersed in rare, exotic and evocative scents, everything she told me seemed to make perfect sense. I was young, romantic, ready to believe in the evidence of my senses. The coming of night made me feel simultaneously disembodied and filled with an earthy vitality. As the last saffron glow of sunset faded in the treetops, fireflies began to glow. With the coming of full night, they began to gather in vast multitudes, more than I had ever seen before, so that their illuminations pulsed in silent waves, bright enough to read by, like atoms of moonlight.

‘Isn’t it a bit early for fireflies to be out?’

‘Their mating season peaks in June, yes. But here in The Gardens, they always show up early. Mother says that this is the place where all the fireflies in the South start their seasonal cycle — they radiate out from here in a great spiral. Something about the place gets them charged-up. It’s funny to think of firefly lust, I guess, but I have this lovely image in my mind of a great vortex of living light, gathering energy here like a cyclone, then spreading all that beauty across the land.’

Suddenly, her hand was in mine and its softness, its warmth, the grace of her long, elegant fingers, evoked a thrill of intimacy in my whole body.

‘Come with me,’ she whispered, ‘and we’ll walk in the heart of The Gardens. On nights like this, it is very beautiful.’

What followed was dreamlike. Neither on the morning afterwards nor on any of the many times I tried to reconstruct the episode in detail, could I summon more than an Impressionist memory of the walk I took with her. Anchored to my flesh only by the touch of her hand, I followed her around the house and into a great expanse of orderly groves and fields, each with its own whirlpool of scent. Thousands of fireflies swarmed around us, escorting us, making the very leaves and vines and night-blooming flowers phosphorescent. I had never seen anything more beautiful or more mysterious; the very air we breathed seemed to be imbued with some undiscovered sensory dimension. Virginia herself appeared to glow softly, as though her flesh were kin to the nocturnal blossoms whose now-soothing, now-arousing scents flowed over us as we explored.

How many hours passed, I cannot say. Nor can I remember the names and properties of the orchids, vines and nectars she described for me. Not only time, but also the world beyond this place had ceased to exist for me. And try though I later did, obsessively, I could never remember the exact moment when we first embraced, when I first tasted the rich, nocturnal sweetness of her mouth.

I only know that, if someone had asked me during the week that followed, if I believed in Magic, I would have answered, passionately, ‘Yes!’

At some point, we ended our circumnavigation of The Gardens and I could see the dark outlines of her house again. Dim light showed in several windows, and the back door was open. Suddenly, a thick, soft, oddly distorted voice uttered a single word, not loud, but curiously penetrating: ‘Virginia?’

Instantly, she squeezed my hand and let go. The spell that had surrounded us faded quickly, leaving me again disoriented, suspended between two worlds.

‘That’s Mother, calling me in. I have to go now.’

‘I’ll come in and meet her,’ I stammered, reverting to the middle-class manners I had been taught. ‘I don’t want her to think I’m rude.’

Virginia put her hand to my lips and stared at me with luminous eyes.

‘It’s all right. She understands. But she’s shy. Perhaps some other time.’

I was suddenly desperate to stay near her. ‘Can I come back? Can I see you again?’

‘Of course. Come back a week from tonight.’

‘I don’t know if I can wait that long. What about tomorrow night?’

She shook her head. ‘Mother and I have a lot of work to do this week. She’s experimenting with some new things, exploring some new directions. I’m the only help she has. But I will be waiting for you, a week from tonight.’

And with that, she blew me a kiss and went inside. Stumbling like a drunk, I groped my way back to the front of the house, found the driveway, and eventually regained my car.

I returned to The Gardens one week later, at twilight. Virginia was waiting on the front porch when I parked. The sight of her, gracefully gliding down the front steps, rewarded a week of mounting anticipation, during which I could hardly keep my mind on classwork. There was just an instant’s hesitation when I got out of the car and faced her, then she came into my arms and I smelled the sunlight lingering in her hair and the evocative woody aroma of whatever herbs she had been working with earlier.

She led me into the kitchen, where her mother — nowhere in sight, but that did not surprise me any more — had put out a lavish supper for the two of us. I remember lamb chops grilled with herbs, fresh corn, biscuits, and, predictably, a monumental salad whose strange and subtle flavours bespoke the local origin of its ingredients.

It was dark by the time we finished. I helped her wash and dry the dishes, effortlessly falling into a domesticated routine, just happy to be standing beside her. As she finished putting away the last plate, she turned and said: ‘Would you like to see where I do my work? It’s my lair, really, my own private mad scientist’s laboratory.’ Of course I did; if she wanted to spend the evening playing canasta, that was fine with me.

So hand in hand we threaded through the foliage to a secluded corner of the grounds until we stood before a surprisingly large building. Inside were numerous boxes, pots, and trays filled with plants and flowers, some of them bathed in the light of fluorescent fixtures hanging from the ceiling. The far wall was lined with shelves and cabinets, all filled with gardening tools, glassware and stoppered, labelled jars. Nearer the entrance was an area furnished like a study, with desk, bookshelves, even a bed. Of course I noticed the bed right away; in retrospect, I think I was supposed to.

Virginia gave me a tour, and I hung on every word. Inside the jars were exotic essences, powders and oils from all over the world, imported or grown here in The Gardens under special conditions: coriander oil from Russia, lavender from England, sandalwood from India, nutmeg oil and patchouli from Indonesia, bergamot oil from Sicily, bitter orange from Egypt; anise, valerian, chamomile, lemon, spikenard, clove, champak and ylang-ylang… I remember but a few of the names of what she showed me. The commingled scents, until you got used to them, were close-to-overwhelming, a fugue of such complexity that its individual strands overloaded the ear. From their effect, and from the nearness of the girl herself, I became intoxicated, transported to the same dreamlike state I had experienced on our first nocturnal walk, when we had watched the fireflies weave their sarabandes of light.

Her study shelves were lined with notebooks and esoteric volumes, some of them, I supposed, quite valuable. Their titles had an arcane ring to them: Libellus de Distillatione Philosophica, Garcia da Orta’s Colloquies on the Simples and Drugs of India (Goa; 1563), Giovanni Roseto’s Secreti Notandissimi dell’Arte Profumatoria (Turin; 1555), and so forth. Some were modern reprints; others were antique leather-bound tomes. All bristled with bookmarks, showing that they were consulted (or had been, by her forebears) on a regular basis. I was impressed, and told her so.

‘It’s our family calling; what else could I devote my time to? You really don’t need a fancy laboratory, or research grants — just seeds and patience and time. My mother says that we’ve been successful because there aren’t any courses in aromacology, no textbooks, no rules, no dogma. And thus no inhibiting roadblocks from the conscious, verbal mind. No critical static. We do what we do and find out what works, we distil, we blend, make powders and elixirs, write our own recipes; above all, we’re patient. There are hundreds of formulas in those notebooks, and I’m adding some new ones from my own research.’

She looked up at me with those wide, pure eyes and seemed suddenly to get an idea. ‘Can I show you something I’ve been developing? It’s a compound that relaxes you physically but also makes you mentally alert. No drugs, no FDA approval needed, just Mother Nature’s own ingredients. I’m rather proud of it.’

‘I’d love to see, or smell, anything you want me to.’

‘Careful,’ she teased, quickly kissing the tip of my nose. ‘A girl might take advantage of such an open invitation.’

I settled into a comfortable chair and watched her perform a ritual of preparation, quite ready to be taken advantage of in any way she wanted. She moved amongst her shelves and implements like some improbable alchemist purifying from the gross to the subtle, measuring powders and oils into a pair of heated thurifers. As a final step in the process, she scraped tiny amounts of resins into the mixture, using a spatulate knife with the bold confidence of Van Gogh working his palette. A silken, ghostly vapour began to rise from the censers as she finished and knelt beside me, grasping my hand.

‘What do I do?’ I asked, already becoming more lightheaded.

Again she laughed, musically and with just a hint of prideful anticipation. ‘Oh, just do what comes naturally. But first, just breathe.’

Thus began our first ‘trip’ together. I must perforce use the terminology of the sixties, for these shared rituals with her would acquire the ceremonial quality I later saw amongst dedicated acid-heads trying to synchronise their vibes before the molecules reached critical mass: choosing the records to play, the swatches of cloth to rub, the psychedelic artworks to peruse, preprogramming themselves. Yet no matter how many such events I witnessed, I doubted that many of them had the opium-eater intensity, the sheer sensuality, of the chemical adventures I shared with Virginia.

After a few breaths, I could feel the changes starting. On one level, I was quite aware of my surroundings — I was in a big shed in the backyard of a most unusual family farm, part of me still worried that her mother might come in and create a scene — but on a higher and more resonant plane of consciousness, I was drifting into another place altogether. No, we were. This was not simple ‘smell’ in any way; the carefully mixed aromas permeated my entire being, and those fifty million olfactory receptors were all kicking into overdrive.

We were now in a mental and perceptual space that evoked a windswept seashore: ocean breezes, tangy yet not exactly salty… warm white sand… weathered timber with a faint tarry resonance. I felt utterly at peace, yet fully energised, my skin so sensitive it was almost painful. Her hand burned exquisitely. Her face, at that moment, was that of a Pre-Rafaelite Madonna — transfigured with beauty, but also smouldering with desire. When I bent over and kissed her, our flesh melted into one essence. How we moved from that first kiss into her bed, I cannot remember. We were following currents that flowed outside of normal time.

She was still a virgin, but she knew, instinctively, what to do, and at the time I could only marvel at my good fortune. That first sexual encounter made every other in my young life seem callow and fumbling. By simply responding to her movements and words, by following the hidden instructions in her small cries and moans, I did the things she wanted, when she wanted them, and inhaled for the first time the scent that would be the most precious of all: the deep marine sweetness that rose from between her flawless thighs.

How long, how many times, we made love, I do not know. The entire night was a continuum, one long unfolding melody of touch, taste, texture. She and her magic became my only reality. At some point, of course, we passed into sleep, tightly spooned against each other, our shared moisture drying like new skin layered over the old.

She woke me at dawn. My mouth was dry, and my body reluctant to move. She brought me a cup of coffee.

‘You should probably go before it gets light. Before Mother gets up. As long as we don’t flaunt ourselves in front of her, she’ll mind her own business — I often spend the night here, if I’ve been working late — but it wouldn’t do for her to find us in the same bed.’

I accepted that explanation; why not? I still felt a little trippy and disoriented, but I also felt like the luckiest young stud alive. Whatever the ground-rules were, I would abide by them — anything, anything at all, to prolong this idyll. As I groggily pulled on my shoes, I looked at her in wonder, observing the preternatural brightness of her eyes, the bruised, endlessly kissed flesh of her wonderful mouth, and asked: ‘Why did you choose me? I was a stranger who just happened to wander into your life. Surely every guy within a ten-mile radius of here has come to court you.’

In perfect seriousness she answered: ‘I chose you because you did just “wander into my life”, at exactly the right time, and in exactly the right place. That’s how all of the women in my family have chosen their mates: by instinct. That’s how my mother found my father, twenty years ago — one day, he just appeared in The Gardens, looking for something to cure a sick horse, and as soon as she saw him, she knew. It was the same with me.’

I should have thought long and hard about those words, but now that the spell was wearing off, and the light was growing brighter outside, I accepted the more mundane imperative of getting my horny young ass out of there before her mother appeared and accused me of deflowering her daughter. One last embrace, a willing promise from me to return next weekend, and I was gone, into the dewy grey dawn, circling around the house through groves of cobwebbed bushes and backing my car, as quietly as it would go, away from The Gardens.

Until that moment, I had entertained vague plans of getting a summer job while living with my parents in Charlotte; classes were over for the year, and I was in fact one of the last students still inhabiting the dorms. On the spur of the moment, I decided to stay on campus and register for some elective Summer School courses, just so I could be closer to Virginia. My parents made no objections, and coughed up the registration fees without complaint, even though my sudden dedication to academic betterment probably puzzled them.

So the summer went, and then, in September, I began my Senior year. My course-load during the summer was light, and I was so full of energy, so overflowing with vitality, that I began writing my first novel. By mid-July, I had fifty thousand words on paper, and was taking new chapters with me when I drove to The Gardens for my weekly trysts with Virginia.

Our meetings assumed the quality of ritual: I would arrive in the late afternoon, we would take long walks in the woods and fields surrounding the old house, eat the supper her still-invisible mother prepared for us, then adjourn to Virginia’s quarters. At her request, I began to read my book to her, and she always listened intently, encouragingly. And I, in turn, followed, as best I could, the progress of her own research and experimentation. At some point in the evening, always, she would prepare one of her aphrodisiac aroma-cocktails and we would begin to make love.

In my mind, gradually, a fantasy began to take shape: we would marry and I would live with her in this beautiful place, writing my books while she tended her beloved plants. This was a vision she seemed to share, and if it differed from my own in any details, she never spoke of them.

When I later became so cynical about the drug-and-music culture of the sixties, it was partly because nobody I observed during those years enjoyed a ‘trip’ comparable to the ones I took with Virginia. She was a virtuoso in her field, all right. Sometimes the set-ups were as simple as lighting custom-rolled sticks of incense, and other nights they were quite elaborate. She used censers, small fans, a kind of vapouriser, some glass gizmo that resembled an alembic, even a rotating fragrance-wheel with different pockets of compounds that spun slowly past a fan pointing in our general direction. I never knew beforehand what the conjured ambience would be — delicate and evanescent (putting us in the mood for slow, patient, Tantric sex), or raw and earthy (turning me into a young stallion and Virginia into a growling, insatiable, slut) — but it was always powerful, all-consuming and filled with wonder.

Her mother never interrupted us; if I had been thinking straight, I would have wondered a little more about that. Instead, I simply accepted it as part of the pattern. Her mom would not be the first parent I had known who voluntarily chose to ignore the evidence of her daughter’s sexual activity. As long as she didn’t actually catch us ‘doing it’, Mother could pretend we weren’t. Or so I reasoned it, and Virginia said nothing to indicate otherwise.

Months rolled by. I studied enough to keep up my grades, continued pounding away at my novel, and measured time’s passage only from one visit to The Gardens followed by the next. I remember only one moment of personal friction during the entire autumn of 1964, and that was when I casually said to her: ‘There’s a really good concert at the college next Friday night. Would you like to come with me?’

Her eyes grew hard for a moment, and her smile forced. ‘I can’t do that. I belong here.’

‘But don’t you and your mother ever get out, go into town, even for groceries?’

‘Mother’s not able to travel, even a short distance. When we need groceries, someone brings them to us.’

‘But your mother is an adult — surely she can take care of herself for one evening! I mean, Jesus, we’ve been seeing each other for almost eight months, and I’d like to show you off to my friends.’

Suddenly her nostrils flared with something close to anger, an emotion I had never before seen on her lovely face. ‘I told you Mother is not well! Why do you think I spend so much time in this place? Just so I can make cow-laxatives and sleeping teas for the local granny-ladies? I’m working on something that might make her better, and I can’t just interrupt that work. I make time for us on the weekends because I love you, but I love her too, and I’m dedicated to helping her, as much as it’s in my power do to so. You’ve got to understand that.’

By the time she finished speaking those words to me, she was actually trembling. I did not know why my simple request should have opened a fissure in the hitherto perfect surface of our relationship, but obviously it had, and the very thought sent an icy tendril of fear through me. At all costs, even if it meant accepting some fairly eccentric attitudes on the part of my beloved, I wanted to preserve the idyll we shared… forever, if I could.

There was another uneasy moment on the weekend before the start of Christmas vacation. I had kept in touch with my parents with regular phone calls, but had neglected to pay them a long visit since the end of Summer School. As much as I would have preferred to spend more time with Virginia, I knew it was incumbent upon me to go home for Christmas. She understood, or at least gave the appearance of understanding. And that last night before Christmas break, she made love like a madwoman.

In the morning, as I prepared for my now-customary predawn departure, she kissed me rather sadly and said: ‘I’ve made something for you. Keep it with you, and when you want to remember The Gardens, or me, just open it and smell.’

She handed me a pot-pourri bag about the size of a tennis ball, closed off with a drawstring. I started to open it and take a sniff, but her hands prevented me. I marvelled briefly at their strength, wondering whether I could have forced them open without having to break some fingers.

’Not now!’ she said fiercely. ‘When you’re away, and when you want to be reminded of me. Only then. Promise me.’

Of course I promised her, as I always did, without really thinking about it.

Rather to my surprise, I enjoyed going home. I had not spent a night in my room in almost a year, and I was pleased to rediscover some of my own artefacts. I also renewed contact with some high school friends, one of whom had just been drafted into the Army and was feeling decidedly nervous about it. I started reading the papers and watching the evening news again, and became uncomfortably aware of the widening war in Vietnam, of the first wave of student unrest, of the seismic disturbances looming in the world of pop music, fashion and attitude.

On the night before Christmas Eve, I and my friends held an impromptu high school reunion party at someone’s parents’ vacation home on the Catawba River. Two dozen ex-classmates showed up. We rented two kegs of beer and every other person in attendance, it seemed, brought either a bag of pot and a pipe or a cigarette case full of pre-rolled joints. I’d smoked before, of course, like virtually everyone else I knew, but it had been almost a year. By spending every Saturday night since May with Virginia, I had missed most of the partying around the college, and, of course, she and I had no need of dope — the stuff we inhaled was every bit as potent as any cannabis.

So I took a few sociable tokes for auld lang syne. And then a few more. Pretty soon, I was stoned as a bat and so were most of the others. As we all got higher, the inhibitions got lower. I began to notice that one of the girls was coming on to me — a peppy little brunette, ex-cheerleader, on whom I’d had something of a crush during my Senior year. She hadn’t paid much attention to me then, probably because she was the main squeeze of the Student Council President, but her priorities had obviously changed during the interim. She had heard that I was writing a book and wanted to hear All About it. Under the circumstances, I was happy to oblige.

One thing led to another, while the party-buzz swirled around us and the Rolling Stones growled on the record player. Before I knew it, her hand was on my knee and she was leaning closer, an unmistakable predatory gleam in her eye. Part of my mind was already rationalising: I was not, after all, engaged to Virginia, not in any formal sense, and I was tempted not just by my previous adolescent lust for this girl, but by the looming chance to put some of my newfound sexual expertise to the test. Ten long days remained of the Christmas break, enough for me and the cheerleader to have some good times, not long enough for any real commitment.

While I was marshalling these arguments, I was also acutely aware that I needed to piss like a racehorse. I excused myself, promising to return soon. Don’t go anywhere, I said to the former Miss School Spirit. Oh, I wasn’t planning to, she chirped.

But the bathroom was occupied and there was a line. So I sneaked out the back door and wandered down to the boat dock. The night was cold and clear, windless, and the sudden drop in temperature had a momentary sobering effect. I went to the edge of the dock, unlimbered, and enjoyed a long meditational pee, fascinated by the concentric ripples I was making on the slick, black, surface of the old river.

Then here came Old Man Conscience, just when he was not wanted: Virginia and I had made a commitment to each other; I took her faithfulness as a given — after all, I had never seen another young man in her company, nor heard her speak of any — and she obviously felt the same where I was concerned. Our lovemaking had been epic, deeply satisfying; there had not been a routine moment. Did I really think the cheerleader had anything new or exciting to offer, other than the guilty pleasure of novelty for it own sake? As I zipped my fly, the cold of the winter night suddenly struck me deep and I began to shake. I knew, with utter certainty, that if I went back inside and consummated the evening’s flirtation, that Virginia would know. No matter how many showers I took, she would be able to smell the effluvium of another woman on my skin, in my blood. To Virginia’s hypersensitive nostrils, the coldest ashes of guilt would leave a murderer’s spoor.

Resolved to be strong, I reached into my pocket and took out the pot-pourri bag she had given me. Just before re-entering the house, I stood in the shadows, untied the drawstring and took a deep hit. In these ingredients, somehow, magically, she had trapped the essence of our nights together. Memories flooded me with painful immediacy: nocturnal gardenias, jasmine, roses, the scent of sunlight in Virginia’s hair, the roseate milk of her skin after a night of love.

I staggered back into the muggy warmth of the house, into the reeking banks of cigarette and pot smoke, and with my first breath became violently disoriented: as in ‘bad trip’, my senses going into hyper drive and taking me places I did not want to go. I held on to the side of a kitchen counter and tried to fight down the nausea that threatened to engulf me. Perhaps it was just a chemical reaction between Virginia’s pot-pourri and the marijuana fumes, or perhaps my own perceptions had grown much keener than I’d realised until that moment, trained (so to speak) by all the olfactory adventures I had experienced in The Gardens.

There was a garbage can nearby, and I could smell everything in it: stale beer in the bottom of cans, wet cigarette butts, old popcorn, coffee grounds, the brown remains of a salad. Even worse was the vile, urinous stink of a litter box tucked away beneath the kitchen table. One of the revellers walked by, on his way to the beer kegs, and I could smell the failure of his deodorant, the sulphurous wisp of a silent fart. And, with shocking and disturbing intimacy, the rusty odour of tampons. I could look around the crowded living room and tell which of the girls was having her period — including, I was surprised to learn, the one I had been flirting with.

My system could not process any more of this unwanted information. I retreated into the backyard and violently puked all over some azalea bushes. The stench of my own vomit made me even sicker, and for a moment I thought I was going to pass out. Gradually, however, the cold air washed the worst of the smells from my head and I began to crawl out of the mood. I knew better than to attempt another reentry; what if I had a flashback and disgraced myself in full view of my friends? And as for the cheerleader, all desire had been quelled by that sickeningly intimate whiff of her menses — not to mention the fact that I was now liberally splattered with up-chuck.

With unsteady gait but a pristine conscience, I navigated back to my car and drove, very carefully, to my parents’ house. Safe in my old room, with its comforting momentoes of a more innocent time, I briefly considered flushing the contents of Virginia’s magic bag, but decided that it had not been the pot-pourri’s fault — the scents that came from it were all pure and sweet and powerfully evocative of the finest nights I had ever known. No; the problem was the context in which I had impulsively opened it, creating a violent dissonance of mood and triggering an allergenic sensitivity in all those fifty million olfactory receptors. I put the pot-pourri bag on my dresser and went to bed. I did not sleep well.

1965 came in clear and cold; there was a New Year’s Eve party, but I stayed at home with my parents and watched the big ball fall in Times Square. The decade — mygeneration’s decade — was at midpoint and history was at a watershed. Even my parents sensed as much, for during our last dinner together, the night before I was scheduled to return to college, my mother casually enquired as to whether or not my draft deferment was still in good shape. I assured her that it was, as long as I adhered to my plan of entering graduate school, and as long as I kept my grades up, there would be no problem doing that. My dad grew uneasy during this conversation: he had been in the Navy in World War II, executive officer on an LST in the Pacific, and was fittingly proud of that service, but I knew from our conversations during the holidays that he had grave misgivings about the unfolding adventure in Vietnam. Crushing a peasant uprising was not easy to equate with stopping Hitler or avenging Pearl Harbor.

Six days into the new year, I returned to campus and began my final semester. At first, things were as they had been at the beginning of my affair with Virginia: our first night together, after the unaccustomed abstinence caused by the holidays, was memorable — we all but devoured each other. Whatever doubts I had about the longterm implications of the relationship, whatever inconsistencies and quirks there were about her secluded life in The Gardens, all were swept away from the moment I embraced her and inhaled the new and potent aromatic cocktail she had prepared for our reunion.

But by the end of winter, there were troubling occasions; not when I was with her, of course, but during the week, when I strove to complete my undergraduate responsibilities and to lead the normal life of a Senior. I began to have periodic flashbacks, like the one that had ambushed me on the night of the party. These could be triggered by something as ordinary as the chance whiff of fresh dog turds near a sidewalk, or the body odour of a passing student who hadn’t had a shower in five days. I would become dizzy and nauseous, overpowered not by seductive, floral, sensual aromas, but by sharp and disturbing signatures of decay, filth and the lesser functions of the human body. The episodes might last a few seconds or a few minutes, but they always left me uneasy, oddly insecure, and plagued with severe headaches.

I understood, logically, that my long and regular exposure to the rarified olfactory banquets of Virginia’s world had sensitised me, rendered me vulnerable to the baser, uglier odours of the world as well as its finer, subtler essences. It was as though I had developed a peculiar set of allergies to complement my heightened senses.

From these episodes there surfaced an unwelcome awareness of the sheer weirdness of Virginia’s existence. All my invitations to go on a ‘real date’ — to a movie, a dance, an off-campus party — she deflected adamantly. There were rules to our relationship that now seemed confining rather than deliciously exotic. A year ago, I had fantasised about marrying her and settling down with her, learning something of her family trade, making a secure and hermetic life for us inside her world. Now, I began to feel somewhat boxed-in. Her seeming indifference to the greater world outside The Gardens puzzled and, on occasion, irritated me.

Everything was beautiful and serene so long as we stayed within the pattern that had been established. I still read to her from my manuscript, and she was still the perfect audience — attentive, rapt, flattering in her reactions. ‘Your writing makes me sad for things I can never know,’ she once remarked, after I had read a particularly Kerouacian rhapsody.

‘Why can’t you?’ I asked, a little more sharply than I intended.

‘I’ve told you,’ she answered with bland indifference. ‘I have to stay here and help Mother with her work.’

‘Seven days a week?’ I said, raising the ante. ‘What’s so important that you can’t even go out to dinner with me? And where does your invisible mother do this work of hers?’

Virginia gestured vaguely towards the house. ‘She has her own workshop, her own place, in the house.’

‘Yeah, okay, but what the hell is she working on, a cure for cancer?’

For just an instant, the youthful innocence of her features hardened and her eyes, still the loveliest and most expressive I had ever seen, flashed with impatience.

‘I told you once before, there’s been hereditary sickness in our family. It killed my father not long after I was born, and my older brother when he was still a baby. Both Mother and I are working on therapeutic compounds to counteract its effects. In addition to the things we do for our customers.’

‘Why don’t I ever see any of these customers?’

‘Because everybody in these parts knows we’re only open for business during the week. The weekends are for ourselves. And for you,’ she added quickly.

Before the conversation could evolve further along these patently uncomfortable lines, she removed my arms from around her shoulders, stood up, and quickly added a big dollop of compound to the censer that was smouldering on a nearby lab table. Quick as flashpowder, a cloud of powerful aroma filled the air, and as it reached my nostrils, she watched me closely, observing with almost clinical detachment, waiting to see what effect it would have.

Instinctively, I held my breath, but the scent got into me nevertheless, not just through my nostrils, but through every pore of my flesh. In seconds, all my doubts and questions faded into a muddled vagueness, and I was once more helpless with desire for her. My hands ached to be filled with her breasts, my mouth would shrivel and turn to dust unless moistened by her lips and tongue. She smiled as my arousal became visible, then slowly, tantalisingly, removed her clothes and came to me with open arms. I surrendered, as I always did, to the ecstasies of the moment.

One Saturday evening in May, when The Gardens were flooding with the urgencies of spring, I drove up to the house and was mildly surprised to see that Virginia was not in her usual place of welcome on the front porch. I closed the car door forcefully, figuring that she would appear as soon as she heard the sound. But she didn’t, not this time. In the softening light of late afternoon, the house loomed immense and shadowy. The atmosphere of The Gardens, usually so rich and verdant this time of year, seemed preternaturally still, as though a vast breath were being held.

Curious, I climbed the front stairs and knocked on the door. Then I called her name. After a few more minutes of strained silence, I shrugged and went inside. My first intention was to go straight down the hall and into the kitchen, where I expected to find the usual well-prepared dinner on the dining table. But when I peered into the kitchen, I saw only empty plates and glassware; no food had been set out, although there were simmering pots on the stove and the aroma of a roast browning in the oven. I coughed politely. There was no response.

For a moment, I was at a loss; so unvarying had been the pattern of our trysts that I did not know what to do next. I retreated down the hall and observed as I did so that the living room door was ajar — at least, I presumed it was the living room, although the door had always been closed before as we made our ritual journey from the front porch to the kitchen. It occurred to me that I had never before seen that part of the house and just now, for some reason, I wanted to. Feeling a little bit guilty, I went in.

It was a perfectly ordinary living room, with comfortable but nondescript furniture that looked to have been bought in the late forties or early fifties. There was no TV, but then, I had not expected to find one. There was a telephone, however, on a table near the front window, which was covered with curtains. The telephone was not surprising — after all, these people ran a business — but the fact that Virginia had never given me a telephone number was. Beside the phone was a notepad, with a list of crossed-out orders jotted down. The last one read: ‘Granny Wilkerson: quart of jasmine tea — grandson will pick up Thursday a.m.’

I felt vaguely disappointed, as though I had expected the contents of this hitherto sealed-off space to reveal something important about Virginia’s family. I made a quick circuit of the room, through dim subaqueous light. Only one thing caught my eye: a line of framed photographs on the mantelpiece.

Here at last were some images of my beloved’s family, about whom she had only spoken in generalities. I examined the older pictures first: stern-faced men with muttonchop whiskers and handsome women in late-Victorian gowns of black. A man in the puttees and campaign hat of a World War I doughboy. And a newlywed couple dressed in the style of the 1940s: the woman was tall and blonde, with eyes and cheekbones that resembled Virginia’s. Her expression was one of satisfaction and repletion, as though she had just achieved some major goal in her life.

The stiffly dressed man beside her bore rather a different expression: one of resignation, I thought, rather than newlywed bliss. A man who took his duties, whatever they might have been, very seriously indeed. These, then, were Virginia’s parents; of that, I had no doubt.

But the longer I stared at the image, the more disturbing it was. The dutiful husband bore at least a generic resemblance to me — his features seemed a fast-forward projection of my own as they might turn out to be in full manhood. The same dark eyes and rumpled hair, the same jawline and aquiline nose. My older brother, perhaps, if I had had one. With renewed interest, I went back and examined the older photos. Despite the dramatic changes in dress and facial hair, all the men were at least of the same general physical type as myself, just as all the women bore a passing ancestral resemblance to Virginia. Either I was looking at a record of true Southern Gothic inbreeding, or a remarkable case of coincidence. What was it Virginia had said to me on the first night we made love? Something about how the women in her family picked their mates instinctively, at first sight? Perhaps there was more to that remark than I knew.

Lost in thought, I did not hear her enter the room. When she spoke my name, I jumped. And as I turned to greet her. I could not help noticing that the manteltop space next to the photo of her parents was occupied by an identical, but empty frame. Was it reserved for a similar newlywed image of us?

She was not pleased to find me there, but she hid it well and quickly, distracting me with as warm an embrace as any she’d ever given me.

‘Mother and I were working on something important,’ she quickly explained, ‘and the time simply got away from us. Come on back to my place while she finishes making dinner.’

I hooked my arm through hers and let her steer me towards the porch again. We always went from the kitchen to the porch, and then around the house on the outside; we had never gonethrough the house in order to reach her lair. This time, I balked.

‘Let me help in the kitchen.’

She tugged on my arm impatiently. ‘No, no. Mother has everything under control.’

‘I’m sure she does, Virginia, but I also think it’s long past time for me to meet her.’

‘I told you,’ she insisted, ‘Mother’s very self-conscious about her condition. Please, let’s just go to my place and relax until the food’s ready. I’ve got something special for you tonight.’

Her face was so extraordinarily beautiful in the twilight, her expression so pleading and insistent, and the promise of ‘something special’ so alluring, that I yielded and followed where she led.

Once we reached her quarters, she busied herself (with what would later seem to have been unusual haste) mixing some new compound in her favourite thurifer. She chatted nervously while she bustled, moving some large, extravagantly flourishing potted plants close to our chairs. (‘These will increase the effect,’ she explained, and as always, I accepted her explanation.) I tried to relax; a considerable portion of me was already feeling that wonderful erotic ache for her. But some recalcitrant part of my mind remained tense and on guard, and compelled me to say: ‘Why do all the men in your family look like me?’

‘Do they?’ she forced a laugh. ‘Well, I guess it’s a predilection for brown eyes and curly hair. Just like some men get turned on by redheads more than brunettes. You’re my type, my love, whatever that means. Just accept it as I have. We’re together because we were destined to be. You’ve said so yourself, many times.’

Of course I had. Because our love had indeed seemed predestined, and because I was young enough, romantic enough, and horny enough to find the idea marvellous.

So I remained silent and willed myself to relax as Virginia performed her alchemy and the room began to fill with yet another new and potently effective scent. She settled into my lap, hugged me close and began kissing my closed eyes with hot, delicate lips. My erotic response to her was by now Pavlovian, and I was damned if I would let my doubts and unanswered questions spoil what promised to be an exceptional sexual adventure, even by our standards.

Whatever she had concocted, it was one of the most powerful recipes yet. After a few minutes of breathing a tart, slightly mossy fragrance, none of whose ingredients I recognised, I began to feel warm and tingly, disembodied, anchored to reality only by the intensely arousing sensations she was giving me with her full yet subtle lips, the satiny tip of her tongue. I no longer cared whether I ate supper or not. Nothing mattered except her caresses.

I have no idea how long we kissed and petted and fondled before I lost consciousness. I was never aware oflosing unconscious — the erotic or dream was its own continuum, and I did not know, until I woke up from that dream, that I had passed out. The last thing I remembered, for certain, was Virginia unbuttoning my shirt, running her fingernails through the hairs on my chest, and swirling her tongue around my nipples.

Considerable time had passed, because I opened my eyes to darkness and a pale column of moonlight streaming through the windows that faced the depths of The Gardens. At first, I thought she was still beside me: I felt a pleasant tingling in my arms and chest, as though her wonderfully skilled hands were still caressing me. The scent of her potion lingered in the air, but it was stale and faint. Instinctively, I tried to raise my left arm and look at my watch, but something restrained my movements. In an instant, I was fully awake, and alarmed to feel myself enmeshed, everywhere, by thin filaments that clung to me like ropes. Had she been planning a little bondage as part of the evening’s scenario? That was a specialty she’d never mentioned before, albeit an intriguing one.

Outside, a cloud moved past the moon and by the sudden brightness, I could see my arms, legs, and torso covered with vines that had grown, with unnatural rapidity, from the plants she had positioned around my chair. I was immobilised, like a bug in a spider’s web. When I struggled, a dozen flashes of pain erupted from my exposed flesh, and I saw that the vines not only bound me in place, but their tips had penetrated my skin, and from the obscene sucking sensations that accompanied the pain, they seemed to be feeding on my blood, either that or — and this seemed even more horrible — they were passing some hideous substance from their barbed tips into my flesh.

Shouting and cursing, I began to tear at the vegetation. It was as though I sought to pluck a horde of leeches from my skin, for as each vine tore free, it left a raw, bloody puncture-wound. The vines began to writhe, like a nest of snakes, with a hideously malevolent awareness. As I freed myself, they lashed at me, furiously trying to regain their purchase on my flesh. I kicked over the pots and stamped on them. When I was finally free of their ghastly embrace, streaming blood from a dozen lesions, I grabbed a hoe and smashed the pots, chopping each wriggling worm of vegetation until I saw no more movement. Then I fled. Past the dark and now-sinister house, into my car and back to the campus.

As the cool night air streamed over my raw face and arms, I began to feel like a man who has broken free of a strange and terrible enchantment. What Virginia’s purpose had been in subjecting me to such a horrible experiment, I could only guess. But now that her spell was irrevocably (or so I thought) broken, I could see that, from the moment of our first encounter in The Gardens, she had been cultivating me as she did her exotic plants and essences. Oh, yes, she had instinctively ‘chosen’ me, because I was indeed ‘her type’, just as those sombre-faced men in the photographs had been her mother’s type, her grandmother’s type, and back through all the generations that had lived on that land. And what of the mysterious ‘sickness’ that had plagued the males of her clan? Had it been the by-product of some cruder but equally unholy symbiosis between their flesh and the plants that, for whatever loathsome reasons, required human blood or tissue to complete their life cycles?

How long would she have kept me there? Was there some terrible bargain to be made for continued access to her body? If I had stayed with her, married her, would the price of that union have been the periodic loan of my body to her damned plants?

By the time I reached my dorm room, I was one mass of heartache. Not to mention the fact that I looked as though I had been mugged by a giant octopus. As I was unlocking my door, a friend stumbled by on his way to the bathroom.

‘Jesus Christ!’ he exclaimed when he saw me. ‘Where the hell have you been and what the hell happened to you?’

‘Went to a party that got a little rough,’ I muttered.

‘Must have been some fuckin’ party. You missed at least three final exams, you know.’

‘Impossible. I don’t have my first final until Monday afternoon.’

‘Oh, man, don’t you know what day it is?’

‘I thought it was Sunday night.’

‘Sorry to break the news, pal, but it’s almost Wednesday morning. You’ve been gone four days.’

How I got through those final days of my Senior year, I don’t know. I took make-up exams, of course, but my mind and heart were elsewhere and I did poorly in every subject. Enough to drop my grade average from a B-plus to a C-minus. Enough to jeopardise my plans for graduate school. Enough to make me prime fodder for the draft board.

To this day, I remember nothing about graduation, except my parents’ troubled displeasure at the way my scholastic career had nosedived. I was like an addict who had suddenly been deprived of his drug of choice. Nothing could erase the horror of what I had awakened to in Virginia’s room, but neither could I get her out of my mind. Perhaps, just perhaps, there had been some explanation, which she’d had no chance to give, that would have enabled me to live with this new and bizarre element in our relationship. Part of me was now afraid of her, but larger and more primal parts of me ached for her, for the voluptuous rapture her presence filled me with. I knew, with a woeful certainty, that I would never find another woman who could conjure such erotic magic.

I lost track of days and nights; I hung out in my parents’ house, parried some with my old friends, made a few desultory passes at my manuscript. In my own way, I had ‘dropped out’ before the phrase became a cliché.

When the draft notice came in the mail, in late June, I accepted it stoically. I suppose, looking back on it, that I held fairly conventional ideas about the Vietnam crusade. As an avid student of history, I was under no illusions about the purity of Communist causes — I knew how much blood dripped from the mandarin-thin hands of Ho Chi Minh; and as a writer, I knew the old bastard was at best a third-rate poet. I fancied myself something of a military history expert, and I was curious to see if we could do what the French had failed to do: put a lid on the ideological ant-heap. But in the end, I guess, I submitted to the United

States Army’s call more or less for the classic reason men enlist in the Foreign Legion: I wanted to forget. I wanted a distraction big enough to cure me of Virginia. I figured it would take something on the scale of a war to do that.

But before I entered the embrace of the Green Machine, I wanted to pay her one last visit. I guess I had some bullshit notion of letting her know it was due to her that I was going off to war and maybe going to get my young ass shot off, not to mention some other parts of me that she had been very fond of. I wanted some kind of apology, some kind of explanation, some kind of closure.

Be careful what you wish for.

I drove to The Gardens on a muggy windless Wednesday night, a couple of days before I was scheduled to embark for basic training at Fort Bragg. On impulse, I shut off the headlights and coasted quietly into the parking area in front of the house, not wanting to spoil the impact of my sudden appearance at the door. All around, the groves and fields were in full summer riot and when I inhaled that opulent mixture of fragrances I felt not unlike an alcoholic who’s taking his first belt of bourbon after months of sobriety. Memories washed over me. I was a bit unsteady when I silently closed the car door and mounted the front steps.

After waiting a few minutes for someone to answer my knock, I tried the door. It was not locked. There was dim light spilling from the kitchen into the hallway, but otherwise the place was dark. I heard no sounds of activity. It was too early for the inhabitants to be asleep, and I was quite sure they were not out watching a movie or eating at a local cafe. I walked down the length of the hall and paused before entering the kitchen. I knocked again, rather timidly, on the doorframe. Again, no response. The kitchen was empty.

But now that my ears had grown used to the silence, I did hear Virginia’s voice — distant and too muffled for me to make out any words. It seemed to come from within the walls. I circled the room, trying to home-in on the sound, until its volume increased slightly. I was standing in front of what I had always assumed was the door to a storage closet or a pantry.

After a moment’s pause, I also became aware of a new and altogether unpleasant set of aromas: dank, heavy, suggestive of mould and fungi, even of rot. Part of my mind was urging me to forget the whole business, turn my back forever on this part of my life and just drive away. Another part of my mind was intrigued: was this perhaps the entrance to Mother’s private lair? If it was, and I managed to get a look at what was going on there, I might at least come away from this journey with answers to a few of my questions.

This internal debate did not last long, and, of course, the curious part of me won it. I turned the door knob, and slipped through the opening. As I did so, the foetid, fungal smells grew oppressively stronger: organic, heavy, full of slow, unpleasant moisture. I fought down an impulse to gag and tried to breathe through my mouth.

I was standing at the top of a narrow rickety flight of stairs that made a sharp righthand turn about fifteen feet below the door. There was enough light to see by, but it was a type of light that corresponded to the smells emanating from below: greenish and sickly and thick enough to verge on mist.

Now I could hear Virginia’s voice clearly. She was talking eagerly about whatever experiments were being conducted, horticultural terms mostly, and her words were punctuated by the sounds of glass and metal implements. It took a moment or two of hard listening to realise that the conversation was two-sided.

Some of Virginia’s remarks were answered by monosyllabic grunts that seemed to come from a throat stopped with phlegm, the words barely intelligible to me, as though they bubbled up from underwater.

Carefully, I descended the last few steps and peered around the edge of the entrance to this subterranean den.

I only got a glimpse before I turned and ran back upstairs and out of the house, but I remember every detail, flash-frozen on my retinas: beds of glistening moulds and fungi, some of the growths extruding waving fronds that looked very similar to the vines that had fastened upon me in Virginia’s workshop; Virginia in a stained lab smock, transplanting a vile-looking lump of matter that shuddered and humped in her hand as though it were not merely alive, but sentient; creepers and vines writhing on the ceiling, turning the room into a living cavern; tubes filled with circulating fluids that were being pumped from one obscene growth to another.

And Mother, of course.

Mother still retained a human shape, if you could call it that: an immense, shuddering bulk of distended and puffy flesh, mottled with unhealthy greens and charnel greys and pocked with scabbed-over sores, some of them oozing a dark yellow ichor. Mother, whose fingers had fused into some unholy amalgam of flesh and vegetable matter, Mother, whose face, when she turned it more fully into the greenish light, was a mass of pendulous polyps. Mother, who moved to hand her daughter a glass beaker, and who did not step so much as slosh forward, as though the simple act of movement brought her flesh — if that’s what it was in her condition — to the verge of liquefaction.

I made a sound, more a groan of disgust than anything else, and fled up the stairs as fast as I could go. Most of my mind shut down from the impact of what I had seen, but one rather incongruous thought did keep surfacing as I drove recklessly away: that woman, or whatever she had become, had fixed my supper. Dozens of times.

Lucky me: I got to Vietnam just in time for the Ia Drang Valley campaign, in November of 1965. Actually, I was pretty lucky in a sense: my unit did not participate in the main battle in the mountains just east of the Cambodian border, where more than five hundred men of the First Cav were killed or wounded in a vicious, close-up encounter with about two thousand North Vietnamese regulars. But I was on the fringes of the battle, participating in numerous patrols and ambushes in the vicinity of Due Co. My unit didn’t have any stand-up fights with the NVA — not in November, at any rate — but we lost men almost every day to mines, mortar attacks, and snipers.

Every man took his turn at point on those patrols. My CO gave me a few weeks to get acclimated before giving me that assignment. That day’s operation promised to be hairy: we were to scour an area of particularly thick jungle south of Route 19, where some of the enemy units decimated in the Ia Drang fight were thought to be regrouping and licking their wounds.

Visibility under the forest canopy was dangerously limited; I could see, at best, maybe twenty metres ahead of my M16 barrel and I kept turning around to make sure the rest of my platoon was still behind me. We’d gone about a kilometre when we came to a slight clearing that bordered a stream. On the opposite bank were some mammoth trees with roots the size of a small car, surrounded by dense underbrush. The thought crossed my mind: if I were the enemy, I could not ask for a better place to mount an ambush.

I’ll cop to it: I was scared shitless. I’d never been this close to the enemy before, nor been in a close-range firefight. Without thinking, I reached for the only talisman I had: Virginia’s little pot-pourri bag, which I carried in one pocket of my blouse. My fingers closed over it, and it released a slight, comforting fragrance. I sniffed my fingers, just as I had on the morning after we’d first made love, hoping to obtain some magical connection with a simpler, sweeter time.

As soon as I did that, I experienced the first major olfactory flashback I’d had in months. It came over me like the first rush of a hit of bad speed. My skin prickled, my vision blurred and I was suddenly cognisant of the rainforest smells, in all their wet, fecund, richness, just as if I had inhaled some of Virginia’s custom blends. It was overwhelming: orchids and vines, earth and mould, the silvery scent of the creek, even a passing feral hint of a tiger somewhere in the deeper forest.

I knelt behind cover and signalled for the men behind me to do the same. I tried to ride out the sensations, sort out the smells, get myself together. With this kind of sensory overload, I was worthless as a point man.

Or was I?

After the first blast of scent, my mind began processing the input in a more rational manner, and beneath all the jungle odours, I began to discern — as sharp and keen as woodsmoke on a winter night — the smell of human flesh, and the unmistakable odour of the fish-sauce the Vietnamese love to put on their food. And I knew with absolute certainty that the enemy was on the opposite bank of the stream, waiting for us to come into the open.

I crawled back to the platoon and told the lieutenant what I thought.

‘How do you know they’re over there?’ he whispered. ‘Did you see movement?’

’No sir. I smelled ‘em. And I’m not just guessing — they’re there’

The lieutenant stared at me for a moment, weighing his decision. I didn’t blame him for being sceptical — I was still considered an FNG (Fucking New Guy) and this was, after all, my first time as point man. Then he made up his mind, pulled out a map, and signalled for our d radioman to scuttle closer. Two minutes later, the radioman was bent over the handset of his PRC-25, calling in a fire mission from a battery of 155s that were on call to support us.

Then the lieutenant and I crawled back to a point where we could observe the other side of the stream. The first round fell a little short, throwing up a huge geyser of muck. The radioman adjusted the range and called for a barrage. The far bank vanished in a whirlwind of fire, smoke and debris, and as the big shells chewed things up, we heard e screams and observed body parts and pieces of weaponry flying through the air.

If there were any survivors among the would-be ambushers, they fled long before we crossed the water and started counting the bodies. Well, ‘estimated’ is maybe the word, because the barrage had left only bits and pieces. The lieutenant finally decided, somewhat arbitrarily, I thought, that we had zapped at least twenty NVA, and after he radioed that information back to headquarters, he slapped me on the shoulder and said: ‘Ya done good, son. You must have a golden nose!’

Of course, the tale of that patrol grew in the telling, and some of the other guys started looking at me funny, as though I had some kind of supernatural penumbra glowing around my head. Like it or not, I was stuck with the nickname ‘Golden Nose’ from that day until the day I finished my tour.

But the funny thing — well, it really wasn’t funny so much as weird — is that from the moment of that olfactory flashback, my sense of smell became permanently hypersensitive and my ability to control it, to turn it on and off, grew with practise. Of course the very experience of combat heightens all the senses, adrenalises the reflexes, causes time to dilate (many a firefight registered on my eyes in Sam Peckinpah slow motion), and generally reinforces the notion that life itself is experienced most keenly when you’re in danger of losing it. All of us felt such things.

Only I had an extra sensory edge. Whatever Virginia and her potions had done to my chemistry, to the very meat of my brain, I was blessed/ cursed with a nose that would have done credit to a K-9 tracking dog. Danger and adrenalin made my aroma-perceptions bloom. It was a blessing in the sense that I could literally smell an ambush or an otherwise undetectable enemy bunker complex. My CO was wise enough not to give me the point every time we went into the bush — a man can only do that so many consecutive times before he burns out and turns into little more than a quivering bundle of ganglia — but when we went tunnel-hunting or when there seemed a good likelihood of enemy contact, I was usually up front, nostrils flared, antenna twitching, filtering out the now-familiar rotten-ripe scents of the forest or the rice paddies, trying to pick up the smell of the enemy — the rice he ate, the bunkers he slept in, the hidden places where he buried his shit. I was good at it; I saved some lives and caused some serious hurt to the gooks.

As for the ‘curse’ part, well, I learned about that a week or so after the ‘Golden Nose’ patrol. My platoon went into billet for a few days, while some other poor bastards went out and beat the bushes in our stead. We got a chance to catch up on sleep, write letters, take showers, eat steaks, drink beer, walk to the local native town and pay for a perfunctory blowjob.

We also got a chance to smoke pot. Shit, everybody did it except some of the officers, and most of them just looked the other way. The rule of thumb seemed to be: get stoned when you’re off duty, if you want to, but stay clean when you’re in the field. I had not partaken of the weed since that disastrous Christmas party when it triggered my first, and so far worst, olfactory flashback. But when the corporal in the next bunk handed me a reefer of Thailand’s Best, I figured what the hell?

Big Mistake.

Oh, it felt good enough at first: a nice mellow buzz followed by idle thoughts of walking into the village and getting my ashes hauled. Going with the flow, I brushed my teeth, juiced my pits, and put on the one shirt I could find that was not fouled with sweat. Then I went outside and I got as far as the wire perimeter when the bottom fell out of the world.

That first wave wasn’t so bad. The thing about Vietnam, once you discounted the heat, the monsoons, and the fact that about half the population wanted to kill you, was that it was a damned beautiful country. That first deep breath bequeathed me the essence of that lush green beauty: the delicacy of rice fronds waving in the wind, the richness of the jungles, the stern granite of the nearby mountains, the vast and sinuous pictogram of the Mekong River.

Then I inhaled again and I smelled everything — and I do mean everything — which lay beneath that beauty. I smelled the decay of fifty thousand corpses, even the dry powdery effluvium of the bones of those Frenchmen who had died here in the 1950s. It was as though I had become suspended over a vast charnel pit where each and every victim of that tragic country’s endless wars had been gathered in one stinking mountain of human offal: the stale-shroud scent of the long dead along with the ripe fluid-and-tissue reek of the newly killed.

I reeled and gasped again, and yet another layer of scent invaded my pores: the sour and devious reek of corruption emanating from the governments in Saigon, and the sly taint of hypocrisy pooled in the armpits and under the tongues of our own politicians and generals. I smelled the char of napalmed flesh, the palpable stink of fear from those about-to-be-tortured. I smelled the earthy wriggling of maggots. I smelled jet fuel and the cordite of a million fire-missions.

Even now, after many years of trying to find the vocabulary to do justice to the experience, I can only adumbrate the palest echo of what it was like. My nostrils burned with violation, my brain began to seethe, unable to contain the input. With no other possible outlet, I began to scream. Those who witnessed me in the throes of this moment later told me I looked like a man who had been struck by lightning. Several guys ran over to where I lay, writhing on the ground in a foetal ball, clawing at my skull. I remember nothing that happened after I hit the ground, and that’s just as well, but one of the soldiers who reached me first later told me that the only intelligible words I said were: ‘Virginia, you bitch, what did you do to me?’

I went into deep catatonic shock and just lay there, trembling, a thin stream of bile trickling from my mouth. The medics were puzzled, of course, and finally just diagnosed it as a case of total, sudden burn-out (a not-unheard-of phenomenon in men who had been out in the bush one time too many). I was sent to the base hospital at Plei Me ‘for observation’. They pumped me full of Valium; I slept a lot; the symptoms faded rapidly. After a week, the doctors could find nothing wrong with me. Neither could the shrink who spent a few hours prodding my psyche — if I had tried to tell him the truth, he would probably have thought I had just concocted a fantasy in the hope of getting a psychiatric discharge. So they declared me fit for duty and I went back into the bowels of the Green Machine.

Where I performed my soldierly duties well enough to earn a Bronze Star. My lieutenant kept a close eye on me for a few days, to make sure, I suppose, that I didn’t suddenly start foaming at the mouth or speaking in tongues, and then, because he needed the Man with the Golden Nose, he put me back on point whenever there was an especially hairy mission to perform.

But something had profoundly changed in me. That apocalyptic vision of death and corruption had altered my perceptions. I did what I had to do out of loyalty to the men I served with, but all illusion was now stripped from me. I knew we were not going to win this war: I had quaffed the stench of defeat on a psychic wind, I had turned over the biggest rock in the country and seen the maggots crawling on the underside. I knew now that every death, on either side, was one more drop in a tidal wave of futility and waste. And there were times when that knowledge tore at my heart, for there was nobody I could share it with.

For the rest of my tour, you may be sure of it, I smoked no more pot. And as these things have a way of doing, my inability to share its benign balm made it all the more desirable to me. Time after time, when the other guys were passing joints or fellating the bore of a shotgun while someone else poured smoke into the breech, I cursed the chemical peculiarity that was Virginia’s legacy to me. I felt shut out of the camaraderie that made our miserable existence tolerable. I longed to join them in the communal high, but was terrified at the thought of what even one toke might trigger. When the fumes got thick, I had to leave. Another olfactory visit to that vast charnel house might really drive me nuts, and I knew it.

What did I do instead? I began to drink. Not just the lukewarm beers that were plentiful in any base camp, but Jack Daniels, straight out of the bottle. Oh, I never did it on the night before we were scheduled to Go Out, at least not in the beginning, but when the other guys lit up their Thai sticks and pipes full of Laotian Brown Lung, I reached into my locker for the bourbon and sought out an empty bunker for another ride on what Willy Nelson called, in one of his greatest songs, ‘The Amber Current’.

By the final weeks of my tour, I was walking a thin line indeed. Off duty, I had become a drunk, and there were days when I went into the field nursing God’s own wrath of a hangover, which did nothing to increase my chances or my usefulness to the other guys. The lieutenant knew, and sometimes when he talked to me, I could see him weighing his decision: should I ground this guy before he gets himself or someone else zapped, or does he still have enough left to be of value?

It was getting harder and harder to pull myself together, especially there at the end. I was now a short-timer, subject to all the traditional fears of getting my ass shot off just before it was time for me to leave, and I was a borderline alcoholic to boot. Things were made even worse by the fact that we were now patrolling a region that had been in enemy hands for months and was known to be riddled with tunnels. Guess who was the Designated Tunnel Rat? Yes sir, it was Air Golden Nose himself.

About ten days before I was due to rotate home came the mission that won me the Bronze Star and finished me as a soldier. Things were hot in our zone: lots of scrappy little clashes with NVA regulars, our resources stretched thin putting out tactical fires, and incessant demands from headquarters for the sort of intelligence one is more likely to find in a tunnel complex than on the body of some ordinary dead gook.

The one I sniffed out on that particular morning gave every promise of being a monster, a labyrinth that went God-knew-how far back inside a massive jungle-covered ridge.

There was a ritual to preparing for a tunnel-crawl. I stripped off everything except my basic clothing, took a flashlight, shouldered an empty pouch, and drew a special silencer-equipped.38 revolver (if you fired a regulation.45 in the confines of a tunnel, there was a good chance you’d rupture an eardrum). I felt like a matador donning the Suit of Lights before entering the bullring. Then I shook hands all around, trying not to observe those I’m-glad-it-aint-me expressions on the other guys’ faces, got down on my belly and slithered in.

A few feet from the entrance, I paused to let my eyes become adjusted to the dark. The dank brown walls stretched ahead of me like the coils of an intestine. As silently as I could, I began to lever myself forwards with my elbows, keeping the flashlight in my left hand and the revolver in my right. At the first fork in the tunnel, I paused again. Which way to go? I needed some advance warning if there were live people down here. So once again, ritualistically, I reached for Virginia’s magic bag and took a whiff.

Instantly, my smeller prickled with new sensitivity. The scents from the righthand tunnel were old and stale, but from the left came a trace of recently boiled rice — an underground kitchen, perhaps, or even a command post. I went that way, the tunnel broadening slightly. I discovered the command post by falling into it. Whoever had been living here, they’d had time to fix things up rather comfortably: desks and chairs, a couple of cold lanterns, a radio set, crusted rice bowls, some sleeping pallets. All the comforts of home, VC style. After untangling myself, I shone the light around and found what I was hoping to find: a cardboard box fall of what appeared to be old radio messages, a couple of folded maps with marks on them (no booby trap; I could smell those, too), the sort of stuff that gave the intelligence analysts a hard-on.

But as I gathered up this bounty and stuffed it in the pouch slung over my shoulder, I was blasted by a new wave of scent: hot, fleshy, sanguine, tainted with fear, sweat, and pain. Somewhere in the tunnels ahead was a hospital. If I could force myself into that loathsome reek, I might find more documents, perhaps fresher and more timely than the relics I had already bagged.

Moving very slowly now, I entered the tunnel that led away from the command post, the smell of the hospital becoming almost unbearable as I advanced. There was candlelight ahead. The tunnel went upwards and beyond the lip of earth, I sensed an expanded space. I could smell human habitation, too, but the scent of blood and bandages and sweat was so powerful that I could not tell if it came from occupants recently moved or still there. A wounded VC could be very dangerous. I shut off my own light and decided I needed some more precise olfactory input. Time for another hit off the pot-pourri bag.

This time, I got more than I bargained for when I raised my head over the entrance and peered in. Christ, what an abattoir was there! Five or six cots, all of them rusty with old blood, a dented operating lamp connected to a dead generator, a pile of basic surgical instruments near an old-fashioned boiling-water steriliser, rolls of bandages, a few jars of ether. And a big corrugated washtub full of putrid human parts — arms and feet and blackened lumps of tissue. It looked positively mediaeval.

Then the full wave hit me, with so much force I almost fell back into the tunnel. I smelled, and felt, the agony of every wounded man who had been brought here. Suddenly I saw this whole war as my enemy must have seen it: endless effort, endless pain, endless suffering, endless hiding from our planes and artillery, years and years of it, and still burning fiercely beneath all that, a raw, primal determination to be rid, once and for all, of the foreigners who had held this land in bondage since antiquity. It was a staggeringly simple perception, but it turned my mind inside-out. I felt the hopelessness and suffering of every man who had been treated in this room, and I also felt their pride, the determination of those men to bear any pain, any suffering, if by doing so they could move their cause forward by a single inch. The hospital I had been in was no Disneyworld, but it was a suite at the Plaza compared to this primitive butcher shop. What a foe they were! How could we hope to outlast them?

Then I smelled, and saw, the wounded man. He rose from his cot like a wraith: emaciated, terrified, his face consumed by two black-lacquer eyes that burned with fever. Now I was belted by the char of the gangrene that was devouring him. His torso was wrapped in slime-covered bandages, and I was sure they were the only thing holding his guts inside. I got a burst of his pain, too, and it was almost more than I could bear. Maybe his comrades would come back for him when our unit had left the area, although it didn’t seem likely that he had that much time left. One thing for certain: I could not shoot him like a dog.

‘It’s okay,’ I said, shaking my head and pointing at my pistol. ‘I won’t kill you. Just lie back down and I’ll leave.’

Of course, he didn’t understand a word. I held up both my hands and made placating gestures. I was going to back out of the room and his existence would be our little secret. There was a pile of ragged, torn, bloody uniforms in one corner of the room, but I had already decided not to look for any more papers in their pockets — it would have been too much like sticking my hands into other men’s gaping wounds.

As I started to back away, I spotted the AK-47 he’d been hiding by his side. Though it must have cost him immense pain to do so, he was slowly swinging it in my direction, his eyes glowing like coals.

‘No! It’s not necessary!’ I yelled to him, but even as the words came out, my hand swung up and the.38 barked twice, its reports muffled by the silencer. And I felt, almost as hard as he did, the impact of the bullets as they tore through his ruined body; I also felt the last dying flicker of determination that made him pull the trigger of his own weapon, emptying the whole clip in one long roaring burst that blew the bed next to his in half. And I felt him die, still hating me.

How long after that I lay there, I don’t know. Long enough for the lieutenant to send somebody in after me. When they dragged me out into the sunlight, he took one look at me and knew I was finished. But the stuff I brought out in my satchel, along with the other odds and ends my rescuers had filched from the pockets of those bloody uniforms, actually proved to be valuable information, so he wrote me up for the medal.

I stayed in the base camp until my time was up, drinking heavily, staring into space mostly, trying not to relive that moment when I felt the impact of my own bullets snuffing out the existence of a brave man who had been keeping himself alive by sheer willpower and consuming hatred for his enemies. I was so hungover on the morning I was lifted out that I puked out of the helicopter — my last contribution to the soil of Vietnam.

The rest, as they say, is history — literary history, anyhow. There was money put away for graduate school, but I took it and moved to New York instead, just as the city was turning into one of the nation’s two biggest hippie meccas. For the whole time I’d been with Virginia, and during odd moments of nostalgia during my ‘Nam tour, I’d kept working on that huge, romantic, Thomas-Wolfeian novel — fanciful autobiography, most of it — whose avowed theme was to capture the essence of that Ball-Before-Waterloo period of the late fifties and early sixties, before the death of innocence and the collapse of the American Dream as my parents had lived it, and I had absorbed it, during my early adolescence.

The writing was (need I even tell you?) a gushing amalgam of Kerouac, Wolfe, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and every other writer whose work had given me a hard-on during my formative years. With my graduate-school grubstake and a part-time job, I figured I would be all set to do the Young-Writer-in-New-York bit for two or three years, and at the end of that time, naturally, give birth to a great novel.

I arrived in Manhattan near the end of 1966, still suffering from periodic ‘Nam-mares and bad flashbacks, but still young and so grateful to have survived combat that I felt, on my better days, not unlike I had during my affair with Virginia: freshly laundered nerve endings, pumped with Possibilities, ready to drink in the scene and spew out the words.

Trouble was, I expected to find the same New York I’d read about in Wolfe and Kerouac: Bohemian cafes with chequered tablecloths and drippy Chianti bottles, great jazz, wild poets reading their sequels to ‘Howl’, and hip intellectuals sitting up all night discussing books, movies and music.

What I found instead was a three-year block party thrown by a chaotic alliance of cultural anarchists, political zealots who harboured all the good will and tolerance of Joe Stalin’s favourite judges, puffed-up media pundits, and greed-crazed record company executives. I was armed with a theoretical knowledge of what Young-Writers-in-New-York were supposed to do with their careers, but that aspect of my book-learnin’ was hopelessly out of date. Nobody gave a shit about big, romantic, traditional novels any more. In my small southern college, I had been regarded as a rebel; in the Big Apple in late 1966, I was hopelessly middle-class.

Off-balance from the start, I foundered. I had, God knows, as much reason to loathe the Vietnam War as anyone, but I boiled with rage every time I saw the TV images of protestors vilifying or even spitting on returning vets whose only crime — like mine — was that they had survived their tour.

But as 1967 dawned and the bloodbath increased, I, too began to oppose it, at least in my mind. The war had started to stink (as I knew all too literally) like fish gone bad in the sun. By then, it lacked even the tragic existential grandeur of the French debacle, that operatic, Foreign-Legion-to-the-front sense of a once-great empire dying like an old Gauloise butt hissing-out in the mud. It was not just the bull-headed stupidity of our ‘body-count’ tactics that offended me, it was also the deplorable lack of style that characterised the whole American effort on any level above the regimental: thousands of young men just like me being fed into a meatgrinder by generals who specialised in management theory instead of honest-to-God warfare and who probably had cement deer in their yards at home.

Work on my novel sputtered, then died. That ‘innocence’ I had wanted to capture now seemed as remote as the Court of Versailles. I decided to make an all-out effort to plunge into the milieu in which I was stranded, and forget about trying to find what Wolfe and Kerouac had found in the city. I grew my hair long, bought some fashionably outlandish duds, and tried to blend in. Everybody I knew was awash in hedonistic abandon, grooving on the music, turning on, living for the day, etc., etc., the whole Party Line. Not to mince words, there was enough good fucking going on to exhaust a dog with two dicks.

Problem was, it was all fuelled by pot. In the words of my sometime-friend Norman Mailer, ‘Sex has got to be pretty goddamn great to match even a quickie on pot’, and, as he so often was in those days, Unca Norman was right. If you smoked, you flowed. You could participate in marathon conversations whose contents would stupefy with their banality if you were straight; you could wallow in music you would ordinarily consign to the cultural midden-heap after the first eight bars; you could laugh a lot, get the munchies, and score with any nearby chick who happened to look at you with even a flicker of interest.

And I wanted all that, wanted to immerse myself in What Was Happening; if I could not write like Thomas Wolfe any more, well then, I could become the madman chronicler of the craziest, horniest, yeastiest era since flappers and bathtub gin.

But — God damn you, Virginia! — every time I tried to get high, every time I toked on a soggy passed-around joint, I suffered an attack of hypersomia so close to clinical schizophrenia that I had to lurch out into the night and heave my Nachos into the nearest alley, leaving me sodden and slow and disoriented for days afterwards. Whatever she had done to my metabolism, the changes were permanent. While the circulating fumes of other people’s tokes only made my eyes burn and my appetite for junk food increase, the first touch of cannabis on my own lung tissue always, always, threw me straight to the vestibule of my private Hell.

Imagine yourself a poor but goodhearted child, confronted with a vast display of toys and candy — all the things you’d ever wanted Santa to bring you, but your parents could never buy. And all that separates you from this bounty is a membrane as transparent as glass and the society around you has given you blanket permission to reach in and grab anything your heart desires. But every time you press your hands against that invisible barrier, it’s like sticking a wet finger into a light socket. Imagine the frustration, the longing, the gnawing bitterness.

On every side, the century’s greatest party was going full blast, and to groove with it all you had to do was smoke a little reefer and check your mind at the door. How I ached to join the dance! Because I could not, however, I became consumed with directionless anger and jealous envy of all those who were lustily soaking up enough memories of sensual pleasure to keep their hearts warmed up in the old-folk’s homes, decades later.

At the age of twenty-five, then, I had become as crabby and cynical as the crustiest NY Times columnist railing against the excesses of youth. Jesus, I wanted those excesses to be mine, too, and I burned to write about them from the inside. There were weeks when I felt like a man with a permanent erection who could not, for the life of him, achieve a decent climax.

Damn you, Virginia!

What jolted me out of my funk — and led me down a creative path I had never contemplated before — was the legendary March on the Pentagon, in October 1967. If I had not been able to lose myself in the hedonistic swirl of the times, I had at least been sharpening my sense of their politics. The word on the streets, as the event drew nigh, was close-to-Apocalyptic. The Johnson government was mobilising massive force to protect its symbolic Bastille; there might well be blood in the streets, and the radical crazies from the Left seemed hellbent on making sure there would be copious amounts of it. I wasn’t sure just where I stood in the ideological spectrum, but if the Revolution really was about to happen, I was as well-positioned as anyone to be its John Reed. So I packed a notebook, a secondhand movie camera, and a vial full of uppers and hitched a ride — in a VW microbus full of tie-dyed Dead Heads who seemed to think it would be a lark to have their heads cracked by police batons — to Washington.

By sheer accident, I ended up in the vanguard of the horde that made the march. Even more: I managed to end up on the very steps of the Pentagon, with only two or three rows of protestors between me and a double row of bayonets. Believe me, this was not the vantage point I would have chosen. If the SDS lunatics really did try to storm the building and shooting did break out, I was ten feet from the muzzles and utterly held in place by the pressure, behind me, of approximately one hundred thousand people. I looked nervously over my shoulder: simmering in the ripe afternoon sunlight was a restless sea of people, waving banners, playing guitars, lofting effigies and all manner of weird cultic fetishes. Before me loomed the guarded ramparts of Power. And off to the side, on the edge of a parking lot, Allen Ginsberg and the Fugs were chain-dancing, chanting their Pentagon id Exorcism: ‘Out, demon, out!’

Then, as I looked around at the snipers posted on the roof and the CIA types in sunglasses muttering into their headsets, at the banks of TV cameras and lights and microphones, while the multitude behind me chanted ‘The whole world is watching!’ I felt a sudden breakthrough to exaltation. At that instant, the whole damned world was watching, and I was at Ground Zero. The historian in me came wide awake, even as the rational part of me was half-sick with fear. No, it was not really the Bastille, or even the Palace Square in Petrograd, but there were enough similarities to get my adrenalin pumping as it used to when I was pulling point in the jungles.

It was, as they say, A Moment, and during that measureless interval, the writer in my soul stirred vigorously to life.

Suddenly, from around the flanks of the main steps, two flying wedges of gas-masked MPs charged into the crowd. Tear gas canisters popped and clubs began thudding into flesh. They were obviously under orders to move the mass of people back and simply to spread fear, and I instantly recognised, behind the lenses of their gas masks, a look I had seen all too often in combat. Knees drove into groins, and hippy-length hair was yanked out by the fistful. You can bet your ass the crowd dispersed, or tried to. I saw an opening to the left and wormed my way out of the melee, doing a bit of groin-kneeing myself, my eyes streaming tears from the gas.

And as I stood gasping for breath and groping for my handkerchief, I found myself standing a few feet away from Norman Mailer. He looked as wild as a bull with three pies in his hump, head lowered, ham-sized fists clenched, those tangled trademark eyebrows practically grinding together with determination. Taking a deep breath, he marched defiantly into a line of US Marshals blocking his path.

Christ, I was with Thoreau at the moment he was choosing to let himself get hauled off to the pokey! Without thinking, I ran forward and dove into the knot of people surrounding a man whom I considered America’s finest living writer.

The marshals, evidently, had been warned to look out for Mailer and not to rough him up. They were under no such instructions with regards to myself, however, and by the time we found ourselves sitting in the same sweatbox of a police van, I was nursing a loose tooth, a split lip, a cauliflower ear and a bruised right hand from the one good punch I’d managed to land during the fracas.

At first, both of us were too winded, too speedy with adrenalin, to do more than nod. After a while, though, Norman stuck out his hand and introduced himself.

‘I know who you are, man. What you did back there took some guts.’

‘You too, unless my personal magnetism is greater than I supposed it to be.’

Jesus, he actually talks like he writes! I thought.

‘Call it research. I’m a writer, too, and there’s a story in all this that somebody’s got to write.’

Norman looked at me sternly, pulling rank.

‘That’s why I’m here as well, sonny.’

I shrugged. I was a second-rate club fighter suddenly thrown into the ring with the heavyweight champ. No contest.

‘It’s all yours, maestro,’ I managed to croak.

As though by way of consolation, Norman patted me on the arm and said: ‘That was a pretty fair right hook you got in, I’ll say that. Where’d you learn to fight?’

‘Army.’

He studied me with renewed interest.

’Infantry, I’ll wager.’

’How’d you know?’ I responded, forgetting, for a moment, that this was the man who had authored The Naked and the Dead.

’For a flash there, you had That Look. I saw it often enough in the Philippines.’

The authorities took their own sweet time booking and fingerprinting us, and while we waited, we swapped war stories, grunt to grunt. I even told him about the Golden Nose business, although of course I did not tell him about how I came to acquire that metabolic anomaly. He seemed genuinely fascinated.

’The sense of smell is unjustly neglected, much maligned by being written about only in connection with vaginas and toilets’ (he pronounced the word with the gnarly Irish brogue he was then affecting in his public speech, ‘ter-let’). Then he startled the hell out of me by writing his unlisted Brooklyn Heights address on a scrap of paper and saying: ‘Write a war novel, kid. If you can write it as good as you talk it, you’ll have something. When you’ve completed the first hundred pages or so, send ‘em to me and I’ll tell you if they’re worth a shit.’

So as soon as I bailed myself out and got back to New York, I did just that. I fussed with outlines and chronologies and made some false starts, but then, one lonely night when I was about to crack the seal on fresh bottle of bourbon and hammer myself to sleep, I remembered Virginia’s pot-pourri bag. I had not even fondled the damned thing since ‘Nam, except to pack it away in a bottom drawer. But the instant I remembered it, clarity enveloped me like a gilded halo on a Byzantine icon.

My hands shook as I retrieved it, untied the drawstrings and put my nose down into whatever essences still brooded there for me, compounded to match the profile of my soul by a woman who had become, in my rational mind, almost a myth.

One hit was all it took, and I was back in Vietnam, on a trip as vivid as anything the acid-heads could have conceived. It was as though my senses had become transposed: nose for eyes, scent for touch, turning me into one big quivering dousing-rod of a receptor.

But there was one crucial difference: along with the rot, pain, terror, blood and corruption came the bronzen scent of pure courage, the plough-horse-stubborn effluvia of endurance and stoicism from the warriors. Not only my comrades, but those at-the-time faceless little men who outlasted every massive horror our technology could throw at them, who could march twenty miles and still fight a battle, fuelled by nothing but a few handfuls of congealed old rice.

It would be an exaggeration to say that the novel ‘wrote itself’ in that moment of epiphany, but the sculptural outlines of it manifested themselves like a bronze by Rodin. I was visited, almost palpably, by the two main characters: one would be an amalgam of every brave American I had ever fought with, and the other would be a fleshed-out version of the gaunt, pain-ravaged enemy soldier I had killed in that reeking tunnel-complex. The story would be theirs, their lives and deeds and sufferings and ultimate deaths, as intertwined as Yin and Yang. I would grind no axes, make no apologies, follow no agendas. My model would beThe Iliad, nothing less.

Six months after that night, I sent Mailer the first three hundred pages. Two weeks went by before I got a growly-voiced telephone call from him: ‘Come over and let’s get drunk together, you son of a bitch! You’ve written a great book.’

As soon as I’d hung up, I whispered: Thank you, Virginia!

Thanks to Norman’s recommendation, the completed manuscript landed right on the desk of Putnam’s senior fiction editor. They bought it, but warned that it could not actually be published until ‘the political climate’ was right. I never quite understood that (and Mailer fulminated about it in commiseration), but for once in my life, my timing was perfect: six months later, the film The Deer Hunter came out, to extravagant reviews, and the media moguls took that as a sign that it was now okay to treat the Vietnam War as History, not as some untouchable sore on the body politic that equated with box-office poison. I thought that movie was the most over-rated piece of shit I’d ever seen (and flayed it savagely in a critique for Commentary after my own novel had squatted on the bestseller list for a few months), but I can’t deny the importance it had in paving the way for my book.

A lot of plum writing jobs fell my way after that, and of course the film Paramount made out of the Vietnam novel copped three Oscars. What followed was a predictable curve: three Trophy Wives (and three messy divorces), a long-running column in Esquire, six more novels (each received respectfully, but none, to my mind, on par with the first one), and a drinking habit that was probably spotting my liver by the time I was forty. And of course, the usual round of celebrity gigs at workshops and literary soirees, the most recent of which was the one at my Alma Mater, terminating in that sour encounter with the green-eyed coed and her proper little story.

Mine was a success story, to be sure. But there were nights when me and the Jack Daniels pulled out that old, yellowed, first-novel manuscript and I wept to see the untainted purity of so much that was in it, ached for the now-impossible dream of finishing that paean to pre-Vietnam innocence. If I had only known a tenth of what I knew now about my craft, what a fucking book that would have been!

But of course I could no more finish that book now than I could will myself to become eighteen again.

But no less could I leave my old campus without once more following that route to The Gardens. Would Virginia know of my career? Would she sometimes ache to remember our idyllic nights and our ravenous hunger for the feel and taste and (of course!) the smell of each other’s flesh? She would be, what? Forty-five, forty-six, now? Had she found ‘by instinct’ another mate? Had she buried her mother, or merely repotted her?

After so many years, that period of my life had become a legend even to me. The pot-pourri bag was still with me, like a talisman, but I had never opened it again since the night it conjured, as though by magic, the shape and structure of my first, best, published book. Whatever other rewards and satisfactions I had known in my career, Magic had not been an ingredient — I used up the last of it from the pot-pourri bag like some latter-day Merlin who had hoarded one valedictory spell to cast at King Arthur’s flaming burial-ship as it sailed into the mist between worlds.

Now, verging on fifty, I was a practical, world-weary man, and it was inconceivable that the things I thought I had seen and experienced in The Gardens had been real. Such things do not happen outside of fantasy tales… or dreams.

But just the same, I thought as I drove that once-familiar route towards The Gardens, I had to know. If I could, after so many years, reaffirm that my private mythology was indeed based on real events, a real and unforgettable love affair, perhaps the grace of Magic would touch me again. If it did, and my liver didn’t give out, what strange and marvellous tales might I yet be able to write?

The hamlet of Haynesville — at whose only traffic light I had first seen that sign pointing towards The Gardens — was now a fair-sized town, the little general store was gone, replaced by a Wal-Mart and a Blockbuster video emporium. The hand-painted sign was also gone, of course, but that was no surprise. I was driving on automatic pilot, riding a tide of memory that flowed inexorably towards the site of my own personal shrine and, if she was still there, its priestess.

Once more, I drove through the narcotic opulence of honeysuckle, now in full riotous bloom. I parked on the highway’s shoulder and approached the house quietly, instinctively going into that heightened state of sensory alert I had known on combat missions, although it struck me as slightly absurd that my body should react in such an extreme manner.

Evidently, Virginia, or somebody, was still in business, for The Gardens were as lush and well-tended as I remembered them. The house, however, when it finally came into view, had a dilapidated air to it: paint peeling in long dingy strips, one shutter hanging askew like a droopy eyelid. As I silently mounted the steps, I wondered: should I knock?

There was no need. The front door was open, and when I peered through the screen at the dark hallway, I saw her standing in silhouette at the entrance to the kitchen, arms folded placidly, as though my appearance after a quarter-century was neither surprising nor unexpected.

I entered and walked towards her, then stopped halfway, just looking at her. She had fleshed out some, but that only made her seem earthier, riper. Her cornsilk hair had turned a lustrous grey, but it still had the flow and fullness of youth. An astonishing sword-stroke of desire cut through me. We appraised each other for a moment, then she spoke:

‘I knew you would be coming.’

‘How did you know that, Virginia?’

She laughed, and there was just enough of an edge to the sound to make my skin prickle.

‘You forget how much I know about genetics, about the power of blood and kin.’

‘I haven’t forgotten anything, and I have no idea what you’re babbling about.’

Again that wise, knowing, sad and somehow chilling laugh.

‘It’s your son’s birthday. What loving father would miss such an occasion?’

‘What the fuck are you talking about, woman?’

‘The last time we made love — the night before you destroyed some of my most precious plants by tearing yourself free of their embrace — that was the night, and part of the process, that made me pregnant.’

Now she sighed, with genuine regret.

‘If only you had stayed unconscious for a little while longer, if only I had had a chance to explain things to you, my God, what a life we would have enjoyed together!’

She shook her head as though banishing the phantoms of memory.

‘But enough of that! What’s past is past, what’s done is done. And now, it’s time for you to meet your son.’

At that instant, my arms were pinned by a grip so fierce and unyielding that none of my rusty, basic training counter-moves could budge it. I did manage to drive one elbow into the chest of the powerful man who was restraining me, but I might as well have smashed it into a cinder-block.

Helpless, I watched Virginia come towards me, unscrewing the lid of a mason jar full of cotton wadding. As the first fumes of the chloroform seared my nostrils and napalm started bursting in my brain, I struggled like a gored bull, but the iron grip that held me never lessened.

The last thing I heard her say, as she clamped the jar over my mouth and nose, was surprisingly gentle:

‘Welcome back to The Gardens, my only love.’

It has become difficult for me to think of ‘time’ in terms of days and weeks; now it seems more natural to think in seasons. With effort, however, I can for brief intervals reclaim some dim simulacrum of my consciousness as it was before the transformation, and during those brief, disturbing, spells, I estimate the passage of almost a year.

At first, until Virginia concocted the nostrums and aroma-blends that kept me both paralysed and numb to pain, I was restrained, by padded wires, to numerous stakes, like a vulnerable sapling. I was catheterised, of course, since urine, while I still produced it, is acidic and bad for my soil. My solid wastes, however, simply dropped from their usual orifice, fertilising the ground below. Virginia was always a believer in organic horticulture and during my frequent early moments of madness, the writer in me — still alive and kicking somewhere deep inside — found the very idea highly risible.

Now that I have taken root, of course, the wires and stakes are gone.

My son, who is indeed a strong young man, even though he cannot or will not speak, and might be judged by the outside world as a simpleton, proved to have a good heart. When I dropped my shit, he cleaned me tenderly and applied ointments to my frequent rashes.

Now he waters me, twice a day, and assists his mother, very efficiently, in preparing the nutrients that are regularly mixed with my soil. Virginia seems pleased with my development.

She still loves me, too. She plays classical music for me, an art form I have become very fond of in my present state. Sometimes she speaks to me tenderly and caresses my stems and kisses my new buds, of which I am very proud. She has also been kind enough never to hold a mirror up to the dwindling remnants of my vision. In the early months, when I was paralysed by her potions, I was unable to speak; now, even if I wanted to, I could not, for my mouth has become some sort of polyp-fringed orifice, not unlike — I assume from the sensations — the lips of a Venus Fly Trap.

Since the time when I no longer needed to be drugged or restrained, I have, in fact, known only one moment of terror: the night when she came towards me, her still-beautiful hands sheathed in gardening gloves, holding a bright pair of pruning shears.

‘It’s time to transplant those lovely buds into The Garden,’ she said. ‘I’m not certain, but I suspect you’ll find the results interesting, something like being cloned and something like giving birth. I don’t think it will hurt.’

But it did, and the thick, matter-clotted scream I produced startled her so much that she dropped the shears after the second cutting, apologised and hurriedly administered some sort of aromatic anaesthetic, so that the rest of the procedure was indeed painless.

I can no longer be positive, but I think that scream was the last recognisable human sound I ever made.

Now, although I can no longer ‘see’, I am discovering a whole new spectrum of senses. She tells me that my buds have matured nicely, out in The Gardens, and her intuition was correct: I do feel a growing sense of communal awareness with all the living, flowering, beautiful species that she tends so lovingly.

I sense that Spring is coming. It’s a very pleasant sensation: a drowsy, slow, sensuous awakening — I would never have guessed that photosynthesis could feel so sexy.

I dream a lot, as the last of my formerly human senses atrophy into ghostly wisps. And in my dreams, I often seem to be floating through The Gardens, like one of those glorious fireflies whose golden arabesques lent true Magic to the first night when Virginia and I walked, hand in hand, through her world, when she first cast upon me the spell that would lure me into that world and bind me to her forever.

Even as I had wanted, from the first time she made love to me.

Yes, my dreams are often beautiful, and unbounded by any human measurement of Time.

I wonder what my flowers will look like in May, when the scent of honeysuckle is so very, very sweet.