The Night of the Triffids (10 page)

    Seymour wiped his forehead. I expect there was a good bit of perspiration mixed with the rainwater. 'I think I could do with a cup of tea,' he said in a small voice.

    'I'll second that, Seymour.'

    With that, I went to collect a pair of torches from the plane. When I returned I found that Seymour Hinkman, the eager young meteorologist, was dead.

    

    

    

    IN the morning I opened my eyes to find that I was no longer alone.

    There, through the cockpit canopy, I could see sinister swaying shapes. Dozens of triffids had congregated around the downed plane, eager as a pack of hungry hounds at feeding time.

    More joined them. I could see their forms lurching across the marsh toward me, their leaves shivering and shaking with every step.

    I watched for a while, hypnotized by the sight of so many of these ambulatory plants on the march. Perhaps at that moment I experienced a certain empathy with a mouse transfixed by the gimlet stare of a cat. For I knew, without a doubt, that these plants had targeted me as their next square meal.

    Already the body of the young meteorologist, Hinkman, had vanished beneath the triffid greenery. What had happened to him there was something upon which I chose not to dwell too closely.

    That I'd managed to sleep at all in such circumstances - hunched up in the cramped confines of the cockpit after the crash landing, horrified at the manner of Hinkman's death, and besieged by triffids - was remarkable. I put it down to the after-effects of sheer trauma. In the direst of straits the human body will seek respite in sleep. A rested body, after all,
is
in far better shape to survive than an exhausted one.

    As I looked round at the
things
that now crowded up against the grounded Javelin it suddenly occurred to me that a marvellous thing had happened.
I could see.

    Light had returned to the world.

    I stirred myself; my heartbeat speeded up.

    At least I had a little more to be optimistic about. True, the sun only revealed itself as a dim disc no brighter than a piece of foil pasted against the sky. A dull red sky, at that. But at least I could see my surroundings. The upper atmosphere was mainly free of cloud, with the exception of a few streaks of high cirrus - which, peculiarly, revealed themselves as parallel black lines across the sky.

    The sudden turning of my head to look this way and that excited the triffids into action. Instantly they smashed their stingers down on the jet's transparent canopy in a rain of vicious blows; each stinger left a smear of sticky poison on the perspex until I could hardly see through it at all.

    The aircraft's ammunition magazines had been left deliberately empty to reduce weight and so extend the flight's duration. A pity: I would have dearly loved to press that red button on the flight-stick and blow those murdering plants to merry hell.

    For a moment I sat still, controlling my furious breathing. I had to think clearly and decide what my next plan of action would be. When I stopped moving, the blows against the canopy subsided.

    Soon there was silence, apart from a light tapping as the triffids exercised their stumpy little 'finger' sticks against their boles.

    I found myself thinking about what my father had said.
The plants are talking,
he had told me.
They talk to each other, exchange information, make plans, perhaps even give voice to their dreams of world domination and the extinction of Man.
For the first time, I really understood what he had told me. And I believed.

    Those infernal plants were intelligent. Even now they were singing out to their neighbours.

    
Here is Man.

    
Come, join the feast!

    To remain there was death.

    I had no doubt about that as I sat in the jet's cockpit, surrounded by thirty or more triffids, the reddish light of day glinting dully on their leaves.

    Clearly, the plane had come down on the mainland. Equally clearly, I couldn't simply just wait to be rescued. The community's resources for mounting a search for a downed plane were severely limited. If the thunderstorm had knocked out the island's radar as well as the radio link then they would have only the haziest idea where to begin looking - in poor light amid hundreds of square miles of overgrown countryside, too.

    Outside, the triffids' tapping grew a little faster, a little louder. It was almost as if they sensed I would have to act soon.

    I had to think my plan through logically.

    First, I must leave the plane so that I could begin my walk south to the coast.

    I was sure that the triffids would strike at me the moment I opened the canopy. However, I was still wearing the all-in-one pressure suit. It was made of a thick rubberized cotton, and once I'd donned my gloves and helmet with its full-face perspex visor there wouldn't be so much as a tenth of a square inch of skin exposed.

    In theory I was as safe as houses. But what if the poison should soak through the material? Or what if I should feel stifled and be forced to raise the visor?

    If I thought about this any more, I reckoned, my nerve might fail me. There was nothing for it but to slip on my helmet and gloves. Then take a little walk.

    After carefully fastening my helmet (the visor locked into the 'down' position) and making sure that my gloves made an airtight seal with the rubber cuffs of the flying suit, I cracked open the cockpit.

    I found myself holding my breath as I swung myself out of my seat and climbed out of the plane. I moved as if I was trying to steady my nerves for a leap into icy water.

    In a flash, the stingers whipped at me. Even though the poison couldn't penetrate my heavy-duty pressure suit the force of the blows against my body was enough to make my skin smart, while strikes to the helmet set the crash-strained muscles of my neck throbbing unpleasantly.

    In a moment I was on the ground and pushing through the fleshy leaves like an explorer forging through virgin jungle. My visor was smeared in seconds with splashed venom as stingers struck, reducing the world beyond to a blurred red tableau of moving shadows.

    I glimpsed the boots of the dead man, the legs already shrunken. Modern triffids made short work of their prey.

    Then, thank Heaven, I was through the crush of plants. Even so, I felt the stingers crack against my back like whips as I fled.

    I wiped poison from the visor with the back of my glove. With a slightly better view I could move faster, so I lost no time escaping the cluster of triffids around the plane.

    The landscape in front of me was flat - very flat - and surprisingly springy underfoot. It was as if I was walking across a giant mattress.

    The reason for this was depressingly simple - or so I thought. I knew that much of the low-lying land of southern England had been marshland long ago, only being drained in the Middle Ages or even later. With the disappearance of electric drainage pumps and with ditches becoming blocked by silt, the water table was creeping back to its original levels, slowly but surely returning farmland to bog.

    I paused for a moment to check my revolver, as well as the emergency rations that I carried over one shoulder in a canvas satchel. After that, I turned my attention to the pocket compass. When I had due south, I sighted it on the murky red horizon and began to walk.

    There was precious little to see close by as I walked. Only scrubby vegetation - no proper trees, no houses, no roads. With the horizon obscured by a rust-coloured mist and my smeared visor not helping visibility one jot I saw nothing in the distance, either.

    I'd been walking for barely five minutes when I saw where land ended and sea began.

    Just as I was telling myself that this must be the Solent that separated mainland England from the Isle of Wight it struck me that I couldn't be further from the truth.

    Here was something I'd never seen before.

    The land didn't end at a cliff and there was no beach. Oddly, the land just frayed away at the edges, looking as if it had decayed into fibres - fibres that were being washed this way and that by the surf.

    As I walked, slowly now, towards its edge, the ground became even more springy beneath my feet. Now and again my boot broke through the turf into liquid beneath.

    Once more I wiped at the visor. Although this made it only a bit cleaner I saw now that this ragged shore extended to my left and right perhaps a hundred yards or so before running back behind me. I might have described this as a headland, but now I realized that the word 'land' was, at best, an approximation.

    This 'land' was counterfeit. It was a freak of nature.

    Cautiously, I moved on towards the sea. Its waters glinted with dull oranges and reds, reflecting that sombre sky; even the foam whipped by a fresh breeze was the colour of rust. Crabs the size of dinner plates, with dull green shells, side-scuttled across the weed.

    In heaven's name, what kind of world had I been thrown into?

    I asked myself this again and again as I carefully worked my way towards the shoreline, hoping that soon I'd see a stretch of sand or rocks.

    But no.

    I watched as a larger wave hit the shore. It didn't break so much as pass beneath the 'land' I stood on. I felt the huge, slow ripple as it moved under the soles of my flying boots and on inland.

    It happened again. Then again. Good grief. This wasn't solid land at all. It was an undulating mass of vegetation. A huge one, floating on the sea, rising and falling in harmony with the waves.

    I returned 'inland' to where the vegetation might be thicker and hence more likely to support my weight. For this was nothing more than a colossal raft formed from driftwood and held together by a thin layer of turf. Beneath it lay only cold saltwater depths.

    Still, I cherished a hope that this vast floating mat of vegetation
might
still be attached to solid land. But investigation, carried out during an hour's walk around its outer edges, soon gave a pretty clear picture of the truth. My 'island' drifted freely in the sea.

    Now. I could see how a mainland Britain largely untenanted by human life would become overgrown; silted rivers would alter their courses; cities might sink into waterlogged foundations. However, the idea that perhaps a huge logjam might build up in a river, become overgrown with turf, then simply break away to become a free-floating raft fifty or sixty acres in area seemed just that bit remarkable.

    A hundred yards away I saw a copse of triffids, their leaves swaying in the breeze. They were otherwise unmoving, content perhaps to stand with their roots dug in and to wait. Was this great flexible raft their invention? Maybe they had brains in their woody boles, after all. Perhaps they had evolved at such a rate that in the past twenty or thirty years they had developed intellect; that individual plants had already acquired specialist skills. Triffid warlords? Triffid technicians? Triffid engineers? Engineers whose role it was to plan, to build and even to navigate a craft like this that would carry their race to hitherto unconquered lands.

    Too fabulous a concept?

    I didn't know. But ask a farmer how quickly a common thistle can colonize a wheatfield. Or invite a gardener to testify how even the lowly daisy can invade, conquer and dominate a garden lawn. Then ask yourself whether a plant that can walk, can communicate - and can kill - could invent such a craft to seek pastures new. I, for one, now realized how the triffids had effected their landing on the Isle of Wight at Bytewater just a few hours ago. I didn't doubt for a moment that our people would find a mat of vegetation such as this washed up on the beach. One that would have carried the advance shock troops of a triffid invasion.

    The question that occurred to me now was: where would the currents take this triffid vessel?

    Time would tell, I told myself grimly. In the meantime, I noticed a group of low mounds rising from the northernmost end of the raft. Rather than skulk in the hidey-hole of the jet's cockpit I decided to investigate what further secrets this singular vessel might yet conceal.

    

    

    

    WHAT I found among those humps and bumps confirmed my earlier suspicions. Beneath a shroud of bindweed, ivy and moss I saw remnants of a jetty; perhaps one that had lain in the upper reaches of Southampton Water or on the River Avon.

    Still wearing my helmet, its visor down against any triffid attack, I picked my way across the debris. Here and there I saw timbers of a pier lodged in the mat of vegetation. Nailed to one hefty post a sign stated
MOORINGS - FOR PERMIT HOLDERS ONLY,
the barely legible lettering long since faded to stencilled outlines around mere speckles of black paint.

    Elsewhere I saw the remains of a thirty-year-old shoe entangled in weed, and what I recognized as the shell of a television set,
sans
glass screen and tube, inside which squatted a handsome crab with the biggest pincers I'd ever seen. When I approached he snapped a claw in the air; he wasn't going to quit his bakelite home without a fight.

    Above me, the red sun still shone bleakly in a rust-coloured sky. Seagulls cried, the sound so hauntingly sad that it served only to emphasize the mournful atmosphere. What a world - what an exquisitely mournful world. Light the colour of rust; the flotsam and jetsam of a nation now extinct; a near-supernatural sense of loneliness.

    
Moss, moss, moss - the last king of Angkor Wat is dead…