Appendix 13-II: View From a Jungle

Appendix 13-II: View From a Jungle

(THX 0477, June 6th, 2011)

You proceed into a jungle you hesitate to consider ‘man-made’. Perfect sunlight streams through a little more than half of the innumerable panes of glass. The other panes seem to face into various parts of the House with the building’s trademark impossibility.

A quiet gathering sways to unheard music in a roughly finished basement. A row of ornate chairs loom over a spacious hall. An elegant and studious woman strolls with melancholy through a tattered library. You almost lose yourself in the sight of a fantastical bacchanal led by a grinning imp.

You stop. You refocus. The admonitions of the guard roll back through your mind, affirming your feet on the path and tightening your grip on the rake. Step by trepidatious step fear grows along with wonder. Your mind reels and contemplates how the sight of such a place would not drive a person…

“Mad! Mad! Heehehe…” the laughter trails to a rustling in the contortion of vines up the path.

“Ah cripes,” you mutter, much disheartened, “The gardener.”15

15 In the comments: Jay Dee: “Interesting, I had not planned to take the story in that direction. I was thinking more that it would be hideous, carnivorous, mutant triffids that would be behind the glass, but you managed to tie the story in with other parts of the house instead. I like the sense of inter-linked mythology that this challenge is generating.”

‘Triffids’ are the fictional ambulatory, carnivorous giant plants of John Wyndham’s novel The Day of the Triffids (1951). Due to the popularity of the novel and its numerous adaptions, ‘Triffid’ has, according to the Collins English Dictionary, come to be used in British English as a generic term for “any species of fictional plants that supposedly grew to a gigantic size, were capable of moving about, and could kill humans”. 29