Seeders: A Novel (16 page)

“What’s all this?” she asked.

“Nothing.” Jules cleared his throat. “Just an experiment.”

“You certainly found a lot of equipment in that cabinet.” She pushed back the fronds of a fern hooked up to electrodes.

“Don’t touch that, please,” he nearly shouted.

Startled, she was about to ask him why in heavens not, when she noticed the front of his shirt was covered with bits of brown leaves and pine needles. Burrs stuck to his arm and continued down the side of his trousers to his muddy boots. There was a mushroom in his hair.

Isabelle touched his wet sleeve. “Where did you sleep, outside?”

“Of course not,” he snapped. “I was looking for specimens in the woods this morning. Must I now get your permission?”

“No, I—”

“You think I slept on the ground?”

She was put off by his rudeness. Why was he so angry? She did nothing wrong, just brought him some coffee. Certainly no reason to snap at her.

His face showed impatience. “Shouldn’t you be looking for the diamond?”

“I wanted to ask you about that. I found a Bible in the library with a passage underlined. It mentioned the word
Eden,
just like in my father’s journal. May I see it?”

“I’m afraid you can’t at the moment,” he said coldly.

“Fine, then, maybe later,” she snipped back.

He picked up the steaming mug and stared out the window, saying nothing as though she weren’t in the room. She squared her shoulders and snatched up one of the ferns covered with a fungus.

“So is it ergot or not?”

“I don’t think so.”

“What kind of fungus could it be?”

“What makes you think it’s a fungus?”

“You said it was.”

“Well, I … don’t know.”

Isabelle pursed her lips. She was overly tired and anxious to know what had happened to her father, if the fungus had anything to do with his death. “What do you mean you don’t know? It’s either a fungus or not.”

“It’s not that simple. There’s no fungus in the world that can grow on bark and leaves and grass, and every bloody thing in the forest. I’ve been studying them all night. Truthfully, I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Then you’re suggesting it’s some new kind of life-form?” she said sarcastically.

“It could be anything, really. Slime mold or a gall, perhaps. A new type of neoplasm that we’ve never seen before.”

With a smirk of defiance, she leaned over the microscope to have a look.

“Please don’t touch that.”

“Why not?”

“You’re not a mycologist, or even a botanist.”

“And
you
can’t tell the difference between fungus and a gall.”

He pointed with his chin. “Go ahead, then. Have a look.”

She hesitated, but then peered into the lens.

“What do you see?” He sounded curious.

After a moment she said, “The cellular structure of the leaf looks normal, except for these rather hideous microbes shooting out from the leaf. They look like blackish purple tubes. I’d say it’s a fungus.”

“Yes, the dark mass could be sclerotium, and those threadlike stalks most certainly resemble some kind of endophyte, but none I’ve ever seen. Its reproduction and life cycle are completely different from ergot or any other kind of
Claviceps,
and the fact that it grows on everything; well, it could be some kind of
Neurospora
mold mutation.” He stared pensively out the window again. “It’s not really the fungus that worries me, but the plants themselves.” He motioned to the desk. “That Eden book. Your father wrote about giving the plants an ability to hear our thoughts, communicate on a cognitive level with humans. Suppose he was right? What if they could read our minds?”

“You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s ridiculous,” she said. “Plants can’t think. They don’t have a brain.”

“
Of course,
the almighty brain. You think because there’s no organ to study and we can’t see how the information is organized, then plants can’t process thought. It’s all right here.” Jules walked swiftly to the green journal and picked it up, pointing to the text. “The action-potential propagation in all of these plants is comparable to the speed of action potentials in mammalians, specifically one hundred and five meters per second, which is the same velocity as a neuron. The amplitude, duration, relative and absolute refractory periods, depolarization peaks are the same as you’d find in the cognitive regions of the human nervous system.”

Isabelle didn’t understand his pedantic jibber-jabber. Her education in botany stopped at common species identification. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, but what proof do you have besides that silly book?”

For a moment he stared at her. Then he turned to the window, gazing at the trees in the distance. She could barely hear his voice. “I had a strange experience in the woods this morning. I can’t explain it, but it felt as though I wasn’t alone out there. I may have passed out, but I could hear some kind of chatter. Then I felt them, touching my mind.”

“Jules?” Isabelle whispered. “You’ve been up all night. You should go upstairs and rest.”

“They touched my memories.”

“Who?”

His eyes narrowed and she suspected he was only semi-aware of her presence.

“It has something to do with the fungus. Its relationship with the plants that makes it all possible. How they hear our thoughts. Communicate. Understand. Everything is starting to add up.” A smile crossed his lips and he whispered, “Imagine the possibilities.”

“Jules?”

All at once his demeanor changed. He was grinning with excitement, his voice bursting with cheer. “Do you realize the significance of this finding? Isabelle, I’ve been up all night thinking how this could change the entire world. Change my future.
Our
future.” He walked quickly over beside her and grasped her shoulders, a towering giant looking down into her face. “I want you to be part of this. We can study your father’s research. Figure out how he did it, you and I together.”

Isabelle was stunned and reflexively pushed her hands against his chest, but the feel of his warm body, the hardness of his muscles, stopped her cold. She felt small and helpless under his gaze.

Jules leaned down and kissed her on the mouth, squeezing her arms tight. At first she struggled, but the sensation of his soft lips left her weak.

He jolted back, his expression aghast. “Isabelle, please forgive me. I never—”

She wiped her mouth. “It’s all right, really.”

“No, it’s not. You’re a married woman, and here I am…” His voice trailed off.

“My marriage has been over for years.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

She was hesitant to go on. After all, Jules was acting crazy just seconds ago. But now he seemed normal again and looked at her with sympathy. She wished the kiss had happened somewhere else, another time, perhaps twenty years ago. She wanted to pour her heart out to him. “I knew it from the beginning, really. After the kids came it only got worse. I felt stuck, too dead inside to leave. Colin is awful for me, even worse for the kids.”

“I hate to pry, but why did you marry him?”

She shrugged and told him that leaving the island was difficult. She missed her father terribly, but love soon turned to anger. Her mother was a tyrant who never let her out of the house. Isabelle had hoped George would come rescue her.

“He never came to visit, never called?”

Isabelle shook her head, and explained that as she grew older, she was told of her father’s indiscretions, that Dr. George Brookes was a well-known fraud and a drug addict. It was a relief to finally get married and change her surname, leave the solitude of her mother’s house. “I rushed into marriage, thinking it was a way out of a bad situation, but I really wasn’t thinking at all.”

“I am truly sorry. You deserve better.”

She smiled at him, still feeling the kiss on her lips. “You never married?”

Jules released a long sigh. “My work has always been my life, to the point of ignoring everything else. Of course I’ve never been good with intimate relationships, terrible with commitment.” He hesitated. “I had a difficult childhood too. My mother suffered from schizophrenia. When I was six years old, she tried to kill me.”

“How awful.”

“I’ve never told anyone.”

Isabelle couldn’t think of anything to say and turned toward the window. She gasped a small breath. Sean was walking down the trail toward the woods, dragging a walking stick.

“I should call him back inside.” She took a step toward the door.

“No, don’t,” Jules said. “It’s good for a boy to explore on his own.”

“He’s not safe wandering around by himself.”

“How do you know? You don’t give him much freedom, do you?”

It was true; she was barely a child of five or six when she started running around the island, and she never got hurt. Just a few cuts and scrapes. But Sean was different, and a man had just been murdered. “What if—someone’s out there?”

He raised a brow. “I can assure you we’re quite alone.”

She bit her lip, nodding. “So you believe my father killed Hodges.”

“I’m sorry, but it’s the most logical conclusion.”

Her shoulders dropped. It was only morning and already Isabelle was exhausted. Her mind spun in so many directions. Her suicidal father might have been a murderer. She was having romantic feelings for another man. Jules’s mother tried to kill him. Sean was walking around the woods alone. She didn’t even want to think about telepathic plants.

“Excuse me. I’ve got to see about breakfast.” She turned to the window, where Sean had already disappeared into the woods, and she rubbed her hands nervously. Jules was once again absorbed in his work, peering into the microscope.

She left without another word.

*   *   *

Sean trudged through the woods, dragging his stick in the dirt and taking small bites from a biscuit. He vaguely remembered getting lost on the trail yesterday, and the horrible smell of the body Luke found, but he wasn’t scared. There was something comforting and familiar about the woods and he felt an urge to be surrounded by nature.

The air was cold and quiet, except for the soft crunch of dried leaves underfoot. His breath came out in little puffs of vapor that he stabbed with his finger. He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve, stopping to look back at the trail. For some reason, he felt he wasn’t alone. The idea that his mother might be following was irritating and he scrutinized the gaps between the trees.

Sean froze. He dropped the walking stick.

There was a doll head hanging from a branch not far from where he stood, suspended by a length of frizzy blond hair. A child’s face, but old looking, and her half-closed eyes were more sinister than sleepy.

Sean was scared to move. He tried to turn away, and that’s when he saw another head, hanging from a thin, white rope. The paint on the right side of the face had peeled off in patches, exposing shapes of brown clay beneath, so it looked like a puzzle with missing pieces. On the other side, half of the doll’s skull was gone. She hung lopsided; one glass eye staring up, the other fixed on the ground.

Sean blinked hard, hoping there were no more heads, but there were several more on other trees, dangling like fruit. The painted face of a clown with his mouth open in a maniacal laugh, staring from the corners of his eyes in an expression of utter madness. Another had no eyes at all and hung like a black ball of soot, its features hardly distinguishable, as if it had been thrown into a campfire. Staring down at Sean, and close enough to touch, was a face that looked remarkably lifelike. So realistic that for a moment he thought she was breathing through her nostrils, her pink mouth caught in a sudden smile.

Then her lips seemed to part ever so slightly.

Sean fell back hard and got tangled in a bush. He struggled to recover and scanned the trees, spotting dozens of doll faces, maybe hundreds. His heart began beating like a piston.

A breeze picked up, making the heads sway. Gently at first, and then the wind gusted and some of the heads clanked together, filling the air with a soft clattering sound. Sean turned to run, but quickly stopped in terror. Thousands of doll heads hung from every tree like macabre Christmas ornaments. They swung in the wind, knocking together, staring with dead expressions, missing eyes and fissured cheeks.

Sean scrambled for the path, but it was gone. The woods became darker and there was nothing but bushes and doll-infested trees all around him. As he took off, twigs and branches caught on his jacket and he hacked his way free, then he slipped on wet leaves down an embankment, scraping his palms.

He sat in the dirt, out of breath and inspecting his stinging hands.

The clattering sound was gone and the wind had died. He looked up at the trees.

No doll heads. That was good.

Sean shifted his attention back to his hands. There were thin lines of blood that he licked with the tip of his tongue.

A voice echoed, like a child falling down a well.

Sean—

He whipped his head around, but he was alone. A chill ran down his neck as he suddenly remembered being lost in the woods the day before, and the voices in his head.

Leggo—

Sean hastily got to his feet, but wooziness pulled him back on his knees like a burst of gravity and the world around him began to spin. It felt as though weights were tied to his back and he got on all fours until the feeling passed. He sat up on his knees and noticed right in front of him a thick vine wrapped around the trunk of an old maple tree.

The vine moved. Slightly at first, and then it slowly twisted. Sean moaned in fright as it tightened around the tree’s girth and slithered across the bark, coiling like a serpent. He could hear a sound like cracking bones as it uncoiled, touched the ground, and crept straight toward him. That’s when Sean noticed that all the trees were looped with heavy vines spiraling down their trunks. He crawled backward.

All at once, the ground burst like a grenade underfoot, and he turned around to see the roots of a tree blasting out of the soil. Above his ankle, a long root swayed back and forth, like a cobra ready to strike.