Blood Test (30 page)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Garland and Emma’s bedroom had a view of the
greenhouse. I wondered if they’d woken in the morning, peered down at the
chamber of mutations and been warmed by a self-congratulatory glow. There were
two single beds with a nightstand between them. All available floorspace was
given over to cardboard boxes. Some were filled with shoes, others with towels
and linens. Still others held nothing but other cardboard boxes. I opened the
closet. The parents’ wardrobes were meager, shapeless, decades out of style and
biased toward grays and browns.

There was a small hinged trapdoor cut into the ceiling
of the closet. I found a stepstool hidden behind a mildewed winter coat, pulled
it out, and stretched high enough to give the door a strong push. It opened
with a slow pneumatic hiss, and a ship’s ladder slid down automatically through
the aperture. I tested it, found it steady, and ascended.

The attic covered the full area of the house, easily
two thousand square feet. It had been transformed into a library, though not an
elegant one.

Plywood bookcases were propped against all four walls.
A desk had been constructed of the same cheap wood. A metal folding chair sat
before it. The floor was speckled with sawdust. I looked for another entry to
the room and found none. The windows were small and slatted. Only one mode of
construction was possible: planks had been slipped through the trapdoor and
nailed together up here.

I ran the flashlight over the volumes that lined the
shelves. With the exception of thirty years’ worth of
Reader’s Digest
condensed books, and a case full of
National Geographies
, all were on
biology, horticulture, and related topics. There were hundreds of pamphlets
from the U.C. Riverside Agricultural Station and the Federal Government
Printing Office. Stacks of mail-order seed catalogues. A set of oversized
leather-bound
Encyclopaedia of Fruit
printed in England, dated 1879, and
illustrated with hand-tipped color lithographs. Scores of college texts on
plant pathology, soil biology, forestry management, genetic engineering. A
hiker’s guide to the trees of California. Complete collections of
Horticulture
and
Audubon.
Copies of patents awarded to inventors of farm equipment.

Four shelves of the case closest to the desk were
crowded with blue-cloth looseleaf binders labeled with Roman numerals. I pulled
out Volume I.

The cover was dated 1965. Inside were eighty-three
pages of handwritten text. The writer’s penmanship was hard to decipher—cramped,
backslanted, and of uneven darkness. I held the flashlight with one hand,
turned pages with the other, and finally got a perceptual fix on it.

Chapter One was a summary of Garland Swope’s plan to
be the Cherimoya King. He actually used that term, even doodling miniature
crowns in the margins of the book. There was an outline of the fruit’s
attributes and a reminder to check out its nutritional value. The section ended
with a list of adjectives to be used when describing it to prospective buyers.
Succulent. Juicy. Mouthwatering. Refreshing. Heavenly. Other-worldly.

The rest of the first volume and the nine that
followed continued in this vein. Swope had authored eight hundred and
twenty-seven pages of text lauding the cherimoya over a ten-year-period,
recording the progress of each tree in his young grove and plotting his control
of the market. (“Riches? Fame? Which is paramount? No matter, there will be
both.”)

Stapled in one of the books was an invoice from a
printer and a sample brochure brimming with gushing prose and illustrated with
color photographs. One picture showed Swope holding a bushel of the exotic
fruit. As a young man he’d resembled Clark Gable, tall, husky, with dark wavy
hair and a pencil mustache. The caption identified him as a world-renowed
horticulturist and botanical researcher specializing in the propagation of rare
food crops and dedicated to ending world hunger.

I read on. There were detailed descriptions of
crossbreeding experiments between the cherimoya and other members of
annon-aceae.
Swope was a compulsive reporter, painstakingly listing every possible climactic
and biochemical variable. In the end that line of research had been abandoned
with the notation that “No hybrid approaches the perfection that is
a.
cherimoya.”

The optimism came to an abrupt halt in Volume X: I
opened to newspaper clippings reporting the freak frost that had decimated the
cherimoya grove. There were descriptions of the agricultural damage wrought by
the cold winds and projections of rises in food prices clipped from San Diego
papers. A mournful feature on the Swopes specifically had been printed in the
La Vista
Clarion.
The next twenty pages were filled with jagged, obscene
scribbles, the paper deeply indented often to the point of tearing; the pen had
been used to stab and slash.

Then new experimental data.

As I turned the pages, Garland Swope’s fascination
with the grotesque, the stillborn, and the deadly evolved before my eyes. It
started as theoretical notations about mutations, and rambling hypotheses about
their ecological value. Midway through the eleventh volume was the chilling
answer Swope found to those questions: “The sublimely repugnant mutations of
otherwise mundane species must be evidence of the Creator’s essential
hatefulness.”

The notes grew progressively less coherent even as
they increased in complexity. At times Swope’s handwriting was so cramped as to
be illegible, but I was able to make out most of it—tests of poison content on
mice, pigeons, and sparrows; careful selection of deformed fruit for genetic
culture; culling of the normal, nurturance of the defective. All part of a
patient, methodical search for the ultimate horticultural horror.

Then there was yet another turn in the convoluted
journey through Swope’s mind: in the first chapter of Volume XII it appeared he’d
dropped his morbid obsessions and gone back to working with
annonaceae
,
concentrating on a species Maimon hadn’t mentioned:
a. zingiber.
He’d
conducted a series of pollinization experiments, carefully listing the date and
time of each. Soon, however, the new studies were interrupted by accounts of
work with deadly toadstools, foxglove, and dieffenbachia. There was a gleeful
emphasis upon the neurotoxic qualities of the last exemplified by a footnote
attributing the plant’s common name, dumb cane, to its ability to paralyze the
vocal chords.

This pattern of shifting between his pet mutations and
the new annona became established by the middle of the thirteenth volume and
continued through the fifteenth.

In Volume XVI, the notes took on an optimistic tone as
Swope exulted in the creation of “a new cultivar.” Then, as suddenly as it had
appeared,
a. zingiber
was discarded and dismissed as “showing robust
breeder potential but lacking any further utility.” I put my strained eyes
through another hundred pages of madness and set the binders aside.

The library contained several books on rare fruit,
many of them exquisite editions published in Asia. I looked through all of them
but could find no reference to
annona zingiber.
Puzzled, I searched the
shelves for suitable reference material and pulled out a thick dog-eared volume
titled
Botanical Taxonomy.

The answer was at the end of the book. It took a while
to comprehend the full meaning of what I’d just read. An unspeakable conclusion
but agonizingly logical.

As the insights hit I was seized with acute
claustrophobia and grew rigid with tension. Sweat ran down my back. My heart
pounded and my breathing quickened. The room was an evil place and I had to get
out.

Frantically I gathered up several of the blue cloth
binders and placed them in a cardboard box. I carried it and my tools down the
ladder, bolted the bedroom, and rushed to the landing. Teetering with vertigo,
I ran recklessly down the stairs and crossed the frigid living room with four
long strides.

After fumbling with the latch I managed to throw open
the front door. I stood on the rotting porch until I caught my breath.

Silence greeted me. I’d never felt so alone.

Without looking back I made my escape.

ALONG WITH everyone else, I’d dismissed Raoul’s
conviction that Woody Swope had been abducted by the Touch. Now I wasn’t so
sure.

I’d seen no aberrant crops growing in the gardens of
the Retreat, which meant Matthias had lied about buying seeds from the Swopes.
On the surface it seemed a petty falsehood, serving no purpose. But habitual
liars often lace their stories with demitruths for the sake of realism. Had the
guru fabricated a casual connection between his group and the Swopes in order
to obscure a deeper relationship?

The lie stuck in my craw. Along with the memory of my
first visit to the Retreat, which, in retrospect, seemed suspiciously well
orchestrated. Matthias had been too gracious about my intrusion, too pliant and
cooperative. For a group that had been described as reclusive, the Touch had
been strangely willing to endure scrutiny by a total stranger.

Had the generous welcome meant they had nothing to
hide? Or that they had hidden their secret so well that discovery was out of
the question.

I thought of Woody and allowed myself the luxury of
hope: the boy might still be alive. But for how long? His body was a
biochemical minefield ready to explode at any moment.

If Matthias and his cultists had stashed the boy
somewhere on their grounds, a more spontaneous inspection was in order.

Houten had gotten to the Retreat by driving through La
Vista and turning right at a fork just outside the town limits. I wanted to
avoid being seen and if my recollection of the county map was correct, the road
I now traveled intersected the one from town, forming the right prong of the
fork. I sped along, headlights off and soon found myself nearing the gates of
the former monastery.

Once again I hid the Seville under tall trees and
walked to the entrance on foot. The bolt cutter was in my waistband, the
flashlight in my jacket pocket, and the crowbar up one sleeve. I wouldn’t stand
a chance in an electrical storm.

My hopes for surreptitious entry were dashed by the
sight of a male cultist patrolling inside the gates. His white uniform stood
out in the darkness, the loose-fitting garments billowing, as he walked back
and forth. A leather stash bag swung from the sash around his waist.