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The Bell Flowers of Lymphos
At first the house shifted only at night; a slight quiver in the woodwork, a tremble in the floor. Simon stirred uneasily in his sleep, his mind still dense with dream.
Then again, a shiver running from the floor, up the walls to the ceiling. Simon got out of bed, inspected the boards under the worn Axminster. Lilian, her black hair shrouding her face, slept on.
Silence. The house motionless. Simon went back to bed.
Two days later he noticed a hairline crack running from the bedroom floor halfway up one wall. The next night no water came from the kitchen tap. That in the bathroom was dry too. "We had no notice of the water being cut off," he commented to Lilian.
"Probably a burst main they had to repair in a hurry," she replied.
"I think there's some sort of subsidence in this road," said Stephen, Simon's neighbour next day. "I've a great crack up my kitchen wall." Simon mentioned the one that had appeared in his bedroom.
"How did you manage for water last night?" asked Simon.
"Fine. Why?"
"Oh. We were cut off for two hours."
Stephen looked mystified. Clearly he had not been affected. But next day he mentioned dry taps to Simon. The water supply remained erratic. The Water Board was mystified.
Simon, a wiry, semi-retired civil servant, to whom idle fancy was alien, carried out an amateur investigation but emerged as mystified as the Water Board.
Two weeks later, around midday, the lending library at the end of the road shook violently and the book borrowers took cover under the shelves as the floor heaved and one wall shifted slightly. Then silence. Baffled surveyors looked and left, and sent builders to shore up the leaning wall.
On the planet Lymphos, beyond the galaxy of Andromeda, the seeds mass like fine down as they drift over cold stones that offer no succour. They rise, a moving mist, fragile against the star-pricked black and as though mustering a common mind, drift slowly towards Earth.
"Curse these weeds!" cried Lilian, pulling at an alien blue flower with yellow veined bell-shaped petals suspended on a succulent stem. It grew outside the front door, immediately below the bedroom. When she pulled its stalk the plant moaned and a shiver, sharp as an electric charge, shot up her arm. She left the flower, swaying as though in pain by the door.
One week later, twenty people were trapped and twelve seriously injured when, in spite of the builders' work, the wall of the library collapsed. Surveyors and the building firm were summoned to account and, amid persistent protests, condemned.
"Not another!" exclaimed Stephen next day as he did his weekend weeding. From where he stood at the garden fence, Simon could see a tall, bell-shaped flower leaning on a thick stem by the door.
"There was one of these damned things round the front yesterday. I didn't plant them."
"Probably carried by birds or on the wind from Kew," suggested Lilian. The Gardens lay less than a kilometre away.
Simon shuddered in his sleep. Then waking, knew it was not he but the house once more, this time groaning slightly as the floor shifted and a loud wrenching sound came from one wall.
Simon scrambled out of bed and Lilian woke with a cry. The wall where the hairline crack had appeared, was now gaping, rent jaggedly from top to bottom.
Two days later a picture fell from the sitting room wall. Behind it lay a narrow crack that widened as Lilian and Simon watched, showering plaster, the wallpaper torn into shreds.
The same evening part of Stephen's roof caved in, trapping Rose his wife, who was rushed to hospital while Stephen was badly bruised.
As buildings became unsafe, half the town was hastily evacuated. Caravans and tents were mustered with increasing difficulty as other parts of the country were affected. The water supply grew unpredictable. For the first time Big Ben, leaning at an angle, struck at odd hours. An emergency sitting of the Commons was disrupted by the very disturbance under discussion. Water rationing was imposed.
By doors and under windows of many buildings, the blue bell flowers appeared, growing larger on stems that thickened overnight. Botanists carried them to Kew. The microscope revealed the flower to be an ancient species, its floral attributes spiralling, like those in flowers of a million years ago.
Elsie Smallbridge, who lived in a timbered cottage by the river in Richmond, found the bell flowers nodding as high as her front door. She had long made trite pictures from pressed flowers. They covered her discoloured plaster walls and were sent at Christmas to relatives reluctant to hang them in their homes.
Defying the electric charge, she picked four of the bell flowers early one October morning and placed them between leaves of blotting paper inside the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Days later she opened the book and the bell flowers sprang from the blotting paper, as fresh as when they were picked. Their veins were vivid and their long white stamens reached like questing tongues.
Elsie jumped back, her long brown skirt caught in the electric fire and in seconds she was screaming, enveloped in a bright column of flame.
On Lymphos the seeds multiply; black specks protected by feather-light cases of down, drawn from the spent and ancient ground, into another soft blanket. Larger than the last and pale as dawn, it lifts from Lymphos to float gently through the Milky Way, tilting towards Earth and murmuring softly on a wandering wind, yet unthwarted on its course towards the land.
Simon and Lilian converted their cellar to a makeshift home. One side of their house had been demolished but there were too many unsafe buildings for the demolition teams to cope. Throughout the day and night the sound of shattering stone persisted, more homes were left derelict, injuries and fatalities increased. Hospitals could no longer keep pace with the demand. The injured tried to tend each other, the first frosts came, hundreds succumbed and died.
Parliament went into recession. The structure of the Palace of Westminster was declared unsafe and a small emergency cabinet was set up under Whitehall. There, the vibrations felt above ground increased with a violence that intermittently brought decisions to a halt.
The power supply was affected. With little water, light or heat, people sought shelter in the Underground tunnels. Deliveries too, were difficult to make, as road surfaces were ruptured.
Lilian, with her poised perceptions, grew restless at certain times, as though sensing the approach of the invasive force, ironically borne through the galaxy with a delicacy preceding death.
The bell flowers appeared everywhere; now in clusters of four or five, their stems fat and sleek, their veined heads held high and intermittently nodding, although there was no wind, as if in some way they were communicating.
In the laboratory at Kew the white stamens of the bell flowers curled under the microscope as though recoiling from observation. The stems were found to have an unprecedented capacity for retaining water and the petals with their livid yellow veins had the texture of flesh.
While the plants were being examined inside, they pushed through the ground under the laboratory window, raising their heads to look through the glass, as though to keep track of the botanists.
One morning the floor of the laboratory shuddered, the bell flowers laid on the table slid to the floor, the equipment shattered and notes were caught as though by a wind, although none blew, and fluttered through the open window.
One night Simon and Lilian, who were running out of food in the cold cellar, lit only by an oil lamp, saw the thick stem of a bell flower thrust through the cracked concrete. The floor heaved violently and a great blue bell unfolded as the stem straightened.
Lilian, who was closest, scrambled towards Simon, on the other side of the cellar. Overwhelmed by unnameable menace, they turned to go up the cellar steps. But at the bottom stood another bell flower, even larger, its huge head waving as though warning them not to move.
As the bell flower swayed they could not take their eyes from it. The yellow veins swelled and swum before them. The flower merged with the grey
plain of their misery.
Five days later seven bell flowers nodded and conspired in the cold cellar. Lilian and Simon were dead.
Under the planet great roots grew, having at last found a favourable place to propagate. City after city collapsed, their people destitute, suicidal or starved. Disease was rife and the few who overcame a consuming sense of misgiving and cut down and tried to eat a bell flower, died instantly.
The massive root system, draining the world's water supply, stretched from London to Sydney, from Mexico to Reykjavik, thrusting as persistently through the sea, causing tidal waves which changed the character of the land and carried away the remains of towns.
The giant bell flowers nodded and communicated; the great stems drawing water from deep underground. Other vegetation was smothered, trees leaned at steep angles and where a muddled but irrepressible civilisation once existed, a dense blue and yellow blanket murmured.
Bees, growing larger, as though in anticipation of their task, moved in great humming clouds across land and sea. They probed the mesmerising centres of the waiting bell flowers that bloomed perpetually for nine months.
And as their roots form a labyrinth in the dark, the seeds lift one day and drift, as once they did from Lymphos, to every corner of the Earth, obliterating the last mellow sun of the season.
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