Eppstadt felt a new series of eruptions in his legs, leading all the way up from his knee to his groin. The large, pale muscle of his thigh had become a veritable garden; upwards of twenty flowers had blossomed there. Blood ran from the places where they’d come forth, and it coursed around the back of his leg, soaking into the tatters of his trousers. The collected scent of the blossoms all but made him swoon. He toppled backwards, and sprawled in the shoots that were waiting for him, like a death-bed welcoming him into its final comfort.
“What the hell happened to Eppstadt?” Todd said, looking back.
The brightening day had put a layer of haze between the Hell’s Mouth and the door that led up into the house. The details of Eppstadt’s condition were impossible to fathom. All they could see was that for some reason the man was lying back amongst flowers.
“I thought he was in trouble a few moments ago,” Jerry said. “He seemed to be crying out.”
“He’s not crying out now,” Tammy said. “Looks like he’s taking a nap.”
“Crazy … ” Todd said.
“Well leave him to it, I say,” Jerry remarked. If he wants to stay, that’s his damn business.”
There was no argument from the other two.
“After you,” Jerry said, stepping aside to let Tammy cross the threshold. He followed quickly after her, with Todd on his heels.
Todd glanced back one last time at the transforming landscape. The ships had disappeared from the horizon, as though some long-awaited wind had finally come and filled their sails, and borne them off to new destinations. The little gathering of houses beside the river, with its two bridges, had been eroded by light, and even the snaking shape of the river itself was on its way to extinction. Though she’d doubted the tale Zeffer had told him it seemed now that it was true. This had been a prison painted to hold the Duke. Now that his Hunt was over and the Devil’s child had been returned, the place no longer had any reason to exist.
Age was catching up with it. The heat of its painted sun was undoing it, image by image, tile by tile.
“Eppstadt!” he yelled, “Are you coming?”
But the man in the long grass didn’t move, so Todd let him lie there. Eppstadt had always been a man who did what he wanted to do, and to hell with other people’s opinions.
Sprawled on the ground, Eppstadt heard Todd’s call, and half-thought of returning it, but he could no longer move. Several shoots had entered the base of his skull, piercing his spinal column, and he was paralyzed.
The greenery pushing up through his brain, erasing his memories as they climbed, had not yet removed every last shred of intelligence. He realized that this was the end of him. He could feel the first insinuations of shoots at the back of his throat, and an itching presence behind his eyes, where they were soon to emerge and flower but it concerned him far less than it might have done had he imagined this sitting in his office.
It wasn’t the kind of death he’d had in mind when he thought of such things, but then his life hadn’t been as he’d expected it to be either. He’d wanted to paint, as a young man. But he’d had not the least talent. A professor for the Art School had remarked that he’d never met a man with a poorer sense of aesthetics. What would they have thought now, those critics who’d so roundly condemned him, if they’d been here to see? Wouldn’t they have said he was passing away prettily, with his head full of shoots and colour and his eyes was
He never finished the thought.
One of Lilith’s flowers blossomed inside his skull, and a sudden, massive hemorrhage stopped dead every thought Eppstadt was entertaining, or would ever entertain again.
Indifferent to his death, the plants continued to press up through his flesh, blossoming and blossoming, until from a little distance he was barely recognizable as a man at all: merely a shape in the dirt, a log perhaps, where the flowers had grown with particular vigor, hungry to make the most of the sun now that it was shining so brightly.