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The soil of a man's heart is stonier. _________ Stephen King, Pet Sematary

The death of Dr. Martin Perry, Ph.D., was remarked upon, and mourned, in many quarters, but most of all his academic community, at the University of Florida, Gainesville. He was a botanist by trade, profession, and passion. Wherever he went he was remembered as a kind and forthright man who made valuable contributions - his specialty was carnivorous plants, but he had done a bit of theorizing about xenobotany for NASA as well, and had advised dozens of doctoral candidates. While he was alive, he was a highly visible member of the University of Florida community, taking leading positions that he felt were of, in his own words, a necessary ethical bent. Himself African-American, his infamous dustups with, for instance, his colleague in the Entomology department, Rhodesian-born Dr. Drake Le Carde, came about because of Perry's chance discovery of the latter's involvement with Apartheid South Africa, particularly the time Le Carde spent as a medical officer in the Weermag, and his deep horror that such a man would be allowed to work and research with impunity in the contemporary day and age - later on, when Le Carde's controversial work to revive prehistoric insects was announced, he succeeded in getting his old adversary's work defunded. More well-known than this, but in the same vein of taking that necessary ethical bent, was his successful battle to save the career of Dr. Irving Collins, the former Chief of Flight Control who had taken so much public blame for the death of Tom Ryan, the beloved astronaut...poor man, his hands always shook, never recovering from what he considered his life's greatest failure. Dr. Perry was, in other words, a valued, important member of the University of Florida family, who brought a sense of honor and dignity to his position....which, of course, makes the particulars of his death so deeply unsettling. For some time before his death, Perry had been working on a new project which he disclosed very minimal details about - a new plant with fascinating qualities that grew in the treacherous reaches of Baltistan, a very isolated part of Pakistan, which he had apparently read about in some esoteric material that had been deposited near to a hundred years earlier at the UF library. He took a paid sabbatical to study it, with hopes to publish a paper on it, and spent some weeks travelling, and staying, in the Pakistani city of Gilgit, at the beginning of 2010. Exactly what the plant was, taxonomically and chemically and so on, has yet to be determined, and no follow-up investigation was ever allowed by the University - more than likely it was because word got out what later happened to Dr. Perry, the events surrounding his death, which has led many to assume some things are too dangerous in the shadows to have searching lights thrown upon them. What notes of Perry's that survive reference a chapter about esoteric botany found in the 1896 volume of Cultes des Goules by the Comte d'Erlette that was in the University of Florida's Rare Book Collection. Evidently, the plant Perry was searching for produced a nectar très terrible, appellée La Dargaïe that would grant prodigies merveilleux de la vie - cryptically described as une herbe aux le Plateau de Leng, where Leng has problematically been understood to mean a vast area encompassing Tibet, far western China, and the Kashmir. Being the materialist that he was, Perry may have sought to debunk any mystical properties of the plant, La Dargaïe, and explain whatever was "très terrible" in purely naturalistic terms, while at the same time describing a heretofore forgotten piece of Asiatic botany...but here the trail grows cold, because if he recorded how he triangulated exactly where to go, and exactly what to find, it has not survived. Perry came back stateside with the plant that he had indeed managed to acquire, the last week of January, 2010. He had informed nobody of where he had been or what he had been doing. Where he was in Gilgit are not well-remembered by locals there, and his passport stamps showed nothing unusual - Orlando, Dubai, Karachi, and returning the same way. But immediately his inner circle knew something was wrong: many remarked that he was not even the same man - he seemed furtive, curt, short-tempered. When he returned, plant ready to cultivate and study, every witness that saw it agrees that it was a kind of grass that he grew on a plot in his backyard outside - not, oddly, inside - his greenhouse. It seemed to contain an overabundance of unusual carotenoids which gave the individual blades a striking, bright scarlet color - very much like blood. How he got it through customs is not known: one theory by law enforcement - what little information they are willing to give - was that he bribed the relevant officials, while others presuppose the grass looked totally harmless until he planted it, whereupon it acquired its morbid and unwholesome color. His neighbors - whose eyewitness accounts are at this point invaluable for a narrative of what happened - soon noticed that Perry had seemed to have picked up some nameless ailment while travelling, or maybe right after he returned. He looked and acted very unhealthy: he looked really sick some mornings, like he'd been throwing up a lot, pale, listless, and withdrawn...as the days went by he looked, and acted, sicker and sicker. He cancelled a spate of classes, citing illness, but never just what kind. Thereafter he was very rarely seen, mostly staying indoors, except for in the morning when he would come out and look over that red grass, like a farmer looking over his prize crop. He'd step in it, more than one person noticed, as though to test it, and when he did, the grass would spurt red sap that looked just like blood. The whole time, he would walk with kind of shaky gait that got more and more unsteady every day, so that near to the time he died he looked from a distance like a lame old man. He had developed a cough that sounded wet and full of mucous, in between muttering to himself, always wheezing like he was always out of breath - those that could hear it were sure whatever language he was speaking wasn't English. The way he dressed now was even more off-putting: he had taken to wearing a large, black overcoat, and only this particular overcoat to cover his entire body. In the last few days, he looked prematurely aged, fully thirty years older. But worst of all was his face - thick veins and arteries, pulsing on his head, raised and livid, threatening to burst. For the duration of this disturbing, enigmatic period, there was a faint odor always coming faintly from his house, strong to the point of being unbearable when Perry would come outside. What exactly the smell was like is a matter of some dispute - all agreed it would hang in the air and be dispersed with the breeze, and all agreed it was highly disagreeable. This went on for some weeks - the neighbors watching Perry, mute, wearing that black overcoat that eventually looked disgusting from never getting cleaned, shambling around, coughing softly and mumbling to himself with the veins pulsing, first one and then another, as though independent of his heartbeat. It didn't take long for some talk in the neighborhood to coalesce about calling the authorities, and a community action group was formed, because - tenured professor or not - Dr. Perry's behavior, sickness, and smelly house were all clear and dangerous nuisances. Every night, without fail, the most terrible noises came from Perry's house: moaning and groaning and, sometimes, the sound of painful vomiting and retching. Some nights there was a pounding noise, like he was hitting the wall with his fist. Neighbors looking out the window swore that the patch of red grass seemed to glisten eerily in the moonlight, as though reflecting it back up to the sky. Then, one evening, just as the Sun was beginning to set - Perry was seen to take a trowel, and dig up a small piece of the plot of the red grass, scooping up something small and whitish, but a rather sickly shade, like rice paper. With a shaky hand, he took a long, silver needle from the pocket of his unkempt overcoat, and pierced the thing that he had dug up. He fled back into his house, the noxious, indescribable smell following him - the thing that he had pierced spurting and gushing with black, greasy fluid. After this incident - whatever it was - the neighborhood had enough, and the police were called at last. The policemen entered the house by force, as no one responded when they knocked and announced their presence - the entire cul-de-sac and many from the down the street gathered to watch...but they would all be disappointed. The only thing the police would ever say they found was Dr. Martin Perry himself, dead, his corpse seeming to have undergone an amazingly rapid putrefaction. That is the story that has been repeated, not a detail deviated, ever since. Certainly something under a covered sheet was carried by a hazmat team - but not a soul saw what it was, or could have been. There were calls of alarm that the house had been contaminated with something - what the something was, never got discussed publicly, but it was repeatedly inferred to be one of Perry's experiments gone horribly wrong - certainly there were a swarm of agents from a federal agency that would not give out its identity, but which was widely assumed to have been the EPA. Whomever they were, and whatever they found - whatever the police told them that they would find, if they found anything at all - has never been made public. Full in the face of Dr. Martin Perry's own, stated desire to be buried with an orange tree sapling so that his body could nourish something beautiful and bountiful, his body was cremated, and an urn fashioned to be the centerpiece at his well-attended funeral service. This was a gauche, even heartless thing to do to the man that had done so much for the University of Florida over his long career - so why was it done? Even if whatever had killed him badly disfigured his body, they could have still had a closed coffin...but instead it was insisted that ashes were all that remained of the man. They were scattered on the grounds of his beloved place of learning at UF, the same state senator that gave the moving eulogy for Tom Ryan arriving speaking equally highly of Dr. Martin Perry, who was once his trusted mentor, and who transcended barriers of race and class to become an imminent and sagacious champion for equity, decency, and wisdom - mention was made of that ethical bent, his kindness, his devotion to science and his relentless pursuit of knowledge...even Perry's old adversary, Le Carde, was seen to shed a tear for the late head of the Botany department who was so adored by everyone who knew him. Just as Dr. Perry was reduced to ash, so was his house: very soon after he was declared dead, his house caught fire, burning the whole thing right to the ground, nothing left, not even the yard or the greenhouse - the whole property, leaving behind a true eyesore: a charred crater, even a month after. There were repeated and harassing interviews from law enforcement - federal agencies - of Dr. Perry's neighbors, colleagues, and his extended family, having no children of his own. All of them tried, in vain, to determine who, if anyone, would have a vested self-interest in the deliberate arson and destruction of Perry's house and his uncollected work. The fire marshal was, in the meantime, never able to determine a cause for the fire. Eventually, worn out by nearly everything about this ongoing travail, the homeowner's association voted to have the property paved over and turned into a small, but convenient, access road for golf carts getting to the fairway on which the house sat, with a tasteful row of palmettos was planted on either side. Now it is as though the house never existed - the not-quite-secret wish of too many people who lived through this ordeal happily granted. The memory of what went on that strange season in 2010 is still fresh - the neighborhood, a gated community in suburban Gainesville, saw its property values plummet, and many who were present for the decline and death of Dr. Perry moved away, leaving houses vacant in a down market for almost two years. Whatever really happened, before and during and after, can only be pieced together from several eyewitness accounts - all of which, to a one, are routinely hushed up by vague lawsuit threats by the University of Florida. Police records are sealed and are unlikely to ever be unsealed, hospital files are very hard to request and be seen by the average person...it is the word of powerful organizations against a handful of rattled rich people who would just as soon the entire thing never be spoken of again. And so, maybe, it never will be. But a few lingering facts persist - things that do not fit, that have undoubtedly kept many of the people who lived those awful nights and days up in the dark, small hours, when sleep, ruined by coincidences and unanswered questions, remains elusive: It is true, maybe a little too true, that nobody saw Perry's corpse, and it is also true, again maybe a little too true, that the ashes scattered at his memorial smelt faintly of woodsmoke and charcoal, and not human remains at all - nobody questioned it, of course, because that would have been grotesquely insensitive, but many people thought it and not a few whispered of it later. And though of course Perry's house no longer exists, the covered sheet that they took out of it was never lifted - no autopsy report was ever released, no cause of death given out except for heart failure...which Perry was not known to have had trouble with. For months and then years afterward neighborhood children frightened each other with tales of a boogeyman that shambled about the bushes, a monster that looked like a plant but walked like a man, with long shaggy arms that made weird and spooky noises - they were hushed up quickly by their parents, who exchanged nervous, knowing glances. Very recently, a plaque was installed in a tasteful gap between two palmettos that hem in the access-path where Dr. Martin Perry's house once stood - it honors him as a pioneer who fought racism and ignorance, who stood for decency and kindness, and who made advances in his beloved field of Botany, a role model to whomever he reached. It is easy enough to portray a man as a crusading ethicist and brilliant scientist, far easier than it is to tell the truth, that he had lived out his final days - and, maybe, lives still yet - as a deformed, diseased, shambling monster, having found that terrible nectar that reveals prodigious marvels, who wishes ever for a merciful death that will never, ever come.