{"sf1_id":967785,"sf2_id":null,"title":"Anaphylaxis","author":"Aux Chiens","words":2132,"posted_at":"2016-02-22T06:07:00.000Z","tags":["Body Horror","Cthulhu Mythos","Horror","Male","Plant","Transformation","creepypasta","gross","lovecraft","weird"],"url":"https://fse.anthro.fr/stories/967785-anaphylaxis","original_url":"https://sofurry.com/view/967785","image_url":"https://www.sofurryfiles.com/std/thumb?page=967785\u0026ext=.jpg","description":"","content":"\nDar'st thou\ndie?\n\nThe sense of death is most in apprehension;\n\nAnd the poor beetle that we tread upon,\n\nIn corporal sufferance feels a pang as great\n\nAs when a giant dies.\n_________ \nWilliam\nShakespeare,\nMeasure For Measure, Act\nIII, scene i\n\n\n            The death of Dr. Martin Perry, Ph.D., was remarked upon,\nand mourned, in many quarters: in the press, the university he worked for -\nFlorida, in Gainesville - his community, and in a limited capacity whatever\nfamily he still had. He was a botanist by trade, profession, and passion, but\nhe had worked for NASA as well as teaching at UF. Wherever he had been he was\nremembered as a kind and forthright man who made valuable contributions to his\nfield - carnivorous plants, a bit of theorizing about xenobotany for NASA - who\nhad clashed with his colleague Dr. Drake Le Carde and his controversial\nattempts to revive prehistoric insects, and saved the career of Dr. Irving\nCollins, the former Chief of Flight Control who had taken so much public blame\nfor the death of Tom Ryan, the beloved astronaut...poor man, his hands always\nshook, never recovering from what he consider his life's greatest failure.\n\n            Dr.\nPerry was, in other words, a highly memorable, highly visible member of the\nUniversity of Florida family. Which, of course, makes the particulars of his\ndeath so strange.\n\n            Martin\nPerry died in the early morning hours of 28\nth, February, 2010. For\nsome time he had been working on a new project which he disclosed very minimal\ndetails about - a new plant with fascinating qualities that grew in treacherous\nreaches of Baltistan, a very isolated part of Pakistan, which he had apparently\nread about in some esoteric material that had been deposited near to a hundred\nyears earlier at the UF library. He took some administrative leave and spent\ntwo weeks travelling, and staying, in the Pakistani city of Gilgit, at the\nbeginning of 2010.\n\n            What the plant was has yet\nto be determined or investigated seriously - perhaps what later happened to Dr.\nPerry, the symptoms he clearly experienced, has scared off anyone who wanted to\nfollow him back to the Indian folklore that brought him so much bad luck.\n\n            Certainly there are\nreferences to a\nterrible nectar that would \"grant strange and marvelous new\nlife\" in the Comte d'Erlette's\nCultes\ndes Goules, which make reference to \"une herbe aux le Plateau de Leng,\" where Leng has problematically been understood to mean a vast area\nencompassing Tibet, far western China, and the Kashmir.\n\n            Being the materialist that he was, Perry may have\nsought to debunk any mystical properties of the plant and explain whatever was\n\"strange and marvelous\" in purely naturalistic terms...but how he\ntriangulated where to go, where and how to look for it, instructions on growing\nit - all are awash in mystery.\n\n            Every witness agrees that the plant was a kind of\ngrass that he grew on a plot in his backyard outside of his greenhouse, which\ncontained an overabundance of unusual carotenoids which gave the individual\nblades a striking, bright scarlet color - very much like blood. How he got it\nthrough customs is not known: one theory by law enforcement - what little\ninformation they are willing to give - was that he bribed the relevant\nofficials, while others presuppose the grass looked totally harmless until he\nplanted it, where it acquired its morbid and unwholesome color.\n\n            When he came back stateside\nwith the plant that he had acquired, the last week of January, Dr. Perry\ninformed nobody of where he had been or what he had been doing. Where he was in\nGilgit are not well-remembered by locals there, and his passport stamps show\nnothing unusual - Orlando, Dubai, Karachi, and returning the same way. But\nimmediately his inner circle knew something was wrong: many remarked that he\nwas not even the same man - he seemed furtive, curt, short-tempered.\n\n            His\nneighbors - whose eyewitness accounts are at this point invaluable for a\nnarrative of what happened - soon noticed that Dr. Perry had seemed to have\npicked up some nameless ailment while travelling. He looked and acted very\nunhealthy: he looked really sick some mornings, like he'd been throwing up a\nlot, pale, listless, and withdrawn. But as the days went by he looked, and\nacted, sicker and sicker: he cancelled a spate of\nclasses, citing - appropriately - illness.\n\n            Thereafter he was very\nrarely seen, mostly staying indoors, except for in the morning when he would\ncome out and look over that red grass, like a farmer looking over his prize\ncrop. He'd step in it, one more than one eyewitness said, as though to test it,\nand when he did, the grass would spurt red sap that looked just like blood.\n\n            The whole time, he would\nwalk with kind of shaky gait that got more and more unsteady every day, so that\nnear to the time he died he looked from a distance like a lame old man. He had\ndeveloped a cough that sounded dry and asthmatic, in between muttering to\nhimself, and wheezing like he was always out of breath - those that could hear\nit were sure whatever language he was speaking wasn't English.\n\n            The way he dressed now was\neven more off-putting: he had taken to wearing a large, black overcoat, and\nonly\nthis particular overcoat - no shoes, only a black overcoat to cover his entire\nbody. His skin got paler and sicklier as time went on. In the last few days, he\nlooked prematurely aged, fully thirty years older.\n\n            But by far the worst part -\nfor his neighbors, anyhow - was how violently ill and sickly Perry seemed in\nhis final days...the veins on his face stood out, bulging, pale blue and red.\n\n            At\nthis point he was noted as never having gone to his greenhouse anymore, which\nhe used to do at least once a day either before or after he went to work at the\nUniversity. In fact, the door to his greenhouse - the place where he kept all\nhis rare plants and so on - was never seen to have been opened\nonce.\n            Things\nonly got stranger from there: for the duration of this disturbing, enigmatic\nperiod, there was a faint odor always coming faintly from his house, which\nwould become strong to the point of being unbearable when Dr. Perry would come\noutside.\n\n            What\nexactly the smell was\nlike is a\nmatter of some dispute - all agreed it would hang in the air and be dispersed\nwith the breeze, and all agreed it was highly disagreeable. One neighbor\ndescribed it as: \"What you would expect a bouquet\nof dead flowers to smell like. After only a few minutes I would start to feel\nnauseous after smelling it for too long.\"\n\n            So this went on for some\nweeks - the neighbors watching Dr. Perry, mute, wearing that black overcoat\nthat eventually looked disgusting from never getting cleaned, shambling around,\ncoughing softly and mumbling to himself with the veins bulging,\npulsing, in his head.\n            It didn't take long for\nsome talk in the neighborhood to coalesce about calling the authorities, and a\ncommunity action group was formed, because tenured professor or not, Dr.\nPerry's behavior, sickness, and smelly house were all clear and dangerous\nnuisances.\n\n            But\nthat very week came the climax to the horror - and the end of Dr. Perry.\n\n            Every night, without fail,\nthe most terrible noises came from Dr. Perry's house, always well after\nmidnight: moaning and groaning and, sometimes, the sound of someone throwing\nup. Some nights there was a pounding noise, like he was hitting the wall with\nhis fist. Neighbors looking out the window swore that the patch of red grass\nseemed to\nglisten eerily in the\nmoonlight, as though reflecting it back up to the sky.\n\n            Finally\nthe neighborhood had enough - the police were called at last.\n\n            It\nwas fortuitous that they were. For when the policemen arrived and entered the\nhouse, the entire cul-de-sac and many from the down the street gathered to see\nwhat had happened, they found it full of broken mirrors - not one mirror had\nbeen left unshattered - and dead man in an advanced and nauseating state of putrefaction\nand decay. They carried the body out with the help of a called hazmat\nteam...where it was never seen again.\n\n            This\nmay or may not be connected with calls of alarm that the house had been\ncontaminated with something - what the\nsomething\nwas, never discussed publicly, but inferred to be one of Perry's\nexperiments gone horribly wrong - certainly there were a swarm of agents from\nthe EPA and, not a few hours later, the FBI. Whatever they found has not - nor,\nprobably ever will be - made public.\n\n            There\nwas no body at the funeral, it was discovered a week after his death, for\nMartin Perry had been cremated. This was full in the face of his own, stated\ndesire to be buried with an orange tree sapling so that his body could nourish\nsomething beautiful and bountiful - very poetic, very rather like him in life -\nso to cremate him instead was a gauche slap to the man's reputation. Why was it\ndone?\n\n            Even\nif whatever had killed him badly disfigured his body, they could have still had\na closed-coffin funeral...yet they did not. They cremated whatever it was they\nfound in his house, promptly, and though the ashes were supposed to be\nscattered somewhere special to him, nobody remembers it happening - because it\nprobably never did.\n\n            It was somewhat ironic that\nthey cremated his body: not twenty-four hours after Dr. Perry was found dead,\nhis house caught fire, burning the whole thing right to the ground, literally\nnothing left, not even the yard or the greenhouse - the whole property, not only the\nbackyard but the front as well. It left behind a true eyesore: a charred\ncrater, even a month after.\n\n            There\nwere repeated and harassing interviews from law enforcement - federal agencies\n- of Dr. Perry's neighbors, colleagues, and family, trying to determine who, if\nanyone, would a vested self-interest in the deliberate arson and destruction of\nhis house and his work. The fire marshal was, in the meantime, never able to\ndetermine a cause for the fire - eventually the property was paved over and\nturned into a small, but convenient, access road for golf carts getting to the\nfairway on which the house sat. A row of palmettos was planted on either side.\nIt was as though the house never existed - and perhaps, after all, it need not\nto have.\n\n            The\nmemory of what went on that strange late winter in 2010 is still fresh - the\nneighborhood, a gated community in suburban Gainesville, saw its property\nvalues plummet, and many who were present for the decline and death of Dr.\nPerry moved away, leaving houses vacant in a down market for almost two years.          For\nmonths afterward neighborhood children frightened each other with tales of a\nboogeyman that shambled about the bushes, a plant-monster that used to be a man\n- they were hushed up quickly by their parents, who exchanged nervous, knowing\nglances.\n\n            The\nofficial report said that death came from exposure to a particularly poisonous\nplant, species uncertain - but whatever killed Martin Perry\ncannot and, probably,\nshould not be\nknown with certainty. His research, whatever it was, was clearly misunderstood,\nand his appearance was clearly from an allergic reaction that he was fighting\nin his effort and commitment to the scientific community.           The\nman's final days - the strange illness and off-putting behavior, the red grass\nthat looked like it was spurting blood - are taken from several eyewitness\naccounts, all of which, to a one, are forcibly ignored and refuted by the\nUniversity of Florida. Police records are sealed and are unlikely to ever be\nunsealed, hospital files are very hard to request and be seen by the average\nperson. It is the word of powerful organizations against a handful of rattled\nrich people who would just as soon the entire thing never be spoken of again.\n\n            And\nso, maybe, it never will be.\n\n            It\nis easy enough to portray someone as a harmless botanist and devoted scientist,\nfar easier than it is to tell the truth, that he lived his final days - and,\nmaybe, lives still yet - as a deformed, hideous, sickly monster wishing for a\ndeath that will never come.\n"}