# Anaphylaxis

Author: Aux Chiens
Tags: Body Horror, Cthulhu Mythos, Horror, Male, Plant, Transformation, creepypasta, gross, lovecraft, weird


Dar'st thou
die?

The sense of death is most in apprehension;

And the poor beetle that we tread upon,

In corporal sufferance feels a pang as great

As when a giant dies.
_________ 
William
Shakespeare,
Measure For Measure, Act
III, scene i


            The death of Dr. Martin Perry, Ph.D., was remarked upon,
and mourned, in many quarters: in the press, the university he worked for -
Florida, in Gainesville - his community, and in a limited capacity whatever
family he still had. He was a botanist by trade, profession, and passion, but
he had worked for NASA as well as teaching at UF. Wherever he had been he was
remembered as a kind and forthright man who made valuable contributions to his
field - carnivorous plants, a bit of theorizing about xenobotany for NASA - who
had clashed with his colleague Dr. Drake Le Carde and his controversial
attempts to revive prehistoric insects, and saved 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 consider his life's greatest failure.

            Dr.
Perry was, in other words, a highly memorable, highly visible member of the
University of Florida family. Which, of course, makes the particulars of his
death so strange.

            Martin
Perry died in the early morning hours of 28
th, February, 2010. For
some time he had been working on a new project which he disclosed very minimal
details about - a new plant with fascinating qualities that grew in 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 some administrative leave and spent
two weeks travelling, and staying, in the Pakistani city of Gilgit, at the
beginning of 2010.

            What the plant was has yet
to be determined or investigated seriously - perhaps what later happened to Dr.
Perry, the symptoms he clearly experienced, has scared off anyone who wanted to
follow him back to the Indian folklore that brought him so much bad luck.

            Certainly there are
references to a
terrible nectar that would "grant strange and marvelous new
life" in the Comte d'Erlette's
Cultes
des Goules, which make reference to "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 and explain whatever was
"strange and marvelous" in purely naturalistic terms...but how he
triangulated where to go, where and how to look for it, instructions on growing
it - all are awash in mystery.

            Every witness agrees that the plant was a kind of
grass that he grew on a plot in his backyard outside of his greenhouse, which
contained 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, where it acquired its morbid and unwholesome color.

            When he came back stateside
with the plant that he had acquired, the last week of January, Dr. Perry
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 show
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.

            His
neighbors - whose eyewitness accounts are at this point invaluable for a
narrative of what happened - soon noticed that Dr. Perry had seemed to have
picked up some nameless ailment while travelling. He looked and acted very
unhealthy: he looked really sick some mornings, like he'd been throwing up a
lot, pale, listless, and withdrawn. But as the days went by he looked, and
acted, sicker and sicker: he cancelled a spate of
classes, citing - appropriately - illness.

            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, one more than one eyewitness said, 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 dry and asthmatic, in between muttering to
himself, and 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 - no shoes, only a black overcoat to cover his entire
body. His skin got paler and sicklier as time went on. In the last few days, he
looked prematurely aged, fully thirty years older.

            But by far the worst part -
for his neighbors, anyhow - was how violently ill and sickly Perry seemed in
his final days...the veins on his face stood out, bulging, pale blue and red.

            At
this point he was noted as never having gone to his greenhouse anymore, which
he used to do at least once a day either before or after he went to work at the
University. In fact, the door to his greenhouse - the place where he kept all
his rare plants and so on - was never seen to have been opened
once.
            Things
only got stranger from there: for the duration of this disturbing, enigmatic
period, there was a faint odor always coming faintly from his house, which
would become strong to the point of being unbearable when Dr. 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. One neighbor
described it as: "What you would expect a bouquet
of dead flowers to smell like. After only a few minutes I would start to feel
nauseous after smelling it for too long."

            So this went on for some
weeks - the neighbors watching Dr. 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 bulging,
pulsing, in his head.
            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.

            But
that very week came the climax to the horror - and the end of Dr. Perry.

            Every night, without fail,
the most terrible noises came from Dr. Perry's house, always well after
midnight: moaning and groaning and, sometimes, the sound of someone throwing
up. 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.

            Finally
the neighborhood had enough - the police were called at last.

            It
was fortuitous that they were. For when the policemen arrived and entered the
house, the entire cul-de-sac and many from the down the street gathered to see
what had happened, they found it full of broken mirrors - not one mirror had
been left unshattered - and dead man in an advanced and nauseating state of putrefaction
and decay. They carried the body out with the help of a called hazmat
team...where it was never seen again.

            This
may or may not be connected with calls of alarm that the house had been
contaminated with something - what the
something
was, never discussed publicly, but inferred to be one of Perry's
experiments gone horribly wrong - certainly there were a swarm of agents from
the EPA and, not a few hours later, the FBI. Whatever they found has not - nor,
probably ever will be - made public.

            There
was no body at the funeral, it was discovered a week after his death, for
Martin Perry had been cremated. This was full in the face of his own, stated
desire to be buried with an orange tree sapling so that his body could nourish
something beautiful and bountiful - very poetic, very rather like him in life -
so to cremate him instead was a gauche slap to the man's reputation. Why was it
done?

            Even
if whatever had killed him badly disfigured his body, they could have still had
a closed-coffin funeral...yet they did not. They cremated whatever it was they
found in his house, promptly, and though the ashes were supposed to be
scattered somewhere special to him, nobody remembers it happening - because it
probably never did.

            It was somewhat ironic that
they cremated his body: not twenty-four hours after Dr. Perry was found dead,
his house caught fire, burning the whole thing right to the ground, literally
nothing left, not even the yard or the greenhouse - the whole property, not only the
backyard but the front as well. It left 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 family, trying to determine who, if
anyone, would a vested self-interest in the deliberate arson and destruction of
his house and his work. The fire marshal was, in the meantime, never able to
determine a cause for the fire - eventually the property was paved over and
turned into a small, but convenient, access road for golf carts getting to the
fairway on which the house sat. A row of palmettos was planted on either side.
It was as though the house never existed - and perhaps, after all, it need not
to have.

            The
memory of what went on that strange late winter 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.          For
months afterward neighborhood children frightened each other with tales of a
boogeyman that shambled about the bushes, a plant-monster that used to be a man
- they were hushed up quickly by their parents, who exchanged nervous, knowing
glances.

            The
official report said that death came from exposure to a particularly poisonous
plant, species uncertain - but whatever killed Martin Perry
cannot and, probably,
should not be
known with certainty. His research, whatever it was, was clearly misunderstood,
and his appearance was clearly from an allergic reaction that he was fighting
in his effort and commitment to the scientific community.           The
man's final days - the strange illness and off-putting behavior, the red grass
that looked like it was spurting blood - are taken from several eyewitness
accounts, all of which, to a one, are forcibly ignored and refuted 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.

            It
is easy enough to portray someone as a harmless botanist and devoted scientist,
far easier than it is to tell the truth, that he lived his final days - and,
maybe, lives still yet - as a deformed, hideous, sickly monster wishing for a
death that will never come.

Source: https://sofurry.com/view/967785