Jim became defensive. “I knew that.”
“Sure you did.”
At that moment, the creature raised its tiny head and never-ending neck to the sky and emitted a wailing but strangely harmonic cry, something between the call of the humpback whale and a mournful foghorn. It was immediately answered by similar calls from elsewhere in the swamp.
“They do like to sing of an evening.”
Even though Jim was fairly certain that the frog voice-and the human archaeologists of his own time-were correct in believing that such dinosaurs were harmless, he stood and waited for the giant beast to finish its song before resuming his struggle to dry ground. He recalled that a raging bull was also technically a herbivore, and he certainly had no idea what kind of red rag it might take to raise the ire of a diplodocus.
“Makes you nervous, does she?”
“Anything a few thousand times my size makes me nervous.”
Jim was now wading out of the swamp toward an area of coarse grass hummocks and tortured willows a few poor inches above the general water level. The mist was more patchy on this marginally higher ground, and off in the far distance he could see a dense plume of smoke rising from what he took to be an active volcano. He really did seem to be in some young Jurassic world. He looked around for the source of the frog voice, but could see nothing that qualified. “So where are you, friend?”
“I’m over here, aren’t I?”
The voice was coming from a tall clump of vegetation that ran rampant between two willows. The plant or plants were like nothing that Jim had ever seen before. Three elongated, open top gourds stood together in the middle of a base of fleshy green and yellow leaves, and a long, whiplike tendril extended from the mouth of each gourd. Jim could still, however, see no sign of the frog or any other creature from which the voice might emanate.
“Why don’t you show yourself?”
“You’re looking straight at me. I don’t know what else you expect me to do.”
Jim noticed that, each time the voice spoke, the lower leaves of the plant rubbed against the gourds in exact time to the words. A look of incredulity came over Jim’s face. “You’re the plant?”
“Why shouldn’t I be a plant?”
It was a reasonable question, and all Jim could do was shrug. “No reason, I guess. I just never met a plant that talked before. Also you sounded so much like a frog.”
“It puts the real frogs at their ease before I eat them. It gives them the illusion they’re dealing with one of their own.”
“You eat frogs?”
“Never met a plant that ate meat before?”
Jim nodded. “Sure. I had a Venus’s-flytrap when I was a kid, but-”
“Strictly small-time.”
“Are you telling me you’re a carnivorous plant?”
“You have a problem with that? A vegetarian or something? I have to tell you, vegetarianism looks very different from my perspective.”
Jim took a step back. “I’m not a vegetarian.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Jim took another step back. “But how do I know you’re not going to eat me?”
One of the tendrils made a gesture as though such a suggestion was close to insulting. “You really think I’d eat someone with whom I had just been talking?”
“You talk to the frogs before you eat them. You just told me that yourself.”
“Yes, but you’re not a frog, are you?”
“That’s true.”
“So come closer and tell me all about your adventures with the aliens.”
Jim didn’t move. “I think I’ll just stay where I am for the moment.”
The tendril stiffened as though offended. “You don’t trust me?”
Jim drew himself up to his full height and adopted a cool pedantic tone. “I seem to recall that most carnivorous plants I ever heard about feed by luring their prey into reach, either by the enticement of scent or color or by some kind of sugar excretion.”
“You think I’m trying to lure you to your doom with witty and urbane conversation?”
Jim nodded. “It’s a possibility I have to consider. I mean, you can hardly blame me for being cautious, can you? I may not be a frog, but I’m just as edible. More so, in fact, considering I’m larger. You’d be happily digesting me for a week.”
The plant sounded offended. “That does rather put me in the same class as tyrannosaurus rex.”
“Believe me. If I saw a tyrannosaurus rex, I’d run like hell regardless of what it might say to me.”
The tendril made a limp curling gesture; Jim would have sworn the plant was pouting. For such a rudimentary limb, it was able to manage a high degree of expression. “I have to tell you that your suspicion makes me very unhappy. Especially after I helped you find your way out of the swamp and onto dry land.”
As guilt trips went, this was pretty effective. Jim almost felt compelled to approach the plant as a sign of trust. Before he could take the first step, though, another voice came from behind him. “Don’t believe a word it’s saying. That overgrown weed is a consummate con artist. It’s been trying to get me for years.”
The voice came from a small mammal, about the size of a raccoon, that sat on its hind legs on one of the tussocks of coarse swamp grass. The creature resembled a lumpy combination of hamster, prairie dog, and potbellied pig. Jim looked down at the little animal. “You really think he’s going to eat me?”
The animal nodded. “If he gets half a chance. He’s trying to sucker you in with that phony Brit accent. He wants everyone to feel sorry for him, but the truth is, he’s like all the rest of us here, except the dinosaurs-another dead asshole one jump ahead of a bad reincarnation. I mean, take me, for example. My species doesn’t even have a name. Nobody ever found so much as a fucking fossil’s worth of us.”
Jim pushed his hair out of his eyes and scratched the back of his neck. The mud was starting to dry and his skin itched. “I’m sorry.”
The animal’s expression was ruefully resigned. “Don’t be. I wanted to be a giant sloth, but I miscalculated by a couple of million years and came out a distant ancestor. Sometimes I think I ought to let one of them eat me and start all over again, but then I think, fuck it, maybe I’ll wait for the asteroid to wipe them all out. I’d definitely like to see that.”
“The dinosaurs?”
“Who else?”
At this point, the carnivorous plant interrupted. “I’m sure you mammals have a lot to talk about, but-”
The odd little mammal looked bleakly at the plant. “You’ve had your shot, now can it,” He turned back to Jim. “My suggestion is that you head for the big house.”
“The big house?”
“The big old run-down mansion in the swamp, with the trees all around it and the Spanish moss. There’s a rumor that Elvis lived there for a while before he moved on.”
“There are people living there?”
“Sure there are people living there.”
“What kind of people?”
“Buncha weirdos. Kind of people you’d expect to be living in a big old spooky mansion in a Jurassic swamp.”
Jim didn’t know if he really liked the sound of this. On the other hand, first impressions could deceive. Doc Holliday’s little town had seemed pretty promising, until the Voodoo Mysteres had shown up and Doc had eighty-sixed him. Perhaps an uninviting mansion might have compensatory depths. While Jim was considering the idea, the carnivorous plant tried to butt in again. “Listen, this is all very nice but-”