She looked at me in surprise. “Why do you say that? I don’t think I shall ever leave.”
“Don’t tease me, Jane. You’re a child of another world than this.”
“My father came from Peru,” she reminded me.
“But you didn’t get your voice from him,” I said. “I wish I could have heard your mother sing. Had she a better voice than yours, Jane?”
“She thought so. My father couldn’t stand either of us.”
That was the evening I last saw Jane. We’d changed, and in the half an hour before she left for the Casino we sat on the balcony and I listened to her voice, like a spectral fountain, pour its luminous notes into the air. The music remained with me even after she’d gone, hanging faintly in the darkness around her chair.
I felt curiously sleepy, almost sick on the air she’d left behind, and at 11.30, when I knew she’d be appearing on stage at the Casino, I went out for a walk along the beach.
As I left the elevator I heard music coming from the shop.
At first I thought I’d left one of the audio switches on, but I knew the voice only too well.
The windows of the shop had been shuttered, so I got in through the passage which led from the garage courtyard round at the back of the apartment house.
The lights had been turned out, but a brilliant glow filled the shop, throwing a golden fire on to the tanks along the counters. Across the ceiling liquid colours danced in reflection.
The music I had heard before, but only in overture.
The Arachnid had grown to three times its size. It towered nine feet high out of the shattered lid of the control tank, leaves tumid and inflamed, its calyx as large as a bucket, raging insanely.
Arched forwards into it, her head thrown back, was Jane.
I ran over to her, my eyes filling with light, and grabbed her arm, trying to pull her away from it.
“Jane!” I shouted over the noise. “Get down!”
She flung my hand away. In her eyes, fleetingly, was a look of shame.
While I was sitting on the stairs in the entrance Tony and Harry drove up.
“Where’s Jane?” Harry asked. “Has anything happened to her? We were down at the Casino.” They both turned towards the music. “What the hell’s going on?”
Toy peered at me suspiciously. “Steve, anything wrong?”
Harry dropped the bouquet he was carrying and started towards the rear entrance.
“Harry!” I shouted after him. “Get back!”
Tony held my shoulder. “Is Jane in there?”
I caught them as they opened the door into the shop.
“Good God!” Harry yelled. “Let go of me, you fool!” He struggled to get away from me. “Steve, it’s trying to kill her!”
I jammed the door shut and held them back.
I never saw Jane again. The three of us waited in my apartment. When the music died away we went down and found the shop in darkness. The Arachnid had shrunk to its normal size.
The next day it died.
Where Jane went to I don’t know. Not long afterwards the Recess ended, and the big government schemes came along and started up all the clocks and kept us too busy working off the lost time to worry about a few bruised petals. Harry told me that Jane had been seen on her way through Red Beach, and I heard recently that someone very like her was doing the nightclubs this side out of Pernambuco.
So if any of you around here keep a chore-florist’s, and have a Khan-Arachnid orchid, look out for a golden-skinned woman with insects for eyes. Perhaps she’ll play i-Go with you, and I’m sorry to have to say it, but she’ll always cheat.