The Terror Garden has many orchids in it. Stories like “The Orchid Terror” from 1911 are typical as it that classic “The Purple Terror” (1899) by Fred M. White and H. G. Wells’s “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” (1894). The Pulps came later and had their share too. For some reason, orchids are chosen msot often to be sinister and creepy. Is that they grow in hard-to-reach places like swamps and jungles? Or is it because though beautiful, there is something flesh-like and their petals? Whatever the reason, there are plenty of great tales about evil orchids to enjoy, such as the tale here in this post…
“The Orchid of Asia” by Edna Worthley Underwood appeared in Asia: The American Magazine of the Orient, September 1920 in two parts. The story received seven illustrations by Will Crawford. (I am not familiar with this artist but his work has a wonderful Virgil Finlay ornateness to it.)
Part One
Jacques D’Entrecolles is a Frenchman who suffers from lung disease. He quits his life in Paris, leaves his younger brother, to live in hotter climes. He doesn’t convalesce in the Tropics but begins a ten year search for orchids all over the world, hiking into some dangerous places to obtain them. The bulbs are sent onto his garden in the Powell Islands near India. There he collects many different and amazing plants.
One of these is worthy of special mention: the Death-Orchid. In the foothills of the Andes, near Colombia, is a valley where the local tribesmen won’t go because of the perfume of the orchid. If they smell it at night, it drives them insane. The Europeans, with their usual racism of this time period, defy the perfume and discover a valley covered in white blossoms. D’Entrecolles studies them from afar until he discovers they are harmless during the daytime. The death-orchid is harvested and sent onto India.
Returning to his island garden and his plant partner, Labat, the orchid hunter crossbreeds the Death-orchid with two other plants. This new creation is a gigantic flower that changes color in the night and has an entrancing odor. D’Entrecolles names it La Revenante, or that which is brought back to life. (This is the author’s first intimation that the thing is a vampire.) At night, D’Entrecolles spends hours holding and caressing the plant, even though it has an ill effect on his body. Vlei-la, a local girl who speaks French, tries to dissuade him from these nightly sessions. She gets him away for awhile, rowing him out on the sea instead of spending time in the garden. La Revenante resents this, stinging the girl’s skin with skull-like marks. Vlei-la flees, going to spend time with Labat instead.
D’Entrecolles goes back to his plant. He realizes:
Within his dazed brain this fact arose to confront him and to sober him. He had cultivated a flower beyond the limits of flower life. He had made an orchid-woman. The beautiful, pallid, silent flower was mocking his misery with her velvet-white expressionless eyes. La Revenente was a vampire that sat upon his soul.
Part Two
Underwood spends several pages trying to explain the cosmic changes going on inside D’Entrecolles. This section is quite Lovecraftian as the orchid hunter realizes that La Revenante is a superior being, the pinnacle of all plant growth. He sees back into time when plants and animals waged war, with the plants losing to become stationary. After this they develop flowers. The man also realizes that he is changing but not upward. he is slowly devolving into a lower form of man, unworthy of La Revenante‘s greatness. (I wonder if Robert E. Howard read this tale? The theme of a man trapped by something and having visions of lost ages is the plot of “The Mirrors of Tuzun Thune” (Weird Tales, September 1929). D’Entrecolles has no Brule the Spear-Slayer to rescue him.)
D’Entrecolles has one last chance to escape. This comes when Labat’s daughter, Clarice, arrives from France. D’Entrecolles is smitten and eventually proposes. He finds Clarice and the idea of returning to Paris help keep his thoughts away from the plant monster. And yet he never quite leaves even though Clarice asks that they should. Vlei-la tells her that if she wants to go she must destroy La Revenante. Clarice attempts this with a hatchet but she doesn’t return from the garden. Labat finds her under the plant, dead. Clarice’s eyes have turned white and sightless, her skin burned red. The local doctor claims it is meningitis but Vlei-la insists it is the plant.
With the death of Clarice, the Labats plan to return to France. They will take Vlei-la with them. Labat tries to get D’Entrecolles to come too, but he returns to his plant. Not willing to give up, Labat goes to the garden for a final plea but doesn’t even try. He can see that D’Entrecolles is physically changing into something not human. The man’s mind is gone.
In the end, D’Entrecolles doesn’t escape. As he declines into plantness, something ugly for La Revenante to cling onto, the man has moved towards the plant while the plant has become a woman. This weird relationship between plant and human, the very wellspring of all plant monster stories, is best set out here by D’Entrecolles:
“The sensation that a beautiful orchid causes is not wholly pleasure. Mingled with pleasure, although to a lesser degree, there is something that resembles fear, then surprise, and to those who are sensitive, a vague, unsatisfying questioning. It is as if some monster, sensed but not seen, were trying to wing its way toward me across aeons of time.”
Underwood’s tale covers old ground in orchid horror, but she writes it at greater length. Many Pulp stories, like Sophie Wenzell Ellis’s “White Lady” (Strange Tales, January 1933) would tell the same story but at half the length. “The Orchid of Asia” manages to do something that many writers won’t until Clark Ashton Smith pens “The Seed From the Sepulcher” (Weird Tales, October 1933). She actually makes plants scary, and with a wonderfully Lovecraftian flare in a day while HPL was still writing for amateur magazines. I am surprised this one hasn’t been reprinted repeatedly.
Conclusion
If old stories of plant monsters are your thing, then check out Charles G. Waugh’s latest anthology: Roots of Evil! In his introduction he says:
As far as we can determine, there are now 13 anthologies out about strange plants (see appendix). Yours truly (who started working on speculative anthologies 47 years ago), has coedited 2 and this is my 3rd. Indeed, I, an introvert, now have many more ferns than ever before.
Kellermeyer, Miller, Chazin and Waugh don’t include “The Orchid of Asia” in their collection but of the twenty-five picks they select, half are unknown to me. (Which is saying something with all the posts I have done in The Terror Garden. There are always new delights to be discovered.) They do include some old chestnuts like “Rappaccini’s Daughter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “The Flowering of the Strange Orchid” by H. G. Wells but these are important legacy stories.
The Afterword by Timothy Miller is a nice round-up of the thirteen other anthologies that Charles mentioned. This include the 1976 anthology The Roots of Evil by Michel Parry (as Carlos Cassaba). I was a little surprised the guys chose to reuse that title rather than call the book Frankenplants! I guess forty-seven years is long enough to use it again.
Roots of Evil is available here.
