It was unfortunately typical of his frame of mind that he never once considered taking a straightforward course, seeking to make the acquaintance of Gaspard Gruiller so that he might quite legitimately ask what plants the garden contained.
Armand knew that he must get higher up if he was to see over the hedge of the enigmatic garden, and there was only one way to do this that was immediately obvious to him. There was no other room above his, but the house had a steeply-sloped roof of red tile, and a chimney-stack, which could offer him an extra twelve or thirteen feet of elevation if only he could scale it.
Because this seemed a hazardous project he called upon the help of his friend Philippe, asking him to secure a rope within his room and pay it out yard by yard while he climbed, so that if he fell the rope would save him from serious injury. Philippe agreed, reluctantly, and waited impatiently when Armand had clambered out, wondering what possible account he could give to the Carriere family should the escapade go wrong. But he need not have worried, because Armand soon came back through the window unharmed, in a state of some excitement.
"What did you see?" asked Philippe, caught up for once in the tangled threads of the mystery.
"I could not see so very much," replied Armand, "but more than I have seen before. There is a trellis-work erection - perhaps a kind of summer-house, though I could only see the top of it - which is longer than it is broad, having the house at one end and an open space at the other. The trellis-work looks like the sort which is sometimes placed against the wall of a building to assist climbing roses and honeysuckle, but I could not tell whether there was a wall within. The roof of the trellis bears flowers of several different hues - huge flowers, with heads like trumpets. There are birds there, wandering about."
"And did you see these flowers seizing and devouring the unfortunate birds?" asked Philippe.
"No I did not," admitted Armand. "But I have not seen the like of those flowers before, and I feel sure that there is something strange about them."
"Oh Armand," said his friend, "are you not satisfied? Must you still insist that although what you have seen is by your own account most ordinary, what remains hidden from you must be something unparalleled in its strangeness?"
"The
birds
are ordinary," replied Armand, insistently. "But their situation is not. I have never seen the flowers before, nor have I seen such a structure to mount them. What pleasure could it give a gardener to place his best blossoms on the roof of a structure, where he could not see them?"
"Ah," said Philippe, "but he
can
see them, can he not, from the upper windows of his own house? And you have said yourself that the garden gets too little sun - is it not probable that the entire purpose of this structure is to lift the flowers up, so that they receive more?"
If this speech was intended to set Armand's mind at rest it failed, for Armand was no longer listening. Instead, he was standing by his window looking out in the direction of Gaspard Gruiller's house.
Philippe went to stand by him, to see what he was looking at, and saw that the shutters of the one window which faced this way - which had been closed only a few minutes before - had now been thrown back. There was a man standing at the window, just as Armand was standing at his, and he was staring at the Carriere house. Philippe drew back reflexively, but could not resist peeping around the angle of the window to see what would happen.
After standing there for little more than a minute, Gruiller went away, leaving the shutters undone.
"He must have seen you on the roof!" said Philippe.
"I suppose he must," replied Armand. "But what of it? A man may climb upon the roof of his own house, if he wants to!" Despite the bravado of his words, however, Armand's face was pale, and frightened; it was as though all his excitement had been turned by that cool stare into anxiety.
"And yet," muttered Armand, hardly loud enough for his friend to hear the words. "There
is
some secret about that garden, and I would dearly love to know what it is. I feel an attraction to it, as though it had placed a spell on me."
"It is only a garden," said Philippe, soothingly, "And by no means the only one in Parravon to contain special blooms whose owner strives to hide them from potential thieves."
That night, Armand closed the shutters of his window tightly, as he always did - as all men do in Parravon, if they have any sense. But in his sleep he had a very curious dream, in which there was a tapping at those shutters, and a fluttering sound of wings in hectic motion, and a sharp scraping sound as though a claw was dragged momentarily across the outer face of each shutter.
Had he been really awake Armand would have clapped his hands to his ears and prayed for the morning to come, for he knew well enough that monsters were reputed to haunt the night in that city. But he was not awake, and in his dream he rose from his bed to go to the window, and threw back the shutters, so that he looked out boldly into the starlit night, as he had never dared to do before.
He was startled by the eerie brightness of the light which the stars gave, and as he peered out into that imperfect gloom he saw black shadows moving within it - sinister night-flyers larger by far than those birds which filled the sky by day.
Though he could not follow these shadows as they wheeled and soared in the starry sky, he became convinced that it was around the roof of the tower-house that they gathered. And when he looked at the tower-house he saw that the window from which Gaspard Gruiller had looked out in the daytime was unshuttered, with a red light burning within it, and that someone stood there looking out, just as Armand was - perhaps Gruiller, perhaps another. And there was a strange scent in the air, like exotic perfume, which made him intoxicated as he breathed it in, and made him almost ready to believe that he could fly.
The next day, when he tried to recall this dream, he could remember it up to that point, but not beyond - he did not know what had happened next, if anything farther had happened at all. He told what he could remember to Philippe Lebel, and found himself quite carried away when he told it, so that he argued very fiercely that the night-flyers he had seen were too huge to be ordinary birds. They might, as he assured Philippe with rapt insistence, have been
anything
.
"Well," said Philippe, "what of it? In our dreams, we may see whatever we will. We meet more daemons there than we ever could in everyday life."
Armand did not take offence at this remark, but simply took his friend to the window, where the shutters had been thrown back to let in the daylight. He pulled one of them back until it was closed, and invited Philippe to crane his neck and inspect its outer surface. Then he opened that one and pulled the other back in order to allow a similar inspection.
Philippe saw that there were three long scratches in the wood, extending across both shutters, and when he measured their span with his hand he shuddered to think what manner of claw it might have been which had made them.
"But after all," said Philippe, "even if the scratching sound was real, the rest was only a dream - for you did not actually rise from your bed and open the shutters, did you?"
"Did I not?" said Armand, quizzically. But then, after a moment's hesitation, he threw the shutters wide again. "You are right," he said. "I did not - and I surely never will."
Armand attempted to put Gaspard Gruiller out of his thoughts for the remainder of that day, and returned with a new will to the study of a book he had found which had much to say about the tenets of the Old Faith. He tried not to dwell on the matter of the garden, but could not help pausing whenever he found a reference to flowers, lest he find some clue regarding the nature of the unknown blooms which he had seen upon the trellis in the hidden garden. But there were far too many flowers mentioned in connection with the worship of the Old Faith, with far too little in the way of description to allow them to be easily identified.
The next night, and the next, he slept very fitfully. Once or twice he was convinced that he heard the nearby flutter of wings, but nothing tapped at his shutters and nothing scratched the wood. He did not dream - indeed, it seemed that whenever he was about to escape from anxious wakefulness into the comfort of a dream he was snatched back from its brink so that he might continue to toss and turn upon his pallet.
By day he tried to tell himself that he had done everything he could to fathom the mystery, and must be content to let it alone. Indeed, he came close to convincing himself that he had had enough of Gruiller's garden, and did not care about it any more. But this was a mere sham, which could not stand the test of temptation.
Three days after his expedition on to the roof Armand and Philippe were walking in the street, intent on their conversation, when they suddenly found their way blocked. When they looked up to see who had accosted them, they were most surprised to discover that it was Gruiller.
"You are Carriere's son, are you not?" he said, addressing Armand, after directing a brief but polite smile at Philippe. "You are my nearest neighbour, I believe. You are interested in my garden."
All the colour had drained from Armand's cheeks, and he was too surprised to reply.
"I would like to show it to you, now that the proper season has come," Gruiller continued, amiably. "The birds love to visit it, as you must have observed."
Armand still did not seem disposed to reply, so Philippe intervened, saying, rather uncertainly: "You are kind, sir. Armand and I would be pleased to see your flowers."
Gruiller responded with a litle bow. "The time is not
exactly
right just yet," he said. "I think you will see the blooms at their very best in three days time. I would like you to see them at their very best."
"Shall we come at noon?" asked Philippe.
"That would be perfect," replied the other, bowing again and walking on.
"Well," said Philippe proudly to his silent friend, "here is something to set your mind at rest for once and for all. We will see his garden, and the mystery will be extinguished. But I do think you might have spoken to him yourself - he seems a pleasant enough fellow, after all."
Armand seemed to be about to disagree, but in the end he simply nodded, and said: "Perhaps it is all for the best. We will go together, and see what there is to be seen."
At the appointed hour, Philippe and Armand made their way up the path to Gaspard Gruiller's door. Armand had told his father about the invitation, and had asked again what he knew about his neighbour, but the elder Carriere had simply shrugged his shoulders and said that tradesmen had no right to pry into the affairs of others unless their credit was suspect, and that as far as he knew, Gaspard Gruiller had no significant debts.
When Armand knocked he was promptly answered, and Gruiller took them through his house to the side door which was the entrance to the garden. The rooms through which they passed were well-furnished, the quality of the rugs and wall-hangings suggesting that Gruiller was not a poor man, but there was no clue to his occupation. They did not linger in the house, passing rapidly into the garden.
As they came through the garden door such a sight met their eyes that Philippe drew in his breath very sharply, and Armand released a gasp of surprise.
As they had already discovered, the centre-piece of the garden was a rectangular trellis-work erection, which formed a kind of tunnel, arching over a path which led from the doorway of the house to the open space at the garden's further end. This tunnel now extended before them, so that they saw it from the inside. It had many open spaces like small windows in the top and the sides, and because the sun was high in the sky the ones set in the roof were admitting distinct shafts of sunlight slanted from the south, which made a pattern on the paving stones beneath the bower, as if to mark out a series of stepping stones.
There were no green leaves or coloured flowers inside the tunnel. Its walls were matted with dangling tendrils, which were white or pale pink in colour. The great majority of these tendrils lay limp and still, though some trembled even though they were not busy. The minority, however, had a most curious occupation, for they were wrapped tightly around the still corpses of birds, writhing ceaselessly as they played with their prey and passed the shrivelling bodies slowly along the wall.
While they watched, Philippe and Armand saw a tiny bird come from without to perch upon the rim of one of the windows, peering into the tunnel with evident curiosity, as though wondering whether it had somehow stumbled upon a paradise of edible worms. But then it began fluttering its wings in panic, trying to launch itself back into the air, as it became aware that its tiny feet had been caught and held. Within thirty seconds the tendrils had pulled their victim inside, away from the window, and were dragging it across the inner face of the tunnel.
Its struggles were short-lived, though Philippe could not tell precisely how it had been killed.
Gruiller said nothing at first, but simply watched his guests, smiling at their confusion. Eventually, he said: "I know that you have not seen their like before, my friends. There is nothing like this in any other garden in Parravon. But this is not a pretty sight, and I am sure that you would prefer to look at the lovely flowers."
He led the two youths to the outside of the bower, where they could see the woody trunks of the climbing plants embedded in the soil, and the pale green leaves which surrounded the huge blossoms. The nearest flowers grew just above head height, and there was little foliage close to the ground because that part of the bower never caught the sun at all. The growth was lush, but the pattern of the trellis-work could clearly be seen from without, whereas it had been masked within by the sheer profusion of the clinging tendrils.