Part 2: On the Matter of Fellow Petalmourn

Being the Second of the Institute's Findings on the Case. He Has Been Located. The Case Has Not Been Resolved.

(This is the sideways view of my colour pencil drawing of a lot of eyes in a strange plant - Chaiga T. Cheska)
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(Fernhollow Waltz - written and curated by Chaiga T. Cheska)
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I am glad to report that Fellow Petalmourn has been found. I had rather hoped this notice might therefore be brief. It is not. The search party’s account follows in full, since the Institute’s incident forms do not currently include a box for what they found. Fellow Grubb has requested, not unreasonably, that one be added before anybody is sent down Fernhollow Lane again.

Director Wendeline Ashgrove, Institute of Liminal Phenomena
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We got as far as the passage on gloves and goodwill alone. Beyond that, Grubb’s shears did the talking, and the growth did not care for the conversation. It had thickened considerably since Wednesday. The air in the hall had grown warm and close, like a glasshouse rather than a home, and every leaf we passed turned, unhurried, to watch us go by, as a room full of strangers watches a late arrival find their seat.

The glasshouse door had swollen shut in its frame. Grubb took it off the hinges rather than argue with it.

He was at the far end, amongst the ferns he always preferred, and it took a moment to see him properly, for what he had become rather than what he still, in places, was. The waistcoat remained, buttoned, though bark had grown up and over it at the shoulder, as if the waistcoat had stopped objecting some time ago. One hand still held a trowel. The other had put down roots of its own into the bed beneath the bench, and above him, where his hair had been, a modest crown of new growth had come in, each leaf bearing, patiently, an eye of its own, all of them turned towards us with the calm, unhurried attention of people who have been expecting company.

His face was completely his own and very much at ease.

“You’ll have come about the symposium,” he said. “I’m afraid I shan’t be able to present in person.”

Nobody answered him for a moment.

“I did think about leaving,” he said, in the tone of a man discussing a change of lodgings rather than a change of species. “But they had all been so very patient with me, and it seemed a poor sort of return to simply walk away once I understood what they were offering.”

Grubb asked whether he required watering on any particular schedule. He said Tuesdays, generally, though he was flexible.

Simonson asked if he was in pain. He said he had not felt so comfortable in eleven years, but none of us found it reassuring in the way he plainly intended.

We did not attempt to move him. He did not, as far as we could establish, wish to be moved.

We came away with more questions than we had when we arrived, and considerably less certainty about how to record any of them.

Perpetua Simonson and Fenwick Grubb, for the search party
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Apparently, watering on Tuesdays. I have added this to his personnel file under a heading I had to invent.

Grubb

He looked happier than I have ever seen him look as a whole man, and I find I resent this more than I can properly account for.

Simonson

His paper on Oculomorphomancy will, at long last, no longer be rejected for lack of a verifiable specimen. I understand the Registry has already been in touch to discuss publication. He will, I am reliably informed, attend the acceptance in person.