The Hungry Garden

Chapter Eight: The Hungry Garden

The next day I was back with Wilco and Chris in the workshop. While I'd been off working with Scott on the sliced bread stunt, the two of them had made a lot of progress on the robotic and manually controlled perils they'd been working on.

We'd had word from Uncle Morbid that he wanted to be ready to do the first outdoor Masquerade of the year as soon as possible and we were now not too far off from making that a reality. We still didn't have a proper constricting snake (the robotic tube Wilco had set loose on me worked better as a vine), but Big Gulp and the puppet-controlled Sadie Coils were good to go, with a few other animals in progress throughout the workshop including a giant salamander that lolloped along and performed various actions through a combination of animatronics and manual puppetry. Scott was bringing up a backhoe to start preparing the quicksand pools and there were plenty of spaces around the cantina and woodland clearings to set up whatever smaller deathplays were called for. Craig and Rebecca came up from the kitchen to see what we were planning and made notes on any special liquids we'd be needing.

Mostly we were working on the area with the carnivorous plants, which we had now given the official title of the Hungry Garden. We had an idea for a special event that would be a kind of easter egg hunt played by a large group of spirits at a time in an area set up with multiple plant traps waiting to devour the unwary (or willing, as the case may be).

For the various plants around the Hungry Garden, I'd helped out with a little research of my own in Morior's library, between all of us we'd worked out four main categories of people-eating plants as described in literature and popular culture.

The simplest were the trappers, static flora that would lure in their prey with sweet smells or psychedelic visions before immobilising and slowly digesting them. The real botanical version of these would be pitcher plants, liquid filled containers into which unwary flies would slip to be immersed in digestive juice. We could build human-size versions of these for people to slide into and had Craig and Rebecca working on an appropriate liquid to fill them with. We could have just used water, but they'd be able to come up with something a little more viscous, organic and aromatic, something that felt closer to the digestive juices of a carnivorous plant without actually dunking people in acid.

A more mythical and beautiful trapper was Captain Arkwright's Death Flower of El Banoor, a large sweet smelling bloom which wanderers would venture into and fall asleep, where they would be consumed. This was a lovely away-with-the-fairies notion that we couldn't easily translate for deathplay purposes (we certainly weren't going to poison anybody), but we could have versions of the flower as an aesthetic prop and Craig and Rebecca could pipe in some sweet smells. If anyone did actually fall asleep or decide to play dead in there, that would be their business, we'd just take them off to Limbo.

Then there came the munchers, like big venus flytraps. I'd already been eaten by one of Wilco's prototype munchers on my first tour of the jungle, they were the most direct form of plant trap – the victim enters and gets closed up in a pair of jaws. They could then either be held there or slipped down into a belly area, like our old friend Big Gulp the Bullfrog.

The shamblers were walking trees, the Triffids being the most famous example from popular culture. In the movies these were really just slow moving monsters that happened to be plants, so the way to realise them would be as costumes operated by angels and stagehands. To help delegate the job of constructing these, Uncle Morbid introduced us to Hannah and Jess, a pair of sewing and textiles experts who worked in the office and had a sewing studio in one of the upstairs rooms of the main house. There hadn't previously been a lot of creative needlework for them to do at Morior; spirits provided their own costumes for the Masquerade, angels and stagehands wore stock uniforms and the visiting film crews that rented Morior's facilities brought their own wardrobe departments. So they were delighted to finally have a chance to get stuck in and show what they could do. They had a meeting with Wilco to discuss his concept sketches and got to work.