IN THE CONSERVATORY
by A. L. Sirois

The big puddle looked normal. John Ostrowski drove his car into it without a thought. Bang! The right front wheel dropped into a hidden pothole, splashing brown water up into the engine compartment. The car spluttered and died, leaving Ostrowski astonished and struggling with the sudden lack of power steering. He maneuvered to a stop on the shoulder.

"Dammit." That hole hadn't been half as big yesterday. Three days of heavy summer rain must have undermined the road. He ground the starter, but the car wouldn't turn over. He got out to examine the engine. It looked dirty and wet. Ostrowski was no mechanic. He slammed the Chevy's hood closed with one large hand and looked around. He lived a half mile or so further down the road, in this wooded section of town where there were few other houses.

There was no reason he couldn't walk home and return later for the car. Now that the rain had stopped, the walk would be tolerable if not exactly pleasant.

The air was cool and the surrounding woods gave off a thick earthy odor. There were no sounds save for the drip of water and the twittering of late-afternoon birds. The sun came out from behind the clouds, filling the glades with green light that spilled onto the road. The pebbles of the asphalt lay in a thin tepid stew of rainwater and worms.

A stray ray of sunlight hit the car's hood. Ostrowski sighed. He stepped around to the passenger door, opened it, and bent to lift the object on the seat: a large, heavy bell jar, destined to provide a temporary home for the humidity-loving fittonia clippings in the conservatory attached to his house.

He locked the car and turned to the road with the jar cradled in his arms and his battered old rain hat stuck on the back of his head.

He walked slowly, smoothly, almost majestically, not unlike a blimp. As his feet rose and fell, his small gray eyes peered here, glanced there, as if to provide clear passage for his large lumpish nose and the scraggly mustache hiding beneath it along his thin upper lip. Pink papery ears, secured on his head at right angles to his skull supported the rain hat. The color of his tie matched his eyes, purely by accident: after his wife left him he had happily stopped worrying about what in his wardrobe matched what.

As he walked, he considered his car. If it didn't start, he'd have to leave it for tomorrow. If it didn't start then, he'd have to call the garage. Preoccupied, he didn't hear the odd noise from the woods until it was repeated.

He halted. It came again. He couldn't identify it.

It was a strange sort of rattling clatter. Frowning, he turned toward the dripping wall of foliage to his right. The sound seemed to be coming from no more than ten feet away. It was like someone shaking a sheet of tinfoil.

What would someone be doing shaking tinfoil in the woods after a rainstorm?

He stepped off the road, ignoring the dripping grasses in the ditch, and found himself peering through a screen of branches into a clearing.

In the center of the treeless area, something floated about four feet off the ground. Ostrowski thrust his head forward, hunching his shoulders. His lower lip slowly sagged, exposing yellowish teeth.

It was a cloud, a little cloud no bigger than a toaster.

A minuscule web of white lighting flickered from it, followed by the rattling sound. A faint odor of ozone reached his nostrils.

He bit the sides of his tongue and chewed, making wet noises.

The cloud rattled and roiled. It was a perfect, functioning cumulonimbus, a basic anvil-head thundercloud, apparently normal in every respect--except for its size.

It looked small enough to fit inside his bell jar. Without debating with himself, he decided to capture the thing if he could. Carefully he detached the jar's ceramic base and moved into the glade.

Stalking the cloud was like trying to fish bits of shell out of a frying egg, in that some operant field relationship seemed to keep the thing at a distance from him. It also tended to avoid the trees and overhanging branches. He tried to recall something, anything, about electromagnetic energy from his high school physics course.

The cloud drifted this way, then that, and he became bolder as it eluded him. He would have it. He began making awkward lunges at it with the bell jar, coming closer each time, yet cringing: expecting to feel a sharp stab of lightning.

As he danced clumsily around the clearing, he wondered vaguely where the thing could have come from. How had it found its way down into this open space below the overhanging foliage?

Stretching like Nijinsky, Ostrowski managed to back the cloud toward a copse of ghostly white birch. Whatever kept it away from him kept it away from them, too. It hovered in mid-air, pulsating in electric dismay.

His eyes opened wide as he brought the opening of the jar down over the cloud and clapped the base into place. The little patch of vapor flickered. An arc of baby lightning forked out in vain against the thick glass. Ostrowski slumped, panting and red-faced.

The cloud was his.

As fast as he dared, burdened as he was, he hurried home. The anomalous size of his prize made him acutely conscious of the immensity of the oaks and maples around him. He felt like a gnome scurrying along under nodding ferns.

The courtyard at the end of his driveway was pleasantly cool in the deepening twilight. The conservatory shone wetly. It was an aluminum-strutted structure with Plexiglas panes, built on what had once been a porch at the southeast side of the house, directly across the courtyard from the garage.

He had had it built after inheriting some money from a deceased aunt. His wife had wanted a new car, or investment property. The construction drove a wedge into the crack of a failing marriage.

Ostrowski bypassed the door to the house proper and went to the entrance at the northeast end of the conservatory. The bell jar had become an onerous weight; it massed about fifteen pounds, and he had carried it for almost half a mile.

At the door, he realized he needed two hands. He painfully set the jar down on the steps, shook out his arms to unkink them, and yanked his keys free from his jacket pocket.

Inside the conservatory the air was, as always, humid. Normally Ostrowski moved slowly in it, pausing here to check for rot or there to peer at seedlings in the propagating case. Today, without looking at any of his plants he lumbered directly to the switch that overrode the automatic functioning of the ventilator panels along the ridge of the roof, and jabbed it. The vents, open as usual at this time of day, closed.

He checked his workbench. Plenty of room for the bell jar. He stared down the length of the aisle to the open door. Was he taking a risk by bringing the cloud indoors?

"Don't know what else I can do," he muttered, taking off his hat and wiping the perspiration from his brow with the sleeve of his suitcoat. "Can't keep a cloud in a jar. It'll have to replenish its vapor somehow, probably, I guess... I don't know."

What, however, of its lightning? Would that harm his other plants?

He eyed the vents. They were covered with cheesecloth to prevent bugs from getting in. Eventually he'd have to open them to provide air for the plants. Might the cloud diffuse through the cloth? He cracked his knuckles, then went to fetch the jar.

There was no question of snatching off the bell and ducking for cover; the thick glass was too heavy and awkward for that. Taking a deep breath, he lifted it off the base.

The cloud, curdling in on itself like murky water, remained floating over the base for a moment, then bobbed up like a child's balloon, pausing inches below the ceiling.

Over the next hour, it made several very slow circuits of the conservatory in response to the weak air currents. Every so often, it flickered, like a candle in a bag. Ostrowski found himself wondering if it could somehow be made to rain on his plants. It didn't look like it could contain much water.

He realized he was famished, and went in to slap together a quick meal of sandwiches and diet soda. With this, and the encyclopedia volumes containing WEATHER, CLOUDS and METEOROLOGY, he returned to the conservatory and settled in to read.

The conservatory was a jungle under the full moon. The only other illumination came from a small lamp he'd lit in the living room and angled through the French doors for reading light.

The cloud hung near the top of the conservatory, just below the roof, above the Norfolk Island pines and the suspended English ivy.

His acquisition was apparently a typical thundercloud. Typical, except for its amazing miniature condition. According to the books, thunderclouds normally weighed many thousands of tons. He glanced uneasily up at his "guest," hovering above the saxifrage, then resumed reading.

Presently he got up to go to the bathroom. On his return, and without really thinking about it, he opened the French doors wide. The cloud, floating nearby, almost slipped into the house, giving him a bad scare.

As the night wore on, he gradually lost his apprehension while watching the little cloud drifting among his plants. He noticed that it never came closer than three or four inches to anything. It probably would not, therefore, be able to sail out through the ventilator cloth. The doors were another story. Ostrowski knew he'd have to be careful with his comings and goings.

Around midnight, long past his usual bedtime, he closed his eyes for a few moments to rest them, and fell toward a doze. A vague thought of his abandoned car jerked him awake. He sat blinking. Well, he would get the car in the morning. It was off the road, safe for the night. He looked around for the cloud. It wasn't easy to see at night among the plant growth unless one knew exactly where to look, or unless it emitted one of its tiny sparks of lightning.

Then he saw it, above the gardenia tree near the star jasmine vine. Here the moonlight poured through the Plexiglas, golden from the UV-reducing tint. The cloud looked like brassy smog.

Ostrowski's buttocks ached and his eyes were scratchy and watery. He decided to go to bed. Wearily he stood.

Suddenly the cloud was above him, scant inches over his head like a ghost hat. He froze. The cloud made no further move. Carefully and very slowly, he edged toward the French doors. The cloud paced him, remaining immediately over his bald spot. His eyes stung with the strain of trying to look up through his skull: he didn't dare raise his face for fear of lightning.

Sweat trickled down his double chin. The cloud would clearly trail him into the house, if he let it. He chewed the soft point of his upper lip until it began to fray. He was going to have to make a break for it. He knew that if he paused to weigh his chances his nerve would abandon him. With a half-snort, half-whimper he dove for the door, pushed it open, fell through and spun back into it. There was a crack of glass. His breath jammed in his throat, but the pane held.

The cloud floated beyond the door above the place he had just vacated.

Shakily he inspected the cracked pane. Replacing it would be a trivial job. In dull relief, he turned to switch off the reading lamp.

Snap! A tiny bolt of lightning splattered on the French door.

*

Ostrowski slept well, and rose to a clear sunny day. The strange midnight incident with the cloud he wrote off as a sort of waking dream brought on by exhaustion and an overactive imagination. He called in sick to his job in the classified advertising department of the local newspaper. He was on good terms with all his outside accounts as well as with his boss. Anyway, it was Friday; he'd picked up copy for the weekend ads yesterday.

He ate his usual breakfast of corn flakes and a toasted bran muffin while standing in front of the French doors, watching the little cloud float aimlessly above the plants.

He dressed in chinos and a workshirt and walked to his car. It started easily. He drove into town and parked in the small municipal lot adjacent to the library.

Ostrowski moved along the sidewalk like a Thanksgiving parade balloon, slowly as ever yet buoyed by his wonderful secret. He found himself restraining an impulse to take a playful swat at a telephone pole. Elation had dawned in him with the new day. He had captured a cloud, a cloud all his own! He broke into a breathy whistle, feeling better than he had in--well, how long? Much longer than he could say. In fact, maybe he'd never felt so good.

He left the library seven hours later in a different mood. The dry, dignified weight of the books had replaced his cheer with pensive study.

He was no wiser as to the nature and origin of the cloud than he had been. There was no reference to any such object anywhere in scientific literature. Little clouds did not figure in the mythology or legends of any past or present civilization. No works of fiction dealt with the subject.

His captive seemed unique in history. This made him uneasy. Until yesterday, his life had been proceeding along a definite groove in a clear direction. He ate the same foods every day, listened to the same radio station, watched the same TV shows, did the same work, put in the same leisure time among his plants.

His tendency toward sameness had delighted his wife in the early days of their marriage. "You're so reliable," she would say. "I can always count on you." As time passed, however, she grew exasperated with him. "You're so predictable," she would say. "Never any surprises." The conservatory had surprised her, all right. In disgust, she ran away to California with a computer programmer. Ostrowski never heard from her again.

After her departure he sank into comfortable, organized routines and tried to make his life as predictable as possible.

Predictability was one of the most admirable qualities of his plants. He derived satisfaction from the sure knowledge that cineraria, for example, sown in September would bloom in April. The conservatory and the garden outside were so arranged as to present blossoming plants almost the entire year round, a regular, reliable vegetable mechanism. He knew what each flower's color would be before it unfolded. The sun came up, the sun went down, and the flowers bloomed.

But this cloud....

Of course, it was delightful, that he had this cloud. Who else had one? Yet, it represented a change, a difference that could cause other, unpredictable, alterations in his lifestyle.

Troubled by this thought, he sought to banish it with the car radio. Another storm was gathering, said the weatherman. A big one was coming, rolling over the towns to the west as it bumbled along. It would arrive in the listening area in less than an hour.

In emphasis, the radio crackled with static. Ostrowski switched it off.

He realized his palms were sweating on the steering wheel. This is silly, he told his hands, biting at his sore upper lip. I like storms, always did, even when I was a kid. Storms are, well, exciting, beautiful. Wild. I'll never forget that tree I saw struck by lightning when I was camping with the Boy Scouts. Didn't know trees could explode.

The lightning strike flashed the tree's internal water supply to steam, blasting the wood apart with outrageous violence. His interest in plants stemmed from that incident.

The greenery of his forested neighborhood soothed his apprehensions. Still, he found himself driving more slowly than usual as he neared his home, unwilling, somehow, to see the glimmering Plexiglas walls of his conservatory. He avoided looking at it as he rounded the last turn in the driveway and pulled into the open garage.

He closed the overhead door, an unusual thing for him to do. Finally, he had to face the conservatory.

The thought popped into his mind: You're going to have to let it go.

He rolled his eyes and took a few paces in one direction, then another, in a sudden agony of frustration. How the hell was he going to do that? How could he give up his cloud?

Slowly, more blimp-like than ever, he moved toward the house.

The approaching storm darkened the sky with an intensifying greenish glow. Coolness seeped through the air, licking at his skin.

He glimpsed the cloud through the tinted Plexiglas panes. It appeared oddly diffuse. No; that must be a trick of the peculiar light.

The idea brought a new worry. He paused at the conservatory door, rubbing his right forefinger violently across his mustache. Who could he consult about the well being of a cloud? More to the point, whom could he trust to keep quiet about the cloud in the first place?

Wait--well being? He snorted. Clouds weren't alive, not even this little one. They were big glops of water vapor and electricity blown around by the wind, forming and evaporating.

Of course, this one was so small, it had no business existing in the first place. What else might be different about it?

He snorted again. Nothing.

He leaned against the doorframe. His head swam. The entire situation was crazy; maybe he was crazy as well.

It would be good to have someone to talk to.

He licked his lips. He couldn't trust anyone. Something like this, assuming anyone believed him, would be major news, an instant wonder in this wonder-starved society. He worked for a newspaper; he knew how it was. There always had to be something new, some novelty, some story, some passing fancy.

TV? Worse. He visualized his yard trampled by reporters: cigarette butts in the flower pots, minicams thrust in his face, mikes under his nose.

To escape the images he yanked open the door and stepped in. He peered up toward the cloud. It definitely looked weaker, paler. He realized he had no documentation if the thing were to evaporate. Worried, he hurried through the French doors into the house for his camera.

From somewhere outside came the rumble of distant thunder.

*

Even as he took the pictures, wondering if the little lightning flashes--which certainly were less brilliant than they had been last night--would bollix the f-stop setting, he couldn't rid himself of the uncomfortable feeling that cleverer hoaxes than this had been perpetrated on the public. Sophisticated film effects could make extraterrestrial monsters and spaceships look real, even on relatively low-budget TV programs.

He sighed, and peered through the viewfinder. All he could do was take the photographs and hope for the best while expecting the worst. He was getting ahead of himself, anyway. The cloud was here, no one else knew about it, and there was no reason, yet, to seek a confidant.

The cloud floated above the nasturtiums, churning slowly. Outside, fat raindrops began splatting here and there on the pea gravel in the driveway. The sky had grown dark. Clotted gray thunderheads glowered to the west, over the fringe of woods dividing his yard from the property of his nearest neighbor. Lightning sparked in their bowels.

Although the interior of the conservatory was temperature regulated and quite humid, Ostrowski felt the rising wind pushing at the walls as if testing them. Thunder thumped close by.

There was an abrupt splintering crash, and the clouds cracked open. In seconds, the driveway was awash in a sheet of stippled water.

Ostrowski returned to snapping photos of the cloud. The storm seemed to bother it, because it was moving around the plants in an agitated, random fashion, more than ever like some living thing.

"Air currents and electric fields," he muttered, peering through the range finder. Every slice of outside lightning made his light meter jump.

The rain slowed for a moment. In that instant, the little cloud emitted a glitter of its own lightning. Ostrowski waited for its tiny rattle of thunder.

An earsplitting bang shook the conservatory simultaneous with an explosion of incandescence. Shocked and deafened, Ostrowski dropped his camera. A bolt of real lightning had struck the courtyard. Another bolt slammed into the gravel, shaking the house. Pebbles flew against the Plexiglas.

The house lights flared and went out.

"Damn!" he said. With the fuses blown, the conservatory's heating system was dead. He'd have to descend to the fuse box in the basement. As he turned he realized that every hair on his body was standing on end and the air reeked of ozone.

Another blast hit the courtyard, closer this time to the conservatory. That was three strikes. He stared into the deluge. Lightning--striking the same place three times?

The fuses. He reached for the door. Movement in the rain caught his eye. Something near the garage. Unwillingly he went to the outer door and peered into the downpour.

The light was uncertain, but in the illumination provided by distant lightning, he thought he saw steam rising from the ground around the garage. Had the bolts hit it? Was it on fire? No flames were visible....

Then several flashes, close together, gave him a strobe-light view of the scene. The ground was smoky with vapor, vapor that was--yes, pouring along the pea gravel like thick liquid, from somewhere behind the garage, flowing across the driveway toward the conservatory.

He squinted through the Plexiglas. The mist, or whatever it was, spread over the ground like a pool of gray ink. He watched the stuff flood the entire courtyard.

He realized he was shivering. The temperature control was out, of course... but so cold so soon?

Enough picture taking, he decided. This was a hell of a storm, about the worst he could remember. He needed a sweater, a change of fuses, maybe a brandy to calm his nerves. He glanced outside one last time.

The thick fog writhed around the walls of the conservatory like dry ice vapor, rising before his eyes, flowing turbulently up to the edge of the brick sill.

He had the sudden weird sensation that he and the conservatory were sinking. He glanced at his small cloud.

It was glowing with phosphorescence of lunar bluish white. Eerily, a glimmer of identical color seemed to seep from the clotted mist outside.

A subsonic rumble shook the conservatory, coming from everywhere and nowhere. Thunderous it was--and Ostrowski realized a cloud surrounded him.

Again it thundered, like a huge beast's growl of warning. Two leaves drifted down from one of the hanging plants. Something creaked alarmingly.

The conservatory was being squeezed like a cashew in the jaws of a nutcracker.

"This is crazy," Ostrowski whispered--but the Plexiglas was awash to half its height now with silver-gray semiliquid mist. Vague subliminal shapes twisted deep within the rack.

"Got to be a temperature inversion, keeps this thing at ground level," he said. He could barely hear himself in the thunderstorm's furor. Intermittent flashes from outside lit the conservatory like shell explosions over a battlefield.

The sides of the conservatory groaned as the outer cloud pressed closer; the noise cut through the roar of the tempest. The small cloud swung back and forth along an arc from one end of the conservatory to the other, obviously affected by proximity with the rising wall of water vapor. An insane thought flashed through Ostrowski's mind: It knows Mom's here. Terror whirled out of his guts as the seething storm cloud topped the eaves, engulfing the conservatory.

It seemed to thicken as though it was exerting yet more pressure against the fragile Plexiglas frames, testing for a weak place. Ostrowski's arm rose from his side, and slowly, most slowly, he forced his trembling hand to grasp a trowel from his workbench.

Smack! A saucer-sized shard of Plexiglas shot across the conservatory, forced in by a jet of curdled miasma. Ostrowski pressed back against the wall. The vapor poured out across a box of seedlings, blanketing them, spreading, reaching the edge of the bench and spilling over the side.

The little cloud descended toward the lake of mist on the table. Ostrowski raised the trowel with a shaking hand.

"Take it, take it, Christ, take the damned thing!" The two clouds touched --

The wall struts emitted a wail of metallic agony that wavered off into the storm. With a colossal detonation, lightning hit the garage. Shingles and timbers spiraled off into the torrential rain, trailing sparks and smoke.

Stunned and terrified, Ostrowski fell back into his workbench. He hauled in great whooping gasps of stinking ozone and, choking, stumbled into the propagating table. Groping for support, half blinded by the lightning, he blundered along the table toward the French doors.

Lightning struck the conservatory.

The tumult swallowed his shriek of fear. The thunder came continuously, like an artillery barrage. The conservatory, squeezed and twisted along stress lines from its vaporized southern corner, began to buckle. Ostrowski fell to his knees and covered his head. A triumphant chorus of tortured metal and splintering plastic tore the air, cutting even through the thunder. Another bolt struck, flinging him to the ground. He curled into a fetal ball. He felt the heat of flames, he saw the light through his closed eyelids, through his arms and chest--worst of all, he felt the slithering touch of the cloud from beyond as it flowed smoothly across the floor and broke over his cowering form. The cold, alien power of it froze him to his core. He recoiled and gasped, drawing in a lungfull of cloud. Snow! Dull scratchy reek of metal and fried dirt--in reflex his eyes opened and he gagged. Through his tears he saw the little captive cloud rise angelically through the smashed, melted roof panels.

Ostrowski scrabbled in a pool of dirty white fluid. Then it was withdrawing, like a huge amoeba, leaving behind flames, smoke and cold pelting rain.

The cloud melted away across the gravel and back behind the garage, where a titanic blur of fog hovered over the ground. It blended into the storm.

The sky, boiling, pounded with thunder. He cowered in the wreckage waiting for the final bolt, the one that would disintegrate him, blast him to reeking ashes. He accepted the rightness of it.

The debris settled. Minutes passed as the storm spent itself in rain, drenching what was left of the conservatory and quenching the fire. The thunder drew off, grumbling away to the east.

Ostrowski gradually untensed, still not daring to open his eyes, afraid to hope. Rain pattered gently on his skull, running into his eyes, finally making him blink.

He looked around at the blackened remains of the conservatory.

In the air above the smashed propagating table floated four small clouds. Lightning slipped back and forth between them like the whispers of schoolchildren.

THE END

Story copyright A.L. Sirois 2002, published by the Fortean Burea
http://www.forteanbureau.com