Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

wall rather than recessed into it. Of course, before we could do that, the old one had to be removed.
"Can you turn the water off?" asked the plumber.
Oh dear.
My house is on the corner of the street. The valve for turning the water off is round the corner, outside
the house at the back, which is number 188. The people in number 188 turn their water off with the
valve outside number 186. The people in number 186 turn their water off with the valve outside number
184. The people in number 184...but you get the picture. I have no idea what happens at the bottom of
the street. Perhaps everybody in Auckland has their water meter outside their next door neighbour's
house. Probably it's all my fault.
I walked up my street, round the corner, down the next street and turned the water off. Then I walked
up the street, round the corner, down my street and back into my house. "Water's off."
The plumber grunted, obviously wondering what took me so long. He began to dismantle the cistern. He
unfastened the downpipe from the back of the toilet. "The pipe goes behind this plank up to the cistern,"
he said. "It will have to come off."
He levered the plank off with a chisel. Reluctantly and with a hideous squeak of rusty nails parting from
wood, it came away. "Good heavens," said the plumber, astonished. "Will you look at that!"
What a pleasure it is to welcome Richard Matheson's novel I am Legend back into print. This is the
novel on which Charlton Heston's famous film The Omega Man was based, but as is so often the case,
the book is considerably richer than the film. A bacterium that induces vampirism is loose in the world.
Most people are now vampires and exhibit the usual vampiric traits. But Robert Neville is immune to the
disease. By day the world is his to do with as he pleases, but at night the vampires emerge from their
sleep and they want to hunt Neville down and kill him.
This is one of the seminal works. Both Stephen King and Dean Koontz, two of the biggest writers in
contemporary horror fiction, have recognised the debt that they owe this novel. It defined a generation,
and it marked the beginning of the maturity of the horror genre, its emergence from the pulp ghetto.
The novel is very short by today's overblown standards -- only 170 pages, barely enough to qualify as a
novella in modern publishing terms. Perhaps for this reason, the new edition also includes a selection of
Richard Matheson's previously uncollected short stories. They are a patchy bunch. Most are quite slight
and there are perhaps good reasons why they have remained uncollected until now. But don't let this
put you off. Every serious library should have a copy of I am Legend.
In the 1960s Robert Sheckley wrote a series of quirky novels and short stories whose fame endures to
this day. One of them, The Game of X was a very weird detective novel that became a minor cult
classic. It is long out of print, and copies command high prices on the rare occasions that they surface.
His new novel, The Alternative Detective is the first of a series and is billed by the blurb as a return
to those heady days. Direct comparisons are made with the earlier novel and I expected to read
something comparably odd. Instead I got a perfectly acceptable, but very ordinary detective novel with
none of the quirkiness or stylistic mannerisms that would once have marked a Robert Sheckley book.
This is not to say that the book is bad -- anything but. As a straightforward genre detective novel it is
probably head and shoulders above most of the competition. But don't let the blurb mislead you.
I looked into the hole in the wall. There was the down pipe from the cistern to the toilet bowl. It had a zig,
closely followed by a zag. The cistern was not immediately above the toilet; it was slightly off centre, and
the pipe had been bent in order to join the two together. Judging by the bubbles on the surface,
someone had taken a blow torch to it in order to soften the plastic. "No wonder they hid it behind the
wall," said the plumber. I couldn't help but agree with him.
Unfortunately we would have to retain this misalignment between cistern and bowl because the new