But the winter wind proved itself their match. A flower was toppled from its lofty perch to shatter the windshield of a car whose owner had parked there just minutes before. The driver stood, alone in the winter silence, gaping at the broken glass and the inverted plant whose upper half now occupied the two front seats. And when at last—with a herculean effort—he managed to pull it free, he got back into his damaged vehicle and started driving around and around, trying to get closer to the house on the hill. And failing. Around and around he went through the quiet paved lanes, never any closer to the looming walls, and when, exhausted and defeated, he finally stopped, he looked down to see two thin streams of blood running from his wrist where it had been punctured by the plant’s great spines. Only then did he smell it.

A few days later, a young mother locked the brake on her child’s stroller and went rummaging through her handbag, searching for a ringing phone. She had found it, and was talking and laughing into the receiver, when there was a sudden crash, and she looked up to find that her little boy was gone and in his place, a colossal green body, like a distended rose upended: base over tip; stem over bloom. A flower more massive than she’d ever seen, like a prop from a sci-fi movie. Silently, apprehensively, people gathered around her, staring in disbelief as the boy’s thin wail rose up between the leaves.

The first person to be killed wasn’t anywhere near the villa. The wind plucked a corpse flower and bore it several streets away through the air, like a warplane, like a catastrophe looking for company. It found its victim in a five-year-old boy riding his tricycle. Just before the plant came to earth a gust caught it and sent it rocketing parallel with the road, as massive as a careening car. It smacked into the child and lifted him into the air before shredding them both, boy and bloom, against a wall.