GARDEN OF EVIL By MARGARET ST. CLAIR Even to a drug-soaked outcast ethnographer Fyhon was a paradise planet. It was worth anybody's life to find Dridihad, the secret city of dread! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Summer 1949. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Ericson returned to an awareness of his personal identity quite suddenly. He had an impression that it was a long time, months at least, since he had been in a state of normal consciousness. At the back of his mind a memory of pain had imprinted itself as a signet makes an impression in hot wax; he shied away from it. "Where am I?" he asked. The green-skinned girl squatting beside him in the coppice looked at him sideways out of her dark jade eyes. "Hungry?" she asked. "But where am--yes, I am hungry. Yes." Mnathl--he knew, somehow, that that was her name. Didn't he remember her from the other side of the gulf in his memory, from the days when he had begged food in the streets of Penhairn? Mnathl handed him a nicely-roasted _bosula_ rib. He ate it avidly. He had always thought the _bosula_ was the best of the food animals of Fyhon. When the bone was gnawed clean she passed him, in a folded fresh green leaf, a mixed grill consisting of bits of _bosula_ liver, kidney, tripe, salivary glands, and eyes. He ate that, too. When his stomach was full Ericson lay back with his arms under his head and looked at the big puffy clouds drifting overhead. He had no desire to think about himself or the things that had been happening to him in the last three or four months, but the thoughts came anyhow. The chief thing was pain--remorseless, long-continued, pain. Mnathl had come to him one day when he was sitting on the dock in Penhairn and told him they were going to Lake Tanais. He had got up and gone with her obediently; a _byhror_ addict has little will of his own. The pain had begun after that. There had been a barren island in the middle of the brackish, poisonous waters of the lake, and most of the time, until just latterly, he had been kept bound for fear he would drown himself in them. Mnathl ... Mnathl had swum over from the mainland to tend him; she had bathed him and kept his body free of sores and vermin, set food before him and tried to coax him to eat. And twice a day she had given him injections of mercapulan with a hypodermic syringe. His arm was pocked with the needle marks. Where had she got the syringe and the drug? She must have stolen them from the big Colony Hospital in Penhairn.