Removing dead animals from a customer’s property was not something a gardener typically did. It’s sure to really sing on the résumé, Ezra thought.
The property sloped beneath a festering sun. The lake was scummed over, and the boathouse had been let go. The house itself was a gutted hulk. It had been mostly dismantled. Its roof was gone. Rebar jutted from the slab. Conduits poked from dissected brick and wood.
Inside the house there were flowering plants. You could see and smell many of them fifty yards out through holes in the walls, flowering plants like rhododendron, Manchurian lilac, and spotted geranium. It was a time of year when many of them were in bloom. The company Ezra worked for had planted them. Instead of having the structure restored, the customer had elected to turn what remained into a ruin garden.
“D’ya hear that in the 80s there were murders at that house?” Derick had said in their work truck along the way. “I’m talkin’ multi-homicide. Daddy dearest snapped, killed the rest of his family. Like with that Amityville thing.”
“I don’t believe you.” One of Ezra’s hands had drifted from the wheel to his phone. “And I don’t think it was the father who did the killing at the Amityville house.”
“No use looking it up. This property passed to the government and the government scrubbed it away so they could get it back on the market.”
“Why did it pass to the government?”
“Dunno. Got all this from Abigail. Maybe try asking her for the deets.”
Abigail had her own folk-rock band and was the cool one who everyone believed even when they didn’t.
At the job site, Ezra and Derick put on gloves, not the knit cotton kind but rubber ones. They didn’t put on respirator masks. That was not something their company gave out to its employees. While Derick held open a heavy-duty contractor bag, Ezra used a square shovel to dump the carcasses of a squirrel, two birds, and a raccoon inside. The dead animals stank terribly. Flies buzzed up and touched Ezra’s mouth.
They found a dead mole, too, next to the climbing hydrangea. It was naked in a walked-in-on way, as Ezra was sure he’d heard someone say of dead moles above ground. It was as though its seeming lack of eyes and the nasty turn of its claws were not meant to be shown in the light of day, but some of that might’ve been the decay speaking, making it more monstrous.
They had been off this job for over a week. It was supposed to have been done. But dead animals had shown up on the property not long after the flowers were planted. The customer had blamed the fertilizer Ezra’s company had used. Ezra’s company had sent Derick and him out.
Ezra and Derick went over to the mole, and Ezra tried not to watch as this time Derick lifted the dead creature with the shovel and put it into the bag Ezra was holding. “Took care of a mole today,” Derick joked, touching two fingers to his earlobe like he had an earpiece and worked for a covert agency. Ezra was thinking about those gloved fingers grazing rotted carcasses.
They hauled the bag out to the truck, taking turns, and then came back with a drip irrigation system and tubing. They connected the drip irrigation system to the water supply and laid the tubing down throughout the garden. The water from dripline along this tubing would slowly flush out the fertilizer without harming the newly planted flowers. That was the idea, at least, but it seemed to Ezra this was one of those things done for appearances to make the customer happy.
Ezra was twenty-five. He was a gardener because it was something that came up in a job search. Once it became too hard or, more likely, he was fired from playing hooky or finding somewhere to hide, that would be that and then on to the next. He wasn’t “figuring himself out” or any of that other life coach speak. It hadn’t taken long for him to figure out that work took more from him than he could ever possibly make.
Derick, as far as Ezra knew, had been a gardener for five or six years. His aunt used to be a bookkeeper for the company. Derick was a little older than himself.
Ezra noticed again that the walls on the inside of the house were graffitied. One of the stone paths between the flowerbeds led up to a concrete mass with the word PROM on it.
The labrador violets were a shade darker than they should’ve been.
“Guess we’ll come back tomorrow?” Ezra said when the drip irrigation system was all set up.
“Yeah. Or whoever other sad suckers they send out.”
Ezra and Derick started to leave. Before they could pass the threshold of the house, something hit. It hit strong, fast, and heavy like a ton of bricks falling from the structure. At first that’s what Ezra thought it was, a piece come loose from the building and fallen onto them.
It knocked Ezra and Derick from their feet, flat to the ground. It hit like a storm wave or thunderclap or like the sudden fear of God or death. It hit like the machinery that had never finished demolishing the house. It hit so hard it took Ezra a second to realize how bad he hurt. Then the pain fell out and he got all numb and he thought this was it. He could taste the copper of blood in his mouth. He could see and he thought he could hear. He couldn’t move. This was it, he thought again and again, without knowing why. This was it.
Ezra lay with his back on the ground, his head to one side. He couldn’t see Derick anymore. Directly in front of his face was the goatsbeard they’d planted.
The leaves of the shrub were sawtoothed.
It wasn’t entirely clear to Ezra whether anything had fallen on him, if anything in him was broken, or if this was something his body had done to itself. He could only assume that as Derick had seemed to have fallen as well, it had to have been something from the outside impacting them.
He followed the leaves of the shrub to what was above. Being able to move his eyes was a small consolation.
The flowering was a rising, cream-colored substance. Beads of fluff dripped from radially composed knobby finger shapes. It looked something like goatsbeard was supposed to look.
Ezra heard himself wheezing. A warm high tension had started in his neck. He was able to move enough for a better look. It was very close, hanging just above.
A little like the arms of starfish, but more like fingers, they shifted where stems should be. The flowers sprouting from them capered in place before dripping down, a whispery laugh dying and permutating. If it was feathery, it was in the way some feathers can be sharp, like the other end of it poking through a pillow and glancing off your eardrum.
A hand dropped down towards Ezra, slow and easy.
“D-Derick.” Ezra had slobbered out a word. The string of saliva reached like the other hand, the hand coming for him, towards the turned dirt. His head was a couple of inches from the ground, but it seemed to hang across eternity. One of the fingers—of his string of drool—was out like Adam reaching towards the hand of God in The Creation of Adam on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.
The liquid sliming from his mouth touched the dirt, and Ezra was suddenly very wet. It may’ve been the drip irrigation system at work. It may’ve been only that.
Frantic, Ezra was able to rock himself into freeing more of his body from whatever paralysis, shock, or impact had overcome him. He could wiggle enough that he was able to sight Derick.
Derick lay motionless.
His body was next to the bear’s breeches. The basal rosette arrangement of the leaves, the leaves becoming purple above white flowers that hung heavy, thick stalks almost like the rough, slimy surface of okra—it was again a little like it should be. But the spines on the stems were more pronounced. And some of the purple leaves were half open like clam shells, with wet shimmery things peeking out. The flowers hung a little too much like vestigial appendages for Ezra’s liking. Look here, they seemed to say, we long to touch and be touched just the same.
One of the clam shell eyes rotated just a hair in Ezra’s direction, blinked.
A flower was already on Derick’s chest.
“Get up. Wake up, Derick!” Ezra slurred his words.
The flower detached and shimmied up to Derick’s head.
“Get up.”
It slithered into his open mouth.
“Get . . .”
Derick’s eyes had been open to the sky for some time. Blank. His body wiggled lifelessly as more sagging flower shapes dropped from the bear’s breeches and journeyed into the hole of his mouth.
Something tickled Ezra’s ear and he slopped out a scream.
A feathery whisp of a thing, both a goatsbeard flower and not a goatsbeard flower, crawled over Ezra’s eyeball. It was sticky, like how he imagined a trail of snail slime to be. That eye burned and blurred. When the thing reached Ezra’s nose, it made him sneeze, but it clung to the skin of his face.
Fingers ran through his hair, almost tenderly at first. Then they yanked and Ezra cried out in pain.
Ezra was able to get one of his arms going. He slid himself along in a series of hitching motions, using the one arm and his neck and head to edge himself farther from the goatsbeard.
The hand in his hair yanked hard as he moved away, and at the same time Ezra jerked his neck sharply. Hair snapped free from skin. His scalp was alive with pain. Blood dribbled into his eyes.
It slicked the surface of his face enough that it helped him free that sticky flower. The thing had positioned itself right above his lips. It was good that he hadn’t opened his mouth. As he peeled it away, he heard it whispering. He heard it laughing.
Dragging and rocking his numb body along the ground, Ezra was able to get more of himself working.
But he yowled as he pulled a bare arm over one of the big rough stones of the garden path. He judged that he’d skinned himself pretty badly. He paused there to catch his breath. He worked his phone out. A text message to Abigail was already started. At some point while he and Derick had been on this job, he had wanted to text her to find out if she really knew more about the property, but then he’d lost interest.
His call went to her voicemail.
“Abigail,” he said. “Derick is . . .”
A hand took the phone from him.
Above, Mr. Greer, the customer and current owner of the property, stared down. From that angle, the large hemp sun hat he wore didn’t much hide the luster in eyes. His mouth twitched.
“I’m glad you boys came back out,” Mr. Greer said. He took a heaping breath, excited to confide in another human being. “They said they wanted something bigger. And smarter. Smarter being the operative word I suppose, but which of us mortals can truly know the minds of gods?” He whistled. “Oh, they do talk. You can read it in their works. It’s scrawled all across the face of it like what them hoodlums did graffitiing those walls. A peculiar sort of language, but some of us have gotten pretty good at reading it and giving them what they want. Thank you boys for coming out and making everything right.”
Mr. Greer stooped. He parted dark green leaves to flowers that were somewhat hidden, like a not-so-well-kept secret. The flowers were bell-shaped. These were the Solomon’s seal Ezra had helped plant. There were already some bruise-colored berries there, too. Glancing within, the arching stems overwhelmed like the vaults of a cathedral.
Mr. Greer picked one of the flowers and placed it gently in Ezra’s ear.
Ezra didn’t react as quickly as he could’ve. The flower filled up his ear canal, a tiny little bell.
He could hear it eating him. Its mastication worked its way throughout like a sermon. It was a jaw that wasn’t his within, permutating the morsels of his body. It broke down the barriers and fed on his dying thoughts.
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