April 6th
I haven’t written in a few days, I wanted to be sure that I had something worth writing about before I did.
I think I saw Chuck tonight.
I think I saw a few of the people that are supposed to have gone missing.
The last four nights have been filled with strange little occurrences. The trees are still moving at night. I can hear their voice boxes at night, but they seem to be taking great pains to avoid me. I would find them in other rings sometimes, but they stayed put whenever I was looking at them. We had come to a silent agreement that I wouldn’t bother them if they didn’t bother me.
No, the weirdness started with a series of strange thefts.
I had just gotten to sleep the day after the incident with the trees, when I got a call from Carl, the security supervisor.
“Hey, sorry to wake you, did you happen to see anyone in the park last night?”
I started to tell him about the trees, it was on the tip of my tongue to tell him everything, but instead I just told him I hadn’t seen another person till Randy got there that morning.
“Sucks that the cameras went out. The grounds keepers are saying that their missing two bags of concrete.”
“Concrete?” I asked, barely awake as I tried to get my wits about me. It had taken several hours to get to a point where I could sleep, and I was beginning to think I wasn’t going to get any before work that night. The sleeping pills had made me extremely groggy, though, and I was having trouble following the conversation.
“Yeah, two bags, and a wheelbarrow. Keep an eye peeled tonight, alright? If someone is sneaking in and messing with the camera so they can steal things, I want it to stop.”
I told him I would keep an eye peeled, and hung up before rolling over to get back to bed.
That night, there was a folder sitting on the desk of the security detail office.
Randy tapped it when I came in and looked at me with a worried stare, “Carl was here for like an hour and a half today. He says the guys in maintenance are missing some stuff.”
“Yeah,” I said, with a nod, “He told me earlier. A whole bunch of concrete or something right?”
“More than that now. They’re missing wheelbarrows, some gardening tools, and a whole bunch of weed killer for some reason.”
“Who the hell would want that much weed killer?” I asked as I took the folder and looked inside. Randy hadn’t been joking. Someone had stolen almost 20 gallons of industrial weed killer. It was the kind that would kill damn near anything, weeds included. Something like that used at the wrong time could really mess this place up.
“ I don’t know. Carl says to just keep an eye on the cameras tonight. If they go out again, he wants to know about it immediately. Call him on his cell, even if it wakes him up. He says that Dr. Thurston is pretty upset about all this. Apparently there hasn’t been a theft at the botanical gardens for quite some time.”
He left then, and I got my equipment on so I could start doing my nightly checks.
I had just gotten to the Lilypond on my first check in the night, when, as if summoned by his name, I saw Mr. Thurston standing around the edge of the pond.
He was alone, the guest, no more than a few oldsters taking a last walk before they left, and as I came up, he seemed lost and thought. He was mumbling to himself, all while keeping an eye on the Pale Lady. They seem to be having a very intense conversation, and whatever he was hearing back from her he didn’t seem to like it.
“Not going to let you ruin this place for me.” I heard him say, just as I came up beside him.
“ Dr. Thurston?”
He jumped, as if a goose and walked over his grave, but he was all smiles when he turned back to look at me.
“You gave me quite a freight,” he said, “ how are you settling into Night Shift? Had any more trouble with fainting spells?”
“ No, sir, it’s OK I guess. Awfully spooky around here at night, though. Always seems like I can hear voices and catch shadows late at night.”
Dr. Thurston chuckled, “ I imagine some of that might change once those damn trees are gone. They weren’t my first choice, but the educational grant money that we got for housing them was worth the headache. They do make quite caterwauling.”
He went back to looking at the pale lady, and I joined him in silence for a few moments before he asked a strange question.
“Is she one of the shadows you see sometimes?”
I didn’t know how to respond, would he believe me if I told him I thought this lady statue proud around at night?
He laughed again, putting an old hand on my shoulder, “ I’m just teasing you boy. You know, the statue was my contribution to the Gardens when I became the Director ten years ago.”
“ I had no idea, sir.”
He looked back at the statue, but his face was an odd mixture of pride and contempt.
“My father had been a lover of horticulture and biology. He had been something of a botanist himself, scoured, the world for strange plants, and odd flora. He claimed to have found the statue in an old temple somewhere in deepest India. He brought it home and put it in his own garden, and said that it made his plants bloom as if summer never ended. He may have loved the statue, but I lived in fear of it. When he died, I could no longer stand to have that strange statue looking at me whenever I walked the grounds of his estate. So I brought it here, so that whatever strange energy it has could benefit the botanical gardens. I am grateful to whatever effect it has on this place, but I still have a great deal of fear and respect for it.”
He left shortly there after, and I continued my rounds, as I made ready to close the gardens.
The first few nights weren’t so bad. I felt watched as I made my rounds, and I caught sight of things out of the corner of my eye. The trees, thankfully, did not move again, but something was moving in the botanical gardens. They were normal sized things, people, perhaps, but they were far too quick for me to see. I tried to ignore them, thinking it was more of the strangeness, and it made the trees move, and the next day, there was a new folder on my desk.
Maintenance was reporting more thefts. Their industrial sprayers were gone, as well as the remainder of their weed killer. Someone had also taken the keys to the truck that held their biggest sprayer, the one they use for pest control. Carl and Randy we’re at a loss, and when Carl asked me again if I had seen anything, I told him I hadn’t seen anything out of the ordinary last night. I should’ve told him about feeling watched, but I didn’t want to seem paranoid. This was a good job, and I really needed to keep doing it. So I put up with the weirdness and what about my night as I had the ones before it.
The next night, however, Carl spent half of my shift furiously sifting through security footage. Someone had broken into the botany labs behind the gardens, and taken something that he couldn’t tell me about. It was all very hush-hush he said, but it was something that we could get into a lot of trouble for if anyone found out about it.
“The techs signed nondisclosure agreements before they started working on it. It was for a company that would prefer not to be mentioned either. If someone stole it, and that company finds out we lost it, we could be in for a lot of fines, and a lot of heartache.”
He left around midnight, having found nothing on the cameras besides the occasional burst of static.
The weirdest thing to me was in all this time I had only run into the lady and she took her evening walk once. I knew that she moved around at night, but I had seen her in her pond pretty much constantly. Don’t misunderstand, I didn’t want to see her again. Running into her was really the last thing I wanted, but I was intrigued by her intentions, and what interest she had in the gardens. After Doctor Thurston’s story, I began to wonder if maybe his father really had found something magical in India. Some old totem to a harvest goddess, or maybe something darker.
There was no new report when I came in tonight, but there was certainly something to see.
Randy was in high spirits when I came in. He handed me a cup of coffee, sweetened just the way I like it, and told me how everything had been where it was supposed to be when he gotten here this morning. Not that the stolen things had magically returned, we were all still under the spotlight for that experiment that had gone missing, but nothing new has been added to the list today, so that was good.
“I guess maybe the heat had gotten a little too hot for whoever keeps breaking in. Maybe they found somewhere a little cooler to do their burglary at.”
I nodded, hoping so. I really hoped I wouldn’t have to spend all night looking over my shoulder for whoever had been following me. It made me a bit paranoid, and that kind of thing will eat at you after a while. I said good night to Randy, and after the park was closed I mostly did rounds and watched cameras. It was only a matter of time till they started blaming me for these nighttime burglaries, and I really wanted to catch something so that I could redeem myself just a little bit.
As if on cue, I started seeing things dart in and out of the camera. It was similar to the flashes of static that I saw when the statue moved, but these were definitely movements. Creatures that looked vaguely human would move at the edges of the camera, a little too quick for me to see. Still, my eyes found them. I grabbed my flashlight, and decided to go investigate. I knew there wasn’t much I could do if they had come in a group, but maybe just the realization that they weren’t alone would be enough to scare them off.
I moved quietly through the dark gardens, the overhead lamps creating little islands of light in the murky blackness. I could hear something, but I wasn’t immediately sure what it was. It almost sounded like construction, but who would be doing construction in the middle of the night? The tree voices bombarded me as I walked past the Governor’s ring, but it couldn’t quite block out the sound I had heard earlier. All the trees were still where they should be, so I felt confident that they weren’t the ones making all the racket.
No, I told myself.
They weren’t all here.
Three of them were missing, and I couldn’t believe that I hadn’t noticed them. They were the three biggest trees in the exhibit, likely having been brought in with several forklifts, and they were all just gone. Had they left on their own? I didn’t know, but as I turned my face back towards the noise, I figured I was about to find out.
The area around the lily pond turned out to be the source of the noise.
I hunkered at the edge of the exhibit, and watched as a half dozen hunched figures went about their work. They were mixing and pouring concrete, cutting wood and making rough tables, constructing seats out of stone and wood, and building something in the lily pond. I couldn’t tell what they were. They were only vaguely human, but much too hairy and muscles to be actual humans. the longer I looked the more I thought I could see horns sprouting from the top of their curly hair, and wondered where they had come from so suddenly?
The longer I observe them, the more familiar faces there seemed to be.
They should look familiar, I suppose. Many of them were faces I had seen on the posters in the break room, the ones detailing missing employees. One of them pouring concrete looked a little like the smiling botanist who had gone missing last year. The one lifting a large concrete stone with one hand looked a little like the middle-aged woman who had worked in groundskeeping. This could’ve all been a mistake, my mind playing tricks on me, but when I heard something snort behind me, I turned and found someone that there was no mistaking.
Chuck was pushing a wheelbarrow, his hair now long and brown and his eyes like a cat. I could look past the faces by the pond, I had only seen them on missing posters, but there was no miss remembering Chuck. I had seen him quite often, and despite the changes to him, I still recognized him. The wheelbarrow made a harsh sound as it fell, and two of us just stared at each other for a few seconds before I could find my voice.
“Chuck? Is that you?”
Chuck looked startled. He took a step away from the wheelbarrow, and it looked like he wanted to use his hand to cover himself. He seemed ashamed to be seen like this, and when he spoke, his voice was nothing like the deep baritone it had been before. It sounded like someone pretending at a deep voice, and a falsetto all at once. He sounded like nothing so much as a sentient hive of bees that’s learned to speak through some strange sorcery.
“You shouldn’t be here. You’re not supposed to be here. Get out, get out before it’s too late.”
I took a step back, but got control of myself pretty quickly, “Come with me. We can go talk to Doctor Thurstan. Maybe there’s some way he can,”
“No,” he cut me off bruskly, “I don’t need saving, but you might. Get out of here, get out of here before it’s too late. There are things happening here that you don’t understand. You need to leave while you still can.”
He looked like he wanted to say more, but every word seemed to put him at odds with himself.
When a sudden guttural scream erupted behind me, the sound of a beehive falling down a flight of stairs, I turned to see that one of the other creatures had seen me, and was pointing with an accusing finger.
I ran for my life.
It’s amazing sometimes what adrenaline will do. I could hear the sound of hooves on the concrete behind me, and the clatter made it hard to tell how many there were. Two, three, a dozen, it hardly mattered. I had watched one of them lift a slab of concrete that looked like it weighed as much as eight hundred pounds. One of them would be enough to kill me, and I knew it.
As the security hut came into view, I breathed a sigh of relief before wondering why?
A door would be childsplay for this gang of billygoats, but it hardly mattered.
I turned to slam it in their faces, and got a split second view of a pack of angry monsters. Their teeth looked huge as they gnashed from their lips. Their arms pumped wildly and the cords that showed on them bulged dangerously. They were a pack of bacchanalian revealers, a group of pissed off satyrs, and as I slammed the door and ran the bolt, I already had my cell phone out.
“911 what’s your emergency?”
“I need the police, the army, something to the Cashmere Botanical gardens. I’m the security officer and I’m being attacked by something. I’ve,” at that moment something hit the door hard enough to bow it in the frame and I saw an arm attempt to poke into the gap, “I need someone here now. They’re almost through the door! Please God HELP ME!”
They battered at the door as I yelled into the phone, and as the woman assured me that help was in route, I hung up on her and dialed Carl.
He sounded groggy, but woke up quickly once he heard the banging, “What the hell is going on over there? Are you okay?”
“I need help! I called the cops but I need to let you know in case something happens to me. They’re working for the statue, the one in the lily pond. She’s been making them steal things. They’re the ones who have stolen all the tools and concrete and stuff. They’re building something, they’re making something and I don’t know what to do.”
“Slow down, kid. You aren’t making any sense. I’ll be down there in about ten minutes with everyone I can lay hands on. Just stay safe. There’s a flare gun in the box under the desk. It’s only got one shot so try not to waste it and only if you really,” his last words were blotted out as something bent the door enough to reach their arm all the way in.
I dropped the phone in surprise and backpedaled until I ran into the desk. The hand was like a furry spider, scuttling around the door as it looked for the clasp. The door wasn’t much protection at this point, it was bent almost in two and I wasn’t sure why the hand was trying to open it when it would be easy to just knock it down. I didn’t question my good luck. I just reached for the case Carl had told me about and popped the safety latch as gauze and bandages and antibiotics spilled onto the floor.
The flare gun clunked onto the desk, and I scoop it up as the hand seemed to find the latch.
I took aim, though it was very shaky. I had never been much of a marksman, to dads chagrin, but as I steadied my hands, I reminded myself that I only had one shot. The thick fingers slipped off the lock, but it seemed they were more curious to find where it was. As they returned to it, I put a bead on them, and pulled the trigger.
I missed, but I missed spectacularly.
The shot bounced off the doorframe and out the large hole the arm was creeping through. I heard a sound that was part goat bleat and part angry bee swarm, and the arm came out as whatever it was attached to beat at itself and bellowed. It was joined by the clatter of hooves and other plaintive cries, and I began to wonder what I would do when the next hand came snaking through the crack?
I didn’t have to find out.
As the blue and red lights filled my vision, the creatures took flight. They clattered back down the sidewalk and away from the guard station as swiftly as they had arrived. I sat on the floor, flare gun still in my hand, and could do little but try to make my teeth stop chattering. I had never felt closer to death in my life and as my breath tried to catch itself, I wondered if it was really over.
When the police announced themselves and called out for security staff, I dropped the flare gun and told them I was here.
The EMT that looked me over was the same one from the other day.
“We gotta stop meeting like this. People are gonna talk, ya know.”
In my current state, I didn’t even register his joke. The police had helped me out of the smashed booth and deposited me with the ambulance as they went in to check the park. I’d been sitting dutifully on the stretcher, letting him examine me for about twenty minutes, when the headlights of an SUV pinned the both of us in place.
The EMT looked a little nervous as the doors opened and four others climbed out.
Was this some new trick by the Pale Lady, or was it more cops showing up after the fact?
To my surprise, it was Carl, and Randy, the new kid (Gabe), and at the head of them all was Doctor Thurston. They approached the ambulance, and as Carl asked the EMT about my status, Doctor Thurston brought his seemed old face very close to mine. He seemed to be looking for something, and when he didn’t find it, he calmed visibly and his usual smile emerged like an autumn sunrise.
“Tell me the truth, boy. Did she make you drink anything? Did you eat anything? Did she take anything from you?”
I shook my head and just kept on shaking it until he put a hand on either side of my face and leaned in so close that I thought he was gonna kiss me.
After a few minutes, he leaned away again, “He’s just scared, Carl. I don’t think she’s gotten ahold of him.”
“Well thank Christ for that.” Carl said, signing something the EMT had put in front of him and telling him they would take it from here, “Gabriel, go tell the police that we’re taking our security guard to Doctor Thurston’s office. If they have any more questions, they can find us there.”
Gabe nodded, but Carl stuck out a hand before he could go tearing off, “And don’t run, for God sake. These cops are gonna be tense enough without you spooking them. Come on, kid.” he said, putting an arm under me and helping me up, “Tell us the whole story.”