Umm…… hello.
This feels weird. I have exiguous incentives to pen down something. You have even fewer incentives to hear the ramblings of a nobody. But what can we both do, now that I have begun to write it down, tell me, what in the name of the devas can we do? Nothing. Absolutely Nothing. Like I said, this feels weird. It feels like one of those detours we love to take once in a while to take a ‘break’ from the persistence of routines that we so readily love to tame ourselves to. We all crave a break from our routines, from ploddingly fixing our minds on something, from our regular jobs, from the masks we put on every day we step out to face the world. Yet we also want to see ourselves as iconoclastic thinkers, firebrand revolutionaries, brave knights who are making ‘some’ difference in the regularities of the natural world. What can I say of this two-faced nature? Seems like one of those analyses of Marx, you know, like seeing commodities as having use-value and exchange value, and then building on from this premise to find other such interesting concepts. But I ain’t no Marx, and this isn’t a critique of political economy. It’s a rant. So bear with me. You don’t have a choice. And the sad part of this entire equation is, neither do I.
So where were we? Yeah, me picking up the pen again. I had decided this fall I won’t pick up my pen. A dangerous thing, it is, and even more dangerous are the thoughts that cause me to pick it up. Have y’all noticed this thing, that we are all more interested in activities we take up as hobbies than what our careers are? They serve as guilty pleasures, seducing us and unraveling us in their seeming infinitude. So, I decided not to pick up the pen again. But no, my prarabdha karma can’t let me sleep properly, it haunts me even in my most joyous dreams. So I am forced to pick up my pen again, sadly.
Life is rarely linear, each event is usually a result of multiple factors that combine in order to cause it. I don’t remember the deets of everything, but I do have influential blocks of memories stored, which keep racing in my mind in cycles. I was at a coffee-shop, near Severus Lane, and I was sipping the regular muck I had been used to consuming. It seemed like a normal evening,
The orchard in Mr. Riley’s house seemed good, Mrs.Mayor and her daughter were buying gobstoppers from the confectionery store beside Severus Lane, and Thompson was drying his clothes out on the balcony. But my mind was thinking about something else, something far more sinister than the residents of Dasgarh could even fathom.
No, this isn’t a crime fiction novel or your good old horror classic, so get your mind off that, please. This thought wasn’t sinister due to its content, but rather due to its repetition. I had just bought some chrysanthemums from a nearby florist. And I was thinking of buying them again. But there was a problem. I had already bought them 18 times that day. Yeah, you heard it right, 18 times. So no, this is not a Wattpad story, and I ain’t writing this to gain clout. I need your full and undivided attention, so don’t let your thoughts branch off in vague directions for even a minute.
It was like something was ringing a bell in my head, no matter how much I tried to deviate my thought away from those flowers, they still came to me either in existence or essence. I was starting to get really scared. Old sport, my coffee was smelling like chrysanthemum as I was drinking it. How insane is that? I smelt it again and again. Three days before that day, I asked Bill the janitor to sniff my coffee to check if it had its regular smell. He said it did. Yet it smelt like 100 percent chrysanthemum to me. Yeah, I know, this sounds really funny. Even I thought that earlier too.
What creeped me out was something that occurred a week ago from that event. My girlfriend, Jenna, went on a work tour with her colleagues for about a fortnight. When she returned,
She said that she had brought me a surprise gift. It’s okay, they were not chrysanthemums. The creepy part was, she got me an album of pictures. They were my pictures, which she had carefully crafted in the form of an album. In each of those pictures, either in the vase, or behind me near the bushes, or even in the waiter’s shirt pocket, there were chrysanthemums.
I asked her if she had done this on purpose or something, and the response I got was shocking. She told me that in the pictures that she chose to be a part of the album, there were no chrysanthemums AT ALL! She was baffled, and couldn’t figure out how this happened.
I then asked her the name of the shop where she bought her album.She said she did not remember the exact name, but the man who was at the counter wore a neat suit with a bowler hat.
I was scared as shit, so I tried my best to stop thinking about this event for the next 2 days. I kept trying to see the pictures again and again, thinking that maybe I could get another pattern instead of the flowers. I failed. But I kept trying again and again.
The next day, I was putting some silverwork on the mantelpiece, when I heard knocking on the door. When I opened the door, I saw a man, dressed in a plain white t-shirt and pants. He said he had just moved into the apartment next door, and needed some help unpacking. I decided that this would keep me off thinking about the flowers, so I decided to help him. I went down with him to help him, and saw that there was only one box left there. I peered in the box(it was open), and saw pictures, lots of them, with their faces down concealing their contents. I then picked some of them up, and was shocked to see their contents. I wanted to say something to the guy, but when I turned back I saw that no one was there.
In each of the pictures, there were stills of me and Jenna. Some of them contained some scenes that I knew we did not film, you know, like when we went hiking to the Himalayas, or had a private dinner at a beach in the Maldives. But the pictures that creeped me out the most were the last two of them that I picked up. The second last one was of me receiving the album of pictures from Jenna. And the last one was definitely me, putting silverwork on the mantelpiece.
I only then remembered that the apartment next door got burnt and was really desolate without it’s previous occupants, whom the fire consumed in the process.
I was wondering whether this was some sort of a sick joke or prank that was being played upon me as I stood there in the middle of the hallway wondering what to do with those pictures. I slowly crept back to my room, and started to observe the pictures, side-by-side, all at once.
I then finally saw a pattern, after hours of searching. In each of these pictures, I was wearing either a white t-shirt or pants, the same ones that the man who asked me for help in shifting was wearing!!! You might be wondering that I would be rather thick for not realizing something this significant, but you must understand where I am coming from. You see, in some photos, I was wearing the white t-shirt, but wasn’t wearing the pants, and vice-versa in others, so it was a bit tough for me to chalk that out, coupled with the paranoia that encumbered me at that time.
I then moved out into the drawing room, when I heard the doorbell ring again. With trembling fingers I opened the door to find Jenna standing there. She had just come back from work. I asked her whether everything was alright, and she nodded in agreement. I then told her what had happened today, and she got really perplexed. She told me that she had received a package this afternoon, from a certain guy called “Mr. Kirk The Florist”. It was the same white t-shirt, and the pants. I opened the pair and scrutinized them. On the back of the t-shirt, was the name of a website, engraved upon it in stark, black letters -
“www.don’t-abandon-the-chrysanthemum.com”
I opened my computer and quickly typed in the URL in order to find a clue. When I finally opened the webpage, I saw that there was an image there, which I thought I had to download. I proceeded with the download, and boy, did it take one heck of a time?
When the image finally got downloaded, I saved it, and then finally gave it a double click to open it.
What I saw….. I only remember I had opened the image and left the shirt as it was.
It was a picture of me, only I was much younger, about 7-8 years old. I was sleeping on an altar of a rather dimly lit room, with a lot of people surrounding me. All of them had chrysanthemums raised in their right hands, and a pair of gardening scissors in the other.
Their faces were covered, as they were wearing bunny masks, literally all of them.
What terrified me the most was the man standing in the center, prostrating in front of the altar, looking right at the camera. He was dressed up in a neat suit, and wore a bowler hat. I immediately knew he was the same guy. His pupils were bright red, and his tongue, quite longer than the tongue of ordinary humans, was protruding out from his mouth.
I saw myself again. I noticed I was wearing a birthday cap, and there was a teddy bear in my hand, just hanging at the side of the altar, barely managing to remain steady within the grasp of my loose fingers. I knew when this event had occurred. It was my 7th birthday. Dad gave me this teddy bear that he brought from Switzerland after his work trip.
And then a volcano of memories erupted in my brain.
I decided to call my mom. I needed answers. I told Jenna that I had to leave for a work trip for a few days, and would meet her later. There was a parallel creepy thing that was happening while investigating more about that memory. Actually, I did not notice earlier that in the picture, there was a wall clock on the top of the altar too. When I zoomed in on the wall clock in order to have a better look, I saw that it contained only a “FINISH” sign where the “12” mark should have been, and it was then placed at about where “6” should have been in an ordinary clock. What weirded me out the most was that every time I opened the picture, and zoomed in on the wall clock, the hand moved a little towards the “FINISH” mark.
When I finally called my mom later that night, she was initially reluctant to get into the details of my 7th birthday. It was a painful memory, for both of us. You see, my father disappeared without a trace on the same night as my birthday. We phoned the police, and a routine investigation was carried on for about 6 months, to no avail, of course. Eventually it was deemed a cold case. I remember police officers coming in to question me and my mom thoroughly during those months. I tried asking my mom repeatedly when I was young what she thought happened, but she always shrugged the topic away, as if she didn’t want to talk about it. I too eventually decided to drop it, thinking that was a painful part of my mom’s memory, until I decided to phone her that night.
She finally told me, and opened a can of worms that I am still dealing with.
She told me that after the birthday party, Dad got a phone call, after which he really panicked. He went out of the house after that without telling mom anything, and then went missing. Mom told me that when his call records were traced, it was surmised that the last person who called him was someone by the name of “Mr.Kirk The Florist”. What was even weird was that the caller’s location, when he called, was found to be at the patch of chrysanthemums at our garden backdoors. The whole area was dug up, but obviously nothing was found.
My Dad was actually a wedding planner. Mom told me that she knew who Mr. Kirk was before, as he was the man who Dad used to call up for any flower business he had to attend. She told me that Kirk was a weird person indeed, and always wore a suit and a bowler hat, no matter what the occasion. A month before my Dad’s untimely appearance, Mr. Kirk was arrested. The police suspected that he had started a cult, where he used to sacrifice children, and there were several members in it from the community who got arrested too.
It was reported that he was shot dead in the encounter. He had a daughter about 6-7 years old at that age. I asked her about the whereabouts of the daughter.
She told me she wasn’t sure, but she did know that her name was Jenna and she was sent to St.Patrick’s orphanage nearby.
A chill ran down my spine. You know why, so let me carry on.
She told me that she had seen my father’s personal diary, and was shocked to find some of its details. She told me that she suspected Dad had been a part of that cult too, seeing some of his writings. She read in the diary that Dad had just married her for the sake of having a child, which he could later sacrifice for the cause of “spreading the message”. Dad also specified that Mr.Kirk was the “high priest” and his daughter his heir, whereas he repeatedly referred to me as the “lamb”.
She said she was very scared after reading all of this, so she burnt the diary, and decided to move away from the place. I asked her if she noticed anything else peculiar throughout the years. She told me two things. Firstly, on each anniversary of my father’s demise, she received a bouquet of chrysanthemums from different florists throughout the country. When she further enquired who had asked them to be sent, the florists simply responded “Mr. Kirk, who sells chrysanthemums just by the corner”.
The second thing was that whenever she visited a shop to buy a watch when her old one was beyond repair, there was always a weird clock which only she could see, and none of the staff of that shop could. It had “FINISH” instead of the 12 sign.
I thought I had finally got my answers. I told mom to pack her bags, and that I was coming the next morning to pick her up. I had decided that we were going out of the country, far away from where all this shit happened.
When I went there the next morning, Mom was looking tired, perhaps from all the packing. I asked her to get her meds for sure. She said that she had left them upstairs and would just go up and fetch them. I waited by the car for 10 minutes. After that, I decided to go upstairs and check for myself what the delay was all about.
As I climbed upstairs, I saw rows of chrysanthemums littered across the staircase. With my heart beating terribly, I walked up to her bedroom, and what I saw, well, I wish even my worst enemies wouldn’t see that.
Upstairs was my mom’s body, half decayed and rotten, with some of her skeleton visible from it. She was sitting upright on a chair. Her contorted face was drawn in a wide smile. I saw a projector, a fucking projector attached to the top wall. It displayed the same picture on the wall where my mother was facing. I noticed that the details of the picture were still the same, except the clock. It’s hand was dangerously close to the “FINISH” point by now.
There were other chairs and bodies of other people on them beside them. One of them….was…. My Dad’s. He was still wearing the shirt he did when he last disappeared. Jenna’s body was there too, but unlike others its contents were very much intact.
The police held me in custody for about three weeks, after which I was released due to insufficient evidence.
They told me that my mom and dad died three weeks ago, according to the forensic report. I was baffled. What about the phone call with my mom? Who was on the fucking line the whole time? Who received me when the door opened? What about my Dad? Where had he been all these years?
And lastly, Jenna? If she was indeed the heir of that crazy florist, why did she have to die?
Did my childhood really happen? What the hell was going on?
With lots of questions in my heart, I left my home town.
And here I am. Writing all this. For what, you may ask? Like I said, I’ve had these urges to buy chrysanthemums ever since that incident. These urges, they just don’t leave me. My thoughts are clouded. I don’t know what I wear, and how I land up at flower shops after falling asleep on my couch. I don’t know why all my clothes are gone, and replaced with new neat suits and an array of bowler hats. I just don’t know.
I found my Dad’s diary, you know. Mom had kept it hidden in the attic till now, she hadn’t burnt it. There was a set of verses, which had to be written, read aloud. Dad’s notes said that they contained all the information about the cult. So I did write them, and then read them aloud. It was like my mind became clear, free from all its worries. I knew what I had to do.
I just want to tell you, that there are times when I gain back my sanity, and my previous self. There are times when that feeling of purpose, of carrying forward the cult, subsides. It is in one of these moments that I have decided to pen down this tale.
Don’t ask for other explanations. Just remember. If you see a man in a suit with a bowler hat, selling flowers for a few rupees at your neighborhood named Mr. Kirk, don’t walk away without buying his flowers. Just whatever you do, buy something else, roses, tulips, lilies. Do not buy the chrysanthemums.
If you do, well, you’ll be a part. One of us. Wait, is there a us? No, no sorry. Sorry. I don’t …. I shouldn’t have written this down…. Oh Shit….. No, wait, don’t read this. Please. Forget it. Or try to. Otherwise, you won’t have to do anything. They’ll come, right at your doorstep. To root out your sin. To redeem you.