Both my husband and I had been caught up in work projects for the past months. So when our daughter came to me about a garden in the backyard, I knew it couldn’t have been him.
There had been some tension in our marriage, separate rooms and spaces as we worked from home and avoided our issues. It was easier for me to go straight outside, without a word to him, and have a look at this so-called garden myself. Because our daughter is nine, my first impulse was imagining what her mind might produce or overexaggerate. Maybe, I reasoned to myself, she had tried planting seeds or relocating shrubs.
Once I stepped out onto our back porch, though, it became apparent that there was a sizable chunk of growth back there.
It was blocked off with hedges. There was an entrance. The entrance was circular, made of bent branches and twigs. Vines and mosses twined around and hung from it.
I could not see far. Not without entering. As the threshold was only a little above waist height, I would have to get down on my hands and knees to gain access. I did go around the “garden” first, to get an idea of its scope, but because it backed up against our fence and seemed to stretch beyond that, down into the woods, I couldn’t get a real sense of its extent.
What made it impossible to see inside was the thick hedging. It was wild and layered, and it wound over the top. I wasn’t for sure that there was a garden in there. Whatever was within couldn’t be getting enough sunlight.
I went back inside our house and questioned Sadie about it.
“I don’t know when I first saw it,” she said. “Coulda been . . . last week. Think it was a surprise?”
“From whom?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s from those inside?”
A chill planted its fingers on my spine and walked its way down on weird hands. “Who is inside, Sadie?”
Although she smiled, I could tell she was more than a little frightened.
When I asked again, her only reply was “I dunno.”
I questioned Michael, my husband, about it, and I asked our neighbors.
Nobody knew how the garden, if garden it was, had gotten there.
I called the police. They sent over a couple of officers who went in on hands and knees while assuring me they could draw their weapons from that position. It was just me and Sadie standing there near the garden entrance.
My husband was in the house supposedly up to his neck in work.
About an hour passed.
Our backyard is not very big; the garden couldn’t have taken up more than a quarter of it. When fear got the better of embarrassment, I started yelling out for the officers.
Sadie was really quiet beside me. I expected all kinds of questions. Something in there had spooked her. She kept looking from me to the entrance.
The moss quivered about the entryway like a breath was coming out. I began to imagine shadows creeping at the mouth.
When I could see a crawling shape that turned its way into the opening, that crawled in a hurry towards us, I put my arms around Sadie and got ready to run.
“Hey!” one of the officers called out. “It’s only us.”
They told us about what they had seen. Like a maze, they said, and pretty, but not well kept. Strange as sin to boot. Their pants knees were stained and somewhat ripped. I wondered if they’d crawled the entire way.
“Not well-kept?” I was most incredulous about that. “It was just planted.”
“I hope you aren’t yanking our chains,” the older officer said. He was stretching his back. “This has to have been here for years. It goes back into the woods, too. For a long ways. My partner and I . . . we didn’t see the end of it. When’d you move in?”
“It’s been a little over a year now,” I said.
“Think you could’ve missed it?”
“Not a chance in hell. But you didn’t see anyone in there, did you?”
“Nope. It ought to be empty. We would’ve heard somebody at the very least, or found the usual signs. You could have some deer or other animals living out of it from time to time, though. Pretty neat.”
“It’s pretty unsettling is what it is,” I said. “I have no idea how that got here. Can’t you do anything about it?”
The older officer shrugged.
“It’s your property,” the younger one said. “At least what’s on your property. Happen to know whose is behind yours?”
I couldn’t remember.
They told me to give them a call if we did see anyone. When I told them it was my daughter who implied there might be someone within, they nodded and smiled knowingly. And soon they were on their way.
___
I was certain it had been planted recently. There was no way I would’ve missed a thing like that. And Michael, he had been so thorough about our property before we moved in, surveying every square inch.
I had to see the inside of that so-called garden myself. I told Michael that I was going in. I told him that if he didn’t hear back from me in a couple of hours, he was to call my cell. His door was closed and he had that folk music of his turned up loud, but I was sure he could hear me because I got the usual—what had become usual—grunt back.
“And if you aren’t able to get a hold of me,” I said, “call the police. For Sadie’s sake.”
Another stifled grunt from him, and then I was heading downstairs. I told Sadie to stay inside and if I wasn’t back by dinner to go up and knock on Daddy’s door and remind him to call me.
Sadie wanted to go too. I had to promise her some new toys if she remained on the living room couch watching her favorite programs until I got back.
I didn’t have any pepper spray or anything, and I didn’t want to be crawling with a knife, so I took along a bottle of hairspray and a lighter. It’s not that I really planned on using them, considering the untold damage a big fire could do to habitat and home. It was mainly just to make me feel safe.
But I did not feel safe as I got down on my hands and knees in the backyard and finally crawled into the entrance of that garden.
If I half-closed my eyes, it might seem like I was clambering though one of those playhouse tunnels at fast food restaurants. But the light that seeped through the strangled vegetation, it infused flowers, highlighting them. Many different kinds were entangled. There were also herbs growing, and I smelled about a hundred scents strangling each other as I crawled. There were alcoves with things like cucumbers and strawberries somehow growing in the dim light. They were shrunken and sickly-looking. They seemed to spring from the walls rather than the soil. If this thing was a garden, it was avant-garde. Maybe not new from the looks of it, but certainly experimental. In my mind, I started calling it “avant gard-en” for some good ole self-levity. I don’t know how whoever planted it kept those species from taking each other’s light, space, and nutrients, how they didn’t all kill each other in that embrace.
It was crawl all the way, and there were many forks. I just kept taking right turns so as not to lose track. I was planning to at some point map out the whole thing if possible. Maybe, once I was out again, I’d start by figuring out what expert I needed to truly investigate the garden.
After about an hour and a half or so, I began to hear this music. It started with a few grunts. Then there was like a whistling, not like from human lips but more as if it were a breeze flowing over some open bottles. It scared the life out of me. But I had to find the source of it. I had to put all my fears to bed if I could. Otherwise, I’d be tempted just to burn them to the ground.
I kept looking behind me, then in front. So much so that I was losing time. Michael would call my cell, and then I’d go back. But what if he didn’t? I wondered.
It had been afternoon when I crawled in. What if it got truly dark?
With those fears offsetting the others, I picked up my pace, crawling ever closer to that strange music.
Then there was an opening. I started to stand up and scraped my head against a thorny ceiling. A yelp came out before I could stop it.
Up ahead, there was a rustle. The music had at some point quit playing.
I aimed my cellphone that way.
There were four garden gnomes, about the height of my shins, standing in a circle. One of them was facing me.
I tried to pluck up my courage.
“Is this going to be one of those things,” I said, “where I look away, and you move, but when I stare at you again, you stay put?” I said this laughing, but my voice cracked like the surfaces of those gnomes were.
In the head of the gnome that was facing me, there was a jagged hole in the upper right. Something winked in that darkness, an object pale and oily that reminded me of a pet snail I had when I was a kid. Ants had gotten to it and had revealed that there was another snail within.
“Well, let’s give it a try,” I said.
I forced myself to look away from the gnomes. I kept remembering I had to put to bed all my fears. My family depended on it. I held my breath until I saw stars.
When I turned my head back around and peered again, with my cellphone held out like a weapon, something was crawling out of the gnome’s cracked face.
I screamed, backing into the garden tunnel I’d come from in reverse.
It was a mistake, but I had to watch what was coming after me.
It gooped as much as crawled out. It was like a pale, naked, deboned man. It must’ve had to contort itself to fit into that garden gnome.
It slipped and squirmed along the ground, leaving a trail of goop behind. Its head was bald, its eyes crazed.
I fumbled with my cellphone as I tried to scoot back on my rear at the same time. Doing both made me drop the phone.
I screamed as it wriggled over my shoes. Digging in my pockets, I produced the lighter and hairspray.
“Back off!” I yelled.
I felt its weight, supple and slimy, pressing against my body as it explored towards my face. Its mouth salivated, as toothless as a baby’s. I noticed a single hair jutting from its right ear.
I put hairspray and fire together. A jet bloomed out and scorched its face.
When it screamed, it was more like a man than an infant.
Fire caught on the surrounding vegetation, quickly spreading.
I turned around, and I crawled, making lefts all the way. The fire must’ve spread in another direction. Otherwise, I might’ve died in there.
The screaming I heard behind me was pretty bad; it mingled with the whistling I’d heard before, creating a new song.
Until fire and smoke choked it all out.
I ran into my house. Sadie was there on the couch watching TV. I got on the landline. The fire department were soon on their way.
I went slowly upstairs. Something about those grunts I’d heard in the garden, before the strange music, wasn’t sitting right with me.
Michael’s door was still closed, his folk music belting out like a concert was going on in his room. I noticed there was a lot of whistling to that particular song. I knocked. And knocked.
Then I opened the door.
“Michael?” I said.
He was at his desk, papers stacked all around. His head was tilted back in his chair and there was a hole at the top. An eye winked out at me.
I shut his door, fumbled for the key above the frame, and locked it. I shoved a towel under the door and, with Sadie’s help, slid a bookcase from my room up against it.
Sadie is still crying, but I can’t explain anything to her.
I’m less afraid that it will unlock the door from the inside, more that it will slip through a crack.
I don’t know how that garden got there in the backyard. If it wasn’t planted, if it didn’t grow and age in a hurry, maybe it’s some development or other from the woods that’s crept out onto our property. But now it’s all burning. I can hear the sirens of fire trucks as I’m finishing up this post, playing countermelody to the whistling folk music that streams out, barely muffled, from Michael’s bedroom.