6 Fantasy Stories (10 page)

Rose Head

By

Robert T. Jeschonek

The woman with a daisy for a head--her name is Gravelina Scalding--runs out the front door of her townhouse with a pair of pruning shears pointed in my direction. The silver-shining blades are scissored open wide, ready to snip my green throat with a squeeze of the handles.

Myself, I have a red rose for a head, but not for long if I don’t make a major move right this instant. Then, who’ll find the killer of things roselike, the man, woman, or thing the papers call the Pruner? Who’ll avenge the murders of my dear darling wife and seedlings?

The very thought of their deaths is enough to fill my red red heart and my green heart too with rage.

My partner, Chub, is nearby, but I know better than to look to him for help. While I have the head of a rose and the body of a man, Chub has the head of a man (though it’s a fat, pasty man’s head like a pile of mashed potatoes) and the thick-stalked body of a sunflower. He gets around on flippery roots, but he’s useless in a pinch because he just can’t run.

So it’s up to me, as usual.

Since I’m more interested in questioning Gravelina than killing her, I don’t reach for the pistols in the pockets of my lemon yellow suit jacket. Instead, as Gravelina charges, I grab a nearby lawn chair and charge right back, jamming the aluminum frame into the blades of the shears. Gravelina keeps pushing--she’s stronger than I expected--but I hold her off. One last shove and I knock her back off her feet, sprawling on the cobblestone walk.

The shears fall from her grip, and I kick them away. Dropping on top of her, I pin her wrists to the walk and cough a cloud of ester vapor in her face. This particular ester is meant to tranquilize and bring out the truth.

“We know you’re connected to the Pruner,” I say in the language of the flower-headed people, the play of scents and the rustling of petals. “Now tell me the killer’s name.”

Gravelina thrashes violently beneath me, nearly freeing one arm. “The weeds must be pruned if we are to touch the sun,” she says.

The blood and chlorophyll syrup in my veins freezes. She is quoting the message that was left hanging in wisps of fragrance in the air at each of the Pruner’s twenty-one known murders.

I press the thorns in the palms of my hands more deeply into the meat of Gravelina’s wrists. “Tell me! Who is the Pruner?”

“The question you should ask, Inspector Glisten,” she says, “is who
isn’t
?”

*****

“Daisy-heads suck,” says Chub, wrapping a dark green frond around a mug of beer. He hoists the beer from the bar and downs the contents in one swallow. Drinking is one thing he does fast.

“Gravelina won’t crack,” I say in flower-speak. Though Chub has the head of a man, he understands my rustling/scent language, which makes my life easier. With some difficulty, I can eke out a whispery approximation of man-talk with vibrations of my stamen, but Chub saves me the trouble.

Whatever I did to deserve him as a partner, I’m glad I did it. Chub’s no rose-head, so he’ll never be promoted, but he’s been my loyal, reliable helper for seventeen years. He hated me at first, but I won him over by saving his life, and we’ve been crime-busting best buddies ever since.

Not that we’ve been busting much crime since the Pruner came along.

“Maybe the aphids in the crime lab’ll dig something out when they get a taste of her,” says Chub. “Sniff out trace information from her petals.”

I shrug, displaying my lack of confidence in this possibility. Though aphid bugs have been known to find evidence when we let them gnaw on a suspect or a victim for a while, the technique has been as useless as everything else we’ve tried so far to track down the Pruner.

A girl with a marigold head drifts by, carrying a water mister on a tray. I want a spritz and wave her over. “In the meantime, what do we do next?” I say. “Gravelina was our best lead. Aromacams picked up her scent in the lobbies of two hotels where murders were committed. We found the pollen prints of five victims on her pistils.”

“Hmm,” says Chub, thoughtfully swaying from side to side. “She said the question we should be asking is who
isn’t
the killer. Does that mean the process of elimination?”

The marigold girl lifts the blue-tinted mister bottle from the tray and directs the nozzle at my rose-head. I lean forward as she squeezes the trigger, spraying my crimson petals with fine droplets of water.

I feel instantly refreshed and tip her generously. As she bows and glides away, I admire the bobbing of the sepals at the base of her blossom, the sway of her buttocks under her filmy white skirt. She reminds me of my wife, Zwilla, though my wife has a rose instead of a marigold for a head.

Had. I mean she
had
a rose for a head before the Pruner killed her.

For the umpteenth time today, I feel a stab in my gut at the thought of dead Zwilla. Though she has been gone for a month, the pain is as fresh as if she had been taken only this morning.

To dull that pain, I return my attention to talk of investigating her murder. “One other possibility, Chub,” I say. “Could she have meant that the least likely suspect is actually the murderer?”

Chub thinks for a moment, then sighs and shakes his fleshy jowls. “Maybe she just wanted to throw us off track,” he says.

“You might be right,” I say, reaching for a plant food spike from the jar on the bar. “We know Gravelina has a connection to the killer. Perhaps we should take a closer look at her personal life.”

“She works for a rhododendron-head who arranges humans,” says Chub. “Miss Carionette. Maybe we should drop by her shop.”

I kick off my right shoe, peel off the sock, and nibble the food spike with the tiny toothy maws on my toes. “Now you’re thinking, man-head,” I say as the nutrients rush into my system. “We’ll clip this weed yet.”

I flash Chub a confident smile, but it’s all fake. We’ve been looking for the Pruner for over a year now, and all we have to show for it is a longer list of victims.

A list that now includes my wife and children. They bring the grand total to twenty-one.

That means that more is at stake in this case for me than personal revenge for the death of my family. For any police inspector like me to leave twenty-one murders unsolved in one year’s time, that individual won’t be inspector for long

The word on the grapevine is that I’m just about out of a job, and I believe it. I’ve seen better cops than me get the old heave-ho for lesser failures than this. My nineteen years of distinguished service on the force don’t mean much next to my last year of shitty underperformance

If Chub and I don’t produce a perp soon, the axe will fall hard and fast on yours truly. What comes after that, you don’t want to know.

Let’s just say that they’re probably not saving me a spot in the garden of honor.

Not that anyone needs to punish me for failing. I’m doing a great job of that all by myself. Whatever the department does or doesn’t do to me, I’ll
never
forgive myself for not saving my family.

This does
not
mean, however, that I will go any easier on the criminal rot that I am about to tear into. If anything, it means I’ve got that extra, bloodthirsty
zip
that comes with having almost nothing left to lose.

The kind of zip that’ll make the Pruner wish he’d never put it there...
if
we manage to find him.

*****

“Gravelina is my finest arranger,” says Miss Carionette as she puts the finishing touches on the latest masterpiece at her shop, Fleshlovers. The masterpiece is a bouquet of six humans done up in spring colors. “I refuse to believe she had anything to do with any murders.”

“What do you know about her personal life?” I say, admiring Carionette’s work as I question her. The tall woman in the center of the arrangement, jet-haired and smooth-skinned, is draped with veils of pastel chiffon in pink, mint, and lemon.

The mauve petals of Carionette’s rhododendron-head ruffle with an affected highbrow accent. “Very little, Patrolman Glisten,” she says, giving me the wrong rank on purpose. (I can tell from her scent.) “She had a keen interest in composting and expressionist animal grafting...not necessarily in that order.”

Strolling away from Carionette, I look at the framed photos on the walls of the shop, examples of her past work. In one, three dark-haired human males dressed as farmers hold watering cans over a naked blonde human female huddled on the ground like a furled shoot. Something about the image makes me feel warm inside, and I linger in front of it.

“Did Gravelina ever talk about roses?” I say, moving on to a photo of three human females in brightly-colored leotards, standing back-to-back with arms stretched skyward.

Carionette’s tone changes. Her scent, aloof until now, sweetens with false servility, and a barely perceptible nervousness excites the flutter of her petals. “Only when a rose placed an order,” she says, “and then only in a businesslike manner, I can assure you.”

I come to a photo of a single human male, a young one, covered head to toe in a red silk bodysuit. He holds his arms straight out, red-gloved hands folded together in the foreground of the picture.

Suddenly, I realize that all is not as it seems at Fleshlovers.

“I’d like to see your back room,” I say, giving Chub a meaningful glance.

“I’m afraid I don’t have time to show you gentlemen around,” says Carionette, brushing at the veils on her subjects. “You’ll excuse me, but I have to deliver this arrangement within the hour.”

“We won’t take up your time,” I say. “My partner and I will have a look-see ourselves.”

“There’s nothing of interest back there,” says Carionette.

“Not according to this,” I say, pointing at the photo of the red-bodysuited human male. “How about it, Chub?”

Chub shakes his head and wags a frond at Carionette. “You oughtta be ashamed, Miss Carionette.”

“It’s not what you think,” says Carionette.

I lift the photo from its place on the wall and wave it at her. “You can’t openly advertise illegal trade,” I say, turning my scent bitter and stiffening the flutters of my petals. “But this, the Red Boy, is a well-known sign of certain criminal activities.”

Agitated, Carionette stops working on the human bouquet. “That’s not an advertisement of illegal merchandise. It’s a photo of a specialty item that’s very popular with our hipper clientele--the Red Boy bouquet. It’s meant to capitalize on public awareness of the Red Boy image.”

“Capitalize this,” I say, hurling the photo to the floor. The glass pane in the frame shatters on impact.

Storming past Carionette, I sweep around the counter at the rear of the shop and heave open the door to the back room.

What I see in the back makes my stomach churn and my petals wilt. Though I knew what to expect as soon as I spotted the Red Boy, the sight of such perversion is still hard to take.

On one side of the workbench, a translucent plastic bin brims with deep crimson petals. More of the petals are scattered over the bench, each a graceful curl from lip to cup.

And on the center of the bench...

“Rain, sun, wind, and earth,” I say softly, making the sign of the cross over myself to ward off the evil in this place.

On the center of the bench, half-finished, is a replica of a face...the face of a rose, assembled from the same crimson petals. As if that were not bad enough...

I can tell from the texture and scent that the petals are real. This mask is being glue-gunned together with petals from someone with a rose for a head.

Someone like me.

“Let me explain!” says Carionette as she charges into the room. “These are all castoffs purchased from donor plants!”

“As if I care where you got the petals,” I say, turning to face her. “As if you don’t know that the true crime here is the manufacture of rose-head masks.” I step toward her, emitting one of my special ester vapors. This one is designed to instill terror in whoever inhales it.

“B-but this is a special commission,” says Carionette. I can tell from the way her petals flicker that my ester is taking effect. “It’s a death mask for a rose-head whose face was t-terribly damaged in the accident that k-killed him.”

I continue to move closer. Carionette remains frozen in place. “Do you know how many times I’ve heard that story before?” I say slowly.

Then, I pounce, throwing her back against the wall and pinning her arms to the plaster with my palm-thorns.

Chub has finally managed to flipper into the doorway, and I say to him, “Partner Man-Head? What is the penalty for making, distributing, or wearing rose-masks?”

“Everyone knows that,” says Chub. “Death by lethal injection of herbicide.”

“Mandatory death penalty,” I say, pressing my petals to within inches of Carionette’s rhododendron-head. “But you never know, Miss Carionette. Maybe, if you tell me
everything
I want to know, I’ll cut you some slack.”

“W-what do you w-want to know?” says Carionette.

“A name and address,” I say. “Who ordered this mask?”

*****

I am surrounded by roses who are not roses.

Men and women dance under the flashing colored lights in the warehouse, and at first glance, everyone appears to have a rose-head. A closer look, however, reveals that every rose is a mask, and behind every mask are petals of white or gold or pink or purple or orange.

There must be at least a hundred people who look like roses in the warehouse, and the only one among them who is an actual rose-head is yours truly.

And I’d thought seeing the rose mask in progress at Fleshlovers had been sickening. This twisted masquerave, in violation of the most sacrosanct of our laws and moral codes, is off the charts when it comes to sick-making.

Masking oneself as a daffodil or petunia is one thing. Lower species are fair game when it comes to dress-up.

But the rose is sacred. The rose is most beautiful. The rose is above all others.

And imitation of the rose is forbidden.

Under other circumstances, I would call in a strike force and fumigate this noxious den of pretenders...but my job tonight requires different tactics. Forcing down my revulsion with great effort, I circle the dance floor in search of the man described by Miss Carionette.

Fortunately, my authentic rose-head enables me to blend in as I explore, though I am certain no one around me imagines that a true rose is among them. Chub waits outside; there was no way that mashed-potato man-head could have entered this exclusive “roses-only” event.

It doesn’t take me long to locate my target. He is seven feet tall and wears the only black rose mask in the place. His name is Carotid Aficionado, and according to Carionette, he is the man who ordered the rose-head mask she was making in the back room at Fleshlovers.

He is also the organizer and host of this nightmarish masquerave.