Let's Play in the Garden (27 page)

There was a soft tap on the door. “Go away!” she yelled.

“Mery, it’s me, Tobey. Please let me in.”

“No, I don’t want you to see me like this. Tobey, didn’t you see? I’m an ugly thing. Both of us. We’re freaks! We’ve been artificially made. We were just experiments…”

“I know, Mery, I know, and I hate them for it. But I don’t hate you. You’re still my sister and I’m still your brother. You’re not a freak, and I don’t care what you look like on the outside right now. You’re still Merydith. I love you. Now please let me in. I need you.”

The door opened slowly and Tobey eased himself in. The worst had been discovered, or had it? Despite the shock, anger and hatred, they still had to go on. They still had to live and figure out where to go from here. Merydith would know. She always did.

23. Root of All Evil

As Marion had promised, the skin did return to normal and Merydith was fine again, but refused to leave her room for days. Tobey stayed right by her side. Neither of them returned to school. There was no way that Merydith could go back, now even if she wanted to. She and Tobey had made a vow between them not to return to school and to resist everything the adults tried to get them to do. As Merydith put it, it was time to make them pay for their crimes, crimes against humanity and nature. They refused to go out, eat, talk to the adults, or obey them any longer.

“Tobey, this is it, the time to bring it all down upon them, little brother. We know what we are, but that’s only part of it. Time for them to pay. There’s more, the seeds, what lives in the garden, the formula—we know it’s responsible for the garden’s growth and life, but we’ve got to know what it is. We need to know what happened to Aaron. We still haven’t discovered that. You know where the key to all this is?”

Tobey shook his head.

“The only other place left. The workshop. The only place we haven’t seen, the one they still refuse to let us into. They were holding back that day, the day they ripped my flesh. They only told us enough to get us to leave it alone. It’s not enough. We must thank them kindly for all they’ve done to us.”

Merydith went over her plan with Tobey, her desire for knowledge and the quest for truth tainted with revenge. Deep hatred for what she was and the ones responsible for that festered inside her and she was letting it corrupt her.

###

Days of utter silence passed as Merydith and Tobey prepared for one final quest to end the nightmare they were living. The absence of Merydith only fueled the curiosity of one, Mrs. Jean McCormick. She knew quite well that this weather could not be the cause of Merydith’s absences. She felt it was time to find out what was really wrong. She needed answers. After the school day was out, she made a little trip to the Santaneen household.

Her car rolled down the rock and dirt path and pulled up beside the small picket fence. She turned the car off and got out. She stared at the house for a moment. “What a pretty house,” she said as she entered the yard. She walked slowly through it, admiring the neatly cut grass and the flowerbeds in bloom with striking colors. It was such a well-kept and pretty place. Hardly what she expected. Her head turned slightly, catching an object in the corner of her eye. It was the garden wall that stretched on for an eternity, solid spikes crowning it, and the ominous garden waiting beyond it. Some trees and plants were just visible over the top.

“A garden behind a wall?”
Astonishing…but I’ve come for Merydith, not the
garden.
She moved on and walked up to the porch and approached the door. There was no sound from the inside of the house…all was quiet, too quiet. She raised her hand to knock when something stopped her.

It was giggling. She heard sweet childlike laughter in the air. “They have other children?” she said. It was coming from around the house and in the direction of the garden. Again the laughter came, a young child giggling happily from the garden. She left the porch and slowly walked around the other side of the house.
Sounds like it’s coming from inside the garden.
She walked up to the gate, discovering it locked and barred. Again the laughter reverberated.

“Is there someone in there?” she called.
My Lord, did they lock a child up in the
garden?
How do I get in?

She walked around, looking up at the wall and the spikes. She ran her hands over the wall and started as the laughter came again, but from in front of her now, seemingly from the direction of the front yard. “What on earth?” She turned and backed up against the wall.

Over the wall slithered a tentacle-vine mottled with thorns. The creature’s substitute for an arm slipped down and wrapped itself around the teacher’s throat. Her cries for help died in the choking and suffocation that followed.

She struggled, fighting the tentacle-vine, gashing her hands on the thorns, blood smearing on the wall as her eyes bulged and her face and lips turned blue. Her legs kicked hard but she could not escape.

With one hard pull, it yanked her up, dragging her body up the wall. Hitting the spikes, the creature ripped her between them, the sound of cracking bones filling the air. From inside the garden, slobbering noises rose.

###

Again Merydith put her hair up in a tight ponytail, signaling that it was time. Time to see the ultimate room in their world. The room where the horrible truth lay in wait for them. As before, Tobey lowered Merydith down the side of the house and then lowered himself, again tumbling to the ground. They ran around to the front of the house, feeling strange vibrations off the garden as they passed it.  

“Now hurry, Tobey, let’s get to the pickup before we’re seen. This may be our only chance.”

They ran to the back of the pickup, where they threw an old blanket aside, revealing all the heavy tools stored in the back. Merydith remembered this well. “Okay, grab the sledgehammer. I’ll take the chisel. There’s no way of getting the keys from Grandpa. All hope of that plan is gone. This is the only way left. If we fail now, we’re doomed here forever. And then they win. Understand, Tobey, those monsters in there will win. Let’s go!”

Tobey felt the fear return, but this time it was of his sister. She was different. She was letting this twist her, and Tobey didn’t like it.

They ran to the cellar doors. They were ready. Two children who had braved everything and dealt with all the horrors that had been thrown at them were finally breaking open the biggest mystery of their lives. Merydith thought of them as survivors.

“Now, Tobey, now! This is for us.” Merydith placed the chisel upon the lock as Tobey raised the hammer with all the strength he had inside him. It was heavy, as if it weighed a thousand pounds. He lifted it slowly, his hands shaking, eyes squinting, his small muscles tightening and wrenching. Unable to hold it up anymore, he let it come crashing down with swift precision. It fell dead on, the chisel shattering and cracking the lock on the doors with one blow.

Tobey fell back and dropped the hammer. The chisel burned in Merydith’s hands and she let the pieces fall quickly to ground. The doors shook with a metallic bellow and one actually cracked as it fell open. A putrid smell billowed forth, meeting them head on.

“We’ve done it, we’ve done it!” Merydith cheered with glee. “And this lock will never work again. They’ll have no use for it now, wonderful! Let’s go down.”

Tobey gulped as the two of them pulled the cellar doors wide open, dim light glowing from below. They held their noses against the rushing smells that escaped the dank room.

They descended a long flight of stairs. Merydith could not believe how deep it went down; Grandpa Simon must have dug it well beneath the house. They finally entered the first room of what they discovered was a two-room workshop.

As they figured, it was a real lab. There were long tables filled with bizarre and exotic equipment that could only be of use to a mad scientist: test tubes, flasks of strange-colored liquids, things boiling on the tables atop Bunsen burners, an amber-colored liquid bubbling in a flask with a coiling tube through its cork where drops of the strange potion slithered out and down into a bowl of black powder. There were shelves upon shelves of chemicals—sulfur, nitro glycerin, hydrochloric acid, sodium nitrate, sodium sulfate, and other unlabeled liquids and powders.

The room was dimly lit by oil-burning lamps placed randomly around the worktables. There were hoes, rakes and shovels on a wall rack. There was a pan of water with a host of sharp instruments sitting in it: scissors, scalpels, knives, a small fishing hook, a pizza slicer, sewing needles, and a hypodermic needle.

One table had two overgrown plants growing on it, one giant, violet-colored flower, the other was something that looked like a giant brown turnip with gnarled and tangled roots that infested the entire table and reached to the floor.

Merydith approached the abominable vegetable and put out her hand. She was about to touch it when it touched her first. Its roots spun up and wrapped themselves around her arm, the entire table shifting under its strength.

“Tobey, help me! Tobey!”

Tobey ran to Merydith and pulled the roots violently from her. The plant untangled from her and went motionless.

Cabinets with drawers and files lined the walls. Merydith was instantly drawn to them. She opened the top drawer of one and found some of Simon’s journals, his step-by-step progress in the creation of the garden.

She skimmed through them and decided to open the next drawer down. Contained within were many files, one labeled
Marion
, one labeled
Merydith
, one labeled
Tobey
, one labeled
Aaron
. She took them out and glanced through them. Inside were pictures of them as infants, born without sexual organs and then developing them later upon reaching the age of one. It seemed their genders were not determined until they were one year old. There were no signs of belly buttons or umbilical cords, just as the children thought.

There were blueprints of their creation, the designs itself, sketches of molecules and cells, notations about measurements of chemicals, cells, flesh, and plant life. Dates of the actual creations were noted, as well as their growth progress. Everything was kept up to date with some actual recent photos. Merydith didn’t recall them being taken of her.

Toward the back of the drawer, Merydith discovered a hidden file, shoved haphazardly behind all the rest in a poor attempt to hide it from view. The label read:
Specimen X
.

Merydith opened it.

She read with great interest, discovering that it was the plans to another member of the family, dated to have been created right after Marion. Photos showed the infant, but it was not as normal in appearance as the others. It was distorted in grotesque ways…more plant than human. It already had teeth inside a deformed mouth. It eyes were black and green instead of white with pupils, and it only had one human arm…the other was the beginning of a vine, a tentacle-vine. The photos documenting its stages of growth ended abruptly with a stamp across the last one that read:
Terminated.

“Tobey, come see this,” she called.

He walked over and looked in the file. “Another,” he said. “There was supposed to be another child?”

“I don’t think this would have been a child. He would have been Mother’s mate. That’s what’s in the garden; it’s him, this other experiment. He lives in the garden. It has to be him. He isn’t terminated like this file says. They thought he was, but why did they try to destroy him? Had they no stomach for a deformed child? All of their precious experiments just had to be perfect. Cruel people…they’re the ones who are monsters.” She put the file down in disgust and looked away in the distance. “There’s another room down here. I’m sure there’s more in it. Let’s see what else they’re hiding.”

Beside the smaller second room was a large barrel connected to a coiled up hose. Merydith opened it and saw gallons of whitish fluid. It was the formula. They moved past it and entered the smaller room, a room so dark and dank it made their flesh feel clammy. The further they went, the worse things got as their senses filled with a putrid odor.

Giant spider webs covered their hair and faces like tapestries as they made their way through. In the din light of the room behind them, they could make out some objects.

Merydith surmised them to be three large tanks sitting against the left wall. Opposite them was a white cabinet, and at the very back of the room, a furnace.

They split up. Merydith went to the tanks, Tobey to the cabinet. Merydith lifted the lid slowly off one of the tanks and put her hand in. It sank into a cool, thick liquid. She retracted her hand swiftly, disgust washing through her as she looked up at her arm. It was covered in deep crimson running in torrents down her fingers, coating her wrist, dripping down her arm. Cold terror struck her as the realization that it was blood settled in her. She choked back a scream as she checked every tank just to be sure….they were all filled with blood, and in one there were traces of human skin…genetic material for more of Simon’s experiments.
The formula…it’s made of human blood! The plants of the garden are fed and sustained by blood.

Merydith turned and tasted bile in her mouth. She fought the urge to vomit and instead called for her brother. “Oh God! Oh, Tobey. The formula…blood. The tanks have blood in them, human blood.”

“Merydith, come here,” Tobey responded. “Look what I’ve found.”

She ran to his side. In one of his hands he held a bloodstained spade, and in the other, a cowboy hat. Merydith looked in the cabinet. There were piles of dirty bandages, snow boots, and painter’s pants. She had heard news reports that some people thought the killer might be wearing a cowboy hat, and that he used a spade-type weapon. Her eyes went wide. Grandpa Simon was the killer, the inhuman slayer of Henman’s Copse.

“Tobey, do you know what this means?” Merydith was aghast. “Grandpa is responsible for all those occurrences in the woods. The abandoned cars, the missing people, the missing police. He’s a killer. He kills people to get their blood and uses it to feed his garden. They’re all cold-blooded killers.”