Wheezing, Raymond fell back on the handle of his shovel, noticing for the first time how the muck and mud of the garden had stained his new patent leather shoes. He’d wanted to hire someone for the job, but Jaclyn had lately insisted that he start “acting like a man” and take care of some household chores himself. The rose bush seemed like an easy job, an afternoon digging in the shade with a glass of spiked lemonade close to hand, Jimmy Buffet on the portable. So he’d envisioned it in his mind. But the task proved both complex and grueling. The bush was ancient, left over from the former owners of the old estate, who were some kind of minor nobility. 

Jaclyn memorized all the historical details before even deciding to buy the place. She loved order, both imposing and preserving it. Because of this she wanted to live in a home with a long, well-chronicled past, preferably stretching back centuries. No building in the Americas was old enough. Often, she took guests on guided tours of the house to show off places where significant events occurred. There was even a room where someone was beheaded during the Jacobite Rebellion. Raymond found all these details dry as dust, would just as soon pay a landscaping company to come in and flatten the whole plot. He envisioned a swimming pool, a patio with wicker chairs, maybe an outdoor tiki bar. But Jaclyn…she got her way, always got her way. If he got his they’d live in a Stateside city instead of out in this English backwater. 

Yet here he was, digging up a goddamn rose bush.

The sun pelted him through the shade provided by an overhanging oak, lancets of heat prickling against his too-white skin. His fingers were already scraped and bloody; he hadn’t thought to wear gloves. Splinters prickled in his palms and under his fingernails, along with a copious amount of dirt. The bush, for its part, rose imperiously above him, ancient in years beyond the reckoning of any single human life. Most of its branches had withered and died, but a central trunk still radiated a few thorny limbs tipped with droopy red roses. Jaclyn wanted the plant to prosper, aka to cease being an eyesore, and for that to happen, the old roots had to be dug up. If he found rot he’d need to uproot the whole thing, an undertaking he now understood would take days.

Raymond mopped at his forehead again, then took a drink of lemonade. A bit spilled on his hands, the alcohol searing in his many cuts and scrapes. “Ouch! Shit!” he swore, fumbling for a moment before managing to set the glass cockeyed on a mound of excavated dirt. He stood in a hole about a foot deep, the exposed dead rosewood roots twining in Gordian knots under his feet. He had a hatchet to hand, which he’d used to hack out three large segments. Now, Raymond saw the first blood blister forming between his thumb and forefinger. A reddish bubble swelled, surrounded by a purple aureole of bruising: unable to resist, he squeezed it until it popped, red spurting out to stain the ground and roots.

The sight made him nauseous. Turning, Raymond went to the shed and started digging around for some gloves before deciding he should go inside and disinfect the wound. Approaching the house, he took in its somber appearance, all gray stone and mullioned windows, with bulls-eye glass dating back to Shakespeare’s time. In one spot you could see a musket ball still embedded in a wall. The well off to the left was supposedly haunted by the spirit of a Woman in White, but he’d never seen her. The front doorway arched up to a point, topped with a gargoyle of crude design, grinning oafishly instead of snarling. Raymond walked up the steps and shoved the heavy oak door wide, its iron knocker – in the come-hither form of a satyr – clanging against the age-blackened wood. The sound reverberated into the house, whose interior was thankfully free of medieval trappings. The last thing he could deal with were suits of empty armor standing around, like living on some kind of campy movie set. No, Jaclyn had worked her magic in here, everything sparkling and new and modern, done in complementing pastel shades. She had an eye, even if he disliked her aesthetic. But at least there was a huge basement downstairs for him to putter around in, a place he fondly called his “dungeon.”

Jaclyn was in the upstairs bathroom, rearranging shampoo bottles. She took one look at him and almost laughed, though she had the decency to restrain her mirth to a slight curl at the left side of her lip. 

“The hero, come home from war,” she declared as he turned on a faucet and ran cold water over his hand. “What happened, did that stray dog come over and bite you again? Oh, Ray, you have to wear gloves, don’t you know anything?”

He stared at her for a long moment before answering, “No, I don’t know anything.” Then he shut off the faucet and surrendered himself to her ministrations. The sting of disinfectant, a swathing of bandages. But, no release from his labors. 

“It’s getting dark out there,” she observed, with a coy cruelty in her tone. “Better get digging while the digging’s good, hmm?”

“Of course. Just let me catch my breath.”

Getting dark. The sun stayed out until goddammed eight o’clock. She was always goading him, always making him look like a fool to himself. Why did she do that? Raymond’s mind wandered back to his lemonade; the damn dog had probably gotten at it. Grumbling, refusing to look his wife in the eye, he trudged back outside with a leaden step.

What happened to them? The spontaneity defining their early years together had curdled to something unspeakable. They became ambulatory cliches, rich and vacant and passionless towards each other, dissipated in the ways of love and living. Raymond mulled over this as he ambled across the yard, already huffing in the sun’s renewed heat. He reached his lemonade – of course all the ice had melted – and gulped it down, “Margaritaville” playing tinnily in the background from a Bluetooth speaker. His hands ached, and he remembered he was supposed to get gloves out of the shed. 

Well hell. Always one thing after another. I could be out hitting the greens. Instead – 

He looked ruefully up at the antique rose bush. A kinder eye may have noted its picturesque situation, growing out from the base of an ancient shale shepherd’s wall. Heather and honeysuckle flourished close to hand, gone half-wild in the absence of any dependable yard help this summer. He only had himself to blame; the lawn was supposed to be his domain. Let Jaclyn endlessly rearrange the house’s interior, dust and polish and paint. Here he would be king. 

Emboldened by this absurd thought, Raymond snatched up his shovel, forgetting again about the gloves. The gauze wrapping on his wounded hand tore a bit, and he winced. “Goddamn it! What is it about today?”

The roses bobbed rhythmically above him, blooms weaving in small hypnotic circles. Raymond found himself distracted by their bright red color, their uncanny resemblance to elfin faces. Had he ever noticed that before? People were always telling him he should pay more attention to the world around him. Though – the roses seemed redder than when he went inside. Raymond recalled the blood spurting from his blister, shivering as he looked over the ground he’d laboriously spent the last several hours clearing.

Fantastically, the impenetrable meshwork of roots had somehow parted, curling aside like amphitheater curtains. This revealed an oval-shaped depression in the earth, about four feet by nine feet, more or less the dimensions of a human grave. Except – what the retracted roots revealed was difficult, at first, for Raymond to process. Kneeling down, his brows knit in utter perplexity as he surveyed a tiny graveyard of mounds, monuments, and tombstones, all perfectly miniature, as if constructed to accompany a model train set. Except on closer inspection, the make of the stones, the language of their inscriptions, the strangely graven grotesques surmounting the above-ground crypts showed a breadth of imagination and craftsmanship that baffled any commonplace explanation. To one side mounded an ant hill-like necropolis, covered with small holes visibly stuffed to overflowing with minikin bones.

Raymond started to sweat, his whole body going cold. Reaching down one hesitant finger, he dared to scratch the surface over one of the plots, large enough perhaps to inter the body of a dormouse. A few millimeters down, his fingernail scraped against something solid, something which gave at the slightest application of pressure. Raymond gulped and proceeded carefully, managing to pry up a miniature coffin carved exquisitely of whorled rosewood. Pinching it with his fingers, he pried off the lid without destroying the fragile object, which had clearly lain at rest for many centuries. Inside, he found something that took his breath away, made his heart pound and pores constrict, every hair on his body electrified by a dread-and-awe-induced horripilation.

Within the sarcophagus lay the withered, inwards-turned corpse of a minute winged being. Not an insect, though this was Raymond’s first conscious impression. The shriveled skin possessed a weird sort of iridescence, and he found himself angling the coffin in a sunbeam, struggling, just as he had with the graveyard itself, to comprehend what his senses undeniably disclosed. Narrow, spindly limbs, fingers (only four on each hand) tipped in black talons; the chest showed the outline of fine bones beneath the papery skin, ribs and gently flowing clavicles, all surmounted by a wizened face, utterly inhuman, pinched by decay but with gleaming green gemstones in place of eyes. Raymond found himself wondering if these had been placed deliberately, perhaps as part of a funerary rite; or rather, had its eyes just shrunken and hardened, turning luminous in death? The brittle wings were especially magnificent to behold, interlaced with multicolored filaments of fiery color, like those of a dragonfly but almost opaline. A smell wafted up from the corpse, of spices and balsam, sweet sap and flowers a thousand summers vanished from the world. The only clothing it wore was a skirt of leather-like material about the hips, obscuring its sex, and a belt from which hung a needle-thin sword of silver, tip dyed black. One clawed hand curled around the hilt.

Raymond trembled as he held the creature’s corpse, his eyes widening then contracting, gears turning in the dim recesses of his mind. The implications – the implications! Unless some kid had built a whole fake burial ground, left it here as a joke? That seemed unlikely enough to merit disregard. If this was the body of one of the wee folk, a “faerie” as they were called…. Raymond remembered weird stories told by his great-grandmother from her girlhood in northern Scotland, and with a little gasp of wonder bent to re-examine his find. He seemed to remember her saying something about fae-folk and rose bushes, maybe even a warning against digging them up? To prove authenticity, he dared prod the remains with one finger, niggling until an arm crumbled and broke free, disappearing in a whiff of silvery dust.

Kneeling down, Raymond used the very tip of his shovel to uncover several other graves. Each yielded a tiny, mummified occupant, wings and skin opulently colored but bodies wearing little, all interred with weapon to hand. It dawned on Raymond that this might be the site of some ancient battle, these the nobly slain of a conflict laid to everlasting rest. Certainly there seemed to be a ceremonial element to the site, and he wondered if the necropolis stuffed with bones marked the burial-place of their innumerable slaughtered enemies.

To a mind unaccustomed to wonder or enchantment, any sudden slip of mundane reality can reveal vistas so profound as to induce extreme emotional states. Raymond started weeping, and very carefully he re-buried the bodies he had disturbed, thinking now about curses in addition to respecting the dead. The ancient rose bush nodded above him, its crimson blossoms dripping with a dew the color of blood. He eyed its warped and knotted limbs, its withered protrusions and clumps of puckered flowers; a sacred, chilling dread stole into his heart, and he even stammered some half-remembered fragment of the Lord’s Prayer.

“Our Father, who art in Heaven…. Hallowed be…. Be…. God preserve me!” At this he recoiled from the burial site, hands twitching over his face in a dance of nervous fascination. 

What to do? He felt the immediate need to share the secret with others. Who cared if they said he was cracked? But then, was it safe? The best thing he could do was cover the whole thing up and forget about it. He’d lie to Jaclyn, tell her the roots were too thick and he’d given up. “I should call in that landscaper,” he muttered to himself, mopping his forehead with one sweat-saturated sleeve. “Have them bulldoze over the whole thing. Problem solved.”

It occurred to him that the drop of blood from his blister had caused the roots to retract, revealing this mystery. What would happen if he offered up more blood? Raymond cautiously stepped back into the plot, looking down at the bandage Jaclyn had wrapped around his wounded hand. Always so caring when she could pair it to condescension. What would she say when, if, he showed her his find? He could easily imagine her being extremely upset about it. She liked things orderly, arranging people and objects and concepts as if they all had the same value. 

Thinking this, Raymond reached out to grip the shovel’s haft. A compulsion overcame him, to offer much more than a single drop of blood to the plot. He saw visions, just for a moment, that repulsed him, and with a gag scrambled clear of the excavation, shaking from head-to-foot and making repeated moaning noises. To a passerby he would seem like a ghoul struggling up from its grave.

***

Jaclyn gasped as Raymond burst into the kitchen, sweat-and-dirt stained and panting like an animal, his eyes bulging from his head. 

“Don’t scare me like that!” she chastised, then tried to smile, knowing he was trying his best. She’d asked a lot from him lately, and her therapist had told her to start acting more generous. “Raymond, what’s going on? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

His eyes, if possible, grew even wider, red veins pulsing in frantic rhythm around the washed-out blue of each iris. “Not a ghost,” he said in a strangled whisper. “Just – please, come with me. I’ve found something out under the rose bush, something so fantastical…I can’t tell you, Jaclyn. I can only show you.”

Jaclyn felt her smile start to fray at the edges. Fantastical? She’d never once heard Raymond use a word like that. All he read were sports statistics and Popular Mechanics. 

“What is it?” she asked in a cold, foreboding voice. “What have you found out there?”

If Raymond noticed the strange tone to her questions, he showed no sign. “You just have to come and see,” he insisted. “I know you don’t like going outside when it’s sunny, but that precious skin can bear a few extra UV rays. This is a real, genuine marvel.” 

Now he sounded like some sideshow huckster! Jaclyn remembered her therapist’s advice: stay calm, stay centered. Be the focal point of your localized reality. Whatever Raymond had found, it was obviously something important. His face showed more joy than fear, more fascination than repulsion. Maybe the old noble family buried some treasure beneath the rose bush? Now her heart nearly skipped a beat, and she renewed her smile, reaching out one hand to awkwardly pat Raymond’s heaving shoulder. 

“All right, dear. If it means that much to you. Of course I’ll come.”

She followed him outside, into the blazing summer sunlight. Heat flooded over her, making her skin clammy, burning where it touched her face through the tiny holes in her wicker hat. Raymond ran ahead of her with an almost animal gait, fairly hooting with excitement; she had the impression of manicness, near-madness, a fey delight totally foreign to his character. 

A sensation like creeping nightmare surrounded her. She felt her own fragility, the jagged edges she kept carefully padded in cotton to keep from cutting or cracking. Raymond was content to let her swaddle herself, to have her own ordered domains and rules. In turn, she allotted him such freedom as kept him complacent. Now, something threatened this well-established order; something unearthed from the ground, at the base of an ancient rose bush. 

Looking up, she saw the red blossoms bobbing ahead, resembling little plucked hearts suspended on thorny veins. Or rather, like lush mouths pursed for kissing. A swirl of disorienting sensations overcame her, and she staggered, falling against an ornamental shrubbery. The bush broke her fall, Raymond too consumed to notice. He stood under the rose bush now, motioning to her without looking back, his gaze avidly fixated on something down in the earth. She saw him climb lower, the bottom half of his legs disappearing; the bush bowed its engorged blossoms over him. Jaclyn thought she made out something red dripping.

“Come on! We’re going to make a million. Call the magazines first, the scientists second. Or do you think we should call them first? We need it authenticated, don’t want to make it seem like a gauzy hoax. Oh, come on Jaclyn, get off your skinny ass and get over here! Your whole world is about to change.”

Jaclyn flashed back to her childhood. Something started living under her bed; not in the way imaginary monsters did, but something real and black and terrible, a night-thing which whispered horrid profanities to her through the mattress after bedtime. She told her parents, even managing to convince them somewhat, her dad calling on a priest to come and bless the house. Then she’d moved her bed into a different room, putting the mattress flush on the floor, but nothing helped. The voice came to her through the very floorboards. Only when she slept with her parents would the thing under the bed leave her alone, let her sleep.

Eventually, over the tiresome years of her adolescence, the entity whispered to her less and less. Jaclyn settled back into her own bedroom at last, but discovered she could still feel its presence there. Sometimes it seemed a long, snaking arm crept out from the darkness below, raking spectral fingers over her body. For a while, she awoke with bruises in strange, even shameful places; but she persevered, until finally the entity, starved by her willpower, vanished and was heard no more. This concluding chapter to the episode she kept even from her parents, simply telling them all was well, hiding the bruises with makeup.

Ever since, she’d sought to order reality. Make it make sense. Eventually, she started going to see a therapist, who convinced her what she’d experienced as a child wasn’t real in the literal sense. Jaclyn desperately wanted to believe this, as the alternative was too terrible for her to even consider. She’d endured and outlasted the thing by telling herself it wasn’t really there; but still, years later, she had terrible dreams where shadows swept out from under the bed, powerful phantom talons raking against her, shredding her flesh and probing her innards, ripping out her eyes and pouring into her mouth, violating her with an inundation of saturating darkness.

Raymond knew she suffered from nightmares, but she passed them off as mundane in nature.

“Oh, you know me. Naked in front of the class again. I had to do a report on the Spanish Civil War, but all I could remember was the name of Napolean’s horse. Marengo! Isn’t that ridiculous?” Then, she went into the bathroom to tidy up everything, re-order and re-arrange little details until she felt focused, centered on the present. Humming, she’d do up her hair while drowning all memory of night terrors in the backwater of her consciousness, denying while awake what still came to her in dreams.

And Raymond called her crazy! If he only knew what really went on inside her head. Her parents were already dead when she met him, and she had no siblings, so he was spared any stories of her childhood affliction. He just thought she was nervous and controlling, a “twitchy bitch.” He hated her, really, but tolerated her for the most part, savoring his role as persecuted husband. 

Now, this banal and foolish man stood knee-deep in a narrow ditch, staring raptly into the roots of a rosebush, expression like a jungle explorer who’d hacked aside vine and bough to reveal the glittering spires of El Dorado. Whatever was in the ground, whatever he’d found, it wasn’t natural. The way he was acting wasn’t natural. She hated it.

“You see?” he exclaimed, unaware she still lingered some distance from the find. “I dug one up, and it was just like you see in a child’s picture book. Little wings, and a sword, a tiny little sword! Do you have your phone on you? We should take pictures, document the scene before we call anyone.” Only then did his head jerk up, awe-struck features furrowing with irritation as he noted her reticence. “For God’s sake, get over here. Who am I talking to, myself?” She saw his hand stray to the shovel’s handle as he spoke, as if an intimation of violence had casually occurred to him. His brow contracted further, and he jerked his fingers away, instead turning back to regard the hole’s contents. “Just like you see in a child’s picture book,” he muttered again.

Whatever it was, it wasn’t natural. Whatever it was, it would shatter her world. Jaclyn approached the rose bush with baby steps, holding one arm over her eyes. She could feel the plant reaching out to her, brambles scratching against the immaculate silk of her blouse. Closer, closer – Raymond’s compulsive grasping of the shovel gave her an idea. She stepped by increments until the tips of her shoes stuck over the hole’s edge. Jaclyn felt soil crumbling, felt the crumbling of her world. Somewhere in the depths of her mind a horrid, familiar howl rose, promising pain, looking for a crack to re-enter her waking life.

“At first I was scared, but then I starting seeing dollar signs – or pounds, Euros, whatever. I figure we might even be able to sell tickets, advertise to the new age crowd for maximum profit. Do you see it, Jaclyn? Can you believe it? I wonder if the old family who lived here knew anything about this. Lord knows how old the rose bush is.”

Sometimes reality aligns to serendipity. Jaclyn always knew how to seize control of convenience. 

Reaching down, she hefted the shovel, raised and swung it straight down on top of her husband’s balding cranium. Thwack – the blow landed with sickening power. Raymond made no sound as he collapsed forward, into a perfect grave-shaped excavation it seemed. She heard a faint crunching sound, as if his body had disturbed something fragile. Good. Raising the shovel, she delivered three more sound blows to his head. Then, while he still lay twitching, she hastily shoveled all the dirt back on top of him, ignoring the rose bush as it pulsed and writhed with malign life, red fluid gushing from each blossom’s heart. 

In her mind, the dark presence receded, thwarted by a lack of revelation. All she had to carry with her now was Raymond’s murder, a trifling thing compared to whatever he’d wanted to show her. That would have changed things, would have made things worse.

Her world only had room for stability, at whatever cost.

Tamping down the soil while Jimmy Buffet warbled on about Key West, Jaclyn started muttering to herself. She’d loved Raymond once, and perhaps even liked him a bit still. Had it been the right thing to do? What would she tell his family? That he was off on another of his escapades, cavorting with some young escort. He’d done it often enough that the excuse was practically foolproof. Her mind tried not to speculate on what she’d avoided seeing, on what she buried beneath her husband’s corpse. 

He was a sacrifice for her sanity, necessary to stave off chaos; anyone would have done the same in her position.

The sun finally slipped behind the far treeline. She looked down at herself, coated in dirt and blood and sweat, and almost screamed aloud with horror at this ultimate offering made to keep everything in place. But the impulse passed, and she made for the house after pocketing Raymond’s radio and carefully removing her red-stained shoes. Once inside, she stripped off and incinerated her clothing in the basement furnace, heating the house to a swampy fetor in the process. She then went upstairs to wash off the evidence of her crime. She already missed Raymond, his absence evident in the ringing silence of evening as it drew gradually on. 

She would sell the place – but no. Then someone might find the grave. She would have to stay here and tend to it, watch over it, maybe even plant more roses on the plot. Her dedication to this role developed as night deepened, a consuming silence surrounding her. She sat out on the patio, drinking tea and thinking about what to do next, the dark thing in her mind quieted back to the slightest of discrete murmurs. 

The Strawberry Moon rose, shedding a reddish pallor over the countryside. When she went to bed she kept the light on.

***

Out beneath the rose bush, roots twined and coiled, flowers trembling as they glut themselves on Raymond’s precious fluids. His blood coursed into the earth, into the desiccated little bodies in their disturbed graves. Dead mouths opened to suckle obscenely at the flow, withered limbs plumpening, wings dry as cicada husks flushing with a renewed sheen. Twittering, groaning, they crawled out from their interment, burrowing upwards through Raymond’s soft tissues, avoiding only the overly iron-rich liver and the brain, repository of the soul. They gnawed him clean through like an old bone, then cracked his bones and sucked at the foaming marrow; all around the roots roiled and toiled, turning the earth, clearing the way.

Come sunset, crepuscular powers waxing with the risen moon, they sloughed aside the soil of their burial, the roses writhing with excitement, flowers flexing open and shut like mouths declaring a soundless exaltation. The Unseelie had returned to life; they drew their weapons and turned as one towards a lighted window, just visible through the veil of darkness. Hungers consumed them, a malice millennia old, alive again with potent will. As one they flitted through the dusk to consummate a thirst whetted by the grave.

The rose bush wept its blossoms white. Twisting in a frenzy of rapture, tearing itself up by the roots, it toppled to obscure the plot holding Raymond’s remains. 

And all was silent the rest of that night, save for a single faint and failing scream.

[Scott J. Couturier is a Rhysling-nominated poet and prose writer of the weird, liminal, and darkly fantastic. His work has appeared in numerous venues, including The Audient Void, Spectral Realms, Tales from the Magician’s Skull, Space and Time Magazine, Cosmic Horror Monthly, and Weirdbook; his collection of Weird fiction, The Box, is available from Hybrid Sequence Media, while his collection of autumnal & folk horror verse, I Awaken In October, is available from Jackanapes Press. Currently he works as a copy and content editor for Mission Point Press, living an obscure reverie in the wilds of northern Michigan with his partner/live-in editor and two cats.]