The Catacomb Garden

When I returned from the mountain village of Abuela Rosa, the nightmares faded, and life in the city felt almost bearable. My brother and sister resumed their schooling, but our mother, fretful and worn, kept me at home, insisting that rest and prayer would mend what had broken. I spent my days in the company of Abuela Rosa, a stooped woman who smelled of chamomile and dust, and her legion of cats—a writhing, purring tide that lapped at my ankles. When I wasn’t helping her feed them, I was on my knees before the small plaster saints in her candlelit room. Yet even with this, the terror would sometimes surge, a riptide pulling me under, and I would pace the narrow hallways of our apartment, muttering to myself, a mad litany against the creeping dark. The next morning, I would retreat from my family, finding solace in a rusted toy car I pushed along the cracks in the linoleum, pretending I was somewhere else.

One humid afternoon, my mother and her boyfriend, a man with grease-stained hands and a perpetual scowl, drove me across the sprawling, smog-choked city to my Aunt Elba’s house. ‘She has a big house,’ my mother said, her voice tight, ‘and a big family. You’ll never be alone.’ The house was a decaying Victorian nestled in a forgotten cul-de-sac, its garden a riot of overgrown roses and thorny vines. Aunt Elba, a plump woman with kind but weary eyes, welcomed me with a squeeze that smelled of garlic and mothballs. Her family was indeed large: three boisterous cousins, a taciturn uncle, and a cacophony of barking dogs. They all seemed to exist in a constant, chaotic motion that I found both comforting and overwhelming.

At first, my pacing and whispered monologues were met with gentle understanding. Aunt Elba would pat my shoulder, her hand warm and solid. My cousins ignored me, too engrossed in their own games. But as the weeks passed, the nightmares, though quiescent, began to mutate. They were no longer the familiar chases and falls, but something new, a whisper of soil and roots, a pressure beneath my skin. I became obsessed with the garden, with the dark, loamy earth beneath the tangled roses. I would sit for hours in the dirt, my fingers digging, feeling the cool, damp weight of the soil, a strange comfort blooming in my chest.

One afternoon, as I clawed at the ground beneath a wilting hydrangea, my fingers brushed against something hard and smooth. I excavated a small, clay figurine, no bigger than my thumb, caked in dirt. It was a crude, featureless humanoid shape. A strange thrill shot through me. I cleaned it with my shirt and pocketed it, feeling a possessive surge. That night, I dreamt of a vast, subterranean garden, lit by a sickly green glow, where rows of human-sized cocoons hung from gnarled roots. I woke with a gasp, the texture of soil still on my tongue. The figurine was warm in my hand.

Days turned into a grim routine. I would unearth more figurines, always buried in the garden, always forming a silent congregation beneath the roses. My cousins began to avoid me, whispering that I was ‘creepy.’ Aunt Elba’s gaze grew troubled, and I caught her speaking in low tones to my uncle, her eyes darting toward me. The nightmares grew more vivid, more insistent, the cocoons in the underground garden beginning to twitch. I felt an irresistible pull to complete the collection, to find them all.

One evening, after a family dinner, I slipped out to the garden, the moon a pale coin in the sky. I dug frantically, my hands bleeding, until I unearthed the final figurine. As my fingers closed around it, a tremor shook the ground, and the roses behind me parted to reveal a gaping maw in the earth, a staircase spiraling down into darkness. A sweet, loamy scent wafted up, mingled with something foul. The figurines in my pocket vibrated, humming in unison. I knew, with a terrible certainty, that my nightmares had never truly left. They had simply been waiting, patient and hungry, and I had been the one to find their garden.

I descended the stairs, my heart pounding a frantic rhythm. At the bottom, the underground garden awaited. The cocoons hung from the roots, but they were not human. They were my size, and they were pulsing with a sickly life. Each cocoon bore a face—my face, contorted in the throes of sleep, my eyes wide with terror. I heard a cacophony of whispers, the voices of all the children who had been left here before, to be tended by the old women, to pray and feed the cats, to plant the seeds of new nightmares. I realized then that I was not a visitor. I was a gardener. And my own nightmare was the first bloom.

I turned to flee, but the stairs were gone. In their place, a familiar, stooped figure stood, her eyes glowing like embers. Abuela Rosa smiled, and her mouth was full of soil. ‘You’ve found your roots, child,’ she said, her voice a rustle of dead leaves. ‘Now you must plant.’ The ground beneath my feet began to shift, and I felt roots curling around my ankles, drawing me down. I screamed, but no sound came out, only a shower of dirt. The last thing I saw was the garden closing over my head, a final, silent blossom on the surface, a rose as black as midnight.