The Room of Rotting Flowers

The bus to Karwar smelled of diesel and damp earth, and Meera pressed her face to the cold window, watching the rain turn the red laterite soil into a slurry that swallowed the narrow roads. She’d been away for five years, building a life in Bangalore, but the call from Neelam had dragged her back.

‘Mira, you have to come. It’s about Amma’s house… they’re saying we need to sell it. I can’t do it alone.’

Amma’s house. The old colonial bungalow on Church Street, with its peeling paint and the garden that had grown wild after her mother’s death. Meera had sworn never to return. It held too many memories, especially of their childhood friend, Rhea, who had vanished when they were twelve.

Now, as the bus groaned to a halt at the Karwar depot, the familiar scent of jasmine and fish hit her, and she felt a chill despite the humid air. Neelam was waiting under the tin shed, her face pale, eyes darting.

‘Meera, thank God,’ she whispered, gripping her arm tightly. ‘It’s… it’s worse than I thought.’

They drove to the bungalow in Neelam’s battered scooter, the rain easing to a drizzle. The house stood at the end of a cul-de-sac, its windows like empty eyes. The garden was a tangle of overgrown hibiscus and thorny bougainvillea, and the air was thick with the scent of rot, as if something had died in the undergrowth.

‘It’s the flowers,’ Neelam said, unlocking the heavy wooden door. ‘The rose bushes Amma planted. They’re all dying, but they still bloom… in a way.’

Inside, the house was musty with the smell of old wood and dried spices. Dust motes danced in the slanted light. Meera felt a tightness in her chest as she walked through the rooms, her fingers brushing over the faded photographs on the walls. There was one of them, Rhea, Neelam, and her, in the garden, all smiles.

‘Remember Rhea?’ Meera asked, her voice barely a whisper.

Neelam nodded, her jaw tight. ‘That’s why I asked you to come. I found something… in the attic.’

They climbed the creaking stairs to the attic, a cramped space filled with trunks and moth-eaten curtains. In the corner, under a stained tarpaulin, lay Rhea’s old diary, the one she’d always hidden from them.

‘I was cleaning out Amma’s things and I fell on this,’ Neelam said, handing it to Meera. ‘I read it. Meera, it’s… horrible.’

Meera took the diary, its cover warped and smelling of damp. She opened it, and the first page had Rhea’s looping handwriting. It was dated a month before she vanished.

‘The flowers are moving again. They move at night when no one’s watching. I saw them crawl from the garden to my window, their petals like wet fingers. They whispered my name, but I couldn’t tell anyone. Amma said I was imagining things. But they’re real. They’re eating the light in my room.’

Suddenly, from downstairs, a sound. A wet, slithering noise, like something heavy being dragged across the floor. Meera’s blood ran cold. She looked at Neelam, whose face was whiter than chalk.

‘It’s been doing that all week,’ Neelam stammered. ‘But I thought it was just the house settling.’

The diary fell from Meera’s hands as the noise grew louder, coming up the stairs. The stairs that led to the attic. The only way down was blocked.

‘I think we need to leave,’ Meera said, her voice trembling. But when they turned, the attic door was slowly closing, pushed by a gust of wind that smelled of overripe mangoes and death.

Through the narrowing gap, Meera saw a figure in the hallway below, shrouded in shadow, its shape that of a woman, but its skin was the color of bruised flowers, and its hair was a writhing mass of creepers. It raised a hand, fingers like petals, and pointed straight at them.

‘You shouldn’t have come back,’ it said, in a voice that was both sweet and rotten. ‘The roses have been waiting.’

The door slammed shut, plunging them into darkness. Meera fumbled for her phone, the light revealing the diary lying open at the last page, where Rhea’s handwriting had become frantic, the letters blotched with what looked like dried blood.

‘Tonight, the garden takes me. But I’ll bloom again. I’ll bloom in their dreams, in their rooms, in the air they breathe. The ones who remember me will smell the decay. They will see the petals in their food, in their pillows. And they will understand. The house wants a new gardener. It always does.’

A cold breath stirred the nape of Meera’s neck, and she heard a soft giggle from behind them, in the attic, among the trunks. She turned slowly, her hand trembling, and in the dusty light, she saw a single rose, perfectly red, lying on top of an old trunk, as if placed there for her. Its petals opened slowly, revealing a black heart, and from that heart, a thousand tiny moths burst forth, filling the air.

And then, the attic was silent, save for the sound of two beating hearts, and the distant, patient rustle of petals in the garden below, waiting for morning, when the new gardener would come.

They never found Rhea’s body. But every spring, the roses in that garden bloom with an unnatural lushness, and their scent is so sweet, so cloying, that it makes the neighbors’ eyes water. And in the rooms of the old bungalow, if you listen closely at night, you can hear a faint, wet sound—the sound of petals unfurling, hungry for soil, hungry for light, hungry for the living.