The Wormwood Bloom

The day I decided to rip out the garden, I knew something had to give. Our rental, a sprawling Victorian with peeling paint and a wraparound porch, had been a steal. My partner, Lena, and I had jumped at it, ignoring the nagging feeling that the walls themselves were holding their breath. The landlord, a man named Mr. Holloway, had been oddly insistent on two things: the garden must be kept ‘natural,’ and absolutely no pets. Not even a hamster.

From the beginning, the place felt wrong. The rose bushes that bordered the property were monstrous, their thorny canes reaching like grasping fingers, but they never bloomed. They just seemed to pulse, hungry for something they couldn’t find. The backyard was a patch of sickly crabgrass, and a few weeks in, we found a pile of bones half-buried near the fence. We told ourselves they were from a deer, but they looked too large, too human-shaped.

Inside, the house was immaculate, almost too perfect. The hardwood floors gleamed, the radiators clanked with warmth, but there was a musty, sweet smell that clung to everything, like rotting flowers. We discovered a chain bolted to the wall just outside our bedroom window, and the screen was held on with yellowish duct tape. I removed the chain and replaced the tape, but the sense of being watched never left.

Lena started confessing to waking up at 3:33 AM every night, feeling like something was pressing on her chest. She saw a figure standing at the foot of the bed, a tall, thin silhouette that dissolved when she blinked. I dismissed it as sleep paralysis, but a part of me felt it too. I felt a presence in the basement, a weight in the air like a held breath. I started meditating, trying to clear my mind, but I kept getting a single image: a patch of dark soil, pulsing like a heartbeat.

That’s when I decided to fight back. I was raised by a mother who practiced a mishmash of folk religions, and I’d studied everything from Buddhism to Wicca. I feared nothing spiritual, but this… this was different. This was a malevolent intelligence, passive yet persistent. I started an anti-feng shui campaign. I moved furniture to disrupt the flow, hung mirrors to deflect negativity, and burned sage. But nothing worked.

Then I tackled the garden. I poisoned the patches of moss that grew in thick, damp clumps, and after a week, they turned black and brittle. I ripped them out with my bare hands, the roots coming up easily, as if they wanted to leave. In their place, I planted tulip bulbs and grass seed, trying to impose life where there was death. That night, I had a dream. I was standing in the garden, and the soil split open, revealing a network of pale, threadlike roots that writhed like worms. They reached up, wrapping around my ankles, and whispered in a voice that wasn’t a voice, ‘You’ve let them out.’

When I woke, I found the tulips had already sprouted, their green tips breaking the soil in perfect rows. But they were facing the house, not the sun. And Lena was standing at the window, staring at me with an expression I didn’t recognize. ‘Don’t,’ she said, her voice hollow. ‘Don’t let them in.’

I ignored her. I was convinced that the garden was the key. I spent every day out there, digging, planting, clearing. I tore out a patch of withered weeds and found a small, porcelain doll buried there, its eyes scratched out. I burned it, but the smell of burning plastic filled the house for hours. The next morning, I found the doll intact on our doorstep, its blank eyes aimed at the front door.

The final night was the worst. A storm rolled in, heavy with rain, and the wind screamed through the bare branches of the rose bushes. I had just finished planting a new batch of marigolds when I heard a sound from the shed: a low, rhythmic scraping, as if something was dragging a heavy stone across the floor. I opened the shed door to find the old, rusted gardening tools arranged in a neat circle, with a pile of fresh dirt in the center. In the dirt, a single tulip had bloomed. Its petals were black as pitch, and its stem was curved like a beckoning finger.

I fell to my knees, exhausted, and as the rain soaked through my clothes, I felt something move beneath the soil. Slowly, I realized the entire garden was a lie. The beautiful flowers I had planted were just the surface. The real garden was ancient, waiting to be disturbed. And I had been the fool to wake it.

I ran inside, locking the door behind me. Lena was standing in the hallway, shaking. She pointed to the basement door, which was slowly creaking open. A thin, watery light spilled from within. We held each other, listening. The howling from before, the one we had heard the first week, started again. But now it was close, beneath our feet, and it was no animal.

I knew then that the tulips I had planted were not flowers. They were the roots of something older, something that had been sleeping under this house for a century. And I had fed it with my own energy, day by day, believing I was cleansing the land. I had been building a feng shui garden, but I had only been tending its grave.

The door at the bottom of the basement stairs opened. A silhouette stood there, tall and thin, its head cocked to one side. It took a step, and I heard the sound of bare feet on wood. I know now that the low rent was never a bargain. It was a warning. And in my arrogance, I had let it in.

As I write this, the tulips outside are all in bloom. They are black, every one of them, and they cover the yard like a funeral shroud. The howling has stopped. Now, there is only the silence of the garden, waiting for its next gardener.