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Darkness Blooms
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Darkness Blooms
- A Novella -
Christopher Bloodworth
Darkness Blooms
- A Novella -
Copyright © 2015 by Christopher Bloodworth
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the author.
Cover art by Rofik Achmad
Cover design by Christopher Bloodworth
Interior design by Christopher Bloodworth
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For Stephanie.
OTHER BLOODWORTH TITLES
HANDBOOK FOR A TEENAGE ANTICHRIST
WELCOME TO THE FAMILY
BEDTIME STORIES FOR THE DAMNED
BOOTHWORLD INDUSTRIES EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS
Table of Contents
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
Epilogue
Book 1 of the Armageddon Trilogy
Other Bloodworth Titles
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1
The last call Sylvia ever received took place on February seventeenth.
Sylvia tapped the screen of her cell and answered. “Hello?”
“Sylly?” The voice on the other end of the line asked.
Sylvia could’ve picked that voice out of a crowded train station even if it hadn’t used her old nickname.
“Mamere?” Sylvia asked back. She sat down at her desk and looked up at the map of Louisiana above her desk, tracing the roads that led from New Orleans to Dyson Ditch.
“You know it’s me,” Mamere said. “Voice ain’t changed at all. Yours has dropped a fair bit, eh?”
Sylvia rolled her eyes.
“Don’t roll your eyes at me,” Mamere said from the other end of the phone.
It was always disconcerting how easily her step-grandmother could pinpoint exactly what she was doing without having eyes on Sylvia.
Sylvia sighed. “Sorry.”
“Your Papere is gone.”
And there it was.
Plain and simple.
Sylvia had no living relatives now. She was the only Crawstow remaining. Some might say that Mamere counted as she’d been the only mother Sylvia ever had, but Mamere wasn’t blood, and no matter what anyone bullshitted, that mattered.
Of course it did.
Family history was built on the bodies of ancestors.
Blood ancestors.
“In his sleep?” Sylvia asked, shaking her head even as the question spilled out.
Of course it hadn’t been in his sleep.
“No,” Mamere said. “Don’t be a couyon, girl. He disappeared like I told you he would when you was little.”
Family history.
Sylvia still remembered the tears that poured down her face when her step-grandmother sat her down to tell her that her grandfather would disappear when she was a grown woman. She hadn’t really thought much about it though. It wasn’t the sort of thing you expected to come true.
“How long has he been missing?” Sylvia asked even though she already knew the answer.
“Year,” Mamere said.
“A whole year and you’re just now calling me?”
Mamere snorted from the other end of the phone.
“So...” Sylvia’s voice fell off. She was about to ask when the funeral was, but what did you do when someone disappeared. Did you even have a funeral?
“There was no will, but you can come get anything of his that you want.”
“When?” Sylvia asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” Sylvia asked. “I have work tomorrow. What about this weekend?”
“I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. Back to Baton Rouge for me.”
“What’s happening to the house?”
“Already sold. Come by tomorrow or not at all. I’ll be gone and all of his stuff will be there. Key’s in the same place. Good luck, girl.”
There was a click from Mamere’s end of the phone.
2
Sylvia rolled into Greyson the next morning around 7 AM, but something felt wrong about the town. It felt empty.
There were cars parked on either side of the road, but none of the lights in any of the businesses were on. None of the restaurants were open for breakfast. No one walked on the sidewalks.
Sylvia didn’t like it. Thankfully, her grandparents lived on the outskirts of the town.
She looked at the GPS on her cell to make sure that she was actually in Greyson.
She was.
Sylvia kept driving, trying not to think about the way her hands gripped the steering wheel to keep from shaking.
The place where Sylvia had grown up was smaller than she remembered, or maybe she’d just grown to fill more of it.
“How did I ever live here?”
Her apartment had more square footage than this house by a long shot.
The steps leading up to the front porch sagged, and when she stepped on the first one, it groaned. Thoughts of her leg plunging through a cracked board with rusty nails sticking out came to mind, but Sylvia pushed that thought from her head and kept going. Each step groaned louder than the last and when she finally stepped onto the front porch, the destination of supposed safety, the boards bowed under her weight.
Sylvia continued to the front door and fished the key out from behind the old shingle where they’d always kept it. Faded blue paint flaked off onto her fingers as she put the shingle back.
The floor inside the house was better, studier. The rooms all had the same dead perfume smell that they’d always had, only now they were empty. Sylvia walked through the old house, breathing in the old smells of her childhood. She walked room to room, lingering longer in some than others as memories rolled over her.
Papere’s stuff was all still in the bedroom he shared with Mamere, although it felt like a stranger’s things without her Mamere’s stuff beside it all.
Sylvia went straight for the desk in the corner. That held the thing she wanted, assuming Mamere hadn’t changed her mind or just lied outright and had taken something of Papere’s back to Baton Rouge with her.
Pulling open the middle drawer, Sylvia smiled.
The book was there.
Alone in the dark.
Hers.
A memory came to mind of sitting on Papere’s knee as he wrote. She couldn’t read at the time, but there had been drawings and maps in addition to the quick, clipped letters that made up Papere’s handwriting.
Sylvia pulled the book out, smiling. It was a leather bound book dyed a green so dark that it almost looked black. When she pushed on the cover, it gave way under her fingertips, then pressed back against the indentations her fingers left, like it had that expensive Swedish foam stuff just beneath the surface of the dark leather.
She opened the cover of the book, smiling at the antique key she’d watched her Papere draw. Color more like. The whole page was black, and in a black a shade lighter than the rest of the page was an
antique key. It had taken Papere several weeks to draw that. She remembered sitting on his knee, listening to his wallet chain clink against the wooden chair as he worked, watching as he brought the pen to the top of the page and drew a line straight down the page vertically. He would let out his breath after every stroke, as if he’d been holding it. He pressed so hard on the paper, the tendons in his hands standing out like cables that sometimes Sylvia thought the paper would tear or the tip of his pen would snap off.
When he got to the key, he kept almost the same pressure on the paper, only letting up a tiny bit when he got to the place where the key was, then he’d go right back to full pressure.
She remembered watching as the image took shape over the weeks. On his knee as he drew the final downward stroke on the page, she’d let out a sigh too, but what happened next scared her.
“One,” Papere had said under his breath. “Seventeen to go.”
He brought his pen to the left and started from the beginning, pressing the pen down into the paper on the left most side of the page and carving downwards, retracing his first line.
Sylvia never sat in his lap again after that.
She did go in to watch him from time to time.
It took a year for him to finish his eighteen passes on the page.
After that, he closed the book, put it in the drawer where she’d just pulled from, and never opened it or talked of it again.
He’d done that cover page after the rest of the book was filled with words and images, and now the book was hers.
Sylvia sighed, closing the book and tucking it under her arm. She started walking back out of the house when another thought occurred to her.
The greenhouse.
Her grandfather had collected orchids at one time, keeping them in a tiny greenhouse he’d built himself behind the house.
Sylvia set the book down on the kitchen counter as she walked to the back of the house. Opening the door onto the back porch, Sylvia stepped out and frowned.
Scattered around the backyard were several black mounds. Sylvia counted them off. 18 total.
From the porch, the black mounds looked like piles of burnt rags. Encircling each mound was a perfect circle of pristine soil, almost as if the grass had shrunk back, or as if—Sylvia voiced her thought aloud, “Something burned it.”
That seemed to make more sense, but not enough sense for Sylvia. She walked over to the mound closest to the stairs and crouched down.
The mounds weren’t burnt rags at all. Each was covered in dusky, black flowers. Hundreds of them, none larger than a quarter. Each bloom was twisted closed, shiny black veins crisscrossing the dull black petals.
Sylvia had never seen anything like it.
She stood and walked to the next mound, noticing that in the grassy space between each mound, a few single black blooms grew. Each of these singles again had its own perfect circle of soil between it and the surrounding grass.
Sylvia shook her head as she stood and walked to the greenhouse.
She’d never seen anything like it, but as she stepped up to the door of the greenhouse and reached her hand out to turn the handle, she realized that she had.
In fifth grade, she’d done a science project on the effect that different hand soaps had on bacteria. She’d gone to her pediatrician and asked for agar slides. Papere paid for them and when they got home, the fun started. She went through a whole day without washing her hands, then she touched one of the agar slides. She then washed her hands with one of the selected soaps and touched another slide.
They covered the slides and watched the bacteria grow on the surface. Perfect little circles of filth.
That’s what the patches of black flowers reminded her of.
When Sylvia turned around to look at them again, her stomach twisted.
“That’s stupid,” she said under her breath, irritated that for a second she thought that she’d seen one of the blooms turn to face her. “Now you’re scared of wind?”
Her eyes flicked across the 18 flower mounds, stomach still clenched even though she didn’t see any more movement. Letting out a sigh, she turned back to the greenhouse.
Hopefully Mamere had watered some of Papere’s orchids and she could take a living piece of him home with her.
Sylvia twisted the handle, pulled the door open, and screamed.
3
She tried to back up, but tripped on something. Then she was falling. Falling and staring at the hulking man in the black trench coat, black hat, and what looked like an antique plague doctor mask that was black with a long, curved white beak. His arms spread wide to grab her.
Sylvia kicked her feet, trying to get traction so she could run. Then she saw the man’s feet.
Or rather, the lack of feet.
It took her several shuddering breaths to calm down and quit trying to run.
The man had no feet because it wasn’t a man at all. It was a scarecrow. The wooden post plainly in sight. The scarecrow didn’t even have hands. The coat sleeves just stopped.
“First wind,” Sylvia said, shaking her head. “Now a scarecrow. Nice.”
Sylvia got to her feet, brushed the dirt from her shorts and legs, and walked into a different greenhouse than the one she’d grown up with.
The outside hadn’t changed a bit, but the contents inside had.
Mounted beside the door, just inside was an elaborate metal box. Painted onto the outside of the box with white paint was a large, thick circle. Inside the circle, at the bottom were two white X’s, that were beside each other. At the top of the circle, still inside it though, were four vertical white lines, side by side. A horizontal white line bisected all four vertical lines.
Sylvia thumbed open the catch at the top of the box and the front cover lowered itself on pneumatic hinges that hissed. Inside the box were all sorts of knobs and switches, all that same dull black color. Above each knob or switch was a symbol. There was a golden X with the upper right arm extending out farther than the others. Another symbol consisted of eight purple dots that formed a circle with a much larger purple dot at the center. Above another switch were two jade circles with solid black dots at the center.
The symbols went on and on. Sylvia almost switched one on, but after following a tube that extended up from the box and back across the ceiling of the greenhouse, she decided against it. What if one of the switches turned on water and she soaked herself?
Seemed like a bad idea to her.
Sylvia noticed that the main tube that ran down the center of the green house branched out into smaller tubes that curved down the ceiling and along the walls. Some snaked out along the tables and others seemed to go down the walls and into the concrete beneath her feet.
On the tables were something that Sylvia hadn’t ever seen in the greenhouse before.
Plants that weren’t orchids.
Growing up, Papere had only ever grown orchids. Sylvia brought a poinsettia home from school one day to put in the greenhouse to surprise Papere as a gift. When he went out to the greenhouse that night after dinner, his nightly ritual, he’d called her out as soon as he’d set foot inside.
She’d gone out the back door, skipping down the steps, smiling and happy that she’d done a good thing.
When she walked into the greenhouse, Papere was frowning.
“What is this?” He’d asked her.
“It’s a poinsettia,” she told him. “They were giving them away at school so I brought one home for you to go with the other plants.”
Papere snorted. “Plants? I don’t grow plants, I grow orchids. There’s a difference, child. Do you know what the difference is?”
Sylvia shook her head no, feeling tears prick at the corners of her eyes.
“These are orchids,” Papere said, gesturing all around the greenhouse with his hands except for the place where her poinsettia sat, then he pointed right at it. “This is a weed. Plants that aren’t orchids are either weeds or trees, and I have no interest in either.”
“There’s no need to cry for a weed, child,” Papere said. “They’ll die and grow again. An orchid though, needs love and care.”
Sylvia nodded, not really understanding though.
“I think you’re old enough,” Papere said with a smile. “I think it’s time.”
Oh how her heart had fluttered at that. She’d begged him for an orchid of her own since she’d first been allowed into the greenhouse.
“It has to be a good one though,” Papere said, turning away from her and walking around the greenhouse, pausing here and there, mumbling to himself before finally picking up a little clay pot with huge holes in the side. It was filled with bark and a little green sprig sat atop thin white roots with green tips that seemed to be reaching for anything they could find.
“This is a Neofinetia Falcata, can you say that?” He asked.
She repeated it back to him.
“Good,” he said. “This one is yours. We’ll mount it to a slab of bark tomorrow and it will be up to you to care for it.”
That had been one of the proudest moments of Sylvia’s young life.
What filled the greenhouse now though were pots and glass jars filled with plant species that Sylvia had never seen before. There was something that looked like a venus flytrap, only the tendrils that extended from each mouth were a bright blue that ended in a shiny black. In jars there were plants that had leaves covered in beads of bright white liquid that had a yellow tint, almost like pus.
Sylvia walked down the center of the greenhouse, not wanting to reach out and touch any of the plants. She also didn’t want to touch the scarecrow and made sure to keep her distance as she walked around it.
Farther in the greenhouse were even stranger plants. There was a pot that had long, tubular black and white striped roots erupting from the center and jointed every two inches. Next to it was a massive jar filled with what appeared to be fuzzy, red confetti, but when Sylvia leaned closer, she saw that the little bits of confetti were actually little red blossoms.