Let's Play in the Garden (19 page)

16. Let Me Out!

The school nurse, Mrs. Cleftin, pulled the thermometer out of Merydith’s mouth as Mrs. McCormick leaned in to look.

“Well, Mrs. Cleftin?” asked Mrs. McCormick.

“She has a whopping fever and seems to be dehydrated as well. You were right to have her brought here and have her dismissed. She must go to a doctor immediately. This could get worse. I’ll notify her parents right now.” Mrs. Cleftin slipped the thermometer back into its place and immediately went to the office to get Merydith’s home number.

Merydith sat on the cushioned bed with a heavy blanket wrapped around her. She stared blankly into space as she continued to shiver and shake like a leaf.

Mrs. McCormick went over to her and put her arms around her. “Don’t worry, Merydith, you’re going to be just fine. We’re sending you home. The nurse is getting your parents right now. They should be here in no time, and then everything will be just fine.”

Ha! If only she knew. They’re the last things that can help me now. They’re nothing but liars. I don’t even know who they really are. I will not let them get away with this. Tobey and I will see to it. They’re the ones responsible for Aaron’s vanishing. They’re responsible for all our pain. I will heal myself…alone.

Within ninety minutes, Simon arrived at the school. All the while Mrs. McCormick wondered if he was ever going to show up. Classes had come and gone, and she sat and waited with Merydith, who was silent the entire time.

At last, the gruff and stern Simon walked into the nurse’s office, visibly irritated. It seemed his granddaughter was just a thorn in his side.

“Well, c’mon, Merydith, let’s go,” he said in an unsympathetic tone.

“I’m sure glad you got here, Mr. Santaneen.” Mrs. McCormick started. “Merydith collapsed in my class. You’ve got to get her to a doctor as soon as possible. She’s running a high temperature and could become dehydrated again, as well.”

“Well that’s all very fine, Miss—?”

“Mrs. McCormick.”

“Well, that’s all fine and dandy, Mrs. McCormick, but we have our own ways of dealing with our family illnesses. We know better than any doctor. Good day.”

Merydith looked back as she walked out of the school with Simon. “Thank you, Mrs. McCormick,” she managed to squeak.

“You’re very welcome,” Mrs. McCormick answered back. She watched as the two climbed into the truck and pulled out of the parking lot. “That has to be the strangest man I have ever met. Poor girl, my heart goes out to her.”

Mrs. Cleftin just sniffed and returned to her paperwork.

###

Merydith was taken directly home and went straight to her room. There she disappeared under a stack of heavy blankets. Her mother carried up more medicine and juice and told her to use the solar panel.

Marion seemed to lack the concern and caring from before. Merydith suddenly remembered what she had learned in school. She seethed with anger again, and after her mother left the room, she took the green tablets out of her mouth and hurled them across the room.

###

That night, as everyone slept, something stirred in the garden. Among the withered flowers and skeletal trees something walked. Among the frost-coated vegetables and fruits something raged. It traveled the twisted and lifeless paths, through the slumbering plants and brushes, and cried out…distressed.

It wailed for freedom and searched for the way out of its prison.

The beast stomped along the vast acres of the garden, snarling and moaning. With brute strength it shook the trees and the oversized plants.

The garden quaked beneath its steps, animals scurried, snow shook from the plants and scattered in the breeze. It thundered around, growing angrier with every passing second. In its rage, it lashed out at anything in its path, striking the plants and foliage, beating trees and overturning stone wells, picking up benches and hurling them.

It stood three or four times bigger than Simon, the tallest member of the family. It glared at its hideous form in a reflecting pool…green moss covered its flesh and twisted in a collage of lichen, fungus, vines, and leaves. Hulking, immensely strong, and perpetually angry, it hungered for freedom.

Like Merydith’s rage and resentment, its own grew to insane proportions. It wanted out of this foul and artificial place. It was the creation of a man gone insane, an evil man who deserved to be crushed and smashed and devoured.

“
Aaarrrrggggghhhh!”

The fury it carried with it left impression on everything. Massive footprints marred the grounds—three-toed footprints.

Beside it, it dragged a thorn-ridden, slime-infested green tentacle that served as its left arm. The right one was human-like, but much stronger, with clawed fingers more like knives that could shred flesh like paper.

It scoured the garden deeper, observing, watching, listening. It stared at huge bushes and trees and wondered about them. For some reason, it envied them. They knew their place; they knew what they were and where they belonged. It did not.

A noise caught its attention, a sound whispering from behind. It turned and a gray rabbit darted down the path behind it. Hunger…it had remembered the pain of hunger. It needed the animal, the rabbit, its mouth drooling with saliva as slime secretions oozed from its lumbering body.

It roared and tore after its prey.

The rabbit raced away, but the beast kept up with it, making good time, all the while keeping keen eyes upon him. The tentacle arm shot out, slithering like a snake to try and snatch the rabbit out of the garden.

After three tries garnered nothing, the creature roared with frustration and stomped as hard as it could. The tentacle lashed once more and finally latched the rabbit by the throat.

It pulled the animal into its other hand and crushed it until the rabbit was rendered lifeless. It tore into the rabbit with dagger-like teeth, ripping and chewing the flesh, letting the warm blood coat its face. It felt wonderful, but it wished it was their blood, all of them. The ones on the outside, the ones who who had put it here, had imprisoned it…no,
him
…the ones that put him here, abandoned, alone, wishing him dead. He never asked to be alive in the first place.

That’s why he had killed the little one, the one who had wandered too far. He did not deserve to leave while he could not. He didn’t deserve to be normal while he was nothing but a creature, a thing, an it. He did not deserve to live and be happy. He deserved to be stolen and imprisoned, tortured and devoured, crushed and smashed and eaten.

All of them would come to the same fate. Fueled by anger, he devoured the rest of the rabbit, fur matting his face in bloody clumps, meat torn and shred, bones cracking and popping from socket and joint.

He dropped the remains to the ground and continued on through the forests of the garden, through the patches that were once pumpkins and squashes and lettuce and would soon return. He never touched the vegetable and plant life; he never hurt them. They were brothers. They were like him and understood him and his reasoning. They accepted him.

He lumbered down more paths, his eyes darting here and there, eyeballing the marbled birdbaths and wells, useless trinkets placed by the evil ones outside. He stared at huge, vacant vineyards and decided to return once more to the entrance gate.

It began to snow again.

No! Not more snow upon my flesh. I hate the cold and the snow. It hurts…it hurts…

There was no escape from the cold here, no escape from the snow that continued to attack all the life in the garden, including him—the deadly powder that turned everything brown and made everything decay. It made him weak and hungry.

Why did he wait so long to try to escape? He should have moved on them sooner, before he became weak and they sealed the gate.

They thought they had destroyed him, when in actuality it was they who had brought him to life again. Fools watering this place year after year every summer, finally soaking the earth down to his corpse and pulling him from the brink of death.

The old man’s own secret formula brought him back, and his precious garden had nurtured him to health. He had come back to life too late, though.

It was the end of summer when he’d returned, and he’d been still too weak when fall and that blasted winter showed up. Why couldn’t it have been in the spring? That way he would have had the time to regain his full strength and smash out of the garden.

He’d waited too long and winter had come upon him. Now he was not as strong as he could be. He only had a fraction of his inhuman strength and earthly intelligence.

He spotted the gate ahead. He could see the tips of the boards and the links of strong chains. Damn them…nothing had changed. He rushed toward the gate with full force and rammed his enormous body into it.

The wood shook and creaked, the chains rattled, but the boards remained unruffled. Yet the crack had deepened. The crack unseen and unknown to him and to those who were on the outside. Once it gave way, hellfire would burn.

With one last frustrated roar, he punched the door with his right arm. Wind howled and snow drifted. And he wept.

He walked past the gazebo where they had held their lunches so many times, so many times to escape, so many times lost. He walked up to the garden wall and looked up at their house. It stood silent and still, all except the light glowing in the oldest child’s window.

He watched her curvaceous shadow swaying back and forth in the light. He wanted to get in there, to see and hurt and punish. She wanted the same. He wanted the light. He even envied the humans who dwelled in that artificial light. He wanted inside that house.

A tear came to his eye as he fixed his gaze on that golden window. He would wait, time was his friend, time would set him free. He was not stupid. He knew change was coming, life would come again, strength would come again.
I have to wait. I have to wait.

###

I have to wait.
Merydith thought
. I was a fool to attempt all of this in the winter.
How could I expect to find out anything when I get sick every time I turn around? I’m too weak to continue this game. It’ll have to wait until spring. It won’t be that long. All I have to do is wait. In the spring, I’ll be at my strongest, and able to take the foundation out from under them. I’ll hurt them as they have hurt me. I do this for all of us…including Aaron.

There was a soft knock on her door. “Come in, Tobey. I know it’s you.”

The door opened slowly and Tobey slipped in.

“Tobey, you don’t need to knock. You’re always welcomed in here, anytime.”

“I know, I just can’t help doing it,” he answered.

“Now, what is it? Has anything happened? Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. But that’s what I came to ask you. Are you okay? I know you were dismissed from school today. I heard you fainted.”

“Yes, I fainted. I just couldn’t take the cold anymore, but I’m fine now. I heal quickly. I know how to take care of myself.”

“Mery, why are we always sick? I hate it. It scares me. They scare me.”

“I don’t know, but I promise it won’t be like this forever. Nothing is forever.”

“Momma did something strange to me.”

“What, Tobey? What did she do to you? If she hurt you, I swear I’ll—”

“No, it wasn’t like that. When I was really sick and not getting better she held me under the solar panel. We stood there for some time. I felt so safe and warm. It was so weird. I don’t know what happened, do you?”

“No, not really. I do know it seems to heal us and make us stronger. I figure it’s the sun. That’s what makes us heal. It does something to us. We need it somehow. That’s the one good thing I’ve discovered about us so far. But I still don’t know why it does it. Tobey, there’s something I must tell you, something that will surprise and may upset you.”

“What is it? I can handle it. Really, Mery. Tell me.”

“Before leaving school today I had one class, sex education class. It teaches you about your body, and where babies come from, and about reproduction.” She hesitated before continuing. It was both frightening and embarrassing to repeat this to her younger brother.

“Well, I found out how we reproduce. It takes a man and a woman, and it takes egg and sperm cells. The sperm fertilizes the egg, and that creates the baby that the woman carries for nine months. Mother never carried a baby for nine months. She was never pregnant. And the belly buttons, those were umbilical cords. That’s how a baby is fed inside the mother’s belly. At birth, the doctor cuts off the cord, and that gives you your belly button. We don’t have belly buttons because we never had umbilical cords. We were never inside anybody.

“Mother has no belly button either. She’s the same as us, so the three of us were never given birth to. I don’t know where we came from, or where they came from, or who we all are.”

Tears filled both their eyes. They sobbed and hugged each other. Tobey raised his head to her and smiled.

“It’s okay, Merydith, it’s really okay. I’m not scared. We’ll get through this. I know we will. We’ll find out the truth, Mery. Please stop crying. You’re the strong one; you said everything would be all right and it will. One thing is for sure, I know that you really are my sister and you always will be. I love you Merydith.”

She smiled with a glimmer of hope in her eyes. “I love you too, Tobey.”

They hugged quietly.

17. Christmas

Merydith and Tobey fought the cold and their illnesses. Each of them took turns staying out of school. The curiosity within Mrs. McCormick grew. She would constantly ask Merydith about her strange knack of getting sick so often. She never received a satisfactory answer.

Merydith walked downstairs, bored with a touch of frustration. It was late and dinner was long over. Tobey was in his room, studying quietly. The adults had gathered in the family room to watch TV. Strangely enough, Merydith felt she should join them. She felt pulled in their direction for some odd reason.

Surprisingly, the TV was on the nightly news, something they very rarely watched. They cared very little for the news and mostly avoided it like an infectious disease. Simon, Gladys and Marion listened to a report, unaware of Merydith’s presence. That allowed her to listen in with them.