Matt texted Cassie from the backyard at midnight on the dot, as planned: I’m here.
Cassie looked out her bedroom window. Sure enough, she could see her brother lurking in the shadows at the base of the porch. She’d turned off the porchlight earlier in the day, just after she’d propped the side gate open and backed her car into the driveway. The car would probably make a racket when she tried to start it, but that couldn’t be helped.
Cassie was already fully dressed; all she did was put on her shoes before creeping out of the house and into the backyard.
Matt was dressed all in black, complete with black work gloves that looked brand new, and had a headlamp already affixed to his forehead. His fleshy jaw was set with determination. Cassie, by contrast, was just in her normal field clothes: cargo pants and a t-shirt. She wished she had some in darker colors, but her wardrobe had been optimized over the years for sunshine comfort, not stealthy midnight plant heists.
“What do you need?” Matt whispered. Cassie gestured him over to the station wagon and popped the trunk, cringing as it shrieked rustily. “I need to fit about two dozen plastic bags with blackberry plants in them in here,” Cassie whispered back. Matt shone his headlamp into the space; the dome light on the car had ceased working years ago.
“Will it fit?” he asked dubiously.
“We have to make it fit,” Cassie said. “Put them in the back seat too, and on the floor. I can drive with one in my lap if needed.”
Matt chewed on his lip before stuttering, “W-w-where will—does he need to—sit? Does he need a seat?”
Good question. “I don’t know,” Cassie muttered. “We’ll have to ask him.”
Even in the dark, Matt looked terrified. “Is he here?”
Right on cue, a shadow emerged from the indistinct gloom of the nighttime yard. Cassie nodded over Matt’s shoulder. He started and whirled around.
Rubus stood in the faint, quavering light of Matt’s headlamp, clad all in ragged black. His eyes looked bruised. Clasped in his sinewy hands was the missing garden gnome.
He nodded cordially at Matt. “Hello.”
“Hi.” Matt swallowed. “It’s nice to see you again.”
“You too,” replied Rubus quietly. There was a moment of profound and yawning awkwardness as nothing more was said.
They didn’t have time for this.
Cassie cleared her throat, almost apologetically, and asked, “Would you like to sit in the front?”
Rubus looked at the car.
“The… the bramble is going in the back,” Cassie explained. “But you could sit up in the seat next to where I’ll be driving. If you… if you need a seat.”
“I’ll try it,” Rubus said.
Matt unnecessarily re-tightened his work gloves. “Can we put the plants in one by one,” he asked nervously, “or do we need to keep them clustered to within a certain radius?”
Rubus looked back at the bramble for a moment, then at the car. “One by one should be fine,” he said quietly. “I’ll let you know if… it hurts.”
“Okay. Right. Okay.” Matt took a shaky breath. “Good.”
“I’ll get the bags out of the bramble,” Cassie said. “Matt, you take them to the gate, then we can all pack the car together. Rubus, you… let us know if you need anything.”
“Okay.” His voice was barely above a whisper. “Thank you.”
The bramble tunnel was sparse and brittle as Cassie walked through—walked, with only a slight crouch. Rubus had opened the channel, although whether it was due to ease-of-access intent or merely an incidental result of the propagation process, she wasn’t sure. In the light of the borrowed headlamp, the leaves looked crumpled and yellow. A few fluttered to the ground as she brushed past, dry as a candy wrapper. Cassie could feel her pulse leap with anxiety, eased only somewhat as she entered the bower and saw the propagated canes, small but otherwise hale. She took them out one by one, cradling each bag to her pounding heart.
Matt and Rubus were speaking softly to each other as Cassie brought the last bag out. “—responsibility of the buyer,” Matt was saying. “Presumably, it will delay any move-in date. The mold incursion is extensive.”
Rubus nodded. “I told Cassie, when I came for your father’s funeral; the house is full of life.” He gestured at the house. “There are quite a few mushrooms growing at the southwest corner of the foundation, as well. I think the cement may be crumbling.”
Matt turned to look at Cassie, eyebrows raised.
“I thought he was being metaphorical,” Cassie said weakly.
Matt made a dismissive it’s-not-important-right-now motion with his gloved hand and took the bag carefully from her arms. “Let’s load the car.”
Everything fit, barely. Cassie surveyed the bags, snugged so tightly against each other and the features of the car they had already begun to deform. At least she wouldn’t have to worry about anything sliding around back there. Rubus’ long legs turned out to be the tightest fit of all: without room to adjust the passenger seat backwards, he sat with his knees crooked at a sharp angle, shins touching the glove box. He sat rigidly in his seat, like a first-time patient at the dentist, clutching the garden gnome to himself and staring straight ahead unblinkingly as Cassie buckled him in. When Cassie asked him if he was comfortable, he just nodded tightly and kept staring.
Matt peered in through the driver’s side window. “We good?”
“As long as my car starts,” Cassie said grimly, and twisted the key in the ignition. The engine spluttered to life on the first try. A good omen. Matt patted the roof of Cassie’s car and hurried to his own as she rolled out of the driveway and drove up the street. His headlights flared to life as he followed.
They drove in tense silence. Cassie kept casting glances at Rubus every few minutes; he held the gnome so tightly she was worried it might shatter. She wondered if she ought to keep him engaged in conversation, like a concussion patient at risk of slipping into a coma, but her mouth was dry and her hands were wet and she was having enough trouble keeping her mind on the road in the dark as it was, so she held her tongue.
Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
Rubus was the one to break the silence, just as they pulled onto the highway. “Cassie,” he said faintly.
“Yes?” Cassie kept her eyes on the on-ramp.
“I…”
There was a soft thump and a zip. Cassie jerked her head around to look, momentarily wobbling the car between two lanes, and her throat seized with horror.
The seatbelt had retracted flat. The gnome lay rocking gently on its side, alone on the seat.
Rubus had disappeared.
Biting back a sob, Cassie returned her focus to the road and floored the gas pedal. The engine roared asthmatically, resulting in a slight increase in speed. Matt effortlessly pulled alongside her on the right. He took one look in at her now-empty passenger seat and his eyes went wide. He dropped back to following position.
It took an agonizing eternity to reach their off-ramp. Cassie barely reduced her speed as she rounded the bend onto the access road, and she completely blew through the flashing yellow light at the rural intersection. At this time of night, those were merely suggestions anyway—and this was an emergency. Matt did the same.
They flew over a set of railroad tracks with no regard for their suspension and barreled down the dirt road on the other side, jouncing violently, then skidded to a dusty halt in front of a chain-blocked fire road. Matt leaped out of his car and hauled a pair of bolt cutters from his back seat. Cassie could see the price tag still attached to the handle as he knelt by one of the posts in the dim yellow glow of her headlights. In a matter of seconds, he had snipped open the corroded old lock and stuffed it in his pocket. He pulled the chain across the road, and they were through.
They had to go slowly now, or else risk their lives. The road was deeply pockmarked and rutted with rocks, and there was a sharp dropoff to one side. The two cars inched along, bouncing and jolting, until the road widened and dipped down to the edge of a stream. Cottonwood trees (Populus trichocarpa) threw sharp shadows onto each other as the cars rumbled to a stop. Cassie cut the engine.
It was eerily quiet after the roar of engines and growl of tires over rough road. Cassie almost felt like she had plugs in her ears; the only sounds to make it through were the gentle trickle of the stream and the click of Matt’s door as he hopped out. She did the same, with a decidedly louder screech of old hinges.
“Is he...?” Matt wrung his hands, looking for a moment like a large, hairy version of their mother.
Cassie shook her head. “I don’t know,” she quavered. “He may just be too tired to manifest. I don’t know. But we’d better get the bramble planted, quick.” Matt nodded and ran to the back of his car, pulling out two spades. Cassie wrenched her trunk open and touched one of the leaves tremulously. It felt healthy, but it was so small… She left it there and joined her brother.
He handed her one of the spades. “You said you had a specific spot in mind, right?”
“Yeah, should be over this way. I hope I can recognize it in the dark.” She wished she had thought to ask Matt to buy another headlamp, but her phone light would have to suffice. She pushed through the underbrush and rock-hopped across the stream, then walked along for a few paces until she found a brook feeding into the stream and turned to follow it uphill. Matt lumbered behind. The two of them scrambled up the slope, panting, until they broke free into the faint moonlight of a clearing. Cassie tramped ahead through a patch of giant horsetail fern (Equisetum telmatiea) until the ground stopped feeling spongy, put her phone in her mouth, and stabbed the spade between her feet with both hands. Soft, but not soggy. Perfect.
Cassie spat her phone back out and surveyed the rest of the clearing. Honestly, it was astonishing it hadn’t already been colonized by a blackberry bramble of its own. She turned back to Matt, who was still catching his breath, and waved him over.
“This is the spot,” she said. “It’s gonna be a real bitch hauling the plants up here, but I think we need to do it in stages anyway, just to keep them clustered together. In case… yeah.” Better to focus on the physical, so as not to get wrapped around the axle of the metaphysical. Cassie instructed Matt on how to pull up the existing plants and dig the holes, and the two of them set to work.
“This absolutely... looks like we’re... disposing... of a body,” Matt grunted haltingly as he dug. “Digging holes... in the wilderness... in the middle... of the night.” He paused to wipe his brow. “I hope no missing persons cases happen in the vicinity anytime soon.”
“Good thing we’ve got such a good lawyer.”
“I am definitely not that kind of lawyer.” He moved on to the next hole. “I’m glad I paid for these tools in cash.”
“We’ll just say it was for my research. You’d be surprised how readily the authorities accept that.” Cassie started another hole of her own. “I’d have a couple trespassing charges otherwise.”
“What were you actually doing?”
“Research,” Cassie said. “I wasn’t lying. Just trespassing.”
They finished their holes and left the spades stuck into the earth, upright poles barely visible in the moonlight, to climb back down the hill and cross the stream to their cars, where they both chugged thirstily at their water bottles.
What followed was an interminable Sisyphean slog of bag moving: first from car to stream, then across the stream, then up the hill, then over to the holes, never splitting the cluster apart by more than a backyard’s length. Both were gasping and sweating through their clothes by the end—at one point on their final trip up the hill, Matt paused to retch into a bush—but they never stopped moving for more than a moment. Too much was at stake. Were the little rooted bramblings wilting, or was it just Cassie’s imagination? It had to be—it took more than just a bit of a ride in a bag to phase Rubus armeniacus.
Wearily, they de-bagged each transplanted sprout and levered it gently into its hole, scooping the displaced dirt back in around it and watering it with what was left in the canteens. Then they both stood back and waited.
And waited.
Cassie made a noise. “Wait here a sec,” she said, unnecessarily. She trudged out of the clearing, slithered down the hill more on her butt than upright, and crossed the stream. She slipped on the last rock; her foot plunged into the stream and twisted at the bottom. Tears began to stream down her face—too much, this was too much—but she kept quiet and hobbled onto the bank and over to her car. The gnome was still there in the front seat, bright colors dulled to grayscale in the dark. She took it and limped damply all the way back to Matt.
“You ok?” he asked.
“Twisted my ankle,” she grated, smudging away tears. “Not too bad. It’ll be fine.” She settled the gnome gently in the middle of the freshly-planted bramble patch. It was taller than most of the plants, and gazed across them possessively. Cassie hobbled back to the patch edge and dropped inelegantly down in the dirt. After only a moment of sitting, she slumped onto her back and cried.
“Do you need first aid?” Matt asked nervously.
“No!” She howled, although she probably did. “No, I need him to be alive!” Cassie was practically screaming; she rolled over and pressed her face to the dirt to muffle the volume. “I just lost Dad, I can’t lose him too! I just got him back, and it’s my fault! I forgot! Like some kind of moron! And I wasn’t a little kid, either, I was thirteen! Fucking thirteen! There were pictures and everything!” Her ranting didn’t make sense, but Matt still sat down heavily at her back and patted her shoulder. Like a dog. Oddly, it did make her feel comforted, but feeling comforted just made her cry more.
She sat up again once the tears slowed. She could feel dirt all over her face, but made no move to wipe it off. It smelled good.
“Do you actually think we should wait here for him to… revive?” Matt ventured finally.
“No,” Cassie replied dully. “No, I’ll come back to check tomorrow. Today. Later.” She fished out her phone to see what time it was, but the battery had finally run out. Too much flashlight use. “Let’s go.” They gathered the spades and bundled the bags, misshapen and dirty, into one big crinkly lump, and made their careful way back down.
The gnome watched them go with unseeing eyes.