XVIII
Madam smiled and asked me if I wanted to work for her for a little while. She assumed correctly that I had nowhere safe to go. I couldn't go back to the church with its constant monster battle. The graveyard was out of the question. I had to find somewhere safe for a little while to avoid the fog while I figured out how to preserve my soul. My body was still out in another world, and I didn't have an inkling about how it was surviving or how long it would last before it would also wear out and pass away.
"You wish to know how my people are lasting longer and are more alive than those poor unfortunate souls fading away? Louise will show you. Everything has to do with the consumption of energy and the fortification of the spirit. We need the other world plants to sustain us here. We have the means to make sure our spirits here are more solid, and last longer with just a little bit of salad. Others use more predatory means, alas, it is a dog-eat-dog world in this place."
Louise led me back to a dilapidated greenhouse in the back yard. In her hand a strong oil lamp swung. It cut through dim as we walked through the garden a few steps through wrought iron doors, lead lined glass and stone surrounding a large garden. The plants grew in neat partitions surrounded by wooden boxed rows. Through glazed glass above was captured whatever little light the daylight had, focusing it on the vegetables with silvery mirrors along the walls angled to get the best light.
The air inside the greenhouse feels heavy, almost sentient. The maid's lantern throws trembling light across the cracked tiles, revealing rows of grayish plants. Their barely green leaves curled inward, stems brittle yet damp with condensation. The moss-covered well in the center breathes a slow mist, its stones slick and ancient, feeding the air with a faint earthy scent.
Our footsteps echo softly, swallowed by the humidity. Each mirror along the walls catches a sliver of light, bending it toward the wilted vegetables. It's as if the light itself is reluctant, forced through unseen channels to nourish what should not grow.
"Look here, see this is where madam grows all our food. We trade for a bit and profit a bit. Madam was like the rest of us, a dead shade fading away until she figured out how to grow food from other places. She found some plants in the market that would grow large enough to eat. Other places must make do with the leftovers scavenged out in the wilderness, or grow their own, but madam is one of the most successful growing things where plants aught not exist. These bits of veggies here get sunlight from places before, coming from the mirrors. What little sun we get is all brought here by all the metal bits and mirrors above and feeds all these plants."
Their heels tap on the gray walkway as they make their way down the rows to the center. The maid's lantern glow wavers as the two of them step closer to the center of the greenhouse, and the well comes into full view. There loomed an ancient thing, older than the cracked foundation beneath it, older than the warped glass panes overhead.
The stones are swollen with moss, thick and velvety, as if centuries of damp breath have been exhaled into them. Water beads along the edges, gathering into slow, deliberate drips that fall back into the darkness below. The wooden bucket hangs from a rust‑eaten crank, its rope frayed, swollen, and dark with age. Every fiber looks ready to snap, yet it still sways gently, as though someone had only just pulled it up. It didn't seem very sturdy but it was enough to water this whole garden.
The whole mechanism—iron, wood, rope—seems to have survived far longer than it should. Everything glistens with moisture, as if the well itself exhales a cold mist that keeps the greenhouse alive. The sparse vegetables around it lean inward, drawn to the damp like starving creatures seeking warmth.
The maid pauses beside the protagonist, lowering her voice.
"Madam says the well was here before the manor," she murmurs. "It keeps the place alive even when the mirrors fail. Some nights… you can hear something in it breathing." Louise laughs as she smacks my shoulder. "Oh, afraid now ain't ya. Best is yet to come. I've got to introduce you to our gardener. You will be working with her if we don't find something better for you to do at the manor. A little bit of hard work ain't killed anyone yet."
The air around them shifts—cooler, heavier—like something deep below has stirred causing ripples at the surface of the well water.
A blonde woman with two neat braids hanging down kneels to plant something in a garden bed. Her eyes look up at the approaching maid and protagonist. "This is Alice, she works to keep up madam's garden." She wears a faded blue denim smock reaching her knees, long gardening boots below.
Alice looks up from her work with the quiet focus of someone who has spent years listening to the soil more than to people. The lantern light catches in her blue‑gray eyes, giving them a reflective sheen. They seem too bright, reflective like river stones turned over in a cold current. Her two neat straw-colored braids fall forward as she straightens, brushing dirt from her faded denim smock. The fabric is worn soft at the knees, patched in places, but clearly cared for. Her long boots are caked with the greenhouse's perpetual damp, the kind of mud that never fully dries. She pats her hands, wiping them on the smock as she walks over towards the two of them. She steps over a discarded shovel, hand poised to shake.
The maid's tone shifts into something almost proud as she gestures toward her.
"This Alice is a miracle worker. She keeps Madam's garden alive."
Alice nods once trying to hold back embarrassment, head tilted to fight a blush, polite but wary, as though strangers might bruise the fragile balance of this place. Behind her, the garden bed she's tending is little more than grayish soil and struggling stems, but she handles it with reverence. She presses something small and pale into the earth, green and delicate, cupping her hands around it as if shielding a secret.
The greenhouse around them creaks softly. Moisture drips from the rafters. The moss‑covered well exhales its cold breath.
Alice wipes her hands on her smock and finally speaks, her voice low and steady.
"Things grow here if you're patient. Even when they shouldn't."
She smiles in a quiet certainty, as if she's seen impossible things sprout from this dying soil.
"Here, put on a smock and we'll get to working. Things to plant and water and weed wait for no-one."
Louise leaves me with Alice waving as she walks back into the manor. "Right I'll be seeing you later."
The shovel's rhythm breaks as I sense it first. There is a subtle shift in the air, a faint plinking sound echoes like a dropped coin hitting water. I look over at my companion, but Alice, several rows back, remains bent over her work, fingers deftly teasing weeds from the gray soil, humming softly to herself. She's too far, too focused, too accustomed to the greenhouse's strange noises to notice the one that isn't supposed to happen.
The well answers with a deeper ripple.
The surface trembles… then parts.
A translucent tentacle rises, slow and deliberate, as if tasting its way through the cold air. It stretches upward, suction cups pale and coin‑flat, each one catching the lantern glow with a wet shimmer. The limb elongates with a boneless grace, curling once before straightening like a periscope breaking the surface of a dark sea.
It pauses at the rim of the moss‑slick stones.
Then it looks.
Left.
Right.
Searching for warmth, for movement, for anything alive.
I stand frozen, echo of the breath I once had in my chest. The shovel's wooden handle feels suddenly cold in my hands, every tiny shift threatening to betray my position. The tentacle tilts toward my row, suction cups flexing with soft, eager pops.
Behind me, Alice continues her quiet work, unaware and is kneeling in the dim rows, braids swaying gently as she leans forward, her voice a faint murmur to the plants she tends.
I start to run through the rows toward Alice, and towards the exit. The shovel lay discarded behind me with a clang, revealing my position. I gambled that I could run away faster than the monster could find me. I was terrified, and terribly wrong.
It happened so fast I had barely had time to gasp.
The tentacle finds me. It was heavy and muscular as it wrapped me, cold, slick, and impossibly strong. The length wrapping around my calves with a wet shlup that sent me crashing onto my side. The shovel clatters against the tile, loud enough to echo through the greenhouse. Alice finally looks up but is still too far away to do much. She had been too absorbed in her careful weeding to notice anything beyond her own row. I am slowly dragged through the neat garden rows. I couldn't focus on anything but the tentacles and ground that scraped underneath me. I didn't have enough breath to scream as the tentacle made its way up my body and squeezed my torso.
Water erupts from the well in a sudden, violent splash.
More tentacles surge upward, each one translucent and glistening, suction cups flashing like pale coins in the lantern light. They slap wetly against the moss‑coated stones, suction hauling something massive toward the surface. The air fills with a slick, dragging, hungry sound. Then the creature rises, up over the side of the well.
Nine feet tall, its form is vaguely human only in the way a shadow might mimic a man. Its skin is a shifting palette of translucent blues and sickly greens, as though its flesh is made of deep water and drowned algae. It's as if a pulsing jellyfish is encased in a human frame, beneath the translucent otherworldly skin, muscles and sinew grew and could be seen in a back light.
Veins pulse faintly beneath the surface, glowing like vines trapped. Its limbs are long and human shaped, with two strong arms, hands and fingers. Its torso had clean muscular lines above the ribs yet below grew a nest of meaty inhuman tentacles writhing and swaying where abdominal muscles should have been. In the center revealed a large concentric structure, rows and rows of beak shaped teeth that looked like it could grind away any pray caught by the tentacle nest.
The elongated tentacles that grabbed me emerged from the creature's back. One of two extra-long tentacles emerge from its back and shoulders like living ropes, each one dripping, each one reaching. The suction cupped ends are shaped like serving dishes, fishhook like grasping teeth lining the inner walls of each cup.
The creature plants one webbed, half‑human foot on the greenhouse floor, and the tiles groan under its weight. Moisture spreads outward in a cold halo.
I struggle, but the tentacle around my legs tighten, encasing me above my thighs, dragging me inch by inch toward the well, and him.
Bang! A heavy metallic sound echoes as the pulling suddenly stops.