Spring Blossoms

If you are reading this, then I am more than likely dead.

I want you to understand something before you read any further. I am not a dramatic person. I am not the kind of man who makes things up or tells tall tales to get attention. I have lived in this town my whole life, and everyone here knows me as a plain, simple, hardworking man. I fix things. I mow lawns. I patch roofs and unclog drains and replace fence posts. That is who I am. So when I tell you what happened here, I need you to believe me. I need you to take every single word seriously, because what started in one woman’s garden has become something so terrible that I cannot find the right words to describe it, even now, sitting here in this dark basement with nothing but a lantern and a notepad and the sound of something moving slowly across the ground above my head.

For the moment, I am safe down here, for a while at least. I have boarded up every exit I could find, I have stuffed rags and old towels into every crack and gap along the walls and floor. I have not made a sound in hours. I am writing this by the light of a single lantern, keeping the flame low, keeping my breathing steady, trying not to think too hard about what is happening just a few feet above me on the other side of the ceiling.

I am writing all of this down so that the real story of how it started will be known. People need to know. Someone on the outside needs to understand what happened here and why, so that they can stop it from spreading beyond this town. I am describing everything as clearly and as honestly as I can, in the order that it happened, because the details matter. The warning signs were there. We just did not know what we were looking at until it was far too late.

Hopefully, it will not happen again somewhere else. Hopefully, someone out there will read this and recognize the threat before it takes root in their own town, their own neighborhood, their own backyard. I hope the outside world will be smarter than we were. I hope they will have the tools and the knowledge and the time to eliminate it before it eliminates them.

It is too late for us. By morning, it will have worked its way into every corner of this town. Every street, house, basement, attic and crawl space. I do not think there is any stopping it now, not here, and not with what we have. I have decided to set the record straight on what happened, because I was partially responsible for what started all of this. That is not easy to write. It sits in my chest like a stone. But you need to know the full truth, and the full truth includes my part in it.

You have to recognize the warning signs, you have to spread the word to everyone you know. Above all else, you have to find something that will get rid of it for good. Please. Read carefully.
***
It all started innocently enough in Jill Johnson’s garden.

Ms. Johnson had lived on Clover Street for as long as anyone in this town could remember. She was a small, thin woman with white hair she kept pinned up tight and reading glasses she wore on a chain around her neck. She had a sharp tongue and a warm heart, and she would tell you exactly what she thought of you whether you asked or not. Most people in town found her a little difficult to deal with. I always liked her.

Her garden was her whole world. She had been working that garden for over forty years, and she treated it the way some people treat their children. She talked to her plants. She kept detailed notes in a little green notebook about soil conditions, rainfall, and sunlight. She subscribed to three different gardening magazines and had a shelf full of books on horticulture in her front room. She had entered the regional gardening competition every single year for the past two decades, and she had won it more times than not.

Her pride and joy was her ivy.

Now, I will be honest with you. I never understood the appeal of ivy. It is a plant that does nothing but spread. It climbs over everything and crowds out everything else. It covers walls and fences and trees and just keeps going, reaching and grabbing and choking out whatever is in its path. But Ms. Johnson loved it. She called it her green curtain. She said it gave her garden character. She had won the regional prize for ornamental ground cover three years running because of that ivy, and she was not shy about telling people.

“There is nothing in this county that can match it,” she told me once, standing in her garden with her hands on her hips and a proud look on her face. “You know that, don’t you, Thomas?”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said, because that was the honest answer and also the easiest one.

“People underestimate ivy,” she said. “They think it is just a weed. But ivy has character. Ivy has determination. It knows what it wants and it goes after it.”

I thought about that later, after everything happened, and I wished she had never said it. Since Ms. Johnson had gotten up in age, her knees have started giving her trouble and she could not manage the harder physical work in the garden anymore. She hired me to help out a few times a week. I was already doing odd jobs for most of the people on her street and for the town itself. I took care of the grounds around the courthouse on a regular basis, trimmed the hedges along the main road in spring and fall, and fixed whatever broke in the public buildings when the budget allowed for it. Handyman work is not glamorous, but it suits me. I like working with my hands. I like solving problems. I like being useful.

So Ms. Johnson hiring me was a natural fit. I would come by two or three times a week, do the heavy lifting, the digging, hauling, spraying. She would stand nearby and direct me, pointing her cane at whatever needed attention and telling me in great detail exactly how she wanted it done. I did not mind. She was good company, and she always had lemonade ready when the work was done.

She had been experimenting with fertilizers and plant foods for years. This was something she was very serious about. She mixed her own blends using ingredients she ordered from various suppliers and catalogs, and she kept careful records of what she used and what results she got. Some of her mixtures worked well. Some did not. A few of them smelled absolutely awful, and her neighbors had complained more than once about the odor drifting over the fence.

“Ms. Johnson,” her neighbor Mr. Evans had said to her one afternoon while I was working nearby, leaning over the fence with a look on his face like he had just stepped in something, “what on earth are you putting on those plants? It smells like something died over there.”

“It smells like results, Gerald,” she said, not even looking up from her notebook.

He opened his mouth to say something else, then seemed to think better of it and went back inside. I laughed about that for a week.

About two weeks before everything went wrong, Ms. Johnson told me she had mixed up a brand new batch of fertilizer and wanted me to apply it to the ivy. I came by on a Tuesday morning. It was a nice day, cool and clear, with a little breeze coming through the trees. Ms. Johnson met me at the garden gate with a large plastic container and a spray applicator already filled and ready to go.

“This is a new formula,” she said, holding the container up with both hands and looking at it the way a person looks at something they are very proud of. “I have been working on this one for almost two years.”

I took the container from her and looked at it. The liquid inside had a green tint to it, almost like diluted algae, and even through the sealed lid I could smell something sharp and unpleasant.

“What is in it?” I asked.

“A trade secret,” she said, smiling.

“Ms. Johnson, I am the one spraying it. I think I have a right to know.”

She waved her hand at me. “It is organic. All natural ingredients. Nothing harmful. Himalayan salt, Amazonean soil for ph, fish extract for nutrition, and a few other things. I have been very careful about the ratios this time. I think this batch is going to produce extraordinary results.”

I looked at the container again. “It smells like an open septic tank on a hot day.”

“Strong smell means strong nutrients,” she said firmly. “Now go on and spray it the same way you always do. Even coverage, start from the back wall and work your way forward.”

I did as she asked. I put on my gloves and my work apron and I sprayed the ivy the same way I had sprayed it a dozen times before, working my way methodically from the back of the garden toward the gate. The smell was strong enough to make my eyes water a little, but I had worked with worse. When I was done, I rinsed out the applicator and left the remaining fertilizer in the container on Ms. Johnson’s back porch.

“Beautiful,” she said, standing at the edge of the garden and looking at her ivy with great satisfaction. “You will see, Thomas. In a few days this garden is going to look like nothing you have ever seen before.”

“I am sure it will,” I said.

I washed my hands at the outdoor tap, drank my lemonade, and went on to my next job.

For the first two days, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. I checked in on the garden briefly on Wednesday and everything looked normal. The ivy was green and healthy, same as always. Ms. Johnson was pleased. She told me she had already noticed some new growth and that the color of the leaves looked richer than before.

“You see?” she said. “I told you.”

“You did,” I said.

I should have paid more attention on Thursday.
***
On the third day after I sprayed that fertilizer, the ivy started growing. I do not mean a little. I do not mean the normal, slow creep of healthy ivy putting out new shoots here and there. I mean it grew almost a foot every single hour. I know how that sounds. I know it is hard to believe. But I measured it. I put a stick in the ground at the edge of the ivy on Thursday morning and by Thursday afternoon that stick was buried under a foot of new growth. By Friday morning it was buried under nearly two feet.

You could actually watch it spread if you stood still long enough. The vines moved slowly but visibly, like the minute hand on a clock. You could not see them move if you stared directly at them, but if you looked away and looked back, they had moved. Inch by inch, foot by foot, the ivy crept outward from Ms. Johnson’s garden in every direction.

I went to see her on Thursday afternoon when I first noticed something was wrong.

“Ms. Johnson,” I said, standing at her garden gate and looking at the ivy, which had already grown over the top of the back wall and was spreading down the other side, “I think something is happening with the plants.”

She came out of her house and looked at the garden and her face lit up like a child on Christmas morning.

“Oh my goodness,” she said softly. “Oh, Thomas. Look at that.”

“I am looking at it,” I said. “It concerns me.”

“Concerns you?” She turned to me with a look of pure delight. “This is extraordinary. This is exactly what I was hoping for. The growth rate is incredible.”

“It is growing over your wall,” I said.

“It has done that before.”

“Not like this.”

She looked at the wall again. The ivy had already crept another few inches while we were standing there talking. She was quiet for a moment.

“Well,” she said slowly, “we can trim it back if it gets out of hand.”

“I think it is already out of hand,” I said.

She did not agree with me that day. She was too excited about her formula working to be worried. I went home that night feeling uneasy but telling myself it was just fast-growing ivy. It was unusual, but it was not dangerous. Plants grow fast sometimes. That was all it was.

By Friday morning, some of the men in the town had noticed what was happening and they were not as calm about it as Ms. Johnson. I ran into Bill Harker outside the hardware store. Bill was a big man, a farmer, not the type to get worked up over nothing. He had his arms crossed and a serious look on his face.

“You seen what is going on over on Clover Street?” he said.

“I have,” I said.

“That ivy is going over the wall and up the outside of the houses next door,” he said. “It covered most of the Evans fence overnight. Gerald is furious.”

“I know.”

“What is causing it?”

I told him about the fertilizer. He listened without interrupting, which was not like him.

“We need to cut it back,” he said when I was done. “Before it gets further.”

“I agree.”

He gathered a few of the other men and they went to Clover Street with pruning shears and loppers and a hand saw. They worked for most of Friday afternoon, cutting back the vines that had gone over the wall and spread into the neighboring yards. They made a decent dent in it. They piled the cut vines in the street and felt good about the progress they had made.

But the next morning, the ivy had grown back everything they had cut and then some. I don’t know if the fertilizer mutated the ivy, or created something that wasn’t supposed to exist. But this thing was becoming more than just a nuisance.
***

It was around the fifth day that people started noticing their pets were gone. Old Mrs. Carey’s cat, a fat orange tabby named Biscuit that had spent most of his life sleeping on her porch, was not there when she went out Saturday morning. She called for him all day and he did not come. She knocked on doors up and down her street asking if anyone had seen him.

“He never wanders,” she told me, wringing her hands. “He has never gone further than the end of the block in twelve years. Something is wrong.”

The Harker family’s dog, a big brown mutt named Scout, went missing the same day. The Petersen children’s two rabbits disappeared from their hutch overnight. Something had torn the door clean off the front of the hutch.

At first, people assumed the animals had been frightened by the strangely fast-growing ivy and had run off to find quieter hiding spots. It made a kind of sense. Animals were sensitive to things people could not always detect. Maybe they had smelled something in that fertilizer. Maybe the movement of the vines had spooked them. We were wrong about that.

The birds were the other thing people noticed. The town was normally full of birdsong in the mornings. Sparrows, robins, starlings, the occasional crow. By the end of the first week, the mornings had gone quiet. No birds on the power lines. No birds in the trees. No birds at all.

I mentioned this to Bill Harker when I saw him on Saturday afternoon.

“I noticed that too,” he said, looking up at the empty sky. “Quiet as a church in here.”

“The animals are gone,” I said. “Not just scared off. Gone.”

He looked at me. “What are you saying?”

“I am saying I do not think they ran away,” I said. “I think something happened to them.”

He was quiet for a long moment. Then he said, “We need to call someone. The university, the county, somebody.”

The mayor, a nervous little man named Robert Finch, had already sent messages to the agricultural department at the state university asking for help and advice. He had sent the first one on Friday when the ivy went over the wall. He sent two more over the weekend. He never received a response. Whether the messages did not get through or whether no one took them seriously, we never found out. We were left to face what was happening on our own.
***
By Sunday evening, the ivy had spread to cover most of Clover Street and was moving steadily outward in every direction. It had completely covered Ms. Johnson’s house. You could not see the front door anymore. The windows were buried under layers of thick green vines. The same was happening to the Evans house next door, and to the Careys on the other side. Mayor Finch called an emergency council meeting in the town hall on Sunday night. Nearly every adult in the town showed up. People were scared and angry, and the meeting got loud quickly.

“This is that Johnson’s woman’s fault,” said Gerald Evans, standing up from his seat before the mayor had even finished calling the meeting to order. “Her and her crazy experiments. My house is being swallowed up and she is probably in there proud of herself.”

“Now, Gerald, let us try to stay calm,” the mayor said.

“My fence is gone,” Gerald said. “My front porch is gone. How calm do you want me to be?”

“Nobody is saying your concerns are not valid,” the mayor said.

“Where is she?” someone called from the back of the room. “Where is Ms. Johnson?”

There was a murmur through the crowd. I looked around and realized that Ms. Johnson was not there. I had not seen her since Friday. I felt a cold feeling settle in my stomach.

“I will check on her tomorrow,” I said, though even as I said it I had a feeling that checking on her tomorrow might not be possible.

The meeting did not accomplish much. People argued about who was responsible, what should be done, who had the authority to make decisions, and whether the town had the money to bring in outside help. There was a lot of noise and very little agreement.

But we did manage to get a few things done. Someone suggested gathering every bottle of weed killer in the town, from garden sheds and garages and the hardware store, and using it aggressively on the ivy. People agreed on that. We also agreed to form work groups, teams of men and women who would go out in shifts to fight back the plant wherever it was spreading. We decided to start first thing Monday morning.

“We can beat this,” Bill Harker said, standing up near the end of the meeting. “It is a plant. It is a fast-growing, strange-smelling plant, but it is still just a plant. We have tools and we have people and we can push it back.”

People nodded. Some of them looked encouraged. I wanted to feel encouraged too. But I kept thinking about Biscuit the cat and Scout the dog and the quiet, birdless morning sky, and I could not quite get there.
***
Monday morning came and we went to work. There were about thirty of us in the first work group. We had weed killer, pruning tools, rakes, and shovels. We started on the east side of Clover Street, where the ivy had spread furthest into the neighboring streets. We sprayed and cut and hauled and piled, and for the first hour or two it felt like we were making real progress. Then Bill Harker, who was working about twenty feet ahead of me, stopped and stood very still.

“Thomas,” he said quietly.

“What?”

“Come look at this.”

I walked over to where he was standing. He was looking at a section of ivy that we had cut back about an hour before. It had already grown back. Not just a little. It had grown back fully and was pushing further than it had been before we cut it.

“That is not possible,” said one of the younger men, a kid named Danny who worked at the feed store. He was staring at the vines with wide eyes.

“And yet here we are,” Bill said.

We kept working. We sprayed more weed killer on the new growth. For a little while, the affected vines turned brown and seemed to pull back slightly. But within an hour, new green growth was pushing through the dead brown vines and spreading outward again.

By midday, it had become clear that the weed killer was slowing it down but not stopping it. The ivy seemed to absorb the poison and keep going. We doubled the concentration. Same result. It would slow, brown slightly, and then recover and continue spreading.

By the time we stopped for the day, the ivy had covered nearly a quarter of the town. Streets that had been clear in the morning were thick with green vines by evening. The ivy moved along the ground and up walls and over rooftops with that slow, steady, relentless pace that had started to feel less like plant growth and more like something else. Something deliberate.

“It is like trying to hold back water,” Danny said as we packed up our tools at the end of the day. He looked exhausted and pale. “Every time you push it back somewhere, it just comes through somewhere else.”

“We will try again tomorrow,” Bill said. But he did not sound as confident as he had the night before.

The next morning, the ivy had spread even further. It had covered almost a third of the town overnight.

The town went into emergency status.
***
Seven days after I sprayed that fertilizer, we started to understand what we were really dealing with.

We had been thinking of it as a fast-growing plant. An unusual, aggressive, fast-growing plant, but still just a plant. Something that could be cut and burned and poisoned. Something that obeyed the rules of nature, even if it was pushing those rules to their limits.

We were wrong.

On the seventh day, we started seeing the ivy move in ways that no plant should be able to move. Not just spreading outward along the ground, but reaching. Lifting. Turning toward things.

Bill Harker’s neighbor, a quiet man named Paul Denton, came running into the street early that morning, shouting.

“It got my dog,” he said. He was out of breath and his face was white. “I let him out the back door this morning and the ivy came off the fence and wrapped around him. I tried to pull him free but it was too strong. I had to let go.”

We stood there looking at him.

“It wrapped around him?” Bill said.

“Like a rope,” Paul said. “Like it was grabbing him on purpose.”

We went to Paul’s backyard and looked. The dog was not there. There was a section of ivy against the back fence that was slightly thicker than the surrounding growth, with the vines wound tightly together in a rough, lumpy shape. We did not look too closely at that shape. We did not want to.

“It is hunting,” Danny said softly. He said it like he did not want to say it out loud, like saying it would make it more real.

Nobody argued with him.

Over the next two days, we saw it happen again and again. The ivy would reach out toward animals, toward people who got too close, wrapping its vines around them with a strength that was completely out of proportion to what a plant should be capable of. It moved toward sound. It moved toward warmth. It moved toward anything living that came within reach.

And after it wrapped around its victims, something else happened. The vines would tighten, and then they would begin to secrete a substance. A thick, sticky, yellowish liquid that coated whatever the ivy had caught. At first we thought it was just sap. But then we noticed what the sap did.

It dissolved things.

Within a day, whatever the ivy had caught was gone. Not dead and lying there. Gone. Dissolved completely, absorbed into the vines, leaving nothing behind. No body, no bones, no trace. The first time I understood what I was seeing, I had to sit down on the curb and put my head between my knees for a minute.

“Thomas,” Bill said, crouching down next to me. “Are you all right?”

“No,” I said honestly. “Are you?”

He was quiet for a moment. “No,” he said. “I am not.”
***
We tried burning it. It was Bill’s idea, and at the time it seemed like the best option we had left. The weed killer was not working. Cutting it back was pointless. But fire was different. Fire destroyed things completely, roots and all, if you could get the temperature high enough and keep it burning long enough.

We organized a burning crew on the ninth day. About twenty men with torches and cans of fuel, targeting the densest sections of ivy on the south side of the town. The plan was to burn a wide strip all the way through, creating a clear barrier that the ivy could not cross, and then work our way outward from there.

It worked, partially. The ivy burned. The vines caught quickly and the fire spread through the dense growth in a way that was almost satisfying to watch. For about an hour, we made real progress. The burning strip grew wider. People watching from the edges of the cleared area were cheering.

Then the ivy changed what it was doing. The burning sections were dying, yes. But the surrounding ivy, the parts that had not yet been touched by fire, began moving faster. It rerouted itself, spreading around the burning areas, flanking us on both sides. It was as if the plant understood what we were trying to do and was working around it.

“It is going around us,” Danny shouted, pointing to the left where a thick mass of vines was pushing rapidly along the ground toward the edge of our fire line.

“Move the fire that way,” Bill ordered.

We moved, but the ivy moved faster than we did. It was coming from three directions now, and we were a line of twenty men with torches trying to cover an area that was growing faster than we could burn.

Then something happened that made everyone stop.

One of the men on the far end of the line, a farmer named Jack Reed, got too close to a section of burning ivy while trying to push it back with a long-handled rake. The ivy, even while it was burning, reached out and grabbed the end of his rake and pulled. Jack stumbled forward into the fire line.

The men nearest to him grabbed him and pulled him back before he went into the flames. He was shaken but unhurt. But we all stood there for a moment in silence, understanding what we had just seen. The ivy had tried to pull him into the fire. It had been burning. It was on fire. And it had still reached out and tried to take one of us with it.

“Normal plants do not do that,” Jack said, breathing hard, staring at the burning vines. His voice was very flat and very calm, the way people sound when they are too scared to show how scared they are.

“No,” Bill said.

We kept burning for a while longer, but our hearts were not in it the same way they had been. We all knew now that we were not dealing with a plant that was just growing unusually fast. We were dealing with something that could think. Something that could react. Something that could fight back.

By the end of the day, the south side of the town was partially cleared but the ivy had pushed through on the east and west flanks and was continuing to spread. We had slowed it down. We had not stopped it. That night, the ivy completed its ring around the town. It pulled down all the power and telephone poles. We were stranded on an island in a sea of green.
***
On the tenth day, we woke up to find that the ivy had formed a solid wall of growth around the entire perimeter of the town.

It was not just covering the ground and the buildings anymore. It had built itself up into a dense, thick hedge, taller than a man, running in an unbroken circle around us. It was not perfectly smooth. The surface of it moved constantly, vines shifting and adjusting, the whole mass breathing slowly like something alive, which of course it was.

“It has closed us in,” the mayor said. He was standing at the edge of the main street, looking at the hedge wall with an expression on his face that I had never seen before. Pure, helpless fear.

“Yes,” I said.

“Can we get through it?”

“I do not know,” I replied. “I do not think trying is a good idea.”

We had lost several people by this point. Not many, but enough. People who had gotten too close to the ivy on their own. People who had gone out at night and not come back. We did not talk about it directly. We talked around it, the way people do when something is too terrible to say plainly.

The work groups had stopped going out. There was no point. The ivy was inside the town now, not just around it. It had covered most of the buildings on the outer streets and was working its way steadily toward the center of town. Every morning we woke up and the clear area was a little smaller than it had been the night before.

People were gathering together in the larger buildings. The town hall, the school, the church. Anywhere with solid walls and small windows that could be blocked. People were sharing food and water and trying to keep calm, and mostly failing at the last part.

I spent the tenth day helping people board up windows and block doorways. I helped an elderly couple, the Petersens, move their most important belongings to the second floor of their house, which seemed safer than the ground floor since the ivy was moving along the ground and up walls but had not yet figured out how to come in through upper-story windows.

“Do you think help is coming?” Mrs. Petersen asked me. She was a small woman with kind eyes and she was trying very hard to be brave.

“I hope so,” I replied, as I was nailing a board across her kitchen window while I talked to her.

“But you do not know.”

“No, I don’t.”

She was quiet for a moment. “Thomas,” she said, “do you think it is going to take all of us?”

I stopped hammering and looked at her. She was looking at me steadily, waiting for an honest answer.

“I think we need to be very careful,” I said. “I think as long as we stay quiet and stay inside and do not give it reasons to come looking for us, we have a chance.”

She nodded slowly. “All right,” she said. “All right. Thank you.”

I finished boarding up her windows and moved on.
***
On the eleventh day, I was moving through the town toward the town hall, keeping close to the buildings and moving quietly the way we had all learned to do. The ivy covered most of the street but there was still a narrow path of clear ground along the wall of the old post office building, and I was making my way along that path when I happened to look directly at a section of ivy on the wall above me. There was an eye looking back at me.

I froze.

It was set into the vines about six feet up the wall, round and pale, with a dark center that was clearly focused on me. It blinked. Slowly, like something that had not been blinking for very long and was still getting used to the motion.

I did not move. I did not breathe. I stood completely still against the wall of the post office and stared at that eye and it stared at me, and after a long moment the vines around it shifted and it was gone, covered over by new growth. I walked the rest of the way to the town hall as quickly and quietly as I possibly could.

I told Bill what I had seen. He looked at me for a long moment without saying anything.

“You are sure,” he said.

“I am definitely sure,” I said.

“An eye.”

“Set into the vines. It looked at me. It even blinked.”

He sat back in his chair and rubbed his face with both hands.

“Thomas,” he said, “that is the most terrifying thing anyone has said to me in eleven days, and these have been eleven very terrifying days.”

“I know,” I said.

“What does it mean?”

“I think it means the plant is developing,” I said. “I think it is growing more complex. More aware. I think it is watching us.”

We sat with that for a while.

Later, I talked to a few other people and found out that I was not the only one who had seen the eyes. Danny had seen one near the base of a wall on the south street, looking up at him from close to the ground. A woman named Clara Briggs had seen two of them close together on her garden wall, side by side, watching her kitchen window. None of us said much about it out loud, because there was nothing useful to say. But we all knew what it meant. The ivy was not just growing and spreading and feeding anymore. It was watching. It was aware of us in a way that went beyond simple instinct. It was learning.

I do not know what comes after learning, and I didn’t want to find out.

That brings me to where I am now.
***
On the morning of the twelfth day, I made my way back to my house. The ivy had covered the outside walls but had not yet come through the windows or doors. I had boards and nails and I spent two hours sealing every opening I could find. I pulled up the hatch to my basement, climbed down the ladder, and pulled the hatch closed above me.

I have stuffed rags into every gap around the hatch. I have pushed an old bookshelf over against the wall where I know there is a crack between the foundation stones. I have turned off my lantern twice already when I heard sounds above me, not wanting even the thin line of light under the hatch to give me away.

It is quiet down here. The basement is cool, dark and I can smell the earth and the old wood. Under it all is something faint that might be that fertilizer smell from Ms. Johnson’s garden. Or maybe I am imagining it. I have been imagining a lot of things in the dark lately. I blame the stress of it all.

I think about Ms. Johnson sometimes, sitting down here. I wonder if she made it, or if she is somewhere in her house, buried under layers of ivy, still alive and still holding her little green notebook. I hope she is alive and safe. But I do not think she is. I think about what she said to me once, about ivy having determination. About knowing what it wants and going after it. I think about that a lot.

I want to be angry at her. Part of me is angry at her. But mostly I just feel sad. She was a good woman who loved her garden and spent forty years trying to make something beautiful grow. She did not know what that formula would do. Nobody could have known. The thing that is out there now, crawling over our town and wrapping its vines around everything it can reach, is not something that any reasonable person would have imagined possible.

But then what about me? I was the one who sprayed it. That has occupied my thoughts more than I care to admit. I could have refused. Or have asked more questions. I could have insisted on knowing what was in that formula before I put it on anything. But why? I never did before. I trusted her, and she trusted her formulas, and now here we are.

I am not going to spend what time I have left punishing myself for it. What I am going to do is write all of this down as clearly and as carefully as I can, and hope that somehow this notebook makes it out of this town and into the hands of someone who can do something with the information. The fertilizer that started all of this was a homemade formula created by Ms. Jill Johnson of Clover Street in this town. I do not know all the ingredients. If you can find her records, her green notebook, her supply orders, anything that might tell you what went into that formula, it might help you understand what you are dealing with and how to stop it.

Please show it to scientists, government officials, military, to anyone who has the knowledge and the resources to study what happened here and develop a real solution. Do not come into this town without full protective gear and a solid plan. Do not assume that what worked on other invasive plants will work on this one. Do not underestimate it.

And please, whatever you do, find and destroy every last trace of that fertilizer formula. Do not let anyone else use it. Do not let anyone else experiment with it. Whatever Ms. Johnson put into that mixture, it created something that the world was not meant to have. Whatever it is, it needs to end here.
***
This morning marks twelve terrible days since I sprayed that strange homemade fertilizer on Ms. Johnson’s ivy patch. Twelve days to turn a prize-winning garden plant into something that has taken over an entire town. Less than two weeks it went from a quiet Tuesday morning with a cool breeze in the trees to this basement, this lantern, this notebook, and the sound of something moving slowly and deliberately across the floor above my head.

I can hear it now. A soft, dragging sound, like a rope being pulled across wood. It stops sometimes. Then it starts again. I am holding very still and breathing very slowly and writing these last words as quietly as I can. I do not know if help is coming. I have no way of knowing. The mayor’s messages may have gotten through to someone who took them seriously. Someone outside may have noticed that this town has gone quiet. Someone may be on their way right now with the tools and the knowledge to deal with what is out here.

I hope so. I genuinely do, not just for myself but for anyone else who is still hiding somewhere in this town, still quiet, still waiting.

But I am not going to count on it.

What I am counting on is this notebook. I am going to put it in a waterproof bag that I keep down here with some emergency supplies. I am going to seal it up and leave it somewhere it might be found. If I make it through this, I will carry it out myself. If I do not, then whoever finds this place will find this record, and they will know what happened. The world will know what to look for, and what to tell the people who can do something about it.

That is the story of what happened here. It started with a garden. It started with a woman who loved her plants and spent forty years trying to make them grow better. It started with a formula that worked too well, applied by a handyman who asked too few questions on a clear Tuesday morning in spring.

It is an evil plant, this TerrorIvy. Or something that was a plant and is now something else, something that has no name yet because nothing like it has existed before. It wants to cover everything. It wants to take everything in. It does not stop nor rests and it does not feel anything that I can recognize as hesitation or mercy.

If you are reading this, you are the last hope for making sure this never happens anywhere else. Please do not waste that.

The dragging sound has stopped. I am going to be very still now.

Credit: Rodney Hatfield Jr

Facebook