“H-hello, um, my name is, ah, Reymond… m-my friends call me Rey. God, d-do I really have to do this?” a young man questioned, looking around the room with restless eyes.
“Not unless you want to be charged with murder, son,” answered the older of two police officers. Rey sank back into his chair at the harsh reply, the fear obvious on his face.
“Alright, alright… I guess I’ll start off with everything that happened before you guys picked me up.”
~*~*~*~
Wes, Jason, his girlfriend Anna, and I were going out to celebrate our graduations. We didn’t go to the same colleges, but we all partied the same, you know, knocking a few back. I was, rather unfortunately, designated to be the sober cab. I mean, not stone sober, ‘cause who can go all night without at least one or two here and there? For cheers, of course. A-anyways, Wes and the others had at least four drinks by th-the time we decided to leave.
This is where all the trouble began.
In the middle of some backwoods, country road, the engine started giving out. First it rumbled and squealed, and then it just quit. I pulled us over to the side of the road so some idiot wouldn’t hit us.
‘Fuck man, looks like we’re stopping,’ Jason said, his arm wrapped around Anna’s small shoulders.
‘Now hold on. Wes, you’ve got a phone, right?’ I asked, the only one left with working brain cells apparently. Wes took a minute to dig his phone out of his pocket, the alcohol not really making him the sharpest at that moment. He nearly dropped it on the ground when he handed it to me. ‘Great, now I’ll just call a tow truck and we can be on our wa-…’
Something had caught my eye. It was across the road, in the shadows of the trees. It… it was a woman. She was tall, like, really tall, and covered in dirt… a-and blood. She was looking down, her hair covering her face. The blood on her dirty green shirt was pooled around ragged rips on her shoulder and her hip, like she had been attacked by something. I noticed that her feet were bare, caked in dirt from the forest floor. She just stood there, looking down… then Wes called out to her.
‘Hey miss! You alright?’ The woman looked up at his voice, just enough for me to see her smile stretch across her face. Then she turned and walked off into the woods, like she wanted us to follow her. The… the only one that didn’t want to was Anna.
‘Guys, I-I don’t think we should go,’ was what she told us. I wish we would have listened to her.
‘Come on, Anna. Maybe she has a car to help with ours,’ Jason said. Wes and I both agreed, but for different reasons. I’m not sure what Wes was thinking, but I wanted to help the woman, maybe get her to a hospital to check out all the blood.
Jason and Anna argued. They almost never argued. Somehow, Jason got her to come with us and follow the woman. We followed the path the woman had taken into the trees. We followed her giggling. No one else seemed to find it odd that we were following an injured woman that giggled. I was alone in my concern.
It took us seven, maybe nine minutes of walking until we came across a beautiful garden. It was full of every kind of flower I could imagine. You would have thought there would be rose bushes among the crowds of flowers, but I didn’t see a single one.
‘Wow,’ Wes breathed, stumbling drunkenly towards a group of daisies. He knelt down, to smell them probably, but he leapt back up, starting to shout something. But, there in the middle of his chest, was a sharp spade, pierced through his heart. I didn’t even bother to look for who, or what, was at the end of the handle. The three of us only screamed and ran. We didn’t even look back for Wes… He was dead.
~*~*~
“I’m sorry, c-could you give me a minute?” Rey asked with tears in his eyes. Both of the officers nodded, the younger handing him a cup of water. “Th-thanks.”
Rey gratefully sipped at the water while the officers waited impatiently for the boy to continue. The young man took a couple minutes to silently mourn his friend before he continued.
~*~*~
A-anyways, once I felt we had gone far enough, I stopped and turned around. Only Anna was behind me, puffing and bent over her knees. She looked like she wanted to puke, but I couldn’t wait to ask, ‘Where’s Jason?’
She looked up at me with surprise, her head jerking around in panic for her boyfriend. Just as she looked like she was going to call out for him, a bloodcurdling scream rent through the air… I would only find out later that it was Jason’s. At that moment, we just opted for staying away from the source and finding our way back to the road. Carefully, and as silently as we could, Anna and I started trying to find a way to circle back to our car. We… we got lost pretty quickly in the flowers and trees. We must have ended up in the middle of the garden.
The first thing we noticed in the bright blooms was a rotting smell. It was so out of place among the perfumes that had battered at us since we arrived at that god-forsaken garden. That’s when we saw the rose bush. It was huge, taller than Anna by far, and filled with wide roses on every branch. They… they were dripping with some red liquid. It looked so much like blood, but I just ignored that. Because what roses drip anything, let alone blood?
‘Rey, what are you doing?’ Anna’s question snapped me out of my daze. I had been walking towards the bush without even realizing it. I thought I heard a woman sobbing in pain. I must have been following that sound.
‘D-don’t you hear that?’ I questioned her. The minute I looked back at her, fear pierced my core. Behind Anna was that injured woman from the road. She was grinning like a maniac with a pair of hedge clippers poised open on either side of Anna’s neck.
‘ANNA RUN!’ I screamed. But before she could do anything, those clippers closed and sliced through her neck, her head falling to the ground with the surprise still on her face. I-I remember her blood gushing out of the wound and hitting me in the face, on the shirt as well… as well as…
~*~*~*~
“Oh God!” Rey cried, burying his face in his hands. Tears ran down his face and the graduate began to sob uncontrollably. The officers looked at each other before the older one put a reassuring hand on the boy’s back.
“It’s okay son, you’re safe now. You don’t have to tell us any more if you don’t want to.” The officer had a sympathetic look on his face as he tried to calm down the youth. Surprising both of the officers, Rey looked up, took a deep breath, and shook his head.
“N-no, I’ll continue.”
~*~*~*~
After A-Anna died the… the woman looked up at me and I could finally see the rest of her face. Those inhuman red eyes and that face-splitting grin were terrifying.
‘I think you’ll go great with some daisies,’ she said in a sing-song voice, giggling as she picked up Anna’s… Anna’s head with huge, clawed hands covered in blood. I didn’t even know whose it was anymore. She looked at me again, insane glee in her inhuman eyes.
But then, then that glee turned to fear. I swear I saw blue shine through the red for a moment. The crying that I was hearing stopped, only to be replaced with a scream of, of pain and… anger. That scream was shrill enough to make me cover my ears and to scare away the blonde woman with Anna’s head. All I was left with was Anna’s headless body.
After the woman had vanished, the screaming stopped and returned to crying. I-I honestly don’t know where the crying and screaming came from. But in that moment, I didn’t care. I just sprinted away from that horrible rose bush, no concern for what I trampled or ruined. I tripped over a bunch of tulips at one point. They were planted in a-a human skull. The adrenaline in my veins goaded me onward, away from the horror of the skull pot.
The only time I stopped from there was when I found… when I found Jason’s body. He had a trowel in his head, right between his eyes, and… his… his arms had been cut off. I felt so sick, but the fear that crept down my spine spiked. The woman’s voice was back- the one that killed Anna.
‘Trying to run away? Why not come back and play?’ she sang. My pulse spiked through the roof as I ran as fast as physically possible to the tree-line. I never looked back.
~*~*~*~
“That’s when I got to the road and you guys found me,” Rey finished, guzzling the last bit of his water. The young man’s hands continued to shake. They hadn’t stopped since the officers had brought him into the station. The younger police officer was finishing writing the boy’s story. The older one gave the boy a sympathetic look. Rey’s sad smile disappeared when he looked up to say something more. His eyes widened in fear and he pointed behind the officers, screaming loud enough to wake the dead.
“SHE’S HERE!!” he wailed. The two officers looked around the interrogation room and saw nothing. They were looking straight at her grinning face and they weren’t doing anything. Rey realized they couldn’t hear her either. She was practically singing as she sauntered towards Rey, like a cat trapping a mouse.
“Mary, Mary, quite contrary. How does your garden grow? With blood, with blood, with blood I water the ground. All my rows of flowers, that grow along your severed spines, are watered around with your blood divine.”
The two officers died with confusion on their faces, trowels buried to the handle in their backs. Only with their last breaths could they see the woman with ruby eyes and insane smile.
Back in the garden, the bloody rose bush continued its sobbing, the body of a long dead blonde woman buried under its roots. She lied there, crying, sobbing, wishing for her spirit to come back and rest in peace.
ns 15.158.61.20da2
