Under gravel and twisting roots there lies an intricate system of life, hundreds of sizes smaller than our species. Like pale, empty veins they stretch out to dig downwards into damp soil. It is dark. Darker than sunless skies. The realm underground is the realm of corpses. They settle between debris like shells pushed under sand by careless ocean waves. Deeper, and deeper. While you walk overhead on solid ground, thinking of the casual facets of life, corpses are clawing overhead themselves, grasping those roots and pulling at them with a vengeful desperation to return to life. We never hear their wailing, but the earth’s surface shakes with their conviction.
Ghosts are known to protest against going quietly. If they were wrongfully put to sleep, they will show no hesitation to express indignation- rightfully so! If your life ended too soon, you would travel to the sun and bring it down with you. This is just the self-righteous nature of mankind. We feel that we are the special exception and are meant for greater things than the natural course of life. We feel there are no accidents. We do not forgive unfortunate circumstances. We do not accept them. Unlike the animal kingdom, we fight to live for more than survival and procreation. We want to exist and make a name for ourselves. While some may envy the beasts for their simpler motivations, most men appreciate the chance to do something greater in life. Thus, understandably, when we die prematurely, it is a serious offense to our entire existence.
It is even worse to be betrayed by another human at the cost of your life. It feels as if God himself has turned his creations on each other. You question the sanity of the offender; who would, with the very same passion for life, take that away from someone just like themself? In a sense it is like killing an extension of oneself; like taking an ax and swinging at your comrade as if you weren’t a tree yourself in a forest realm.
But what hurts more than an active aid in murder? The opposite, in fact. What may be perhaps the worst experience concerning death among others, is the refusal to save a man’s life. Passiveness. To be witnessed in peril and receive no help at all. It is more dismaying than the rest of life’s outcomes, especially knowing there was indeed a chance for survival. A great chance, at that. For those who die at the hand of none but feel killed by the world, I share a great sympathy. Of course, I am not dead myself, but I can understand to a degree what rage could be incited in an individual should he experience this first hand. I have even seen the terrible consequences of a fate never to be avenged. I think back now to the terror I escaped not more than a year ago.
Have you ever passed by an empty garden or a greenhouse— fogged with sun-bleached windows that obscure what should only be innocuous plants inside, and felt a dull dread? You may have felt an indescribable sadness that you cannot rationalize, though it was not strong enough to remark. Most people do not realize this phenomenon until it is brought to their attention. It can be confidently said that this is none other than your faithful intuition kicking into gear with a plea for avoidance. Do not distrust your own mind. I write to whom— everyone it may concern, in an effort to provide desperate advice. I come bearing a warning of some explanation to these instinctual senses. Knowing the potential danger lurking within such unassuming spaces will grant you patience with the manner in which I speak about the matter at hand.
Consider now the inherent fear you have of suddenly no longer existing in this world, leaving without a trace for any to track down and recover you. You would only be known by what you’d left behind, what you perhaps contributed. If there is little to show for, your name will be all people can harken. It is dreadful, no? The most existential species of phobia. I can save you from but one dimension in which this will happen. Though, when all is said and done, a resulting consequence is that you will be undesirably aware of every botanical space you pass by. Petals will make you shudder at the sight of them. Ivy that hangs over stone and brick and wood will induce a paranoid brush on the back of the neck. The price of your hope for survival is constant anxiety for the worst. Are you taking this moment to recall the last place you’ve seen?
Wherever you may roam, you must take precise caution in coming across a garden or greenhouse. There is a secret peril hiding in a great many of them. This will be especially difficult to avoid. If the secret peril does await in one of those places, you will be able to identify it by a nagging, gravitational energy.
My first word of advice is to avoid encountering situations where you must be alone. Your solitude will become your first enemy. Man’s independence has always been the downfall of many who take preference in secluding themselves. However, I understand that sometimes it is unavoidable. Thus with the utmost digression, I implore you:
If you are ever alone in a garden, greenhouse, arboretum— whatever it may be— and find yourself discovering a botanical journal with an embossed symbol of a golden flower, you are never to open it. Though it appears curious with its many embellishments of thin metal and fine crafted leather, the appearance is the single most pleasant thing you will find about it. Nevermind what curiosities you may have about the contents. Abandon all interest immediately. Should you open it your days of autonomy will end upon reading the first page. That is all it will take to enact a bout of sudden possession. You will feel compelled to continue reading against your better judgment. And while you do, the ghost in that book will dawn. He will emerge from that wretched journal. Against futile protest he shall pass his long-accrued grudge of being left to rot among the flowers unto you. A curse will strike your soul. It will transform you most terribly, both physically and into sheer madness. I hesitate to tell you the specifics of the curse, but I suspect that knowing the dismaying details will more effectively dissuade you. How I wish I did not know the outcome! I can see it so vividly in hindsight. That colleague I once knew with such acuity and all his life’s moments, gone in a flash, replaced by something tenfold more terrible. How I wish that I could die instead of live with the bleak memory of this wretched phenomenon, if only I was not equally gripped with the inevitable will to survive as all human men do. Instead it plagues me with confliction.
The curse, it will spread, slowly but progressively, at such a rate that by the time you notice anything wrong it will be too late. The flesh in your body will become more and more akin to soil while you grip the book with an alien force unbelonging to you. Churning and softening like butter. Stems and leaves are known to grow from an unknown source beneath muscle and bone, pushing rather forcefully with bulbed heads. I can only conjecture to describe this as I would fast growing tumors. I wince at any extra use of words to expand upon the already gruesome event. Quickly will they flourish from the surface of your skin. Soon after, they will bloom at a supernatural pace. Flowers will grow out from your body; arms, legs, stomach, head. Out of all the flowers surrounding you, you will be the most splendid specimen. To those who did not know you were once a mortal being, they will find out quite hauntingly beautiful, resembling in the subtlest way a human form. Your contouring will appear bloated underneath a sloppy amalgamation of flowers, and you will stand rigid. You will stand silent.
You will be left wondering what mad spirit would bestow such an unfair punishment on an innocent observer. Wondering will be the last thing you ever do. From witnesses and historical memory alone the journal has been identified as that of a renowned botanist— I am afeard to utter his name— who dedicated the entirety of his life to studying rare and exotic plants. Tragically, he was betrayed by his peers and left to die in the very garden he loved. You understand now why a man would ever be so bitter. Perhaps though, his peers had seen something sinister in the man’s work which will never be recovered.
Nobody knows what is written in the journal— whether it has anything to do with plants at all for that matter. All that is assured is his name scrawled on the inside of the cover page. By the time you become a curious mass of golden, pulsing flowers which will eventually decay into the ground, the book will have disappeared without a trace. At that moment you will be left with nothing but the memory of the words that plagued you. My admonition ends just as quick as those final moments.