Stop and Spell the Roses

by Stacey Alabaster

  Kaylan stared up at me and didn’t say anything for a long time. “There’s something different about you, Ruby.”

  “Since the other day?” I asked, confused, wondering what it might be. I picked up my unused knife and briefly glanced at my hair in the reflection, hoping that a miracle might have occurred. Nope. It was still bright red.

  But Kaylan was shaking his head. “No, I mean, in general.” He took another large bite of his burger and then put it down. “You have this weird quality about you. Like you are hiding some sort of secret.” He leaned back and smiled a little bit slyly. “Like you are trying to fit into this human world. But you’re not . . . quite part of it.”

  I slunk back in my seat a little bit, but tried to laugh it off.

  I even took a little nibble of my brown apple. These wouldn’t be getting any prizes at the garden show. Kaylan was still staring back at me as I swallowed.

  I wondered if Kaylan had looked into me online. I mean, it wasn’t like there was a website out there that had my full name and picture and the text “I am a witch” written underneath it. But I didn’t know what might be lurking out there in the dark web.

  “Whoever is running this scam is making a lot of money,” Kaylan said, picking up his burger and finishing it off. “The way the chain spreads, if one person sends it to twenty people, and they each send it to twenty people within a day, and so on—within a month, the entire population of earth will have received the message. At least, the population of earth that has cell phones.”

  My eyes grew wide. I hadn’t done the math on it like that. “Wow,” I said, wondering if that had been the scammer’s plan all along. “That is a truckload of money to get. Even if only a tiny fraction of those people actually pay the money to the crypto account—whoever started this is going to have more money than he or she will have time to spend it.”

  Kaylan nodded. “It makes me reconsider going straight, hey? Sometimes crime really does pay.”

  8

  It was a perfect day for a garden show. Seventy-five degrees, not warm enough for anything to wilt in the heat and not cool enough to make any of the fruits and vegetables and flowers get frostbite at the edges.

  There were games and face-painting stands set up at the entrance for the kids. A good distraction for them while their parents bustled around with aggravated looks on their faces, trying to find their tents so that they could set up their stock. Some people were also using the opportunity to sell their wares to the general public, and so, tent position was a big deal. The closer you were to the entrance and the main stage, the more items you would sell. And the closer you were to the judges’ tent, the sooner your items would be tasted and inspected. There was a long-held theory among participants that the items that got inspected first had a better chance of winning, or at least getting a runner-up.

  There were acoustic guitar sounds drifting across the park where the show was being held. Vicky had a short gig before the main act took over, so I was left to set up my tent on my own for the first hour following my arrival. But I soon had someone beside me helping to man the decks as I got out my tiny watering can and gave my vegetables a little drink. Then I picked up one of the pots and dried it off. The judges marked you down for messiness.

  “You’re entering those?” Vicky asked, screwing up her nose as she looked down at my shriveled-up spinach

  “It’s just so that I can take part,” I said, hugging the pot to my chest. I felt a little defensive of my poor spinach plants. They were doing the best that they could, weren’t they?

  Because I had taken third place the year before, I had a good position. Third tent away from the judges, which meant that I would be the third one sampled. And close enough to the entryway that I would get a lot of buyers walking by. Everyone was expecting me to turn up with my ripe and juicy magical plums.

  One woman had her purse out until she glanced down at the three pot plants I had standing on my otherwise empty bench and tent.

  “Oh.”

  Yeah. I was getting a lot of that.

  But everyone was distracted by the announcement of the new head judge, and so, no one really lingered on my spinach or had time to ask me about my plum disaster. People were even ignoring their own stands in favor of craning their necks around to try and get a glimpse of who the new judge was.

  “I can’t believe they’ve managed to keep it a secret for this long,” Vicky said as yet another disappointed would-be customer backed out of my tent. “I wonder if whoever it is had to enter the park with a security detail.”

  I wasn’t sure, but I was as anxious as everyone else was to find out who the mystery judge was. And as soon as it was announced that the judge was about to take the stage, everyone stopped talking and watering and picking brown leaves off the plants and looked up, some just flat-out abandoning their tents to race to where the stage was in the middle of the park.

  Vicky and I didn’t have to go anywhere. We had a perfect view.

  “Oh, my gosh,” I gasped when I saw who it was.

  “What?” Vicky asked, spinning around. She didn’t recognize the fella with the grey hair and the blue cardigan on the stage.

  It was Tanner. Tanner Spears.

  “That is Lisa Spears’ husband!” I whispered to Vicky.

  In fact, there was a murmur through the whole crowd, spreading like a virus as people slowly realized that the new judge was the husband of one of the top contestants.

  No wonder his identity had been kept under wraps.

  “I was at Lisa’s place, and she flat-out said to my face that she had no idea who the new judge was,” I said to Vicky, who was standing on her tiptoes trying to watch as Tanner Spears gave his commencement speech to a very unimpressed-looking crowd.

  Most of the crowd were still murmuring, some even jeering quietly, but I was just silent. I couldn’t believe that Tanner was the new judge.

  And yet it all made perfect sense.

  Lisa had been at the top of my suspect list since day one. When I had made that list, my intuition had told me to go to her house and check it out.

  And now here we were, watching her husband take over the judging, while the previous judge had suspiciously turned up dead.

  Vicky was being the more rational of the two of us, which was unusual. “Maybe she was just embarrassed about the fact that her husband was taking over as the judge,” she said with a large shrug. “Or knew how bad it would look. Anyway, so far it hasn’t worked in her favor at all, has it? Look at all the people glaring at her. This isn’t good fortune for Lisa Spears. Probably the opposite, in fact . . .” Vicky pointed to Lisa cowering in her own tent about six meters away. “I mean, now she probably stands zero chance of winning, because no one will actually buy her win as legitimate if she takes first place, or any place at all. She’s probably upset about this turn of events, if anything.”

  “Hmm,” I said. I wasn’t totally sold, but I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt. At least for a little while. Vicky did have a point. It would look incredibly dodgy if Lisa actually won now, and she probably knew that. There would be a riot if Lisa’s name was called out after the final judging.

  Tanner stopped by my tent and peered down at my wilted spinach. My small, wilted spinach. He pulled a face and scribbled something on his clipboard.

  “I’m gonna take it you just wrote down a perfect ten there,” I called out drolly after him, and then sighed as I picked my pots up and started to pack them away in the box I had brought them in.

  I knew I didn’t stand a chance of even making the top ten, let alone the top three, and I kept thinking about what could have been, if those crows had only kept their distance.

  Vicky asked me if I was coming up to see the judging. I had already picked up my box and was ready to march my spinach back to my car and call it a day. “Come on,” she said with a wink. “Be a good sport!”

  I shrugged and said, “Why not,” as I made my way over to the stage where the top ten we
re all waiting for the prizes to be announced. Third place went to my best customer, Violet, who grew blueberries but didn’t actually like to eat them herself. I dropped my box and burst into loud applause as Akiro’s squashes took second place. I’d had no idea he was even in with a shot. He looked a little embarrassed as he walked up to the mike and muttered a few words of thanks before he slumped away gripping the runner-up trophy.

  Everyone was silent as Tanner took back the mike and cleared his throat to announce the winner of the entire Swift Valley Garden Show.

  “Lisa Spears!”

  “What?” I spat out, and Vicky gasped in disbelief.

  There was some scattered clapping, but not much, because everyone was gaping at what they were seeing on stage and looking at each other for answers, sure that this must be a mistake, or they had just plain misheard the winner’s name.

  Lisa was as bright red as her strawberries as she walked over to the mike. She couldn’t even look at the crowd properly as she cleared her throat to make a very squeaky winner’s speech.

  I wondered if Vicky was right—maybe Lisa had been in a no-win situation. I mean, was it fair to have her lose just because her husband was the judge? I clapped a little, because I was starting to feel bad for her, but glares shot at me from every direction.

  Still, my intuition told me that something wasn’t right. It was just too much of a coincidence that Lisa’s husband was the judge, and she happened to win.

  But in the end, it wasn’t the fact that Lisa had won or even the fact that her husband was the judge that was the most suspicious thing. I was ready to leave again, but my best friend was still staring up at the stage where the top three were getting their photo taken for the paper. Lisa was clutching her giant check.

  Vicky shook her head. “I have never seen strawberries grow like that,” she said, staring at Lisa’s winning batch as though she was entranced by them. “They are so large and red that they don’t even look like they’re from earth.”

  “No. Not the human earth, anyway,” I replied.

  9

  “Are you going to abandon me again?” I asked Geri as she left me by the gate and started to walk off toward a section of ground a few meters south of the maze. She was pretending to rake fallen leaves from the ground. I say pretending because I did not believe that a magical garden actually needed such manual upkeep as this.

  Geri told me that she found the act of raking to be relaxing. She said it was therapeutic, and that she came to check on the garden.

  “So, you keep a pretty keen eye on it, then?” I said to her. “No one would get in or out of it without you seeing.”

  “That’s right.”

  Rake, rake, rake.

  Geri had told me that no regular humans knew about the garden. And that even if they knew about it, they would not be allowed in. But that was a moot point anyway, because none of them knew about it.

  Sigh.

  I just wanted to check a few things for myself. I had been hoping that Geri would give me a guided tour this time, so that I could avoid a repeat of my previous venture into the winding depths of the maze.

  Geri stopped raking for a moment and walked over to me. “This garden will take you where you need to go,” she whispered to me.

  I spun around to ask her what exactly she meant by that. But she had already gone.

  Right, so that answered my question as to whether she was going to abandon me there again or not.

  That would be a big, giant “Yes.”

  The gold gate seemed to be shining and beckoning me inside. Was that how it trapped its victims?

  I was almost too scared to open the gold gate and take my first step through it. What if I disappeared into another dimension?

  I told myself that I was being very silly. It was just a garden. A witch’s garden with rich soil, yes, but it was still just a garden with plants and vegetables in it, not a gateway to a different world.

  So I shook off my nerves and stepped inside. So far, so good. I could see a bunch of herbs at the entryway. That was where Vicky got all the herbs for her spells, she had told me. I was getting a little low on those myself. I made a note to grab some on the way out before I headed toward the middle of the garden where the maze was.

  Lisa had a “Secret Garden” of her own, and I had seen her strawberry patch there with my own two eyes. I knew that.

  But when I thought back to my trip to her house, those strawberries that I had seen—and even tasted—had not been as red, ripe, and plump as the ones that had earned her the first-place trophy. Maybe the ones she kept in her own garden were a decoy, so that no one suspected what she was actually up to.

  Gulp. The maze seemed to be calling me in. It was the only route to get to the center of the garden, and so I stepped inside it.

  I felt like the walls of the maze were closing in on me as I edged along, like if I stayed in one spot, I might be squished like a car that was being turned into scrap metal. It was all I could do to stop from squeezing my eyes shut and running through the maze blind so that I couldn’t see my own impending doom.

  In the end, it was fine, of course.

  A bit winding. And I was feeling dizzy at the end of my journey.

  But finally, I came to a clearing right in the center of the maze where sixty meters of garden spread out before me, and I could finally take in a deep breath. I hadn’t reached this part the previous time I had been in the garden. Last time, it had almost felt like I wasn’t “allowed” to reach this point.

  Like the maze was sentient. And, as Geri said, the garden always led you to where you needed to go.

  There was sunlight streaming into the place, and I stepped into it in awe. It was even more beautiful than the opening to the garden, where all the herbs and strange flowers had been. This part was like a magical forest that had been untouched by human hands since the beginning of time. Dark leaves and thick branches provided the perfect amount of shade, and dappled sunlight lined the edges. I made my way right into the center.

  The sun seemed blazingly hot, but it was just the right temperature. I glanced up, sure that there must be some sort of dome protecting the garden like a greenhouse, regulating the temperature. But I couldn’t see anything between me and the sky.

  But something was keeping the growing conditions in the garden precisely right. I hadn’t seen Geri bring a watering can along with her rake. Yet all the plants were perfectly green and the soil just slightly spongy to walk on, even though we hadn’t had rain in a week. And there was none in the forecast, either. Just dry, sunny days ahead.

  It was like this place was separate from the rest of town. From the rest of the world.

  This was a hard-enough place for a witch to find—I couldn’t believe that a human could just stumble into it by accident. I started to wonder if the crazy theory I’d had was just that: crazy.

  I jumped when I heard something coming from the bushes of the hedge maze.

  “Rubyyyyy . . .” It seemed like the leaves themselves were calling my name. Not the first time that had ever happened to me, but it never failed to creep me out.

  Was this what Geri had meant when she’d told me the garden would lead me to where I needed to go? I gulped and followed the strange, eerie voices. Maybe the crows had betrayed me, but the trees were still on my side.

  There was a patch of something up toward the other side of the garden where it turned into the maze again. That was the place it was leading me to.

  The garden was the size of a football pitch, but I trusted the sound. If it was going to lead me where I needed to go, then I was going to follow. There must be a reason I was being called all the way to the other side. I ran over there, part of me worried that the garden would melt and change shape before I got there. So I had to hurry; I had to get there fast to see what the trees wanted me to see.

  This must be it.

  I stopped dead in my tracks.

  No strawberries.

  Just yarrow.

 
; “Great,” I said, staring up at the bushes. “Are you guys in on this as well? Is this all one big conspiracy to deliver me bad luck in as many ways as . . .” I stopped speaking when I heard a loud rumbling. Like angels above had started up a motorbike.

  I looked up and saw something stirring overheard. Not like any regular storm that I had ever seen. There hadn’t even been any rain forecast, let alone this electrical current that was swirling through the sky like a spider on a record wheel.

  Another rumble. This time the angels were really revving the engine. There was a cracking sound, as though the mountain on the other side of the maze was being split in two.

  A storm was about to hit Swift Valley.

  I just knew that the inside of a maze wasn’t the best place to be in a storm, and so I ran back across the field even quicker than I’d crossed it. I wondered if that had been the garden’s plan all along, to trap me so that I couldn’t get out. I gasped over my shoulder as I watched the black clouds close in.

  But I couldn’t find the exit. I ran my hands frantically across the side of the hedge maze, sure that this was the spot I had come in through, but none of it looked familiar, and the hedge seemed to be growing thicker and thicker.

  There was a lightning strike, and one of the trees on the edge fell. I screamed and leapt out of the way before the heavy trunk could crush me.

  “HELP!” I screamed, hoping that somewhere out there, Geri was still pretending to rake leaves. Surely, she would see the storm and realize that I hadn’t come back.

  “Argh!” I screamed as something hard hit the back of my neck. I turned around to see golf ball-sized hail pummeling down from the sky.

  I tried to duck below the branches of the trees that had seemed so welcoming just fifteen minutes before, and they provided a little shelter from the golf balls. But there was a greater danger: the winds were so high that branches were falling, and the entire tree was bending over.

  “HELP!” I cried out again, wishing that I knew a teleportation spell. Or a spell to stop an entire storm. Some witches could control the weather. I tried to remember any snippets that I had overheard the other witches say at coven meetings, but my mind was as blank as the sky was dark.