The House Where Flowers Cease To Grow

Prologue:

Across town, amid the forest, was a rather colossal house. It wasn’t the small, hygge cottages with a cobblestone exterior and bland decor, nor the immensely lavish houses of Roman castles or kingdoms. The house amongst the serene pine trees and furious brambles wasn’t like the homes with a gingerbread trim, or marble columns, or even the lazy arches rising aloft in pride. The House Where Flowers Cease to Grow was unique.   

Part One: Petrified Blossoms

Hunter was fourteen, and she relished anything pure. She adored trees mostly; in fact, her ability to name a variety of foliage and vegetation made her a popular student in her gardening class.

Of course, her ecstasy was everlasting when her kin announced their departure to their new abode, which was stated to be veiled beneath a canopy of pines. She was weary of the old, yellowed wallpaper and the sickly green carpet of her prehistoric bedroom. She knew she wouldn’t yearn for her previous house. 

Hunter was curled cozily in the vehicle’s backseat, humming along with tumultuous music blasting from her smartphone through her AirPods. 

The burly moving truck had already departed weeks prior, carrying barely any furniture in its belly. Hunter’s parents had previously arrived and checked the place out, gloating on their new home’s impeccable beauty to two oblivious children. 

Hunter doesn’t lack even a smidge of content as they drive swiftly past grazing cattle and rural homes, for she had frequently found rigorous joy in lengthy road trips. However, this one was merely one-way. 

“Can we stop?” he whined crossly, “I’m hungry.” 

Hunter’s little brother, Ashton, has complained since before he could toddle. Therefore, Hunter remains subtly indifferent to his ravenousness. 

Ashton had jet-black hair that curled into shaggy waves–unlike Hunter’s auburn—he wasn't lanky for eight, and his toothless smirk often screeched upcoming mischievousness. 

However, when the mustard yellow and crimson neon lights of the ice cream joint glinted in her peripheral vision, Hunter was dimly aware that they had already packed dessert. 

Jolting up, Hunter lifted her head from the cool window, damp from the downpour outside, and spoke loudly over the blare of her music. “Yeah, please?”

Her father peered impatiently at them through the rearview mirror and sighed when their mother grinned, “Fine, only one thing each.” 

Ten minutes later, the car erupted into turmoil after Ashton unintentionally dropped a generous dollop of cookie dough ice cream onto the immaculate leather seats of their dad’s luxurious vehicle.

Despite the tempest, Hunter was euphoric, consuming the waffle cone of mango ice cream, although a brain freeze claimed her every couple of bites. 

The Balisons arrived at the forest at the house seven minutes before midnight. They had driven through the eerie town, and Hunter mused on how surreal and fanciful it seemed after dusk, where not a noise was emitted. 

“Let’s just go in quickly, please.” Hunter muttered, “I don’t like it out here.” 

She shifts from foot to foot nervously. Hunter’s uncertainty wasn’t due to the chill or the darkness. Despite her adoration for nature, there was a sense of anything but benevolence in the atmosphere, which froze her blood.  

Fortunately, their parents obliged, agreeing to turn over the house key as soon as they got there.

When the trees above space out, leaving strips of moonlight that brighten the ghastly forest so it no longer conceals their vision, Hunter doesn’t glimpse the house first. She doesn’t concern herself with the bewitching exterior of the home. Not the sea blue glass that proudly identifies as modern windows. Not the black marble and ebony wooden frame. Not the sweet, honeyed scent of woody pine sap. Not the swimming pool, stretched across the length, sleepy as a dozing feline. Not the gasp of her little brother’s astounded voice. Not the pride-filled mumbles of her parents. Not even the stream that babbled vocally from the western side of the house. The first facet Hunter is aware of is the petrified blossoms; how, around the house’s perimeter, pulchritudinous flowers cease to grow. 

Part Two: Hide-and-Seek

Never in her fourteen and a half years had Hunter felt so transfixed. 

She had been residing in her new house for three weeks now.  Her room had graciously been painted a smoky blue hue, her most cherished color. Her mother had been shopping, buying new clothes and trinkets to decorate the gargantuan rooms. Hunter was diligently aware that whenever her mother shopped, she was wholly content. Hunter’s mother always cackled that they had struck a deal on account of the mansion’s immense inexpensiveness. Even her father was astounded by the home’s beauty and grandeur compared to the price tag, and the only aspect that slightly impressed him was whether a potato chip was shaped like a celebrity. 

Her father was chiefly occupied with his professional calls. Otherwise, he often spent leisure time outdoors with Ashton. 

Hunter had explored the pool, sloshing ebulliently around in the glassy water, she had ventured across the stream, wincing and dashing for the bank as the frigid currents nipped her ankles, and she had played hide-and-seek with a rather deceiving Ashton. 

She had done it all. 

One morning, she had woken up, snug and warm, wrapped up in her four-poster bed to the cacophonous titters of songbirds amid the burly pines. She had drawn herself heavily from bed and blinked at the sleep still lingering beneath her lids, out of her eyes. Hunter strode across the shaggy carpeted, yawning widely, her excitement bubbling up into a cocoon of joviality. 

However, when Hunter entered the tidy, sleek kitchen, not a soul was present. She traveled through her abode,  knocking heartily against her kin’s bedroom door and banging with aloofness when her family didn’t respond with assurance. 

As Hunter stepped out into the morning gloom, the exquisite, lush forest no longer intrigued her; a feeling of petrified trepidation filled her heart, and she longed to call out for her parents and little brother, all of whom had melted into oblivion without a trace.

The blunt screech of a raven made her flinch, her grandmother had always reminded her of an obsolete saying. 

Slowly, as if she was attempting it on her hoarse tongue, she muttered it to herself, “When a raven cries, something nearby di–” 

“Hunter?” The voice was a mellifluous melody in Hunter’s ears, the silence lying heavy above the woods like a sheet of quiet was anguishing. 

Hunter whirled around to face a bedraggled Ashton. His pale eyes glinted with unshed tears.

“Where were you?” Hunter hissed grudgingly. “I looked everywhere!” 

“Sorry!” Ashton squeaked, “I was trying to find mom and dad, I didn’t find them!” 

“Why didn’t you consult me before running off like that?” Hunter sighed with disrupted impatience. 

His voice, laden with anxiety, ignited an incomprehensible fear in Hunter’s heart. She was no longer furious with her little brother; she was no longer bewildered as to why Ashton had departed alone instead of informing her. 

“I didn’t find you!”

Hunter nodded, his words were unrealistic, as if he were fibbing. 

“Perhaps mom and dad are outside?” Hunter offered, “Playing a game of hide-and-seek?” Her brother giggled as she tapped his nose, enunciating the last word. 

Ashton grinned bashfully, and somehow, Hunter knew she was lying. 

Part Three: “Where the White Lily Lies”

Hunter was tedious. She had waited with Ashton in the whimsical, modern house, watching television on the smart flat-screen her mother had boastfully purchased. 

Wrapped up in the film, Hunter was simply unaware until she noticed a peculiar factor of her new home. 

“Where’s that vase?” 

“Huh?” Ashton deadpans, peering blankly in the direction Hunter was gesturing to. 

“There!” She shifted excitedly on the leather sofa. “There was a cheetah, or a leopard vase, there! Mom said it was pretty with pink tulips, and Dad claimed it creeped him out!” 

Ashton narrowed his pale eyes and shrugged with no recognition, turning back to the blasting movie. “Well, I don’t remember it. Ask mom and dad when they get back.” 

Hunter grumbled to herself, Ashton was the type that was painfully oblivious to minor, and almost always vital details. 

The missing vase was an uncanny puzzle piece, a facet torn out from her consciousness. However, she swiftly assumed her superstitious father had thrown it out with fearful suspicion, and waited until he would come back. 

Hunter fixed Ashton and her a simple meal that afternoon, roast beef and cheddar sandwiches. They chewed in deafening silence for a while until Ashton began whining. 

“Where’s Mom and Dad?” he cried with discontent. “They should be back by now!” 

Hunter couldn’t help but silently agree with her little brother, as occupied and unconcerned as he seemed, he was catching on to the oddity. 

“Don’t worry. I’m sure they’ll be back soon.

“Actually,” Hunter began with the officious tone of the elder sibling, “You should be getting to bed soon. You know Mom and Dad don’t like it when you stay up late.” 

Astounding, Ashton nodded and obliged meekly. Hunter could hear his faint footfalls on the springy, beige carpeted stairs across the room, and the gentle creaking of his bedroom door being closed. 

A pause. 

“Where’s my bedroom drawer?” Ashton squealed, muffled from upstairs. 

Now he was concerned. Currently, two items have vanished inconspicuously. 

After he grew silent, Hunter sighed heavily and took their plates to the dishwasher. Before she could begin an additional task, a grueling thump was emitted loudly from the other side of the house. A region not even explored on account of how she lost her way after even five minutes of venturing. 

Intrigued with a morsel of mild concern, Hunter gingerly padded toward the source of the noise. 

The gargantuan house seemed to lengthen amongst her, each door she entered deeper into the oblivion of the home, toward the noise, the house became more bare. It was stripped of furniture, of the modern oil paintings her mother had brought, bleached of any sign of life.  

Soon, not even a minuscule amount of anything was left in the rooms and halls. Merely undecorated white walls wrapped her in an embrace of choking pale ash.  

A noise that sounded suspiciously like a footstep in the room behind her made Hunter whirl to face the other direction. She blinked for a while, straining to make out anything that seemed to produce the sound. She eventually turned back on course and hurried along.

Suddenly, the desolate rooms began to grow seemingly ragged. The white walls grew yellowed and black with mold. The once sleek redwood paneled floors became scratched and splintered, the ends stuck up like angst-filled thistles. A keen odor of mildewiness wafted into her nostrils, the air was damp, nd Hunter shuddered–not due to the abnormal, sudden chillness per se, in the atmosphere hung a peculiarity that brought hesitance to her once brisk strides.

To her, this was quite odd. Hunter had not deciphered the house as large as it seemed from the inside. It was almost unreal in comparison. 

Ashton’s movement upstairs had slowly faded to a ringing silence in her eardrums as she strode toward another door at the end of the corridor.

Her heart was in her throat, her head throbbed with petrifiction and sickening as she gripped the handle hastily, trembling as she tore it open. She was somehow painstakingly aware that this door held a moment she would never cease to forget. She shut her eyes and held her breath, grateful for the break from the rooms’ musty reek. 

Hunter’s closed eyes gradually blinked open. 

A discreet gasp was anything equivalent to what she encountered next. She was first conscious of the excruciating scent of staleness. Then, her parents lay dozing on the floor nearest to the door she pulled open. Then, the skeletons. After, the array of furniture presumably dating back to the 1900s was scattered haphazardly throughout the room. Finally, the last factor that struck her was a white lily, encased in a sealed container. On the front of the flower of perishment was a blood-red symbol dotted with a jet-black speck in the very essence. The pure milky flower’s red iris center gleamed and let out a thump, jerking the glass it was encased in. It was as if the plant was brawling to escape the safety of the glass. 

All of this was captured in a single, windowless room. Her gaze flitted to the ceramic vase shaped like a leopard and the oak drawer that Ashton had been questioning the disappearance of.

Hunter's heart seemed to freeze; any method of serenity or tranquility she attempted was futile. Hunter struggled to fathom the scene that played out in front of her. 

Everything that ever vanished from this house and probably numerous others was right in front of Hunter…and she was standing right in the middle of it.

Part Four: “What the Pretty House Reaped”

Hunter was both transfixed and frozen in shock. Regaining her senses, she lunged forward and desperately shook her parents awake. 

“Mom!” She cried in anguish, a tide of anxiety was lapping at her heels, threatening to consume her whole. “Dad, Mom, wake up! C’mon!”

After minutes of prodding them to consciousness, Hunter’s heart slowed to a constant, steady rate, and her parents’ eyes fluttered awake. 

“Hunter?” they murmured en masse. 

Hunter smiled through the tears that threatened to spill over, She clasped her parents' hands as they pulled themselves upright. 

“Where were you?” Hunter sobbed, embracing her kin. 

Her parents exchanged wary glances. Her father began speaking. “We..” 

“We aren’t sure what happened...” her mother finished. “One moment we were waking up, the next we found you standing over us.” 

Hunter stared at them blankly. “You were gone for over a day.” 

“Then who–” Hunter’s dad shook his head, “We’ll figure it out later, the only thing that matters is that we are together now.” 

His wife nodded, and his daughter nodded in unison.

“Wait, where's Ashton?” 

“Here!” Ashton burst through the door, eyes alight with mischievous enrapturement. “I knew you were hiding!” 

His voice melted into silence at the wide eyes of his family. His eyes flew to the skeletons, and he took a step back behind the room’s threshold. 

“I followed you...” he murmured, horrified, to Hunter, “You didn’t notice, but I was behind you.”  His gaze slowly turned to the missing furniture and eventually the white lily. “What is this!”

Hunter could feel the tension in that atmosphere and rushed forward to console her sneaky, distraught, little brother. 

Suddenly, a gust of zephyr from a window outside the room, in the corridor, flung the door in front of Hunter and her parents shut. The metal click of the lock was heard, trapping Ashton outside the room and Hunter and her parents inside. 

Ashton banged on the door, weeping and hiccuping. Hunter's parents kicked the door with all the strength they could muster. Despite their multiple endeavors, their results weren’t fruitful. Hunter whispered to her brother from the other side, ordering him to call the police. 

“They’ll come.” Hunter’s father promised flatly, knuckles crimson from heavy pounding, a weak method to escape the clutches of the monstrous room. “Go, son.”

Ashton was already gone. 

The three family members paced the room after Ashton had departed for the availment. They scavenged for supplies to break out. From a blunt bone to a dusty broom handle, nothing seemed to penetrate the wooden door of steel. 

Her parents seemed to have given up hope, faithless in their pursuit of leaving the room that trapped them like mice. Ashton hadn’t come back for a while, but Hunter never thought he would return; hope was something her grandparents had instilled in her. 

After half a day, Hunter learned something about her new, seemingly innocent home:

The house reaped what it sowed. It provided what one hopes for, seductive to the foolish. This house that Hunter’s parents had bought with no record had led them astray, had played them. It had given beauty, wonder, and most of all cataclysm, all for a cheap but expensive cost. The house was too pretty, a precious jewel in a remote mine. One in a billion. Its inexpensiveness and the location’s alienation weren’t a coincidental notion. No one knew who built the house, or better yet, all of them, for it fit the desires of its victims. All Hunter knew was that she had lost, and the price would be paid for eternally. 

The police did indeed come to the location, but there was no house. They arrived a day and a half later, struggling to find the home the little boy described: Seafoam blue windows, modern structure, exquisite, glistening swimming pool.  He said something too, something the authorities couldn’t recall, something paranormal about flowers that cease to grow? The little boy was presumably an eight-year-old, too deep in his fantasies, lost in the isolated woods. Of course, the poor boy was probably disoriented, for no matter how much they searched, they had never found a home of such.

Epilogue: 25 Years Later

The man held his wife’s hand in one, and the little girl’s in the other. 

The child was young, bright-eyed, and bushy-tailed. Intent to discover beauty in even the basics of aspects. A dress blue like forget-me-nots, eyes the same hue. She giggled when her mother tucked a flower into her wavy black curls. 

“Do I look pretty, Papa?” She danced and sang, skipping in the fields of flowers. 

“Always.” The man chucked, twirling the little girl around until she squealed with delight. Somehow, his daughter reminded him of someone, someone he adored deeply. However, he could not recall where the little girl obtained those wide blue eyes and splash of freckles. 

His wife, mother of the child, smiled and looked up at the house in front of them, amongst the blossoms kissed gently by bumblebees. 

“Isn’t it always what you wanted?” the man asked his wife. “A house like that?” He gestured to the large abode. 

“Yes. A house in the middle of a beautiful meadow. It was so cheap, too!”

“Wow!” The little girl cried. “Look, Papa, pretty flower!” Her tiny index finger pointed to a white lily with an eye of red by the pond where emerald frogs croaked a melody and fish swirled in the shallow depths. 

Somehow, the flower recalled the man of something, something odd from his childhood. He racked his brain for the answer to the sense of déjà vu, to no avail. His intriguing blossomed when the ring of forget-me-nots faded to the damp soil around the home, the few that were within the circumference of flowers were yellowed with death. 

The man blinked; he was on the brink of remembrance, but his consciousness did not cooperate. He stood scrutinizing the white lily and the flowers that ceased to grow around the rim of the house. 

He thought, It's as if they are scared of– 

His wife yelped in surprise as the little girl pulled her along, dashing for the looming house. “Come on,” his wife called to the man from the porch. “What are you looking at?” 

The man stuttered and jerked as if waking from a deep slumber. “N-nothing. I’m coming.” 

“What was wrong with you out there?” His wife asked inquisitively once they were inside their new home. “You looked frozen, Ashton.” 

“Nothing,” the man squeaked. He cleared his throat. The wave of his thoughts receded away, ebbing from the shore of his mind as swiftly as they came. 

“Nothing. Nothing at all.” The man smiled warmly, and a kind of joy ignited in his heart. “Come on, let’s have a good look around. I have a feeling this house is made for us to stay.”