Chapter 4.31 – Piglet

Jessica had had a terrible night’s sleep. Tossing and turning, this way and that, on Pixie’s lumpy sofa bed. She could have gone back to her cosy bed in Willow Creek, but was still somewhat terrified that a monster lay in wait for her.

The nightmares she’d had had further ruined her sleep. She was back in the crypt, sifting through skulls until Rose was sure they’d found hers. She was back outside the crypt, watching her fellow GliTS desperately trying to close the lid before the sun went down.

Morag was sure that she could call in a favour with a friend to get Rose’s remains analysed. Apparently, the GliTS had members in many places, and Morag had one in a forensics lab. Jessica was just worried that this mysterious scientist wouldn’t turn up any sensible results. It all sounded a bit dodgy.

Jessica would’ve, of course, liked to exhume all of the remains and get them all identified – she had a feeling that she’d be solving a lot of misper cases that way. But how best to go about that when they were all in a crypt that no one could see? How would she explain the invisible house?

She didn’t think Beth or the other officers would understand. So until then, it was her and the GliTS; Morag tracing Rose’s background, Pixie and Yibbo identifying and hopefully disabling the trick that kept the house hidden, and Jessica had been tasked with identifying the tree.

Which had brought her to here.

Eventually, when sleep just wouldn’t come, Jessica had switched on her phone. She carried out search after search on this mysterious tree they had found and had come up with nothing.

Nothing, that is, except for a website. A relatively local florist who, according to the website and recent reviews, was a specialist in identifying and caring for rare and unusual plants.

It was worth a try.

First thing in the morning, well first thing in the morning for Wyatt, so about 10 o’clock, Wyatt had put on his big boy pants and ventured over to Windenburg. The familiar streets led to the one place he’d been dreading to return to. The flower shop and, within it, the basement apartment he and his mum had called home.

He wouldn’t have come back, he hadn’t ever planned to come back, raw still were the memories of the last time he’d been there. But overpowering his sense of shame was a new, powerful sense – that to protect his daughter.

April was a prisoner in multiple senses of the word, but he could grant her some freedom with this sunlight protection potion they had crafted, so he had to craft it. And to craft it, they needed ingredients. Broof’s stock was limited, as the bearded witch barely brewed tea, let alone any complicated potions. Wyatt could buy things online, but with a grand total of seven simoleons in his bank account it wouldn’t pay for postage, let alone a litre of esbat water, a white quartz and three bunches of rare herbs.

So, there was nothing else for it. Wyatt needed to go home and raid the well-stocked cupboards.

He’d planned to swiftly nip in, grab what he needed and leave again, but still sorta afraid to use his magic, he’d had to go there on foot rather than transportalate. And the memories of his mother further slowed down his endeavours.

In an attempt to leave the Scene of the Event ‘til last, Wyatt had taken the store entrance to reach the craft room. The darkness rested heavily on him, but he didn’t have the energy or will to spark up the daylight spell that gave the basement dwelling the illusion of sunlight.

The overwhelming scent of flowers smacked him in the face as he entered. Granted, some had died from lack of sunlight, but most still clung on, enchanted as they were with Wyatt’s carefully brewed plant feeds. Even in the dark, he could make out the colours, could see his mum busying around them, pruning, tidying, singing to herself, “Oh! What a beautiful morrrrning!”

She’d been such a happy soul. Wyatt shrugged off the creeping feeling of guilt and began to gather what he needed, not only for the sunlight potion, but for a few other basic ones. If April was going to craft potions, with or without him, he’d rather she do it with and he’d rather that she had the right ingredients.

Once he’d gathered what he needed here, he realised that he’d need a few pieces of kit too. Hoggy barely had any flasks in his house either. It was like the dude wasn’t even a witch sometimes. Wyatt kept most of his kit in his room, where he’d brewed his private concoctions.

Getting to his room, however, meant crossing the kitchen. Thankfully he’d walked that route so many times over the years that he could literally do it with his eyes closed. So he did, sneaking blindly past the Scene of the Event and only bumping into one ceramic piglet.

He’d forgotten that Broof had cleaned his room. It almost didn’t feel like his. He dug into his supplies and filled his inventory with as much as he thought he could carry without smashing everything. It was weird though. It felt like the air was getting thicker, felt like memories were drowning him, weighing him down…

“I should’ve known that when I heard the vacuum that you wouldn’t possibly be cleaning!”

He snorted around an embarrassed laugh. Of all the things to recall. And with his laugh he felt something shift, something lift.

Crossing the kitchen again, once again passing the Scene of the Event, somehow didn’t feel as difficult as the first time. He even stole a look at the corner where she’d… where he’d…

It was just a corner.

He entered the brewing room at the base of the stairs, where they kept all their spell books and weirder ingredients, a tangle of memories replaying in his mind. Some dark a laden with guilt, but most not dark at all.

This room, above all others, was where they’d crafted together, strategised together.

Wyatt!!!

Where she’d shouted at him the most for causing unplanned destruction.

Wyatt walked the perimeter of the room, coming to rest at the giant cauldron. He looked around at the suspended herbs and flowers, the photos of his folks, the dainty bottles and shelves upon shelves of ancient books. All, undeniably, his mother. But then there were the nicks and scratches in the wall that hadn’t been able to be mended, the jars of frogs legs and chicken feet that had been subtly switched out over the years for more humane ingredients. The cheat sheets hidden in the pages of old tomes he couldn’t be bothered to read more than once. There was a lot of his mother in this apartment, in this room, but, when he looked closer, there was also a lot of him.

The feeling he got then wasn’t guilt, or shame or misery. It was comfort. This hadn’t just been her home; it had been their home. It was where everything had begun and where everything had grown. He had thought that this was where everything had ended, but was it?

The flowers still bloomed. There was still so much life here. It would be such a shame if he let everything wilt, if he let everything that his mum, and his dad, worked hard for simply die with them.

He ran his fingers around the lip of the cauldron, restraining the spark of his magic as it contacted the familiar pot. The light spell flickered behind him, like a sign.

Could he do this? Could he really move back in? Maybe. He knew April would be happy here, and there was plenty of room for Melinda too. Melinda was very polite and grateful but Wyatt could tell that she felt a cooped up in Moon’s tiny cottage. The pair of them could have his mum’s old room, a double bed to get up to the things he knew they’d be getting up to. He and April could brew up potions with all the right equipment. It was a shorter distance for Melinda’s parents to travel to donate blood for their daughter. He wouldn’t have to worry about scrubbing the toilet with a toothbrush every time he had a dodgy pizza. Heck, he could even open the flower shop periodically, get some cash coming back in. Melinda could carry on painting pots to sell…

It was a no-brainer really; the only obstacle, he realised, was himself.

Wyatt’s thought process was interrupted by a familiar jingle from above and a moment of panic. Shit, he’d forgotten to lock the door to the store. It was probably only Agatha Bun, but he hot-footed it up the stairs before she could wander down and see a giant cauldron and a cabinet full of eyeballs.

The woman was browsing with her back to him. He cleared his throat but she was clearly very jumpy.

“Arghhh!” she screamed. “You scared me!”

“I scared you!?” Wyatt spluttered as the freaked out woman turned to face him. He immediately noticed the tummy bump on her lithe frame and apologised. “I’m really sorry, I didn’t mean to scare you, but we’re not open.”

“Well, the sign says you’re open from nine-thirty on Mondays—”

“It’s a bit outdated.”

“And the door was open. Ajar, in fact. So you seem open to me.”

Wyatt sighed. This woman probably just wanted a cactus or something, he might as well serve her. “Sure, okay, we’re open. What can I help you with?”

“I’m here about a plant.”

Wyatt gestured around himself at the hundreds of plants in various stages of dying. “Can you be any more specific?”

The woman looked around and shook her head. “You don’t have anything like it.”

“Oh. You could try the supermarket on Blueberry Street—”

“No, no, I’m not buying a plant – I’ve found one and I don’t know what it is. I’ve tried a plant identification app, web searches and nothing even close is coming up. I was hoping you might be able to help me identify it.”

“Me?”

“Yes, well, I looked up ‘local botanist’ in the phonebook and your store popped up along with a few reviews saying that you were very skilled at identifying plants.”

Wyatt shrugged, “I mean my mum was the expert but yeah, I know a thing or two about plants. Do you have it on you or—”

“I couldn’t bring it with me, but I have photos of it,” the woman whipped out her phone and showed Wyatt a few picture of what looked like a dead tree. “It had fruit, here’s a picture of them. They looked like light pink apples but were a bit soft and had a metallic sheen.”

“What do they taste like?”

“Uh… I mean I didn’t try one – would you eat an unidentified fruit?”

Probably. “Probably not. What did the leaves look like?”

“Flat, almost perfectly round, very dark purple, almost black. Here.”

“Weird,” Wyatt muttered looking at the photo. “What are those purple streaks on the trunk?”

“I was hoping you could tell me. They sort of… move.”

“Move?”

“Yes, they streak and flash.”

“Wyatt cleared his throat. “A flashing, streaking tree, huh. And where did you find it?”

The woman looked at him for a moment. “In a crypt,” she said quietly.

“A crypt?”

She nodded. “Yes, growing entirely underground. Isn’t that unusual?”

“Unheard of,” Wyatt repeated, taking in the woman’s headgear fully for the first time. “In a crypt, you say. Hey, where is this crypt?”

“I can’t tell you that. It’s classified information.”

Wyatt nodded slowly, the whole situation becoming very clear. “Sure. Well, leave it with me.”

“Don’t you want the photos?”

“Uh, sure, yeah fine.”

“Great, I’ll email them to you. Is the address on your website correct?”

Wyatt had no idea. “Yeah.”

The woman tapped her screen rapidly, entering in the email address that Wyatt hoped led nowhere. “Okay, sent,” she confirmed. “It’ll come from Jessica Spoon; that’s me. Remember, this is classified, don’t share those images!”

Wyatt nodded at this woman, wondering how to get her to leave. “I won’t be sharing them,” he said. “I’ll be in touch if I find anything out.”

“Fab!” Jessica smiled and glanced to her left, her smile wavering for only a second. “I’ll look forward to hearing from you, Wyatt.”

“Great.”

With that, Jessica turned on her heel and left the store. Wyatt swiftly locked the door and tore the opening hours from it. He headed back down the stairs to resume his train of thought, when he heard a ping from the kitchen, from his mum’s mobile phone that had been left on charge under the counter for months. He quickly bypassed her minimal security efforts to see that she had a new email; Plant ID from Jessica Spoon, with the promised pictures attached.

His finger hovered over a key as he looked at the images. They were dark, blurry. Contained a plant that apparently grew entirely underground, in the dark, and glowed purple, seen only by a dippy-looking woman wearing a tinfoil hat.

Wyatt knew a hoax when he saw one. It was the ‘cow plant’ fiasco all over again. He hit the button he was lingering over.

Delete.

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