Tales from the Night - His Inflorescence

May 2067. It's dead of night. Lejl is at the flower shop where she works, questioned by the cops. Something bad has happened, bad enough to cause two investigators from Yard to get there as quickly as possible.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

“One more time from the beginning, please. This time with all the details.”

I look up at the person in front of me, the person who just listened to a summary of my story, of my recounting of the events, up to the point where I opened the door. Her voice is kind of rough, as if she just recovered from a bad throat condition. Feels like listening to a chainsmoker, even if she doesn’t look the part. The scars on her neck and face tell a different story – I wonder what kind of story, though. Her hair too, that long, azure hair that almost touches the ground. It can’t be dyed, it would be insane to keep such beautiful hair in perfect shape while maintaining that vibrant color, unless she used a whole bottle of hair dye every day or something. No, it has to be natural, no matter what dark pact or deal with the devil she must have made for that to be the case. She looks positively gorgeous, I’m not going to lie about it. Her emerald eyes are literally piercing through mine, staring deep into my soul, and those strange scars on her skin make her somehow even more attractive. Yet, I must restrain myself. She’s here to do her job. She’s a sleuth from Yard.

“I’d... rather not, Detective Rainer. It was... already quite painful.”

Mr. Kramers, the shop’s mascot, is placidly sitting near me, rubbing his back against the chair. Our little pet nocti, still recovering from that horrible parasite plant infection. That Paddy was a godsend, I’ve gotta ask Chai for her number again. I owe her at least a drink. Li’l Kramers seems to feel way better already, but I’m sure he’s still aching here and there. I notice how detective Rainer stares at him, with some sort of curiosity, mixed with disgust. I can’t fathom the reason why, but contrary to most people I know, she behaves as if she’s had one or more close encounters with phages – and they weren’t pleasant at all.

“How did you get to know this Niamm Kissilmer?”

Oh, huh. That’s the question? I don’t think I can answer truthfully, I’m sorry. Can’t tell you Niamm Kissilmer saved me from the Shadow Gallery and then hired me to work at his newly opened flower shop in New Langdon. I can’t reveal my origins. I can’t tell her I’m not a... let’s say, naturally born human being. It’s been hard to get through this, I don’t like direct questions. Fortunately, I’ve had plenty of time to rehearse some answers, during my short existence as a normal woman.

“By absolute chance. The day I arrived in New Langdon from Ireland, I noticed this building and asked myself, ‘what kind of idiot would open a flower shop in a harbor?’”

Detective Rainer chuckles, out of the blue, interrupting my well-crafted story.

“I had the same question. Then, I remembered who I was dealing with and suddenly everything made sense. Please, continue, though. Don’t let my random quips sway you.”

I delve back into my memory vault, trying to piece together my story again.

“Well, uh, so I got to have a look at it, entered and saw all those species of flowers... some of which were so bizarre and exotic that I didn’t even know they existed before then. All of a sudden, this old-looking guy walks out from the back room and starts talking with me. We chat a little, he learns that I’m new and looking for a job, and he ends up offering me a position. He needed someone to deal with the customers while he was working in his lab, or something. Since I didn’t know anybody here and the money seemed decent, I... uh, just accepted it?”

I notice how her eyebrows are bending, much like she’s questioning my life choices. I’m sure I must seem weird to her, even down to my appearance. My body is plastered with faint tattoos, and my outfit shows more skin than it covers. It’s still an improvement compared to – you know – not wearing anything at all, but I can see why she would be surprised, and not in a good way.

“That noctiphage... was it already there when you first arrived?”

Oh. Huh. That was the sticking point? Our li’l Mr. Kramers?

“Yes. I found him adorable.”

I see her expression turn sour, as if I had just uttered a nasty four-letter-word to her face. She really doesn’t like noctis.

“Where I’m from, we terminate them on sight. With extreme prejudice, before they can kill us in turn. Sorry, Ms. Kaleidos, I just can’t understand how you could happily live together with a walking biohazard like that. Maybe I’m just getting old.”

“Told ya!”

“Shut up, EiN.”

The voice that called her out was that of her colleague. A very tall man, taller than Cyphy. Muscular, yet slender, with neck-length brown hair and gray eyes, clad in a leather jacket and ripped jeans that are both covered by golden studs shaped like the number one. EiN, he’s called. With a capital N, apparently. Go figure. The two of them work for Yard, or so they told me. They look completely antithetical to each other, in a “good cop, bad cop” kind of way, but nonetheless, they’re both hounds, part of an elite group of detectives. I’ve watched a documentary about them, on the Reality Oscillation Phenomena they investigate. To think The Walking Night was one of those...

“Okay, so you accepted the offer and started working for Mr. Kissilmer. Did you notice anything... strange or out of the ordinary about him? Before yesterday night, I mean.”

It would honestly be easier to tell her what wasn’t out of the ordinary about him. Niamm Kissilmer was a walking concentration of strangeness and didn’t do anything to hide it.

“Aside from his horribly gray skin, the missing eye, the patch he’d always wear on his cheek, the constant stench of rotten flesh, his unhealthy obsession with Eliphya, the multiple scars on his right wrist, and the fact that he slept inside a literal coffin? No, not really. He always paid me on time, even though the shop was on the verge of bankruptcy. We didn’t have many customers, as you might have guessed.”

Detective Rainer’s eyes stare right at me, wide-open, as if each item on my list had reawakened some memories or repressed experiences within her. What has this woman in front of me gone through?

“Eliphya, you said.”

“Yup, he watched re-runs of that series every day and night, ogling the protagonist and saying really gross stuff about her all the time. I hated that.”

She seems deep in thought, pondering her next question.

“Listen, Ms. Kaleidos, is there any chance... he mentioned someone by the name of Baal the Mad, even just once?”

“No, I don’t think he ever mentioned him. That was the guy who was connected to the Walking Night, right? Mr. Kissilmer did talka lot about the Walking Night. And also about this weird Rosenmaester case. They seemed to be his favorite topics, when he wasn’t busy lusting over Eliphya. He always complained about how people believed Rosenmaester’s flowers to be, well, roses, when they were actually chrysanthemums.”

And I remember how mad he was, every time someone got that wrong. I remember him getting in an argument with a customer about it. It was insane, I had to stop good old Mr. Kissilmer from siccing li’l Kramers on them. I had never seen him in such a state of rage before. Still, this question is... unsettling.

The Night is finding her way back to me, even if I want to keep her out of my life. Every time I think I’m free of her influence, she manages to step in from the back door. I feel a shiver running down my spine. That’s in the past, Lejl. Don’t beat yourself about it. It was all a performance, you’ve never been a conduit for the Walking Night. It was just your persona. It was just make-believe. Now, calm down, okay?

I draw a deep breath, look back at those deep, emerald lakes quizzically gazing at me.

“So yeah, Mr. Kissilmer always felt a little bit – how should I say it – fixated? As in, he used to repeat himself very often, and always about the same stuff. Like a broken record, I guess?”

“...A broken record?”

“Oh, uh, I mean... like, you know those vinyl music discs, yeah? When you try to play them with a gramophone and the grooves are all scratched up, it might get stuck playing the same part of the track over and over, like a defective echo.”

I almost shiver again at those words. A defective echo. That’s what he called me, not long after having saved me. A defective echo of Aylin. That’s what I am. A violation of causality. For a long time, I didn’t even exist; I just... kind of woke up one day, as a figment of Amy’s psyche. I realized I could read her mind like a book, that I was a guest in her body, but had little to no control over her. It was weird. I could call her, but she couldn’t hear me. She didn’t know about me, and I couldn’t understand anything at first. I had to learn, and learn, and learn. And, at some point, I wanted it. I wanted a name.

Lejl.

In hindsight, Lejl was a strange choice. It means “night” in Maltese. Pronounced “Layl”. Why did I pick a Maltese name of Arabic origin? How did I learn about its existence? Sometimes I think I might have been born as a sort of... vortex, capable of ingesting and absorbing residual information from my surroundings. A spinning, spiraling black hole, an anomaly feeding on raw information and turning it into a new part of myself. That’s how I believe my consciousness formed, by constant assimilation of random bits of fading words, memories, traces attached to the places Aylin was traveling through. Traces that stopped existing, as soon as I consumed them. So, to whom did that fragment of knowledge belong? Who was the person who was thinking about the Maltese word for “night”, when I picked it up? Where were they now? They don’t know about the role they had in making me myself, and they probably never will.

Do they still remember that word, or did me learning about it erase it from their memory? It’s scary to think I could have had such an effect on the people around me, yet I have no idea if that was ever really the case. Lejl. The Night.

It comes full circle again.

My existence and the Night’s are inseparable. I am Lejl. I am Night.

“Ms. Kaleidos?”

My mind movie breaks down, turning the clock back to the current moment, to the blue haired woman interrogating me. Her fragrance catches my attention. Good choice of perfume, very sweet, yet decisive. I need to ask her later what it is. I’d like to buy it for Cyphy. They’re more similar than they might look. Same determination, same fire burning in their eyes.

“Yes, sorry Detective Rainer, I just spaced out a little. But, yeah, I was saying that Mr. Kissilmer sometimes felt a little bit, like... disconnected from reality, if that makes sense. In more ways than one, too. Once, I punched him in the gut – I was seriously angry, okay? And it felt like – I dunno, hitting a bag full of flies? No thud, no impact. Just... the weird feeling of touching something that shouldn’t have been there.”

Her lips move slowly, her voice gets lower all of a sudden.

“Like a ghost giving sermons in the drunkard-filled streets, without caring whether commoners listen or not, in the cold embrace of his Night.”

I gulp, startled. Those words... Those words are...

An audible sigh interrupts me again – a very loud one. Detective Rainer turns around, ignoring me for a moment, waving her hand in the direction of her colleague.

“How come we didn’t find out about this before, EiN? This is textbook Baal, and he was hiding under our noses for at least a full year, maybe two!”

The towering man shrugs as he flashes a smirk at the blue-haired lady, showing his perfectly white teeth – almost shining in the dim light of the shop.

“I was on paternity leave, Veckert... aaaand you were dealing with being single again, dismantling yet another drug cartel, paying emergency reparations for Blame, yadda yadda, et cetera. Shit happens.”

“Well, it shouldn’t have. Not with him.”

Veckert. That’s another weird name, I’ve only heard it once or twice, and only on the news. Sounds like a German name, but I’m pretty sure she isn’t. From her accent, I’d wager she’s Irish, just like Paddy. Maybe they know each other? That would indeed be a curious coincidence. I don’t think they’d get along, though. This Veckert seems hellbent on killing phages, while Paddy is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. They would probably murder each other at first sight. And Chai would be sitting there, munching popcorn and enjoying the show like the gremlin she is, no doubt making bets with Cyphy about who would survive.

“He wasn’t even half subtle. Niamm Kissilmer – he just rearranged the letters of his name! And, apparently, this Kissilmer’s face showed the very same gun wounds Baal suffered four years ago. It can’t be a coincidence, can it? It must have been him.”

She stares at her colleague with what I can only define as quiet disapproval. This woman is pure fire, bottled up energy on the verge of exploding, but still manages to keep a cool demeanor. I wish I was more like her. Still, I don’t understand. Why does she keep calling Mr. Kissilmer “Baal”? That’s the name of some ancient deity – or demon, by some accounts. If she’s correct... who was Niamm Kissilmer, really? Did he lie to me from the beginning, from the day he saved me from the Shadow Gallery? But why?

He just rearranged the letters of his name.

There’s no way Niamm Kissilmer is an anagram of “Baal the Mad”. Then, which name...? I start racking my own mind, diving into my consciousness to grasp it, to understand what’s going on. The fragments of information that I have absorbed, that I’ve kept on assimilating into myself, spin like vortexes in my brain, taking that unremarkable sequence of letters apart, breaking it down, combining it again into a plethora of possible outcomes. Outcomes I had never thought about until now.

Niamm Kissilmer.

Niammkis Silmer.

Silmer Niammkis.

Silmen Animmkis.

Silman Serimmik.

“Excuse me, Ms. Kaleidos...”

Detective Rainer interrupts my thoughts again, at just the wrong time. I felt I was so close, so close to having a revelation. Mr. Kissilmer deceived me from the start? I was so naive to trust him, just because he saved me. A bad person wouldn’t have saved something like me from the Gallery, right? I can’t accept that the bizarre old Mr. Kissilmer I used to know and tolerate, who I used to laugh with and see closed up in his casket-bed, was... someone else. Someone unknown. A complete stranger, masked as a weird yet apparently well-meaning flower artist. I store those thoughts away for now, looking up again at that blue-haired woman.

“Yes, detective?”

“I know it might be hard for you, but... I need you to answer a couple more questions about... what you’ve seen. The full story, this time.”

A shiver.

What I’ve seen.

I don’t think I’ll be able to forget that anytime soon. Just three days ago, Paddy was here, checking on Mr. Kramers’s health and bickering with Mr. Kissilmer. We found the sand blood flower inside my bunnies, inside our pet nocti’s stomach. It shouldn’t have been able to infect mammals. Yet, that specimen did. Sucked them dry. Of course, we called the police and the biohazard team. Of course, they didn’t believe us, thought it was another publicity stunt, due to Paddy being Paddy. Sand blood flowers, sprouting from rabbits. Jumping species. They wouldn’t believe it. So, they didn’t come, not for two days at least. Yet, yesterday evening, when I arrived at the shop for my night shift, something was wrong.

The tape we had used to secure the small hut with the infected, dead bunnies had been ripped, torn apart. Paddy told me not to enter it, for any reason whatsoever, but I wouldn’t, I couldn’t leave this to chance. And so, I slammed open the door.

And found nothing.

The bunnies were gone. The flowers were gone. As if they had never existed in the first place. It was jarring. I didn’t know what to think. Dead animals can’t walk away. Mr. Kramers would have left a mess of bones and blood around, if he ate them. But the hut was clean. Cleaner than it ever was before.

Then, I heard it.

That cry.

It’s Mr. Kramers. He’s wailing, howling in an animalistic lament. I run for the entrance, quickly making my way inside. No lights on, only the moon shining dimly from the windows. And Mr. Kramers’ bioluminescent bands. He’s there, scratching the interior door, the door to the lab, yelping helplessly. He’s scared. He’s scared of something. I’ve never seen him like that. I sit near him, pet him, trying to calm him down.

And I feel it.

The stench. The horrible stench of rotten meat.

Coming from the lab.

“Mr. Kissilmer, are you there?”

No response. Only the sound of the TV speakers. Crackling, distorted. Still, I recognize it, it’s the same episode he’s watched so many times. He has to be inside, right? Why would the TV be on, otherwise? I bring my hand to my nose, covering it as best I can. That smell. Unbearable. I grab the handle, wait for another second.

“Mr. Kissilmer?”

Silence again. Mr. Kramers runs away, taking shelter in his own little hut. I let him go. I need to know what’s going on.

At that point, I pull the handle, unlock the door, swing it wide open.

Then,

I

scream.

I might have screamed, at least. Was it me? I can remember a voice, probably my voice. I must have fallen to the floor too, incapable of believing my very own eyes.

In the dark. All in chaos.

Vials and tools. On the floor.

The TV. Still showing Eliphya. Same re-run. Her death scene, stuck on loop.

And, in front of it. A cocoon.

Big, as big as a man.

Ripped from the inside out.

Torn, burst open.

Plant matter inside, vines spreading out.

But its shape. Is not that of a plant.

Its shape. The cocoon.

Is his body.

Mr. Kissilmer’s body.

I

scream,

again.

His gray skin.

His thin fingers.

His violet eye.

Wide open.

A grimace.

Of joy.

Uncontrollable laughter.

As the rafflesia flowers.

Sprout from his heart.

Lungs.

Kidneys.

Bones.

Muscles.

Mouth.

Nose.

Skin.

I

scream.

Not a man.

Not a corpse.

Just a plant.

In human shape.

Or something.

That isn’t here.

Anymore.

I

scream

scream

scream

SCREAM.

The window open.

The glass cracked.

Mr. Kissilmer is not here.

Not anymore.

But was he ever?

I scream

and run

Run

RUN

RUN

RUN

RUN

RUN

Run

run.

Faint.

Next thing I remember is waking up on the bare asphalt, just outside of the shop. Mr. Kramers licking my face, trying to wake me up. What did I see? What was there, inside the lab? What was it? What? I don’t remember. I can’t remember. I don’t WANT to remember. I just...

“Ms. Kaleidos?”

I throw up. I throw up on Detective Rainer. Again. And again. Until nothing remains in my stomach. That thing. That... creature in the shape of a man. That empty cocoon. What was that? What was that? What WAS that? I almost faint again. I don’t want to think. I don’t want to remember.

“Dammit! EiN! Quick!”

I see the world spinning, in a vortex without end. I close my eyes. When I open them again, I see those emerald irises, those long, blue strands. Veckert Rainer is leaning over me, cleaning my mouth. I’m in shambles. But those images... those pictures...

“Don’t worry, Lejl. May I call you Lejl? It happens, I’ve seen worse. Now, calm down. Want us to call someone? Your partner? Your parents?”

I sit down on the floor, looking at Veckert, staring at the man she called EiN, gazing around within the shop, my shop, my world. Chrysanthemums. Everywhere. No roses. No roses at all. Every kind of flower except roses. I get it now. I get it. It was him. Him.

That person.

How could I be so stupid?

How could I trust him?

Chrysanthemums

and no roses.

Plants.

Flowers.

Blood

flowers

Like those

made by

Niamm Kissilmer.

Niammkis Silmer.

Silmer Niammkis.

Silmen Animmkis.

Silman Serimmik.

Silman

Simmerik

It’s with horror that I realize it. I’ve been working for a mass murderer. I laughed with him. Played cards with him. Fed a noctiphage with him. Planted trees with him. Cut leaves with him. Yet, he was none other than...

Rosenmaester

I feel like I’m gonna puke. I’m going to throw up again. That thing was not a man. That thing... What was that thing?

“Lejl, breathe. Breathe, please. It’s over, he’s not going to hurt you. He’s gone... for now.”

Detective Rainer’s rough voice is still so odd. I can’t get accustomed to it. Yet, I can feel her genuine concern. She’s dealt with him. She’s faced him. I’m sure. I’m sure of it. Steps. The sound of steps. Someone exits from the backroom. A scientist. White, neck-long, straight hair. Albino, maybe. Young.

“Veckert? We’ve finished the analysis of the sample.”

“And?”

He shakes his head, I can see his eyes quivering.

“His body... It's a miracle that it didn’t decompose sooner. His cells were basically dead. And plants... replaced his skin, his muscles, every part that was breaking down, as time went by. There was a flower in his empty eye socket, and another in the hole in his cheek, where you shot him four years ago. His broken bones were kept together by vines. It’s... I don’t even know how to describe it. That... thing defies all logic. It’s an abomination, something that shouldn’t exist! Veckert, what I’m trying to say is that... Baal the Mad... no, Silman Simmerik...”

He shivers, seeming almost unable to talk. I hear what he says. I hear all his words.

“...was already a corpse in 2062, when you met him for the first time...”

But I can’t believe it. I can’t understand it. I can’t grasp it.

“...And whatever was inhabiting his flesh...”

He stares at the window, at the open window in the back room, surrounded by countless shards of glass.

“...is now out there... in some shape or form.”

The Night.

If he wasn’t...

If he had never been alive.

was he himself

the Walking Night?