Ira is mine but credit where it’s due: Wheels, the Crook and the Garden are all tyrastafr’s ideas.
Rating: Mature for body horror
Content warnings for torture, mutilation, kidnapping and captivity
***
Set in pride of place at the back of the Garden, in the curve before the wide elegant windows that look out on a haunted cityscape—that’s where Wheels has set Ira’s chair.
He can feel the flowers planted in his wound rooting in him, the delicate hairlike filaments of their roots burning their way deeper into him, seeking the nourishment they can drink from his body. Before him, in tidy rows, sit the rest of Wheels’ Garden, with their vibrant, well-established plants rising bushily from their mortified flesh. But Ira isn’t quite like the others. The living dead, strapped into their chairs with their eyes and tongues and kidneys carved out.
Ira was bound and gagged, but not mutilated. Which means, he hopes, his stint here is only temporary. He hopes that with a furious desperation laced with sick guilt, because Wheels has made sure none of the others will ever walk out of here alive even if somehow they could break their bonds.
Wheels leaves. And Ira can’t move. Can’t talk. But he wasn’t blindfolded this time.
It makes time pass more slowly.
It’s terribly quiet down here. Quiet and dim, with most of the room’s light provided by the phosphorescent green fog that floats and swims outside the conservatory-style windows. There’s a whole city out there. He’s caught glimpses of it. Silhouettes of the buildings, like a twisted mockery of Chicago. Like something having a laugh by deliberately fucking with his perceptions.
There are shadows moving in the fog, occasionally. He looks away from the windows.
Occasionally there’s the shuffling of his fellow…prisoners? His garden-mates? Should he call them that? Is he one of them? He…he feels like one of them. Even though he’s never really experienced what they have. Been made part of this permanently. The thought gives him horrors, and makes him feel lonely at the same time.
He doesn’t want to be part of this. This is a living nightmare. A living death. A tiny bespoke Hell that Wheels has created in his own basement. And yet. And yet.
And yet.
He isn’t prepared to interrogate that.
Another little shuffle, someone strapped into their heavy wooden monster of a chair just like he is—did Wheels have these things custom-made for the purpose?—just as bound down, as unable to move. Wrists and upper arm, throat and chest and waist and thighs and shins and ankles…at first it feels like bondage, like captivity, being tied down. But after hours, after days, in this place…it begins to feel like you don’t have a body any more. Like you’re just a…an installation.
A pot. For a life that’s still growing. Feeding from you. Reaching upward from the soil that’s all that’s left of you. Soil that still thinks.
Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. Only there’s no escape in death.
He’s not alone. He’s surrounded by people. Only he’s very, very alone. They’re all… Well. Are they even people anymore?
(He knows they’re people. He knows. They’re still in there, still locked helpless and silent, blinded and deafened into the containers of their bodies, minds still turning, still…but. But what does that make of you eventually? When it’s just you and the plant that’s become more the rightful owner and filler-of-your-body than you are?)
Do they even know he’s here?
Time passes. Maybe. Silence passes, anyway. Silence and silence and silence, in the dim greenish light. He’s gagged, but he could make a noise. He could pitch fits! He could prove to himself and…hell there’s that one other guy, right? The one with the belladonna? Wheels said he’s not deaf. Or at least, he wasn’t last time.
But there’s a weight, in this place. He’s been avoiding thinking about that, but once he considers pushing against it…oh. There’s always been a weight, everywhere in the Crook. He’s wondered if anyone else could feel it, like a living awareness alongside their own. Another person in the room, no matter where you are or what the room is like or who’s actually there.
But the rest of the Crook…it’s…friendly. Amiable. A shopkeeper focused on good public relations. But pass through that door—the one he can see, in front of him, between the rows of the living dead with their host plants—and in here, it changes.
In here, it…he doesn’t know how to describe it. It likes what Wheels has done with the place. And…and it might disapprove, if…
He doesn’t make noise.
Too much silence can do things to a man. How long has it been? When will Wheels come back? He watches the door—the one at the far end of the room, the room that’s longer than should make sense, that feels like it’s stretching further away as he watches. That’s wider than it looks, he knows it is, why does it feel so tight, why does it feel like the walls are closing in? Curving down? Why does the air—wasn’t it almost chilly—feel so stuffy, like he’s rebreathing used air, like it’s hard to find oxygen—
He moans. Whimpers. Whispers, “Please.” None of the other plant-people react. “Please, please, please, please.”
It feels like being real again. Like he’s the only one who knows he’s real. Like maybe he’s hallucinating himself—
There’s something behind him.
He freezes solid.
It’s on the other side of the glass. But the glass…suddenly, somehow, it feels less like a barrier and more like a polite suggestion. He’s in arm’s reach of it. If something could make it through, just stretch out a limb—a limb shaped like what?—it could touch him, brush him, take hold of him.
It’s looking.
Somehow, he knows, it knows. It knows something is out of place in here. It’s looking for what’s different, what doesn’t fit—and if it finds it… He can’t shake the idea that if it does…it might decide to come through. That it can come through. That there’s nothing actually protecting this space except for courtesy.
Do the others feel it? Is it only him, because he’s the only one who doesn’t belong? Who hasn’t been rooted here permanently?
He closes his eyes. Is it even real? There’s no sign that it exists anywhere except in his own panicking imagination, but he can feel it, shifting back and forth along the windows. Creeping along the edges of that green fog, gazing in, seeking. Seeking what doesn’t belong, seeking what it might be able to claim…
Ira keeps his eyes closed and doesn’t move.
In the dim silence, bound and helpless, a mind whose body has been stolen, alone in a room filled with people. He sits, and tries to exist as little as possible. Tries his hardest to belong, to be one of these damned souls, in a room that feels hideously open to that green fog and warped city and whatever makes its home there. Part of this tranquil space of living death Wheels has made, so he won’t be dragged away into whatever other hell lies outside it. He sits with his eyes closed and waits for Wheels.