10 May Don’t Forget to Water the Plants
“Don’t Forget to Water the Plants”
Written by Dale Thompson Edited by Craig Groshek Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek Narrated by N/ACopyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).
🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available
⏰ ESTIMATED READING TIME — 8 minutes
Rosa lived alone. Rosa had always lived alone. Rosa had become late middle-aged; she never had a cat, though by looking at her, one would think that she had many cats. She loved plants and gardening. Rosa was not only an outside gardener; she prided herself on the accomplishments of her indoor plants as well. She had plants of every shape, size and color. She didn’t make bouquets or any classical arrangements; she simply grew them and cared for them in her nursery.
The day was brilliantly sun-shined, and the perfume from her flowers put her in a shopping mood. She could easily spend the entire day shopping or, as she put it, “gathering flowers and plants.” Rosa made her way by bicycle down the street, humming to herself and anticipating what sort of plant she might bring home with her today.
Would she buy roses, maybe orchids? She absolutely loved orchids; the spider-like petals of the Brassia, the small 30 bloom per pike cymbidium, the encyclia with its octopus shape and the speckled butterfly orchid. She wouldn’t know which to take until she arrived, and then she would allow her instincts to do the choosing.
Once at the garden center, she browsed as if she were buying fine jewelry. She touched the leaves, smelled the flowers, stroked the vines with her fingertips. She was leaning toward a perennial vine, something that she could actually tack on her dining room wall and just let it crawl. Rosa knew a climbing vine had to have a lot of attention, but she was a stickler for details and imagined she could keep up with the growth rate. She had a deep, giant pot that she thought she could use to get the plant started. It was a green, three-lobed leaf vine with a hairy underside. She settled on it, and peddled away on her bike, taking care with the bumps on the road so as to not jar the vine out of her basket.
Once home, she got straight to work getting the pot ready with all of her ‘magic tricks,’ as she would say, in order that the vine would have the richest, fertile soil to start its new life in. Gardening was demanding and time-consuming, but this is where Rosa felt right at home. Hands dirty, working up a little sweat, the smell of the soil in her nose was like having a gourmet meal. “Best exercise a person can do,” she would tell people. In no time at all, her new creeping vine was planted, and she couldn’t wait for it to start growing.
The next day the first thing she did was check on her new addition. She was amazed at the rate it had grown. The vine had already started spreading out, and it had grown at least 2 feet from the day before. She thought, “I best keep an eye on this. It will need pruning sooner than I thought.”
Being a retired school teacher, Rosa lived on a modest pension, so she did not have an everyday job except maintaining her plants and flowers. She also had grown a small veggie garden with cucumbers, tomatoes, squash, radishes, green beans and turnips in the corner of her backyard. On this particular day, she was picking tomatoes for a salad she was going to have for lunch. She had bought lettuce at the fruit stand and thought the tomatoes would be perfect. She returned to the house through the back door carrying a small pail of black cherry tomatoes.
As she entered the kitchen, she was immediately alarmed by the creeping vine. It had grown since she had been outside. The vine had grown from the dining room around the wall that separated it from the kitchen and was tightly stuck to the floor by suction cups that she had not noticed. No…the vine had grown suction cups. It was as if it was morphing and adapting to its new environment. This was hardly acceptable, and she immediately retrieved her gardening shears and began the pruning process. After a bit of difficulty, she cut the vine back to half its current size. “No more fertilizer for you,” she said, believing that it was reacting to the mixture of manure and fertilizer she had mixed into the soil.
Rosa went about her day tending to the other plants in the house, then returned to the garden where she trimmed back some Variegated Japanese Pieris shrubs that were beginning to bud. Finding herself thirsty, she returned to the house to find that the creeping vine had grown double the size it was before.
“What in the world?” She stood staring in disbelief. Rosa had never seen any plant with such a rejuvenation feature. Once again, she had to use a lot of effort to pry the plant from the floor and wall, and she once again applied the shears to this horticultural nightmare. It seemed that no sooner had Rosa snipped a part of the vine than two more shoots would appear. This ambitious vine seemed to have a life of its own and would reanimate a lost stem by growing two more. After a few minutes of this losing battle, Rosa had had enough, and she went to her gardening shed and brought out her loppers. This was the monster of pruning shears.
It wasn’t long before there was a war. The vine was resilient and determined, weirdly writhing, with nets of tendrils climbing like a Black Faced Langur, but Rosa kept cutting and chopping this crawler-climber. She went one last time to her tool shed and returned with an ax. By the time she had returned, she noticed that this beastly Fabaceae seemed to be fighting back. It had grown into her floor, boring perfectly circular holes, creeping viper-like. The ceiling had been penetrated, too, with the vines of this laboriously scaling beast now reaching the attic space. It frantically climbed, gripping everything to go as high as it possibly could. Rosa believed that the vine was seeking more light, because vines would normally grow upward if attached to something while not weighed down by their own weight. This was all so preposterous; she couldn’t believe that it was really happening.
She swung the ax liberally and freely, chopping the gnarled vine to pieces, but the darned thing would just sprouted more shoots. She felt things were getting out of hand, and she likely would not be able to contain it at the rate it was reproducing. This relentless anthropoid-thinking monster had incredible vigor. Being overwhelmed by the immensity of this dire event and fearing for her own safety now, she decided to get out and go for help.
As she made her way to the back door through the kitchen, the vine, with unwelcomed tenacity, reached out and attached itself to her ankle. It twisted firmly. She kicked at it with her other foot, and realizing she had the ax, she chopped that bit off and freed herself from the enormous strength of the acetabulum. This was when the moment of panic overshadowed her. The room itself was getting darker because the vine had regenerated expeditiously with such dramatic quickening it practically covered all of the windows. The pathway to the back door appeared to be the clearest route to outside, but as she moved toward the door, it suddenly slammed shut, and a large sinuous arm, moving like a serpent, reached out and wrapped itself around the door knob.
The scandent was all around her now, slithering and creeping and crawling like some disgusting slug from the underworld. Its serpentine slithering unobtrusively twisted and contorted back and forth. The house creaked and cracked like a submarine that had gone too deep in the mirky ocean. The vine was tearing her house apart! It moved freely with a sinuous rhythm. Like an anaconda, she could hear the squeezing of the floor joists and the bending of the studs in the wall. She had a moment of panic, and stygiophobia gripped her. She wasn’t facing the eternal fires of hell, but for Rosa, this was as close to hell as she had ever been. This primordial plant’s ability to revivify was astounding. It all seemed like slow motion, but Rosa could not keep up with the pace of the acceleration. She began chopping and hacking away again at this leviathan that had been turned loose in her house, shocked by her own temerity. The ax flew, and she swung it like never before, attempting to take another way through the house.
It was no use; she was repelled back to the kitchen as the vine seemed to be coming after her now. Endorphins raced; she was propelled by adrenaline and survival instincts. “Think…think…what can I do?” The wheels of her mind were spinning. The ax was not working; as a matter of fact, she had determined that it was making matters worse. It was as if she was battling the reptiles of Medusa.
She had one more thing to try. Maybe it was a long shot, but she knew she wasn’t getting out of here any other way. She went to her sink cabinet, where she kept all sorts of cooking sprays, detergents and other household cleaners and liquids. She pulled everything out that she could reach quickly. First, she poured vinegar into an empty spray bottle that she had. She turned to an approaching vine and began spraying liberally onto the tentacle that groped for her. It repelled and curled up, moving back away from her. “It’s working!” she congratulated herself.
She continued to spray until she ran out. The vine that was on the retreat, the invasive scaler, seemed to know when the bottle of spray was empty. Rosa squeezed the trigger in vain. The bottle was bone dry. Slowly, like a cryptic mummy, the vine came to the offensive again, spiraling unrestricted, straining to reach out again. Rosa ran back to her liquid supplies and filled the spray bottle sloppily with bleach, spilling it on her hands and on the floor. The smell was harsh and bitter, acrid and unpleasant, but Rosa squeezed the trigger on the spray bottle liberally. She had almost emptied it, and it was working, repelling and weakening this elongated squirming cephalopod-like monster back into its lair. Tragically though, the trigger snapped off in her hand, and the bottle was rendered useless. As if the vine knew that she was defenseless, it stopped its retreat and began to advance forward again, backing Rosa against the kitchen countertop. The vine entangled itself around her legs, and she could feel the circulation being cut off from her lower half.
As it forced her to retreat, her upper half bent backward over the countertop; she caught sight in the corner of her left eye, a large bag of salt in the open cabinet. She was not a tall woman, so she stopped resisting the surge of the vine and allowed it to push her further upon the countertop until she could just barely reach the bag of salt. Once she had secured it with her left hand, she reached with her right to open it when the devilish beast sprung more horror upon her by securing her right hand so she could not take hold of the salt bag to open it. She pulled and tugged to loosen its iron grip but to no avail. Her arm was stinging with numbing pain as she resisted. With no other option to open the bag, with pure grit and undiluted gall, she tore at it with her teeth, ripping the bag and spilling crystalline mineral upon the vine. Instantly the vine jerked loose as the water balance of the vine was terribly disrupted.
“Don’t like that, eh?” Rosa yelled as she flung handfuls of salt everywhere. The vine went into full retreat, the dissuading atrophied tendrils curled up in a coil like a rattlesnake but wasting away at an incredible rate, dying in tortured sibilations. Rosa walked over to the less menacing coil and dumped the remainder of the bag straight into its center. The vine shriveled like an earthworm caught on the sidewalk on a sunny day. Now incapacitated and dehydrated, the newest addition to the greenery of her home was lifeless; a crusted sepia color of decaying vegetation, in flaking rusty brown, discoloring more by the second.
A few weeks later, she had managed, with the help of a contractor, to get her house back in order. The floorboards were replaced, the ceiling was repaired, a couple of rafters had to be replaced, and some new paint was rolled on the walls covering the stains left by the mucus-type secretion of humectant hyaluronic acid left by the crawler. She had returned the vine to the garden center for a refund, but because the vine was in such a state – and she did admit that she had sprayed it and doused it with household chemicals, not to mention dumping a bag of salt on it – they rejected her claim and refused the refund.
Rosa was in no mood to argue after what she had endured. She thought of the note she wrote herself just yesterday:
‘Don’t forget to water the plants.’
🎧 Available Audio Adaptations: None Available
Written by Dale Thompson Edited by Craig Groshek Thumbnail Art by Craig Groshek Narrated by N/A🔔 More stories from author: Dale Thompson
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Copyright Statement: Unless explicitly stated, all stories published on CreepypastaStories.com are the property of (and under copyright to) their respective authors, and may not be narrated or performed, adapted to film, television or audio mediums, republished in a print or electronic book, reposted on any other website, blog, or online platform, or otherwise monetized without the express written consent of its author(s).