This is the short story I wrote, poked at, and have finally made available.  I’ll be releasing it in bits throughout the week, but if you are impatient and just want to read the whole thing, I have it available here: Dr. E versus Da Goblinz.

I’m terrified of goblins and, by proxy, horticulturalists.

Whenever I go through my memories of fear (a particularly masochistic scrapbook exercise) there’s one that stands out.  It’s a picture of a beautiful late-summer garden in the sunshine, focusing on a yellow flower whose insides are stained with blood. The petals are ruffled, as if torn. Butterflies (the craven creatures) are drawn to it.

It’s called the Goblin Gaillardia.

I am not a gardener.  I pay Carmelo, a neighborhood kid (and have kept him in $10s [and now $20s – inflation, right?]) to mow the tufts of grass that are determined to grow around my home.  He has his own mower and set of half-buttoned plaid shirts he’s made into a recognizable uniform throughout the neighborhood.  Melo’s pretty self-sufficient, and I expect a knock on the door about every week or two in the summer, depending on the weather.

He talks the talk, though.  His mom, Beatriz, is out there in a hat and gloves every day ruing our lack of interest in the overall property values. She has brought order to the neighborhood, bright coloured petals, and a lawn too green and pristine for any runaway dog to consider desecrating.  That or it has a laser fence with anti-dog mines or somesuch.  “Butt nuggets approaching, let loose the anti-canine cavalry!” and the flowers attack!

Maybe not. Maybe not funny.

“Dandelions are up,” Melo says.  He’s pretty laconic with me.  It’s always, “Lots of pollen,” or “Too much moisture brings mushrooms,” or “Nothing today, come back next week.”

Dracaena is Romanized from the Ancient Greek “drakaina,” or “female dragon,” as you can find on Wikipedia.  I know this because I inherited some plants from a girlfriend, and they’re going steady… even if we’re not.  There’s power in names, and being on the good side of a young female dragon is a grand idea.  Maybe it helps balance against the couple of ancient dragons I have mad at me.

Goblins don’t actually care for the dark, however it goes against folklore.  They prefer it hot and dry, although they’re rugged little creatures, and the worst infestation I’d heard of was during a beach party.  Luckily, you can prune them from a place pretty quickly.  Shears work great, although it gets messy and ends up being fairly sadistic.

Gaillardias are commonly known as the blanket flowers.  There are specialized caterpillars that eat them exclusively to turn into pixies.  Painted Schinia Moths, if you must, but the difference between butterfly and pixie is remarkably slim.  Both are attracted to sweets and have very little in the way of brains, and both masquerade as each other.  I can’t tell if that’s intentional or luck.  They’re both harmless except to plants, I suppose.

Names have power.  Wizards say this all the time, and I’ve never been able to find a good argument against it.  Caryopteris clandonensis is known as the Dark Knight.  It flowers heavily in the summer, spending little time with Aster laterifolius, the ‘Lady in Black’ who prefers the later summer and autumn.   Both may be the darlings of so-called hedge wizards, but the magic of botanomancers isn’t limited to turning thumbs green or black.

“Botanomancer” is a mouthful.  Hortigicians?  Black hearted and black thumbed thorns of the wretched villainy known as gardeners, his name was Dario, Dare to his friends.

My name is E.

I am what we call a Portal Doctor.  I close the doors you’ve left open.  I’ve only got the one trick, but I’m getting pretty good at it.  Reality is a big place, and it bumps up against a lot of things Beyond the world we know.  Luckily, those things Beyond don’t belong here, and sometimes closing the door in their face gives them the right idea.   It’s a trick, but it requires proximity and a clear head, and enough knowledge to make sense of it all.

Ignorance is bliss.  That’s not anything you’d hear a wizard say.

That’s why they’re trouble.

Dare lived in the big haunted house at the edge of some land claimed by the city.  Yeah, it was near a graveyard, but that wasn’t the problem.  The grass is always so nice and orderly in a corporate cemetery; you could bring your morbid little picnic basket and have yourself a nice lunch in the quiet. I always found the similarity between them and golf courses to be a great opportunity to combine the two.

If you did an image search on haunted houses, you might see some creepy topiary, maybe even some gothic bonsai, but you expect chaos.  You think of triffid-like clumps of bloodthirsty botanic secrets, hiding cabals under their suffocating miasma of organic chaos; a cancerous thicket of overgrowth where there is no peace, no succor; a place where nature has less mothering and more murder on her mind.  Blood makes the grass grow.

Dario was Beatriz’s cousin.  I had invited Melo and his family to a neighborhood barbecue back in, oh, call it aught-eight.  This was either their way of repaying the favour, or scaring me into landscaping compliance.  The grass wasn’t greener on the other side of this fence after all.  It was raspy and Lovecraftian, with too many tendrils, and if it had a voice it spoke in mad tongues.