Fen Dead
The Groundskeeper Tale 6
I’ve started to write the next novel. I’m being glacially slow, relatively speaking. However, I am going to keep at it. I sort of know what I’m doing with this story, and I’m having fun with it. The chapters will all be language of flowers titled, which I’m having fun with.
Pansies for Thoughts
“Psst... Hey, Chloe...”
Chloe suppressed both her sigh and eye-roll. “Yes, Benny?”
“Just thought you might like to know...”
The long pauses were getting on Chloe’s nerve. (She seemed to be down to only one these days.)
“Benny, get to the point.” She straightened up from where she had been planting in a mass of annual bedding plants.
A pop of color, Padraig said when the flats of seedlings showed up from Eloise’s personal nursery. Chloe joined the gnomes in planting out, happy to have her hands in dirt. She missed the day in and day out work of groundskeeper, but she did not miss having Benny creep up on her with his drama-llama ways.
“Well, um, you know, the oil...”
Chloe did indeed remember the oil baron’s grave, and her consternation the previous fall when the ghost-animated oil seized one of her tools. They had resolved that dispute; she thought. She also knew she should have followed up on it. There had been no time. She sighed, sitting back on her heels.
“What is it doing, Benny?”
The sun was setting behind her, and in the golden light the ghoul almost looked like a normal person, aside from the way he was wringing his hands together and shifting from foot to foot.
“Well, you might want to look. That’s all I’m saying.”
There was a movement to Chloe’s left, and Benny, suddenly wide-eyed enough that the ghastly dead blue-white around his dark pupils showed, scuttled away. Chloe turned her head to look at Padraig.
“He’s afraid of you.” She realized she sounded envious. “But me, he pesters.”
“Eh.” The stocky gnome, nearly as wide as he was tall, shook his head. Chloe, who knew none of that bulk was fat, or at least that he was massively strong under his bulky exterior, wondered if Padraig had threatened Benny. “He’s a dull drip. He likes you. You listen to him. I just put my headphones on.”
That would explain it. Chloe contemplated this for a moment of silence. “I feel that a lot of my current situation comes down to being a good listener.”
Padraig chuckled into his beard.
Chloe glared at him. “You’re included in that, mister.”
This sally got a belly laugh out of him, as Chloe anticipated. The gruff old gnome had all but adopted her, and unlike the rest of his reclusive clan, he sought out her company to have those conversations.
“Light’s going,” he said when he could talk again. “Might want to see what t’creep wanted you to take a look at.”
Chloe abandoned the pansies to Padraig’s tender care. She knew his helpers were lurking just out of her sight, waiting for her absence to get more work done than she could have managed in a week working alone. The sprawling cemetery complex was slowly looking less like a post-apocalyptic wasteland and more like someone cared for it. Chloe had made progress in her year of working alone. It always felt like she was fighting a losing battle until she’d been able to hire the gnomes as assistants through the Brotherhood of Death’s contacts. That same connection meant she no longer had the time to be boots on the ground in the cemetery. She found that she missed it.
Invasive plants, dramatic ghouls, and even possessed oil slicks were easier to deal with than her current role in the Brotherhood. She’d become a listener to the dead, for better or for worse, and it might not have been so bad except...
Chloe grumbled aloud as she steered the little electric vehicle up the hill. “Why did it have to be going back to school?”
The answer, of course, was that she needed to know things. Things she wouldn’t have learned in school, anyway. So now, she was drinking from the firehose of information relevant to her new job. Training for everything wasn’t possible. Mr. Cruor had told her she couldn’t know everything, but he wanted her to ask the right questions when she needed them, and that required her to learn. Chloe hadn’t enjoyed school the first time around. This time? Well, at least it wasn’t classrooms and period bells.
The sun had set and twilight was deepening by the time she made it to the part of the graveyard where she’d encountered the oil before. Chloe parked the little cart and walked to the edge of the paved road. With her flashlight, she looked suspiciously at the mowed grass. Oily black tendrils clung to her boots last time, following her all the way to the road.
This time, nothing strange stirred in the grass, so she walked over towards the ostentatious headstone.
“Urm,” she cleared her throat and started over, addressing the air in no particular direction. “Was there something I needed to know?”
Mr. Cruor had recently reminded her that asking if she could help was going to get her in trouble. Never volunteer! Trunk had added cheerfully. He’d winked broadly at Chloe’s boss and said, ‘wait until you’re voluntold.’
