Raisa loved flowers.

It was there in her blood. Maybe it was something she had inherited from the maternal side of her family. All her aunts and uncles, grandaunts and granduncles, her mother and her grandmother loved flowers. Then there was Alice Reed, her great grandmother, who was obsessed with flowers like nobody else. Her mother had told her how the house was all covered in weeds and vines when she cleared it for the funeral. How Alive had refused to let Miss Rose or anybody to clear it? As if they were her shield against some unknown darkness. Now all that remained were her roses, dessicated and withered.

Raisa had a mind to change this situation.

So two days after her discovery of the corpse in the bog, she was standing in the living room with a bunch of gardening tools, including a water can, dressed in her old pajamas with a small bag of fertiliser under her arm. Organic, Miss Rose had said. Her great grand used nothing artificial for her dear plants. Raisa might not be an expert gardener like her, but she was quite good with plants. Her apartment back in London was filled with them - philodendrons, ferns, fiddle-leaf figs, jade plants, faeted garden hoyas, orchids, violets, or gloxinia. You name it; she had it all. Sometimes it made her sad that she could only keep plants which are suitable for an apartment. Her mother laughed whenever she complained about it during their frequent phone calls.

"Honestly, Raisa," she would say, her voice almost inaudible as she doubled over with laughter. "You sound just like your great grandma. Only you two would whine about not having enough plants in your life."

Raisa would pout. "Come on, mom. I am missing out on so many things! Great grandma has literal trees going in her backyard. And I am stuck with potted plants and flowers."

While her mother's teasing was good natured, not everybody was kind about this hobby of hers. There was Sharon who had made her give away so many of her plants, which Raisa had spent so much time trying to grow. She would cry in the bathroom each time Sharon made her do it, but her girlfriend did not care. It was always 'it's me or the weeds, Ree-ree,' with Sharon. As if she would know the difference between a healthy plant and that of a weed, even if it danced naked in front of her. It made Raisa furious at herself for putting up with that nonsense for so long. To sacrifice her hobbies for the sake of settling down. She dug her nails deep into her palm. This was high time; she would change her ways and find her way back to gardening and plant keeping. Starting with these roses.

They were not wholly dead; she noticed as she ran a finger along a withered petal. Raisa bent down and picked up the shears, and scraped off the bark. Her heart did little leaps within her chest; the colour beneath would confirm or obliterate her hypothesis of the roses being alive. After repeating the motion a few times, she saw a sliver of green. Her lips quirked into a smile. Yes, this was a good sign. Now all she needed to do was cut off the dead branches, clear the dead leaves and flowers, prune the bushes a bit and apply that organic fertiliser. A visit to the local nursery might also supply her with a fungicide. She would not have needed it, but she wanted to be safe than sorry. Oh, and she was going to buy some saplings to plant in the backyard and on the lawn. They looked so damned empty. It was quite the disheartening sight.

Raisa went about doing it for each of the rose bushes that hung from large rectangular boxes on each window trellis. She had drawn up her sleeves to her elbows, shears in her hands as she went about her. It was nice for a lack of a better word. This required little of her mental faculties. Raisa could do this all day, for there was something so comforting in mindlessness. Without realising what she was doing, she hummed. The very same tune that was stuck in her mind, ever since she came here.

"Flower faced, the flower maid..."

Snip. Snip. Snip.

"She sleeps beneath the trees..."

Snip. Snip. Snip.

"Frolicking with nymphs and-"

"Oh, shit!"

Raisa cursed loudly, dropping the shears. It plopped down on the rug with a muffled clatter. She had poked her finger in a thorn. It was the index finger on her left hand, with which she was holding the stems and cutting with her right hand. She could not understand why it happened, for she was doing the same thing for the others. Perhaps her finger slipped or something. That would make sense. Sometimes being a little too mindless can be bad, huh? She chuckled as a bead of blood emerged from the poke, looking quite like a miniature ruby in the sunlight, before dropping within the rose bush. She plopped down on the nearest couch and sucked on her finger.

It hurt a little. Nothing more than the fleeting sting of a needle. Raisa was accustomed to it given her disastrous attempts to learn to needle in her junior year of high school. Young Raisa had the strangest interests; interpreting tea leaves, double-sided embroidery, chthonic deities and many other things which people of her age were not usually interested in. Even if they were, it was a fun thing with them. Raisa got obsessed to the point of running on two hours of sleep, scourging libraries and shutting herself in her room for hours. Her mother would sometimes have to scream out of her lungs to get her attention. And when she became an adult? She gave it all up.

Raisa did not know when the tears fell. But when they did, they came like a torrential downpour with little warning, breaking down all the floodgates she had constructed around her heart. She brought up her knees to her chest and wept. Her chest heaved in great motions, tears blotting the top of her pajama top. A part of her wanted Michael to be here because he always knew what to say.

There was no passion left in her, no desire to know and explore. She did not have favourites anymore; they were like faded memories from a past life. When did it start? This infernal process of giving up everything that made her her? She used to love books; for three years she had not read a single one. Only after coming to Gwaywe did she finish her first audiobook in a long time. Back in London, she would start many of them and then abandon them altogether. She gave up gardening to some extent for her ex-girlfriend. Her interest in occult and folklore was because she wanted to fit in the role of a typical person in science.

It was not all Sharon's fault. Raisa knew that well. This was a gradual process started by expectations that eroded away her uniqueness, making her yet another clone of the society. Who was she? Did she matter? She no longer knew. Gwaywe, despite the things that had happened after her coming here, seemed so different. Life was slow here. Despite being in a small town, the weight of expectations was not bearing down upon her shoulders. Perhaps it was easier to stand up to complete strangers than to your own family. She did not blame them either; it was all that they knew. Besides, a girl is supposed to give up much more than any man of her age to be taken seriously. Especially if she was also a woman of colour.

She was sobbing so hard that she almost did not hear the rustle within the walls. If she had stayed awake a little while on her first night in Gwaywe, she would have recognised it happening again. If only she had kept the memories of her childhood, she would have recognised what it was. But when the rustles became louder, she stared at it in horror. Her tears had stopped as she gasped at the surrounding walls, her pupils blown wide.

The wisteria on the walls undulated, as if something was moving beneath the wallpaper. Many somethings. As if a bunch of inhumanly long fingers caressed the underside of the wallpaper. Or maybe snakes crawling inside the walls. Neither of the two options made her feel any less worried. Sweat beaded up on her forehead. Her throat had gone dry. She curled up against the couch, wishing for the soft, foamy material to swallow her up. She did not want to see this.

"What in the world..." her voice shook. She rubbed her eyes. It was still there, the rustling beneath the walls, which made the walls look like they were dancing. A searing headache made her wince, threatening to split open her skull from the middle. She jerked her head around towards the dining room. It was everywhere; the strange motion within the walls and that constant hissing sound. Of something moving. Scraping, coming closer. Threatening to tear through the wallpaper and reach for her.

No, no, no. Raisa stood up on unsteady legs. Her face had gone pale like a drowned corpse. Should she try the door? Run out of the house till whatever was happening quieted down. But the thumps coming from the beams around the main made her stop dead in her tracks. Her eyes darted about wildly.

She was trapped. Everywhere the walls moved. The motions were growing frenzied, whatever inside making bigger strides within them. Like a worm in the soil, but much bigger. She clutched at her throat; she had half a mind to throw up the bread and omelette she had for breakfast that morning.

A flake of wallpaper, a little more than a millimetre wide, fell off from the corner of the wall nearest to the couch in which she had been sitting just moments earlier.

Any other time, Raisa would not have noticed it. But her senses were on hyper alert. Heart thudding, she noticed how a tinkle of thick, black liquid dripped out of the hole. It was just a trickle, but goodness did it smell! The scent was cloying, the kind that made her nostrils burn. It was the smell of the bog. The same smell that she had experienced when she fell into it. Peaty, acidic. Like all things dead and decomposing. She fell on her knees, dry heaving.

Dark spots blotted her vision. Her head throbbed so hard that the two veins on either side of her head had become visible. She would pass out here, and she knew it. But she did not want to. She did not want to. Not with whatever that was rustling within the walls. She would not lie here helpless and at its mercy.

In a surge of strength she did not know she possessed, Raisa clambered onto a couch and threw herself out of the window. The one where she had poked her finger. She closed her eyes as she hit the ground. Her knees hurt from the impact, but not that bad because she could still move them. The entirety of her body was shaking. She pushed herself against the outer walls, taking in deep gulps of breath. The midday sun's glare never felt more welcome to her. She was safe, for now. But how long would she be able to stay outside? Even if she wanted to leave, she had to go inside and collect her things.

This is why we stopped coming here, she thought. Perhaps whatever that had happened inside was related to aunt Catherine's death. Maybe that was why her mother did not like to talk about it. But if that had been the case, why did she not remember? Could it be trauma? It was not uncommon for the brain to use memory loss as a coping mechanism. Raisa wished her brain had not done that. Because whatever little Raisa had seen was related to what had happened to her a few moments ago. But what was it? Was she losing her mind, or had that really happened? Were the walls moving or was something moving inside the walls? It's not a mystery, she surmised. It's the walls. They hold secrets, but what are they hiding?

A rosebud bloomed in the box upon the trellis, its petals bright red like a drop of fresh blood.

~•~