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wo cop cars stood side by side, their lights no longer flashing, three of the four officers who had brought them standing together at the base of the steps. A hearse was on the way.
Up in the apartment Roy stood in the middle of the room with the fourth officer. Neither man had ever seen so many plants packed into such a small space. They covered every wall, pots in front of pots, even the bathroom completely covered with them.
“How did she take a piss?” Roy asked, but the officer didn’t seem to be in the mood for jokes.
Near the door the reason for his presence lay strewn across the floor, her thin fingers reaching out towards a door she never managed to open. Judging from the decay already setting in Roy figured she’d been dead for at least eight or nine days, if not longer. The thick aroma of the plants and flowers within the apartment hid the worst of the decaying smell, and had stopped anyone else from realizing anything was wrong for over a week. A concerned relative was the only reason Roy had bothered to knock on the old woman’s door.
Out on the balcony even more plants were clustered together, these the healthiest of the lot, their large leaves full and green. With spring still going strong and the worst of the summer heat still around the corner now was the perfect time for the plants, and Roy had to admit it seemed a shame that the woman had missed it all.
“We can handle this from here,” the officer said to him. Roy nodded and took his leave. At the base of the steps in front of the building the ambulance-turned-hearse was pulling up when he walked across the parking lot. He glanced back at the balcony overrun by green leaves.
He was kind of sad to see the old woman go. She’d always paid her rent on time, something he couldn’t say for most of his tenants, and the plants didn’t look half bad, giving an air of beauty to the otherwise ugly façade of the buildings.
Oh well, he thought, and walked into his office.
A day later he opened the door for Mr. Biehn. The man looked like the blue-collar type, his face poorly shaven, the hand he reached out to shake with covered in calluses. Roy took a bit of a liking to the guy almost immediately, and Roy wasn’t inclined to like anyone.
“I’m here about Andrea Morris. I’m her grandson.”
“Yeah. You talk to the police already?”
“Yesterday.” While the man looked tired and worn out Roy didn’t figure he’d been particularly close to his grandmother, and judging from the way she lived, didn’t figure there was much of an inheritance coming anyone’s way.
“Well, you can take all the time you need to clear out the apartment, choose what you’re keeping and what you’re throwing away. I’m not in any rush to rent the place out so don’t feel like you’re in a hurry.”
“Could you show it to me?”
“Sure.”
Roy didn’t know how much Mr. Biehn knew about his grandmother, and when he asked, “What’s up with the balcony covered in leaves?” as they approached the building, Roy figured he didn’t know very much.
So Roy remained silent until they had the door open and Biehn could get a good look himself at the state of things.
“What is this?” he asked once they were standing in the room, his mouth nearly agape as his eyes scanned the wall of plants.
“This is how she was living. Seemed like her life became nothing but taking care of these plants.”
“Is there even any furniture below all of them?”
“Couldn’t say. Been years since I saw the inside of this place. She’s been here for well over seven years if I recall correctly. Made quite a place for herself.”
“I guess.”
“What do you plan to do with them all?”
“Trash them. What else?” Biehn shook his head and turned away from the room. Roy paused right before leaving; aware of a faint rustling sound, and just briefly he thought he saw the leaves waving lightly, as if a breeze had blown through the room. He shut the door behind him, happy to be away from all the plants, and just a tad creeped out. How anyone could live in that room was beyond him.
“She certainly made things interesting near the end, I guess,” Biehn said as the two men walked down the steps and out into the parking lot.
“How long you figure it’ll take you to get the place cleaned?”
“Couldn’t say. I’ll have to get it done after work each day, and might make a go of it on the weekends if I have time. I’ll take maybe two weeks or so to get it done. I’ll just be trashing all the plants and seeing what else is underneath them.”
“Let me know when you’re done so I can start doing some of my own inspecting, ok?”
“You got it.”
The two men parted, Biehn taking off in an old, beat up truck while Roy retreated into his office. He walked to the back wall and lifted up the blinds on his window. From there he could see the green balcony. He’d be glad when that business was taken care of. Until then he had other things to concern himself with.
Life after that day started moving rather fast. Thanks to a tenant in apartment C3 Roy was given another chance to see the police. This time it all ended with a man getting dragged out in handcuffs while spewing profanity, and gave Roy a rather large headache.
Two tenants putting in notice the day after added more chores to his already long list. Spring always brought with it a winter’s worth of repairs. During that first week after Andrea’s passing Roy caught sight of Biehn a few times during the early evening making his way up and down the stairs with a few plants in hand, but really, Roy had more pressing concerns.
In fact, he forgot all about Biehn’s clean up and the late Andrea Morris for nearly two weeks straight, all of his free time spent repairing this, cleaning that, or going after people late on their rent, until three weeks had passed since Andrea’s death and Roy paused one day to stare at her balcony still coated with green leaves.
“Said it might take longer,” Roy whispered to himself, and let it be. After all, he did have other things to concern himself with, and Mr. Biehn wasn’t high on his list.
But after another week passed Roy found his eyes always drifting over to that balcony each day and the ever-growing plants that now hung down over the balcony and stretched up along the walls of the building. With careful trimming Andrea had always managed to keep the plants in check a lot more than Roy had ever realized, and he kept hoping Biehn would just get his job done and empty out all those plants.
It wasn’t until nearly a month and a half had passed that Roy really felt that tension creeping into his stomach. The heat of summer had started to wilt whatever he didn’t properly water, which wasn’t a lot, and yet those plants on the balcony never showed any signs of damage. If the heat was hurting them Roy sure as hell couldn’t tell, and how exactly were they getting water? He didn’t figure Biehn for the type to care about them.
Finally Roy reached his limits, the only sensible conclusion obvious: Biehn had ditched out on the job and left it to Roy to finish up. That Roy could handle, especially if that was really the only thing going on, something he wasn’t entirely comfortable with.
That’s why his hand shook when he walked up the stairs towards that closed apartment door with the key ready. He paused before even inserting it into the lock; aware something bad was going to greet him on the other side. There was a familiar stink in the air.
He came quite close to just calling up the police to let them take care of this, but fear that they’d open the door to find a half cleared away apartment and nothing more was enough to make him hold off. He was being a coward. That was all there was to it.
Something resisted on the other side of the door when Roy tried to push it open. The resistance wasn’t strong, and a solid enough push managed to shove the door inward into the dense mass of tangled vines.
Roy stared at the overgrown plants, the entire room filled with them, but through all that green he could see the other colors just a little further back near the floor, and after a few seconds of staring Roy figured out exactly what he was looking at.
Two minutes later the police were telling him over the phone that they’d be right over.
The scene was largely silent save for the buzzing of the trimmer making its way through the growth. Roy stood back near the door while two officers knelt beside the decaying corpse of Mr. Biehn. Vines tore through his body, or perhaps out of them, even his eyes replaced by long, green ropes.
They had managed to break through his stomach as well, along with other various points on his body, as if a massive plant had been growing within his gut and suddenly burst to life. Judging from the dried blood near the body Roy figured that might very well have been the case.
No one spoke because no one quite knew what to say. Roy didn’t have anything of value to add to the scene and so he chose to keep his own mouth shut.
The whole fiasco ended up lasting for nearly two hours. A crowd of spectators gathered around the base of the building to watch the show, while Roy himself retreated past the murmuring crowd to spend the bulk of the time in his office with a bottle of whiskey for company.
Roy had come across some oddities over the course of his life, but the sight of all those vines pouring from Biehn’s body definitely topped the list of messed-up shit.
When the police finally came to his door he asked the one question everyone was thinking and no one knew the answer to. “What exactly happened to him?”
“That’s what we intend to find out,” was all the answer he could get.
The apartment would be left the way it was for the police to continue to investigate, but for that night the door was closed and police tape was placed over it. The sun sunk and the few working lights in Roy’s parking lot flickered to life. One of those working lights just happened to be positioned directly in front of a balcony covered with overgrown plants, allowing Roy a perfect view of them through his window.
The weird nature of it all was part of what made him continue to the bottom of his whiskey bottle, and maybe the fact that Biehn had seemed like an okay kind of guy was the other part. By midnight Roy was drunk, and by two in the morning with another bottle in hand, he’d managed to go beyond the point of drunkenness.
And it was in this state of mind that he pushed open his door and stumbled towards the apartment building. The plants were watching him, he felt, as he mounted the stairs towards the door covered in yellow.
He didn’t care what the police wanted to do. Everyone already knew what had killed poor Mr. Biehn, even if no one felt like admitting it, and Roy figured he was just the man to solve this little problem before it got any worse.
The door opened into a dark apartment, the middle of the living room free of plants thanks to the police, a marking on the ground around where Biehn had died. But the walls were still dominated by green, black, plastic pots sitting side by side.
Roy grabbed hold of one and yanked it away from the others. The plant seemed to cling to them, leaves and vines intertwined, but Roy managed to yank the plant from its companions and take it out to the dumpsters. He got a chuckle out of seeing the pot hit the bottom of the dumpster and spill the plant. He left it to die that way.
Back and forth he went, clearing away the pots, filling the dumpster with all those plants, and thinking about the can of gasoline he had in his shed along with a matchbook in his pocket. He’d make sure the damn plants didn’t do anyone anymore harm.
The living room was largely cleared away, his hands sore and swollen from all the effort, when the pain first pierced through his palm.
There was no electricity anymore in the apartment, leaving Roy with only the light that managed to come in from outside to give him sight, but in that poor lighting he could see the blood trickling down his palm, and the vine that had broken its way through his skin.
He stared wide-eyed at what almost looked like a green snake slithering through his palm, and then his eyes rose to the plants on the balcony, the leaves turned towards him like hundreds of faces watching.
Another prick of pain cut through the back of his neck. Roy felt around until he could touch the growing vine.
He took a step towards the open door, but the alcohol combined with the work he’d just done and the fear of what was happening was simply too much for him, and Roy toppled, realizing once he was on the floor he had landed on the outline of Mr. Biehn.
He opened his mouth to scream, only to taste the vines pouring up out of his throat, out of his mouth, coming from his nose, looping out from his ears.
The real tenants of this apartment had never really left, Roy realized then, and they didn’t care for being evicted.
By the time the vines managed to tear their way through his eyes and split open his massive gut, Roy was blissfully unaware of the pain anymore. |
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