Total pages in book: 129
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 125117 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 626(@200wpm)___ 500(@250wpm)___ 417(@300wpm)
“Am I in Agatha Tark’s fucking house?” Truman breathed. He scrambled for his suitcase and pulled out book six, The Heart Screams.
Clarion took it for a sigil. An artisan generations before had laid each piece of the Draggør sailing ship into the floor. They were carved from light skrimwood and dark mhyrtlewood—both hard, strong, and nearly impossible to cut with any but the sharpest blade. This craft had been a work of love and obsession. More and more, Clarion believed they were the same.
“Holy shit!” He squinted at the ship again. “No. No way. It’s impossible.”
His spinning head insisted that he stop squinting.
He took a picture of the ship, intending to text Germaine and Charlotte and see if it could possibly be true. But somewhere between tapping the button and moving to get back into bed, sleep took him.
***
Truman groaned as a beam of sunlight stabbed him in the eye.
He was on the floor, in a nest of duvet, pillow, and flannel top sheet that he had no memory of making. His legs were under the bed, and when he opened his eyes, he just had time to see a dust bunny inches from his face before sneezing wildly.
“Oh, Jesus,” he groaned as the sneeze threatened to tear his skull apart.
As if in answer, one of the empty wine bottles, apparently dislodged from its rest by his sneeze, rolled across the floor and clunked into his head.
I’ll just lie here for a while.
***
The next time he awoke, the sun was less stabby and his hip ached. Truman dragged himself up slowly as different parts of his body complained. He crept to the bathroom and stood under the hot water until vomiting didn’t seem imminent.
When he finally opened his eyes, he realized that the bathroom was full of plants. Maybe they were ferns? Two of them hung in front of the small window and another hung on the wall opposite it. There was also something that looked like balls of moss on the windowsill next to a vining plant with beautiful deep purple leaves.
Over coffee, Truman studied the instructions Greta had left and did the morning plant routine of turning on this humidifier and turning off that grow light. One of the humidifiers was for a cluster of carnivorous plants in front of a window in the second bedroom that had been transformed into a kind of greenhouse.
When Truman had heard carnivorous, he’d worried that he would have to mess with live grasshoppers or something. But Greta had written that she’d fed all of them before she left and that he wouldn’t have to worry about feeding them again for two weeks, at which time there were pellets to give them.
So he simply refilled the humidifier and peeked at the odd plants. Several of them looked like the “Feed me, Seymour” plants, though thankfully much smaller. But a number of them were something he’d never seen before: plants with rounded cup-like appendages in streaks of maroon, green, purple, and red.
“What the hell are you?”
They were absurd and almost beautiful. Truman wanted to touch them but wasn’t entirely sure that they couldn’t bite off a finger. So he settled for examining them closely.
And when he looked, he saw that one of the medium-sized plants looked withered and brown.
“Oh god, did I kill something already?”
Panicked, he reached in and picked up the pot, peering at the plant. Its soil seemed moist enough, but he had no idea what enough meant for ordinary plants, much less something like this.
He ran back into the kitchen and reread the instructions to see if Greta had left contingency plans for such a scenario. There was nothing.
Should he text her? What would he say, though? “Sorry, but I immediately got so drunk in your bed that I didn’t notice one of your precious babies that I swore I would care for was in its death throes.” Yeah, nope.
Then he remembered the walk to the general store.
“Florist. There was a florist. Florists know about plants, right?”
Right.
He pulled on jeans and a long-sleeved shirt. But remembering yesterday’s walk and his own insufficient winter wear, he opened Greta’s closet. She wouldn’t mind if he borrowed a sweater, would she? No, that was weird.
He tapped a quick message to her: Hey! Hope you’re enjoying the warm weather! Unfortunately I’m rather unprepared for the cold. I know it’s kinda weird to ask, but…would you mind if I borrowed a sweater?
Her response came immediately. oh, totally, borrow whatever you want. it’s gorgeous here. And then a palm tree emoji.
He pulled on a gloriously warm woolen sweater and felt much better about leaving the house. Now he just had to find the equivalent for the plant. He pulled a blanket off the couch and wrapped the plant in it as well as he could to protect it from the winter but not squish it in the process, then he set off into town.