The Story Pirates Present

by STORY PIRATES

  “We’ll have you planted in no time!” boomed Mr. Carroll.

  Two minutes later, wearing her backpack and carrying her box of books, Eliza found herself following Mrs. Carroll’s fluttering skirts across the shop’s front room. A whirl of new, sweeter smells greeted her as they entered the cut flower department. Tubs of bright flowers cluttered the floor. Buckets of roses and mums formed fireworks of color behind foggy glass refrigerator doors. A cluster of lilies spilled from a vase on the countertop.

  “This is where you’ll usually find me, with my face buried in a bouquet,” said Mrs. Carroll happily, leading the way up the staircase that angled through the floral department. “If you get close enough to flowers, you can practically hear them singing to you.”

  “What do they sing?” Eliza asked curiously.

  “Oh, not songs,” said Mrs. Carroll. “Each one just sings its own little note. But when you put a bunch of them together, you can hear chords. Symphonies.”

  Eliza glanced back at her mother, who was trying very hard to straighten a smirk.

  “We live here on the second floor, Camila and Tommy and I,” boomed Mr. Carroll, as they crossed a landing onto another flight of stairs. Through an open doorway, Eliza caught a flash of colorful rugs and squishy furniture.

  “We have the whole building,” Mrs. Carroll explained over one shoulder. “It’s been in Win’s family for ages.”

  “Yes, we put down roots here a long time ago!” Mr. Carroll laughed.

  The next flight of stairs was narrower and creakier. The hallway it led to was dim. The surrounding air was cool, which might have been due to the thick brick walls, or—possibly—to spectral presences. Eliza held her box tight, squinting eagerly through the shadows.

  “Most of this floor is shop storage,” said Mrs. Carroll, leading the way past a row of bolted wooden doors. “But the best part of it is all yours!”

  She threw open the door at the very end of the hall.

  Eliza and her mother stepped over the threshold.

  The room they entered was large and high-ceilinged, with dark green paper coating the walls. Narrow windows glowed with dusty sunlight. A tiny stove and an old enamel sink sat in one corner. A table with two chairs stood in the center of the room, a spindly chandelier dangling above it like a big glass spider. At the far end of the room, two wrought-iron beds—the kind that creaked every time a person twitched in her sleep—were covered in patchwork quilts. Thrusting out from the remaining corner, its interior a shadowy half-circle lined with cushioned seats, was the pointy turret.

  “We used to rent out this room, but we gave up that bother a few years ago,” Mrs. Carroll was saying. “We know it’s a bit outdated….”

  But Eliza wasn’t listening. She was staring at the turret, at the chandelier, at all the shadowy nooks where ghosts could hide. Her family’s house in Massachusetts had only been built in 1950. It was full of clean angles and smooth walls and floors that didn’t creak, and it stood on a street of other creak-less houses. When her parents had explained that, as far as they knew, no one had ever died a horrible death inside of it, Eliza had been seriously disappointed. But this place was so rambling and old and odd, it had to have at least one ghost hanging around. Maybe more than one. Maybe a whole ghost family. Eliza’s skin zinged with excitement.

  “This is lovely,” said Eliza’s mother, but in a way that told Eliza she’d be checking for black mold later.

  “Would you like some time to unpack and freshen up?” asked Mrs. Carroll.

  “Honestly, I’m dying to get a look at your plants.” Eliza’s mother swung her laptop bag over her shoulder. “Do you mind if I just jump in?”

  “Do we mind?” Mr. Carroll boomed. “We hoped you’d say that! We’ve got a whole room full of mystery plants just waiting for you!”

  Mr. and Mrs. Carroll bustled back into the hall, followed by Eliza’s mother.

  Eliza was taking a last look around when, from somewhere nearby, there came a soft creak.

  Eliza froze.

  The sound hadn’t come from the hallway. In fact, if she had to guess, Eliza would have said it came from directly above. She looked up at the cracked plaster ceiling. Was it just the creaking of a weathered old building? If not…what was up there?

  “Eliza!” Her mother’s voice sliced through the silence. “Come with us, please!”

  Eliza sighed. “Coming!” she called back, and hurried through the door after the others.

  Turn to this page.

  “OUR PLANTS COME IN from all over the world,” said Mr. Carroll, as they thumped back through the floral department into the shop’s main room. A few customers browsed the shelves. Tommy was nowhere in sight. “We’ve got things no one else carries,” he went on. “Things no one else has ever seen—Camila and I included, and we’ve seen a few plants! A few years ago, we found a botanist who was willing to help us determine care preferences, observe interesting properties—poisonous, edible, self-pollinating, what have you. When he moved away, we were really up a tree.”

  “Thank goodness you’ve come to save us!” said Mrs. Carroll. “You too, Eliza.” She gave her a twinkly smile. “Summer is our busiest season. We’re so grateful for an extra pair of hands around the shop!”

  Mr. Carroll opened a door tucked away in one shady corner. “Here it is.” He dropped his voice dramatically. “The treasure chamber.”

  Everyone stepped through the doorway.

  Eliza glanced around. The room was smallish, with a row of latticed windows letting in the sunlight. Except for one tall laboratory table in the middle, every bit of the room was crammed with plants. Very weird plants. Plants with purple-veined leaves and huge fuchsia flowers. Plants with three-inch black thorns. Plants that sent out tendrils as fine as spiderweb to coil around anything that wandered near.

  Eliza’s mother gave the kind of sigh she usually gave when she took her first sip of coffee in the morning.

  She made a beeline toward the nearest specimen. Eliza watched her do the things she always did when she examined an interesting plant: crouching down, squinting, darting from side to side like a giant frizzy-haired hummingbird.

  “Please make yourself at home,” said Mrs. Carroll. “Although we can’t advise you to touch anything. We don’t know what stings and what doesn’t!”

  Eliza’s mother paused in front of something that looked like a miniature birch tree, except that its leaves were a vivid gold, and clusters of glittering red berries dangled from its twigs. She darted in for a closer look. “This is stunning,” she said. “Do you know where it came from?”

  “Somewhere in North America, I believe!” Mr. Carroll gave a big shrug and another chuckle. “Like I said, our dealers cover the whole globe. That’s the one I’m most curious about myself. Never seen anything like it.”

  “Stunning,” said Eliza’s mother again.

  Eliza edged around the room. She backed away from a cluster of plants that looked like they might bite and skirted something with a speckled seed pod as long as her arm. She was bending down to sniff a wrinkly blue flower when, from somewhere nearby, there came a deep, ghostly moan.

  Eliza froze.

  A second strange sound within ten minutes? This place was definitely ripe for paranormal research!

  She glanced over her shoulder. No one else had turned toward the sound. Her mother and the Carrolls were still staring at the little red-gold tree, not acting at all like people who’d just heard a ghost.

  But Eliza knew that people often don’t notice what they don’t expect to notice.

  She peered into the leafy shadows. When she took a small step sideways, the moan came again, a bit louder. It had a breathiness to it, a sort of tired ache. And it seemed to be coming from the floor.

  Maybe there was a vent in the floorboards. The vent could lead down to the basement—which, after an attic, would be a ghost’s favorite lurking place.


  Eliza crouched down to look.

  There was no vent. There was something else.

  From the darkness beneath a rack of plants, a black blob with gleaming yellow eyes stared straight back at her.

  Eliza yelped.

  She jumped backward. Her heel hit a giant potted fern, and she toppled through its rustling branches, plunking onto her behind on its other side.

  Now everybody turned to look.

  “Oh, I see you’ve met Moggie!” sang Mrs. Carroll. She swept across the room, jewelry jingling. “She’s an opinionated old thing, our Moggie-doggie.” She bent down to rub the ears of what Eliza now saw was an ancient black dog. “She’s the one who’s really in charge around here.”

  Eliza blinked at the dog. It was about the size of a retriever, with a long snout, droopy gold eyes, and black hair frosted with puffs of gray. Eliza didn’t know much about dogs, but as far as she could see, this one didn’t look like it was in charge of anything—including its own tail, which was banging floppily against one table leg. Mrs. Carroll went on rubbing, and the dog let out another low groan.

  A mixture of relief and disappointment washed through Eliza’s chest, dragging her heartbeat back to normal. Oh well. One more almost ghost sighting was better than no sighting at all.

  Turn to this page.

  “Eliza, I’ll be busy here for a while.” Her mother was setting out her notebooks with one hand while bundling her hair into a knot with the other. “You could get to work, too. I’m sure the Carrolls can tell you where to start.”

  Before Eliza could answer, Mrs. Carroll sang, “Oh, Tommy can show you around. Where did that boy go? Tommy? Tommy!”

  Tommy slumped into the doorway, gazing at them through a curtain of hair.

  “Tommy, why don’t you give Eliza a tour of the shop?” said Mrs. Carroll. “Then she can help you with the repotting or deadheading or whatever needs doing.”

  Behind their hair curtain, Tommy’s eyes widened with dread. “Uh…”

  “He doesn’t have to,” Eliza blurted. “I mean, I can just—”

  “That would be perfect,” said Eliza’s mother loudly. She looked up from her work, straight into Eliza’s eyes. “Eliza is happy to help with whatever needs doing. Right, Eliza?”

  “Right,” said Eliza. “I just—”

  “Lovely!” exclaimed Mrs. Carroll. “Go ahead, you two!”

  Tommy turned and shuffled off. Eliza slunk after him, stretching her fingers against her opposite palm one by one.

  There was nothing so bad about Tommy. But he was clearly uncomfortable with her, and that made Eliza even more uncomfortable with him. Maybe Tommy liked things that stayed the same, too—not strange people who blew into your life and bumped everything out of its usual place. Or maybe he just didn’t like her. Eliza stretched her fingers harder.

  Tommy led the way through the main room. Even with customers browsing here and there, the room was hushed, like a garden with no birds or breeze.

  Tommy stopped beside the counter, pointed at a phone, and mumbled something that sounded like foam. He tapped a board below the register counter, where keys hung on little brass hooks labeled FRONT DOOR, BASEMENT, ATTIC, THIRD FLOOR ROOM, and RESTROOM. “Spare keys,” he mumbled.

  Then he wheeled around, almost smacked straight into Eliza, shook his hair back over his face, and shuffled off in another direction.

  Eliza followed him, keeping a careful distance. Tommy reminded her of a teenage version of Cousin Itt from The Addams Family. She’d always wondered how Itt had gotten around without walking into things.

  Barely skirting a rack of cacti, Tommy shuffled through an archway into another high-ceilinged room. At least, Eliza assumed it was a room. If not for the creaky floor under their feet, it could have been a patch of forest.

  Potted trees with speckled leaves and glassy black fruits reached all the way to the canopied ceiling. Giant shrubs filled the corners. Vines tangled on the walls. The air was humid and clogged with scents—scents that reminded Eliza of lemons and smoke and rotting meat, but that must have been coming from the blossoms nearby. Eliza leaned down and sniffed a red flower. Yep. Rotting sausage.

  “Popular plants are out front,” said Tommy, in a voice so soft Eliza almost missed it. “These are the rarer ones. Things almost nobody buys.”

  Eliza gazed down at something that looked like a haystack made of mold. “Who does buy them?”

  “Plant collectors.” Tommy shrugged. “Weird rich people.”

  “Is there anything really strange?” Eliza asked. “Like, anything you have to water with your own blood?”

  “This isn’t Little Shop of Horrors.”

  Eliza glanced up. Behind the oily brown curtain of his hair, Tommy seemed to be almost smiling. She almost-smiled back.

  “I’m not really into plants,” she admitted. “But I like scary stories.”

  Tommy looked down again, as though her eyes had shoved his away. “I like The Twilight Zone,” he mumbled to his shoes. “Well. Um. We’d better keep going.”

  He lurched through the room toward another open doorway.

  They made their way along a narrow hall. They passed a door marked STAFF ONLY, and another door marked RESTROOM—SEE STAFF FOR KEY, and a heavier, wider wooden door marked NO ADMITTANCE.

  “What’s through there?” Eliza asked.

  “Um…” Tommy glanced back. “The basement.”

  “Is it a creepy basement?” Eliza asked eagerly. “Like—do you ever see things moving in the corners, but when you turn around, nothing’s there?”

  Tommy threw a wary look in her direction. “No.”

  “Never?”

  “No.”

  Eliza’s heart sank.

  “It’s mostly just soil and fertilizer and chemicals.” Tommy pointed to the end of the hall. “There’s the door to the backyard.”

  “There’s a backyard?” Eliza had thought houses in the city didn’t have yards at all.

  “A little one. Behind the greenhouse.”

  “There’s a greenhouse?”

  Tommy didn’t answer. He just pushed open a pair of glass doors.

  A wall of damp air smacked Eliza in the face. The smell of the plants had been strong in the rest of the shop, but here, it was so green and forceful she could practically feel it shooting into her lungs. Behind it came the rich, murky smell of the soil. Inhaling the air of the greenhouse was less like breathing and more like sucking a garden up into your nose. It made her woozy.

  Tommy threaded through the glass house, dodging plant-packed tables and hanging baskets. “We can start deadheading here.”

  Eliza glanced around the greenhouse. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, but it might have been a miniature guillotine. “How do you do it?”

  Tommy reached for the nearest plant, gently tugging off a withered blossom and tossing it into a compost bin. “You take off any dead flowers.”

  “That’s it?” said Eliza. “Deadheading sounds so…violent.”

  “Don’t you know everything about plants already?” Tommy asked Eliza’s shoes. “With your mom, I mean?”

  “She and my dad tried to get me interested, but it never really worked.” Eliza watched Tommy pluck a crumpled flower. “Why do you know this stuff? Because of your family?”

  Tommy shrugged. “Some, I guess. I just—I like botany. Biology. Ecology. How things affect each other.” He broke off with a little flinch, like all the words he’d just spoken had startled him. He shook his hair back over his eyes. “So. Um. You can do that side. I’ll do this one.”

  They got to work, back to back. Eliza was sick of deadheading in about two minutes, but she figured that she shouldn’t complain about her very first chore on her very first day, so she kept quiet. Tommy kept quiet, too. The longer the quiet went on, the more real it seemed. Soon Eliza could practically feel it looming behind her, ju
st out of sight, like a ghostly presence.

  Eliza would have picked a ghostly presence over human quiet any day.

  Ghosts were nothing to be feared. They were just souls who wanted to stay where they had always belonged. It was people who could be trouble. It was people who could stick out a foot and trip you, or decide they weren’t your best friends anymore, or give you such relentless silent treatment that your whole body got as tense as a strained rubber band.

  Eliza stretched her neck. She stretched her shoulders. She reached for a withered blossom and accidentally ripped off a live one instead.

  She glanced around to see if Tommy had noticed.

  But Tommy wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t anywhere in the greenhouse. She and the plants were alone. The silence, which she thought she’d been sharing with someone, seemed suddenly crushing, all of its weight falling onto her alone. Its pressure filled the dewy air.

  Eliza turned in a slow circle. How long had she been alone? A few minutes? Longer? Had Tommy rushed away as soon as he got the chance? She held her breath, listening, but in the insulated greenhouse, she couldn’t hear a thing. No footsteps. No voices from inside the shop. Not even the noise of the street beyond this weird green world.

  From the corner of her eye, she saw something move—a streak of shadow outside the misty glass walls. The shadow seemed too low and too long to be Tommy’s. Probably just Moggie lumbering through the backyard, Eliza told herself. She waited, watching. But whatever it was had vanished. And Tommy didn’t return.

  THE CARROLLS INSISTED THAT the Stahls join them for dinner that night. At closing time, they all trooped up to the second-floor apartment, where Mr. Carroll’s pot of jollof rice sent out ribbons of spicy scent.

  Eliza would have preferred a meal she’d had a thousand times before, like her father’s Monday Macaroni or Tuesday Tacos, or her mom’s Wednesday Western Omelette. But the rice turned out to be pretty tasty.

  They all clustered around the Carrolls’ table and ate and made small talk. The adults made small talk, anyway. Tommy and Eliza mostly just ate. Tommy had never returned to the greenhouse. Eliza had eventually found him tending orchids in the front room, and he’d looked almost startled to see her, like he’d already forgotten she was there. Moggie lay between their feet under the dinner table, giving occasional wheezes. Mr. Carroll slipped her a bit of chicken whenever Mrs. Carroll wasn’t looking. Mrs. Carroll did the same thing whenever Mr. Carroll wasn’t looking. And when Tommy wasn’t looking, Moggie craned up and slurped a chunk of chicken off the edge of his plate.