The Ladies of Horror
Picture-Prompt Writing Challenge!
The Geometry of Petals
by Kathleen McCluskey
The expedition logs do not agree on when the flowers first appeared.
Some entries describe them as always being there, silent fixtures embedded in the seamless stone plains. The mottled petals curled like talons suspended in the act of closing. Others insist the ground was bare upon arrival, that the first bloom unfolded only after the third rotational cycle, beneath a sky that never achieved full darkness. Both accounts persist, and neither can be disproven. The world itself resists certainty as though truth fractures under the weight of observation.
It is not a planet in any familiar sense, though it is classified as one. The horizon curves abruptly, folding inward at impossible angles. Distant formation shifts position when approached, never nearer or farther, just elsewhere. Sound travels in slow, deliberate pulses as if the atmosphere is resisting the tone.
And everywhere now, there are flowers.
They stand knee high in clustered fields stretching to the horizon. Their petals, marbled brown and bruised yellow with deep purple interiors that glisten in the pale light. Veins pulse faintly beneath their surface. They resemble plants the same way a corpse resembles sleeping.
No roots have ever been found.
No specimen has ever been removed.
Blades pass through the stems without resistance, yet the blooms remain standing untouched, as though the tools entered another layer of reality. Sensors record impossible readings that collapse into static when reviewed. One technician suffered a seizure after prolonged analysis and clawed his own eyes bloody while repeating the same phrase.
“They are looking through us.”
After the first disappearance, the flowers multiplied.
There had been maybe thirty surrounding the camp before engineer TelVay vanished during second watch. His distress call lasted no more than two seconds. A sharp inhalation followed by a wet tearing sound then abrupt silence. When the search team reached his position, they found no body, no blood, no damage to his suit. He was just gone.
Only flowers. Hundreds of them.
The blooms crowded the stone where bare earth had once been. Their petals flexed slowly in the windless dark, opening and closing by fragments. Several leaked drifting clouds of yellow pollen that hung motionless in the air.
The expedition leader ordered the perimeter burned.
Incinerators flooded the field with chemical flame. The flowers writhed inside the blaze, not burning but distorting. Their forms stretched into impossible angles that hurt the eyes to follow. For moments they didn’t resemble flowers at all. Shapes moved within the fire, vast and many limbed, pressing against reality like a predator testing glass.
The flames died. The flowers remained.
That night another crew member disappeared.
A scream echoed through the camp, quick and sharp. By the time the others reached the source, the room stood empty except for a coating of fine, yellow pollen drifting through the air vent. The inside of the missing man’s suit crumpled near his cot.
Not torn. Hollow.
The interior lining was wet and translucent, coated in clear mucus. Outside, new flowers covered the stone in clusters, their purple interiors glistening as though just fed.
After that, no one slept.
The surviving crew sealed themselves in the small lander while the field outside spread in vast geometric patterns. Under certain angles of light, massive shapes moved between the blooms, limbs the size of towers, enormous eyes opening behind the veil of reality.
The flowers were not organisms. They were projections. Small portions of something vastly larger pushing itself through from another dimension.
Then Crewman Drews began coughing.
The sound deepened into uncontrolled spasms. He clawed at his helmet seal as blood sprayed across the inside of his face screen in thick black bursts. The others backed away as his suit tightened violently against his body.
Something moved beneath his skin. Bulges rolled through his arms and chest as though living things were under his skin. Yellow blooms pushed against the visor from within, unfurling slowly across the glass. Petals. Veins. Hooked shapes began to bloom outward. Then his body folded inward. Gone.
Clouds of yellow pollen burst through the cracks in his suit. Where he had stood seconds earlier, a cluster of yellow flowers swayed on the metal floor.
One of them contained an eye. Moving. Looking. Seeing.
The final recovered recordings ended when larger blooms began emerging through the walls of the lander itself while something immense shifted behind them in the dark.
No further expedition has been sent.
.
Fiction © Copyright Kathleen McCluskey
Image courtesy of Pixabay.com
More from Kathleen McCluskey:
The Long Fall: Book 1: The Inception of Horror
Lucifer always cunning and intelligent challenges father to a battle of wits. Being the angel of light he casts a judgemental eye upon mankind. He begins a war with his fellow archangels and God. Michael, along with his siblings defend their home and mankind from their deranged brother. Broad swords and hand to hand combat drench heaven in blood. The four apocalyptic steeds are released, each having their own destructive power. Betrayal and lust are at biblical levels. Understand the very creation of evil and the consequenses that transpire in the first of THE LONG FALL series.
Spreading the Writer's Word 