The cut on your knuckle scabbed over quickly, leaving a thin, silvery line that still twinged occasionally, a phantom echo of that sharp, cold shard. You found yourself glancing at it more often than you should, tracing the scar with your thumb during particularly dull meetings.
Speaking of which, Wednesday brought the monthly Interdepartmental Synergy Session (Dave’s aggressively cheerful rebranding of ‘pointless meeting where everyone avoids eye contact’). You sat nursing a cup of sludge that vaguely resembled coffee, listening to Brenda from Parks & Rec drone on about fertilizer subsidies while idly scrolling through the city’s internal messaging system on your tablet.
An unread message from Arthur Penvarnon popped up, timestamped 2:17 AM. Christ, Arthur.
You tapped it open.
You read it twice. Still-Bloom. That hit a little too close to home. ‘Pale,’ ‘crystalline structure,’ ‘difficult to eradicate,’ ‘unnervingly cold to the touch.’ That perfectly described the goddamn thing you’d found in the asphalt crack, the thing you’d sliced your knuckle on. You hadn’t mentioned its coldness or crystalline look in your report, just called it ‘unidentified growth.’ Fuck.
Memetic condition? What the hell was Arthur smoking?
You glanced across the meeting table. Brenda was still talking about mulch. Nobody seemed remotely concerned about memetic substrates or Still-Blooms. Just… mulch.
You typed a quick, deliberately bland reply.
You hit send, feeling a slight twinge of guilt at the downplaying. But what were you supposed to say? ‘Yeah, Arthur, I found your magic, cursed ice-bone fungus from 1950, cut myself on it, and now I think Mrs. Henderson’s ‘cognito-shift’ theory might have legs?’ You’d be laughed out of the Annex, probably sent for a mandatory psych evaluation. Dave would have a field day.
No, best to keep it mundane. Keep it bureaucratic. Still, Arthur’s message left a residue of unease. Silent Winter. Linguistic confusion. It echoed Mrs. Henderson’s bizarre pronouncements, the strange words bubbling up.
Later that day, while compiling feedback from the online portal regarding a proposed traffic calming scheme on Maple Avenue, you saw it again. Sandwiched between complaints about speed bumps and arguments over parking restrictions, one comment read:
Honestly, the whole plan feels like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. The real issue isn’t the traffic flow, it’s the underlying thought-murk settling over this neighbourhood. People aren’t paying attention anymore. It’s getting dangerous.
Thought-murk. Another one. And used so casually, so naturally, as if it were a common term for… what? Civic apathy? General malaise? It had that same bizarre-yet-familiar quality. You searched the city’s public forum database. The term had appeared sporadically over the past few months, mostly in rambling, borderline-incoherent posts you’d previously dismissed as crank magnetism. Now… now it felt different. Like listening to static and suddenly hearing a faint melody underneath.
You pushed back from your desk, needing air. The Annex felt stuffy, suffocating. You decided to take an early site visit for a potential pocket park near the Old Canal Quarter–another area Arthur had mentioned in connection with ‘Still-Bloom.’ Might as well kill two birds with one stone. Check the site, clear your head.
The Old Canal Quarter was a maze of narrow streets, Victorian brickwork crumbling gracefully, and the ever-present smell of damp earth and stagnant water from the sluggish canal nearby. It was trying for ‘historic charm,’ but mostly achieved ‘picturesque decay.’ The potential park site was a small, overgrown lot behind what used to be a public library, now boarded up and awaiting either renovation funding or demolition. Weeds choked the cracked flagstones, and ivy crawled possessively over the brick walls.
You pushed through a sagging chain-link fence, the rusted metal groaning. Almost immediately, you saw them.
Not just one this time. Three distinct clusters of the bone-white growths. One erupted from the base of the library wall, looking disturbingly like knuckles punching through the ancient brickwork. Another pushed up between two flagstones, larger than the one in District 7, its facets catching the weak sunlight in that same, unsettling, non-refractive way. The third, and most disturbing, was wrapped around the base of a gnarled, ancient-looking tree in the centre of the lot, like a parasitic collar. The bark around it looked grey and brittle, dead.
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Your breath hitched. Still-Bloom. Arthur wasn't crazy. Or, if he was, you were sharing the delusion.
This wasn't efflorescence. This wasn't salt leaching. This was… something else. Something is growing. Intentional.
You approached the one near the wall cautiously. The air around it felt colder, heavier. You didn’t touch it this time. You just looked. Up close, the surface wasn't uniform. It had faint, fractal-like patterns etched into it, complex and recursive, like frost on a windowpane designed by a mathematician on acid. And as you stared, you got that same dizzying sensation as before–the feeling that the facets were shifting, rearranging themselves just at the edge of your perception. Not physically moving, but… conceptually moving. Reflecting warped glimpses of things–the pattern on your shirt sleeve, distorted; the vague shape of the boarded-up library window behind you, bent impossibly; a fleeting, half-formed image of Mrs. Henderson’s indignant face, melting into Arthur’s stressed frown.
What the fuck is this?
You backed away slowly, heart thumping against your ribs. This was beyond weird debris. This was Grade A, five-alarm wrongness. You fumbled for your tablet, snapping pictures, trying to keep your hand steady. On the screen, the growths looked… inert. Just strange white lumps. The unsettling depth, the subtle shifting, didn't translate. It was like trying to photograph a migraine aura.
As you were backing towards the fence, ready to get the hell out of there and maybe call… who? Ghostbusters? The fucking X-Files?–you nearly tripped over him.
He was sitting on an overturned bucket in the deepest shade of the dying tree, sketching in a large, worn notepad. An old man, maybe seventy, with a long grey beard stained yellow near his mouth, wearing paint-splattered overalls and a faded flannel shirt despite the mild temperature. He looked up as you stumbled, his eyes, pale blue and startlingly intense, fixing on you. He hadn’t made a sound; you hadn’t even registered his presence.
“Careful there, friend,” he said, his voice raspy, like dry leaves skittering on pavement. “Ground’s uneven. Easy to lose your footing when you’re not looking where you’re really going.”
“Sorry,” you stammered, regaining your balance. “Didn’t see you there. I’m from the city Planning Department, just… surveying the lot.”
He nodded slowly, his gaze drifting past you towards the white growth on the tree roots. “Surveying the… bloom?” A faint, knowing smile touched his lips.
Your blood ran cold. Bloom. He used the word. Just like that.
“The… what?” you asked, trying to sound casual, professional.
“The Still-Bloom,” he clarified, gesturing vaguely with his pencil. “Been watching it spread for years now. Used to be just little bits, down by the canal mostly. Now…” He shrugged, a small, resigned gesture. “Now it’s taking root proper.”
You swallowed hard. “You… know what it is?”
He chuckled, a dry, rattling sound. “Know? Nah. Nobody knows. Not really. You just… get a feel for it. It’s quiet. Listens more than it talks. But it changes things. Changes the way things fit.” He tapped his temple with the pencil. “Changes the thoughts that roost up here.”
You stared at him. Was he senile? A local eccentric? Or… something else? “Changes things how?”
“Words go slippery,” he said, looking back down at his sketchbook. “Ideas get… sticky. You start seeing the patterns. The Veridian Weft under the pavement.”
Veridian Weft. Jesus Christ. He said it too.
“People used to talk about it more, back when,” he continued, his pencil scratching rapidly across the page. “My grandad, he worked the barges on the canal. Said there were winters the fog got so thick with… with quiet… that men would just forget how to get home. Not lost. Just… empty. Hollowed out. Like the Still-Bloom had taken root inside ‘em.” He paused, looked back up at you, his eyes unnervingly clear. “Called it the ‘Thoughtless Garden’ stage, he did.”
Thoughtless Garden. The phrase landed like a lead weight in your stomach. It sounded clinical. Final.
“Look,” you started, trying to regain control of the conversation, of reality. “This growth, whatever it is, it might be hazardous. We need to get it analyzed, removed—”
He cut you off with a sharp, dismissive wave of his hand. “Remove it? You can try. Like trying to scoop fog with a sieve. It ain’t just there.” He tapped the sketchbook again. “It’s here now, too. In the words. In the pictures.” He flipped the sketchbook around to show you.
It wasn’t a sketch of the lot, or the tree, or the blooms. It was a face. Your face. Rendered in startling, photorealistic detail with charcoal. But it wasn’t quite right. The expression was subtly wrong–a slack-jawed vacancy, eyes staring but unfocused. And growing from the corner of your mouth, rendered with meticulous, loving detail, was a small, perfect replica of the bone-white, faceted growth.
A wave of nausea washed over you. You stumbled back, away from him, away from the drawing, away from the cold growths pulsing silently in the dying garden.
“Get… get that away from me,” you choked out.
The old man just smiled that same unnerving, knowing smile. “Can’t run from your own reflection, friend. Best get used to the new scenery. It’s planting season.”
You didn’t wait for more. You turned and practically scrambled back through the fence, snagging your vest on the rusted wire. You didn’t look back until you were safely locked in your car, engine running, hands shaking on the steering wheel.
Driving back towards the soulless safety of the Annex, the city felt alien. The familiar streets seemed subtly altered, the angles of buildings somehow sharper, the grey sky pressing down with a tangible weight. The casual snippets of conversation you overheard through the open window–arguments about parking, gossip about neighbours–sounded subtly distorted, peppered with half-heard words that might have been cognito-shift or thought-murk or maybe just your own fraying nerves playing tricks.
That night, you received another email from Arthur Penvarnon. It arrived just after midnight. No subject line this time. Just a single, attached image file.
Hesitantly, you opened it.
It was a scan of an old, brittle map. A detailed survey of Stillwater Creek, dated 1907. Superimposed over the familiar grid of streets and landmarks were faint, spidery lines in faded red ink, forming intricate, geometric patterns that seemed to converge on several key points–the old rail yards in District 7, the Old Canal Quarter library, the site of the Ash Meadow Riot, even, disturbingly, the land where the Municipal Annex now stood.
And scrawled in the map’s margin, in faded cursive that was unmistakably Arthur’s usually precise hand, but shakier, loopier, was a single, chilling sentence:
You slammed your laptop shut, the click echoing too loudly in your silent apartment. Sleep, you knew, wasn’t going to come easy tonight. The roots weren’t just in the concrete anymore. They were twisting their way into your thoughts, into the city's history, into the very words you used to make sense of the world.
And the Bloom, cold and silent, was spreading.