Free Little Girls by Ronald Malfi Page B

flora.
    It was the greenhouse.
    Now, the little glass house was like a bad secret that had been hidden from the world. The glass panels were brown and grimy with muck so thick they were opaque. The glass itself was thick and unforgiving, unlike the polycarbonate panels used in modern greenhouses. Some of the panels were riddled with cracks, while others had been busted out completely. Triangular shards of glass lay scattered atop the dirt and grass. The roof of the greenhouse, once a cantilevered A-frame, was now a partially sunken pit beneath a weathered sheet of heavy brown canvas. The canvas itself was held in place by a series of long chains that ran down the side of the structure and were bolted to the bottom of the frame.
    It was still here. After all that had happened and all the time that had passed, the goddamn thing was still here.
    Laurie’s mouth went dry. Beside the forgotten greenhouse, the immense oak tree still stood, its massive leafy boughs stretching out over the shattered and covered roof of the greenhouse.
    What does it look like on the inside? She couldn’t help but wonder. After all these years, would there still be blood?
    She went around to the front of the structure. Beneath the rumpled and weather-ruined canvas tent, the greenhouse looked smaller than she had remembered it. But of course, the last time she had seen it she had just been a little girl. The front of the greenhouse was covered by two heavy-looking flaps of canvas. A thick rope had been wound through an eyelet at the corner of each flap and tied in a sturdy-looking knot. Frayed and colorless, even the rope looked ancient. Laurie was able to peel back one of the flaps a few inches and peer underneath without untying the rope. A smell like rotting vegetation accosted her. Behind the flap, she could make out the rectangle of the greenhouse door. The door was comprised of several panels of glass, but the glass had blackened with mold over the years, making it impossible to see beyond. With her free hand, she reached out and pressed two fingers against the door. She felt it give, as if the framework was made of sponge. Her eyes traced down to the handle, expecting to find a lock on the door. There was no lock. There was no handle, either—only a sheared metal bolt, burnt orange with rust, protruding from where the handle had once been.
    She had suffered many nightmares about this little glass house, all of them immediately after Sadie Russ had died. And while those nightmares faded over time and with age and maturity, the sense of dread and terror that had come from them rushed over her now as if they had never left her. And perhaps they never had, that they had simply lain dormant and in wait for just this moment.
    With a series of tugs, she undid the rope. It took some effort, but it eventually fell away and coiled in the dirt at her feet. She parted the canvas flaps like a stage actress parting a curtain for her encore, tucking each flap behind the lengths of chain that secured the canvas covering to the ground. The entire glass front was black. Things grew against the inside of the panes, dark green and furry. The smell coming from the structure was rank enough to transcend olfaction; it was as if all of her five senses were capable of being brutalized by the horrific odor of rotting vegetation. Regardless, she reached out and slipped fingers between the narrow space between the door and the spongy frame, and pulled it open.
    The hinges didn’t so much whine as growl. Hunks of black, springy mildew pattered to the ground. She managed to get the door open just a few inches when the smell from within breathed out into her face, warm and fetid, and no less potent than a punch to the stomach. With the canvas covering overtop the structure, the inside of the greenhouse was absolute darkness. Only hesitant milky light could be seen through some of the glass panels lower to the ground. Squinting against the darkness, she thought she could see