the next morning, it was barely seven. I lay in bed thinking of what Marie had said. She’d told me not to open the door, that there was something unfathomable behind it. She was worried that the plant was poisonous but that wasn’t a concern for me. All I could think of was opening that door.
When I heard Mom and Mo get up, I slipped the key with the heart onto my lanyard and went down the hall to tell them I’d be back for breakfast. As soon as I closed the front door behind me, I broke into a run. I bolted around the side of the house and across the lawn, into the tree line. The pathway opened up before me and I ducked through. I followed it to the garden, and as I came to the clearing, I took out the key and opened the gate. As it swung open, a sprig of climbing snapdragon slithered down from the wall and encircled my head, twisting itself into a crown of fuchsia blooms before breaking off and returning to the wall. This was our exchange every time I went in, and my collection of flower jewelry was deposited all around the house, not a single petal or stem wilted.
The gate clanged shut behind me and I rounded the corner, making my way straight to the Poison Garden.
The front section of the garden had come alive since Karter and I had started working on it. The foliage was lush, vibrant, and more animated than I’d ever seen it, shifting and reaching as I went to the moon gate. I braced myself for the chill of the airborne poison as it hit the back of my throat and burned the inside of my nose. It only took me a second to recover.
Where the front half of the garden had been every shade of evergreen, olive, and emerald, the Poison Garden had also come alive like never before. Blankets of belladonna intertwined with wide leaves in rippling shades of black, sable, and obsidian—just as vibrant, just as prismatic as their benign counterparts. Deadly crimson thorns protruded from the arms of Devil’s Pet, which had doubled in size and now twisted through the overgrown foliage.
I walked to the center of the rear wall. The Devil’s Pet cinched itself up, revealing the door. I held the key in my trembling hand, and its heart-shaped stone glinted as I inserted it into the lock and twisted until it clicked.
The door groaned as I pushed it open. I’d expected another garden or a storage area, but it was a darkened enclosure no bigger than a hall closet. The smell of damp earth permeated the air. The room had a slanted roof made of the same stone as the walls and was completely covered from floor to ceiling with tangles of poison ivy, stinging nettle, and, to my astonishment, crimson brush.
Crimson brush was supposed to be extinct. I’d only ever seen black-and-white photos of it, taken in the late 1800s when a single sprig remained in the British Museum. Its star-shaped blooms burst from their three-leafed seats and emitted a rust-colored pollen. It should have caused sores to open on my skin and closed up my throat and eyes, but once again, I was unaffected aside from an ice-cold chill. I fanned the cloud of pollen away and the brush shrank back, as if it had realized its mistake.
I pulled out my phone and turned on my flashlight, sweeping it around. The tangle of crimson brush shifted, revealing a narrow stairway that led down. Only the top few stairs were visible. I inched closer and held my phone at arm’s length. The weak column of light illuminated the floor of the room below. The steps were covered in a layer of slick green algae. Water trickled down the walls, running off in delicate rivulets, dampening the stone beneath my feet. Gripping my phone, I descended into the dark.
A small, windowless room took shape as my eyes adjusted to the gloom. A glass enclosure sat directly in the center. Immediately above it, a cylindrical shaft as big around as a can of soda was cut into the ceiling. I peered into it, and while I could see some light from the outside, it wasn’t strong enough to penetrate all the way down.
I turned my attention to the waist-high enclosure. Hinges ran between panes of cloudy glass. I tried to open one, but it didn’t budge. I shone