When we moved into our new house on Nightsoil Avenue, my wife was immediately enamored with the big garden. It was already blooming with flowers when we pulled up in the moving truck. Hundreds of roses, tulips, daffodils, lilies, daisies and hydrangeas were lining the backyard on both sides and at the very rear of the property, iridescent in every color of the rainbow.

Christine was thrilled, since she’s always been a gardener, but we never had much space for flowers on our balcony. Still, she’d found a way to grow a collection of tomatoes, herbs, peppers, and cucumber plants, using large buckets filled with soil.

Now she had all the space in the world to work with. An entire property that she could cultivate however she chose to.

We didn’t realize that there would be conditions to the garden, though. Rules to follow.

And my wife was never one to follow the rules.

Despite the magnificent garden at our new house, it was missing a few things. Peppers, cucumbers, herbs, and tomatoes were the things we’d always grown on our balcony. So Christine immediately wanted to do the same thing at the new house.

It was the beginning of summer, and so it was a bit late to be planting. Luckily, she’d brought the big pots from our balcony, and she set them out in the backyard to transplant them into the soil back there.

We would have to dig a new plot, but that was no problem, since the backyard was huge.

I was helping her dig when I felt, rather than saw, a person staring at me. It took me a few moments to look up, but eventually I did, and noticed my neighbor was right there, just a few feet away, standing on her back lawn. She was watching me with a blank stare, her arms hanging limply at her sides.

“Good morning,” I said, as warmly as I could under the circumstances. “How are you?”

She was creeping me out, the way she was just standing there, her hair frizzy and out of place, one upper lip pulled back in a sneer like a territorial dog. The look she was giving me was something that would make most people want to run - but we were in our own backyard. And she didn’t respond to my greeting, or my question.

“You shouldn’t be doing that,” she said.

“Doing what?” my wife asked, looking genuinely curious.

“Read the rules,” she said, then turned around and walked back inside, slamming the door behind her.

We both stood there for a few seconds, quietly in awe of what had just happened.

“What the fuck was that?” my wife asked finally.

“I don’t know. She’s got a frickin’ screw loose.”

“Yeah…”

Doubtfully, my wife went back to digging. She looked back at the neighbor’s house occasionally and so did I, disturbed to see the woman standing there, watching us from her back window.

That night, my wife came into the living room with a crumpled piece of paper in her hands. She was unfolding it and reading it, her eyes going wide as she paced, mouthing the words out loud.

“What is that,” I asked nervously.

She continued quietly reading for another minute as I grew more and more anxious.

“CHRISTINE! What is it?”

Finally she answered.

“I found it wedged under the front door mat. We must have missed it when we moved in. It’s a list of rules, John. A list of rules for living here.”

“Let me see,” I said, and she handed the list to me.

There were only four rules on the crumpled piece of paper. And we had broken all four.

Rule One: You may plant flowers within the designated flower beds, but do not, under any circumstances, plant any sort of fruit or vegetable.

Rule Two: Do not dig outside of the designated flower beds. These are the only areas where planting is permitted.

Rule Three: Watering of gardens must be done between 8AM and 6PM ONLY. Autumn watering is NOT permitted.

Rule Four: No outside soil is to be used on your property. Only soil found within the planters can be used for gardening purposes.

“It’s a joke,” I said to my wife, my throat feeling dry, my mouth parched. “A prank on the new neighbors.”

She looked at me doubtfully, and I wished I believed it myself.

I tried to work up the courage over the following weeks and months to talk to the neighbors, but I always got the feeling they didn’t want to speak with me.

Doors slammed when I stepped outside. Eyes darted the other direction when I tried to look their way. The people on my street were always in a hurry when I was around. Always late for a meeting or for church, bags full of groceries in their arms, too heavy and awkward to stop for a moment to chat. And I couldn’t help but think they were all in a hurry to get away from me. Like I was cursed or something. A Leper they didn’t want to make contact with, for fear of catching some disease.

It felt like both of us were being shunned. But why? Because of some ridiculous list of rules?

After a while I stopped caring, and so did Christine. It was the only way to stay sane and avoid paranoia and unease at all hours of the day. If the neighbors were going to hate us and treat us like pariahs, so be it. We would give them what they wanted. The two of us would be the scourge of the neighborhood, and their ridiculous list of rules.

My wife and I made the backyard garden bloom with fruits and vegetables, well outside the perimeters of the flowerbeds. We replaced almost all of the grass, filling in the empty space with soil and mulch. And things grew amazingly well! There were corn stalks as tall as people, carrots that were two feet long, titanic tomatoes and plump peppers. We had colossal cucumbers, humongous herbs, and several sizable squash.

But the pride of our garden was the pumpkin.

We had only made room for one, which we planned to use as our Jack O’ Lantern come Halloween. And it was going to be one HELL of a Jack O’ Lantern! The thing was enormous! Warty and misshapen, and perfect for the spooky season. It was bulbous and large, nearly the size of a small electric car. I had never seen a pumpkin so large.

As the leaves began to turn yellow and orange, falling from the trees, my wife and I got more and more excited for the day when we would put the pumpkin in front of our house on the porch. It would be the talk of the town!

“We should harvest everything in the morning,” my wife said finally. “After tomorrow we’re heading into a cold snap. That means the first frost of the season.”

It was nearing the end of October, and we’d gotten lucky pushing it as far as we had. Around this area, a cold snap can settle in overnight quickly, despite weather reports stating the contrary. And a sudden frost can spoil an otherwise bountiful harvest.

Since we’d started planting late and everything was doing so well, we’d left things to grow, content to wait out the warm weather.

“I guess we’ll finally get to carve that pumpkin.”

“Yup. It’s a good thing we’ve both got the day off work tomorrow. It’s gonna be a busy day.”

The next morning we woke up and went straight out to the backyard with cups of coffee in hand. We stood on the back deck in the dim light of dawn. The sun was just beginning to rise in the east, casting everything in a golden glow.

That was when I saw the man on the side street, dressed in a long brown robe, holding a torch in his hand. I didn’t recognize him. His eyes were staring straight ahead, looking right into my backyard.

I pointed him out to Christine.

“Hey, I don’t want to freak you out. But… What is that guy doing over there?”

She looked over and we both stared at the man, less than a hundred yards away, separated from us only by our neighbor’s ample backyard and a flimsy chain link fence between our two properties.

“I don’t know. Do you think we should call the cops? He might start a fire. He doesn’t look like he’s quite all there.”

Nodding, I set down my coffee cup on the wooden railing of the back deck. I had a sour taste in my mouth, and my pleasant morning felt like it had already been spoiled.

“Yeah. Call the cops. I’ll stay here and keep my eye on him.”

She went inside, and shortly after she did, another man joined him, standing a few yards beside him. Then another took a position equidistant on the other side.

A low chant began to rise up from all sides of the property, north, south, east, and west. The words were ancient-sounding, like Latin or some other language from long before that, lost to time.

I couldn’t help myself. Staggering down the steps of the back deck, I went around the house towards the driveway, to look for myself and see what was happening. The strange sensation of hearing the chanting from all sides was disorienting, and it felt like I was in a bad dream as dark clouds began to roll in, blocking out the golden rays of the sun. A chill crept through my bones as I staggered across the grass.

It sounded like a hundred voices rising up into the early morning air. The mist was still rising from the dew-covered lawn making everything look surreal and dreamlike.

When I got to the driveway I saw the neighbors were standing all around the house, dressed in identical brown robes, just like the man on the side street. They were holding torches and chanting in that low, rhythmic ancient language, standing perfectly spaced apart.

Freezing in place, I stood there, suddenly terrified.

Whatever was happening here, we were not safe. Whoever these people were, they were in a cult or a secret society of some kind, and we were their target. For breaking their rules. We were going to be punished.

The chanting continued as Christine came outside to find me in the driveway.

“The police aren’t coming,” she said, holding the phone in her hand like a paper weight. “They said we should have followed the rules.”

She looked around and seemed to notice all of the cult members in their brown robes at that moment, and I took her hand and gripped it tightly in mine.

A sound escaped my wife which was somewhere between a whimper and a groan, as she surveyed our neighbors standing all around. Her eyes were wide and panicked as she glanced up at me.

“We didn’t see the rules until it was too late!” I yelled, hoping to make them a little more forgiving of us. The prospect of being burnt alive hadn’t occurred to me until that moment, and it wasn’t a visual I was particularly comfortable with.

“Uh, we’re sorry!” my wife tried. “We were just gonna harvest everything today, anyways. We’d be happy to share with all of you!”

They all stopped chanting at that exact moment.

And then they raced towards us, screaming. Their torches were held out like spears of warriors headed into battle. Their faces were full of violent rage.

My wife and I backed away as the ground began to shake beneath our feet.

At first I thought the ground was shaking because of the approaching mob, but as they raced past us and pushed us out of the way, I realized it was actually an earthquake.

My wife and I were sent reeling backwards, tumbling to the ground.

I looked back to see the neighbors were also falling over from the sudden tremors and a few of their torches had gone out.

What caught my eye next was what was happening in the backyard.

It was impossible. But there it was, right in front of me.

A massive shape like a boulder was rising up from the ground where we'd planted our potatoes and beets. It was defying gravity as it unearthed itself and emerged from the soil.

Surprisingly, it looked like a giant root vegetable, not a boulder as I'd first thought. Dangling from it were bones and corpses in various states of decay, which formed with other huge root vegetables, intertwining to look like sinewy muscle and bone.

And the corpses were moving, groaning and flailing as if alive. A few fell to the ground and began to clamber to their feet, roaming the backyard afterwards.

A huge, hulking spider, the size of a building, was emerging from the soil of our backyard, I realized.

The twisted, bloated forms of zombie corpses and car-sized root vegetables made up the bulk of it, along with clumps of soil that fell crumbling to the ground constantly with each movement it made.

My neighbors were rising to their feet, relighting their torches, as its head emerged from the ground - our prized pumpkin made up its visage and the blank, rotten face of it was more horrifying than any Jack O Lantern we could have carved. Its green stalk connected it to the rest of the monstrosity, completing its hulking arachnid form.

"What the hell is that?," I heard my wife mutter as the two of us backed away in nervous terror.

"It's the reason we have rules in this neighborhood," the woman I recognized from next door said, her face mostly obscured by the hooded brown robe.

"You must be new to Hollow's End," said another man I realized was from across the street. "Sorry, we all just thought you were being assholes."

He took out a bow and I saw he had a quiver of arrows slung across his back, as did many of the other neighbors.

They began to light the arrows from their torches as the entire form of the massive corpse-root spider came into view.

It towered over us, its legs as long as telephone poles. The bodies within its mangled form began to stir as the morning light hit them.

"Ready your arrows!" The man next to me yelled.

"Light!"

"Aim!"

"Fire!"

A dozen arrows with flaming tips were soaring through the air a second later, as bowstrings twanged and released their pent up force.

The flaming arrows hit the giant spider creature and its face lit up with fire, two glowing red eyes and a mouth opening up within the blank, warty skin of the pumpkin. A hideous Jack O Lantern visage bloomed upon its face that smiled at us and breathed a gout of fire in our direction, like a dragon in a rage.

My wife and I dove out of the way, as did our neighbors, just as fire scorched the space where we'd been standing milliseconds before.

The pumpkin-faced spider creature let out a monstrous laugh and brought one of its legs down to stomp on us.

It missed my wife and I just barely, but several of the neighbors were caught up in the tangling roots and grasping, rotten hands of zombies reaching for them. The dead bodies had been buried beneath the soil, I realized. Perhaps we had brought them back to life by breaking the rules. I had no time to find out.

The remaining neighbors released another hail of flaming arrows. They struck the giant spider on its back and face, setting it ablaze even further.

It began to march down the driveway, away from the house as the townsfolk ran after it in pursuit.

The road was soon littered with zombies falling from the thing’s underbelly - they ambled off into the neighborhood and I heard occasional screams as they came across unsuspecting people.

Houses were set alight with the falling debris of enormous flaming vegetables which came tumbling from the spider, smoldering and acting as perfect fire starting material. Sporadic fires could be seen burning after that up and down the street.

I wondered if the entire city would be set on fire soon, and if the zombies would take over the planet. Both of those scenarios seemed highly probable.

But at least we were safe for the time being.

“Uh oh,” my wife said from behind me. “We might not be in the clear just yet.”

One of my neighbors was lying on the driveway, bleeding out. He looked up to see the same thing we were seeing.

The tomatoes in the backyard hadn’t been part of the giant spider. They were still hanging from their vines. But they were far from normal.

Giant, plump red tomatoes began to split open, revealing mouths filled with sharp teeth. They wiggled and broke free from the greenery and began to bounce toward us.

My neighbor gasped, making a panicked sound low in his throat.

“Tell me you didn’t… Grow tomatoes...

MAD

TCC

YT