The Cashmere Botanical Gardens pt 1 The Pale Lady

The Cashmere Botanical Gardens are a pretty interesting place.

The Gardens, despite being in the mountainous region of Georgia, have a nearly constant temperature between seventy and eighty five degrees. It has never snowed in the Cashmere Botanical Gardens, and it is utterly immune to the cold snaps and freeze warnings that sometimes affect the area. The plants here require only minimal care, seeming to get exactly what they need to flourish from the soil and their regular waterings. The place should not exist, especially not in a town as provincial as Cashmere, but it does.

It’s no secret either that eight to ten people disappear in the gardens every year? That's not to say they are killed. That's not to say they are abducted. What the park reports is that eight to ten people are reported missing to the park staff every year, and those reports are passed on to the police and later to the FBI. None of them are ever found, none of their remains ever surface to be identified, and none of them are ever heard from again. They simply come into the park, sometimes with their families or friends or just by themselves, and they are never heard from again. The decorative ponds on the grounds have been dredged, the surrounding woods have been checked and rechecked, dogs have been brought in to smell them out, but no evidence of foul play is ever reported.

Only two other constants can be reported in these disappearances.

The victims are always male, and the disappearances always happen between March first and September fifteenth.

I only know these things because they are part of the new employee orientation. They tell the botanists, the visiting scientists, and the groundskeepers to be careful. They've had staff reported missing as well, though I somehow doubt that they get reported to the police along with the others. We have to sign long release forms before we're hired that absolve the gardens of any wrongdoing should we disappear on the job. The owners are aware that strange things happen here, and they consider it a small price to pay for a botanical garden that seems to reside in an everlasting summer, even in the depths of winter.

I, however, am no researcher, no botanist, not even a groundskeeper.

I'm a member of their security staff.

I started on day shift, six am to six pm, and the old guy they had me working with turned out to be a glorified desk clerk. Randy was forty-five and clearly liked the cushy job he had. He was the embodiment of a rent-a-cop. Soft-bodied, eternally sitting, and he let me know how it would be right off the bat.

"I man the security booth, answering questions and filing reports. You maintain a secure presence around the park. Look sharp, kid. As you may or may not have heard, people have gone missing around here."

Translation- you do all the walking, and I do all the easy stuff.

So, for the next month, I walked my boot soles off as I toured the park. There was an electric cart that security was supposed to ride around in, but the battery was bad, and they had never gotten around to changing it. So, I was left to patrol the grounds with my ring of keys, flashlight, and a radio that would get me little more than a worthless acknowledgement. Every hour, we were supposed to make a check of the grounds, but during the day, I seemed to be constantly going from one problem to another. The Garden played host to many people who came to see the beautiful displays and rare plants, but many others came simply to pass the time or get up to nonsense. Every day seemed to be another chance to break up necking teens, stop people from touching the flowers, throw out teens who came in to cause trouble, or even to ask groups of tourists who were here to look into the mystery of the disappearing people to stop trampling the displays.

That first month was hell, even for twenty-six dollars an hour.

In that time, however, I did see the Pale Lady.

I was yelling at some tourists, one of whom was ankle-deep in the reflecting pool of lilies when I looked up to see her. At first glance, I thought she was another tourist. I had just looked up to tell her to get back to the walking path, when I noticed her alabaster skin and unmoving posture. I felt a strange tremor run through my body as I looked at her, and I hardly noticed my wet socks and dripping boots as I led the tourists towards the front gate.

After that, I found reasons to have my rounds take me by that particular pool.

The Pale Lady is a statue that was gifted to the Garden by Doctor Thurston, the head of the Gardens, about ten years ago. It sits out amidst the north reflecting pool, surrounded by water lilies and is truly a work of art. The statue depicts a woman in a long flowing robe, her hair unbound and hanging down her back. She covers her face with a fan, her eyes staring out catlike and playful. The temperature around that pool is always summery, the water never so much as growing sluggish in the winter. The statue seems to be the epicenter of the good weather that surrounds the garden, and management has made it the centerpiece of the Gardens.

I asked Randy about the statue, and he just shrugged and turned the page on his magazine.

“Things creepy. I remember having to work nights when I first started, and that pond was my least favorite spot to walk. I always felt like it was watching me, and I’m pretty sure that it wasn’t there a few times. Carl can say what he likes, but there's something off about that statue.”

I asked him for more, but he looked up from his Hot Rod mag to ask me if I didn’t have something better to do?

When I showed up the following day to find a brand new officer learning the ropes from Randy, it appeared that I did.

“Carl says you’re on night shift now, didn’t he tell you?”

“No, what happened to the night guy?”

“Who knows? He just abandoned his post. Mark was always kinda flaky.”

I nodded, but couldn’t help feeling a little skeptical. Mark had been flaky, but he still had alimony to pay. No one walks away from a twenty-five dollar an hour job where most of your shift is spent sitting on ass. He was working the night shift, sitting in the booth from six pm to six am, and his relief had come in the next morning to find him gone. The camera showed him leaving the booth at around four o'clock, going on his appointed rounds. He walked off towards the north reflecting pool at four ten, and after that, who could say?

No trace had ever been found of him, and, I guess they decided I would be a good fit for the post.

One phone call later to confirm, and I took myself back home to get ready for that night. I had never worked the night shift at the Gardens, as I mentioned, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I knew it was a position I’d be filling by myself, and I was a little excited about that. From what Carl had told me on the phone it was mostly a lot of watching cameras, and making sure I hit my hourly rounds. He said the boss liked to make sure that everything was locked up after the gates close at sunset, and that he sometimes watched cameras to make sure that the guards weren't shirking their rounds.

“So make sure you are doing what you’re supposed to do, and for God sake, don’t fall asleep.”

So, with that, I frittered away the rest of the day until it was time to go to work that evening.

March 25th

There was a big binder on my desk when I got there and Randy made sure I got the keys before you left.

“Better you than me, kid. You couldn’t pay me enough to stay in this creepy old place at night.”

He left in a hurry, and I was left with another hour of daylight before they made the announcement and closed the gates.

The first couple of hours weren’t so bad. I walked the grounds, helping people like I usually did. I directed some folks toward certain exhibits, and made sure that the buildings were secured after the botany staff had left for the day. When the gates closed, I did another walk around and looked for stragglers and people who might be hiding. We do occasionally get troublemakers after hours who think it’s funny to try to stay in the park and steal things overnight. There was none of that tonight, though, and as I finished my rounds, I went back to my desk and watched the cameras. I set an alarm on my watch so that I wouldn’t miss my next round in an hour, and contented myself with watching the grainy CCTV footage from the security monitors.

They had cameras just about all over the park. You could see most every entrance and exit from the exhibit, and some of them had cameras over key exhibits, like the rare flowers or the endangered species room. One of these cameras faced the pond for the Pale Lady, and I found myself coming back to that one again and again.

The longer I looked at it, the more it seemed to move sometimes when I took my eyes off of it.

I know what that sounds like, but it’s true. Sometimes you stare at something for so long that it seems to move, and the statue was no different. It would wiggle in arms, move its fan, even seem to sway a little, but it was all things I could chuck up to the grainy camera footage. I would go check on it during my rounds too, but it always sat in the same place its always been. I’ve tried not to look at it so much, since I could feel myself lingering the more I did. There was something about it that just pulled me towards it, and I worried that one night I might just walk out into the reflecting pool and sink in the mud.

I can’t really say the weirdness started on the first night, but by the third night, I knew something was weird around the garden.

March 26th

It was just a little thing, nothing really worth reporting, but definitely worth writing here.

Between one am and one fifteen am, the pale lady statue disappeared.

I was listening to the radio and watching the monitors, and I had just tipped a cup of coffee to my lips when I scrolled past that particular monitor. I had got it from the vending machine by the office, and it tasted like mud water. Still, it was better than nothing if I was going to stay up on these late nights. I was cycling through the cameras, here a rare plant, there a pool of lilies, and when I came to the statue, I had to scroll back to be sure of what I was seeing.

I scrolled forward and back a couple of times to make sure it wasn’t a bug or some kind of electrical failure, but after five minutes, I couldn’t find any reason for the error.

The statue was gone.

I wasn’t too worried at first. I mean, it was a statue. Where was it going to go? I kind of thought it might be some sort of electrical problem after all, but I couldn’t figure out why it would disappear just the statue. So I grabbed my mag light and brought my coffee with me, and went out to check on it. I was due for around in about 10 minutes anyway, so I supposed I would just start a little early.

The pale lady’s lily pond is towards the middle part of my round, so I made my way around the rest of the exhibit as I came towards that particular spot. It was about one twelve when I got to her pond, and I expected that I would shine my flashlight into the willow trees out there and find her still on her pedestal. Seeing the area, I checked around the pond and her pedestal, but the camera hadn’t lied.

The statue was gone.

I immediately started looking around for clues. The statue was not cheap, at least I figured it wasn’t, and if it came up missing, and I couldn’t find it, I was likely to be fired. I checked for foot prints, since someone had clearly had to go into the pond to get it, and for signs of entry over the wall, since they would’ve had to have gotten in somehow.

I had just completed my search, finding nothing, when I heard a weird, grating noise. If you’ve ever played with sidewalk chalk as a kid, that’s about all I can equate it to. It sounded like somebody pushing chalk over concrete, except the volume on it was about a hundred times what I was used to. I turned around, trying to see what had made the noise, and I kind of figured it might be somebody trying to quietly move the statue. I expected to see a couple of guys hiding somewhere nearby, the statue between them, and pulled out my phone so I could call the cops if that’s what it was.

Instead, I found the statue of the pale lady back on its pedestal, as if it had never gone anywhere.

I held it in the beam of my flashlight for about two minutes, trying to see what the hell was going on. There was no way I had missed it, I had checked the whole damn area for that statue, but here it was. I made another pass around the pond, looking for clues, or anything that might tell me where it went. After thirty minutes, I realized I wasn’t gonna find anything and made my way back to my booth.

I had pulled out a report to write it up, but by the time my alarm went off for my next round, I realized I hadn’t written anything. What was there to write? Was I going to tell Carl that I had thought the statue had gone only to find out that it had been there the whole time? I sound like a lunatic. Best case scenario, they would laugh at me and call it nighttime jitters. So, I decided not to report it.

The rest of my night went by pretty quietly.

March 27th

When I came in for my next shift after a day off, Randy seemed genuinely happy to see me for the first time ever.

“Wasn’t sure if you’d be here or not. Some of the new guys leave after the first night and never come back. Kinda glad you didn’t run off,” he added, “ you seem more stable than the rest of them.”

After that business a couple nights ago, I kept a careful watch over the statue. I kept a little record too, (which is what you're probably reading here). Just something for my own piece of mind so I could prove I wasn’t losing it. That night, I saw the statue disappear from its spot in the lily pond twice. I witnessed it return every time on camera and it was always gone for ten to twenty minutes at a time.

I thought about going to check on it, but decided against it.

I hadn't liked being out there when it was gone, it felt like something was creeping around out there with me, and the thought of statues moving on their own wouldn't leave my mind.

March 28th

It happened two more times tonight.

While on my rounds, I discovered it gone both times, though I never stuck around to see it come back. If I were watching on the camera, there would be a puff of static followed by a sudden reappearance of the statue, and after the first time I never questioned it.

It was a strange little mystery but nothing else.

March 30th

It all came to a head tonight.

Tonight I met someone on my round, and I have to believe it was the Pale Lady.

She had lured me into a false sense of security by staying put Saturday night. I usually noticed her gone between one am and five am, so when Saturday came and went with her still in her lily pond, I began to doubt the experiences of the week. It was my first week of night shift, maybe I was just seeing things, jumping at shadows. I went home and slept, waking up fresher than I had in days, and spent most of the night without so much as a hiccup. The park closes early on Sunday, so by the time I get there, it was already locked up and all I had to do was my usual rounds and watch cameras.

Randy stuck around to talk for almost an hour, telling me how the new kid had needed to leave early for an appointment or something. He was a little miffed, because he had had to do rounds for the last three hours by himself, and he didn’t feel someone with his kind of time in should have to do that kind of thing. I listened, pretending to be sympathetic while I felt it was his comeuppance for being a lazy ass.

“What kind of appointment would you have on a Sunday anyway? I tell you, kids today are so lazy and unreliable.”

It was just starting to get dark when he left for the day, and after that, it was just me and the quiet, empty gardens.

The next six hours seem to drag by. I sat in the security booth and listened to the radio, mostly. I did some camera watching, went and ran some birds out of one of the exhibits, and really just had a fun time sitting on my butt. Around midnight, I checked the cameras and found everything where it was supposed to be, the Pale Lady included. I grabbed my flashlight and my keys, and went out to do my midnight round, expecting nothing more strenuous, then some leftover trash to pick up along the way.

I was just coming around the edge of an exhibit, when I saw something farther up the path. I guess saw isn’t the right word. I heard her before I saw her. It sounded like someone was dragging a rock across the concrete, and it reminded me of the sound I’d heard that night when I thought the statute was missing. As I came closer to the pond , I saw a woman walking slowly up the path. It looked like a woman, at least. Watching her walk, I thought maybe it was an older lady who was walking a little stiffly. Her gait was slow, and it looked like it hurt her to put one foot in front of the other. I called out and asked her how she had gotten in here. To tell you the truth, it scared the hell out of me. I hadn’t seen another living person since Randy left for the day, and the sudden appearance of someone new put my neck hair up.

She kept walking, like she hadn’t heard me, and I quickened my pace, so I could get in front of her and confront her.

It wasn’t hard, she wasn’t exactly running, but as I came around, I realized she was holding the fan in front of her face, blocking it from sight. She was dressed in old clothes, like a Renfaire dress, and her hair was hanging loose around her shoulders. Sometimes the gardens hire people in costumes to walk around, but I hadn’t got a memo about any upcoming events. They certainly wouldn’t be here in the middle of the night either, and I felt pretty confident that she wasn’t supposed to be there.

I stood in her path, and she tried to go around me, and it seemed that she noticed me as I shouted at her a second time.

“Excuse me,ma’am. The park is closed for the night. What are you doing here?”

For a moment all we did was stare at each other. I seem to have startled her as badly as she had startled me, but she recovered a little quicker than I did. She took a step towards me, extending her hand, as if she meant to touch my face, and I took a step back out of her reach. I was a head taller than she was, but I still didn’t want some strange lady touching my face in the middle of an empty garden in the middle of the night. I thought about raising my flashlight, but suddenly my arm was heavy. It was as if a great weight had been set on my wrist, and when she reached out to stroke my cheek, this time, there was nothing I could do about it.

“Such a handsome guardsman,” she commented, and her voice was odd. She sounded both thousands of years old and painfully young. She sounded like she had lived a thousand years and a single day. I can’t really explain it to you, but she was so strange that I could do a little, but look into her eyes as they swam above the rim of the fan.

“ Would you like to walk with me?” She asked it, but I got the feeling it wasn’t a question.

I got the feeling people did not deny this particular lady, and just walk away.

I had opened my mouth to tell her that would be lovely, but some primitive survival instinct slammed the brakes on my mouth. A strange voice argued that if I went walking with her, I would never go walking with anyone again. This lady would lead me places both terrible and beautiful, but they would not be places I would ever come back from.

When I shook my head, it seemed to surprise her, “Sorry, ma’am. I’m on duty. Perhaps another time?”

She looked sad, but nodded from behind a colorful fan.

She walked around me, continuing her stroll as I stood there like a statue. I didn’t want to follow her. I suddenly wanted nothing so much as to not be here when Randy showed up in the morning. I wondered if this was what the other guards had seen? I wondered how many of them had gone with her, and how many of them had simply left after she continued on her walk?

I turned around to follow her or to continue my round or just run as far as my legs could take me, and that’s when something happened that I can’t explain.

I have a vague memory of her standing right behind me, her fan closed in her face now on display, but I could no more tell you what that face looked like then I could tell you the population of Madrid. If something happened, I don’t have any memory of it. Everything suddenly and irreparably went dark, and the next thing I knew there were people standing over me.

Carl was there, and Randy, and a few other park staff that appeared to have come in early for Monday. Someone was shining a light into my eyes, and it made me squint as I came back to myself. The park had an EMT on standby, but it appeared it was too early for him. This guy looks like an outside paramedic, and as I came around, he turned the light off and nodded.

“ How are you feeling, sir?”

“Very confused,” I told him as I set up, “ the last thing I remember is that it was night time, and I was on a round.”

I didn’t remember the lady I had seen walking around until later that day.

At that point everything was still a bit of a blur.

“He doesn't look concussed,” The EMT said, turning to someone I hadn't seen since my interview.

I gulped, that was Doctor Thurston, the head of the Cashmere Botanical Gardens.

Doctor Thurston was intimidating in that way that all men of a comfortable age are. He wasn't particular large, no bigger than I was, and he didn't look angry as he stood smiling placidly at me, but I knew that if he suspected I was on drugs or I had decided to have a little nap on the sidewalk, that I would be fired without question.

Doctor Thurston smiled at me, his face that of Pa Cartwright in my mind, and he kneeled a little as he got on eye level with me.

“If I drug test you, son, are you gonna be on the dope?”

I shook my head emphatically, “No, sir. I never touch the stuff.”

He nodded, “I believe you. Have you ever fainted like that before?”

“No, sir.”

He nodded again, “When do you work next?”

“Tonight, sir”

“Take tonight and tuesday too. I'll tell Chuck that he's got an extra day this week. Get yourself checked out and get some rest. Come back fresh on Wednesday.”

He patted my arm and I thanked him for his generosity.

I wrote this down as it started to come back, but I'm not sure how much of it is real, and how much of it is stuff my mind has created.

I'll continue to keep this journal just in case other weirdness happens. I can't afford to quit my job at the Gardens, but there is definitely something strange going on. The Pale Lady seems to be at the heart of it. I know I saw her walking around, but when I asked Randy about what they found on the footage, he said it's all static after midnight. The next thing on camera is me, collapsed on the ground, at about one fifteen.

Something odd is definitely going on here, and I mean to get to the bottom of it.