The Flowers Bloom Red in Springtime

The field was bare and uneven the day the Cliffords moved in. It came with the property. The early October grass was quite hard, yellowing at the edges despite the recent rainfall. Martin walked the perimeter as he waited for the moving van to arrive with the rest of his family’s things. He was impressed by the drainage, wondering whether there was enough in the soil to meet his needs. They bought the house outright, a steal at £170,000.

The nearest neighbours were the Aldreds, almost half a mile further down the lane. Gwen Aldred seemed nice enough, gifting the Cliffords a fruit cake as a housewarming gift before they’d even started to unpack. Martin invited his guest in for a cuppa as his wife Clare played with their daughter Sophie in the back garden. Gwen spent the whole time indoors with her back to the field, even when responding to Martin’s questions. As she left, she seemed to mutter something to herself. Martin ignored this and placed the cake in the fridge for later.

Before the end of their first week in their new home, Martin began to notice his wife always faced away from the windows that overlooked the field, even when eating dinner. It was as if something about it unsettled her. Martin said nothing. Perhaps she just preferred to stay in the darker side of the house.

He didn’t notice young Sophie following her mother’s peculiar habit. Aside from her first day in the house, when she pressed her nose against the bedroom window to look out at the field until the sun set, Sophie had also begun to avoid making eye contact with anything on that side of the house.

In early November, Gwen Aldred’s only son came to visit, offering to fix the air conditioning the previous occupants always complained about. Martin asked him about the history of the house. The boy Jimmy was twenty, muscular, and friendly. He told Martin all he knew. The house was old and had a lot of previous inhabitants over the years, many of whom didn’t stay longer than four or five years. When asked about the field, all Jimmy said was, “it’s always been like that.”

“Like what?”

No response. Jimmy just moved onto another subject.

The field was still bare. The grass barely seemed to move. Still, Martin was convinced of its potential.

Before he left, Jimmy looked at Martin as though he wanted to say something more but decided against it.

By March, the ground had started to soften. Martin woke one morning to find Clare already up and about. She was standing at the kitchen sink, sipping a cup of fresh tea. Martin approached for a hug but stopped in his tracks. He froze as he observed the field over her shoulder. It was almost entirely red.

“Something bloomed,” he said.

Clare didn’t respond.

Martin went to get his boots. Clare said his name once, very quietly. Martin looked back. Clare’s face was turned away from the window.

“I’m just going to have a peek.”

Clare didn’t follow.

The flowers were a deep arterial red. Martin crouched down near one to get a closer look. He’d never seen anything like it. The stem was thick and pale. The petals were waxy and hard to the touch. He moved back a few steps to get a better vantage point, noticing a pattern. The flowers were arranged in an unfamiliar shape. Martin headed back inside the house, totally confused by what he had witnessed.

Later that day, Sophie approached her parents after dinner. She stood in the doorway, echoing the way Gwen Aldred had stood all those months ago. She asked a question.

“Who is that person in the flowers?”

“Sorry, honey?” Clare asked, with a hint of fear in her voice.

“Somebody keeps looking at the house.”

Martin turned towards Clare.

“It’s probably an animal,” Clare offered. “Or a deer or fox.”

“It’s not an animal, mummy”. Sophie stormed off to her room. Clare followed her, holding her little hand as she went upstairs.

Martin peered out into the darkness. It was much too dark to make anything out. He stood for a long time until he felt a little uneasy. Was someone looking back at him, he wondered, fully aware that he could easily be seen in the bright kitchen light. He turned out the light and stood in darkness until his composure returned. He decided not to tell Clare of his unease, instead turning on his laptop to catch up on his favourite shows, before drifting off.

He lay asleep in the living room until morning, his dreams full of the red bloom and Jimmy’s strange response to his question about the field. Martin sat up as Clare and Sophie devoured their breakfast. He couldn’t stop thinking about the field. Were the red flowers arranged in a particular shape? He needed to find out more.

He purchased a drone online, telling Clare it was for clearing the gutters. One downside of living at this address was the need to collect deliveries from the nearest drop off point, a few hundred yards away from the Aldreds. The following morning as Clare was taking Sophie to school, Martin collected the drone from the storage locker and spent a couple of hours setting it up.

He flew it over the field. The footage was clear. Watching it back while sitting at the kitchen table, he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The red flowers in the field had bloomed into the shape of a face. Definitely not a human face, but clearly a face, nonetheless.

Whatever it was, the eyes were too far apart and the mouth a long thin arc, almost the full width of the field. The face stared upward. It was as if it had been waiting for some warmth to reveal itself. Martin wondered whether the shape was still there in the autumn and winter months.

Martin decided to delete the footage before Clare and Sophie could see it. He closed the laptop and directed the drone back into the front driveway. He needed to go into the field. He didn’t know why, but he needed to see the face up close.

Martin walked to the centre of the field, where the mouth should be. The flowers around his boots were denser, almost twice as thick as those around the edges. The red colour on the petals was saturated, as if wet. He crouched down to touch a flower, cutting his finger on its brittle texture. It felt cold. Instinctively he looked up at the sky, which was clear only above the field. He didn’t notice the lack of wind over the area of the red face until he started to walk back inside the house.

Clare asked Martin about the guttering almost as soon as she returned from work. Martin stared blankly for a while until he registered why she’d asked.

“Oh. Right. There’s some work still to be done. It was too warm today. I’ll wait for a cooler day to finish the job.”

“Cool. It’s far too expensive getting someone in to do that kind of thing.” She sat down on the sofa to finish her book.

That night, as Sophie and Clare lay in their beds, Martin sat in the chair the furthest from the window, unable to get to sleep. The house was quiet. He couldn’t seem to get the red face out of his mind. He could still feel it looking at him. He wondered if Sophie had experienced that too, or whether there really was somebody out there. He shivered at the thought.

Throughout April the bloom spread. Martin could see it from the bedroom window. Sophie and Clare carried on in deliberate avoidance but didn’t seem to share his constant sense of worry and dread. By the end of the second week, the shape had grown at its edges. The face was wider now, as if it had reached adulthood. The eye spaces were somehow closer together, no longer merely the width of the two furthermost fence posts.

Martin told himself this was a normal occurrence. Plants spread. There had to be a rational explanation for everything he was seeing. Even so, he couldn’t push himself enough to go back into the field. He would stand at the edge sometimes but every time he tried to step forward, he found himself turned back around, as if something was pulling him away. Clare began to notice this change in his behaviour.

“You’ve gone off the field project I see. Too much for you?”

“I’ve decided against it. I think I’ll leave it as it is. There’s something about that red flower that I don’t wish to mess with.”

Clare appeared confused. “Mmm. Well, good” was all she would offer before changing the subject.

Come May, Sophie stopped going upstairs alone. She never explained why. As soon as her 7:30 pm bedtime came around she found reasons for either Martin or Clare to come with her. She would walk into Martin’s study, holding out her hand for him to grasp, or stand in the doorway with one of her bedtime stories waiting for her mother to follow.

On one such nighttime ritual, Martin felt compelled to look outside the landing window as he waited for Sophie to fall asleep. The flowers were different. They had changed their orientation. There were multiple faces, no longer facing upwards, but towards the house. The entire field, thousands of red flowers, all facing the house. He gasped, closing his eyes as he went back downstairs. The flowers were looking at him.

Martin thought back to last October. He was the only one who had peeked at the flowers. Even the neighbours had turned away. Clare and Sophie only faced them once each, but something inside them compelled them to always turn their back to the field.

Nobody else had looked at them as much as he had, let alone pick up one of the flowers. And now they were looking at him, or even worse looking for him. If only he’d left them alone. The red plants had been growing because he had been the one who gave them enough attention.

He lay awake next to Clare that night until sleep finally took hold. He dreamed of the big red smiles, all facing his way behind the walls. He was up before Clare, sitting at the edge of the bed until she opened her eyes.

“Clare hun. Don’t ask me why, but we have to move out of this house. Nobody will want to buy it, but we must go. And whatever you do don’t look out at the field. Sophie was right. There is someone out there. I just can’t explain how I know.”

Clare stared at him for what seemed like an hour without saying a word. They both jumped as Sophie knocked on the door.

“Daddy, are we moving again?“ Sophie asked as though she’d been listening at the door.

Clare was the one to break the silence.

“You know, I think we are, pet. There is something about this house that feels wrong. Do you feel that too?”

“I’m not sure, mummy”. Sophie replied. “Sometimes I think someone is watching us, but I’m not scared.”

Martin sighed. “I’ll call the estate agent in my lunch break.”

Clare and Martin pooled their resources. Without being able to sell the house, they needed something smaller but still within range of Sophie’s school. They settled on a single-floor but spacious flat eight miles down the road, which was on sale for £80,000, almost all of their combined retirement nest egg. Still, they were both young and Martin had plenty of lucrative contacts in the consultancy sector should the need arise.

Martin made coffee and sat across the dining room table from Clare.

“Okay,” she offered. “You need to tell me why you are so jumpy.”

“I’m not sure you’d believe me. Just promise me you will never look into that damn field.”

“I will believe you as much as I believe Sophie. You saw something didn’t you? The other night?”

“This is going to sound like I’m losing it. The red flowers, they’ve multiplied and they are looking at me. It’s like they are moving towards the house. I can’t explain it and I know it sounds mad.”

“Honey, the neighbours won’t even look at the field. I watched them as we moved in. They always have their back to it. Seeing that compelled me to do the same. I cannot explain why as it is not rational. And then Sophie told me she looked out her window and saw something staring back at her. She’s not scared, but I am. I love this house, but something in me says we are better off somewhere else.”

They sat in silence until they were ready for bed. The topic of the field was never brought up again. Martin placed an offer on the flat. The owner was retiring and wasn’t exactly fond of rushing their side of the transaction. Still, they were much quicker than the estate agents and solicitors were. They had no choice but to wait it out.

The Aldreds popped over once or twice but never seemed to offer much in terms of conversation. Gwen wasn’t shocked when Clare mentioned the move, instead offering each member of the family a hug.

In the run up to the move, given their tight financial situation, Martin and Clare took it in turns to drive into town with Sophie to sell off items they couldn’t afford to keep, only spending time in the house to sleep. Martin worked from the local library and Clare spent more time in the office, each taking Sophie with them outside of school hours.

They finally moved in August. Martin helped Sophie into the car, both turning away from the field. Clare sat in the driver’s seat. They sat in the driveway for over thirty minutes, as if fighting the urge to stay. Finally, Clare pushed herself onwards. As she pulled out of the driveway for the final time, Martin placed his hand on her shoulder, keeping it there until the house was out of sight.

Sophie sat in the back, listening to music with her schoolbooks atop her lap. Her face stoic. From the passenger seat Martin glanced out across the countryside, seeing only wheat and corn and no red in sight. Clare kept her eyes firmly on the road ahead.

The Aldreds watched them go. A few years ago, Gwen and her husband had tried to destroy the field using pesticides, with one of the house’s previous occupants. Within hours the flowers returned, more vivid than before, just as Gwen’s husband Eric suffered a fatal heart attack in their kitchen doorway, facing the direction of the field, as young Jimmy slept.

The field had been strange since she was a child. There were many rumours of missing people. A local once claimed to know the origin of the red bloom, but they would never share this information with anyone, as if scared of passing on a dark secret. A secret they would take to their grave.

Since that day the Aldreds tried warning newcomers not to look into the field. Those who ignored them blamed Gwen for all that happened to them. Those who didn’t often left in the middle of the night, without saying their goodbyes. The couple before Clare and Martin reduced the asking price several times before selling, the sheer number of previous owners putting most potential buyers off.

Gwen and Jimmy vowed not to move out of the area, choosing instead to keep a close eye on the house from afar. Martin was the first person they’d ever seen actually venture into the field, hoping that this action was a catalyst for a different scenario. Instead, the flowers appeared to multiply and there was nothing they could do to help.

As the Cliffords’ car approached the outskirts of their new town, Martin heard Sophie shift in her seat, coupled with a sharp intake of breath.

“Are you ok kiddo?” he asked.

She lowered her headphones. “I’m ok Dad, I just …. I saw that face in my mind for a second, but it went. It’s all gone now.”

Clare and Martin shared a glance, not knowing what to say.

Martin couldn’t shake his thoughts from the original red smile, hidden from view on that fine October day of their arrival. Had it always been there, in some form or another? Was it something of this Earth or beyond? He wondered how much the Aldreds knew and why he hadn’t plucked up the courage to ask them.

Suddenly, the road opened in front of them. They had reached their new home in one piece. They were free.

The following day Gwen and Jimmy approached the old house. Jimmy helped his mother pour petrol over the front and back doors before returning to cover the rest of the house and driveway. Gwen lit a match, flicking it towards the curtain in the open lower front window.

As the flames raged, they took a step back, with their backs to the field, to admire their handiwork. If nobody was able to look out at the field, just perhaps, Gwen thought, those things will finally go away. Had they been watching the field, the Aldreds might have noticed the red faces grimacing as they turned away from the house.

The following morning as the house lay in ruins, the field once again lay bare. On the fence boundary the grass started to turn green for the first time in living memory.