There Is a Second Sunset Inside Greenhouse Six

Six was our quarantine house. We used it for old seed collections donated without reliable records: beans from dead family farms, squash seeds in medicine bottles, envelopes labeled only with a surname and a year. Nothing left that building until it germinated clean. Most donations produced weak, ordinary plants. A few produced nothing. The sunflowers had arrived in a flour sack from an estate sale three weeks earlier.

There were twelve of them, shoulder-high and blooming out of season. That morning every yellow head had faced the grow lamps. Now their stalks had bent into smooth hooks. Their faces hovered an inch above the dirt, petals trembling as though warmed by something underneath.

I called my supervisor, Dev Saran, who was logging freezer inventory in the main building. While I waited for him, I put my hand against the glass. It was hot. Not greenhouse warm, but oven-door hot, and the heat came in slow pulses. Each pulse carried a smell through the rubber seals: tomato vines, damp clay, and something sweetly rotten, like fruit forgotten in a sealed lunchbox.

The conservatory's barn cat, Scut, followed Dev outside. He usually slept against the greenhouse doors in winter. That night he saw Six and flattened so suddenly his belly touched the pavement. Then every hair on his back rose. He made a sound I had only heard once before, when a fox cornered him, and ran headfirst into a chain-link fence before finding the gate.

Dev brought an infrared camera. The glass read sixty-eight degrees. The interior benches read seventy-two. The soil beneath the sunflowers read three hundred and nine.

Nothing was burning. The irrigation lines had not melted. When Dev pushed the camera closer, the display bloomed white in a circle beneath the center bed, too hot to measure. That circle was perfectly crisp, like the edge of a coin, and it was sinking. A minute later the hottest point registered six inches below the floor. Then nine. Then twelve.

The orange light deepened as the heat descended. Shadows climbed the walls in the wrong direction. Pots cast long black shapes upward, toward the roof, and those shadows moved even when the plants did not.

Dev told me to cut the power. I threw the breaker for Six. Its grow lamps died. The other greenhouses dimmed for half a second and recovered. Greenhouse Six stayed orange. In the dark glass, we could see the outline of a low horizon stretching behind the benches, impossibly distant. Something round and red was setting beneath the soil.

We should have called the fire department then. Instead, Dev unlocked the door because the collection represented thirty years of donations and because practical people will carry a clipboard into hell if they think hell has inventory numbers.

Heat rolled over us without moving the cold air outside. The instant the door opened, every greenhouse vent in the complex snapped wide. Moths poured from them. It was January; there should not have been one moth, but thousands battered toward Six in a pale, whispering cloud. They crossed the threshold and disappeared before touching a leaf.

Inside, the aisle was longer than the building. The exit behind us remained ten feet away, but the far wall had withdrawn into orange haze. Benches repeated toward a horizon that could not fit between the glass. Each copy held the same twelve sunflowers, all bowed toward the same buried light.

Dev stepped back. His heel struck the potting bench, dislodging a strip of silver tape from its underside. A folded index card fell at my feet. The handwriting belonged to Mrs. Vale, the conservatory's former night custodian. She had retired before I started. Dev said she had been superstitious about Six and refused to clean it after dusk.

The card held four rules. IF THE FLOWERS FACE DOWN, DO NOT ENTER. IF THE SHADOWS CLIMB, DO NOT WATER. IF THE BELLS OPEN, COVER YOUR MOUTH. IF YOU SEE YOURSELF BETWEEN THE ROWS, LEAVE IT BURIED.

We had already broken the first rule. Dev read the second aloud just as the irrigation controller clicked.

Its screen was dark. Its valves opened anyway.

Water hissed from the misting pipes, but the droplets did not fall. They rose in glittering threads, struck the ceiling, and passed through the glass without wetting it. Beneath every bench, roots answered with a sound like fingernails combing carpet. The soil lifted in narrow ridges. White roots crawled over the surface, all pointing down the endless aisle.

The bellflowers opened next. They were an heirloom variety from a school garden, purple cups no larger than my thumb. Each blossom unfolded into a pale throat lined with tiny square teeth. Dev inhaled before I could stop him. The flowers exhaled yellow dust into his face.

He coughed once and said my name. Then the plants said it too.

Not in one voice. Hundreds of stems rasped against their stakes, leaves rubbing together in careful syllables. Mara, Mara, Mara traveled toward the false horizon. The sunflowers lifted their faces. Their centers were no longer packed with seeds. Each black disk had arranged itself into the same expression: Dev's eyes, Dev's open mouth, Dev trying not to scream.

I dragged him toward the door. He had become strangely heavy. Roots no thicker than hair extended from the cuffs of his trousers and stitched themselves into the aisle mat. I tore them loose by handfuls. Each one bled clear sap that smelled exactly like the soap from my childhood home.

Halfway to the exit, someone stepped between the repeating rows ahead of us. She wore my green work coat and my cracked plastic name badge. Her hair was full of petals. Her feet vanished into the soil, and she watched me with patient, sunflower-black eyes.

The fourth rule told me to leave her buried. It did not say what to do when she began walking.

She took one step. The entire greenhouse shortened around her. Distant benches snapped past us like scenery outside a train. With each step she grew more complete: dirt flaking from skin, roots retreating beneath fingernails, my own frightened expression settling onto her face. She was not copying me. She was remembering how to be me from something planted long before I was born.

Dev sagged against me. His lips moved, but the words came from the bellflowers: The sun below is older. The sun below remembers every shape the roots have eaten.

I covered his mouth and mine with my coat, pulled the emergency herbicide canister from the wall, and emptied it across the aisle. The chemical was designed to sterilize quarantine soil. Wherever it struck, the orange light went out. The woman wearing me stopped with one hand extended. For a second her skin became transparent, and I saw no bones inside her—only a dense braid of roots wrapped around hundreds of small white seeds.

Then the real darkness returned. The aisle became thirty feet long. Dev and I fell backward through the door onto frozen pavement. I slammed it shut while something on the other side pressed both hands against the glass. The prints were green and perfectly matched mine.

The college destroyed Greenhouse Six the following morning. They found scorched soil but no heat damage, twelve dead sunflowers, and roots penetrating forty feet into bedrock. Dev spent two weeks in the hospital with fungal pneumonia. He remembers entering the greenhouse but not what spoke through him. Mrs. Vale denied writing the rules. She asked only whether we had watered, then hung up.

I resigned after the cleanup crew showed me what they recovered beneath the center bed: a rusted metal seed marker stamped with my full name and a planting date seventy-six years before I was born.

That should be the end. It is not. Six months later I began waking with dirt between my teeth. My apartment smelled of tomato vines. At dusk, the shadows of my houseplants climbed the walls even after I threw every pot away.

Yesterday a doctor showed me the scan of my lungs. The branching shapes are too regular to be scars. At the end of each branch is a small round shadow, dozens of them, packed like unopened flower heads. He scheduled a biopsy for tomorrow morning.

I have canceled it. The sun went down an hour ago, but a warm orange light is still shining from behind my ribs. All evening, every bird in the neighborhood has been striking my windows. And when I stand very still, I can feel the flowers inside me turning their faces down.