The Noctuary

The subway tunnel had been abandoned for decades, its entrance choked by ivy and the ghosts of commuters who’d forgotten their own destinations. Dr. Elara Voss found it by accident—or it found her—while tracking a rare hybrid fern that grew only in the cracks of neglected places. The flickering neon sign above the archway buzzed like a trapped wasp:

OPEN BETWEEN MIDNIGHT AND NEVER.

Elara stepped inside, her boots crunching over dried leaves and shattered glass. The air tasted of jasmine and wet ink.

The Noctuary unfolded in gradients of shadow and bioluminescence. Vines pulsed with a light that mirrored her pulse. Roses bloomed in time with her breath, petals unfurling like whispered confessions. At the center stood a greenhouse, its glass fogged with the breath of things that didn’t breathe.

The keeper awaited her there, shrouded in a coat of moth-eaten burlap, their face veiled by Spanish moss. They said nothing, only pressed a seed packet into her palm. The label read:

WHAT YOU’VE FORGOTTEN TO WATER.

Elara had always preferred plants to people. They didn’t ask why she worked nights, why her apartment smelled of soil and solitude, why her twin sister’s name (Lila) lived in her phone as an unsent draft. “You left the window open,” Lila had said the night she vanished. “You let the frost in.”

In the Noctuary, the frost was alive. It crept up her sleeves as she wandered deeper.

Topiaries shaped like blurred faces reached for her. One resembled Lila—chin tilted, mouth parted mid-laugh. Elara pressed her palm to its leafy cheek. The hedge shivered, shedding petals that dissolved into syllables: “Why didn’t you stay?”

Mercury pooled in a stone basin, liquid and lethal. Waterlilies floated atop it, their reflections showing alternate Elis: a botanist who’d chosen family over fame, a sister who’d answered the phone that final night. Elara’s fingertips grazed the surface. The mercury clung like regret.

Orchids hung from rusted chains, their blooms withering as Elara approached. “Ask,” the keeper’s note insisted, tucked inside a pitcher plant. She swallowed the question she’d buried for years:

“Did she blame me?”

The orchids surged, petals sharpening into shrieks.

The Lunaria spectre grew at the garden’s heart, its petals translucent as frozen breath. To claim it, the keeper’s rules demanded a truth of equal weight. Elara’s truth festered in her throat:

Lila’s research notes. The ones Elara had published as her own.

The flower bloomed. Inside its crystalline core, Lila’s voice: “You left the window open.”

Elara crushed the bloom.

The Noctuary expelled her, vines snatching the seed packet back. The tunnel collapsed behind her, sealing itself with a sigh.

Back in her lab, a weed sprouted overnight in her desk drawer. Its ivy crawled the walls, spelling Lila’s initials in chlorophyll and cracks.

Elara waters the weed daily. It thrives on silence.