Chapter 2
~Surprises~

Sally started violently, the sound of breaking glass tearing her from sleep. She quickly looked around her room, searching for anything out of place. But no, everything was as it should be. She rubbed her eyes and ran her hand through her long black hair.

“I must have dreamt it.” She rationalized. Sighing, she flopped back down on her soft warm blankets.

She was very near sleep again, when the sound of something large and wooden being knocked over made her sit bolt upright, fully awake. She stared at her door for a while, on the other side of which the unmistakable sound of something moving came. Something was in her apartment.
She just sat there, trying not to think of all the awful ways this night could end for her. And her telephone was out in the kitchen too. Just her luck.
Finally she snapped out of her daze and jumped out of bed, quickly getting halfway under it, digging around for something.

“Oh crap, oh no. Oh nonono.” She breathed quietly to herself as her hands quested in the dark for her baseball bat. Finally, with her heart in the throat, she touched the polished wood. She grabbed it by the handle and yanked it out of hiding.

Okay, she was armed at least. But what now? Stay in her room and wait for whoever was out there poking around to leave? Go out and confront them?

‘You’re wearing a very thin tank top you know.’ It was a random thought that flashed across her mind, but it gave Sally pause.
‘What if whoever’s out there is some sort of crazy rapist?’ She looked around frantically and lighted on her old checkered bathrobe, draped haphazardly over her dirty laundry basket. She grabbed it and wrapped it around herself. To frantic to realize that it would be no deterrent at all to a crazy rapist. Not if he meant business.

Something big and heavy crashed out in the living room. Sally made up her mind. Holding her baseball bat in a white knuckled grip, she slowly walked over to the door, and opened it as quietly as possible.

Out in the hall moonlight shadows flitting across her wall, as who, or whatever was in her living room moved around.
Sally’s mouth went dry and her hands began to sweat. Swallowing loudly, she made her way down the hall, feeling light headed.

Once at the end of it, she peeked gingerly around the corner, and froze. It took quite a while for Sally to actually understand what she was seeing.

It wasn’t a person at all. In fact, they looked like large vines.
They snaked across her living room floor and up its walls, as if they were looking for something. As they grew they sprouted leaves and bean pods. In their quest for growth space they had knocked over quite a few of her things. The TV, her table, her graduation photo. Broken glass lay everywhere.  
Staring in mute astonishment, Sally followed the vines back to their source. She wasn’t entirely surprised to see that they were coming from the tattered bits of the planter out on her balcony.  

“… This is Monroe’s fault.” She said blankly to the vine filled room.

Sally felt something wrap gently around her ankle. Looking down she saw that a very small part of vine was coiling its way up her leg. She reached down and detached it easily. She was about to march into the kitchen and call Monroe, regardless of the fact that the gently glowing clock on her microwave read 4:30am, when she felt the vine again. She looked down in irritation to see that two of the questing vines had gained hold of her leg. With a growl she bent over and tried to tear them off. But it seemed the harder she tried the harder they clung. Two more vines joined in and Sally began to feel a little anxious.  

So far the vines wrapped around her were, compared to the other vines in the room, quite small. Only about as thick as her thumb. But soon more and more were quickly growing up her legs or latching onto her arms.
It was only when the huge pipe sized vine wrapped around her mid section that Sally finally let out and ear piercing scream.  

She thrashed around but the vines only increased in number. She grabbed for her baseball bat and swung madly at them, screaming indistinct battle cries, which the plants ignored.

However, her cries did not go unnoticed by the other tenants in her apartment. Nervous, sleepy people poked their heads out of apartment doors on after the other.

Mr. Watson from downstairs called the police and frantically explained that his neighbor was being murdered.

The couple who lived across the hall looked at each other uneasily, freezing out in the hall in nothing but their bathrobes. Finally Jeremy plucked up his courage and banged on her apartment door.

“Sally? What’s going on?” He called in a loud voice.

His answer was a muffled, but very loud shrike for help. “Get me out of here!”

Jeremy quickly scrabbled for the extra key which he knew Sally kept taped behind the little ‘welcome’ sign on her door. He and his wife sometimes house sat for her if she went on vacation.

Finding it, he jammed it in the keyhole and pushed the door open. It only opened about a foot though, blocked by something heavy. He pushed and strained until the vines snapped and gave way. The sight of his screaming neighbor being hustled out of her own patio door by a writhing mass of tentacle like vines was the last thing he expected to see. And he could do little more then stair, his hand still resting on the doorknob.

More tenants piled in the doorway behind him, and their reactions were more or less the same.

Sally had lost the bat at some point. And she was pretty much completely incased in the troublesome foliage. Her panic increased when she founder herself no longer in her living room, but six feet out from her apartment, three stories high over a cement parking lot. From out here she could see that the vines had traveled down the side of the apartment building and burrowed some way underground. The vines seamed to slow in their growth. She stopped screaming and stared down at the group of tenants who had gathered underneath her, noticing with irritation that some of them were taking pictures.

“Hey!” She shouted down at them, feeling a little embarrassed.  “Quite gawking and get me out of this!” As if on cue, a fire truck, three police cars and an ambulance pulled up in front of the building, sirens blaring.
Sally sighed and relaxed a little. Monroe was going to get such an earful for this.

“Hey up there, are you alright?” One of the policemen called to her from the ground.    

“All the better for your asking!” She called back. She heard a scatter of nervous chuckles from below. One of the firemen answered her.

“Okay don’t worry, we’ll have you down in no time!” Some more fire fighters were approaching with a ladder and an ax.

“Oh thank g-“ She started, but was cut off when the vines suddenly jerked violently upward and shot straight into the air. The crowd in the parking lot were stunned as the woman’s long drawn out scream died away high in the distance. The vines were growing on the ground too, engulfing more and more of the apartment and the parking lot.

The police quickly organized and evacuation as the monstrous stalk swelled and spread out. Water mains broke and telephone wires bent and snapped.

It wasn’t too long before news crews arrived, and by 7:30 the next morning the giant beanstalk was on every channel.

Mr. Monroe, Having turned on the television so he could listen to the news while he got ready for work, was startled to see one of Sally neighbors being interviewed at the bottom of what he could only guess was the beanstalk.

The picture switched to a far away shot. Looking to be somewhere just outside the city. Even from that distance the beanstalk looked huge. It rose so high that it was impossible to see the top of it from the ground.

Mr. Monroe ran a hand through his hair as he collapsed onto his overstuffed couch.
“Oh my god. No matter how long I knew this was going to happen, I still wasn’t ready to believe it.”
He looked back at the screen as Jeremy frantically explained  for the sixth time what he had seen in Sally’s apartment just hours earlier.
Sighing, Monroe turned off the TV and decided to take the day off of work.

“Sally is going to kill me when she gets back.” He muttered.

***

Devin woke up to the sound of Charlie chirping. The small yellow canary sat on it’s perch greeting the sunlight which poured through the curtainless window.

He was a little sad to find the dream he had been dreaming replaced with his real life. The harder he tried to remember what his dream was, the fuzzier it became. Until it was completely gone. Whatever it had been, it’d made him happy while it was there.

He sighed and sat up, rubbing the sleep from his eyes. According to the old wooden clock ticking away on his wall, it was near eight o-clock. He dressed slowly, taking his time, then left his room for the kitchen. Tyson was probably in the dining room having breakfast right now. Devin never ate in the dining room.

It took him several long corridors to reach the kitchen. When he did he poked his head in gingerly. Mabel was in there, bustling around doing whatever it was that maids did. Devin sighed and walked in.

The sound of he door closing drew her attention very briefly away from her cleaning.

“The leftovers are over on the counter. And I had Alice pick up some more bird seed for you yesterday. It’s over in the bottom cupboard there.” She said, not bothering with greetings.  

Devin nodded silently and walked over to her. He dried off one of the dishes she had just washed and used it for himself. Devin cleaned his own dishes most of the time. Eating, as he did, so much later than the others in the house. He walked over to the counter and removed the dishcloth Mabel had placed over the food to keep the fly’s off. There were two buns that Mabel had baked that morning, a pot of fresh honey, and some porridge with bits of baked apple and cinnamon in it. It was all cold by now. He was used to eating cold food.

He took what he wanted and covered over the rest with the dish cloth. The servants snacked on the leftovers throughout the day. Retrieving the bag of bird seed from the cupboard, Devin retreated back to his room to eat. Saying nothing to Mabel as he left.

After filling Charlie’s feeder, he settled down to his own breakfast. The bred rolls were very good, if not the slightest bit stale. But the porridge really needed to be warm. After a while he broke the silence and addressed Charlie.

“Should I go, do you think?” He asked. Charlie pecked at his food. Devin put his head to one side.

“I would have to leave the garden, that’s true. But I could always start a new one… Maybe I could make money being a gardener. People do that right?”

Charlie chirped randomly. Devin shook his head.
“Oh no, I couldn’t take money from the safe. I know a lot of it is mine but… Tyson would come after me if I did.”

The bird ruffled it’s feathers and continued its breakfasting. Not paying the slightest attention to what the man was saying.

Devin sighed and hung his head. “You’re right. It’s probably best that I stay. I mean, I think Cynthia is about to give up, so she won’t be around. And as long as I steer clear of Tyson I can be happy right?” He looked at the bird hopefully, and was ignored.

“Right.” He assured himself, and turned his attention back to breakfast.
After he finished eating he took the dishes back to the kitchen and cleaned them. Then, grabbing the bucket he kept his tools in, he set out to work in his garden.
The sun was bright and hot against his skin.
‘I think I’ll start with the flowers today.’ He thought to himself. ‘Then I’ll move to the herbs and the vegetables.’ It seamed like a good enough plan to him. He smiled and started out along one of the footpaths. However, the sight that met him in the flower garden was not the one he’d expected.  

Devin stared. He hadn’t planted a beanstalk in the middle of the flower garden. He knew he hadn’t. That would have just been strange. And he knew for a fact that it hadn’t been there the day before, because the stalk had grown up threw the very rose bush that he had been working on. Cynthia had been trying to convince him to go to some party or other at the time. But there it was. Defying his sense of logic.   

He walked forward and kneeled in front of it, setting his bucket down on the ground. The stalk was nearly as tall as he was. And it wasn’t so much one stalk as several thick ones  intertwined. Devin rubbed the back of his neck absently. Trying to think of how this could have happened.
A tiny sparkle of light caught his attention. He looked closer. It seamed to be coming from inside the stalk.
Gently, he stuck his index finger and thumb in between some of the vines, and parted them.
Once an eye sized hole was made Devin peered inside and squinted.

The light was very faint and sort of green. A tiny pinprick, laying on top of something strange. Devin drew his face back and blinked a few times. He couldn’t possible have seen what he thought he had seen. Making the hole a little bit wider, letting in a bit of natural sunlight, Devin looked inside again.

It was still a girl. A doll maybe? That was it. A very small doll. Why would there be a doll in a mysterious beanstalk? Who knew. But he wasn’t ready to accept the idea of fairies or humans just yet.

It was tangled up in a few vines, but when Devin gently reached in and toughed it, it came free very easily. It was warm and soft. That was really odd. Devin retracted his hand and examined the tiny thing.

The doll had long, glossy black hair which spilled over the side of his hand. It was wearing very strange clothing. A long fluffy checkered coat, a sort of long shirt that ended just half way down her thighs, and black leggings. Devin had never seen a woman wearing leggings before.
The doll had a very pleasant face. He smiled a little.

It looked as if she were sleeping. She was so life like, Devin could almost swear he could see it breathing. His brow creased. Hunching over a little, he brought the doll closer to his face, and froze.

The dolls chest gently fell and rose in a slow, steady rhythm. He was sure he wasn’t imagining it. Come to think of it, the warmth coming from it could be body heat. And the texture of its skin was all wrong. It wasn’t made of stuffing and string. This was no doll at all, it was a real person.

Devin was stunned for a few seconds, and dropped her in shock. Then panicked because he was afraid he might have killed her. Fortunately, Devin had been kneeling down while examining the tiny woman, and had dropped her onto his lap.

Her limp body slipped and tumbled down his legs and landed with a very small thump in the dirt. And it was at that point, that she finally woke up.