The tumbleweed appeared out of nowhere.
It had been a typical summer night in central Jersey, humid with the weariness of clouds trying to hold onto the rain a little longer. A flash of lightning later, and there it was. No rain, just a bramble of knotted twigs. It didn’t tumble as one might expect; instead, it rested on a patch of lawn at Hackett’s Farm on a trio of odd, leg-like branches that gripped onto the chromium- corrupted soil of Gnarlywood, New Jersey.
Here’s a little known fact about Gnarlywood: it might sound like some redneckville on the farthest outskirts of the Garden State that’s close to but definitely not the Pine Barrens; or a place that’s only famous because it has one of those spooky old roads folks visit at the devil’s hour with black roses because they read in Weird NJ that the ghost of a little girl haunts the reservoir. Truth is Gnarlywood has a bustling city life for a small town, being near enough to the state capital. If this weren’t the case, one might expect to find a tumbleweed or two blowing by like some black hatted transient with a six-shooter at their side and a scar across their conscience. But no, none of the 3,400 or so residents of Gnarlywood had ever in their lives seen an actual tumbleweed except in a spaghetti western.
Just ask Sebastian Holden, who grew up in G-Town. He can name every species of spider that spins their intricate homes deep within the misshapen branches of the titular trees, knotted like the hard-working hands of steelworkers or magicians. He’s old enough to recall marveling at the “TRENTON MAKES THE WORLD TAKES” slogan that to this day lights up Lower Trenton Bridge. His dad had always hated that subtly savage reminder that he was just another cog in the machine, and that the world took advantage of the city and workers like him. Sebastian promised himself never to be such a tool.
That’s why he got into private investigating. To work for himself. To be his own boss. But in standard Sebastian-fashion––a holdover from his days living in Williamsburg––he fell into a very niche type of P.I.ing: the paranormal kind. It was this vocation that brought him out to Hackett’s to investigate an anomalous congregation of twigs, leaves, and small branches that turned up on the front lawn of Carrie Hackett’s family farm. It was the anomalous that interested Sebastian the most, unexplained mysteries rooted in the potentially supernatural, strange, or downright weird. And in Gnarlywood, there was always something unusual to investigate.
But this? This would be filed in the “Downright Weird” folder.
“What d’ya think?” Carrie asked, craning her head over Sebastian’s signature Goorin pork-pie as he gazed at the tumbleweed through an old-fashioned magnifying lens. With his other hand, he snapped a few pictures of it on his iPhone.
“Well, it’s strange that it just appeared here, for sure.” Sebastian nudged it with a mechanical Bic pencil. It rocked backward, then forward, and then it stopped. “Mind if I take this thing home with me?”
“Be my guest.”
Sebastian caffeinated himself into the wee hours of the night and examined the unusual tumbleweed. Its circumference measured two feet. From the distance between the bedroom in which it stood on a night table and the kitchenette where Sebastian stirred himself another instant coffee, the thing looked spherical and symmetrical, as if a trick of the light leering down from the buzzing bulb overhead added more dimension to the plant-based structure it resembled up close. His cat Buffy adamantly refused to go anywhere near it. She normally had a tendency of slinking around any foreign objects that Sebastian brought home to their little apartment. Not this one.
“What’s wrong, Buff?” he asked. The tuxedo cat meowed in protest, then slid down off the stovetop and dashed past a pair of dining chairs. She disappeared into the living room.
The next day, Sebastian paid a visit to the local botanists over on Main Street just off Sycamore Road. He scrolled through pictures of the tumbleweed on his phone for them. The scent of honeysuckle filtered the shop’s air, and the famous line in Double Indemnity about murder smelling like honeysuckle manifested into Sebastian’s head.
One of the botanists consulted a large sampling of shrubs, twigs, and other flora, comparing them to the sample Sebastian had snipped from the tumbleweed. On a table, a stack of books by John McPhee, beautifully styled with vintage pottery and local flowers. A few minutes later, the young hipster couple agreed that it didn’t seem to resemble anything indigenous to Gnarlywood or any of the neighboring towns. Sebastian scratched at his watery, tired eyes.
“Well, if it’s not indigenous,” he asked them, “then where could it have come from?”
“Beats us,” they said in unison.
That night, Sebastian was troubled by terrifying dreams: cows with twisted dead twigs for heads grazed the farms of Gnarlywood as his astral self drifted along the rooftops. Mindless. Spilling milk from their teats as they sauntered about the grasslands. The sky cracked into pieces, shattered by streaks of blue lightning, as if he was trapped inside a giant static electricity ball. He rushed into the nearest house, barged into the bathroom. A headless Carrie Hackett sat on the toilet bowl, pajamas down, doing her business. He splashed water on his face, then gazed deep into the mirror. Water dripped down the tumbleweed that was now his face, eyes sunk deep, deep within the brambles where light couldn’t reach.
His body jerked itself awake. Cold droplets of sweat coated his forehead and slicked his hair like dew on morning grass. Sebastian snatched his phone from the nightstand, opened his camera, and viewed his face. He sighed deep, relieved. He looked over at Buffy. She was staring into the adjacent room, which Sebastian couldn’t see from his bedroom. He slid his legs over the side of the bed, got up, and stalked over. Buffy’s gaze didn’t deviate from whatever it was her eyes fixated on. She hissed suddenly, and Sebastian froze. The floorboard creaked. He reached blindly for the nearest kitchen knife, then slinked with it across the wall. His breath was heavy. The ticking of his Swatch an avalanche of seconds.
Three. Two. One.
He turned the corner, knife held high above his head.
Nothing. Nothing but the tumbleweed on top of the washing machine. That was all.
Buffy leaped off the kitchen table and scurried away. Sebastian lowered the knife, which he now realized was a meat cleaver. Another deep sigh. Relief. Again.
His phone buzzed the theme from Seinfeld. It was Carrie. He answered, turning his back to the laundry room and the tumbleweed.
“Hey Carrie. What’s up?”
“Did you bring that thing back here?”
“What thing? The tumbleweed? No, it’s here with me.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes, I’m sure. I was literally just looking at it a second ago.”
“Well, I’m looking at it right now.”
“That’s impossible! It’s right––” Sebastian turned and peered into the laundry room, at the top of the washing machine. “––here…”
Only it wasn’t. The tumbleweed was gone.
Once Sebastian arrived at Carrie’s house, he compared the tumbleweed before him with the photos he took two days earlier. It was the same tumbleweed. How could this thing be in Sebastian’s apartment one second and literally a second later materialize back on Carrie’s farm? The paranormal P.I. grabbed the prickly shrub by the sticks and walked it over to his beat up old ‘87 Camaro.
“Where are you taking it now?” Carrie called out behind him as he dropped into the driver’s seat. The Camaro snarled to life.
“To run some tests. It’s time to figure out what this is all about.”
It was 7:45 PM. Sebastian placed the tumbleweed on the stove in his kitchenette. In front of it, there was an unusually-shaped 1930s Dewald radio that he had modified into a sort of ghost box. It scattered choppy AM band static through the apartment as it scanned radio frequencies at half-second intervals. It is believed by many paranormal investigators that various entities ranging from disembodied spirits to the Grays can manipulate the fuzz to communicate. Sometimes, Sebastian would work the antique dials like a jazz virtuoso, manually modulating the amplitude like Coltrane on Ascension or Coleman’s Science Fiction. After about 20 minutes of sweeping, he could hear subtle changes in pitch within the world of white noise improvisation: skips, hiccups, abrupt spikes in volume, and eventually, words––actual words––but none he could understand. He asked questions of the other side: Is there anybody out there? Who are you? Why are you here?
Any normal person might have felt stupid asking such questions to what appeared to be a patch of potpourri, but not Sebastian. He had a gift, a psychic connection to the unseen spectrum of the Universe with a capital “U.” He couldn’t explain it, but he was tuned to myriad energies that most others paid no mind to simply because they believed their worlds to be the only ones of any importance.
There seemed to be intelligent responses coming through the radio, though the words were in a language Sebastian could not comprehend. It was as if whatever he had tapped into was using parts of the words, mostly in English and Spanish, being channeled through the speakers as a proxy for its language, whatever language it might be.
Sebastian’s phone lit up. Carrie again. He switched off the Dewald and the room fell silent as Gnarlywood Cemetery.
“What’s up, Carrie?”
“It’s here again.”
“What?! That can’t be, I’m literally looking at it here in my apartment—” His eyes were glassy, but they were focused on the tumbleweed, “—right now.”
“Then there’s another one.”
Indeed, there was another. Sebastian held the original under his arm like a mud-caked basketball as he stood before the second tumbleweed on the grounds of Hackett’s Farm.
Sebastian hadn’t slept in two days. Nightmares plagued him. Tumble-headed friends and neighbors chased him down deserted tree-lined streets, the thick knotted branches hunched over, massive twig-like fingers curling over the shrinking pathway toward Sebastian’s escape. They contorted into the very shape of the fear that choked him. He woke up out of breath. Claustrophobic. Icicles on his brow. Pull yourself together, Holden! he told himself. He had to get it together. He had to piece this all together.
His phone buzzed.
“Not now, Carrie,” he muttered to himself.
Only it wasn’t Carrie. He answered.
“Mr. Holden?” an older gentleman’s voice huffed.
“Yeah, that’s me. Who wants to know?”
“Hunter Grayson over at Grayson’s Apple Orchard.”
“What can I do for you, Mr. Grayson?”
“I was talking with Ms. Hackett, and, well, I don’t know how to say this, but…”
“Let me guess: there’s a tumbleweed on your property?”
“Why, yes. Yes there is, Mr. Holden. But it ain’t just one.”
When Sebastian arrived at the orchard, there were eight tumbleweeds stationed all along the fields of apple trees.
“It’s a strange thing, Mr. Holden,” Hunter Grayson began. “I woke up this mornin’, and there were two. By the time I got outside, there were four more. Now there’s eight of ‘em. I ain’t ever seen ‘em roll in. It’s like they just appeared from outta nowhere.”
Sebastian strolled through the orchard. Many of the apples hanging from the trees were in various stages of rot. A few of them had fallen from their branches with a sloppy schlunk into the muddy ground a few feet below them. Hunter picked one up.
“These apples were red and delicious this morning. Now they’re all like this.” He handed it to Sebastian. The private eye pulled out a miniature Geiger meter. The device crackled as soon as Sebastian switched it on.
“This apple’s irradiated,” he said, then turned to the tumbleweed nearest him and held the meter over it. More crackles, loud and steady. Sebastian lifted his phone, thumbed his recent calls, and tapped Carrie’s number.
“Carrie, your cows––”
“They’re dead, Sebastian!” she cried, choked up. “They’re all dead!”
Arriving home that evening, Sebastian was greeted with the now familiar sight of Buffy staring off in the direction of wherever the tumbleweed was situated. It was still on the stove beside some unwashed pots that cooked last night’s dinner. As he stepped inside, Buffy leaped down and dashed away, faster than the times before. Sebastian turned, froze in place.
The tumbleweed was hovering over the stove.
When Sebastian regained his composure, he reached for his phone. As he was about to text Carrie, the device powered down. There was a flicker from his television set, which was off only seconds ago. TV snow and flickering light. A world of white noise. There were eerie movements from within the tube. Dancing silhouettes reminiscent of the trees of Gnarlywood. A static shockwave pulsed through Sebastian, left him fallen, cold, and unconscious on the black and white checkerboard floor…
He wasn’t sure how long he had been out, but when Sebastian awoke, he felt changed. It was as though something had been downloaded into his mind. Aside from the pounding headache that now oppressed him, Sebastian knew things he couldn’t possibly know. Or was his mind playing tricks on him? He pressed himself up off the linoleum floor and looked around the apartment, then at the stove.
The tumbleweed was gone.
He got up, rebooted his phone, and made a mad dash for the Camaro.
Sebastian arrived at Hackett’s Farm and was greeted by a peculiar sight. Carrie’s cows were alive. Moments ago she had told him––or he thought she told him––that they were all dead, most likely from radiation poisoning. But here they were alive and staring at him. Actually staring.
His knuckles rapped on the screen door. No answer. He checked the doorknob. Full turn. He pulled the door open. Creeping inside, he poked around the old house. There was a low chatter coming from a room just beyond his line of sight. He recognized the language as the one he heard coming from his makeshift spirit box days ago. It was the language that came from the tumbleweed. He stealthed forward. His hand was on his revolver, a vintage 1970s Smith & Wesson .38 caliber, which he only ever brought with him when he thought his life might be in danger. He rounded the corner.
Carrie stood with her back to him.
Sebastian stepped closer. The floor creaked with anguish, and his whole body shuddered as he tried to remain still and unseen.
“So good of you to come, Sebastian,” Carrie, or something that may have once been Carrie, said. Her head crooked to the side. Sebastian swore there were live vines and twigs writhing like worms where her face should be.
“Carrie?”
“She’s here with us,” the thing that used to be Carrie said, “though she is no longer in control.” It was not a trick of light or eye or mind, even. Carrie turned to face him. Her face twisted with green-brown branches that died and lived at once. They molded the head into a close resemblance of Carrie, but the eyes were wrong. Glassy like dead fish. Like the cow’s eyes, staring but not seeing. A flash of light, and an aura manifested around her head, Christ-like and brief. Something like steel or some other metallic spherical object glowed. Somewhere within, beyond the twisting, intersecting branches, Sebastian saw the tiniest little gray figures shuffling about somewhere even further beyond.
“What are you?” Sebastian asked, mouth arid, eyes humid.
“What you will soon become.”
Sebastian ran. He didn’t look back, just dashed hard for the front door, hand outstretched to catch the doorknob seconds before his body arrived at it. He barreled through the screen door, tumbled out into the strange world he always knew was strange, but which had somehow gotten weirder and more deadly. His legs carried him down the steps of the front porch, skipping multiples until his Converse kicked up some dirt on the brittle, brown-grassed lawn.
He gripped his gun as he rushed to his car. As he darted across the lawn and open field of the farm, he saw the cows. Their heads were turned toward him. They were still staring, chewing the dead grass in their mouths. The chatter began again, loud as cicadas, and Sebastian looked behind him. The thing that had once been Carrie Hackett pushed open the screen door. Sebastian aimed his revolver at it. The face was Carrie’s own now, but something just beyond the creature’s shineless irises shuffled about as its eyes absorbed the hazy sunlight. The head turned from the cows to Sebastian, and then to something behind Sebastian.
He turned, and his jaw fell open as he did, as if wishing to let a jagged scream escape into the heavens, one that no god or monster would heed in the whole town of Gnarlywood.
Tumbleweeds––as far as his not-so-private eyes could see––stretched across the barren landscape of Hackett’s Farm and far, far beyond it. Some were still drifting down from the clouds in slow-motion freefall like tiny spherical ships piloted by inhuman beings from somewhere out of space and maybe even out of time. Beings fascinated by the soft machines of humanity, and needing to use these machines, discard the head, and overthrow the mind.
Before he knew it, the private eye who was Sebastian Holden was trapped in his own head. Alive still, but unable to will his body to move. Unable to control anything anymore. The being who now piloted Sebastian’s body turned it round and climbed the steps to the porch where Carrie waited, hand outstretched. The arm that once was his took hers. Then, to his shock and confusion, the two of them shifted side to side, their bodies contorting in some alien dance ritual as the sky above rang with a dissonant, arhythmic whisper buzzing across the land from the newly arrived tumbleweeds. Like music to which only the hopeless could dance.
