Gnome Coming: Freaky Florida Humorous Paranormal Mysteries, #4

1

GUARD GNOME

Once again, the ghost woke Missy. Don Mateo of Grenada, 400 years dead, crashed into a chair in Missy’s bedroom. He wasn’t some clever type of ghost, like a poltergeist, that moved furniture mischievously.

No, he was just a dork. A very awkward, uncoordinated ghost who couldn’t seem to find his way around the bedroom in the dark even though that’s precisely what ghosts are supposed to be good at. Did other people with an ancient ghost in their house have the same problem?

One of her cats, she couldn’t tell which, hissed.

What is it? Missy asked. Why are you stumbling around my bedroom?

The gnome is missing, the ghost said in his heavy accent of archaic Spanish.

What gnome?

The sentinel garden gnome in the front yard. The one we enchanted.

Missy groaned as she remembered. The gnome, made with some heavy plastic-like material, was the stereotypical folklore character. It was about a foot tall and had a huge white beard, a pot belly, a pointy red hat that curved halfway, and an impish smirk. The previous owners of the house had left it behind in the garage. It would have stayed in there forever if Don Mateo hadn’t suggested otherwise. She had never had the desire to decorate her front lawn with a garden gnome.

What do you mean he’s missing? Missy asked. Someone stole him?

No, I believe he left on his own accord.

Missy sat up in the bed, finally abandoning her hopes of going back to sleep. It was just before dawn and she had gone to bed only a couple of hours ago after her overnight shift of caring for her vampire home-health patients.

How could he leave on his own accord? she asked, irritated. He’s not even a he. He’s an it, an inanimate object.

The spell they used was supposed to turn him into an alarm of sorts, not much more than a motion detector and sensor for magical intruders. All he was meant to do was make loud noises. Not run off somewhere.

They had tested the spell, and it had worked. Missy had left through the back door, went around the house, and approached it from the street. The gnome stood next to an areca palm beside the walkway to her front door (and boy was she embarrassed to have it there in full public view). It would detect anyone who trespassed while armed with magic, so she had conjured a weak protection spell around herself and strolled into the driveway.

The gnome began screeching. Loudly. It had a high-pitched, rodent-like voice, pretty much what you’d expect from a gnome. It babbled in an indecipherable language until Missy turned off the gnome’s guarding spell. She then asked Don Mateo to help her alter the spell so it only created audio in her head, not in public where her neighbors would hear it.

Apparently, the alteration did not go well.

I admit we screwed up, to use the contemporary parlance, Don Mateo said.

"No, you screwed up. You’re the one who directed me how to create the spell."

Don Mateo had written the spell instructions in the back pages of a grimoire centuries ago when he was alive. He was a wizard who fled Spain with the Spanish Inquisition at his heels. He had filled the addendum to the grimoire with a blend of European sorcery and the natural, earth magick practiced by the shaman of the native Timucuan people who had lived in north Florida when the colonizers arrived.

The grimoire was The Book of Saint Cyprian, which later belonged to Missy’s father, a witch who died when she was an infant. Someone had stolen the book from her father, and it ended up with Bob McGuinn, the Arch-Mage of San Marcos. After Missy retrieved the book, on written instructions from her father, Bob had tried to steal it back. He even tortured Missy to get her to hand it over.

The spell, intended to turn the garden gnome into a guard gnome, was another line of defense in case Bob came back. Her other lines of defense were a protection spell over the house and your typical burglar alarm. She didn’t have a dog, and her cats were worthless at protecting the house, so adding the gnome—no matter how kitschy it was—seemed like a good idea.

Until now.

Missy considered using various locator spells to find the gnome. But those took a lot of effort, more than was worth to find a corny lawn ornament.

As if he had read her thoughts (and she sorely hoped this ghost didn’t have that ability), Don Mateo said, "We have to find it."

Why? Maybe it will end up in the garden of someone who actually enjoys gnomes.

You added magick to it, and, clearly, that magick malfunctioned. We have no idea what that gnome is capable of doing.

We know it’s capable of leaving my property, Missy said. Maybe that’s a good thing.

A distant siren pierced the pre-dawn silence.

It is never a good thing to release magick unsupervised into the world.

Well, it’s very difficult to find an inanimate object with a spell.

The gnome is no longer inanimate, Don Mateo said.

The siren was much louder now. In fact, it sounded as if it was in her neighborhood. Probably an older resident having a medical scare.

Well, I suppose I can send out some tracer spells, Missy said. The tracers were tiny bursts of magick she broadcast in great numbers. They behaved like drones, flying at low altitude in search of an image she focused upon in her mind. If they made a match with the image, they pinged her with the general location. Usually it required additional magick, a more powerful locator spell directed at the tracer’s location, to pinpoint the precise location of the search subject.

Flashing lights seeped through Missy’s window blinds as the emergency vehicle directly passed her house.

Oh my, Missy said.

Perhaps the gnome didn’t go far after all, said Don Mateo.

Do you mind? I need to get dressed.

The ghost faded away. She still didn’t feel very private knowing his presence was near. But she got out of bed, took off what she called her old-lady pajamas, and threw on a T-shirt, surfer shorts, and flip-flops. They considered this haute couture in Florida.

A police car was parked, strobe lights flashing, down the street in front of Old Man Vansetti’s house. A deep rumbling behind her came from a red Fire-Rescue ambulance and a fire truck driving down the street to park in front of the police car. Paramedics popped out. Something appeared to be wrong in Vansetti’s front yard.

Normally, Missy wouldn’t be nosy about her neighbors. But this morning she had a heavy, foreboding feeling. The old man lived alone, after all. She hurried toward the emergency scene. Old Man Vansetti’s dog, Fifi, was barking furiously.

Missy arrived at the Vansetti front yard and realized the white Pomeranian was on a leash still attached to her owner’s hand. The old man lay face up beneath his mango tree, next to the hand-lettered sign he planted each fruit-bearing season warning he would shoot mango thieves. His head was tilted back, and he was not moving. His face was blue.

A softball-size mango protruded from his mouth.

There are dozens of varieties of mangos, but none are small enough to fit in a human’s mouth. And Mr. Vansetti’s mangos were large. How this one fit into his mouth was a mystery.

He ain’t breathing, one of the paramedics kneeling beside him said. No pulse either.

We have to get the mango out of his mouth anyway, his female partner said, to show we at least tried.

While they busied themselves trying to pry the fruit from Vansetti’s mouth, Fifi continued barking at the emergency team.

Can someone take this dog out of here? the first paramedic asked.

The police officer, a young, skinny rookie, struggled to keep a straight face while he pried the leash from Vansetti’s hand and led the dog a short distance away. Fifi kept barking.

You think he was staring up at the tree with his mouth open and the fruit fell and landed in his mouth? the cop asked.

Nah, said the male paramedic, a serious type with a buzz cut. I think he fell face down and landed on the mango, then rolled over while he was being asphyxiated.

Both theories are far-fetched, the female paramedic said. What are the odds a mango would go right into his mouth?

My theory is the best one. It took a lot of force to get this thing rammed so far in his mouth. He must have fallen on it, her partner said.

Maybe someone else rammed it in there, the cop said.

Either we use the jaws of life, or we’ll have to make incisions to get this mango out, the female paramedic said.

Now the question is, who would choke a guy to death with a mango? the rookie cop pondered.

None of them had noticed Missy hovering there. Something caught her eye across the lawn, beyond the lights from the emergency crew.

Two garden gnomes stood side-by-side in the middle of a flower bed, silhouetted by the faint rays of the rising sun. One of them she recognized as always being in this garden—a chubby gnome holding a tiny shovel.

The other gnome was hers. Its eyes appeared to twinkle in the reflected light.

What was it doing here, trying to make friends? Did it have anything to do with the mango incident? And how was she going to take it out of here? She couldn’t simply pick it up and leave while the cop was here. Was she supposed to explain that it had run away from home?

When the lawnmower-like roar of the jaws of life splintered the night and the work of mango extraction turned ugly, Missy left the scene. Fortunately, Vansetti’s immediate neighbor, a retired widow, agreed to take care of Fifi.

Missy waited at home until the police and fire-rescue teams drove away and the last of the curious neighbors departed. Then she strolled back down the street to Old Man Vansetti’s house. No additional police vehicles had arrived and there was no crime-scene tape, so they must have judged the death to be an accident and not murder-by-mango.

The sun was bright in the sky by this time and Missy walked across the front yard to the flower beds, sweating already. She picked up her gnome and brought it home. She didn’t sense any trace of magick in the gnome. It was simply a tacky decorative object that had somehow behaved like a naughty child and run away.

A dreadful question lingered in her mind: Did the gnome have anything to do with Old Man Vansetti’s death? It should have been a preposterous question, but not when magick and Missy were involved. She hoped the gnome being on the accident scene was a coincidence. After all, how could a poly-resin figurine, barely over a foot tall, murder a man by jamming a mango in his mouth with enough force to asphyxiate him?

She considered the possibility that Vansetti saw the gnome crossing his lawn and was gaping in astonishment when the mango dropped from the tree into his mouth.

Yeah, too ridiculous. Although the police seemed to accept the accidental death thesis, it was too much of a stretch for her. The mango had to have been forced into the old man’s mouth not by gravity but by the physical effort of an individual, by black magic, or by a combination of the two.

She arrived home and placed the gnome in the garage, in the same corner behind a bag of mulch where it had always been.

Don Mateo would have to help her fix whatever had gone wrong with the sentinel spell they had used on it. But first she needed to shower and get dressed for real.

When she returned to the garage forty minutes later, the gnome was gone.

Don Mateo! She shouted. Get your phantasmic butt in here!

Summoning a ghost without using a spell was difficult. What are you going to do to it if it doesn’t obey you—kill it? No, ghosts are way beyond worrying about any live person’s approval. It was their afterlife and they would do as they pleased. In fact, very few would bother to talk to a person as much as Don Mateo did.

Come on, be a good ghost. Please?

He was a no-show. She went back inside and as she passed through the laundry room, she entered a cloud of Renaissance-era cologne and ripe body odor.

Thank you for coming, she said to the empty air.

I was enjoying some eternal rest, said his voice behind her.

She turned around. The ghost was sitting on her dryer. His apparition was faint, as if he was sleepy.

The gnome was at a neighbor’s house, standing next to his own garden gnome. The neighbor was dead, asphyxiated by a mango. I brought my gnome home, put it in the garage, and now it’s missing again.

Egads! What are you going to do about it? Don Mateo asked.

"What am I going to do about it? This sentinel spell is your spell from your grimoire."

When I was alive, I used that spell only twice. Once was on a bronze figurine sitting on a table outside my quarters to prevent my spell books from being stolen. It turned out that no one wanted to steal my spell books. They stole the figurine instead.

Because your spells don’t work, Missy said.

The second time was with a statue of Saint Francis, that stood outside of the building that housed my quarters, to warn me if the Inquisition was coming. And it worked perfectly.

You escaped?

Exactly.

Why do I sense there’s something else to this story? Missy asked.

Well, the Inquisition had not been coming for me. They were coming for someone else in the building. But when they saw the statue had been enchanted, and my neighbor mentioned that I was a wizard, the Inquisition came after me. And I had to leave the country.

I see.

The point I was trying to make, Don Mateo said, was the spell never misfired before. I suspect someone else’s magic is involved. You said your neighbor has a gnome? You had better see if that gnome is still there.

Why?

Why was your gnome visiting with it?

Missy bolted out the door and jogged the few houses down to the late Old Man Vansetti’s house.

Vansetti’s gnome was gone.

Missy reported this to Don Mateo.

Just as I suspected, he said. Whatever strange turn the sentinel spell took in your gnome, has now been passed to your neighbor’s gnome.

Do you think his gnome killed him, rather than mine?

I would wager you are correct. The morphed version of the spell can spread to another host like a disease. If this spreads to other garden gnomes, I’m afraid you living people have a bit of a problem on your hands.

Wait, it’s not only our⁠—

The ghost of Don Mateo disappeared. Ghosts could do that—run away when things got difficult.

2

HUNTING PARTY

On Tuesdays they played bridge. On Thursdays they turned into wolves and ate possums. Those were just two of the regularly scheduled events of the Werewolf Women’s Club of Jellyfish Beach. Josie Denton was their president. The lycanthrope retirees were always busy with fundraisers, road beautifications, fashion shows, and, of course, potluck lunches.

They were an earnest group of women that numbered around two dozen depending on whether the snowbirds were in Florida or up north. The club’s mission was to have some fun, do some good, and kill some prey.

Attacking humans was forbidden, though. At Josie’s age, there was little pleasure in that anymore. What she still enjoyed was loping through the woods in wolf form at speeds her aging human body could never approach. She savored her heightened sense of smell and the complex pattern of odors the forest and its creatures created.

Every week she looked forward to this evening of bonding with her fellow she-wolves. There was nothing finer than howling at the moon, hunting as a pack, cornering their prey, and tearing it to shreds.

Possums tasted much better than raccoons. Rabbits were a rare delicacy. Every so often they’d take down a deer, but at their age the women didn’t want such a heavy meal. Sometimes they quarreled over that and it was up to Josie, as the alpha of the pack, to decide whether to pursue any deer they scented.

Josie sat in the front seat of the community’s shuttle bus as it rolled through Jellyfish Beach toward their hunting grounds. When the women were younger, they would have shifted into wolf form at their beachfront condos and run the eight miles to the undeveloped land west of town. But today, in their sixties, seventies, and eighties, they rode in comfort, gossiping the entire way. Once they entered the woods, they would shift.

Oh. My. Lord. Thelma Lou said, staring into her smartphone. She was two rows behind Josie. The Unger tract has been sold to a developer!

The Unger tract was their destination. The large parcel of land lay in what used to be an agricultural region. In recent years, the sprawling suburban developments spread west of Jellyfish Beach like a contagion, driving up land prices and turning vegetable fields into communities of cookie-cutter homes with gated entrances and elaborate fountains.

Aside from some fields of tomatoes in the north of the property, the Unger tract was dozens of acres of virgin forest—native slash pines, palmettos, and scrub oak. It teemed with wildlife. Josie knew nothing about the Unger family except that they lived elsewhere in the state and they apparently didn’t know that elderly werewolves trespassed on their land.

Hearing that the land had been sold to a developer put an icy grip on Josie’s heart. At her age, she didn’t like anything at all gripping her heart.

Where did you read that? she asked Thelma Lou.

"The Jellyfish Beach Journal. They keep sending me these news alerts on my phone. I don’t know how to shut them off."

What’s going to happen to the land? Mary Beth, sitting across the aisle from Josie, asked.

Everyone already knew the answer: Developers don’t buy land to make nature preserves.

Thelma Lou studied the article on her phone. Oh, my gosh. Four hundred single-family homes, two hundred condos, and retail, she said. Our land is being destroyed.

It’s not our land, Mary Beth said. She was a smart aleck know-it-all from Kentucky.

A tear rolled down Josie’s cheek. We can’t let this happen. We have to stop it somehow. Does the article say if the county approved the plans?

Um, let’s see. . . Thelma Lou scrolled down her screen. The county commission is voting next week to change the zoning and approve the deal. They had a public hearing last week. She shot a disapproving look at Josie. Why were we not at that hearing?

I didn’t know anything about it, Josie said. How would she know?

Clucks of disapproval came from the rear of the bus.

If we lived out there, we might have seen if they posted notices. Who goes out there except on Thursday nights?

No one answered. The energy on the bus was dark as everyone contemplated losing their cherished hunting ground.

We could start going to the state forest that’s only an hour away, Josie offered meekly.

The clucks of disapproval were louder this time.

Though Josie was the alpha of the club, her seat of power was wobbly. Women at this stage of