My Patients Are All Mythical Monsters

0014 - The Panopticon Garden

"I hate this house," Victor repeated, staring into the blue-lit abyss that had replaced his backyard.

The kitchen door, previously jammed shut by decades of rust and neglect, now stood wide open. Beyond it should have been a neglected patch of weeds and the crumbling stone wall of the estate. Instead, there was a dome.

It was a vast, humid cathedral of glass and steel, filled with a dense jungle of vegetation that pulsed with a rhythmic, bioluminescent glow. Vines the thickness of power cables snaked across the ceiling, throbbing with blue light as if pumping data instead of sap. The air didn't smell like earth; it smelled like ozone, copper, and wet electricity.

"The Greenhouse," Yggdrasil said, stepping over the threshold with the casual grace of a man who hadn't just watched a stove eat a three-hundred-dollar ham. "The secondary vascular system of Blackwood Manor. It has been dormant since the... Incident of '89."

Victor wiped soot from his forehead, leaving a black smear across his skin. His blood sugar was crashing again, sending tremors through his hands that he tried to hide by clenching his fists. "Yggdrasil, those aren't plants."

"Of course they are, sir. Helianthus Annuus. Common sunflower."

Victor pointed a shaking finger at the nearest flowerbed. "Bullshit."

The sunflowers were seven feet tall, their stalks armored in chitinous green plates. But it was the heads that made Victor's stomach lurch. The center of each flower wasn't a cluster of seeds. It was a black, glass lens.

The sound of gears grinding against glass broke the silence.

As Victor pointed, fifty sunflower heads snapped toward him in perfect unison. The lenses rotated, focusing. A red LED blinked in the center of the nearest bloom.

"They're cameras," Victor whispered. "They're 4K security cameras."

"They are phototropic, sir," Yggdrasil corrected, adjusting his monocle. "They seek the light. And as the new Master, you are the brightest star in their firmament."

"They're recording me." Victor tried to pull his tattered suit jacket closed. He was covered in soot, sweat, and ham grease. "I'm being livestreamed by a salad."

"Nonsense. The footage is stored locally in the root system. For archival purposes only." Yggdrasil gestured deeper into the jungle. "Now, if you would follow me. The Mentha Piperita—the Sedative Mint—grows near the central processor... I mean, the fountain."

Victor didn't want to move. He wanted to go back to the kitchen, nail the door shut, and hide under the table. But the headache behind his eyes was blinding, a symptom of the magical exhaustion and the house's metabolic resonance. He needed that tea.

"Fenrir," Victor hissed. "Heel."

The giant wolf trotted past him, tail wagging. Fenrir seemed immune to the creeping horror of the surveillance garden. To him, this was just a new room full of interesting smells. He sniffed a glowing blue fern, then lifted his leg to mark his territory on a patch of moss.

"Do not!" Yggdrasil snapped, his wooden fingers lengthening into twigs to swat the wolf's nose. "That moss is a fiber-optic relay. If you short-circuit the humidity controls, we will all boil."

Fenrir sneezed, looking offended, and shook his head.

"Walk," Victor ordered, his voice tight. "Don't touch anything. Don't sniff anything. Just... exist narrowly."

They moved into the undergrowth. The path was paved with hexagonal stones that looked suspiciously like circuit boards. Above them, the canopy of vines hummed—a low, constant drone like a server room cooling fan. The air was thick with the taste of ozone, a metallic tang that coated Victor's tongue. It felt less like a garden and more like the inside of a high-end graphics card that hadn't been dusted in thirty years.

Victor felt the pressure of a thousand eyes on his back. Every time he took a step, the sunflowers turned, a mechanical chorus of servos adjusting focus. It was the sound of a paparazzi firing squad in slow motion. He hunched his shoulders, trying to make himself small. He could see his own reflection in the curved glass of the lenses—distorted, terrified, and covered in soot. The red LEDs blinked in a chaotic rhythm, processing his biometrics, analyzing his fear sweat, probably uploading his heart rate to a database that no longer existed.

"The previous owner was a man of... specific tastes," Yggdrasil said, pushing aside a hanging vine that tried to plug itself into his ear. "He valued privacy. Or rather, he valued the lack of it for others."

"He was a paranoid voyeur," Victor muttered, wiping his sweaty palms on his trousers. The fabric was already ruined, but the habit was hard to break.

"He called it 'Total Situational Awareness'."

They reached a clearing. In the center, surrounded by a moat of bubbling nutrient paste, was a bed of mint. The leaves were silver, shimmering with a faint holographic frost.

"There," Yggdrasil whispered. "The Sedative Mint. High potency. One leaf will calm the nerves. Two will induce a coma. Three will reboot your personality."

"I'll take one," Victor said, reaching out.

"Wait!" Yggdrasil's hand shot out, catching Victor's wrist. The butler's grip was like an iron vice. "Look at the ground, sir."

Victor looked down. Surrounding the mint bed were small, wrinkled tubers protruding from the soil. They looked like ugly, shriveled potatoes with human faces. Sleeping faces. But they weren't just sleeping; they were twitching. Their skin was a pale, waxy texture, like old candle drippings, and their mouths were slightly open, revealing rows of tiny, needle-like thorns instead of teeth.

"Mandrakes," Victor realized. He remembered his mythology. "If I pull them up, they scream."

"If you pull them up," Yggdrasil corrected softly, "they emit a sonic frequency of 180 decibels. It will not just deafen you; it will liquefy your inner ear and shatter the glass dome. We must be very, very quiet."

Victor froze. He looked at the mint. He looked at the sleeping vegetable babies. He looked at Fenrir.

Fenrir was staring at a Mandrake. The Mandrake had a tuft of green leaves on its head that looked remarkably like a tennis ball.

The wolf's tail beat a heavy, rhythmic tattoo against the floor tiles.

"Fenrir," Victor mouthed, the name dying in his throat. "No."

Fenrir lowered his front paws into a play bow. He let out a soft woof.

The Mandrake's eyes snapped open. They weren't organic eyes. They were tiny, glowing vacuum tubes.

A high-pitched whine began to rise from the soil, like the sound of a dial-up modem connecting to hell. It vibrated in Victor's teeth, climbing higher and higher toward a glass-shattering frequency.

"Pruning!" Yggdrasil announced.

The butler moved with a speed that defied his wooden physiology. His arm blurred. A silver pair of shears materialized in his hand—though they looked more like wire cutters.

The blades met with a sharp, decisive shear.

Yggdrasil severed the Mandrake's vocal cords (or audio cable) just as the scream began to crest. The sound cut off with a static pop. The tuber slumped back into the dirt, the light in its eyes fading.

"Crisis averted," Yggdrasil said, pocketing the shears. He calmly reached over the unconscious Mandrake and plucked a handful of silver mint leaves. "Excellent vintage. The fear adds flavor."

He handed the leaves to Victor. "Shall we go? The humidity is wreaking havoc on my varnish."

Victor didn't argue. He grabbed Fenrir by the scruff of his neck—the wolf was still trying to lick the deactivated Mandrake—and dragged him back toward the kitchen.

The sunflowers watched them leave. Click. Whirrr. Click.

As they crossed the threshold back into the kitchen, the heavy iron door slammed shut behind them, sealing off the blue glow and the humming vines. The silence of the house felt heavy, suffocating.

Victor leaned against the counter, clutching the mint leaves like a lifeline. "Tea. Now."

Yggdrasil was already at the stove. The appliance, now sated by the ham sacrifice, was purring contentedly. A kettle of water began to boil instantly.

"The house is stabilizing," Yggdrasil noted, dropping the mint into a porcelain cup. The steam that rose smelled like menthol and sleep. "The metabolic spike has passed. Structural integrity is holding at 45%."

Victor took the cup. His hands were still shaking, but the warmth seeped into his fingers. He took a sip.

It tasted like cold mountain air and television static. It was delicious.

"We survived," Victor exhaled, feeling the knot in his chest loosen. He slumped against the counter, letting the porcelain warm his palms. "We actually survived."

Scritch. Scritch. Scritch.

The sound came from the floor. Specifically, from the foyer.

Victor froze, the cup halfway to his mouth. "What was that?"

"It sounded like... scratching," Yggdrasil said, tilting his head.

They walked into the foyer. The floor here was new—a patchwork of mahogany and bone-white ash where Yggdrasil had performed the surgery on the Gargoyle. The stone creature was fused into the floorboards, only her upper torso and head visible, like a swimmer frozen in a lake of wood.

The Gargoyle's eyes were open. They were glowing a faint, dusty yellow.

"Doctor," she rasped. Her voice sounded like grinding stones.

Victor knelt beside her. "I'm here. Is it the pain? Is the fusion rejecting?"

"No," the Gargoyle said slowly. She looked down—or rather, she looked through the floor, into the earth beneath the foundation.

"It tickles," she whispered.

"What tickles?"

"The ants," she said. "There are ants in the basement. Metal ants. They are scratching my feet."

Victor looked at Yggdrasil. The butler's expression had lost its administrative calm.

"The basement," Yggdrasil said. "There is no basement access from the outside. Unless..."

"Unless they're digging," Victor finished. He put his ear to the floor.

Faintly, rhythmically, he heard it. The hum of drilling. The heavy, muffled thud of machinery chewing through bedrock.

"Someone is breaking in," Victor said, and the panic he had just swallowed with the tea came rushing back up. "Someone is tunneling into my house."

The Gargoyle closed her eyes. "They are loud. Rude guests."

Victor stood up. He looked at the mint tea in his hand, then at the wolf, then at the tree-man.

"Yggdrasil," Victor said. "How much defense budget do we have left?"

"Zero, sir. Actually, negative five thousand."

"Great," Victor said, finishing his tea in one gulp. "Then we'll have to use traps."