Chapter 1
Mrs Mariell Smithers were according to herself the sole protector of law and order within this neighbourhood. As the leader of the local HOA she ruled her realm with an iron fist and she enjoyed seeing the people of the assigned area cower before her. She knew the rules, by heart, backwards and forwards and she wasn’t a stranger to adding new ones when she saw something she didn’t like. The other members of the board could do nothing, the good lady had broken them all. And she was a master at manipulation and threats. The other board members had remained in their positions simply because they were good people who didn’t want her to be the sole ruler of the organisation.
If Mrs Smithers had been living somewhere in the middle ages she would undoubtedly have been a true tyrant, she enjoyed power and she enjoyed ruling others, by fear. She was like a hawk watching a field teeming with mice, her short but round figure could be seen sneaking around at all times of the day, trying to find something she could complain about. She carried a measuring tape in her pockets at all time, if she found one blade of grass which had grown above the regulated one inch and a half the owner of the lawn would get a rather crass letter the next day, demanding that they mow their lawn. If someone had the wrong type of flowers in their garden, the wrong type of fence, the wrong colour on their house, it all ended with letters or the lady herself standing there screeching at the poor unfortunate victim. It was enough that you parked your car an inch too close to the curb, or forgot to gather your garbage cans within five minutes after the garbage truck had left the street.
Her own home was of course impeccable, the lawn perfect, the house a picture of suburban perfection. Everything was by the book but she never raised a finger to achieve any of it. Oh no, her husband had to do it all. He was a person who probably would find purgatory to be a nice restful and relaxing place for he had lived in hell for the last thirty years. The lady herself was short and quite remarkably similar to what math defines as an orb, she was in short round and far from a beauty. That wouldn’t have mattered if she had been a nice person but she wasn’t. One of the inhabitants there came from the mid-west and he said he had encountered wild sows which had been way more placid and pretty than this woman. Her husband was a bent and skinny man who looked as if he had to beg for every little ounce and scrap of food he ever devoured and he didn’t work since his sole reason for existing was to make sure that their home was picture perfect at all times. She even went over the papers of the real estate brokers each time a house was sold and she didn’t want anybody living there which didn’t fit into her image of the perfect inhabitants. The banks and estate brokers had warned their employees, she was to be avoided by all costs.
Mrs Smithers had money, she didn’t work anymore but she had been employed at the school for some years and the children had been terrified of her for she was a sadistic bitch who loved to bully the kids and she camouflaged it as discipline. Her high was power and she craved it all the time. The school had fired her after two girls tried to commit suicide and a boy run away from home to avoid being sent to school. She had promptly sued the school but unfortunately for her a member of the CPS had been there and witnessed her attempts at breaking the kids and she was given quite a scolding by the judge who didn’t cower before her at all. It had been such a humiliation to her that she never mentioned it again. She had inherited her very wealthy father who had owned quite a lot of the businesses down town and thus she could retire early and just continue terrorizing people.
She was infamous for giving a damn about privacy, she would peek into people’s houses even at night and lord have mercy upon those she found to be deviant in any manner. Having too many kids was bad, she was sure to go after you like a rabid bloodhound. Not attending church every Sunday? Oh my, you were certainly a Satanist and had to be pushed out of the neighbourhood at all costs. Did you live with someone of the same sex? She would come running waving a bible, almost foaming at the mouth the moment she saw you. A woman living alone? Whore for sure. A man living alone? Surely a pedophile. She loved finding flaws in others, real or imaginable and the entire neighbourhood had once been a rather nice place but now few people wanted to live there anymore. The value of the estates had dropped significantly and many left, they couldn’t afford to keep the buildings as perfect as she demanded and they were dead tired of getting those annoying HOA letters each and every day. She would demand that people got their pets euthanized, that your dog did its business on the lawn just once was enough, she was suspected of having kidnapped and killed several dogs and cats during her time there and most people hated the very ground she tread upon. She was a despicable person.
She would of course attend to church as a good Christian woman, she was very proud of this, but the good reverend Mr Pike hated her, he said that Jesus himself would have had a hard time turning the other cheek to that woman. She was the antithesis of everything the saviour had asked for from his followers. But she never saw it that way, it was her duty to chastise those who had sinned and her position within the HOA was her tool to do so. She didn’t care that the others hated her very guts, no, she saw that as a sign that she was so much better than them. She walked around glowering in her self -assuredness and warmed by her power. She managed to stay on the good side of the cops and the government since she gave some rather hefty sums as donations each year but the local sheriff had said that it felt like taking blood money and if it hadn’t been that their budgets were kept terribly low he would have declined each and every check cause he knew what she was. He had seen serial killers who were better human beings than that retched piece of malice and arrogance.
Then one day the streets of the community got a new inhabitant, or rather, several. Three homes had been put up for sale and they were next to each other, the families which had lived there couldn’t take it anymore and moved out and now the real estate agents were aware of the danger so not a single word was said about the houses being sold again. The other members of the HOA got a discrete note telling that new inhabitants would move inn but she wasn’t notified at all. Mrs Smithers were not at home the day the moving trucks entered the street, so she couldn’t start to complain right away. The three houses were sold to some people who all worked for the same company, two families and a couple of men who were probably partners. The others there were staring for not only did all of these people look like super models, they were far from what Mrs Smithers saw as perfect members of her domain. All wore their hair long, they seemed to be rather wealthy and they were young. The two families had one kid each and that was something Mrs Smithers would attack with the ferocity of a wolverine, one kid alone would become spoiled for sure. The kids too had long hair even though they both were lads and there was something oddly ethereal about them all. One of the oldest inhabitants there was old Mr Corandish and he was originally Irish. He just snickered and whispered something to himself when he saw them, the man standing next to him could have sworn that it was “sidhe”.
Anyhow, everybody was curious as to what would happen now, and how Mrs Smithers would react. Well, they didn’t have to wonder for very long, the woman exploded. First of all the new inhabitants didn’t go to church and one of them told her rather calmly that they belonged to a different religion and the long hair was a part of their faith. That immediately made her raise her hackles and she got even more pissed when they started repainting their homes. The colours she had determined to be suitable were few, and they obviously didn’t care, they painted their houses in some odd tones of green. She went to complain and was almost fuming like a constipated dragon but she was promptly told that they hadn’t signed up for joining the HOA so the rules didn’t apply to them.
From now on she was on the war path, she tried so hard to find something she could use to get rid of them she forgot to watch the others of the society. She was there day and night and the worst thing was that the new people were all very polite to her. They never seemed to be intimidated by her nor did they lose their temper and the kids were very well behaved and even their huge shaggy dogs were the very image of well trained and bred. There wasn’t a bark or sound coming from them and she just couldn’t find anything she could use. She tried to change the rules of the HOA so that people who weren’t Christians couldn’t live there but these people weren’t even members so what could she do. She would run around with her measuring tape and try to find a flaw but there simply weren’t any and when she tried to attack the gay couple by accusing them of everything between heaven and earth they simply ignored her. And they were not people you would want to piss off, all were very tall and broad shouldered and even the women were athletic and moved with a sort of fleeting elegance you see only in martial artists or ballet dancers. Mrs Smithers didn’t give a damn, she was desperate to remove this in her eyes stain on the perfection of her personal neighbourhood and her attempts became more and more desperate.
These new inhabitants had been warned and they tried to ignore her, it wasn’t until one morning when the mad woman tried to kidnap one of the kids in order to force the lad into claiming that he was being abused that it became a bit too much even for them. They were all born in this age and had become a part of the modern society but that didn’t mean that they had forgotten their wood elf roots. Far from it. That night they started to take the fight back to Mrs Smithers, and with a vengeance. They couldn’t give a damn if people started wondering what the heck it was that was going on, their employer and king could make such things go away easily enough. But that ogre had to go, she was a menace to the entire society, probably a reincarnated orc and Rochriel was rather sure that the woman had been one of the sergeants of Sauron, like Azog.
The next morning when Mrs Smithers woke up it was to find the room oddly dark, she was frowning. She hadn’t pulled the curtains forth the night before? She got up and switched on the lights and screamed. The windows were almost completely covered, by leaves. She ran outside, still screaming and the whole building was in fact covered, by kudzu. The invasive plant was of course known to cover structures with astonishing speed but this fast? And where had it come from? She was in tears as she called every gardener she knew to make them come and remove the horror, her husband tried but for some reason the plant just grew back, with the speed of a racer car.
The gardeners came and now started a very hard fight, the kudzu grew as if it had been fertilized with steroids and the only solution was to tear up the roots. That in itself was not easy since they were surprisingly deep and strong and Mrs Smithers flower beds were never again the same afterwards. But it was over and she could shake off the shock and horror and return to her normal duties, terrorizing the neighbours. She was so angry she was close to having a heart attack but that didn’t stop her, she was yet again snooping around, trying to find violations of any kind. She tore into poor Mrs Brown down the street since her Dahlia’s had begun to fade and she hadn’t removed the ugly flowers. Mr Deliash on the other side of the street was given the lecture of a lifetime since his rose bush had grown an inch too tall, it had to be cut down. As she continued her round, tearing into people and leaving tears and frustrations she felt better, when she reached the end of her round she was almost back to her good old self again. The lord was surely testing her but she was steadfast and strong, yes, she was like Job.
Things returned to normal for a few days, then one evening as she was heading out to go to a meeting her lawn suddenly started to wither. It became brown and yellow in patches which grew steadily and yet again the gardeners were called upon. The reason was probably an acute lack of nitrogen and so fertilizer was brought forth and administered. That night the lawn grew, not a few inches, no, not a few feet, oh heck no. It grew like bamboo, a foot an hour and by the morrow there was a jungle out there. Almost seven feet of grass, it would have made a farmer mad with joy to have a field growing like that but to Mrs Smithers it was a nightmare. The lawnmower couldn’t cope with this, so there was only one solution. The gardener who finally agreed upon coming and helping out had to use an old fashioned sling blade.
By the end of it there was an impressive heap of grass there and she ordered the gardener to remove it immediately, which he promptly denied for how the heck could he fit several tonnes of grass into his small van? In the end she managed to get hold of a farmer who came with a tractor and a trailer and removed it all, it was excellent cow feed after all. But the tractor and the trailer left dirt on the road and the people responsible for the roads there didn’t want to send off a street washer just to clean her street. It would cost too much, besides, it would rain soon enough and the dirt would be gone.
Mrs Smithers were grunting and growling like a feral hog searching for truffles, her husband tried to stay out of her way and so did everybody else. Her garden had to be perfect, it was perfect no more! It had to be the fault of someone and since she was rather sure that nobody would dare to sabotage her property her husband was the one to be skinned and flogged verbally. He had used the wrong dose of fertilizer, he was such a dumbass and so on and so forth until the poor man probably begged for the grim reaper to hurry up and reap his poor soul.
The peace returned to the neighbourhood for a few days, then Mrs Smithers lawn yet again faced an attack, this time from beneath. It was voles, hundreds of them, digging huge holes and mounds and they wreaked havoc upon the smooth surface. The voles were swarming everywhere and Mrs Smithers were in despair. The exterminators had no idea of where the infestation had come from, and the voles were huge and very vicious. When the traps and poisons finally ended the problem the lawn looked more like a quarry than a lawn and the odd thing was that the neighbours hadn’t seen a single rodent. They had all attacked the garden of Mrs Smithers. The exterminators said that it could be due to the fertilizer scandal, the roots had perhaps become extra juicy and nutritious who knew?
By now Mrs Smithers had become rather paranoid when it came to her property, she was sure that something odd was going on but what? She wasn’t superstitious for the lord was with her of course and she wouldn’t stoop so low as to start believing in curses and such nonsense. She remained steadfast, determined to bring the entire neighbourhood to heel, whatever it would take her to achieve this. She tried to get rid of the new inhabitants by spreading rumours, which didn’t spread for the others there all liked these newcomers. She tried to accuse them of being Satanists, that fell to deaf ears. She tried tricking them into signing a HOA contract but that too failed miserably. The kid she tried to trick into signing his father’s name wrote only some odd scribbles which didn’t look like any alphabet she had seen before.
That evening the newcomers gathered in the home of the gay couple, they knew that this woman was bad news and since she had gone so far they had to take it to the next level. Haldaran was the leader of the small group since he was the oldest among them, he was thinking hard. “I think we have to use her own obsession against her once again but how? Our powers doesn’t include things which aren’t natural after all”
The two women stared at each other and the youngest one, a very pretty avarin elleth grinned, her eyes shining. “We could call Aiwendil?”
Haldaran frowned. “Can we truly bother him with such things? It is sort of …well, overkill?!”
She shook her head. “No, he loves to help out and everybody knows that he just aches to do something useful again. Oh please, I am sure he could fix this, rather fast”
Haldaran smiled. “Alright, I will give him a call, I am sure he can come up with a good idea”
Two days later the new inhabitants got a visitor, the uncle of one of them, a rather friendly looking little man clad in tweed carrying a small suitcase. He looked like everybody’s favourite grandpa and he was probably somewhere in his sixties. He had already been told of the problem and he was given a copy of the HOA rules. He pointed at one line of text, his grin was getting wider all the time. “There it is my friends, her nemesis, the key to her downfall!”
The rules were rather strict when it came to lawn ornaments, for some peculiar reason Mrs Smithers had a fondness for lawn gnomes, those small odd figurines which most people find creepy or just generally ugly and a sign of really terrible taste. So she had made sure that there were garden gnomes almost everywhere, small ones, large ones, pretty ones and godawfully ugly ones. Most people loathed them but the rules stated that gnomes were a part of every well maintained garden and thus this area had a very high population of the small horrors.
Mrs Smithers were out on her usual round that night, it had gone dark and the street lights were flickering, they were probably close to going out and she swore to herself that she would skin the electrician responsible for this street, it was lousy work. She walked towards the cul-de-sack and was about to turn when she saw something moving towards her.
She stopped, frowning, it was very small whatever it was and moved slowly and in a peculiar jerking manner. Nobody could have let their toddler out this late? She blinked, what the…
The object came closer and now she saw that it was a garden gnome, it was alive?! And it had glowing red eyes and its tiny hands were waving in front of it, trying to grasp onto whatever came into reach. Mrs Smithers were petrified, what in the name of the lord was this. The thing opened its mouth, it had teeth like a bat, long and thin and it spoke, in a creaky deep voice. “Nom-nom-nom”
Mrs Smithers screamed, then she ran back home, screaming like a banshee the whole way. She ran inside, locked the door and then she grasped the shotgun she owned for protection and sat by the door that entire night. She couldn’t call the cops for who would believe her? As her more rational side emerged again she realized that of course she had been scared by something perfectly mundane. It had to be one of those ghastly toys the kids these days were so fond of, a robot of some sorts. Yes, she had been scared by something completely harmless, she had been silly and thank the lord nobody had seen her.
She was a bit nervous the next evening though, it had been a bad shock and she was not going to let this continue, if she saw that toy again she would confiscate it and fine the owner. She walked down the street and yet again the lights flickered. She stopped with a sense of dread, what was this? Some instinct warned her of danger and she turned around, slowly. The street was filled with gnomes, they had moved inn on her in complete silence and they were just dark figurines until they all raised their head as one, eyes glowing like red embers in the dark, mouths opening to reveal terrible teeth and then those voices, deep and booming, thin and screeching, all crying out. “NOM-NOM-NOM!”
Mrs Smithers passed out, went down like a log of timber for the axe and when she woke up she was in the back of an ambulance, heading for the hospital. She couldn’t believe it, was she seeing hallucinations? Had she hit her head perhaps? Could she have a brain tumour? Of course, it was the water, the plant outside of the city was sending out contaminated water and she was gonna sue them from here to Mars and back. The doctors checked her out, she didn’t mention the scary garden gnomes, she just said she had felt faint and the doctors prescribed something for her blood pressure, then she was sent home, embarrassed and yet fuming with rage and filled with energy. Somebody had to pay for this and pay hard, yes, it would go down in history for sure. The local gnomes were all in their normal spots, didn’t seem to have been moved at all and she sat down and added a new rule to the long list, from now on garden gnomes were forbidden. She was sure that there was LSD in the water or something, or maybe somebody had slipped her something at the meeting she had attended that evening? Oh yes, for sure. The idiots feared her, there it was. She would make sure that they all had to resign, she would rule the HOA, for the rest of her days.
She was rather busy for some days, trying to find something she could use against the other board members and she left everybody alone which to some was like a deep breath of fresh air after a stay in a dark dungeon. She sent some letters, then she prepared to call her lawyer and she had enough dirt on them all to force them out for sure. She went to bed rather self-assured, and she fell asleep swiftly, convinced that she would come out of this victorious as always.
She woke up, the room was almost completely dark and she felt an odd smell. Her husband slept in a room of his own since he snored and she sat up, was the bed moving? She tried to ignite the night lamp but nothing happened, it remained dark and her heart sank in her chest. There was a scratching sound, as if something hard was being dragged across the floors, and she tried to listen. There was a sound, far away, a sort of chanting and she blinked, what the hey? She walked to the window and almost screamed. The lawn and street was covered with garden gnomes, all carrying torches, chanting. “Nom-nom-nom”
They had surrounded the house and she let out a howl and ran back to bed, diving into the duvet, hiding. Her rational mind told her that this couldn’t be real and yet it obviously was for the flames were visible in the window and why didn’t everybody else see them? Was she going mad? There was that odd scraping sound again, probably stone feet dragging along the floor boards. She shivered and then the floors shook and as she took peek out she screamed. There were gnomes everywhere in her room, staring at her with glowing eyes and they were pointing at her with stubby little fingers and screeching their mantra. “Nom-nom-nom!”
They got closer, some started to climb up onto the bed and she saw that they had butchers knives in their hands and she screamed and screamed until the world turned black in front of her eyes and she fell back, passed out.
The next morning there were an ambulance in front of the house and as the neighbours gathered the medics said that Mrs Smithers had suffered a stroke sometime during the night, all she was capable of was laughing and mumbling nom nom nom and if she saw a garden gnome she went catatonic. She was taken away and everybody stared at each other with relief and growing smiles. That evening there was a party held in the street, the barbecues were brought out from their long rest, the kids could play in the street, the cars parked where it was most convenient. Mr Smithers stayed there, even though his wife was put away into a care facility. He turned out to be a rather nice and friendly guy and the local HOA was ended there and then. Now the garden gnomes were placed near the road, for everyone to see. If they could keep the old ogre at bay it was a welcome thing, even if they were ugly as sin.
The newcomers soon became a part of the society and taught the kids how to plant their own vegetables and care for the trees and the society was thriving now it was rid of the mare riding its back for so long. Mrs Smithers were not missed in the least but each Christmas a group of concerned inhabitants of the neighbourhood sent her a tiny gift. A nice little garden gnome, just to make sure she remembered them all.
