Seventeen-year-old Maja finds an abandoned conservatory at the end of her street and a herbarium filled with plants no book could explain.
Maja had always suspected that her sleepy little town was hiding something. Not the harmless kind of secret people gossiped about over fences, but something older, stranger, waiting just out of sight. On evenings like this one, when the wind carried the smell of rain and the streets were nearly empty, that feeling grew stronger.
At the end of her road stood a rusted gate she had never seen anyone open. Tonight, as dusk deepened, Maja noticed it standing half ajar. Beyond it, through a wall of tangled shrubs, rose the broken glass frame of an old conservatory. The windows were filmed with dust, yet even from the path she could see odd marks pressed across the panes, like sketches of leaves she had never learned to name.
Maja looked back at the street. No lights had come on. No one was watching. She slipped through the gate and crossed the overgrown yard, each step louder than it should have been. The air near the conservatory was warm, almost feverish, and threaded with a faint, green smell that reminded her of crushed stems after summer rain.
The door gave way at the lightest touch.
Inside, the light had gone thin and grey, as if the evening had been trapped under the glass and forgotten. Tables leaned under the weight of pots, cracked jars, and notebooks swollen with age. In the centre of the room lay a huge book, so large it seemed less placed there than left behind on purpose. Its cover was dark as wet bark. When Maja stepped closer, the title shifted under her gaze, the letters rearranging themselves like shadows stirred by a passing hand:
The Shadow Herbarium.
Her fingers hovered for a second before she opened it.
The first page showed a plant she could not have named if her life depended on it: ivy, perhaps, but with wings instead of leaves, its veins glowing faintly against the paper. In the margin, someone had written in sharp black ink: Only in moonlight.
The room changed around her. The warmth dropped away. One of the shadows beneath the benches stirred, stretching where no light could reach, until it no longer looked like a shadow at all.
Then, from somewhere deep in the conservatory, a whisper slid through the stillness.
"It’s open now."
Maja froze, one hand still resting on the page, as the thing in the dark moved closer.