The Gnome: A Horror Story

I submitted this horror story to a horror magazine six years ago. It wasn't published. I think it's not so bad.

“Excuse me, but—“

“Sit down”, said the man with the garden gnome, “and I’ll tell you all about it.” His voice was as weary as his face.

“Well, I just wondered—“

“Of course you wondered. Everybody wonders. Grab me a rum and Coke, and I’ll tell you all about it.”

“OK.”

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and Cassidy’s was almost empty. I’d just written the last words of my thesis, and I was in the mood for a celebratory drink. The sight of a twenty-something man sitting in the shadiest corner of the pub, a garden gnome propped on the couch beside him, couldn’t help drawing my interest.

“Thanks. Have a seat. So, you want to know why I’m sitting in a pub with a garden gnome?”

“It’s not something you see every day.”

The young man laughed bitterly. He was a sandy-haired fellow with an athletic figure, fashionable clothes, and a general air of being One of the Guys—except for the weariness in his eyes. He took a thirsty gulp from his beer, but somehow he didn’t seem like a drunk.

“That’s because I move about. I don’t want to become one of the sights. What do you think of this gnome?”, he asked—rather nervously, I thought.

I looked at it. There was nothing special about it. It was about two foot tall, it had a green cap and a blue waistcoat, and no great artistry had gone into making it. The smile on its face was rather imbecilic, but not strikingly so.

“Just a garden gnome”, I said, “like dozens I’ve seen before.”

“That’s what I thought”, he said, glaring at it. “When it first came into my life, eight years ago.”

“Eight years ago?”

“Sure.  The day I finished school. We went out drinking. It got pretty wild. We were starting the great adventure, right? And me and some of the other guys were going to go backpacking. Life seemed pretty good.”

“So where does the gnome come into it?”

“Well, we were walking past old Mrs. Coventry’s house and it—well, it caught my eye. I mean, I’d mown her lawn twenty times, and I’d never noticed it before, but somehow it caught my eye, you know? And I’d heard about this thing…” His voice trailed off, and he stared into his beer, as if overcome.

“What thing?”

“Oh, you’ve heard of it”, he said, looking up again. “It’s a gag. Just a gag. You steal somebody’s garden gnome, you take it all over the place, and you send its owner pictures of the gnome on its travels. Like, a picture of the gnome with the pyramids in the background, or the gnome propped up against a palm tree on a sandy beach, or beside the Lincoln Memorial—you know?”

I nodded, and smiled. I’d heard about this all right. Maybe it was the jerk in me, but I thought it was quite funny.

“So, I guess that’s what you did?”

“That’s what I did. I took it to Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria. We took pictures of it beside the Acropolis and in the Hagia Sophia and, oh, all over the place.” He waved his arm descriptively. “Once we put a little turban on him. We convinced local girls to kiss him for the camera. Stuff like that.”

“And you sent the pictures to…”

“Mrs. Coventry, yes. “

“Was she a real bitch or something?”

The guy looked down into his beer again, ashamed. “Not really. A bit cranky. But nothing…. You know, it was just there. It hadn’t nothing to do with Mrs. Coventry.  She just had a gnome, that’s all.”

There was a long silence, filled only by Eye of the Tiger playing on the pub’s sound system.

“So why didn’t you give it back?”, I asked, taking another look at the gnome. It didn’t look any less ordinary this time.

“The thing is, I did!” said the young man. “Three days after I got home, I took it to her house in the middle of the night. When I got there, there was a For Sale sign on the house.”

“She’d moved?”

“She’d died. Just a couple of days after we left. She was already cremated and scattered on her favourite beach by the time we’d got to Turkey.” He took another long gulp from his beer. It was almost finished. He had not looked into my eyes for a while.

“And—you felt weird about putting it back…” I was beginning to see it all.

“Sure I felt weird about it”, he said. “But I still put it back. What else was I going to do?”

The last notes of “Eye of the Tiger” faded away, and were replaced by the opening drum-beat of “Billy Jean”.

“So…why do you still have it?”

The guy looked up, straight into my eyes, and I was surprised by the intensity of that stare. He had bright, blue eyes. He was just a kid—a frightened kid.

“Do you know how often I’ve tried to get rid of this gnome?” he asked. “I left it in Mrs. Coventry’s garden five nights in a row. Every single morning I woke up with it in the bed beside me.”

“Oh, come on…”

He carried on, impatiently. “I’ve thrown it over a bridge. I’ve burnt it. I’ve hacked it to pieces. I’ve left it in churches. I’ve locked it in a safe. And all the time, it follows me.”

The guy was serious. He spoke slowly, and looked into my eyes, with every semblance of sanity. What could I say?

“How does it….follow you?”

“It’s just there”, he said, pointing at the thing, staring at it with molten hatred in his eyes. “I come home and it’s in my apartment. I go to work and it’s on my desk. I pack luggage and, when I open it, half of what I put in is missing and this thing is there instead. I’ve broken up with five girls and lost three jobs because of it. And that’s just the start. That’s just the start.”

I looked at the gnome, half-expecting to see something more sinister about it now. But it was just a gnome, as silly and banal-looking as ever.

I burst out laughing. This guy had me going for a second, I thought.  “Come off it”, I said, smiling at him. “What’s this about? Research project? Prank? Hidden camera show?”

The young man seemed neither surprised nor offended. He just reached into his jacket, took out his wallet and a notebook of some kind, and plucked a fifty dollar note from the wallet.

“Sure, it’s all a prank”, he said, laying the note on the table, and smiling at me—a bitter, hopeless smile. “Tell you what. Fifty dollars. Take the gnome and do whatever the hell you like with it. But you sign me a receipt. I’ll give you fifty dollars.”

I looked at the gnome, looked at the young man, and said: “No thanks.”

“Come on”, he said, with another hopeless smile.  “It’s all a delusion, right? You’ll be helping me.  Helping to free me from my delusion. And you know what? Take a hundred.” He drew another fifty dollar note from the wallet and laid it on top of the first.

I could have done with a hundred dollars. What student couldn’t? But somehow, the very thought of taking the gnome—ordinary-looking as it was—made my skin crawl.

“Two hundred”, he said, putting a hundred dollar note on top of the other two notes. “Why not? What are you afraid of?”

I rose to my feet. This time there had been a note of desperation in his voice that made me nervous. You never knew what desperate people might do.

“No thanks” I said. “But I hope…”

“Yeah,” said the young guy, hunching over the table, as though he was buckling under an enormous weight. “Yeah, I know. Thanks for the beer.”

I headed straight for the street, only looking back as I was about to head out the door. The kid wasn’t looking at me. He wasn’t looking at the gnome. He was still hunched over the table, his head bowed.

But the gnome was looking at me. And for the first time, his smile looked far from imbecilic.