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“This isn’t a plant we can remove.” I looked around the cavern. “The roots are regulating the water chemistry. Look at the moss, the insects, whatever is living in that pool. They’re all concentrated around the root network. And I think it’s affecting mineral movement through the limestone too.”

“You saying the cave needs it?”

“I’m saying I don’t know where the cave ends and the plant begins.”

Barrett looked toward the flowers as the words settled over both of us.

Grandma hadn’t failed to take a specimen. She’d chosen not to.

Barrett moved to the cave wall, closed his eyes, and placed his palm against the limestone. Diamond-bright flecks immediately appeared beneath the fur at his fingertips. “The roots go behind that wall.” His hand shifted. “Down under the pool. Back toward the passage.”

“You can feel them,” I said.

His eyes opened. Barrett looked as unsettled by his own ability as I was. “I think so.”

I thought about the hidden passage, the boundary, the shimmer. I thought of the rare cutting thriving on Barrett’s windowsill. The soil chosen because it smelled right, the plants that called to him. A man who had been able to read Screaming Woods long before he understood there might be anything unusual about that.

And I remembered what Karloff had written about the Frankenpunch. It might not have created the transformations from nothing. It might have revealed something already there.

Standing in that cavern, watching light glitter beneath Barrett’s fingertips while he sensed a root network buried inside solid rock, I wondered whether the bear had ever been the most important part of what happened to him.

As I turned back toward the flowers, the second realization hit.

If I published this, people would come.

Researchers first. Botanists like me, who would want tissue samples, seeds, roots, water, soil. Then pharmaceutical companies if Grandma’s claims about its medicinal properties survived testing.

People looking for profit, who would swear they could take one specimen without causing harm.

People who would want access to the caves that had been hidden behind something I couldn’t explain. The caves that had reacted to Barrett.

My grant proposal suddenly felt obscene. I’d spent months fighting for permission to document, collect, analyze, and publish. Now I stood in front of the discovery that could prove every person who had ever dismissed me as wrong, and I understood that proving it might destroy the very thing I had come here to find.

Worse, it might expose Barrett along with it.

I looked down at Grandma’s journal, running my thumb carefully along the edge of Grandma’s page.

For most of my adult life, discovery had meant proof: find something, document it, and put your name beside it so nobody could tell you it wasn’t real.

Grandma had found something extraordinary and done the opposite. She’d protected it.

I looked across the glowing cavern, then at the faint diamond shimmer still lingering around Barrett’s fingertips.

“Hazel?”

I heard him, but I didn’t turn. My mind was already racing ahead—to the plant, the caves, Barrett, and everything that could happen if the wrong people learned what was here.

For the first time since I’d arrived in Screaming Woods, I wasn’t thinking about how to prove I was right.

I was thinking about what deserved to remain undiscovered.

Chapter 11

Barrett

She didn’t say my name in the caves.

I noticed it then, but there was too much else to process. My skin had undergone an inexplicable change, and she was kneeling by the water, her hands filled with the legacy her grandmother had left her. It wasn’t the right moment.