Off Switch

A Substack Zone Horror Story

The Twilight Zone redefined storytelling, drawing audiences into the unimaginable. Now, 66 years later, top writers, artists, and musicians are stepping into its eerie glow with a fresh twist. Ready to see where they’ll take you?

Liz Zimmers | Edith Bow | Sean Archer | Bryan Pirolli | Andy Futuro | CB Mason | John Ward | NJ | Hanna Delaney | William Pauley III | Jason Thompson | Nolan Green | Shaina Read | J. Curtis | Honeygloom | Stephen Duffy | K.C. Knouse | Michele Bardsley | Bob Graham | Annie Hendrix | Clancy Steadwell | Jon T | Sean Thomas McDonnell | Miguel S. | A.P Murphy | Lisa Kuznak | Bridget Riley | EJ Trask | Shane Bzdok | Adam Rockwell | Will Boucher

Jack opened the passenger side door to his car and leaned inside to unlatch the seatbelt. He grabbed the bubble wrapped bundle sitting on the seat and tucked it under his coat. The street was quiet, it had rained earlier in the evening and water dripped from eaves and trees, rivulets trickled down the gutters. Jack breathed in the freshly washed scent of the neighborhood as it glittered in the streetlights and smiled to himself, enjoying the peaceful scene. The bundle under his coat was certainly never going to encourage him to take a deep breath in its presence, unless his experiment had worked.

He shut the car door and walked up the cyclamen lined path to the house where a wisteria vine climbed up the porch column and across the special trellis he’d built into the awning. Its spring blooms had long since faded, but the vine itself was lush and green, creating a portal from the world of the outside to the world of the home. He crossed the threshold of the porch and unlocked the front door. Scents of cumin, garlic, and ginger wafted to him from the kitchen as he slipped out of his loafers and headed for the bright interior of the house. Verdant abundance greeted him from every surface, every nook and cranny, and even cascaded down from the ceilings.

Outside the kitchen door, Jack repositioned the bundle hidden beneath his coat to keep it inconspicuous.

“Hey, there you are, I was beginning to wonder,” Jack’s wife, Erica, turned from her sentry over the stove and kissed her husband on the cheek.

“Fender bender on the bridge. Such a hassle. Smells amazing.”

“New recipe, hope you’re in the mood for Asian.”

“I’m in the mood for anything that smells that good. Give me a minute, I’ve got to check on some lights downstairs.” Jack moved quickly for the door to the basement.

“Hold it, Mister. What’s that under your coat?”

Jack flinched, his hand on the doorknob.

“Just something from work. We ran out of space at the lab again.”

“Jack, we’ve talked about this. The weird stuff you do there needs to stay there. Do you remember the rash I got last time? Because I do, it hurt like hell for three weeks. Not to mention, I had to go to my cousin’s wedding looking like a smallpox victim.”

Jack turned and put the bundle on the kitchen table. He walked over to Erica, putting his arm around her waist. “Honey, I solved that problem, I built an air filtered tent downstairs. No pollen, no spores, no smells in the rest of the house, I promise.” He grinned and gestured to the bundle, “I wouldn’t worry, though, we can’t even get this one to bloom anyway. The bud has been sitting around for a month now. Doing absolutely nothing.”

Erica sighed and leaned her forehead against Jack’s. “I love your brain, I do. I love how creative and endlessly enthusiastic you are, but you stress me out sometimes with the wacky stuff you do at the lab.”

“I love you, too, honey. And I know. And I’m still really, really sorry about last time. I should have planned for that pollen cloud. But this time there’s nothing to worry about, I promise.”

Erica rolled her eyes, but a smile quirked up the corner of her mouth. “Dinner in twenty minutes. Sharp.” Jack grinned and turned, grabbing the bundle and disappearing downstairs.

Jack’s home lab was nothing like his high-tech work environment. But the basement was bright, humid, and packed with exotic plants. More than a few were experiments Erica hadn’t caught him sneaking into the house. The basement also now included a clear plastic tent, its air pumped through a filter out a nearby window. Outside, another, much smaller tent with a stronger filter kept any pollen or anything else from polluting the neighborhood. Jack unzipped the tent and stepped inside. He flipped on an overhead grow light and then a small heater that sat on the floor. Misters ran across the top of the tent. In the center sat an empty table.

Jack set the bundle on the table and went to work unwrapping it. Inside lay something incredible. It was a little bigger than a man’s head and looked like a brown Brussels’ sprout. A rafflesia bud. The bud of the largest flower known to man. The bud was growing out of a green stick about the width of a man’s forearm. Jack set it down carefully and stood back, marveling at the sight. The biggest flower bud in the world! In his basement!

Rafflesia were thought to be impossible to grow in captivity as they parasitized the wild grape vines growing in South East Asia. The rafflesia seed would imbed itself inside a vine where it would sprout and grow a small bud, sending roots along the inside of the vine to steal water and nutrients. Once the bud grew too big to fit inside the vine, it would burst out, with its roots remaining inside and continuing to feed. Without the vine, it was thought impossible to sustain the flower’s growth. And what a flower it was. Five leathery blood red petals flecked with white, warty bumps stretching four feet across from petal tip to petal tip. At the center of the flower a yawning black pit hid the plant’s reproductive organs.

But Jack and his team had hopefully changed the plant’s limited viability. They had developed a proxy for the grape vine, a soft wood pulp mixed with nutrients had been loaded into a silicon jacket and a rafflesia seed had been placed inside. And it had grown. Rapidly, too. Much faster than Jack and his colleagues had expected. If the flower bloomed, the product could be a mass-market hit. A giant rafflesia in every backyard, or taking up an entire dinning table!

The only problem was the scent. To attract carrion flies, the plant’s main pollinator, it gave off the scent of rotting meat. Not exactly what an average person wants their dining room to smell like, so Jack and his team had sequenced the plant’s genome, found the gene that created the scent and turned it off. With that done, plant shouldn’t smell like anything at all, but he had brought it home to test. Erica was extremely sensitive, even with the tent vented, she’d pick up any hint of rot. Of course, turning one gene off could always turn another gene on. This was a risk when working with DNA, turn off a gene for the color red, suddenly you have plants that don’t flower at all. It was a crap shoot a lot of the time, but Jack was nothing if not persistent. He’d perfect it eventually.

He was already brainstorming the lab’s next project. Maybe Venus flytraps big enough to catch rats? Or plants that released mood enhancing chemicals? Plants that grew fur? Plants that could see you? Plants that could give hugs… the possibilities were endless.

His phone pinged and he looked at the time. Damn. Time for dinner. He thumbed to the message.

Hey Jack, found a really unexpected thing in the DNA. Call me.

Jack’s finger hovered over the call button. He heard the basement door open.

“Time for dinner, Jack!” Erica called down to him. He sighed and pocketed his phone. This unexpected thing would have to wait.

Dinner was excellent, but afterwords Erica insisted they watch a movie or two. Jack’s phone taunted him from its place from the coffee table while they watched The Fly, one of his wife’s favorites. He really wanted to know what the lab had found. By the time he called his cohort at the lab, it was a few hours after the message had been sent.

“Tom, hey, sorry to take so long to call you back.”

“No problemo, but listen this is wild, we found dormant genes related to carnivorous behavior. They’re similar to genes found in nepenthes, you know the pitcher plant, and we’re thinking that the huge well in the center of the rafflesia used to hold digestive fluid at some point in the plant’s history.”

“That is wild. From carnivorous to parasitic? That’s quite an evolutionary leap, you’re sure?” Jack started to unzip the rafflesia’s tent as he spoke. “Not to mention, it’s all flower, so all of its reproductive organs are in the center where the reproductive juices would be, how did it reproduce?”

“Beats me. We ran what we found through the Kew’s database and the nepenthes carnivory genes were closest, not a perfect match of course. But they’re both found in Borneo, so it makes sense that they could have evolved similar ways of feeding. Maybe nepenthes outcompeted rafflesia and rafflesia had to turn to being a parasite. Who knows? But there are still plenty of other genes we need to identify that might give us clues. We should be busy with this one for a good long while. But can you imagine the implications?”

“A plant the size of my coffee table capable of trapping and digesting the family cat? Say, how would we go about testing this? Assuming we can even turn the gene on. We can’t just go around throwing cats at the plant to see what happens.”

“Lab rats I guess.”

“That’s a lot of paperwork. How about steaks from the market instead.”

Tom laughed, “We’re probably getting ahead of ourselves. We haven’t even gotten one to bloom yet. How’s our specimen looking after the ride home?”

Jack stepped through the tent flap and stared in disbelief at the rafflesia bulb. A large, thick red petal had peeled away from the bud, and a second had started to unfold as well.

“It’s blooming!” Jack could barely contain his excitement.

“No kidding? Look who has the magic touch. Maybe we should move the entire lab to your place.”

“Ha! Erica would kill me,” he laughed. “Speaking of, I’ve got to get back upstairs. I’ll let you know how it’s doing in the morning.”

“Ok, buddy, you take care.”

“You too, Tom.”

Jack reached a tentative hand out to touch the flower, half afraid it would wither under his fingertips. Instead he could have sworn it trembled and sent a faint jolt up his arm.

“Relax, Jack, you’re letting your excitement play tricks on you,” he muttered to himself. The leaf was thick and felt like soft suede with warts. He examined the base of the leaf, where it met the center of the plant and looked into the small bit of the dark maw that he could see. Moisture glinted in the overhead lights like stars in a black night.

“That’s interesting,” he muttered to himself, Tom’s theory about the center holding digestive juices came to mind. But no, that didn’t make much sense. Did it? They’d turned off the rotting scent gene, was that enough to turn on the carnivory gene? It could be, he’d have to wait until it finished blooming to get more information.

He took a few pictures and sent them to Tom before heading back upstairs.

Erica met him with a glass of wine and the remote.

“I can’t believe you’ve never seen Invasion of the Body Snatchers, it’s right up your ally.”

Jack pulled her close and kissed her wine stained lips.

“Aren’t you afraid I’ll try and create one?”

“Oh absolutely. Come on, let’s watch.”

Jack thought the movie was preposterous. Plus it wasn’t even about plants, it was about alien goo that assimilated plants to conveniently reproduce fake humans. He also couldn’t stop thinking about the huge, once carnivorous plant in his basement. There were nepenthes in Borneo found with rats inside their pitchers, so it wasn’t out of the realm of possibility for a giant carnivorous plant to exist. But a carnivorous flower was unheard of. No carnivorous plant also had carnivorous flowers. It just wouldn’t make any sense. Erica yawned next to him.

“Bedtime?”

“Yeah, I’m beat. How about you?”

“Yeah, I just want to check on the flower before bed.”

“Flower?”

Jack grinned, “The thing I brought home from the lab that you were upset about.”

“Is it pretty?”

“It’s incredible, come see.” He needed her down there to test the scent, so this was perfect.

“I don’t know, last time…”

“It’ll be fine.”

Jack grabbed Erica’s hand and led her downstairs and into the tent. By now the bud was completely open and measured, Jack guessed, at least four and a half feet across. Erica stood with her mouth hanging open.

“Did you- did you create this?”

“Oh, no, they grow wild in Borneo. We just figured out how to get them to bloom here without their host plants. It’s a parasite! Isn’t that great? We also made them smell better. What does it smell like to you?” Jake waited while Erica sniffed the air and moved warily closer to the plant.

“Nothing. I don’t smell anything.”

“Really?” He bent down to sniff inside the well felt his heart thump him in the chest. The center of the flower was full of liquid. Was it possible? Had they switched on the carnivory gene? His head spun and he felt a little light headed.

“Why? What should it smell like?”

“In the wild they’re called corpse flowers because they smell like rot.” Jack examined the inside of the center of the plant, the reproductive organs hadn’t developed, at least not yet.

“Gross, I’m very glad you didn’t bring one of the stinking ones home. So how does it make that noise?”

“Noise?” Jack leaned in closer to the flower. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Really? It’s like a hum.”

“Huh, maybe it’s the fan.” He shut it off.

“No, I still hear it.”

He turned off the heater, then the lights.

“Nope, still hear the noise. It’s a little grating actually.”

“Huh, interesting. Head on upstairs, I don’t want you to get a headache or anything.”

“Yeah, good idea.”

Jack texted Tom:

-We turned on the carnivory gene by accident it looks like. You were right, the center is full of fluid. Erica says the plant has no smell… but is humming. I can’t hear it though.

-What? Humming? Wild. Do you think they’re connected? The hum is to attract prey?

-Maybe. I’d feel better about that hypothesis if I could hear it, too.

-I’ll be over in the morning. We’ll see if I can hear it. If not we’ll have to take it back to the lab to find a way to capture the vibrations.

-We’ve got a MEMS accelerometer, don’t we?

-Yeah, we bought it for that talking plant experiment.

-Well at least something good will come of that debacle then, lol.

-Right? I’ll be over in the morning.

-Sounds good. See you in the AM.

Upstairs Jack heard Erica in the bathroom.

“You ok, hon?” He popped his head in the open door. She turned sideways to look at him and he had to fight back a grimace. She scowled hard.

“Got a stupid headache. I swear Jack, if you bring one more plant home from the lab -“

“Ok, ok, ok,” he grabbed her by the shoulders. “Hey, did you take anything?”

“Yes,” she sank into him.

“Ok, go lie down. I’ll get you a cold compress and some water. It’s just a headache, that’s all it’s going to be.” He paused, “You can’t still hear the plant, right?”

“No. I don’t think so. I don’t know, the pain is so bad it’s hard to think.”

“Ok, lie down. Ice will help. I’m so sorry.”

Jack ran to the kitchen and got an ice pack from the freezer. She was right, he really needed to stop bringing stuff home, it wasn’t fair to cause her all this grief. He closed the freezer and nearly dropped the ice pack. Erica stood in front of the basement door with her ear against it.

“What are you doing?”

“I can still hear it.”

“Ok, you can borrow my noise cancelling head phones. They’re in the office.” He handed her the ice pack, “Take this and go back to bed.”

“I think it’s saying something to me.”

“Saying something?”

“It’s speaking to me. I hear its meaning through my body.”

“Ok, haha, you got me. Funny prank. Look I learned my lesson. I won’t bring stuff home anymore.” Jack said, more hopefully than anything. She wasn’t exactly the pranking type.

Erica turned to him. Jack froze, her eyes were unfocused, she swayed, and her lips moved almost imperceptibly.

“I think it’s trying to tell me something.”

“No. I think you’re… I mean vibrations can affect people in different ways. Cause hallucinations and stuff, I think. Come on, it’s just messing with your head.” He put an arm around her shoulder. “I’m going to get you a sleeping pill and you can wear my headphones to bed. You’ll feel better in the morning. Tom is coming over and we’re going to take the flower back to the lab. Ok?”

“It’s hungry, Jack.”

“Its got nutrients in the fake vine we made it. It is definitely not hungry.”

A half hour later they were both in bed. Erica was trying to sleep, Jack was hoping they’d be able to turn off the humming gene. Driving consumers insane was not going to be great for business. Eventually, with thoughts of science and commerce dancing in his head, he drifted off to sleep.

---

BANG BANG BANG!

“Jack! Erica!” Tom pounded on the front door. He’d been trying to get a hold of Jack all morning, and now no one was answering the door.

BANG BANG BANG!

“Jackie boy! Rise and shine!”

Nothing. But he couldn’t shake a feeling of unease, goosebumps rose on the back of his neck. The air was thick and unsettling. Both cars were in the driveway. Tom jogged down the porch steps and around to the side of the house. The windows were too high for him to see inside, but there were a couple of basement windows. Maybe he could get in that way. Near the back of the house he spotted a window and knelt down beside it. Cleaning it off with the sleeve of his jacket he peered inside. The tent Jack had told him about sat in the center of the basement, there was movement inside it, but the plastic was too opaque for him to see clearly.

He banged on the window, “Jack! Buddy, let me in!” He shivered, what was that? Laying his palm flat against the window, he held it there. The window was vibrating, sending a chill up his arm. He pulled his hand away and looked up at the tent again, peering as best he could around the basement.

“No, no, no, no, no.” He looked around the planter beds near the window and found a large rock, smashing the glass. The hum hit him like a thick wave from a subwoofer and he fell backwards on the grass, his heart felt like it was stuttering in his chest. He forced himself to breathe and crawled back to the window.

“Jack?” The bare foot he’d seen lying on the floor just beyond the corner of the tent hadn’t moved, but the red lake of blood was slowing running toward the drain in the center of the basement. Tom tore off his jacket and used it to clear glass away from the window casement.

Then he climbed inside. The hum vibrated through his entire body. All his hair stood on end as he crept closer to the tent, skirting the blood.

It was so much blood.

As reached the foot at the end of the tent, his eyes followed it up to… nothing. It was severed just above the ankle. There was no body where there should definitely be a body. Tom felt a scream rise in his throat, it sat there like a cold lump as he peered through the tent’s door.

“Erica?”

She turned, Jack’s severed head held in her arms.

“It’s hungry, Tom.”

“I know,” Tom sobbed, “I can hear it, too.”