“Holy crap, that’s a lot of Lawn Gnomes!”

When I had told my cousin Tiana that the house at the end of the cul-de-sac had an enormous Gnome Garden, I don’t think my description had adequately prepared her for the reality of it. I had never counted them, but there must have been hundreds of them. At least, it felt like there were hundreds of them. There were enough of them that it was instantly creepy when you saw it. You just intuitively knew that no sane, rational person would ever hoard such a mammoth amount of Lawn Gnomes.

“You can’t even see them from the street because of the hedge, so what’s the point?” Tiana asked, looking around from one Gnome to the next, trying desperately to spot some method to the madness.

“I know. It’s like he’s hiding them. I think he’s afraid that if they were in plain view, they’d be too tempting to steal or break,” I suggested. “Trick-or-treating is pretty much the only time I ever see these things. I swear, there’s more of them every year.”

“So, it’s like some kind of crazy cat lady thing, then?” Tiana asked.

“That’s what my mom says; that Mr. Mahlberg has some kind of OCD hoarding disorder,” I replied.

“They’re so weird looking,” Tiana said as she knelt down to examine the one closest to us. “Does he make them himself?”

I honestly didn’t know, but I had considered it. They certainly didn’t look like anything there was a mass market for. They were squat and lumpy little things, their expressions dead-eyed and dull, their features ill-defined and their colours all unsaturated yet unfaded despite most of them having been left out in the sun and rain for years. None of them had any damage at all, as far as I could tell.

“He maintains them, at least. They mean a lot to him for some reason, so don’t mess with them,” I cautioned her.

"They don't look carved, or even moulded. They look organic, like they've been grown or something. Chitinous! That’s the word. They’re like sea shells that look like people,” Tiana claimed, mesmerized by the peculiar ornament before her. I saw her raise her hand and slowly reach forward to touch it.

"Don't! I mean it! Mr. Mahlberg's nice, but there are all kinds of crazy stories about what he does to kids who steal or break his Gnomes!” I warned her.

The sound of an older man theatrically clearing his throat to announce his presence caught both of us off guard. Tiana shot up and we both turned towards the front porch, where we saw Mr. Mahlberg leaning against the door frame.

Mr. Mahlberg was a tall and slim white man, balding with limp, shoulder-length grey hair. He was wearing a pair of spectacles and a Mr. Rogers-like outfit of a cardigan, slacks, and shiny dress shoes. He looked serious, but not angry or upset, and certainly not crazy.

“Hello April,” he said flatly and with a mirthless smile.

“Hello, Mr. Mahlberg,” I stammered with an anxious swallow. “I’m sorry for what I just said. Mom says I shouldn’t repeat unsub, unsub, un-sub-stan-ti-ate-ed rumours about people.”

“It’s alright, April. Nothing I haven’t heard before,” he said, reaching down to the Gnome by his door and feeling the top of its cap between his fingers, pausing as if he was trying to detect something. “Who’s this you’ve brought with you?”

“Oh, this is my cousin Tiana. She’s taking me trick-or-treating this year,” I replied. “Tiana, this is Mr. Mahlberg. He… lives here, with the Gnomes.”

“Hello,” Tiana said with an awkward wave. “And I’m trick-or-treating with her. I’m just in charge because I’m older.”

Mr. Mahlberg nodded and reached into his house to pull out the bowl of Halloween Candy.

“Let’s get on with it, then,” he said, gesturing for us to come forward. Setting aside the momentary awkwardness, Tiana and I eagerly rushed forward with our bags opened and outstretched.

“Trick or Treat!” we ritualistically said in unison.

“Hmm. Just a witch hat and a black dress, Tiana? That’s not a very original or challenging costume, now is it?" he asked. He cast his eyes toward me with a bit more approval. "You're a dragonfly, April?"

“Yes! Thank you! Everyone else thinks I’m supposed to be a fairy,” I said.

“That’s because a witch and a fairy make a lot more sense than a witch and a dragonfly,” Tiana murmured under her breath.

“There’s no reason why your lack of creativity should stifle that of others, Tiana,” Mr. Mahlberg claimed. “I don’t see too many insect costumes, especially on girls. It’s nice to see someone who treats Halloween as an opportunity for self-expression.”

He tossed the candy into our bags, giving noticeably more to me than Tiana as a reward for my costume.

“Thank you!” I said with a huge grin.

“Thank you,” Tiana said, a bit more perfunctorily than me. “So, you have a pretty extensive Gnome Garden here, Mr. Mahlberg. Can I ask where they came from?”

“Tiana!” I scolded through my teeth, my eyes trained on Mr. Mahlberg for any possible sudden outburst.

“It’s fine, April,” Mr. Mahlberg assured me with a weary nod. “They were gifts. All of them. An inheritance, in a way. I realize they're actually a bit of an eyesore, which is why I keep the hedges up so that I don't get any complaints from the HOA. But getting rid of them or sticking them in a storage facility somewhere would be incredibly disrespectful on my part, so the Gnomes get free run of my lawn.”

“Oh, okay,” Tiana said as she mulled over his explanation. “But April said that you’ve gotten more of them over the years. So, is this like some kind of deferred inheritance of lawn ornaments or –”

“Happy Halloween, girls,” Mr. Mahlberg said as he stepped back inside his house and politely, but firmly, closed the door in our faces.

“That was mean, Tiana,” I said as we turned around and began to walk down the sidewalk back to the street.

“What? A guy says he’s getting Lawn Gnomes as dividends and I'm not allowed any follow-up questions?" she asked. "I don't buy it. Maybe it was his wife that originally collected Gnomes, and she either died or left him and he’s never gotten over it, so he keeps getting more of them as a coping mechanism to act like she never –”

We both jumped at the sound of a small piece of ceramic falling to the ground. The nose and upper lip of the Gnome nearest to us had inexplicably broken off.

“What did you do?” I asked aghast, turning back towards the house to check if Mr. Mahlberg had seen what happened.

“Me? I didn’t do anything! I didn’t even touch it!” she insisted.

"Oh no. Oh no," I said as I started to hyperventilate, every story that I had ever heard about Mr. Mahlberg racing through my mind all at once.

“Hey, it’s okay. Calm down. We’ll just go. It’s Halloween; there are lots of kids and parents coming and going. He won’t know it was us,” she suggested.

"He'll know!" I said in a strained whisper.

“Then we’ll go back and tell him what happened,” was her next idea. “You said yourself that he must be maintaining these things. This can’t be the first time something like this has happened. He’ll tell us that he’ll be able to just glue it back on and not to worry about it. I promise.”

I shook my head fervently, too scared to confess to the crime of merely being present when the Gnome broke, but equally too scared to flee.

“Fine. Then we’ll just put the piece back in place for now and it will fall out on its own again later,” she said, bending down to pick the broken piece up.

“What are you doing? Don’t touch it!” I demanded.

“No, it’s fine, see? It’s a clean break. I should be able to slide it right back into place without it even being all that noticeable,” she claimed.

She began to put the broken piece back in place when she paused, lowered it, and took a much deeper look inside the hollow interior of the Gnome.

“April, I think there’s something in there,” she whispered.

Another crack appeared on the Gnome’s exterior, this one nearly splitting it straight down the middle. Tianna stumbled backwards and pulled me back with her as we watched it slough off fragments of its chitinous shell, freeing itself in a matter of seconds. What was left was a still soft and wet exoskeleton the size of at least a small dog, wriggling and pulsing as it laboured to take its first breaths. We watched in morbid disgust as the overgrown insect unfurled itself to reveal a golden pair of wings and eyes against its dark bronze carapace. It vaguely resembled a cicada, only with a much longer and thinner abdomen, like what one might find on a dragon or butterfly.

"What – the hell?" Tiana cursed softly. I wanted to run, but I also didn't want to leave the protection of her arms, and she was still too transfixed by the bizarre and grotesque spectacle we had just witnessed to want to flee.

The cicada rolled over so that its feet were firmly on the ground, and then started beating its wings rapidly. It couldn’t fly yet; the wings were still too wet. It was beating them to help them dry quicker. An ear-splitting, humming cicada song began to resonate through the air; and this, it seems, was the signal for the other Gnomes to start hatching.

A random smattering of Gnomes began to shake and crack from the inside, and we were now standing in the middle of the lawn. It was a minefield of the strange creatures, with any one of them capable of bursting open at any moment. Tianna and I both began to whimper as we stood too petrified to move, hoping the ordeal would be over as soon as it began.

“Girls!” we heard Mr. Mahlberg shout. He had presumably been drawn back out to his porch by the cicada song, and he was now desperately waving us over. “Quickly! Before they take flight!”

The Gnome nearest to our feet began to crack, and that was enough to send the two of us screaming across the lawn, back up the sidewalk and into Mr. Malhberg’s house. He immediately slammed it shut and turned the lock, but kept a steady vigil on the window in case anyone else stumbled upon the bugs.

“Eggs? They’re eggs?” Tiana screamed.

"Pupa, actually. Those are their adult forms out there," he corrected her. "Their cocoons look like Lawn Gnomes to help them remain inconspicuous in a suburban environment. They're less inconspicuous all clustered together like this, but it's still a reasonable defence. I knew they'd be coming out of their pupas before winter, but I was really hoping it wouldn't be tonight."

“Okay, what the hell is going on?” Tiana demanded. “Why the hell do you have hundreds of giant bug pupas disguised as Lawn Gnomes in your front yard?”

This time, Mr. Mahlberg looked less irritated and more contrite at Tiana’s question.

“I… raise them here,” he confessed. “They’re not dangerous. They’re herbivores. I hatch their eggs in a terrarium downstairs and feed them compost. They have an irregular, years-long pupation stage so once they pupate, I put them outside so that when they come out, they’ll be able to fly off. As soon as they reach their adult stage, they instinctively fly off North West. I don’t know where they go, but I assume they have some isolated pocket of wilderness somewhere they can remain hidden from the world. When it’s time for them to breed, they make their way back here, if they can, like sea turtles returning to the beach they hatched on. They lay their eggs, I take them in, and it starts all over again.

“It started when one of them crashed in my backyard and laid its eggs with its dying breath. I had never seen such an enormous insect before, let alone one so beautiful. They’re like coelacanths, I think; remnants of a long-vanished primeval world. They’re survivors from the carboniferous period, having somehow adapted to the lower oxygen levels and everything else that’s been thrown at them since. And yet, the fact that they’re still unknown to science can only mean their numbers are sparse.

“I knew I had to do everything in my power to make sure the eggs survived. I took them inside, kept them at a steady temperature, and fed them when they hatched. When they pupated, I was as surprised as you were that they looked like Lawn Gnomes. I think it’s some kind of epigenetic camouflage that originally adapted to mimic local rocks, but now mimics human structures, like hermit crabs using pop cans as shells. Their pupation period is so long that I thought they died, so I put them out in the backyard as mementos, until one night I heard their cicada song and came out just in time to see them emerging. They flew off, but some eventually returned to lay more eggs. More and more make it back each time, so apparently, I’m doing a fairly decent job as a cryptid conservationist.

“I’m sorry they scared you, girls. I don’t keep them here to creep people out. I keep them here to ensure they survive. Please, come look out the window. They’re about to take flight. It’s beautiful. You’ll see they’re nothing to be afraid of.”

Tiana and I glanced at one another nervously before warily approaching the window next to Mr. Mahlberg. There were dozens of them, sitting out upon the lawn, beating their golden wings as they shimmered in the moonlight. Then one of them, the first one who emerged, started hovering off the ground and the rest of them followed suit. All at once they rotated to face North West, pointed themselves away from our neighbourhood and towards the woods behind us, taking off on an upwards trajectory like a flock of geese. The house vibrated with the humming of their wings as they flew over the roof. Mr. Mahlberg rushed outside to get one last look at the rare, prehistoric insects he had reared from generation to generation, with Tiana and I racing out right alongside him. I was just able to make out the golden tint of their wings and the shine of their carapaces against the black backdrop of the night before they swiftly faded from view and out of my world forever.

“Wow,” I gushed softly, looking around at the dozens of still intact Lawn Gnomes with a newfound appreciation and understanding for what they were.

Mr. Mahlberg stepped back into his house briefly and came back out with the candy bowl once again in his hands.

“Here. Take what you like. For your trouble. Just leave me enough for the rest of the Trick-or-Treaters,” he offered. I eagerly grabbed a handful of my favourite chocolate bars, but Tiana was a bit more hesitant.

“Are you buying our silence?” she asked.

“Tell whoever you like. One more crazy story about my Gnomes circulating amongst the local kids doesn’t matter to me,” he said with a shrug.

That was almost a decade ago now. My mom’s remarried and moved in with her new husband, and while our old house is still hers on paper, she’s informally bequeathed it to me. I’ve taken in Tiana as a roommate to help with the expenses, but I chose her specifically because she’s the only one who knows the truth about Mr. Mahlberg’s Gnomes.

The other day I went over to Mr. Mahlberg’s house, noting that his lawn was as filled with Gnomes as ever as I walked up to and knocked on his front door.

“April, hello. Good to see you. What brings you over?” he greeted.

“Hello Mr. Mahlberg,” I smiled. “My mom’s all moved out now, so the house is mine to do with as I like. I couldn’t help but notice that things are getting a bit crowded around here, so I was wondering how you would feel about rehoming some of your Gnomes?”