The call came in, as many unusual calls do, on a Tuesday morning, interrupting Monty Tiberius Beauregard-Hayes’s meticulous review of Percival’s “Afterlife Arsenal” invoices. The voice on the other end was frantic, high-pitched, and punctuated by what sounded suspiciously like reptilian chirps.
“Mr. Beauregard-Hayes? Monty? You gotta help me! They’re… they’re everywhere! My arugula! My prized heirloom tomatoes! They’re… glowing!”
The caller was a retired snowbird named Walter “Wally” Pumpernickel, who owned a meticulously kept, award-winning vegetable garden just outside Coral Springs. Wally was known for his prize-winning zucchini and his equally legendary grumpiness. For Wally to sound this distraught, something truly extraordinary had to be happening.
Monty arrived at Wally’s suburban oasis to find a scene that defied belief. Wally’s perfectly manicured garden, typically a vibrant tapestry of green, was now a sea of iridescent scales. Hundreds, no, thousands of iguanas, ranging from palm-sized juveniles to hulking, sun-baked veterans, were swarming every raised bed, every bush, every garden gnome. But these weren’t just ordinary Florida iguanas. Many of them seemed to pulse with a faint, otherworldly luminescence, their eyes gleaming with an unnatural, almost knowing intelligence. These were, as Wally had frantically described, mystic iguanas.
“They just appeared, Monty!” Wally wailed, swatting futilely at a particularly portly iguana nibbling on his organic kale. “After the full moon! And they started… changing! Look at ’em! They’re not even scared of me anymore!”
Monty, ever the investigator, noticed something else. The iguanas weren’t just eating; they seemed to be performing some kind of synchronized, slow-motion ritual. A few larger ones would periodically raise their heads, their dewlaps expanding and contracting in a hypnotic rhythm, while others would rearrange Wally’s carefully placed stepping stones into strange, geometric patterns.
“I tried everything, Monty!” Wally continued, tears welling in his eyes. “Pesticides, scarecrows, even a motion-activated sprinkler! Nothing! So, I… I hired a professional.”
“A professional what, Wally?” Monty asked, already dreading the answer.
“A shaman!” Wally declared, gesturing wildly towards a small, smoke-filled gazebo at the far end of the garden. “A genuine spiritual guide from down by Immokalee. Said he could repel ’em with ancient energies and potent visions!”
From the gazebo, a plume of thick, sweet-smelling smoke billowed out, carrying the distinct aroma of burning herbs and something else, something cloyingly earthy. Then, a figure emerged, swaying precariously. This was the shaman, a man named Bartholomew “Barty” Cloud-Walker, dressed in flowing robes adorned with feathers and shells. His eyes were wide, unfocused, and a serene, almost beatific smile stretched across his face. It was immediately clear to Monty that Barty was not merely “meditating”; he was, to put it mildly, high on ayahuasca.
“The spirits… they call for more!” Barty slurred, waving a smoking feather bundle towards the garden with surprising grace. “The earth… it thirsts for… proliferation!”
Monty’s stomach dropped. “Wally, what exactly did you tell him to do?”
“To, you know, get rid of ’em!” Wally insisted, wiping sweat from his brow. “He said he needed to ‘attune to their frequency’ and ‘send them back to the ethereal plane from whence they came’!”
Suddenly, Barty let out a prolonged, warbling chant, a sound that seemed to vibrate through the very air. He spun around, scattering burning embers, and then, with a final, booming utterance, he thrust his feather bundle towards the sky.
The effect was instantaneous and catastrophic.
From every direction – from beneath the garden shed, from behind the meticulously trimmed hedges, from out of the neighboring cul-de-sac’s storm drains – came a veritable stampede of green. Thousands upon thousands of iguanas, plain, spotted, and those same disconcertingly glowing mystic ones, poured into Wally’s garden. They swarmed over the fence, cascaded from the fruit trees, and emerged from cracks in the concrete, a living, undulating wave of scales and beady eyes. The sheer volume of reptilian life was overwhelming, a verdant tsunami that consumed every last inch of Wally’s prize-winning patch.
Barty, oblivious, merely giggled. “Yes! The abundance! The verdant blessings!”
Wally Pumpernickel simply stared, his jaw slack, his face a picture of utter despair. His garden was gone, replaced by a squirming, chirping, strangely luminous carpet of iguanas.
Monty, accustomed to the absurd, couldn’t help but sigh. He thought of Sammy’s inevitable reaction to this one. “So, Wally,” he said, pulling out his notepad, “tell me again about that shaman. Did you get a receipt?” This was clearly not a case of simple pest control. The line between the natural and the supernatural had been well and truly erased, all thanks to a mystic iguana problem, a desperate gardener, and an overzealously enlightened shaman.
