Midnight Garden

by Jeannie Wycherley

  He won’t be long, I told myself. He won’t be long.

  But as the seconds became minutes I began to worry.

  “Hurry up, Ian,” I urged him under my breath, suddenly badly needing to pee. “Hurry up, hurry up, hurry up!”

  I clenched my legs together and jammed my fists into my bladder, feeling an abrupt coldness sweep through me. Where was he?

  I was eight years old. I had no idea about time. I wasn’t wearing a watch. After what seemed a lifetime, when I was certain that if I didn’t make a move I’d probably wet myself, I recognised what I needed to do.

  I slipped off the shoes and abandoned them by the gates. Taking a deep breath I walked into Oakview Villa myself, against the old woman’s expressed instruction.

  I held my head up, pretending I knew no fear—that I just didn’t care—but truthfully? I was terrified. Nonetheless, my little brother was in there somewhere and I had responsibility for him. I had to find him.

  I followed the path around the side of the house, past a wheelbarrow full of weeds, and piles of rubble—broken flower pots and other ceramics and red bricks left over from when the house—or little outhouses dotted around—had been built. I walked up the stone steps, astonished by the sheer size of the unkempt garden. Then stepping between the lions, I began calling out his name—seeking any sign of movement among the overgrown bushes and dead trees and the once-pretty flowers that had long ago gone to seed.

  I couldn’t see him anywhere, but there were so many places to hide.

  And suddenly my apprehension turned to anger.

  My whiny brat of a brother was playing games with me, surely? He was hiding out somewhere, knowing full well that I would have to come and search for him. I marched around the side of the garden, then ran along the perimeter. Trees, in varying states of decay, hung their branches in my way, and at times I had to step onto the grass to avoid running into them or becoming tangled in the dank foliage.

  With no sign of him along the perimeter of the grassed area, I followed the mosaic path and ventured into the centre of the garden, navigating through what I assumed was some kind of maze, with relative ease. Rose bushes snatched lightly at my summer dress and scratched my arms. Angry insects buzzed around me and I swatted them away, becoming increasingly cantankerous and determined to kick my wee brother’s arse as soon as I laid eyes on him.

  But when I stumbled into the centre of the maze all my anger fell away, and a stone-cold dread settled into my heart and the bottom of my stomach, never to be truly alleviated again.

  His little body, wearing knee-length denim shorts and a red football shirt, lay next to the fountain. His head, with the ridiculous cow-lick, was cocked at a strange angle. There was a single smear of crimson blood on his temple. His eyes stared at the sky.

  Unseeing eyes.

  His little yellow sail boat teetered on the edge of the god’s vase. Had Ian climbed up and placed it there?

  The monkey.

  Why would he do that by himself? I hadn’t dared him to do it. I’d only told him to take something and come back.

  This wasn’t my fault.

  As I watched, the sailing boat fell out of the vase, pushed by the water flowing behind it. It landed in the fountain’s bowl with a splash, righted itself and bobbed around, before gaily navigating the waters, disappearing behind the plinth that the God stood on.

  What had I done?

  What the hell had I done?

  My mother had not had a good night.

  She seemed to have vicariously shared in the agony of my remembrances, and having tossed and turned, restless with nightmares, had awoken in pain and discomfort. She wouldn’t eat and could hardly drink anything, either. I watched as Cathy administered to her, her voice a sweet caress as always, but something heavy in her eyes.

  When Cathy, intent on tidying the bed, made a move to take the rose away from my mother—the purple-red rose that I’d plucked from the midnight garden, still looking as fresh as the moment I’d first lopped it from its bush—my mother weakly protested and held her hands out for it.

  “It reminds her of my father,” I explained, and Cathy, nodding her understanding, handed it back.

  After Cathy had left, mentioning she would ask a doctor to come and check on my mother, I tried to read aloud from Wuthering Heights, but my mother couldn’t settle and neither could I. Thoughts of Ian and my father, of Emily and Joe, tumbled around in my mind like a washing machine with a brick in the drum. My head pounded and I lost track of Heathcliff’s problems, finally blurting out, “I’ve been a bad daughter to you.”

  My mother, who had been trying to doze, opened her eyes in shock.

  “I must be very near the end,” she said and tried to laugh. She no longer had the strength to do so.

  “I should never have sent Ian into that garden,” I said, tears spilling from my eyes.

  My mother stared up at the ceiling for quite some time, lost in her own thoughts and memories, until finally she turned back to me.

  “I think it was always meant to be.”

  I shook my head. “No. It wasn’t. I dared him to go in there. If we’d stayed in the house, carried on … colouring or reading or whatever … “

  My mother lifted one hand weakly, her yellow fingers stretched out to me. “Stop.” She beckoned me closer, so I dragged my chair forwards, and swiped at the tears rolling down my cheeks.

  “You never used to cry,” my mother said in wonder. “Where has all this come from?”

  “I tried not to remember,” I whispered. “From the moment I found him on the ground… I knew I had to bury the pain. Then I wouldn’t feel it. I was determined not to feel it.” I sobbed out loud, the long years of denial bubbling in my chest.

  My mother’s fingers found mine and we laced hands.

  “You were never responsible for what happened to Ian. It was me. It was my fault.” Her eyes bored into me. “I told you before. It was a trade-off.”

  Desolate.

  The memories that I’d buried for so long were now at the forefront of my mind. At midnight I found myself standing in front of the iron gates of Oakview Villa, waiting for them to open. I scratched habitually at the skin on my arms with my nails, the small brown bumps becoming ever more pronounced.

  An unseasonal mist swirled around me, cold and forlorn. The moisture in the air made my skin clammy and flattened my hair to my head.

  I shivered.

  Behind me, the body of my mother lay on her marital bed, covered in a sheet. Beneath the sheet, I’d folded both her hands over the stem of the purple-red rose.

  My mother had finally achieved peace.

  I listened to the distant chiming of the clock housed somewhere deep in the villa in front of me. I was more convinced than ever that the old woman still lived inside the house. I imagined her in there, observing the disintegration of my life—as tragedy after tragedy unfolded—with unguarded glee. The by-now familiar clink and clunk of the padlock and chain falling away from the gates heralded my cue to enter the midnight garden once more, and with a heavy—but determined—heart, I took the familiar route around the house to the stone lions and followed the mosaic path to the entrance of the labyrinth.

  There had been a change.

  The garden was blooming once again, just as I expected it to after midnight, but it had started to die.

  Where only a few nights previously the luscious garden had teemed with life, blooming with beauty—now an air of decay and corruption had crept in. Where previously the bushes and hedges had been carefully cultivated and the paths swept clean and free of weeds, now the sparkling mosaic floor had faded to a dull shadow of itself, covered as it was by falling leaves and dust and dirt. The roses had been left too long, and were now out of condition, their stems leggy, threatening to deteriorate quickly into bramble, and their heads had become enormous, almost grotesque, an exaggeration of their previous magnificence. The gas lamps that had so entranced me on my first visit when they burned with such
happy magical fervour, now merely glowed a dank murky greenish-yellow, with hardly enough light to illuminate my way.

  Undeterred, I trod relentlessly on. Through the brown hedges, stepping around crumbling planters, freeing myself whenever thorns reached out to ensnare me. When the roses prickled and stabbed, I no longer noticed. The mist ebbed and flowed around me, and the shadows played tricks on me.

  I thought my little brother walked with me for part of the way. And then my father—whose face I couldn’t quite see. I heard the whisper of my mother’s voice, and listened again, as she told me her story.

  It was a trade-off.

  I stumbled out of the labyrinth into the central clearing where the fountain merrily played. Isobel was waiting there for me, dressed all in black, a smart velvet hat with a closely knitted veil hung down over face.

  Mourning clothes.

  She pulled the veil over her head in one practised move. Her dark eyes glinted with cold amusement as she watched me walking towards her, my eyes stone, seething because of what I’d learned.

  Leaning against the bowl of the fountain she pulled off first one fine black silk glove and then the other and lay them beside her. She dabbled her fingers in the water and I spotted my brother’s yellow sailing boat bobbing innocently next to her.

  “Who are you?” I asked. “Are you her?”

  “I am she and she is me,” Isobel sang, her mouth turning up at the corners and lighting up her pale face.

  Impossible and yet… she was the evidence.

  “Congratulations. My mother is dead. You have obliterated my entire family from the world.” My voice hard and tight hardly sounded like me. “But I spoke to my mother first. She told me about you. What you did.”

  Isobel’s mouth turned down and she mocked me. “Oh dear. Poor Lisa. What did she tell you?”

  “What you’ve done. It’s unnecessary. Unforgiveable.” The bitterness spilled out of me. My hatred for her—whomever she really was—moulding itself into the cold choked fury of my words.

  “Not I. Not I.” She giggled. “But sadly, you’ve left me no choice now. It is my intention to kill you, too.”

  Despite my anger, a quiver of fear chased up my spine. I’d intended a showdown, and then I would seek help from the police. “Me?” I held my hands out, questioning her. “Why?”

  “I told you not to remove anything from the garden.” Her face screwed up in disappointment. “I expressly forbade that. You didn’t listen to me.”

  I thought guiltily of the rose. She would kill me for a rose? “My mother was dying.”

  Isobel shrugged, her eyes frosty. “And now she is dead, and soon you will be, too.”

  I shook my head. “No.” I cast around helplessly. This could not be how it would end. I would fight her. I would find a way. What was she going to do? Stab me with her secateurs? She wasn’t a particularly strong looking woman. I would fight her off.

  And then what would I do? Maybe go to the police and hope that somebody would believe my strange tale? Would they offer me protection, or call in social services?

  I slowly backed away from Isobel. Maybe if I treated her like a frightened animal, if I didn’t alarm her, she wouldn’t lash out. But I had to get away. I couldn’t stay in the garden a moment longer. Not with her. It just wasn’t safe.

  Inch by inch I moved backwards, putting distance between the two of us. All the time I watched her, waiting for her to make her move. She let me do this for ten, maybe twenty feet and then she threw her head back and laughed with horrifying and genuine merriment.

  “Where are you going to go, Lisa? This is your home!”

  What the hell was she talking about? She could only be insane.

  I spun away and ran, into the labyrinth, pelting down the path, now slippery with drizzle and the damp from the mist. But something was not right. The path had narrowed. I skidded to a halt as the hedges pressed in on me. I must have taken a wrong turn. I turned around… then twisted back again, my head swivelling as I desperately searched for a way out.

  Nothing. I could only go back.

  Back to Isobel.

  I slumped to a squat, my head in my hands. The itchiness of my arms all but forgotten.

  “Lisa,” she began to call me to her, and I caught a jolliness in her tone that chilled me to the bone.

  Nothing else for it. No way forward.

  I retraced my steps, slowly, reluctantly and this time as I stepped into the clearing, it wasn’t Isobel waiting, but the old woman. She wore similar clothing—a tattered version of the same dress, the hem thick with muck and dust. She’d lost the hat, too, and her face had grown lined and pitted, her dark eyes had shrunk deeply into her face, and her lips had lost their plump firmness. I reeled back. This was not the young Isobel—perhaps she had never really existed—but Isobel in the guise of the ghastly woman I remembered from my childhood. Yet, the ghostly vestiges of the girl she had been remained in that face. I could see them clearly. Could see how the passing of a great deal of time had robbed her of beauty and compassion, if it had ever been there in the first place.

  She stood beneath one of the arbours, this one heavy with both fruit and flowers, an autumn’s bounty. Holding her arms out to me, she waited for an embrace I would never willingly give her.

  “Everything that’s happened to my family—it started with you. Why?” I demanded, “What had we ever done to you?”

  The old woman’s eyes narrowed into slits, her forehead creasing further. “Oh, child. You misunderstand. They were never your family to begin with. I’m your family. This is your home. You belong here with me.”

  I thought of my poor mother, lying dead in her house across the road and grimaced at the horror of this situation. This was a slur on my mother’s life. “I hardly think so—”

  “She often used to chat to me after she moved in with your father across the road. She was young. He was ambitious. She wanted to create the perfect family but as the years passed it looked like she would never do so. She lamented that fact several times when we spoke. I saw her one day after she had returned from seeing a specialist at the hospital. He’d told her that the chances of her conceiving a baby naturally were unlikely.”

  I could hardly bear to listen.

  “But what do these men know? These medical specialists? There was a time when women would seek help from within their own community. Wise women.”

  Wise women?”

  “Like witches.”

  “Witches?” I squeezed the word from my tight throat. It sounded strangled.

  “A rose by any other name…”

  The sort of thing my mother would say to me. I shivered, suddenly missing her badly. “What did you do?”

  “I granted her wish. I have my ways and means.”

  I did a double take. “Seriously—”

  “I encouraged her to drink from the fountain, pick my flowers, eat my fruit.” The old woman curved a bony hand high up into the arbour and drew down an enormous peach. She held the fuzzy fruit out to me—ripe and plump—her long and filthy nails embedded in the tender flesh. I curled my lip at her. I wouldn’t eat what she offered me. Instead I folded my arms and scratched at the raised brown bumps I found beneath my fingers there.

  She laughed when I declined, digging her nails deeper into the fruit. Juices, as fresh and red as a baby’s blood, spilled down her hands, dripping to the ground and staining the earth beneath her feet.

  “I gave your mother a peach that I grew for her and in return she grew you. But you were never hers. Always mine.”

  I took a step away from Isobel, repulsed by her. “She said there was a trade-off.”

  Isobel bit into the peach and ripped a chunk of the peach flesh away. She chewed with evident satisfaction, the red juices staining her teeth and spilling down the sides of her mouth and chin. “She spoke true. There was. I ensured all parts of the bargain were kept.”

  I hated to ask but found myself compelled to know the whole truth. “What were they?
These parts of the bargain?”

  “That she return you to me.”

  I laughed, a hollow bitter laugh. After all these years… when my mother and I had never seen eye to eye… she could have given me away. Freed herself of the burden I had become. “But she didn’t.”

  “No, she refused. But a deal is a deal.”

  “What did you do?” I cried, afraid to hear.

  “I took away her husband.” The sing-song matter-of-factness of the statement stuck in my throat.

  I glared at her in abject horror. “You did that?”

  “Of course.” Isobel chewed on the peach once more, her hollow cheeks working hard to contain the flesh. “Not least because I’d told her there could be no more children. Just the one. The one she had to give to me.”

  “But Ian …”

  “Exactly. Your mother had the gall to steal back into the garden one night and drink from the fountain and eat my fruit. I had forbidden this!”

  “And she became pregnant again?”

  Isobel nodded.

  “And you punished her for it? You killed my father and then my brother?”

  Isobel’s eyes gleamed with triumph. “I do what I have to do.”

  It was a trade-off. My mother kept me at the expense of my little brother.

  Tears filled my eyes. “He died here, in this garden, by that fountain. You did that?”

  Isobel’s grin was merciless, her irises huge and black, frozen. “Nothing can be taken from the garden, and anything that is taken must be returned.”

  “He was just a baby,” I protested. “He wanted to sail his boat. He wouldn’t even have been in here if I hadn’t dared him to be.”

  Isobel cackled. “Well that just proves my point, doesn’t it, Lisa? You instinctively knew he had to die. He had to return here. You sent him here. That was your duty. As my daughter. Flesh of my flesh.”

  I recoiled. “Don’t say that,” I whispered, but deep down I began to comprehend something dark and deadly. Something I had known when I’d first set foot in her garden. I scratched furiously at my arms, the itching becoming unbearable.