Midnight Garden Read online

  I’m pretty sure that if Oakview Villa had been empty, Gareth would have found a way to break in.

  “There’s only one way to know for certain,” Gareth challenged me. “Go around the back and see if there are any lights on.”

  The others were quick to double dare and triple dare me, and of course I couldn’t lose face; especially in front of the boys. That evening, once it had grown dark, my comrades-in-mischief hid themselves in the overgrown foliage around the front of the house, while I slipped between the gates and onto the ornamental path. The moss on the paving stones was thicker and spongier than I remembered from old. The air lingered with a smoky subtle scent from a coal fire somewhere within the house, and yet no lights burned at the windows at the front of the house.

  Swallowing hard on a nervous lump in my throat, I’d made my way around the side of the building, senses straining, waiting to hear the click and creak of the front door opening or the tapping of her cane on the tiles. When nothing out of the ordinary happened I crept forwards. There were no windows on the ground floor at this side, and the few in the upper storeys remained black. If she was in, and awake, she was at the rear of the house.

  It seemed to take an age to make my way around there, but what struck me straight away was how extensive the rear gardens were. Half a dozen stone steps guarded by a pair of lions, and a high wall rendered in concrete, separated the patio area from the remaining grounds. In the darkness, I could have been looking into a private wood. I couldn’t see where the boundary ended.

  But I didn’t want to hang around. Sticking close to the brick wall, trailing a clammy finger along the pointing, I crouched to avoid being seen and slunk slowly forwards beneath the windows. My stomach rolled in fear. Sweat pooled in the small of my back. The skittering of something in the garden beyond made me shriek. I clamped a hand to my mouth and waited, hardly daring to breathe.

  How long I waited, I can’t recall. I remember I had a sudden desperate urge to pee, and I closed my eyes tightly, waiting for the sensation to pass. When I was certain all was quiet, I let myself breathe out, hearing the shake as a I exhaled. Slowly, so slowly, I inched myself up until I could peer through the nearest window.

  The window was dark, the room beyond pitch black. From the corner a light shone, perhaps a hall or another room. Feeling more confident I leaned close to the glass and stared into the light. Yes. A wooden floor, a wall. It was a hall. If I waited perhaps I’d see her walk along it. Or I could move along to the next window and see if she was inside that room.

  I stood fully, stretching my cramped legs. My eyes travelled across the window trying to make out what kind of room this was and what I was seeing.

  She was there. Staring straight at me.

  Her face was an inch away from the glass and as I bobbed my head up, her eyes were level with mine, boring into me.

  I could sense her fury even through the glass. How dare I trespass.

  My brain struggled to process what I was seeing. The second it caught up, I screamed in shock and fell backwards, landing on a pile of broken plant pots and a few old and rusty tools. A jagged pain made me flinch as I speared my wrist on something sharp, but the shock of adrenaline had me moving in no time. I scrambled to my feet and fled, racing around the side of the house, scraping my knuckles against the brick wall, belting along the ornamental path.

  Instinctively I knew she would be at the front door. How an old woman with a stick could move so quickly I had no idea, but she didn’t disappoint.

  “You again!” she shrieked at me, and I ducked my head as I whirled past. There was absolutely no chance I was staying put for an audience with her this time.

  As I sprinted through the gates, the others jumped out of their hiding place. I assumed they had their water pistols but when I glanced back, fearing she was coming after me to beat me with her stick, I realized that on this occasion, their weapons of choice were eggs. At the time I thought there were dozens of them, but now I know we would never have been able to pool enough money between us to buy more than a box of six. Even so, my overarching memory is of egg yolk on the old woman’s face, sliding down the front of her dress and pooling on the step at her feet.

  I gave a shriek of triumph and then sprinted up the road, heading for our sanctuary in the closed-up park, putting distance between me and Mrs H and her accusing eyes.

  Later, I bound my wrist in a rag I found lying around Killeen House and reflected on the evening’s events. I lay on the floor of the living room shaking and sick to my stomach, while Gareth burned a couple of chair legs for warmth. But I laughed along with the rest of them. Loudly.

  Because that’s what you do.

  A great jape on our part. A good job, well done.

  Right?

  I picked up my mobile phone and squeezed it, but a little red light flashed at me. Out of battery.

  I glanced the way the woman in the long dress had gone, to the right, heading around the side of the house to the back. Today, I hardly hesitated. I followed her.

  The ornamental path that I remembered still existed, but it was so thick with moss and lichen and squidgy underfoot, that it might have been a damp carpet. Fortunately, my trainers afforded me some traction and prevented me from slipping on the wet surface. Rapidly moving from light into shadow, I trailed my left hand along the brickwork as I made my way along the side of the house, just as I’d done thirty years ago. The brickwork felt rough beneath my fingers, the mortar between the bricks crumbling away in places and scattering to the ground.

  When I reached the far corner of the house I halted, casting a sideways look at the ground floor windows to my left. Even from this standpoint I could see that a light burned somewhere in the heart of the house, perhaps the same light I’d seen all those years ago. Of course I was a little taller now, better able to see into the windows from this vantage point. My younger self, crouching to avoid being seen, probably wouldn’t have been able to.

  For a second my heart did a little shimmy in my chest, half-expecting to see Mrs H appear at the window. I scanned the glass, but as far as I could tell she wasn’t there.

  “Welcome.” A quiet voice, vaguely amused, travelled clearly out of the darkness ahead. I jumped. The young woman in the long dress was standing at the top of the steps, one pale hand resting on a lion.

  “Sorry,” I said, holding my hands up at chest height, palms up, clutching my mobile in my right hand. My stomach performed a nervous somersault. The guilty eight-year-old, trespassing on someone else’s property. The fourteen-year-old caught where she shouldn’t have been. “I was looking for my phone.”

  The woman studied my hands with interest. “You’ve found it?”

  I nodded, cringing. She had to think I was stupid.

  “That’s good. I hate it when I lose things.” She laughed softly, a wonderful lyrical catch to the tone of her giggle.

  “Who are you?” I asked, my words sharp, ringing in the stillness of the night air. There was a short silence while her eyes drifted from my hands to my face. Her smile never faltered. “I mean are you related to—” I indicated the house behind me.

  She followed the direction of my hand and studied the rear of the house, tilting her head as though she were about to whip out an easel and begin to paint it. “It’s a grand building, isn’t it?” she asked. “I’ve always loved it. Haven’t you?”

  I frowned. Did she know me? What did she mean by ‘always’? Always in her case wasn’t a particularly long time, she couldn’t have been more than twenty or so. And I’d never seen her before yesterday. Where had she appeared from that she was able to claim that she’d always loved the house?

  She snickered again. This time I was certain she was chuckling at my confusion. Something hard settled in my stomach and a pulse thumped in my head.

  “I should go.” I began to turn away.

  “Oh no. No, don’t do that. It’s nice to have company.” She cocked her head, dark blue eyes serious. “Sometimes. Not all the t
ime.”

  “It’s very late.”

  As if on cue I heard a clock chiming the hour, although more a heavy bong than a lyrical chime, maybe from somewhere inside Oakview Villa.

  “Midnight,” she said. “That’s the perfect time to take a stroll in my garden.”

  Her garden?

  “Come,” she issued the invitation. “Let me show you around.”

  I climbed the steps and crossed the threshold between the lions to where she waited. Now that I was closer to her I could see that her gown wasn’t a simple evening dress, but a true copy of a Victorian gown. Even a row of tiny buttons laced it up the back. She had to be wearing a corset beneath because she was clinched in at the waist incredibly tightly. I was impressed by the detail in spite of myself. Fancy dress had never been something I’d indulged in.

  “Have you been at a party?” I asked.

  “Oh, we’re always having friends to dinner,” she replied. “My father works in banking in the city and has lots of connections. He likes to impress new clients… and potential new clients.”

  I narrowed my eyes, looking back at the house in confusion. Had the house been sold to a banker? A rich investment banker from London, slumming it down here in the west country? A second home perhaps? Whatever the case, there was no party being held inside tonight.

  She still hadn’t told me her name. I decided to approach it from a different angle. “I’m Lisa,” I told her. “I live across the road.”

  “Oh I know. I’ve seen you there over the years.”

  This was impossible. I hadn’t been at 27 Park Close in over a decade and the woman would only have been a young child at that time. I regarded her with growing suspicion. “And you are?” I pressed.

  She relented, finally. “Isobel Cadwallader.” I distinctly heard the O sound of Isobel and she tilted her head as if to underscore it. She held her hand out, a pale delicate hand with long thin fingers. Instinctively I reached out to shake it and gasped at her icy touch. Her grip was limp, more of a slight press against my own fingers. She dropped my hand hurriedly. “Daughter of the house. My father is John Moore Cadwallader, of the Bristol Moore Cadwalladers.”

  Who knew there was a distinction?

  I nodded anyway.

  “How do you do?” she asked, her voice hinting at the boredom of social niceties.

  “So you’ve lived here a while? And now you’re selling the house?”

  “Why on earth would we sell this house?”

  I indicated towards the front, through the house. “The For-Sale sign?”

  “You’re making no sense. We’ll never sell the house. Ever.”

  She sighed, as though I were being tiresome, then glanced up the garden and raised her chin. “Shall we?” She lifted her skirts and trotted away from me. I followed where she led.

  The edge of the garden was lined with trees of every variation. I recognized elm and beech, birch and ash, common British varieties that must have been planted when the house was young. They grew tall, but thought had been given to their eventual spread, and they each had plenty of space to breathe and grow. Below the trees, foliage grew dense—mainly ferns and fruit bushes that were trained against the wall.

  The tree border had been separated from the central garden by a path similar to the one at the front of the house, but this—to my surprise—had been kept free of weeds and moss. The tiles beneath our feet were a mosaic of bright colours, illuminated by old-fashioned gas lamps.

  I stopped in my tracks, staring up in surprise at the lamps. I’d seen similar in picturesque towns and villages around the UK, but never in a private garden. These were twin lanterns, hanging from curly iron arms. They glowed with a bright warmth, the gas at the centre burning blue and bright orange.

  “Pretty aren’t they?” Isobel asked and skipped away again.

  “It’s like a fairy garden,” I replied in wonder. Up ahead of me, Isobel tittered.

  I’d been right to imagine that the garden was a fair size. Now that I was walking around the boundary I realised that the rear wall would have to back onto the park. You would probably have been able to see this property from one of the windows of Killeen Manor had they not been boarded up.

  “This way!” called Isobel, and I hurried to catch up with her.

  We left the outer path and the mosaic gradually dwindled away until we were walking on cobbles instead. We turned in towards the middle of the garden, our way lit by a bright moon. Tall hedges blocked my view, and I realized—from how carefully cultivated these green giants were—that I was walking through some form of enormous maze. We followed the cobbled path, from lamp to lamp, and raised flower bed to raised flower bed. The layout of the garden was at once precisely planned and yet beautifully organic and somehow spontaneous and random. Flowers of all colour and hue, patterned and plain, and of every conceivable height sprung from planters at every bend, or nestled into every nook or curve.

  “Do you like my labyrinth?” Isobel asked me when I stopped to exclaim over the most beautiful grouping of purple violets. I noted the casual reiteration of her ownership again. Her labyrinth, she’d said.

  “It’s incredible,” I answered. “I’ve never seen anything like this.” I turned about taking in the vibrancy of the colours, the detail I could see on each petal and leaf, in spite of the lateness of the hour and the dark sky. The moon and the lamps lit everything with a magical luminescent intensity.

  “Come,” she said, happily skipping away.

  A little further on we entered a large clearing. Arbours were arranged in groups here, some with seating areas underneath, little iron tables and chairs arranged cosily in pairs. Different colour roses grew around each arbour, huge blooms, stunning to look at. The air was heady with their scent, almost suffocating.

  I buried my nose in the head of an enormous flower nearest to me. The fragrance of a time long forgotten lifted from the petals; a time before over-cultivation, chemicals and pesticides and industrialised horticulture had robbed our flowers of their flavour. The sweet fresh fragrance of powder and fruit and musk danced beneath my nostrils all at once.

  The earth shifted and I gasped. Perhaps it was the deep breath I’d taken, or maybe I was tired, but suddenly the garden spun around me. Unsteady on my feet, I clutched at the rose and a thorn drove itself hard into my right palm, stabbing me with a direct and needle-like force, penetrating my hand so deeply that a wave of pain rushed through my body. In sudden spasm I crushed the flower in my hand, the petals scattering at my feet. When I relinquished my grip on what remained of the rose, I stared as thick dark blood oozed from the wound, just two inches or so below my existing scar, the place I’d slashed my hand on broken pottery on my prior visit to the garden at Oakview Villa.

  I’d never previously reacted adversely to the sight of blood, particularly my own. But now a wave of nausea flooded through me, and I swallowed bile. I lurched away from the rose bush, needing to sit down, my knees barely able to hold my weight. Disoriented, I found myself next to the fountain where some Greek or Roman God, a stone cloth arranged neatly around his genitals, poured water from the huge vase he held aloft. I leaned against the massive marble bowl of the fountain, relieved to feel its strength against my thighs.

  Once the initial wave of dizziness had finally passed, I held my hand aloft and watched as gravity stole several glistening beads of my blood. Each slid down my hand and silently dropped into the water, blooming big and vibrant, like bright roses themselves, before dispersing, streaming away—like the ink from a paintbrush—in the clear water.

  Isobel sauntered up, perching alongside me. When she saw the awkward way I was holding my hand, she gasped, a strange feathery exhalation of breath that originated in her throat, like someone in the throes of passion. She reached for the injured hand. I allowed her to take it in her ice-cold grasp, somehow imagining she intended to clean the wound and utter commiserations. She leaned close to my palm, close enough to lick away the blossoming blood. Sure that this was he
r intention, I tried to pull my hand away from her, but she was strong and held me tight. As her eyes rolled in their sockets, I grimaced in horror and once again yanked my hand back.

  “No!” She growled at me like an angry dog, her lips curling back over her teeth. I moaned in fear, and the sound seemed to trigger some awareness in her. Her eyes returning to normal, albeit directing a sudden look of hatred my way so demonic that it chilled me to the bone. She plunged my hand into the water in the fountain with such force that my knuckles grazed the bottom. With a supreme effort, I yanked my hand free.

  And just like the sun reappearing from behind a black cloud on an otherwise spectacular day, the moment passed. She stood before me, contrite and angelic.

  “I beg your pardon,” she said in a voice she hadn’t used before. A little girl’s voice. My voice. I was cast back through the years to my eight-year-old self. She sounded like a recording of me. A parody. Of all the things to say, of all the places to say it. In this garden.

  I couldn’t quite fathom what was happening here, around me, or to me, or with me. Emotions flooded through my body—grief and fear and hatred and happiness and love and confusion—yes a whirlpool of confusion that tugged at my heart and my head and my womb and my bowels.

  I doubled over and threw up.

  When I pulled myself together—it could only have been a minute or so later—the young woman had gone. She must have drifted back into the labyrinth. I found myself relieved that she had done so, embarrassed that I’d made a fool of myself in front of her. I stood carefully, my shirt clinging to my clammy skin, the sharp scent of vomit emanating from the floor at my feet.

  Revolting.

  I leaned forward, over the fountain. The water appeared clean enough and not too cold. There had to be filters of some kind. I plunged both hands in the water and agitated them to wash away any lingering blood, then lifted them from the water and rubbed ineffectually at my face. Slime slid down my chin. My stomach rolled in response.