The Moonlit Garden

The Moonlit Garden

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I

The sundial.

That was the first thing Jacob Pike saw after the dreams of being buried alive. He opened his eyes to flee the darkness and found himself facing the gnomon. It cast its attenuating finger of shadow to creep in slow motion across the disk like a witch’s talon. He did not have time to register relief at feeling the grass underneath him rather than him under the grass, especially with the sunlight fading like a crypt door sliding shut.

Like a frantic swimmer his mind thrashed toward full alertness, but his brain was packed in cotton and no memories arose to give shape to the miasma of animal dread. Not until he felt but did not see the stars begin to peer coldly down from the fuligin abyss did he begin to remember and the spastic twitching of his limbs take on something approximating purpose.

But by then the sun was setting, the garden had begun to exhale the first scouting tendrils of pale mist, and it was too late.

***

Damn you don’t look at me like that! No, keep that recorder running. You want my story? Let me tell it my own way.

Good.

For me the sundial is the beginning. That’s what I see whenever I close my eyes and remember that night. You think of the night sky as an abyss, right? Maybe that’s, y’know, instinctive, but it’s not necessarily so. You ever hear of dark matter? I didn’t until Dr. Salvner sat me down and gave me an ad hoc lesson. I’m not sure I grasped it all, but I think the idea is that all that empty space is full of stuff we can’t see or feel. Even if you don’t buy into that, there’s still cosmic rays and gamma rays and radio waves and whatnot, so it’s like space isn’t really empty at all. Isn’t that fucked up?

You haven’t? It’s the kind of thing Dr. Salvner thought about all the time. Well, he did a lot of stuff all the time, and a lot of it at the same time. Guess that’s what makes you a genius. Or maybe it just comes with the territory

What I’m getting at is that there’s all this stuff floating around and we can’t see it without some kind of instrument, how do you know there aren’t things watching us by the same way?

Yeah, I know you want to talk about Dr. Salvner. You probably want to talk to him even more, but you’ll have to wait. This could be a good time your friends behind the one-way glass over there to step out and get a sandwich. We’re not quite dealing with their jurisdiction.

***

The sundial was the first thing he saw when he stepped into the garden, and no wonder: he soon saw the entire design of the grounds was arranged to draw the eye back to that old timepiece. Let your gaze light on any bed or trellis and follow its lines. The very shadows bent as if drawn by a subtle magnet toward the clear space in the center where the dial brooded over its shadow’s progress toward day’s end.

He found himself estimating the hours till sunset. The place demanded it.

“Gardening, it is an old practice Herr Pike. An ancient and a venerated practice the world over. I expect few in this time truly appreciate this tradition. Not in this age of rusty iron and plastic decals and wireless dreams of sound and light void of substance.”
His hostess chatted amiably, but she was the type who would chuckle while reading Poe’s Tell Tale Heart and gossip over tea and scones while the gory trophy thumped below the floorboards. Jacob was good at reading people and even without Salvner’s background information he would’ve got that impression soon after she opened the door.

It didn’t hurt that she sounded like Dracula’s grandma.

“What we call civilization was born of the cultivation of plants and the soil. When our most ancient forbearers divorced themselves from the brutality of tooth and claw, the boyar – the nobles and the kings – they fashioned gardens on their estates. They are named among the wonders of the world. The hanging gardens of Babylon, of Rome and the precise balance of the far-off East. When the old tales speak of paradise or the Elysium beyond, they speak of a garden.”

“Is this supposed to be Eden then?” Jacob had mostly kept silent as he followed the old woman down the winding path through what she called a garden and the neighbors and the village council called – to use the most polite term – an eyesore.

Gretchen Ramona paused and turned to regard Jacob with eyes that gleamed with amusement. She resembled a goblin playing at respectability and the longer she was at it the more she made of the performance a blatant parody.

“That, my dear man from the towns, is a question best posed to the Gardener.”

Jacob blinked in confusion. “Thought that’s what I did.”

Gretchen pursed her mouth in an O of surprise and placed her hand to her neck as if embarrassed by unearned praise. “Oh no, a labor such as this is far beyond me. I have found someone far more suited to the task and placed the management of the Garden in her most capable hands.”

This was an unwelcome development. To hide his thoughts, Jacob hmmed and pretended to write in his notebook. “Will I be seeing her?”

“Most likely you will not.”

“She left before I paid my visit?”

Something struck her funny, for she smiled, revealing a set of very clean, very even and obviously false teeth. “You will not see her.”

She returned to her walk down the path and Jacob could do nothing but follow, feeling ill at ease with every step.

They passed beds where dry sticklike things bristled reminiscent of a porcupine’s spines, the unopened buds resembling pustules. Other bushes and hanging baskets displayed an almost leprous color to his eye, green splotched with grey or grey with green, while some growths were more fungoid and clung, pale and bloated, to drooping willows or sprouted in puffy clusters about them.

He recognized almost none of the plants, and the few familiar ones – like the willows – were wilting as though the surrounding stuff were sucking the very life from them, though even that seemed to be doing them little good. The whole garden had the curious quality of appearing to be both dying and overgrown, and it was the only garden he knew of without a hint of bright color.

How is that even possible?

He hadn’t been in a position to get a close look at the grounds as he’d approached the house. A hill separating the place from the garden and a high stone wall enclosed the garden itself. The terrain made it almost impossible to get any kind of vantage.

Jacob tried to follow Gretchen’s spiel as he made the most of his chance to search through the foliage. Unbidden, his confrontation in the old woman’s house rose to the forefront of his mind.

“You have to see things from your neighbors’ point of view. They’ve lodged complaints about the grounds. The garden’s overgrown and a potential breeding ground for rodents, snakes and feral cats, and it’s an election year so the village council is taking a stand against unmaintained properties. If you don’t cooperate and trim this place down the town can do it and put the fee on your taxes.”
Gretchen Ramona had answered with an imperturbable air. Dark eyes regarded him from a nest of deep creases. The very picture of solid Old World stoicism, but then one corner of her mouth twitched in amusement and the illusion broke.

“As I have explained to the most charming village solicitor and to Officer Pickman, this is out of the question. My garden is an exotic one, but by no means overgrown. It is not the product of neglect but of hard work and careful planning and moreover represents a substantial investment. By all means carry your report to the county office. Should the most admirable village solicitor desire to pursue the matter he is welcome to fill out a citation. But though I am but a stranger new-cast on your shores still I know the town ordinances as well as he and I will go to court to defend the presence of every sprouted leaf. Moreso I will challenge them to prove a single vermin makes its home in my property. Now come along.”

It was a more eloquent speech than the greeting she had given him when he had shown up at her door. At first she had given the impression she had only a poor grasp of English. Evidently she had given up being obtuse. Jacob did not know what that meant for him.

She had arisen from the armchair and Jacob scrambled for something to delay her, only to find the old woman was not moving toward the door with the intent of seeing him out but rather to the back of the house and the garden.

”Yes, yes,” she said in answer to his expression. “Your trip here need not be a waste. I will give to you the fifty cent tour, as they say, so that your report will be a thorough one.”

He had followed, pleased to be out of that house. He was even more pleased that she hadn’t looked too closely at the papers identifying him as with the health department. They looked very good, and they were as phony as a seven-dollar bill.

II

Because false pretenses was the only way I could get a look at that place, that’s why.

Dr. Salvner must have known he was onto something big, cause after he went missing I got a packet in the mail from him, to be sent in the event of his disappearance. The Doc had done his homework. That little house was one of the oldest in the state. Hell it was older than the mother loving country. The foundations anyway. The new additions were built over a log cabin and Gretchen had peeled away the interior so the naked logs showed in the central room.

About ten years back the historical society tried to get it on the national register of historic places – probably hoping for some tourism and a boost to the property values. But someone would’ve had to restore it and nobody could step up to the job. Eventually everyone just forgot about the old place.

That was a good thing.

The research Salvner dug up on the folks who had lived there back when it was nothing but woods and the house was isolated in the middle of nowhere…it wasn’t pretty stuff. An extended family of renegade, outcast Calvinists had homesteaded the place. Basically they decided they weren’t the Elect and were predestined to Hell no matter what they did or didn’t do, so they decided to have as much fun as they could before feeling the fire. Followed Sawney Bean’s example apparently.

If you’re damned no matter what you do, you might as well live up to the brand.

Or live down to it.

After all, you can only go to hell once and every sin is the same. Rape and cannibalism is no different than working on the Sabbath, so why not indulge in the first two and skip the third?

Something else, there was an old cemetery on the hill that sheltered the garden, but the graves were moved when they thought a road was going to pass through. They thought all the graves had been moved anyway. Salvner’s research suggested they forgot the unmarked dead outside the cemetery. The criminals and heretics that didn’t warrant sanctified ground.

Right under the place where Gretchen had set up her garden.

***

A face leered at him from the leaves, hideous and lustful, cheeks puffed out and lips pursed to kiss or whistle.
Gretchen chuckled on seeing Jacob start.

“Worry not, my good son. This satyr, he does not do the trampling dance.”

Satyr? Demon more likely. Then Jacob recognized the spout.

“A gargoyle,” he said.

“A fine addition, is it not?”

He was about to answer when he noticed something glinting in the leaves near the monster’s eye. It took him a couple of seconds to realize it was another eye. A glass eye.

The lens of a camera.

The old witch had set up webcams in the place.

The house had creeped him out, but the Garden…he found himself stepping softly and constantly wanting to tell Gretchen to keep her voice down. Instinct. He kept seeing himself as a fieldmouse tiptoeing over a lion’s back.

Or maybe the city mouse raiding the kitchen. No, that was more Doc Salvner’s line. He’d always been one to roll his eyes at the cautious country mouse.

Dr. Ovid Salvner may have finally pushed his luck too far. He had taken pieces of disparate information and made a pattern. The pattern had led him here and now Dr. Salvner was gone. A part of Jacob wanted to shrug and say good riddance, but he owed the old man too much. Despite how they had parted company, Jacob had had little choice when he’d found the Doc’s packet in his mail but to follow the trail.

He tried to make his youth work for him. Just a deskbound kid on his first assignment, hiding his nervousness behind a screen of officiousness. Easily snowed, so no need for her to be cautious.

They passed heaps of compost piled against the wall.

“The plants that would not grow,” she said, explaining that she was cultivating a most peculiar variety of hybrid seeds. Originally they were an exotic stock but she was breeding hardy strains that could thrive in local conditions.

“There’s a market for this stuff?”

“Yes indeed. The whole of the crop is spoken for. Thus my cameras. My clients, they wish to follow the progress of their investment. The compost, those are the poor ones who faltered, and yet serve they will all the same, as nutrient for their healthy brothers and sisters.”

She paused, smiled a little, and said:

“The earth that's nature's mother is her tomb;
What is her burying grave that is her womb,
And from her womb children of divers kind
We sucking on her natural bosom find:
Many for many virtues excellent,
None but for some and yet all different.”

“Romeo and Juliet,” Jacob said. “Friar Lawrence in his garden.”

“A most well-meaning man,” Gretchen nodded. “Yet he too learned the plants will grow where they will, though he tended the ill-fated lovers best he could. And indeed theirs served as a bed of peace for his Verona, if not in the manner he had hoped.”

“The Benedictine monks were big on gardens, weren’t they? Symbolized stuff like innocence and the journey through life.”

“Ah yes, they were great ones for wholesome, outdoor activity, the Benedictine monks,” she wanted to laugh, he could tell. “To them, the garden was a spiritual thing as well as to grow staples and herbs of the medicine.”

“There some symbolism here? A sort of feng shui of the flora?”

“In a sense. I find the plants, they do grow better if arranged along certain lines, but principally this it is for the Gardener. She is…” Gretchen tapped her chin. “Exact. It is odd you mention the Benedictine Monks, for I found these pieces in an abbey adjoining a schloss in Germany. One of the few such places to remain undefiled during the Protestant Reformation.”

“Some trick.”

“Indeed, indeed. They say it had been abandoned long before Martin Luther nailed his grievances to the door. For years reports spoke of strange visions and stranger dreams of those who visited its grounds. There is a tale of a force of Protestants who camped there, but they fled soon after. Some were mad. Others sleepwalked and savaged their fellows in mad dreams. No fewer than five had lost their sight through no cause discerned. All spoke of haunting and dream hags, and of a terrible apparition.”

“More likely a Catholic just got there before them and drugged the well water,” Pike said, not that he cared either way, but in his experience it was wiser not to attribute supernatural influences when malice or plain old human stupidity would suffice.

“Perhaps Herr. The tales they sprout wild and many hands eagerly they fertilize. Regardless, the place was never as defaced as so many others were. There I find the statuary nearly whole. I find other things of value as well. The Gardener takes great care with every aspect of this place. This garden, it is the world to her you see. Should it be violated, I cannot answer for her.”

“Ms Ramona that sounds suspiciously like a threat-Ah!”

He had been staring at the flora as if to penetrate its secrets. Ironic that he failed to pay attention as his hand closed around a railing and he felt a thorn’s bite. With a curse, he withdrew his hand and to look at the welling blood.

A crimson droplet fell to the ground and as the earth drank his he felt a shudder from the soles of his feet to the crown of his head. A small gasp made him turn his attention to Gretchen, but her placid face gave no hint to what moved beneath the surface.

“You must be cautious, sir,” she said with all politeness, but her tone held a note of resignation that hit him like immersion in icewater. There wouldn’t be any need for future caution, her eyes said, since he wouldn’t be leaving this garden. Womb and grave. He looked again at his cut hand.

Marked.

“Let us go get that seen to,” she said. “Come along.”

They stepped away from the ground that had drank the crimson droplet so greedily and something small and white flitted past his ear, trailing a high-pitched squeak. Jacob ducked and covered his head, then spun to glimpse the thing that flew like a spore of airborne fungus.

“Albino bat,” Gretchen said. “I keep bat houses on poles for them, the darling things, so good cleansing parasites that would otherwise feed on the leaves.”

He half-expected her to say: Children of the night, what music they make. The corner of her mouth lifted in a sardonic twist, as if she shared the thought.

“I suppose Casper and his little white friends are easy to keep track of,” Jacob said. “I don’t have much in the way of night vision myself, and it’s getting late, so I think we should wrap up the tour Mrs. Ramona.”

“Indeed, I do not think you would have much enjoyment from the garden at night.”

The sundial loomed as they approach, its gnomon rising to a bitter point.

Gretchen stopped and stalled him. “Wait Herr. I cannot miss that you look to the sundial. There is a story to this as well, if you would know it.”

“Maybe later.”

“Ah but it is one you should know. The sundial, it is the centerpiece of the garden, and I think you will find of interest,“ Gretchen said as she circled round the sundial, clawlike finger running along the edge. Her air of competence was a source of disquiet all its own. “I found this most lovely of artifacts in that accursed schloss as well, and the quiet hamlet nearby was fertile soil in its own way, where tales of their haunted castle had been tended and preserved. Not as a garden, with its flowers and fruits on display for all, but as truffles that must be rooted out.”

Jacob’s eyes flicked from her long, sharp fingernail to the creeping shadow of the gnomon, like Atropos’ finger as it measured thread till the day’s death. Gretchen’s eyes were downcast, as if idly following the tracery of markings on the sundial disks, but Jacob felt her attention focused on him. his every move, his every breath, and not only her. There was a presence that brooded throughout the Garden itself that bent the weight of its regard on him, and none of that attention meant him well.

Jacob’s mouth had gone dry. His skin registered every shift in the air. He assumed a relaxed, bored and faux-attentive posture, even as his awareness intensified, awareness of a danger he couldn’t pinpoint. Every instinct told him to get out, even as Gretchen shared the story she had unearthed.

III

And this is the part of the story where the wicked witch lulls the foolish boy into staying in the haunted garden until sundown, when the trap springs shut.

I knew better, of course I did, but I figured I could handle it. I didn’t realize just how much shit I was in and I let myself get distracted. It was that voice of hers that did it. Pure Old World atmosphere, the sort of story you hear over a gypsy campfire.

But that doesn’t relate to your investigation, so I won’t try and re-create the effect. The bare bones goes something like this: back in the Middle Ages there was this castle with a nunnery and a garden famed far and wide for all the cures and staples it yielded up. There was this novice girl practically lived there among the garden paths. This girl was blind from birth but apparently knew her way around the place and could move as quiet as a shadow, or morning mist. She’d walk in that garden at night because that’s when the vermin would come out and creep around. She wouldn’t need a lantern or candle of course, so no one saw her either.

But she ended up hearing things she wasn’t supposed to hear during some midnight trysts by noble and ecclesiastical big shots, which ended up getting her walled alive in the place. As it turned out, the blind girl got the last laugh, and half the convent died of food poisoning that winter. Seems she’d been tending the stores, but the weird sightings had started before that and kept on. Those, and the fortunes of the time, resulted in the place being abandoned and the ruins were all along with its memories. Till Gretchen Ramona showed up.

Makes sense. I mean, given the circumstances, could you think of anyone better suited for the job? Hell, even I can appreciate the elegance of it all.

It was a lie of course, her learning the story about the schloss from old stories and folklore. No, Gretchen’d heard the story straight from the source.



Author's note: That's all you can find here! To read the entire story, visit Amazon.com where it's on sale for ninety nine cents, and if you really like it, consider the rest of the stories, found in my mosaic novel, Star Winds at Dusk.



http://www.amazon.com/Moonlit-Garden-Robert-DeFrank-ebook/dp/B00HP4Y8Y8/ref=sr_1...

http://www.amazon.com/Star-Winds-Dusk-Robert-DeFrank-ebook/dp/B00HS5943O/ref=sr_...

And to conclude with an appropriate quote from a craftsman of dark fantasy:



I could say something about those other places and the things I have seen there. In one of those places I found the flowers – and why should I not call them that, since they now dwell in a garden?

Almost everything was dark in the place where I found the flowers. But it wasn’t dark as a house is sometimes dark or as the woods are dark because of thick trees keeping out the light. It was dark only because there was nothing to keep out the darkness. How do I know this? I know it because I could see with more than my eyes – I could see with the darkness itself. With the darkness I saw the darkness. And it was immensity without end around me, and I believe within me. It was unbroken expansion, dark horizon meeting dark horizon. But there were also things within the darkness, within me and outside of me, so that if I reached out to touch them across a universe of darkness, I also reached deep inside of this body.

But all I could feel were the flowers themselves: to touch them was like touching light and touching colors and a thousand kinds of bristling and growing shapes. It was a horrible feeling, to touch them. In all that darkness which gave me breathe and let me to see with itself, these things squirmed and fought against me. I cannot explain why they were there, but it sickened me that anything had to be there and more so because it was these flowers, which were like a great mass of maimed things writhing upon the shore of a beautiful dark sea.

I don’t think I meant to bring any of them back with me. When I found that I had I quickly buried them.

Flowers of the Abyss, by Thomas Ligotti