THE SILVER GARDEN

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    Before I was quite awake I had the sehat something was different. And a moment later, before I even opened my eyes, I knew what it was. There was light.

    Gohe shadows that had lurked in my room sihe beginning of the month; gooo, the gloomy ers and the air of mournfulness. The window ale regle, and from it there entered a shimmering palehat illuminated every aspey room. It was so long since I had seen it that I felt a surge of joy, as though it weren’t just a night that had ended but winter. It was as if spring had e.

    The cat was on the window ledge, gazing ily into the garden. Heariir, he immediately jumped doawed at the door to go out. I pulled my clothes and coat on, and we crept downstairs together, to the kit and the garden.

    I realized my mistake the moment I stepped outdoors. It was not day. It was not the sun, but moonlight that shimmered in the garden, edging the leaves with silver and toug the outlines of the statuary figures. I stopped still and stared at the moon. It erfect circle, hanging palely in a clear sky. Mesmerized, I could have stood there till daybreak, but the cat, impatient, pressed my ankles for attention, and I bent to stroke him. No sooner had I touched him than he moved away, only to pause a few yards off and look over his shoulder.

    I turned up the collar of my coat, shoved my cold hands in my pockets and followed.

    He led me first down the grassy path between the long borders. On our left the yew hedge gleamed brightly; on the right the hedge .. dark in the moon shadow. We turned into the rose gardehe pruned bushes appeared as piles of dead twigs, but the elaborate borders of box that surrouhem in sinuous Elizabethan patterns twisted in and out of the moonlight, showing here silver, there black. A dozen times I would have lingered—a single ivy leaf tur an ao catch the moonlight perfectly; a sudden view of the great oak tree, etched with inhuman clarity against the pale sky—but I could not stop. All the time, the cat stalked on ahead of me with a purposeful, eveail raised like a tuide’s umbrella signaling this way, follow me. In the walled garden he jumped up onto the wall that bordered the fountain pool and padded halfway around its perimeter, ign the moon’s refle that shone ier like a bright  at the bottom of the pool. And when he came level with the arched entrao the winter garden, he jumped down and walked toward it.

    Uhe arch he paused. He looked left and right, i. Saw something. And slunk off, out of sight, toward it.

    Curious, I tiptoed forward to stand where he had, and look around.

    A winter garden is colorful when you see it at the right time of day, at the right time of year. Largely it depends on daylight t it to life. The midnight visitor has to look harder to see its attras. It was too dark to see the low, wide spread of hellebore leaves against the dark soil; too early in the season for the brightness of snowdrops; too cold for the dapho release its fragrahere was witch hazel, though; soon its branches would be decorated with trembling yellow and e tassels, but for now it was the brahemselves that were the main attra. Fine and leafless, they were delicately kwisting randomly and with elegaraint.

    At its foot, hunched over the ground, was the rounded silhouette of a human figure.

    I froze.

    The figure heaved and shifted laboriously, releasing gasping puffs of breath and effortful grunts.

    In a long, slow sey mind raced to explain the presence of another human being in Miss Winter’s garden at night. Some things I knew instantly without needing even to think about them. For a start, it was not Maurieeling on the ground there. Though he was the least unlikely person to find in the garden, it never occurred to me to wonder whether it might be him. This was not his wiry frame, these not his measured movements. Equally it was not Judith. <dfn>.99lｉｂ?</dfn>, calm, Judith with her  nails, perfect hair and polished shoes scrabbling about in the garden in the middle of the night? Impossible. I did not o sider these two, and so I didn’t.

    Instead, in that sed, my mind reeled to and fro a huimes between two thoughts.

    It was Miss Winter.

    It couldn’t be Miss Winter.

    It was Miss Winter because… because it was. I could tell. I could se. It was her and I k.

    It couldn’t be her. Miss Winter was frail and ill. Miss Winter was always in her wheelchair. Miss Winter was too uo bend to pluck out a weed, let alone crou the cold ground disturbing the soil in this frantic fashion.

    It wasn’t Miss Winter.

    But somehow, impossibly, despite everything, it was.

    That first sed was long and f<cite></cite>using. The sed, when it finally came, was sudden.

    The figure froze… swiveled… rose… and I knew.

    Miss Winter’s eyes. Brilliant, supernatural green.

    But not Miss Winter’s face.

    A patchwork of scarred and mottled flesh, crisscrossed by crevices deeper than age could make. Two uneven dumplings of cheeks. Lopsided lips, one half a perfect bow that told of former beauty, the other a twisted graft of white flesh.

    Emmeline! Miss Winter’s twin! Alive, and living in this house!

    My mind was in turmoil; blood ounding in my ears; shock paralyzed me. She stared at me unblinking, and I realized she was less startled than I was. But still, she seemed to be uhe same spell as me. We were both cast into immobility.

    She was the first to recover. In an urgeure she raised a dark, soil-covered hand toward me and, in a hoarse voice, rasped a string of senseless sounds.

    Bewilderment slowed my responses; I could not even stammer her name before she turned and hurried away, leaning forward, shoulders hunched. From out of the shadows emerged the cat. He stretched calmly and, ign me, took himself off after her. They disappeared uhe ard I was alone. Me and a patch of ed-up soil.

    Foxes indeed.

    Ohey were gone I might have been able to persuade myself that I had imagi. That I had been sleepwalking, and that in my sleep I had dreamed that Adelieared to me and hissed a secret, unintelligible message. But I k was real. And though she was no longer visible, I could hear her singing as she departed. That infuriating, tuneless five-note fragment. La la la la la.

    I stood, listening, until it faded pletely away.

    Then, realizing that my feet and hands were freezing, I turned back to the house.

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