The Watcher in the Garden (5 page)

“Catherine. They call me Kit at home.”

“I shall call you Catherine. So, Catherine, whether you like it or not, you must think of me as a friend. That means, you see, that you can come into the garden when you like. But just you. I have to be careful. I can't have you bringing friends—”

“I haven't any friends.”

“I'm not surprised, if you always accept offers of friendship like this. Still, it doesn't worry me. I'm too old to worry about those things. So you may come in, ignoring the horrible notice, and you may walk through if you want to. And, if at any time you want to talk about anything, you can find me in the garden, or in the house. You've seen the house. Just ring the doorbell and someone will come. I must leave you now. It's time for me to go in.” He felt for his stick, and she was about to put it in his hand, but drew back in time as his hand found it. The dog jumped up and he got to his feet. She wondered how he was so sure that it was time for him to go.

“Goodbye Catherine. There's no need for you to go. I shall see you again.” He felt for the corner of the seat with his stick and stepped on to the path. Quick, confident steps took him up the path and out of sight.

She continued to sit on the stone seat for a long time after he had gone. Cold air was beginning to flow up from the gorge, but the sun still shone on the look-out. There were no clouds. The late sunlight was very bright and yellow and calm. The night was coming, but she knew she would carry home with her the brightness of that day and it would remain with her, even into the night.

After that day she visited the garden several times, and each time she left it with the same feeling of well-being. Occasionally she saw the gardeners, but because she wanted to be alone she tended to avoid them. Mostly when she came they had not yet arrived or had already left. But always she saw the signs of their presence in little heaps of weeds or prunings and watered areas when the weather was dry. The gardeners had nothing to do with her and she thought little about them. She did not see the old man again and it would have taken more resolution than she had to approach that big front door and ring the bell. Besides, she had never been able to imagine herself having anything to talk about important enough to demand his attention. But she often thought of him. He became a very positive presence in her mind and, oddly, a source of strength. She knew now why the front windows of the house had been dark on that first night. The garden had a new significance for her now she knew it was the domain and, in a way, the prison of an old, blind man. Often she considered his words: “My garden is not an ordinary garden.” She thought so, too, but she had not yet found out what it was he had been going to say. Sometimes when she walked in it she shut her eyes and tried to imagine herself blind. At these times the sounds and smells—the whole feel of the garden—came to her much more strongly. But she quickly lost direction as soon as she moved, and she found herself blundering into bushes and over stones until she sometimes felt that as soon as she shut her eyes the garden deliberately moved round, losing her on purpose. But the feeling it gave her was never malevolent. It was always kindly and healing.

 

There came a day when this was not so. If she had known it she had the answer in her hands. It was late autumn. Most of the leaves had fallen and lay dead beneath the trees that had given them life. As on her first visit, it was late afternoon and the daylight was already half drained from the garden. As soon as she entered it she knew it was not the same as before. Immediately a kind of uneasiness filled her. She found herself jumping suddenly to look behind her when a small bird flew out of a bush as she passed. She almost shrieked when one of the first big, silent moths of the evening blundered into her face. She began to think she was being followed, and she forced herself to walk steadily, feeling that to run was to start something that could not be stopped. But there was nothing that she could either see or hear. The bird was only a bird and the moth was nothing but a frail and velvet moth, searching perhaps for the last nectar of the day. Nevertheless the feeling did not leave her and became stronger as she penetrated farther into the garden. She could see nothing unusual. The terraces above lay quiet under the cooling sky. The trees stood strongly behind her with no wind to move their few remaining leaves. But something hung, invisible, in the air. And now she knew the threat was not to her but to the garden itself, and it came from—she drew her breath quickly as she looked first at the house, pale on the hillside with its rows of lightless windows. Nothing moved there. No sound came from the dog. A Virginia creeper blazed, warm and comforting, over the side porch. There was nothing different about the house.

She stood with her back against the trunk of a tall eucalypt and felt the warmth of the living tree penetrate her spine, enfolding and protecting her with its strength, and because she stood so close against it and so still she could not be seen from above. And she looked about again to find the source of the evening's unrest. The sun was near the horizon, sinking below a heavy layer of cloud that was rolling up from the south. For a few moments the garden lay grey and colourless without shadows and without life. There was one small gap in the cloud low down near the black outline of the hills. The evening sky had been shining through, palely lemon-coloured, but as the sun moved downward the lemon warmed to a fiery tomato, became dazzling in its brightness, and quite suddenly one strong shaft of sunlight struck out across the gorge and blazed on the top of the hill on which the garden lay. It caught the row of trees that lined the road above and for a moment illuminated a clump of autumnal azaleas that grew round a rocky outcrop farther down the slope. It illuminated also a tall figure that stood on top of the rocks. In the distorting horizontal rays, and perhaps as a result of the dazzling brightness, the figure looked inhumanly tall, strangely black, and it sent a long black shadow across the slope of the garden. It stood quite still and the shadow lay motionless along the paths and lawns. Yet some kind of life emanated from it, a threat of evil intent, and the menace of the threat spread out across the garden, enveloping everything that was in it, including the house on its terrace below.

Then the sun sank behind the cloud, the light drained from the sky and the shadow and the figure both faded into the greys and blues of evening. For a long time Catherine was reluctant to leave the protection of the tree. She could no longer see if the figure still stood on the point of rock, whether it had evaporated to nothing with the departing shaft of sunlight, or whether it had simply stepped down and walked away. One thing she did know. The fear which had penetrated every part of the garden and her own body had now gone.

 

“Eh—Terry—”

The four of them had met at the street corner and were waiting for the man to come past. They stood casually, one squatting, drawing pictures in the dust of the roadside, another leaning against the street light. The two others stood a bit apart, as if they had little connection with the first two, and they were talking—idly, it seemed, for their eyes kept wandering up and down the street. The youth drawing the pictures now looked up, and Terry, answering after a small delay fitting to the leader of the group, said, “Well?”

“Sure you'll know him?”

“I see him every day, don't I?”

“Just wondered. Sure this is the day OK?”

“Look—” Terry turned slowly to face him, the pale blue eyes remote, expressionless. “I know him. This is the day, 'cause I seen him, week after week, walk along the street, round by the sports ground to the bank. You want to be boss instead of me?” The last words were very quiet, but the boy squatting on the ground swallowed suddenly and pressed his lips together. He dropped his head and became engrossed in his pictures in the dust. The last time he had ventured to criticize, a pin had inexplicably run in under one of his finger nails. He had not quite known how it happened—only that it had not been an accident. And it had been agonizingly painful.

The sports ground was not far away, a convenient short cut from the point where they waited to the centre of the town. At the moment it was alive and pullulating with a group of girls from the high school. Along one side of it, where the short cut went—a path beaten in the rough grass at the side of the oval—a clump of trees shaded it from the evening sun. Along this side, attached to the ostentatious and quite useless entrance gates, a paling fence bounded the sports ground and continued as far as the other side of the clump of trees. At this point enthusiasm faded, or money ran out, or both, and the paling fence ended. Beyond it, the path along the edge of the playing field wound its way independently towards the houses of the town.

Having effortlessly exercised his authority, Terry now stood silent, watching the activities on the oval. The other three one by one became still, shifting their eyes to watch him. He knew, without having to look at them, that there was a question in the eyes of each. And it pleased him to know that not one of them was game to put it into words. But time was running out and he swung round to look carefully up the road in the direction he knew the man would come from. There was no sign of him yet, but it would be any minute now. At last, in his own good time, he spoke.

“Anyone know how much longer those girls'll be there?”

The youth on the ground, eager to rehabilitate himself, hurriedly looked at his watch, glanced up at the running girls, moved his lips silently and said, “Another fifteen minutes, I'd say. Carol gets home about half past.”

“Thanks, Joe.” He looked at the girls again. “Many come this way?”

“Carol does for sure and a few others. Most go out the other gate.” Joe stood up, confidence returned. “Why, Terry?” Too late he remembered questions were unacceptable.

But this time Terry's mind was elsewhere and he said, “No point in letting them see us. They might remember—after.”

“What'll we do?” They waited for the answer and a little current of fear ran through them all.

For a moment Terry thought, his eyes first on the length of paling fence and then, hurriedly, along the road where the man would at any moment appear. At last he said, “See that kind of ditch in the road? Just where there's the hole in the fence? I reckon if we crawled in under those blackberries or whatever they are, we could stay hid till we heard him come.”

“And we could get through the hole in the fence easy and we'd be pretty near the trees then.”

Terry nodded. “You got the idea. Come on. Quick.” He looked up the road once more. Nothing moved on it yet, and because he had chosen well he was not afraid of motor traffic. None passed this way at this time of day.

They left the corner, slipped into the ditch as soon as they were able to and found they could crawl in behind the blackberry as Terry had guessed. Terry, on his stomach in the yellow mud of the ditch, pulled a twig of blackberry leaves from in front of his face and peered through. At last he said, very quietly, “Here he comes,” and felt them tense behind him.

At the same time the game on the oval broke up. Girls, shouting, screaming, giggling, fanned out in various directions. A group detached itself and came towards them.

A voice behind Terry said, “What if they all come together?”

“We wait till next week. You do what I do—when I say.”

“If he gets to the trees—” A different voice, hoarse and strained.

“That's what we planned, wasn't it? Shut up and wait.”

But they did not come together. The man left the road and entered the sports ground before he reached the gates. By the time the girls drew near the gates, he was already walking along the path near the paling fence. Terry's eyes were on the girls. The man could wait. The girls were the threat now. They were throwing a ball to one another and he saw it fly towards him and a voice shout, “Catch it, can't you? Wake up.” And he saw the nearest girl, who was walking a little apart from the others, stretch out her hands belatedly—too belatedly, for the ball rolled along the ground, went out of sight behind the paling fence, and he heard it bounce off one of the palings not far from his head. The girl ran towards him, disappeared behind the fence, and then there was a scuffle and a bump and a voice, almost on top of him it seemed, said, “Oh, gosh, I'm awfully sorry. Did I hurt you? Didn't mean to. Where's the damn ball?” The man's voice murmured something he could not catch, there was a thud against the fence and then silence. All four in the ditch stopped breathing. At last came the diminishing sound of running footsteps, and then the more deliberate sound of the man's heavy boots. They waited, motionless, for a very long time. No one dared move before Terry.

But Terry forgot to move. His head was full of a queer sensation absolutely new to him. And he was not even sure it was only his head that was affected. Was it his nerves, or his heart, that so agonizingly twitched and tugged? He found it deeply shaking, so that it required all his concentration and will power to persuade his mind back to normal functioning. He wondered, even then, if he would ever be quite normal again. So he waited, and when at last the final reverberation died down and all seemed well again he moved cautiously.

The girls were now out of the gate, going away from them down the road, and the one who had chased the ball had caught up to them, though she walked apart. He looked at her long and hard, for he had the curious notion that it had been something in her voice that had penetrated his ears and had so shaken him. But he was all right again and she was going from him, and all was well. He decided it had been some kind of vibration of sound to which he was obviously allergic. He crept out through the blackberries and slipped through the gap in the fence. After a moment his head reappeared and he beckoned to the others.

One by one they came out and slipped silently through the fence. They saw that he now held something in his hand. It was a short length of metal pipe ending in a heavily padded nob. He waved it.