It’s the old Master, the one who brooks no argument. Who automatically expects everyone to obey his orders without question.
Joel grins at me, a grin that manages to say forgive me, but I know you’ll pass whatever strange test he’s got in mind.
Gill and Jim smile at me in the same way.
I wish I felt as sure as they do that I’ll pass whatever trial I’m put through.
*
I glance about me, seeking out a patch of the garden requiring rejuvenation.
He’ll ask me to walk through there, won’t he?
To see if it all springs into bright and glorious bloom.
I’m…not sure it will.
I don’t have any soul, do I?
Before I can decide what I should do, before anyone has a chance to realise what he’s about to do, let alone stop him, the Master charges at a crouch towards me.
He hits me incredibly hard in a flying tackle, one that carries me through the air with him. We fly back toward the withered stems of the once golden flower, landing amongst its carpeting of yellowed petals, its dark tangled roots.
As we tumble through the dried petals and leaves, throwing them up in a storm about us, the Master is already laughing triumphantly.
When we at last come to a halt beneath the bush’s innumerable crooked branches, he quickly spins around, looking back towards an anguished Joel.
Joel, Gill and Jim are already rushing forward to help me.
The master cries out to them all, but particularly to his distraught son.
‘See?’ he screams, drawing everyone’s attention to the withered bush, the dead bloom, with an airy raising and wave of an arm. ‘You call this love?’
I hate myself.
I hate myself for hurting Joel in this way.
What must it be like for him to see that my supposed love for him was nothing but a lie?
I can’t stop the tears from flowing.
I don’t want to.
So it’s through the murky haze of my weeping that I see Joel and the others come to a sudden halt in their rush to help me.
They’re no longer even looking at me.
They’re staring in awe at the bush.
*
Chapter 46
Everywhere about me is darker now.
Shade; I’m lying in a deeply mottled shade.
The once bared, warped branches spreading above me are full of thick, olive leaves.
An exultantly grinning Joel darts towards me, tenderly helping me up while ignoring his dumbfounded father, whom he lets confusedly struggle to his own feet.
Joel jubilantly draws me back towards the still spellbound Gill and Jim, an increasingly bewildered Master wildly loping after us.
The bush isn’t just a deliciously sparkling green once more, the leaves spreading like a billowing, ever-expanding cloud; a large golden bud is also developing in its very centre, growing in size even as we all gaze at it in amazement.
The Master weeps, his eyes red with anguish.
‘No, no! It’s not possible…’
He whirls on Joel, his whole face now red with a blushing fury.
‘How can she love you,’ he demands terrifyingly. ‘How, when your mother – a real, flesh and blood woman – never loved me?”
‘You sent her away!’ Joel furiously snaps back. ‘Why should she love you?’
The ferocity of their argument is lost on Gill and Jim. They’re whole focus is still upon the opening of the bud, golden petals already begin to spring up, to flop languidly to one side like gloriously silken sheets.
The bud is immense, yet the bloom is still growing, still rising and spreading.
‘I didn’t...I didn’t send her away,’ the Master moans dreadfully, as if he were a wounded animal. ‘I loved her. I brought her here, to show her my love…’
As the golden bloom rises and rises up before us, the Master watches its growth with ever increasing fear until, at last, he falls to his knees weeping inconsolably.
‘Forgive me, Fay! Please forgive me.’
*
The base of the bloom spreads out, like a soft bed of golden clouds, rose-like in its beauty. Yet the main part of the towering bloom is slender, curvaceous, more tulip or lily like in its form.
Its curves are curiously feminine: the long legs, the hips of a woman; the narrowing of the waist, the spreading once more of breasts, of shoulders; the falling of reams of golden hair.
Between the separating curtains of hair, smaller petals ripple, taking on the aspect of a beautiful face.
She smiles.
The Master shrieks, clutching his heart.
‘Fay! No, no!’
His legs crumple, his face contorting in fear and anguish.
He falls to the floor, lying completely still.
*
Chapter 47
Joel dashes towards the still form of his father.
The girl approaches me, reaching for and holding my hand.
She smiles.
‘It’s nearly time,’ she says mysteriously, yet curiously reassuringly.
Gill and Jim are unsure how to react to everything that’s going on. I give them a reassuring smile, and it seems to calm them.
‘It seemed like a heart attack…’ Gill says unsurely.
‘He’s dead,’ Joel confirms, rising up from beside his father’s lifeless body.
He sounds bitter, even sad, that the Master who had treated him so badly has now gone.
‘What have you done?’ he demands of the golden flower angrily. ‘Who are you?’
The woman doesn’t answer. She simply smiles.
The serpentine stem that the bloom sprouts from sways, extends. The woman floats up and away from the bush’s centre, floating serenely towards Joel.
The girl grips my hand a little tighter, her way of telling me he’s not in danger.
Joel doesn’t realise this, of course.
At first he steps back, raises his arms defensively; but then he curiously halts, holds his ground, lowers his arms.
The woman draws closer; smiling.
Smiling like the girl smiles.
She draws closer still towards Joel, petals beneath her golden tresses rolling slighting into the form of silk-draped arms.
Arms that reach out for Joel, that embrace him.
And I’m sure I see tears of water droplets fall from the woman’s eyes.
*
Unsurely, Joel lets his own arms embrace the woman.
A conversation is passing between them now, I’m sure. A conversation similar to the ones I have with the girl.
Joel stares down at his father, his expression now one of fury and hate.
‘Dad,’ he says, as if forgetting that his father is now dead, ‘is this true? Is what she saying true?’
‘Yes,’ the Master answers sadly, turning and beginning to rise unsteadily to his feet. ‘Yes, I’m afraid it is true.’
*
Chapter 48
Like me, Gill and Jim gasp in a mingling of surprise and horror.
Joel, however, reacts to his father’s reanimation with nothing more than an angry glower.
No doubt the woman has already explained how this is possible, this resurrection of the dead.
‘You killed my mother!’ Joel growls, pointing accusingly at the ground beneath the golden flower’s spreading bush. ‘And you buried her here?’
‘I loved her!’ his father protests. ‘I brought her here to show her my love for her; but it only showed that she didn’t love me!’
The woman reaches out to tenderly touch Joel’s heart.
He groans, but not in agony. It’s a moan of ecstasy, of relief.
Of love.
I sense a change too.
It’s his heart; it’s alive once more, a heart of spirit, not stone.
‘My heart of stone,’ he says to his father, more calmly and resignedly this time. ‘That was your gift to me, too.’
‘Real hearts are too delic
ate, don’t you understand? I didn't want you to suffer as I’d suffered!’
The woman smiles.
‘She forgives you,’ Joel says, speaking for her. ‘Her body was a boundary, preventing her from experiencing greater things–’
‘Trapped here, in this garden?’ the Master gasps in disbelief.
‘No: not trapped. The garden has simply retained a memory here, a sliver of her greater spirit–’
‘This garden had to be closed!’ The Master is shaking now with terror. ‘I always feared it was proof of another life; but what’s that to someone like me, after all I’ve done in this life?’
‘The garden’s memory of you isn’t flattering; it won’t keep you any longer.’
The Master’s legs crumple once more.
His now useless body drops to the ground.
This time, there is no sense of horror on Joel’s face.
*
The golden woman turns to me.
She smiles.
Some think that they will see God as if He were standing there and they here. It is not so. God and I, we are one.
Did she talk to me?
I’m not sure.
The girl is tightly holding my hand; did I hear the woman through her?
The woman’s returning now towards the centre of the bush, floating away from Joel, still smiling.
Joel accepts it without demur.
His smile is like hers; benign, joyful.
I even detect a slight trace of that smile when the curves of the bloom are no longer womanly but purely that of a gorgeous golden flower.
Yet just because her body isn’t there, that doesn’t mean she isn’t still here.
A body is merely the worm, setting boundaries to whom we really are; yet it is also this worm who enables us to have knowledge of others, of emotions.
And so we shouldn’t fear its disintegration, when the time to embrace other things has come.
The girl is still holding my hand.
She looks up at me.
She smiles, of course.
‘Yet the ones we leave behind, they suffer,’ the girl says to me with her smile, fleetingly glancing over at Gill and Jim, a hint of sadness, of pity, briefly creasing that smile. ‘Naturally, I’d feared that, even with all my memories, you couldn’t ever be me: but my body was never the real me, for I can shed it, and still be who I really am.’
She’s the garden’s memory of Maxine – of Maxine’s soul – who had been so enthralled when she visited here as a child.
*
Chapter 49
And yet; Maxine hasn’t remained tied to the garden.
She seems, rather, to have had a closer connection to me.
Then do I…do I have all her memories?
I loved it here, in this garden; a garden like no other in its miraculous beauty, it’s incredible purity.
A new Garden of Eden.
Of life.
And yet, of course, when my life was ebbing, I feared I was leaving all earthly beauty behind.
And then I remembered the Garden.
Remembered that our purest self is formed of emotion, not earth.
Yet even I hadn’t dared hope that the garden’s own memory of me would present me with the chance of helping me recall everything I knew.
The girl is no longer holding my hand.
She’s gone.
No; she hasn’t gone, has she?
She’s here.
*
I step towards Joel, take his hand.
Kiss him warmly.
Yes, his heart is no longer of stone.
But then, neither is mine.
I step now towards Gill, towards Jim.
I embrace them warmly; and they cry with joy as they embrace and recognise me.
‘Mum, Dad,’ I say unnecessarily, ‘it’s me; it’s Maxine.’
End
If you enjoyed reading this book, you might also enjoy (or you may know someone else who might enjoy) these other books by Jon Jacks.
The Caught – The Rules – Chapter One – The Changes – Sleeping Ugly
The Barking Detective Agency – The Healing – The Lost Fairy Tale
A Horse for a Kingdom – Charity – The Most Beautiful Things (Now includes The Last Train)
The Dream Swallowers – Nyx; Granddaughter of the Night – Jonah and the Alligator
Glastonbury Sirens – Dr Jekyll’s Maid – The 500-Year Circus – The Desire: Class of 666
P – The Endless Game – DoriaN A – Wyrd Girl – The Wicker Slippers – Gorgesque
Heartache High (Vol I) – Heartache High: The Primer (Vol II) – Heartache High: The Wakening (Vol III)
Miss Terry Charm, Merry Kris Mouse & The Silver Egg – The Last Angel – Eve of the Serpent
Seecrets – The Cull – Dragonsapien – The Boy in White Linen – Porcelain Princess – Freaking Freak
Died Blondes – Queen of all the Knowing World – The Truth About Fairies – Lowlife
Elm of False Dreams – God of the 4th Sun – A Guide for Young Wytches – Lady of the Wasteland
The Wendygo House – Americarnie Trash – An Incomparable Pearl – We Three Queens – Cygnet Czarinas
Memesis – April Queen, May Fool – Sick Teen – Thrice Born
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends