Aliens In My Garden

by Jude Gwynaire

  __________

  ‘What do you mean, an intruder?’ Celeste frowned. This mission was getting unnecessarily complicated and she hadn’t even found a single orb yet.

  ‘A plump avian,’ Alpha reported. ‘Designation: owl.’

  ‘Well, what are you doing letting owls in the ship?’ said Celeste, crossly.

  ‘Your analysis is inaccurate. The owl was not “let” on board. It came-’

  ‘Oh never mind,’ snapped Celeste. ‘I suppose it can’t do any harm, can it? An owl?’

  ‘Probability vectors of harm to the mission...insignificant,’ admitted Alpha.

  ‘Well then, don’t bother me with it,’ said Celeste. ‘I really should have brought my hoverscoot for this mission. Walking’s so...so...dull,’ she finished.

  ‘Probability vectors of mission being harmed by dullness also insignificant.’

  ‘I’m beginning to think you’re insignificant,’ muttered Celeste, and she walked on, trudging through the Garden’s greenery.

  __________

  On her broomstick, disguised inside her patch of perfectly ordinary sky, Alditha frowned. It wasn’t that she liked to frown, but some faces were just extremely good at frowning, and Alditha knew that she had that kind of face. She’d watched the bats attack the orb, nipping in, taking bites, nipping out so the next of them could have a go. That was when her frown had really started, but as she watched the sphere fall out of the sky, the frown had announced its intention to stay for a while and had settled itself into her face as though she were an old armchair. She watched as Skoros and his wretched bird came racing along a pathway, and the wizard stooped to pick up the sphere, examining it with a smirk on his stupid beardless face. And she watched as he marched off again, holding the sphere like it was some precious, jewelled thing.

  She’d thought, as she watched all this, about swooping down on him and clonking him on his stupid wizardry nose. But that wasn’t, she knew, the right thing to do. Witch-magic wasn’t often about pointing a stick at people and turning them into frogs. That was more wizard-magic style, and she knew that Skoros would relish the chance to turn her into something warty.

  No. For now, the beardless wonder had a new toy, which would keep him out of mischief for a while, at least. She consoled herself with the idea that he’d probably never be able to get it moving again.

  Probably.

  Promising herself she’d keep a closer eye on what he did in future, just as Harper had told her to, Alditha pointed her broom towards home.

  __________

  Skoros was back in the castle. Back in his secret room of bronze contraptions. Back with the sphere.

  Razor had been on his shoulder when he’d found it, and as he’d carried it home. But now Skoros wanted to be alone with the sphere. He’d made the bird hop off and wait outside the secret chamber, then he’d gone in and locked the door behind him.

  He hugged the sphere tightly to his body, like a round, metal teddy bear.

  ‘You’re going to make me King of the Garden,’ he cooed to it. ‘Yes you are. Yes you are. And when Daddy’s got you working again, who shall he send you out to get first, eh?’ Without a breath, Skoros’ voice dropped from cooing to sharp-edged spite. ‘That meddling witch, Alditha, that’s who.’

  But then he caught his breath, and the intricate clockwork of his devious brain twirled and danced. ‘No. Nooooonononono, I have a better plan.’

  And alone in his secret room, with just the powerless orb for company, Skoros laughed at the audacity of his imagination.

  __________

  Beyond the Garden, above the Earth, the two original orbs soared into orbit. It took them a few moments to get used to the size of the universe again, then they adjusted, and with a silent pop, they expanded to their normal football size. They began to whistle, a sound that no-one heard, and then the sound dropped lower, and lower, from a whistle to a moan, from a moan to a grumble, from a grumble to that sense of sickness you get on long car journeys, and lower, and lower, far below human hearing. When the noise was low enough, the orbs glowed bright cherry red, and sent out a pulse. It wasn’t a pulse you could see or hear. It was a pulse that would ricochet through the universe that was, and bounce off everything it hit. It would bounce sideways, through the cracks between realities, the tiny little winks between dimensions, and it would do it fast.

  People will always tell you that the fastest things can travel is at the speed of light.

  They’re wrong. Light needs action to travel, it pours through the universe, full of fuss and energy, like a white rabbit running late for tea.

  The speed of dark is faster. All the dark needs to travel is an absence of anything in its way. The dark is almost everywhere already.

  The pulse went off into the rippling dimensions, travelling at the speed of dark.

  Almost immediately, a thousand cracks away, in a dimension it called home, the pulse was heard.

  On a fleet of unimaginably slick, dark spaceships the size of flattened-out worlds, a billion lights switched silently on.

  The fleet of unimaginably slick, now bright spaceships took a moment before reacting, as if to consider the pulse that had turned on the lights and what it meant. And then they silently began to move forward.

  8

  Time passes.

  People always say time passes, as if it just slips silently through the world, unnoticed.

  People are silly sometimes.

  Time passes, but it brushes everything as it goes. It touches us and we grow taller and older, and we learn new things. We change, and little by little as time passes, we’re not quite the same as we used to be.

  Time passes through my garden, brushing leaves, and grass, and flowers. It pulls a season behind it, like a rucksack drooping from its back. It touches buds that grow; they ripen and their colours stream out into the world, petals shouting ‘Look at me.’ Fruits just bursting with their mission, spread seeds, begin again, next phase, next year. It touches leaves and deepens all their greens, bringing sunshine to glisten like butter on everything that lives.

  It’s near Midsummer in my garden now. Two weeks of time have passed, and touched the world and made it shine.

  I’ve seen that tiny owl again.

  He’s been busy.

  __________

  Alditha stirred a big cauldron of thick, bubbling, green and purple goo on her open stove.

  She’d been on a mission in the two weeks since the arrival of the teacup.

  She’d had to go and explain to the Green Man about Skoros’ forest, the effect of her spell, and why its remaining trees were now determined not to be cut down. He listened, his face becoming graver and more still with every word she uttered. When she finished speaking, he didn’t say anything for several long seconds. Then, in a sad, quiet voice, he said that he was disappointed in her, and that her interference with the natural order of the forest was essentially wrong. Some trees were meant to talk and make decisions, while others were not, he said. Then he asked her to leave. Alditha had tried to argue, tried to make him argue back, but the Green Man wouldn’t be drawn into a fight. Alditha wished he had. Eventually, she had to get on her broomstick and fly away from him. They hadn’t spoken since.

  But the Garden didn’t stop needing her witchcraft just because she’d disappointed the Green Man. Sagar had suffered from a terrible stomach ache for the last two weeks—when your stomach is full of chemicals that can be set on fire at a moment’s notice, you’re always going to be vulnerable to indigestion. Alditha had prepared a chalky solution for his heartburn and advised him, as a friend, to give a loud, clear warning any time he had the hiccups or was about to fart. Sagar looked scandalized for a moment, but Alditha grinned at him and he burst out laughing.

  Dragons were often solitary creatures, and Alditha knew Sagar complained of aches and pains just so he’d have someone to talk to who wasn’t scared that he’d burn them to a crisp as soon as look at them.

  Then there was Skoros. A
lditha had friends in all the levels of the animal kingdom, and she’d asked them to keep an eye on the wizard’s comings and goings since he’d got hold of the orb. The strange thing was that they had nothing to report. Everyone who came to see her said the same thing—Skoros hadn’t been seen or heard of outside the castle in two weeks. He was up to something, for sure. In fact, knowing Skoros, she thought he was probably ‘Up To Something, bwahahahahaha.’ She was fighting the instinct that told her she had no alternative but to fly over there and demand to know exactly what it was.

  ‘Stir the pot and stir it well,

  Watch the heat, ignore the smell,’ she muttered, stirring the cauldron three times anti-clockwise, as the recipe demanded. People think witchcraft is all about messing about with dark, mysterious forces, but sometimes, it’s just a load of recipes with twiddly bits added.

  The teacup, when she’d finally seen it for herself, was mystifying. Teacups weren’t supposed to just hang there, and the Green Man was quite enthusiastic to tell her all about it, and about this young girl called Celeste who’d come out of it. But she couldn’t meet his eye, having had to tell him about Skoros’ forest, and so had never got the facts of the teacup entirely straight in her head. Apparently though, according to Flitterwing the blue jay, the teacup had flown off to parts unknown—or at least, unknown to Flitterwing, which was not quite the same thing—not long after she’d left the Green Man’s house. The lightning bolts across the sky had disappeared about the same time, said Flitterwing. It was all odd.

  Alditha didn’t like odd, unexplained things, they made her itchy. She sighed.

  Then of course there was Dramm. Alditha couldn’t help herself—she chuckled as she stirred the goo, waiting for the green streaks and the purple streaks to disappear. Dramm was proving harder to train than she’d imagined he would be. She was making some progress with him, but she’d realized there was only so much he could learn from a human about being a good and useful spellbook.

  Inevitably, she’d started taking him for lessons with Jasper, the old spellbook who lived as a hermit in a shack over Spooky End way. Alditha was the nearest thing Jasper had to a permanent friend. The witch and spellbook had once been an inseparable pair; though many a good year had passed since they’d spoken, due to a disagreement over the correct use of red batwing stew and its associated magical procedure.

  Jasper didn’t like visitors, and seemed always to be muttering to himself in some strange language that no-one understood. But he had at least answered the door when she’d gone to see him, and by bowing and being respectful of his age and wisdom—and by making an effort to reminisce over the good times they’d shared—she’d gained entry to the shack.

  Jasper was mysterious and a little weird—even for a spellbook—and had magical runes on his cover and down his spine. On his front cover, whenever he needed to, he manifested a face with quite a big nose, wide, hang-dog eyes and a pair of thick lips that smacked together as he spoke. He was also, as far as Alditha knew, the only spell book in the Garden to bother wearing clothes. They weren’t much—a tartan cloth wrapped around his lower third, just beneath his lips, and a woven straw hat perched and always ready to fall off the top of his spine when he moved.

  Alditha thought back to the first time Jasper and Dramm had met...

  She had explained in detail about Dramm’s bouncy, excitable personality, and Jasper’s eyes had grown larger, taking up more of his cover-space as he stared down at the younger book. Dramm had stopped bouncing and had scooted behind Alditha’s black skirts, peeping around her legs and darting back out of sight when Jasper’s eyes caught him again. Then the old book had nodded, his face moving slowly over his cover. Frowning deeply and continuing his perpetual mumbling, his yellowed, musty-smelling pages had rustled and opened. With a long sigh, he had eagerly sat down and begun to teach the younger spellbook all he knew.

  Since then, she’d taken Dramm to see Jasper three more times. The first time, Dramm wailed the cottage down and ran around it twice before Alditha managed to catch him and tie him closed, shoving him into a rough sack for the journey. The second time, he didn’t wail but moped and dragged himself across the floor, throwing himself heavily onto the broomstick as though no spellbook in all the history of the world had suffered the way he suffered. The third time, Alditha noticed, he forgot to be miserable about the whole thing, and was his usual affectionate, bouncy self. In fact, the third time, when she called back at Jasper’s to pick him up, Dramm seemed reluctant to come away. She smiled. Say what you liked about the old hermit, he knew how to train spell books. Since the third session, Dramm had been showing off the new things he could do—he’d conjured her a bunch of pink roses, he’d started levitating, though he still wobbled if he tried to fly too far, and, which was most exciting to her, he’d said his first few words, in a voice that was squeaky and unpracticed. Admittedly, one of the words was ‘Why?’, which Alditha knew meant she was in for an exhausting time when he learned to attach it to other words. And he also seemed to be picking up some of Jasper’s mumbo-jumbo, and would mumble the gibberish to himself when he thought she was out of earshot. She chuckled again, wondering what Harper would make of the little spell book’s progress.

  She stopped stirring.

  Harper. Oh, Harper. She sighed and her shoulders slumped. He was arrogant sometimes, and silly, but she missed him so much it was like a fist squeezing her heart. That was how it was with a witch and her familiar—it was like having a pet and a best friend all in one. Against her will, she looked over to the dresser and saw the claw-marks of his last landing.

  The goo on the stove bubbled fiercely, and Alditha snapped out of her thinking. The green and the purple had come together and turned a rich, shiny black that was climbing up the sides of the cauldron. She took the pot off the heat, and scooped great ladlefuls of the thick, sticky stuff into iron funnels, stuck into a row of clear green bottles. Only when she’d scraped as much of the goo out of the cauldron as she could, and it was trickling like treacle into its bottles, did she look sideways at the dresser again, and sigh.

  ‘Oh, Harper,’ she said, biting her bottom lip. ‘Where are you, darling bird?’

  As she thought more about Harper, and reminisced about his sweet personality and habits, her thoughts gradually wandered towards the Garden itself, and her home within it.

  Dimensions were funny things, she decided. They were all over the place, sticking out sideways like morning hair, and stacked one on top of the other like sheets of paper. Whole universes side by side, on top of each other, or sideways if you turned your head just right—and most of the time, you’d never know they were there. But she knew that universes were funny things, too—running like clockwork. The spin of this planet, the orbit of that moon, the streaking path of a comet on a journey that might take thousands of years—it all worked together and looked like a dance.

  Like all good witches, Alditha understood that if you had the right sort of ears, you could hear the universe move, and it sounded like fierce music. And as the universe turned, as galaxies collided and planets spun around their suns, and moons danced round their planets, there were times and places when dimensions came close to touching—the barriers between them thin as tissue. She also knew, though without ever quite knowing why, that people celebrated at those times, and in those places.

  She considered the Hallowe’ens further, staring out of her kitchen window at the flowing summer countryside, as if in a trance...

  The folk that lived in the Garden celebrated their Midsummer and Midwinter Hallowe’ens—those times when the dimensions came close—at Stone Hedge, a mysterious carved stone hedge that was almost, but not quite, in the centre of the Garden. No-one in the Garden knew quite who’d built it, or carved it in the first place, but they all felt the pull of the Hedge, and at the right times, they gathered there. They put up a big tent, they brought food and drink, and there was singing and dancing and poetry and music and wonderful gossip, and everyone was free
to raise any issues with their neighbours that hadn’t been sorted out during the course of the last half-year. It was a time to come together and enjoy your friends, and then, as the night grew old, the chatter would die down to a low hum, and all eyes would turn to the Hedge for the Ceremony of the Eternal Pruning—one of the local beggars would be elected, given a costume and a few coins, and told to play the role of Ven Tao, the Great Gardener. They would prance about, pretending to snip bits off the Hedge and rousing the crowd’s expectation. And then, when the dimensions did their thing, Stone Hedge would be struck, suddenly, by sunlight from Somewhere Else, and it would shimmer and glow, its dull grey stone turning white, and pink, and purple and green and yellow and all the colours of a Garden rainbow, and a few more from Elsewheres that could only be imagined. The Hedge would seem to dance, and stretch, and sway to the sounds of an Elsewhere music that only it could hear, and the people of the Garden would all be hypnotized by its dance, drawn to it for reasons they didn’t know, pulled to watch the Hedge dance. And as the Hallowe’en ended and the dimensions moved on, the Hedge would release all those colours into the Garden air, to float away like soap bubbles while it stopped moving, and turned grey and cold and still again. When the Hedge stopped moving, everyone in the Garden knew the day was done.

  But all that only happened at the Hallowe’ens. Between those days, the high points of the Summer and the Winter, Stone Hedge was just what it looked like—a dullish, blueish, greyish, almost square-cut block of stone. Between the Hallowe’ens, people used it as a meeting place, a place to sit, and chat, and watch the world go by. If people agreed to meet, but never mentioned where, it was taken as read that they’d see each other by Stone Hedge.