GARDENS OF NIGHT

by Greg F. Gifune

  Assuming he’s turned his attention to the photographs there, Wilma motions to the one featuring a pair of young boys and says, “That’s my little brother Dignon, our cat Homer, and me. I was still pretending to be William then, as you can see.”

  And he does. Marc stares at the little boys and the cat in the photograph, and they save him, if only for the moment. There is melancholy in these two, this little boy she says is her brother and the other that was once her. The smiles are for the camera, mere deceptions etched onto impossibly young faces. Only the cat seems authentic, having already solved mysteries these boys will never fully decipher. Marc tries to recall pictures of his own life from that age but comes up empty. He knows they exist. He just can’t quite drag them into the light. His youth was relatively happy and carefree, and he’s certain such photographs would reveal a boy blissfully unaware of what was waiting for him in the years to come, someone for whom desperation and pain the likes of which Wilma and her brother were already experiencing at that age simply did not exist.

  “Long time ago,” Wilma sighs. “Dignon died when we were young. Not too long after that photograph was taken, actually. He was a wonderfully gifted storyteller, a lover of film and fiction and all things magical, mythical and romantic. He was a very special little boy, a prophet, and my best friend.”

  Marc doesn’t know what to say, but he believes her.

  “You remind me of him,” Wilma tells him. “You don’t look alike but you have a way about you, a similar aura, perhaps.”

  “Did violence take him too?”

  “It took us both.” She looks away, as if she’s seen something pass by the window on the far wall. “We came from a very abusive home. Our mother died giving birth to Dignon, and our father was… he was a deeply disturbed man.”

  He wants to touch her just then, to put his hand in hers, to squeeze them and tell her she’s not alone. Instead, he sips more tea and nods thoughtfully.

  “But my God what a charming host,” she says. “Forgive all this doom and gloom, won’t you? I’m just awful, grieving away in my woodland cottage and communing with the dead like some pitiful spinster in an old fairytale, how unspeakably morbid! ”

  Marc wonders about Brooke and Spaulding. Have they returned to the chalet yet to find him gone? Probably not, he’s only been gone…how long has he been gone? It’s as if time no longer exists here. And that’s just fine. He motions to the poster. “You’re a singer?”

  “Oh hardly, love.” She waves her free hand about as if to clear the air of foul odors. “I used to perform now and then in drag shows just for fun. And God help me, it was fun.”

  “I’ll bet you were very good.”

  “You’re sweet.”

  He returns her earlier wink. “I have my moments.”

  “Ha!” she barks with approval.

  It feels good to laugh. He has laughed, hasn’t he?

  “What do you do?” Wilma asks, and then, realizing he didn’t completely understand, adds, “For a living, I mean.”

  “I’m on medical leave right now but I manage an office supply store.”

  She considers this a moment. “That’s not who you are, is it?”

  “No.”

  “What were your dreams?”

  Outside, the wind picks up. The cottage creaks.

  “To be a writer, but that’s gone now.”

  “Replaced by what?”

  Screams… horror… blood…

  “Nothing,” he says. “It’s not important, I –”

  “I realize we’ve just met – and who knows, we may never see each other again – but it’s all right to tell me. It’s safe to tell me, do you understand? Here with Tibbs and me, you’re among friends.” She leans forward and pats his hand. “You’re among friends.”

  “Something terrible happened to my wife and me,” he admits. The words liberate him, if only temporarily, and he embraces the release. “Ever since I’ve had dreams I don’t understand. Something’s happening, something impossible.”

  “I’ve seen the impossible. I’ve touched it. There’s no such thing.” Wilma carefully places her cup and saucer on the table. “Much of life is myth, Marc, a fairytale full of wonderment and beauty, horror and fear, love and hate, pain and suffering, jealousy and greed, compassion and sacrifice. What we’ve lost, what we’ve forgotten, is that sometimes fairytales are true. Fate led you here to me so we could share this exact moment in time and draw from it what we will, what we must. Besides, can’t very well have a fairytale without a fairy, now can you?”

  Marc cannot remember the last time he has smiled like this. It feels delightfully foreign. “Maybe you’re my Fairy Godmother.”

  “I’m as close as you’re liable to get in this life, love.”

  The cottage is already rather dark, but outside the light has shifted. The world has grown suddenly darker, too dark for so early an hour. Perhaps fresh storm clouds have rolled in and blotted out the sun, casting the cottage in longer, deeper shadows. Mr. Tibbs raises his head, looks to the windows as if to be sure there’s nothing more to it, and then fixes his stare on Marc.

  You hear them too, don’t you?

  Marc feels himself nod, remembers the spider spinning its web in his hospital room.

  They’re just outside the door.

  The back of his neck shivers, and a sharp pain stabs his temple then trickles down into his jaw.

  Don’t let them in.

  Fear has become his god. He looks to the floor in worship.

  With a resigned sigh, the cat resumes bathing.

  “Tell me about your dreams,” Wilma says.

  “There’s this old farmhouse.” Marc swallows, realizes this is the first time he’s told anyone. Is that why he’s here, as she suggested? His hands have fallen asleep. “It’s calling me, drawing me to it for some reason. I have this strange connection to it in an almost spiritual way. At first the farmhouse looks deserted. It’s not, though. Someone…something lives there.”

  Wilma rests her chin in her palm. “There’s quite a bit of farmland in these parts,” she says. “Lots of old farmhouses, some still working, some abandoned long ago. Would you recognize the area, if you saw it again?”

  He finally raises his eyes from the floor. “It’s just a dream.”

  “Are you sure?”

  He runs a tingling hand over his head. His scalp has begun to perspire.

  “Are you afraid of this place?” she presses.

  “It’s a part of this somehow. These things I’ve had in my head since the night Brooke and I were... since that night.”

  “What kinds of things, love?”

  “Voices. Feelings. Communications from…”

  “From whom? From what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She stays quiet a while. “You said something terrible happened to you and your wife.”

  He nods.

  “And this brought about these changes in you?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know a thing or two about violence. Chris died alone on a city street. My brother died in my arms in a cold and dark place, a horrible little space in our own private Hell. Violence changes us. It kills things in us, precious things. But sometimes it awakens things too. Maybe it awakened something in you.”

  “Like what? Madness?”

  “Nietzsche once said, ‘There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness.’ ”

  “This has nothing to do with love.”

  “It has everything to do with it. Love binds and sets us free, damns and saves us all at once. And when these horrible things happen, love is all we have left, even if it’s just the concept of love, the hope of love, the memory of love. I can see how troubled you are, Marc, how tormented you are by what’s taken place, and while I don’t know the specifics, I understand, believe me I do. These things in your head, maybe you shouldn’t fight them quite so hard. Maybe you should let them speak to you and see what they have to say.”


  “What if they’re lying?”

  She smiles warmly. “What if they’re not?”

  Set against a pristine backdrop of ice and snow, visions of blood-red roses fixed with steely spikes rather than thorns drift through Marc’s mind. “I think it’s something evil,” he tells her.

  “It very well may be.” Wilma scratches her cheek with a fingernail painted red as the roses. “But evil, at best, is a difficult term, better applied to the realm of religion than psychology.”

  Marc looks to her, half-expecting to see Doctor Berry sitting there instead.

  “Were the men who attacked Chris evil?” she asks. “Were the people who hurt you? Was my father? Maybe. It’s all horribly cold and lonely, but is it evil or simply a base piece of human nature we can never hope to collectively evolve beyond?”

  “It’s a matter of survival.”

  “I agree. But remember, survival is a viciously ruthless enterprise.”

  “Unwarranted aggression isn’t survival. Defending yourself against it is.”

  “But one could make the argument that evil is simply trying to survive as well.” She picks another cookie from the tray, nearly takes a bite then thinks better of it. “My point is that whatever’s trying to communicate with you could be evil or divine. But in the end, if it’s your destiny, a necessary and inescapable journey ordained by fate, does it matter?”

  Pay attention to the things you’ll soon see.

  With a quick side-glance in Marc’s direction, Mr. Tibbs curls up for a nap and begins to purr.

  “Interestingly enough, the book I’m reading ties into our discussion.” Wilma scoops up the paperback from the coffee table and asks, “Have you read Camus?”

  “Not a lot. I read The Stranger in high school.”

  “How apropos.” She places the book in her lap. “This is a collection of his essays. Are you familiar with the mythology concerning Sisyphus?”

  He searches his mind for answers. “Is he the one who had to keep pushing the rock up the hill for all eternity?”

  She nods. “Sisyphus was damned to the underworld by the gods, where he was sentenced to pushing what was essentially a boulder up the side of a mountain until it had reached the summit. Once there, the rock would roll back down to the bottom, and he’d be forced to start again. Backbreaking labor was his punishment, pointless, hopeless and repetitive. He was damned for flaunting his passion-filled life, hating death and stealing the gods’ secrets. Of course it’s a delicious metaphor for the futility of life, of struggle and the torture of one’s mind, body and soul that so often seems to make little to no sense. But rather than Sisyphus’s ascent, what interested Camus specifically was his descent. He writes that the most fascinating quality of the story is when the stone rolls back to the bottom of the mountain and Sisyphus walks down after it to begin again. Because it is during that walk back down the mountain, as he descends deeper into the underworld and the darkness the gods have chained him to, that Sisyphus contemplates his hell, realizes its ramifications consciously and pushes on. And it is then, Camus suggests, that Sisyphus conquers his own doom. Camus paints Sisyphus as a man for whom torment is eternal. But also as a man who through constant torture has become better and stronger than the rock. In this sense, Sisyphus transcends the horrors of his existence and becomes something of a hero. In his triumph over the rock, even while still shackled to rolling it up that mountain again and again, Sisyphus rips his fate from the hands of the gods and returns it to his own. One mustn’t rail against the rock. One must embrace it and defy the torture, and in that contempt for one’s fate – good or evil – ultimately become the rock. In that moment the rock is defeated and one is, in the truest sense of the word, free. As Camus so eloquently wrote: ‘There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.’ ”

  Fear rises…

  Listen to the things you’ll soon hear.

  Marc remembers those words. He could swear he heard them once before, spoken by the man in the driveway. And like then, they illicit things from deep inside him, things otherwise dormant. “I know that quote,” he says, heart racing. “I… I know it.”

  “Synchronicity strikes again,” Wilma says.

  He responds with an algorithm of yearning, an excruciating hunger for understanding within his warren of hidden and unholy configurations, equations, and possibilities. In distant worlds, ancient temples crumble, the rubble falling through his tattered mind like a rain of crushed glass. And all the while the shrouded figures from his dreams watch silently, motionlessly, with the vigilant eyes of the damned. There will be no shelter, no sanctuary. Not yet. He realizes this now. His journey is preordained. Perhaps it always has been.

  Like Sisyphus, he has little hope of escape, only the eventual triumph of enlightenment. He imagines himself in freefall, spiraling down gracefully into deep water, the whales singing to him as he glides toward the rusted and barnacle-laden gates of the underworld.

  “Did you know your brother was going to die?” Marc asks suddenly.

  “Yes. He put his head on my lap and I told him it was all right to sleep.”

  “Were you afraid?”

  “Yes. But his fears had left him by then.”

  “Why should a little boy have to die like that?”

  “Why do any of us have to suffer? Because God is a cruel and unloving monster, or is it through such things that we attain true enlightenment?” She shrugs. “We all have roles to play in this life, love. We all have purpose. And just as in life, we have those roles in death. They may not always be what we’d hope for or choose, but such things are not for us to decide. Or, perhaps they are. Perhaps we’ve chosen our own destinies for some greater purpose we can’t yet remember. Some come to suffer, some to enlighten, some to lead, some to follow. All come to die. And it’s right to struggle, to fight for one’s life. The desire for survival is natural in nearly all living things. But so is death. Release. Surrender. It is, after all, all right to sleep.”

  Distant memories beckon him, flashes of choppy ocean waters…

  “Look, I’m no sage,” Wilma admits, “no fairy godmother. But here’s what I know. Regardless of which mythology one subscribes to, the common thread that runs through most is that long ago the era of Man began and Earth became ours. Ever since, the gods have waited, knowing one day we’d make the necessary missteps that would allow them to take it all back. In our blackest moments, Marc, that’s when they’ll wrench it free if we don’t hold on tight. Because it’s in those moments our humanity dies. But only if we let it.”

  The crack of bone… the spray of blood… the cries of agony…

  He will not submissively slip away to madness. Not yet. If this lunacy is to take him, it will not be without a fight. He will go out swinging.

  “Well, there’s something unexpected.” Wilma rises from her chair, moves to the window and pulls the curtain back to let in more light. It has begun to snow. “Strange, the way the sky went dark, I thought we were in for more rain. It’s a bit early for snow even in these parts.” She turns from the window. “More tea?”

  “I should be getting back.”

  “That’s probably best. No telling how bad this is liable to get. My cell’s in my bag.” She heads back to the kitchen. “You can use it to call your wife and –”

  “I can find my way.” Marc retrieves his coat from the arm of the loveseat.

  “You’re sure?”

  He offers his hand. She accepts. “Thank you,” he says, “for everything.”

  “Well, thank you for keeping me company a while.”

  They hold hands and eye contact for several seconds before letting go. In that moment, this woman, who used to be a boy, alone in her forest cottage with her cat and memories, the ghosts of lovers and brothers and the tarnished dreams of gods drowning in the sleep of the tormented, seems something more than wholly human. And yet her humanness is what makes her real, genuine rather than imagined. Like him, she is as much flesh, blood and bone as she
is spirit, enigma and myth.

  In the nearby woodstove, a log collapses with a crack and a hiss.

  The fire shifts, grows stronger.

  Wilma walks Marc to the door, opens it and gazes out at the snow falling between the trees. A cold breeze rushes in but she seems not to notice. “I hope you find the answers you need, and I hope they grant you peace.” She smiles, with just a hint of mischievous glee. “Hans Christian Andersen said ‘Every man’s life is a fairy tale written by God’s fingers.’ Maybe he was right, maybe not. Either way, just remember: enchanting as they may be, in fairytales the forests are always dark.”

  Seven

  Marc moves through the trees in search of the path back to the chalet. Smoky plumes of breath roll from his nostrils and mouth, mixing with the swirl of snowflakes to form a strange cloud about his head. Like a halo, he thinks, a halo of frozen, beautifully intricate little razors.

  “Don’t let them fool you,” Archie, his roommate in the hospital had always told him. A stout, middle-aged man who shuffled about in pajamas and scuffed slippers, scribbling in a tattered little notebook he never let out of his sight, he’d often spend hours sitting on the edge of his bed staring into space, brow knit and lips moving in silent conversation. Endlessly running a hand over his bald scalp, he’d pontificate about the numerous conspiracies he was certain were constantly being perpetrated against mankind. “They go around opening doors without knowing what’s on the other side, see? And then they make us run on through, see? I know, because I used to open those doors. Now I’m just a guinea pig like the rest of you poor saps.”

  Word on the unit was that Archie had once been a successful electrical engineer at one of the leading universities in the country, and had specialized in the study and application of electromagnetism, which he described as, “Along with gravity, the most important and powerful force in the universe.”

  Marc still isn’t sure if there’s any truth regarding Archie’s alleged past, but there is no doubt that he’s someone for whom the line between insanity and brilliance is wafer thin. Either way, it was common knowledge that Archie was a lifer. He’d been institutionalized since the early 1980s. He’d never be going home, and he knew it.