“Well, thank you for being so thoughtful,” replied Holly, and she actually meant it. Tom’s parents had promised to check on her regularly, but they were two villages away. The few friends she had were all in London and she was just starting to realize that the emptiness she had felt when Tom left had as much to do with feeling isolated as it had to do with his absence.
“It’s not a problem,” Jocelyn said, taking a sip of her tea and allowing a small hesitation before saying what she said next. “The truth of the matter is I fancied a sneaky peak inside the house. It’s been a long time since I was here last.”
“Really?” asked Holly. “Did you know someone who lived here before?”
“I was someone who lived here.”
“Really?” gasped Holly. “When? What was it like? Why did you move?” The questions kept tumbling out of Holly’s mouth.
“Oh, it must be at least twenty-five years now,” explained Jocelyn. “Last time I was in this kitchen it was fitted out in top-of-the-range Formica and the color scheme was orange and brown.”
“Seventies at its best,” observed Holly.
“You guessed it. Although it was the early eighties when I left. My husband wasn’t exactly one for decorating.”
“So why did you leave? Who had the house after you?” Holly was eager to know the full history of the house she now called home.
“That’s a long story,” sighed Jocelyn. “I left because I left my husband. He lived in the house a few more years and then it was sold on.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to pry.” More questions were queuing up in Holly’s mind, but she had the good grace to curb them.
“That’s all right. This house holds some really good memories for me and some”—Jocelyn continued, scrunching her face as she prepared herself for the confession—“ well, some not so good. I just hope you find happiness here. In fact, I’m sure you will.”
Jocelyn was keener on telling Holly all about the village than she was about her life in the gatehouse. She offered to introduce her to village life whenever she was ready, whenever she felt like she needed the company. She told her all about the quiz nights at one of the local pubs, the karaoke night at the other, not to mention all the fund-raisers and bingo nights at the village hall.
“And then of course there’s my tea shop, which is opposite the church. Now, I will only insist on one thing and that is that you stop by this week so I can treat you to afternoon tea.”
Holly could offer no better response than continuous nodding. Jocelyn was turning out to be the perfect medicine for a lonely heart. “I will,” she promised.
“Don’t go getting all polite on me. I’m sure you think I’m nothing but a hopeless busybody,” Jocelyn confessed. “But I know from experience how easy it is to become isolated in a small village. You seem to be an independent and determined young lady, but sometimes that can work against you. It worked against me.”
“What do you mean?” asked Holly, hoping Jocelyn would reveal a little more about her history.
“You remind me a little of myself. Maybe it’s the connection with the house. I hope that’s all it is. I was born and raised in the village, but I had dreams of carving out a career for myself just like you, making my own way in the world.”
“So what happened?”
“I didn’t have any talents to rely on, not like you. I put off marriage as long as I could but, eventually, I conformed to tradition. I didn’t come from a time or a place where it was the done thing for women to have a career of their own, or a life of their own, for that matter.”
“So you became a housewife? In this house?”
“Yes. In the beginning it was actually good. My son was born and my husband had a good job. He ran his own carpentry business.”
“And the outbuilding was his workshop,” guessed Holly. “So what went wrong? Sorry, is that too personal?”
“It’s a long story. A long, long story and I won’t bore you with it now. I’ve taken up enough of your time,” replied Jocelyn, draining the last of her tea.
Holly was a little disappointed. Her interest in this woman’s past life had been piqued. She wanted to know the details and she didn’t mind if it took the rest of the day.
Jocelyn stood up, clearing up the plates and cups before putting them on the tray. “No, please, I can’t let you do that. You’re my guest,” reproached Holly.
“Indulge an old lady,” Jocelyn said with a half-hidden grin. “I like to clean up after myself. Besides, I wanted to have a better look out the window and into the garden.”
“You can have a full tour of the house if you like,” laughed Holly.
“Now that would be cheeky and I really do have to be getting along.”
“It’s still raining,” warned Holly. “Are you sure you want to go yet?”
“A little rain won’t do me any harm. Besides, it’s good for the garden.” Jocelyn turned and peered out of the window. Her body sagged slightly.
“Tom made a start on it, but I don’t think it’s been touched for quite some time,” explained Holly, feeling the need to apologize for the ramshackle state of the garden.
“I see you’ve resurrected the moondial.” Jocelyn was looking intently at the stone table.
“Moondial? Do you mean the sundial?”
Before Holly had a chance to quiz Jocelyn further, the phone rang. It was Tom. He had arrived safely at his new digs in Belgium.
“I’ll leave you to it,” mouthed Jocelyn.
Holly was torn between being a gracious host and speaking to Tom. For the brief time Jocelyn had been there, Holly had forgotten how lonely she was, but those feelings crashed against her chest once more. Holly put a hand on Jocelyn’s shoulder. “Thank you,” she whispered.
With a series of determined hand signals, Holly was ordered to stay in the kitchen and Jocelyn saw herself out of the house. “I’ve just made a new friend,” Holly told Tom. “She’s almost made today bearable.”
Holly treated herself to a large glass of wine and a deep bubble bath before bedtime, a combination she hoped would guarantee a peaceful night’s sleep. Although it wasn’t unusual for Tom to spend nights away, their current separation was going to be the longest of their marriage. To ease their shared loneliness, Tom had promised to set time aside each and every morning and evening to speak to Holly on the phone, so with glass in hand, surrounded by soft pillows, Holly let Tom whisper sweet nothings to her as she lay in bed.
When they could put it off no longer, Holly reluctantly said good-night and put down the phone. She turned off the lights but didn’t manage to switch off her mind so easily. Holly’s best-laid plans of a peaceful night became snagged in a tangle of thoughts. The separation from Tom, the new house, the village, the commission she couldn’t find inspiration for—all of these kept her tossing and turning long past midnight. To her surprise, it wasn’t thoughts of Tom, and more particularly Tom’s absence, that preoccupied her mind most of all. It was Jocelyn.
Holly had taken an immediate liking to Jocelyn. When the old lady arrived on her doorstep uninvited, it had been the last thing Holly wanted. But as it turned out, she had been sorry to see her go. There was still so much she wanted to know about the gatehouse’s previous occupants, and Jocelyn intrigued her. She had the distinct feeling they were going to be good friends. The thought comforted her and in some ways appeased her curiosity.
Try as she might to clear her mind, the effort simply made her concentrate even more on the thoughts she was trying to ignore. The hours slipped by as she tossed and turned, until she eventually admitted defeat and stretched her arms wide and opened her eyes. The digital glow of the clock revealed it was 2:07 AM. Moonlight was seeping through the window blind, filling the room with nature’s very own lunar mood lighting. Holly’s heart skipped a beat as Jocelyn’s words echoed in her mind. “I see you’ve resurrected the moondial,” she’d said just as Holly was distracted by Tom’s phone call. Was that what had been playing on her mind?
If it were, there was only one way to chase away the demons that had kept sleep firmly out of reach.
Holly tumbled out of bed and opened the blinds. A perfectly formed full moon had risen above a bubbling sea of clouds. The storm that had plagued the day was now a distant memory, receding into the night. Holly drew her eyes away from the moon and looked down toward the garden, which was painted in a hundred shades of gray. It wasn’t the white-speckled blossom winking at her from the orchard or the occasional daffodil bobbing its ghostly white head against the night that drew her attention but the moondial. It was positioned perfectly in the center of the garden to catch the full effect of the moonlight. It practically shone.
Though she couldn’t explain why, Holly felt drawn to the dial as it glinted invitingly at her. Once the idea of taking a closer look had formed in her mind, she couldn’t ignore it. She almost laughed at her own foolishness as she slipped into a T-shirt and jog pants and headed downstairs. She slipped on a pair of trainers and then, before going out through the kitchen door, Holly had another equally bemusing idea. She retrieved the wooden box that contained the final piece of the moondial puzzle and took it with her to the garden.
Spring hadn’t quite chased away the winter chill and Holly shivered against the cold April night. The ground was damp and the grass was so long and overgrown that her jog pants soon became soaked up to her knees.
Holly felt a knot of anxiety building inside as she approached the dial. The garden that had seemed neglected and forlorn by day took on a more menacing feel by night as the wind stirred up the dead bracken strewn across the outer edges so that it rustled with the echoes of extinguished life.
She could almost believe that she was being controlled by an invisible puppeteer as she placed the box on top of the dial and opened it. She lifted the orb to catch the moonlight and it glimmered with excitement as shards of light began to reach out like beacons from the prism embedded in its core.
Carefully placing the orb in the center of the dial, where it clattered against the brass claws, Holly was mesmerized as she watched it absorbing the fragments of moonlight until the orb glowed, a miniature moon caught atop the dial. Her heart jumped as the mechanism seemed to come to life, and with an ancient clunk, the dial greedily tightened its claws around the orb. In a split second, thin strands of light spread out from the glowing orb, beams of light that began to turn like the frenzied hands of a clock spinning out of control. At that same moment, Holly put out her hand to hold on to the dial for support, and an electric current shot up her arm.
Instinctively, Holly pulled her hand away as a shower of moonbeams sparked around her. Reeling from the shock, her legs weakened beneath her and as she fell, her head glanced off the side of the dial. She landed on the ground with a thump and stars joined in the merry dance that flittered across her closed eyelids. She could hear the steady ticking of a clock fading into the distance, the sound replaced by the furious beating of her heart.
Winded and badly shaken, she tried to calm herself by taking deep breaths. She leaned over, putting her hands on the ground to steady and compose herself. The grass beneath her fingers felt soft and lush as if she were kneeling on a well-manicured lawn, not the tangled overgrowth she was expecting.
Holly had an irrational fear that she wasn’t in her garden anymore, but she was still half-blinded and could use only her hands to find her bearings and explore her surroundings. She wondered if the force of the moondial’s light show had knocked her farther than she realized, but then she touched the hard surface of the plinth beneath the moondial. It was hard, cold, but reassuringly familiar. Using the top of the dial for support, Holly pulled herself unsteadily to her feet.
Although white worms of light were still crawling across her vision, she could make out vague outlines of other familiar landmarks—the orchard, the studio, the house. Then Holly glanced at the moondial and her heart froze. The orb and the brass mechanism had disappeared, as had the wooden box that had been left on top of it. Holly spun around, scanning the ground in case they had fallen nearby, but all she saw was a perfectly cut lawn. Her heart would have hammered harder if it weren’t already beating to maximum effect. What just happened? she asked herself.
Shaking uncontrollably, Holly suddenly realized that it wasn’t just the shock that was making her shiver. The temperature had dropped by a good few degrees and her T-shirt felt pathetically thin. She tried to calm her shaking body by concentrating on her breathing, which came out in icy vapor clouds that swirled in the air in front of her eyes. The calm was short-lived as she turned to face the house, seeking the comfort of her home. When she walked across the garden earlier, her path had only been revealed by the soft glow of the moon. There had been no artificial lights leaching from the house because she hadn’t switched any on. Now the kitchen window was ablaze with light.
Holly could only imagine that the knock on the head had affected her senses and perhaps her memory was playing tricks on her. She took a deep breath and gave herself a moment to take a more thorough look around her. It didn’t help.
Something was wrong with this picture: correction, so many things were wrong with this picture, but she didn’t seem able to process her thoughts properly. As she neared the house, her mind could no longer deny the one thing that her sanity had refused to acknowledge. There was a conservatory slap-bang in front of the house, running the full width of the living room up to the back door. The conservatory was in darkness, but soft light glowed from the living room beyond.
With faltering steps and a sense of lost reality, Holly crept toward the door that led through to the kitchen. Rather than walk straight back into what was supposed to be her home, she peeked through the window like a thief. To her relief, it was empty, but as she took in the detail, her growing confusion was ramped up to spine-chilling terror, skipping right past the niceties of growing anxiety. The kitchen was still her kitchen—same cupboards, same cooker, same fridge, even the same table—but it was most definitely not the kitchen she had just left. Holly started to wonder how bad the bump on her head must have been to explain away the vast assortment of baby equipment stacked on every available surface.
Holly could only make herself move by convincing herself that what she was experiencing was some form of hallucination. She just wanted to get into the house and take refuge in her bed, blocking out the alternative universe her mind seemed to have created for her own private terror. She stepped toward the back door and tried to open it, but the handle wouldn’t budge. Although the handle felt cold and solid, her hand didn’t seem to be applying pressure on it at all and Holly wondered if it was an aftereffect of the shock she had received from the moondial. She wrapped her fingers tightly around the handle and, with the kind of effort it would take to open castle gates, Holly finally opened the door and stepped deeper inside her nightmare.
The room smelled different, a mixture of home-cooking and warm milk as opposed to the smell of instant noodles and stale wine that she would have expected.
Holly didn’t feel strong enough or confident enough to go too far into the kitchen, so she rested against a nearby cupboard. She waited and listened, hoping at least one of her senses was still working rationally. She wanted to hear nothing but the familiar silence of an empty house, but it wasn’t long before her hearing joined in the game that was pushing her sanity to the limits. She heard distant voices coming from one of the other rooms but moving closer. Whoever was in the house had just entered the hall. Holly’s eyes shot between the back door, which was her only means of escape, and the door that led into the hall, which could open at any moment.
Holly stood her ground. This was her house and she had every right to be here. So why did she feel like a stranger in her own home? There were two voices she could make out—one male, one female. They were soft and muffled and Holly couldn’t quite hear what they were saying above the thumping of her own heart. She did hear the now-familiar squeak as the front door opened.
With a brief momen
t to relax from the threat of imminent confrontation, Holly tried to do a reality check. What was happening to her? Could this really be a hallucination? Had the bump on her head made her delusional? Had she been knocked out longer than she thought? Had she spent days unconscious in the garden while squatters had taken up roost in her house? As implausible as it sounded, Holly almost preferred to believe that option rather than consider the state of her mental health.
She walked across the kitchen and was about to take a chance and peek into the hallway when the door opened wide. Holly gasped and took stumbling steps backward as a figure loomed in the doorway.
“Tom!” Holly cried. “Thank God you’re here.”
She reached both arms toward him but then she froze. The man in front of her looked like her Tom, but there was so much about him that wasn’t familiar it startled her. His hair was cropped short, much shorter than at any other time Holly had known him, but it wasn’t this that startled her most. He didn’t just look disheveled, which would have been normal for him; he looked gaunt. But even this wasn’t what froze Holly’s heart to the core. It was his eyes. His beautiful green eyes looked toward Holly and then right through her. His eyes looked vacant, dead even.
Tom turned away from Holly without even registering her presence. He picked up a pair of ladies’ leather gloves that were lying on the kitchen table on top of a notebook. “Got them,” he called out before turning and leaving the kitchen.
As the door closed and Holly was left on her own once more, she felt a wave of dizziness wash over her. Finally she remembered to breathe. With every ounce of composure she had left, Holly staggered toward the door Tom had disappeared through and with more effort than she knew it deserved, she managed to open it by just a fraction. Tom was standing at the front door with his back to her. Diane was there, too, standing on the threshold with her hand on Tom’s arm, talking to him. Partially reflected in the hall mirror, there was a third figure and, although she couldn’t be sure, Holly guessed it was her father-in-law, Jack.
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