And now folks, the latest from my novel.
The air was still cool for early May. The roses were behind schedule. Pamela was certain that in the previous year
the yellow tea roses had already begun to bloom. This year they were still scarcely developed
buds and reddish young leaves still emerging from the stems. Though she wore a good thick cardigan she
still felt the chill in the air. She
hadn’t fussed at all over her clothes lately, having even taken to wearing
pants around the house. She had always
worn before only skirts and dresses, and never would she emerge from upstairs
without having first put on proper stockings and shoes. She was dressed for working in the garden,
which only since Lawrence’s illness became officially terminal, had Pamela
taken an interest in. She rather liked,
she discovered, frumping around like an old slattern. The grass wasn’t as wet as it had been. It didn’t hold enough water now to seep
through the canvas sneakers she had become used to wearing. Pamela marveled that never in more than forty
years had she ventured anywhere past the satyr fountain. The thing was hideous. Lawrence had had it dismantled and shipped
over here from the family estate in England.
Why ever he would have wanted to bring something like that as a memento
of home was beyond her. In a graceful
dancer’s posture the granite monstrosity held up over his head a basin from
which the water had long ceased flowing.
It was just on the day of her husband’s first stroke four years ago that
the water had stopped. Pamela had never
troubled to get it fixed. She had always
harboured a near-superstitious dread of this statue. She could never bring herself to go anywhere
past it. In more than forty years. Thinking of this now she could hardly believe
it. There, in front of her waited the
holly maze, this setting of her daughter’s, of any daughter’s, worst childhood
nightmares. It was bigger than she thought.
Pamela was actually getting lost in it.
Every right-angle turn led her to another passage, and another turn, and
another passage, and a dead end, then back to another right-angle, and another
passage. It stunned and appalled her
that her hired gardeners, who kept this monstrosity flawlessly manicured should
know it expertly while she, who had lived here since the war… why had she never
gone in here? Did she, in a secret part
of her mind, know that something was going on in here? She was beginning to panic just as she came
out onto the clearing in the centre.
Lawrence, nor anyone, had told her about that gigantic sundial in the
middle. This had been kept from
her? What else had she never been
told? It had been carved out of the same
kind of solid granite as the satyr. The
needle must have been as high as a very tall man. The sun was behind a light filter of clouds,
but she could descry the faintest whisper of a shadow on the great stone disk,
as it fell neatly onto VIII. It would be
soon getting dark. She sat on one of the
four stone benches that surrounded the circle. She watched a snake come
crawling out from the holly hedge that faced her. Knowing that it was only a garter snake, and
harmless Pamela still shuddered with revulsion.
She looked instinctively for a stick, for something to cast it off
with. She fought against the rising panic. It struck her as odd that a snake would be
moving around in weather this cold. But
the thermostat on the terrace read sixty-two degrees. It felt more like forty-five. Perhaps it was just her, Pamela. The sun
broke from the cloud and the snake rested on the stone disk, where the sun
struck its rough brown and yellow skin, right over the numeral IV.
It
wasn’t that she was superstitious, but Pamela did sometimes acknowledge
omens. She had noticed that since
entering the holly maze, all the birds had grown suddenly silent. She didn’t want to stay, not with that
serpent staring up at her from the numeral IV.
Without knowing what direction to go in she began to run. In the other side of the holly maze she had
no sense of where she was going. Soon the
hedges lost there manicured symmetry, and before she knew it she was tearing
through underbrush and trees that led down a steep slope. Soon she was
crab-walking downhill, getting scratched by blackberry vines. The sound of motor traffic below signalled
that she was almost at Granville Street.
On the stone embankment that rose up from the sidewalk she rested,
catching her breath, her hips and knees aching dully from what she hoped
weren’t the beginnings of arthritis.
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