the night. Holly drew her eyes away from the moon and looked down towards the garden, which was painted in a hundred shades of grey. 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 centre 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 out into the garden.
Spring hadn’t quite chased away the winter chills 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 her 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 of the garden 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 up to catch the moonlight and it glimmered with excitement as shards of light reached out like beacons from the prism embedded in its core.
Carefully placing the orb in the centre 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 into life, becoming a miniature moon caught within the claws of the dial. Her heart jumped as the mechanism seemed to come to life too and with an ancient clunk, the dial snatched the orb greedily in its claws. In a split second, thin strands of light spread out from the glowing orb, beams of light that started to turn like the frenzied hands of a clock spinning out of control. At that same moment, Holly put out her hand to hold onto 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 went from under her and as she fell, her head glanced off the side of the dial. Holly 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 leant over, putting her hands on the ground to steady and compose herself. The grass beneath her fingers felt soft and lush as if she was 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 any more, but she was still half blinded and could only use her hands to find her bearings and explore her surroundings. She wondered if the force of the moondial’s light show had knocked her further than she had 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 which 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 wasn’t already beating to maximum effect. What just happened? she asked herself.
Shaking uncontrollably, Holly suddenly realized that it wasn’t only 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 bring calm to her shaking body by concentrating on her breathing, which came out in icy vapour 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 had 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 lights 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 towards 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 up 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 around her for her own private terror. She stepped towards the back door and tried to open it, but the door 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 after-effect 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 and 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 moment 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 in front of her. Holly gasped and took stumbling steps backwards as a figure loomed in