The Last Garden Read online

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  “Yeah, sometime.”

  “Gnorts, Alex. You seem distracted.”

  “Yeah, I mean no, I’m OK. I ran into Brunhilda yesterday.”

  “The warrior girl? She scares me.”

  “Scares me too. She was trying to get me to let her into The Library again.”

  “Maybe you should just take her through? What is the worst that would happen?”

  “She could maim an ancestor of mine, and I could be never-been-born.”

  “What is the second-worst that could happen?”

  “She seemed really angry.”

  “She will get over it. She’s probably just trying to impress some village elder or something.”

  “I’m almost certain that she has taken control of the whole tribe.”

  “Maybe she is trying to impress herself?”

  “Maybe.”

  I was just getting ready to leave school after my last class, my mind on Elaine and on the journey we had ahead of us, when I was approached by Carl. I had not had much to do with Carl since we were both attacked by a gigantic time-traveling Viking. For a while he disappeared from school entirely, returning after a few weeks and saying he had gone on an unexpected holiday. Since then, we generally stayed out of each other’s way. Hank woke up and started slashing at my intestines with his sharp claws.

  “Hey, Alex. I need to talk to you about something,” he said as he came near.

  “Look, Carl–”

  “Don’t worry, I’m not going to ask you out or anything. It’s just, I don’t have anyone else to go to.”

  “What’s this about?”

  “It’s about Daniel. He’s been acting strange lately, I mean, I know you guys already think that we are strange, I mean, he is acting strange for Daniel.”

  “How so?”

  “He wasn’t in economics all of last week. He didn’t log onto his Steam account at all the whole weekend, not even for a moment. Today he was in class, but he didn’t seem the least bit interested in the class content.”

  “O-K,” I said, trying to piece together these strange parts of Daniel’s life into some sort of coherent worry. “Have you spoken to him about this?”

  “That’s the thing, I tried to today, and he totally blew me off. He has never spoken to me like that before.”

  “Did you guys have a falling out? Like an argument?”

  “You don’t understand, Daniel isn’t like that. You see, he is kind of a snob. He is always saying that manners are prerequisite for a man to be considered civilized.”

  “Riiiight,” I said.

  “Yeah, I know he’s weird, but he’s my friend. I think something has happened to him.” Carl leaned in close. “I overheard him muttering the other day about a summoning circle,” he whispered. “I think maybe he has been caught up in some occult group or something.”

  “Occult?”

  “Yeah, and you know about that stuff, right?”

  “A bit,” I said, supposing he must be thinking the flame magic was occult.

  “So will you help him? I’m not just worried about him. I mean, he is my friend, but he can be really awful about people sometimes. I’m worried that he might end up hurting someone.”

  I sighed. I had no idea if this was a genuine concern or just some sort trumped-up nothing that Carl had invented to have something to talk to me about. I could at least pass on Carl’s concerns to Darcy. “Yeah, I’ll see what I can do.”

  Carl nodded seriously. “Thank you,” he said and retreated into the sea of students.

  When I got home, I found Elaine lying in my bed still wide awake.

  “I may have done something a bit stupid,” she said when I walked in

  “Not world-destroying, I hope?”

  “Not quite. I got kind of sick of being weak and pathetic, and kinda-sorta tried to do some push-ups.”

  “You are here because you are too weak to stand, remember?”

  “I know, it’s stupid. It’s just, ever since I left the garden, I have started to feel like my old self again, you know?”

  “Not the old self that killed her friends and turned them into golems?”

  A look of shame rippled over Elaine’s features.

  “Hey, I’m sorry. It was a stupid joke.”

  “Yeah, I know. You must think I’m some kind of monster.”

  I hesitated.

  “It’s OK, I can’t expect you to forgive me if I haven’t even forgiven myself. All I can do is my best.”

  I wanted to tell Elaine that I did forgive her, but the truth was I didn’t. I sat on the edge of the bed. “You hurt yourself?”

  “Yeah, I pulled something in my back. I used to be strong. I had to be. It became a part of my identity after a while. And now I’m going home again… It’s going to be so strange.”

  “Nothing much will have changed there.”

  “I know. It will be like I just went away for a couple of months. So strange.”

  “You must be hungry,” I said.

  Elaine frowned, seemed to consider herself for a moment, then smiled wide. “Yeah, I really, really am. Shoot, now that I think about it, I’m starving. I haven’t eaten in ages. And I’m not kidding, I sort of stopped eating ages back. No wonder I’m so weak.”

  I went downstairs and filled a plate with whatever I could find from the fridge and brought the bounty back to Elaine. She devoured all I brought her, barely stopping to breathe. I had to make an appearance downstairs for dinner, but after that, I stayed up late with Elaine, just talking.

  “It’s like the battle that used to just happen within myself is now happening with all creation,” said Elaine.

  We were both lying on the bed and staring up at the ceiling. Our conversation had taken an esoteric turn.

  “Like, even back when I was in Avonheim, there was a part of me that wanted to do some good in the world, and that part of me watched on in despair as I ruined people’s lives. Vicious has always worked against me. And in the moment it always seemed so right, you know? Like, as in, correct. But then afterward there was only shame.”

  “I think I get it,” I said.

  “Oh, I doubt that.”

  “I don’t mean with the anger and the cruelty. I don’t get that at all. I mean my fear, my anxiety. When it gets triggered, all I want to do is run away and hide. For most of my life, that part of me controlled me, and I was left to pick up the pieces when all was done.”

  “Yeah, I remember something about that going on for you when we met. But since then, you seem to be able to control it. How is that?”

  I laughed. “No, I can’t control it, any more than you can control Vicious.”

  “Then how do you do it? How do you take the burden of the whole multiverse on your shoulders?”

  I smiled. “It all started with giving my anxiety a name. I imagined my anxiety to be a hedgehog called Hank that sat in my stomach and clawed at me when I was afraid.”

  “No way. There was a hedgehog back in the garden. I knew that he was connected to you somehow, it is just that kind of garden, but you’re telling me that he is your anxiety?”

  “Sort of.”

  “I wish that Vicious would just hang around in the garden, eating slugs. You know what, Alex? I would kill her if I could. Even this part of me, this good part of me, just wants to rid her from my life. Maybe not kill, but erase her, rip her from the face of existence.”

  “I don’t think you can,” I said. “I used to want to do that to Hank. I wanted him to go away, to leave me forever. But it’s just not how things work. The only way I ever found peace with Hank was to accept that he was there, accept him for who he was, allow him to be there, and still do what was important to me. I think a lot of people go through life, waiting for Hank or Vicious to disappear before they can start living. But it’s the other way around. Living always comes first.”

  Elaine was silent for a moment. “I wonder if you are right,” she said.
“There is a great deal of difference between an over-sized hedgehog and the sorceress Vicious, but I have always noticed that whenever I was most hateful to that part of myself, that’s when Vicious seemed to be at her most powerful. But what do I do?”

  “Maybe you need to accept her? Forgive her, even?”

  Elaine exhaled. “No. That can never be.”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The journey through the wilderness to Avonheim would take several days. Elaine’s book was still being held by the two golems in a basement level of The Library. There were additional dangers to this quest that I hadn’t experienced for a long time. I would not have Lilly or Darcy with me, I would not be able to consult with the Librarian, and I would not have the book with me to return to The Library when I needed to. It all made me nervous, but the more I got to know this new Elaine, the more I was confident that I was doing the right thing.

  I prepared a pack with enough supplies for the two of us for a few days in the wilderness and tucked it into my closet, out of sight.

  I couldn’t just disappear for a few days without anyone noticing. I would need to give some explanation to Mom who, while not as attentive to me these days, still had a legal interest in the knowledge of my whereabouts.

  I would have to come up with some deception. The following day at lunch, I checked in with Lilly about it, being careful to keep the exact location of my excursion a secret.

  She agreed to let me tell my mom that I was staying at her house, engaging once more a much-exploited ruse.

  “What’s with the secrets, friendo?” she asked.

  I opened my mouth and then closed it again.

  “I’m only kidding,” said Lilly. “I get it, sometimes we need to have a bit of mystery in life. I take great joy and not letting anyone know when I’ve gone off sailing on the great sea.”

  “You go sailing there?”

  “It was a figure of speech. I have tried to sail, though. It did not work out for either of us, me or the boat, so we went our separate ways, I swam back to my mansion, and the boat continued to sail off without me into the distance.”

  “How did you get a boat in there?”

  “I built it.”

  “You built a boat?”

  “It took me weeks, did it in a night.”

  I smiled. “Thanks for being my lie again, Lilly.”

  “I take great joy in your dishonesty, Alex. It gives me more pleasure than you could know. It helps with the illusion that maybe there is still some hope for the rest of humanity. If the greatest among us can still be liars, then perhaps the liars among us can still be great.”

  I picked up a leaf from the table and put it on my head and gave Lilly the, ‘I have a leaf on my head’ look.

  That evening I packed up my things and made a show of leaving the house, making sure that I was seen by Mom on the way out, a challenge in itself considering the amount of paperwork she was wading through. It seemed to be increasing as the weeks passed. I wondered what on earth was happening at the museum, though not quite enough to ask.

  Once outside, I circled back towards my bedroom window. Elaine was sitting by the window sill. “Sure you can do this?” asked Elaine.

  “Hush,” I said as I tried to work out exactly how Darcy had managed to get to my window the few times he had climbed up. There was a sturdy tree not far from my bedroom window, but it would require me to clamber over part of the roof. The main problem was that my path would get just a little too close to Jonny’s window. After several moments of studying the situation, I decided that it was the only way up. Elaine watched with a satirical smile.

  It was easy enough to get up the tree, and over to the roof, but I wasn’t quite sure where to go next. I was in the process of contemplating my options when I heard a familiar voice.

  “You just need to climb up the roof a little way, climb over my window, and then lower yourself down to the ledge of your window.”

  I looked down to see Jonny, arms crossed, watching me.

  “How long have you been there?” I asked.

  “He was standing there when you first left the house. You’re hilarious, Alex.”

  I shot Elaine a look which I hope to conveyed, ‘be quiet, he can hear you.’

  “I’ve done it dozens of times,” said Jonny. “You do have to be careful around the guttering though. It’s made of plastic, and it’s been quite weathered. It won’t hold your weight.”

  “OK, well we’ll get to the point where you’ve been sneaking out when I’m back inside the house.”

  “You’re very strange, big sister. I don’t know why you would want to sneak in and pretend that you’re not there. Usually, I have to do it the other way around.”

  “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” I said. I stepped out onto the roof, being sure to avoid the guttering as Jonny said. The roofing tiles were a lot less stable than I had expected and several of them shifted under my footfall. Soon I had taken the path that Jonny suggested and was stepping in through my window, Elaine offering me support as I climbed inside. I turned around to say something to Jonny, but he was gone.

  “Interesting kid,” said he Elaine.

  “Yeah, I don’t know what’s up with him.”

  “I think he has a lot up with him, Alex. There are many more years behind those eyes than there really ought to be, you know?”

  “Grandma always used to say that he was an old soul.”

  “I don’t think that’s it, but hey, I’m not exactly the resident expert on souls. I presume that I’ve still got one and that’s as far as I have gotten.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I said.

  At first, I traveled into The Library alone, just to check where the Librarian was. It was not worth the risk of running into her unexpectedly. When I saw that she was nowhere in sight, I returned to Elaine and took her through with me along with my pack.

  Though she still did not handle the fall into The Library well, she handled it a lot better than her previous attempt. We were soon both on our feet and exploring The Library, looking for the passage down to the basement where the portal to Elaine’s world still stood. At length, The Library started to transform. The polished wood shelves that filled most of the space where I spent most of my time gave way too large stone block walls and intermittent firebrands. Soon I found myself at the top of the dark stairwell. Elaine stopped and rested against the wall.

  “This library really is large, isn’t it?”

  “It’s usually larger,” I said.

  “I remember when my sister Tabitha first told me about this place. I thought that she must have traveled to some other realm within Avonheim. I had heard of people falling down wells and finding themselves in mysterious jungles, or climbing tall trees and walking out into peculiar leafy worlds. I thought it must have been a place like that. It was a while before I realized the significance of The Library. I wish she never told me about it.”

  There was nothing I could say. I wished she’d never been told about it either.

  I took one of the firebrands from the wall and started down into the dark, Elaine just behind me. I had been here once before since the Librarian placed the golems down here. At that time, there had been a lot more lights. I think that the Librarian expected Mason to be in more contact. I think that she was holding out hope that he would find some way of turning Tabitha back into a human being and that she would be able to see her former Keeper once more.

  It must be hard being the Librarian, knowing all of these self-sacrificing people, and having them one by one just disappear without a trace. The stairs did not go down very far before we were met by a large solid-looking door. I touched the lock, and it immediately clicked. I pushed open the door, and we walked into the chamber.

  The two golems stood in the center of the chamber, their hands pressed together with Elaine’s book between their palms. The portal was still active, and daylight streamed through from the other side. I replaced the lock
behind me and took a few steps towards the portal. Realizing that Elaine was not there next to me, I turned around.

  She was looking at the golems, her face stern.

  “It was a different time, Elaine.”

  “Yeah, I know. Still, I knew these people when they were still people, you know? Memories suck.”

  “But they are important,” I said.

  Elaine shot me a defensive glance. “Yeah, I know.”

  The room was not as clean as it had been when I was last here with the Librarian. The whole space was littered with junk and bedding. Someone had hung some weapons on the walls too. An acrid smell hung in the air, which I was at that moment choosing not to think about.

  “Someone has been living here,” said Elaine.

  “Goblins?”

  “Looks like goblins to me.”

  “I guess they are not home,” I said.

  “No, but what’s on the other side of that portal? We need to be careful. If we are attacked, I don’t think I would be very useful in a fight.”

  I felt nervous. Once through that portal, the only way back to The Library was to step back though again. There would be no book to save me if things went wrong once we were beyond the field on the other side.

  Elaine looked lost in thought. “Are you going to be OK?” I asked.

  “Don’t you worry about me, book girl.”

  I held my breath, and together we stepped through the portal.

  CHAPTER NINE

  We stepped through the portal and into the daylight. Elaine immediately pulled me to one side, and we ducked behind a hanging sheet of linen cloth. Someone had erected a large tent over the portal. We crouched down, frozen, and listening.

  Elaine put a finger to her mouth and peeked carefully past the hanging linen. She frowned and then stepped out.

  “Wait!” I hissed, diving after her.

  She was standing in front of the tent, casually looking around.

  “There is no one here,” she said. “The whole place is deserted.”

  Dozens of makeshift tents and huts were sprawled all around us. The same blue grass that I remembered from my last visit still sprouted here and there, though much of it had been trampled and destroyed.