King Death's Garden

by Gwyneth Jones, Ann Halam

Genres: Time Travel

Synopsis

When Maurice's family moves to the Middle East, they leave Maurice - self-centred, asthmatic, allergy-plagued and an impossible semi-invalid - to live with his great aunt in Brighton. Initially feeling abandoned, Maurice soon becomes fascinated by the eerie and romantic cemetery next door.

Isolated from the world around him, he discovers he can travel through time amongst the graves. He dreams of glory, once he figures out how to control the travel, but the more he travels, the more he realises that things aren't what they seem.

He isn't seeing the past with his eyes. He isn't experiencing these adventures with his own body. And the real owners are getting restless.

It's dangerous to pick the flowers that grow in King Death's Garden, but despite some alarming warnings, Maurice, who doesn't believe in ghosts, just can't stay away.

You can find out more about the fiction Gwyneth Jones wrote as Ann Halam here: http://www.gwynethjones.uk/HALAM.htm

Release date: July 26, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 240

Sample

Unfortunately neither of Maurice’s parents could be with him the day he moved house. His father had already gone to the Gulf and his mother had left two days ago with the baby. It could not be helped. Aunt Sue and Uncle Tom collected him and carried him away, leaving him with a brief impression of Mum neatly stowing herself and all the baby stuff into a taxi. She gave Maurice a kiss and a hug, and at the last moment he relented and hugged her back, just in case the plane crashed. The last thing he heard her say was “This is going to cost a fortune”. She was talking to the taxi driver, but she sounded choked. Maurice was glad. She deserved to be upset.

It was not going to cost a fortune to board Maurice because he was going to live with his great aunt. Aunt Sue and Uncle Tom had arranged to take him home with them for a couple of nights, but there wasn’t enough room for him to stay. After two nights on the camped between cousins Mark and Ben, he’d had quite enough of that arrangement. There were no other relatives within reach.

In the turmoil of the great change, no one had considered that Maurice had not actually seen his great aunt for years. She lived up a hill, away from the shopping streets of Brighton; and quite remote from the estate on the edge of the downs which was Maurice’s home ground. As Uncle Tom drove along, passing street corners nudged at Maurice’s memory. He recalled the taste of a chocolate cream bar he had never liked. That was what his great aunt used to give him. The car drew up in a quiet little street, above red tiled, pastel-walled crescents and the blue line of the sea. They all went in and Maurice sat looking round his great aunt’s parlour while his aunt and uncle talked.

He could tell they were a bit worried. Maurice’s fate had been decided weeks ago, although he himself had never believed it would actually happen. But now that the moment had come Great Aunt looked very aged and wavery. She ought to be in a home, thought Maurice. They can’t leave me here.

“I have my home help,” said Great Aunt. She was exactly the way he remembered her, thin and spidery and peering. She must be so old she had stopped changing.

“Oh yes, the home help,” remembered his aunt with relief.

“For the rough cleaning. That’s what they call themselves nowadays. The Council arranges it.”

Maurice let the conversation float away over his head, a trick he had perfected years ago, and looked at great aunt’s wallpaper which was covered in huge floppy pink roses. It was a very old-fashioned parlour, with a piano and a round table covered with a velvet cloth: a tiny old writing desk and four swollen and uncomfortable armchairs, one of which Maurice was sitting on. The thick curtains at the front windows were opened very grudgingly, letting in two narrow bars of thin sunshine. The piano had candle-holders on either side of the music rest; the round table had a large groping sort of fern sitting in the middle of it. Maurice began to count roses.

“Of course, he was quite famous in his field,” said the old lady, picking up a framed photograph from beside the fern. “But unfortunately he was rather eccentric. He burned his papers, you know.”

She was telling his aunt and uncle the story behind this house. It had belonged many years ago to a retired scientist. He had almost been famous. He retired to the seaside for his health and Maurice’s great aunt was his housekeeper. He was supposed to be researching a great invention, but no one knew what, because he went slightly mad and destroyed all his work just a few years before he died. He left Great Aunt the house.

“It’s a very interesting story,” said Uncle Tom, holding the picture respectfully. “What was his field again? I’m afraid I’ve forgotten.”

“Alas, I couldn’t say, my dear,” answered Great Aunt. “I was merely his housekeeper.” She took the picture back firmly and replaced it exactly in the mark it had made on the faded velvet.

Uncle Tom must have heard the old legend hundreds of times. He was just being polite. But Great Aunt Ada, Maurice remembered vaguely, was supposed to be touchy about it. There was some family gossip, he thought—the kind considered unsuitable for children. He glanced at the old lady speculatively: but it was hard to picture her in a steamy love affair. His mind wandered, he remembered he would be able to walk to school from here. That was a tiny plus, because he hated the squalid uproar on school buses.

“It will be a big change for you, having a young boy living here,” suggested Aunt Sue nervously.

“Oh, I don’t mind,” said Great Aunt. “Maurice is a quiet child, I’m sure I’ll enjoy his stay. There are things he can do for me.”

She looked at Maurice and smiled. Her glasses were crooked, and mended on one side with a bit of pink sticking plaster. How does she know I’m a quiet child? thought Maurice. She hasn’t seen me since I was eight. However, he smiled back. He counted the old lady less to blame than the rest of them. Then he was sent upstairs to unpack while the grown-ups had a grown-up conversation—though it seemed to Maurice his aunt and uncle had already run out of steam.

There was a good reason why Maurice couldn’t go with his family to the Gulf, at least not right away. He suffered from asthma, and a plague of allergies: not desperately, but enough to keep him out of school quite often. It interrupted his work, so everyone thought it was wrong to take him away, on top of all that, in the middle of the school year. There was an International School in the neighbouring state, where he could be a weekly boarder. It was hoped he would start there in the autumn term.

“What’s a weekly boarder?” Maurice had asked.

“You come home every weekend.”

“Home? To England?”

“Oh, Maurice, let’s not go through all that again.”

Maurice did not want to go to the Middle East at all. He had been fighting a desperate rear-guard action since the idea first crawled into the light, out of the uncertain realm of suspicious envelopes and muted conversations that stopped when he appeared. He hated, hated, hated this job that Dad had found. He would rather starve. Why couldn’t they all go on the dole? Other people did. Up until the very last days he had been sure he had won a partial victory. He might have lost Dad except for the holidays, but he’d kept Mum at home. He couldn’t believe she would leave him. But she did. He detested baby Tabitha, for being so portable. His affection for her had always been a little shaky, and based mainly on the hope that she would slow Mum down a bit (she had not, noticeably).

He put his diet sheet beside his inhaler with his latest antihistamines and the rest of his survival kit. “The truth is,” the doctor said, “most of it you’ll grow out of and some of it you’ll get used to. Meanwhile, we try and distract you with our so-called cures.” The treacherous pig also claimed the dry air of the Gulf would do wonders for his wheezing.

He pinned a map of the Middle East on the wall and sat on the end of the bed contemplating it. The Do’an was the name of the state. It was part of the Arab Emirates. His father was based in a town called Ishar, on the coast. Hot, and full of skyscrapers. Sadly, said Dad, they had pulled most of the old town to bits, to make room for progress. Mum and little Tabby-brat were also there by now. He put in a red pin to mark Ishar, and thought viciously of wax dolls. He put his photographs on the chest of drawers under the map. There was his mother, in white shorts and a raggy t-shirt, on the boat in Norfolk last summer: full of health and energy. Maurice had spent that holiday battened down under the hatches, or staggering around with an antihistamine head full of cotton wool. The baby was tucked into a corner of Mum’s picture. She wasn’t a bad baby, she showed signs of intelligence. He had been hoping to develop her to read books and so on eventually, before Mum’s influence could turn her into a sporting idiot. No good thinking of that now.

The indignity of it! Not even a grandmother. A great aunt. After a few minutes he took the red pin out, a little guiltily. It looked too much as if it was marking a battlefield. He put a green one in instead, that seemed more hopeful. Map and pins had been provided by Mum, among other peace offerings. But a moment later he flung himself down on the bed, scowling. He would never forgive them, never. They had ruined his life.

The discussion downstairs went on for a while. He lay on his new bed half-dozing: he didn’t want to go down and hear himself being talked about. The house was very quiet. A clock was ticking somewhere, steadily and gently. There’s something about this place, he decided. It’s peaceful. He pictured the floppy pink roses and the velvet tablecloth and wondered if everything was exactly as it had been when the old scientist lived here. Perhaps Great Aunt had kept it the same, in memory. It was rather a spooky thought but he didn’t seem to mind … At last his relations could be heard coming out into the hall, being called Susan and Thomas in Great Aunt’s thin precise voice, which sounded odd. Their feet thumped up the stairs and they stood in the open door.

In the bitterness of his feelings Maurice hardly bothered to look at them.

“Oh, you’re having a rest,” said Aunt Sue. “Sorry.”

“We’re going now.” “If you need anything you just phone us straight away. We’ll come and see you on Monday about six, to make sure you’ve settled in.”

“He’ll be all right. Maurice is OK.”

Then they were gone. He heard them talking quietly, in off-duty voices, as they went down the stairs.

“I hope it’s not too much for her.”

“There’s the home help. And we’ll keep an eye on things.”

“Funny sort of place to live, isn’t it?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Plenty of free fresh flowers.”

Laughter. Bang of the front door. Vrrm of the car starting up and driving away.

When the quiet and the ticking clock had returned, Maurice sat up. He could hear his great aunt moving about gently, probably in the kitchen. After all, I could be at boarding school, he thought. Or in a children’s home, seeing as I’ve been abandoned. He wondered what his aunt meant about the flowers. It was an odd thing to say. He got off his bed and went to the window, which overlooked the back of the house. The dark curtains were open, but there was a crusty veil of yellowed lace. He pushed it aside and stood looking down at the garden and beyond the garden, over a wall, into what looked at first like a park. Then he saw the grey shadows on the green grass in their regular solemn rows and he smiled wryly, seeing the joke. Of course. It was the cemetery.

Maurice went to school on Monday as if nothing had happened. But he remembered all through the day that he wasn’t going home and it gave him an odd empty feeling in his stomach. He had spoken to his mother and father on Sunday night: they had rung up as arranged across the thousands of miles, from a different time. This is going to cost a fortune, he thought, . . .