Shadows & Tall Trees by Michael Kelly Read Free Book Online Page A

garden. And from the angle the room offered I could see that all the random charm of it was not so random at all—that all the winding paths, the flowerbeds, the aches, all of them pointed towards a centrepiece, and that centrepiece was the pond, and in the centre of that, the fountain. Ian stared out in the cold, naked with only bare feathers to protect him, his mouth fixed open in that silly round ‘o’.
    I pulled the curtains on him, got into my pyjamas, brushed my teeth, got into bed. I read for a little while, and then I turned off the light.
    I felt very warm and comfortable beneath the sheets. My thoughts began to drift. The distant sound of running water was pleasantly soporific.
    I vaguely wondered whether it were raining, but the water was too regular for that. And then I remembered the fountain in the garden, and that reassured me. I listened to it for a while, I felt that it was singing me to sleep.
    I opened my eyes only when I remembered that the pond was dry, that the fountain wasn’t on.
    Even now I don’t want to give the impression that I was alarmed. It wasn’t alarm. I didn’t feel threatened by the sound of the water, anything but that. But it was a puzzle, and my brain doggedly tried to solve it, and its vain attempts to make sense of what it could hear but what it knew couldn’t be there started to wake me up. I don’t like to sleep at night without all things put into regular order; I like to start each day as a blank new slate with nothing unresolved from the day before. And I recommend that to you all, as the best way to keep your mind healthy and your purpose resolute.
    Had Max or Lisa left a bath running? Could that be it?
    I turned on my bedside lamp, huffed, got out of bed. I stood in the middle of the room, stock still, as if this would make it easier to identify where the sound was coming from. It was outside the house. Definitely outside.
    I pulled open the curtains, looked back on to the garden.
    And, of course, all was as it should have been. There were a few flakes of snow falling, but nothing that could account for that sound of flowing water. And poor dead Ian still stood steadfast in the pond, cold I’m sure, but dry as a bone.
    I was fully prepared to give up on the mystery altogether. It didn’t matter. It wouldn’t keep me awake—far from it, now that I focused on it, the sound seemed even more relaxing. And I turned around to pull closed the curtain, and go back to bed.
    If I had turned the other way, I know I would have missed it.
    The window was made up of eight square panes of glass. I had been looking at the garden, naturally enough, through one of the central panes. But as I turned, I glanced outside through another pane, the pane at the far bottom left, and something caught my eye.
    There was a certain brightness coming from it, that was all. A trick of the light. But it seemed as if the moon was reflecting off the pebbles on the path—but not the whole path, it was illuminating the most direct way from the house to the memorial pond. The pebbles winked and glowed like cat’s eyes caught in the headlamps of a motor vehicle.
    And there, at the end of that trail of light, at the very centre of the garden, there was the fountain. And now the fountain was on. Water was gushing out of Ian’s stone mouth, thick and steady; I could see now how his posture had been so designed, with his little hands bunched up, and pressed tight against his chest, to suggest that he was
forcing
out the water, as if his insides were a water balloon and he was trying to squeeze out every single last drop.
    There was nothing even now so very untoward about that. If the fountain was on, so it was on. But I changed the direction of my gaze, I looked out at the garden through the central pane again—and there the fountain was dry once more, the garden still, the pathways impossible to discern in the dark.
    I’m afraid I must have stayed there for a few minutes, moving my head back and forth,