‘Don’t tell me you’ve picked out a bunch of weird and wacky names now you’re aspiring to celebrity status.’
‘Hmm, don’t remind me. I’ve got an appointment with the stylist soon. I can’t believe what the studio is putting me through. But no, no stupid names. I was kind of toying with the idea of calling one of our boys Jack after Dad.’
‘OK,’ Holly replied sceptically. ‘And I’ll ignore the reference to having hordes of children yet again.’
‘And I’d really, really like it if we named our first girl after Grandma.’
‘Edith?’ Holly grimaced at the very idea.
‘No, I wouldn’t be that cruel. Grandma’s second name was Elizabeth. We could call her Beth or Eliza or even Lizzy for short.’
‘Or Libby,’ added Holly, the tension returning to her body with all the subtlety of a knockout punch in the chest.
‘Hey, that sounds perfect. Our little Libby. I can just imagine her now.’
‘Me too,’ whispered Holly.
As they said their goodbyes and Holly put down the phone, she desperately wished life could be as simple as it used to be. She wanted to believe once more that tomorrow was a blank page ready to be filled and that while it remained blank their love could make up a whole new world ahead of them. With any luck, the full moon was about to prove that the moondial was just a garden ornament and, more importantly, that her future was written only in their five-year plan and not captured within the reflections from the moondial.
‘You look different,’ Holly told him as she stared at the photo Tom had sent to her phone. In the safety of her bedroom, surrounded by a sea of pillows and wrapped in her duvet, Holly had insulated herself from the fear of the full moon which was already creeping across the night sky.
‘Different in a good way or different in a bad way?’ pushed Tom. The tinny echo of his voice seemed more noticeable in the night time and emphasized the distance between them.
‘Just different,’ repeated Holly. The photo wasn’t great quality and Tom had obviously taken it himself, arm outstretched with the bland hotel-room decor as the backdrop.
His face looked thinner and his features sharper without his usual halo of curls. Although Holly could vaguely recall the image of Tom with short cropped hair from her vision, it had been the hollowness in his eyes that she had focused on then. In the safe realms of reality, Holly was clear headed and able to take a more critical view of his new hairstyle.
She hadn’t doubted that Tom would look as handsome as ever with a slick hairdo and suit to match, but seeing him with his cropped hair, she felt an unexpected wrench. She had become accustomed to the dishevelled Tom, that was her Tom and he had gone away in more than one sense. ‘It’ll grow on me,’ she added hesitantly.
‘You don’t like it,’ moaned Tom. ‘And to think you always used to nag me about getting my hair cut.’
‘I have, in the past, suggested you keep it tidy and trimmed. I did, on occasion, drag you to the bathroom to wash it. I accept that once, and only once, I chopped off a couple of knotted tats when you were asleep.’
‘You practically scalped me!’
‘You look dashing. You look suave. The viewers are going to be enthralled.’
‘Now you’re just being nice. Tell me more,’ encouraged Tom.
Holly soothed and reassured Tom, who, like Samson, felt emasculated by the simple act of a haircut. As she tucked in the covers around her, Holly’s gaze occasionally lifted towards the bedroom window. She had all the lights on in the room to neutralize the moonbeams that were trying to invade her peace of mind.
She had been counting the days until the full moon, but now she was tempted to rely solely on her rational thinking to dismiss the idea of its latent power. Did she really need to put it to the test?
Still chatting to Tom, Holly reluctantly peeled herself out of bed and crept towards the window. She pulled back the curtains and tentatively opened the blind. The enigmatic face of the moon beamed at her and Holly let out a sigh of resignation.
‘Are you tired? Do you want me to go?’ asked Tom, interpreting her sigh as a repressed yawn.
‘Not yet,’ answered Holly, and a spasm of fear and anticipation gripped her chest.
But she couldn’t keep Tom talking all night so with the pretence that he was guiding her towards a peaceful sleep, Holly said her final goodnight with the acrid taste of guilt on her tongue.
The walls closed in around her as soon as she put the phone down. The air seemed to have been sucked out of the room and Holly succumbed to the urgent need to flee the house, grabbing a fleece and slipping on her trainers along the way. Retrieving the wooden box from the kitchen, Holly pushed onwards. It was only when her hands touched the cold stone of the dial that she realized that it wasn’t the house she was running from but the dial she had been running to.
* * *
The summer rain during the day had left the July evening damp and humid, and as Holly caught her breath in front of the moondial the sweat was already tickling the back of her neck. She had wrapped the fleece around her waist and hoped that she wouldn’t need it.
A host of fluffy clouds were scattered across the sky, with the biggest hiding the perfectly round face of the moon. Holly dropped the orb cautiously into the brass claws of the dial and squeezed her eyes shut, waiting for a dazzling light show and hoping against hope that it wouldn’t arrive.
After a second or two of anxious waiting, Holly prised an eye open and looked around her. She took in the comforting sight of the long grass standing to attention at her feet. In the distance, the branches of the trees in the orchard were gently weighed down by the burden of their emerging fruits. The breath that Holly had been holding escaped as a relieved sigh.
‘See, Holly, no magic, no voodoo.’ Holly reached out to retrieve the orb just as a gust of wind whipped across the garden and the long grass rustled around her. The cloud that had been hiding the moon’s face was also swept away and moonbeams stretched out greedily towards the dial.
Holly’s fingertip had barely made contact with the orb when it glowed into life and thin lines of light trickled onto the surface of the dial. Her finger trembled and she pulled her hand away as an explosion of moonbeams danced across the garden. She squeezed her eyes shut and held on tightly to the sides of the dial to steady herself just as her grip on reality seemed to slip away and she felt herself being sucked into an abyss.
She could feel the dial almost buzzing with electricity beneath her grip, but she held on for dear life. The sound of a ticking clock thudded against her ears and then slowly receded into the distance.
It wasn’t just the shock from the dial that took Holly’s breath away or the dazzling light show as moonbeams danced around her, it was the sudden plummeting temperature as the warm breath of summer transformed into the harsh gasp of winter.
Slipping into her fleece, Holly felt the sweat on her neck turn to icicles. She desperately tried to blink away the light shadows and look around, but she didn’t need full vision to confirm the changes in her surroundings. Long grass no longer tickled her legs and her feet felt like they had been plunged into buckets of ice. As her vision struggled to clear, she realized why she felt so cold. She was standing in over a foot of snow and the remaining light shadows that plagued her weren’t shadows at all but fluffy snowflakes swirling around her.
Holly was frozen within seconds and couldn’t stay where she was, no matter how much she wanted to. She had no choice but to seek refuge in the house and face whatever horrors awaited her. Across the virgin white blanket of snow, the kitchen window sent out a beacon of light towards her. The only other lights on in the house came from the living room, its warm glow partially hidden by the conservatory. Holly was too intent on reaching the safety of the house