A Bad Night In Bridgetown

How Rachel And James Escaped The Skull Garden

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There once was a little girl called Rachel who lived within the Skull Garden. The garden is, to this very day, nestled in a far away wrinkle of the Great Weave where reality itself becomes frayed and worn thin.

Maybe for this reason Rachel did not know how she had come to live in the Skull Garden, she must have arrived when she was too small to remember. She was nearly alone in the lush groves and sweet glades. She ate fruit and vegetables and drank clear, cool spring water. It was a pleasant life if maybe too quiet and sometimes a little lonely.

Not that Rachel was entirely alone in the garden. She had one friend, James the Mouse. Rachel lived in a tree at the foot of the great Skull Rock. James lived in the hollowed out dried gourd of a pumpkin that nestled in the exposed roots of the tree.

So Rachel would make her way around the Skull Garden in the daytime and she would talk with James and James would talk back. Rachel did not know that mice cannot usually speak, so neither of them saw anything strange in that.

Mostly Rachel and James would talk about the seasons, and which fruits or vegetables were growing, and the weather. James was a mouse and not terribly imaginative so he never raised any other topics of conversation. Rachel, however, would sometimes talk about leaving the garden. Or she would talk about being somewhere that wasn't a garden. Sometimes she expressed a wish to meet another little girl just like her. When she talked this way she often imagined herself in another place that wasn't the tree in the shadow of the great Skull Rock.

"I do not understand you sometimes," James said once. It was not the first time he had become exasperated by Rachel's daydreams. "You know that this is all there is, so I do not see the sense in talking about things being different, because they are not different. Things are what they are."

"But James," Rachel replied. "Do you not think of what it would be like to meet another mouse just like you? Are you never sad that you are the only mouse in the Skull Garden?"

"Why would I be sad?" James answered. "This is all I know. I cannot be sad about something unknown because I do not know it."

"So what if I wasn't here?" Rachel asked. "Would you be sad then?"

"I don't know," James said. "You have always been here, I don't know what it would be like if you weren't."

"Impossible mouse," Rachel said and this always meant that the conversation was over.

You may be asking yourself why it was that Rachel never ventured far from her tree in the shadow of the great Skull Rock. She had the vision to send her imagination out into the world beyond, so to wander would be a natural thing.

The problem was that Rachel and James lived in the daylight world of the Skull Garden. When night fell the world was the domain of a giant bat that lived within the hollow of the Skull shaped cave at the summit of the great Skull Rock.

The giant bat hunted in the night. Lying in the hollow of her tree Rachel could hear the slap of the bat's leathery wings through the night sky. Sometimes she would hear the terrified squeal of an animal that the bat had caught to eat. In those times she hugged herself tight, scared in the darkness, waiting for the dawn.

Rachel never wanted to be outside in the night time. To leave the Skull Garden would have risked the bat catching her in its black claws, to bear her away to its lair. Rachel feared that if that happened she would never see daylight again.