The Door Garden

By Mark Weaver

Neal and Karen find a very strange house, with a very strange garden, occupied by a very strange woman, her cat, and her grand-nephew. An entire world of possibilities seems to open for the two friends, but when trouble follows they have to come up with an intricate (and bizarre) plan to save the garden and themselves.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Dec 26, 2013
• ISBN: 9781304747341

Book preview

The Door Garden

The Door Garden

By Mark Weaver

The Door Garden

Copyright © 2013 Mark Weaver

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-304-74734-1

Chapter 1

The June day started as a normal summer day.  Neal Anderson got up at about ten o’clock and pulled on his T-shirt and jeans.  He munched a bowl of cereal while checking the computer for new messages.  There were none; summer vacation seemed to drain away the energy required to write anything, even simple e-mail notes.  He didn’t have that many friends, anyway.

He took his sketchpad out to the backyard and tried a few more times to capture the image of the tree reflected in the patio door, but he never could get it on paper the way he saw it in his head.  I’ll never be an artist, he thought and put the book of incomplete drawings back into the locked drawer of his desk.

After lunch, his mother made him take the family dog, Mac, out for a walk.  Neal tried to dodge the chore, claiming that he would have plenty of time to walk the dog later, how about tomorrow?  His mother pointed out that school had been out for a week already, and both boy and dog needed some exercise.

So boy and dog headed over to the city park a few blocks away.  It was already a warm day, the best kind of late spring day in central Illinois.  The little spotted terrier pulled on his leash, eager to smell every feature of the park in every direction.

Neal found a suitable stick under one of the big oak trees and walked Mac out to the center of a large open area of grass.

Mac, sit!’ he commanded.  The little dog sat.  Good boy!  He scratched the dog’s neck behind the ears and under the chin.  Neal sat cross-legged on the grass in front of Mac and addressed him seriously.  Now. I know you can do this, Mac.  Just because you’ve never done it correctly in the past doesn’t mean you can’t learn.  He unclipped the leash from Mac’s collar and threw the stick.  Go fetch!"

Mac took off, in exactly the opposite direction.  Neal shouted in vain as he watched the little dog head straight past the playground equipment and disappear into the tall, thick evergreen hedge that formed part of the enclosure of the park.  Just before Mac vanished, Neal thought he could see the outline of a cat, a black one, pass into the deep shade underneath the hedge.  Oh, Mac, he thought, we’re not here to chase cats!

Neal ran up to the thick, tangled hedge of juniper and shouted loudly, Mac, come! but there was no sign of the little terrier.  Where could he have gone?  Neal had never considered what lay on the other side of the hedge, but, after all, there had to be someplace back there.

Going after Mac wasn’t easy.  The branches of the hedge were intertwined as though they had grown together since they were planted, and they must have been planted a long time ago, because they reached up twenty feet or more!  He mostly had to crawl on the ground.  The branches pushed him down like a heavily weighted net.  Sometimes he had to grope his way through the branches, like climbing sideways!  Not only was the hedge tall and dense, it was thick, too.  And towards the center it was as dark as night.  The juniper needles scratched his arms and caught at his T-shirt and jeans.  He was breathing hard when he finally broke free.

And that is when the world seemed to lurch around and start spinning the opposite way.  Maybe he was exhausted from crawling on his belly.  Maybe he got too hot.  Maybe there was something intoxicating in the warm air along with the heavy scent of the juniper.  Whatever it was that caused his head to spin when he finally emerged into the dappled shade on the other side of the thicket, it was only the beginning of a very disorienting discovery.  He was standing at the end of a street.  But it couldn’t be!  He had never seen this street before.  How could there be an entire street that he had never seen in the middle of the neighborhood where he had lived all of his life?

He felt so dizzy that he had to sit down.  He was sitting on pavement of old, brown bricks, discolored by age and covered with moss and lichens.  The slightly rounded bricks were set directly into the dirt, with no concrete.  There aren’t any cobblestone roads in this town, he thought.  Thick piles of decaying leaves covered the sides of the lane, as though the noisy street-cleaning machine never came here to sweep them away from one year to the next.  Along the sides of the street grew tall oak trees; they arched overhead, branches touching like they were shaking hands from either side of a stream.  They blocked the warm afternoon sun, and the breeze high above caused the shadows on the cobblestones to dance like ripples on a pond.

All of the streets in Neal’s neighborhood, in fact in the entire city, were made of plain, black asphalt.  Most of the trees were small and the houses recently built.  But this street felt very old.  He could smell the age in the dead leaves and the mossy ground.  It reminded him of the forest where his family had gone camping last fall.

He stood up, slowly so as not to get dizzy again, and turned around.  There was the juniper hedge, and the street ran right up to it, the brick pavers blending into the dark, needle-covered earth.  He spun around to look down the length of the street.  It was only a block long.  Another wall of dark evergreen bushes closed off the other end.  How can you have a dead-end street on both ends?  This reminds me of something.  He had felt this disturbing sensation in the past.  What his eyes were seeing didn’t fit with what his brain was thinking.  Where had he felt like this before?  Suddenly he remembered.  In the drawer of his desk, the one with the lock and the sketchbooks that no one ever saw, was a book of drawings by the artist, M.C. Escher.  One of those pictures showed a house by a waterfall.  In that drawing the stream ran along a brick channel before passing the waterwheel and tumbling over the end of the aqueduct to cascade down beside the house.  If you looked at the details of the scene everything seemed correct, all the angles and surfaces lined up properly.  But if you step back a bit and take in the whole picture you notice that the water is running uphill!  That was exactly how he felt standing in this impossible street.  It looked like a regular street, but it was all wrong by being here!

Behind the oak trees, high walls of dark red brick, capped with grayed and crumbling mortar lined the sides of the lane.  He was on a street completely isolated from the rest of the city, with no normal way in or out.  It was as though someone had forgotten to connect this street with the rest of the town.  Somebody at City Hall really goofed, he thought.

His first impulse was to run back home and tell someone.  But whom would he tell?  His older brother was still away at college.  His father usually expressed no interest in Neal’s activities; he spent all of his time at the lab, a willing slave to his research job.  His Mom was too busy with her real estate business to listen to Neal’s discoveries.  She would just want to know if there were any properties for sale.  But there’s Karen, he realized.  She would appreciate this!

As he peered down the way, looking for his errant dog, he noticed that there was an opening in the wall on the left-hand side.  He walked cautiously forward, old leaves crunching under his tennis shoes.  There must be a house!  Actually, all he could see was a driveway and a gate.  A big iron gate of black bars set into the wall.  Beside the gate, a tarnished bronze plaque with raised black letters announced: 3 FOREST LANE.  He wondered, what happened to number one and number two, because, as far as Neal could see, this was the only driveway on the entire, peculiar little street.  The driveway beyond the gate curved out of sight behind a thick tangle of unrestrained roses.  He saw no movement, but heard plenty of birds calling and singing from the tall pine trees that he could glimpse over the wild rose bush.  From the giant oak tree beside the gate, a squirrel loudly chattered in protest of Neal’s intrusion.

As he peered between the bars of the gate, he heard the familiar, urgent bark of Mac.  The little dog was at the far end of the street, opposite from where they had entered.  Neal sprinted after the fugitive, but groaned in despair as Mac burrowed into the thick evergreen wall and disappeared.  Oh, Mac!  Not again!

When Neal emerged from this hedge, after several more minutes of frustrating battle against the foliage, he felt another vertiginous attack of weirdness. He found himself standing at the side of familiar Cottonwood Street, just across from the elementary school.  How can that possibly be?  He had passed this small stand of evergreen plants between these two houses hundreds of times.  There can’t be an entire street between here and the park!  Mac sat quietly