Dinner in the Moon Garden

Much a work in progress with an abundance of error and in need of rewriting - however, paraphrasing Stephen Fry - 'first build up a bulky blob of words until it's large enough to hack into shape...'

"Gaddum Come!" humphed Ida hoarsely from beneath the shadowy gloom of her hooded cowl. She stood waiting for Miss Ghasm, swaying slightly, her huge hands hanging slack and pendulous at her sides. Miss Ghasm nodded and readied herself to follow.

Ida shuffled unsteadily, turned, and lurched into jerking, disjointed forward motion. As she tramped along, she chuckled anew with each tottering misstep that threatened to topple her. Her heavy boots thudded with every clomp.

Sedate and with a measured step, Miss Ghasm followed closely as Ida stomped off down the dank and dimly lit corridor. Rough-hewn from stone, the damp slime-stained walls seeped moisture, chilling the air.

A dim flicker of yellow gleamed in the distance, and at length the light of a dull, sooty lantern revealed an arched door at the corridor's end. Ida paused momentarily, shuddering to a swaying halt, then gave it a hefty heave from her shoulder and forced it open on ancient hinges with brute strength.

The door opened onto the first stone steps of a spiral staircase, winding upwards around a central pillar. Leaning forward to the point of almost tipping over, Ida lurched ahead and began to mount the worn stone slabs.

Indefatigable and grunting with each treacherous step gained, Ida chuckled delightedly to herself each time she tipped backward—seeming almost to fall—before regaining the step. Heavy breaths of steamy vapour drifted around her in the tomb-stale air.

Miss Ghasm, a few steps below, kept a wary eye on the lumbering figure, half-expecting the boots that anchored Ida to fail and send her crashing backwards to crush them both. Yet Ida snorted and steamed like a carthorse, humphing happily as she plodded upward in her ungainly gait.

Step by step they climbed the tightening corkscrew. Each stair was uneven, worn down at the front, and slick with damp, slippery beneath Miss Ghasm's sharp pointed heel.

The arched roof above them lowered as they ascended. The steps narrowed. The walls closed in with each turn of the spiral. Miss Ghasm lowered her head lest her hat snag on the rough rock above.

At last, her cowl steaming like a compost heap in late autumn, Ida arrived at another thick wooden door, braced with ornate but rusted hinges. Despite her strength, the door opened slowly, squeaking with each shove of Ida's meaty palms. With a screeching squeal, like the croon of an old crone, the door opened outwards.

There was nothing to see but a wall of fog.

It poured over the threshold in slow eddies—cool and wet. Milky-white, dense, and slow-shifting. Miss Ghasm looked ahead but saw only a drifting, motionless cloud. Depth and distance were indistinguishable.

She sniffed the muffled, sodden air: bitter ivy, wet stone, and something rank and undefinable. A tingling sting caught her nose, a pleasant prickling on the tongue. Visibility dropped to mere inches.

Without pause, Ida charged forward and crossed the threshold. Her squat outline vanished instantly into the fog. The dull thud of her boots echoed briefly, followed by a final "humph." Then nothing.

Miss Ghasm followed—resolute and poised—stepping into the mist without hesitation. The air closed around her like a damp shroud. She advanced toward the spot where Ida had disappeared.

She glanced upward. No sky—only dense, impenetrable fog. She looked down. Though the floor felt smooth beneath her shoes, it too was obscured.

Three steps further and she collided with the solid bulk of Ida, who now stood silently in place.

"Gaddum Wait. Ida Wait," croaked Ida, swaying slightly.

Miss Ghasm stood beside her.

Her thin frame was rigid, upright, raptorial. Her breath slow and even, making no vapour. She sank into well-practiced stillness, her senses sharpened and alert. Ida stood beside her, snorting coarsely.

There was a rumble—slight at first—a vibration beneath Miss Ghasm’s feet. With infinite slowness, she felt the floor begin to rise. Fog began to fall and pool around her feet.

Whatever platform she stood upon was lifting—smoothly, silently, ascending into the air. The mist streamed downward in curling banks.

As it rose, the fog grew lighter and brighter above. The top of her head, her eyes, then shoulders emerged into clear air. Gazing upward, she saw a blue-black sky above an endless ocean of fog.

The outlines of a garden began to emerge.

The fog at her waist streamed downward, pooling at her ankles. She rose slowly and steadily, the platform lifting through the clouds.

Above her, the fog thinned further, revealing a starless sky. A single pale afterglow of dusk hung in the distance. The Moon Garden had risen.

Beneath her feet now stretched a great marble disk—white streaked with black, or black streaked with white. The fog drifted down, pooling below like a breath exhaled.

She looked down.

The stone beneath her was no longer rough-cut or damp, but smooth, polished marble, veined with silvery white. The wisps of mist now wafted away in curling eddies, revealing a crystalline floor.

The vast circular plane revealed itself in full—a platform of black-and-white tiles, suspended high above the clouds.

Miss Ghasm surveyed it all—the perfect, monstrous beauty of it.

Moonlight silvered the marble. Shadows pooled. Fountains and raised plant beds shimmered faintly. Almost to the horizon, she could make out a distant balustrade tracing the garden’s perimeter.

Colours were gone, drained to blacks, silvers, and innumerable shades of grey. Starkly beautiful, coldly glittering—light like frost spangled across stone.

There were marble-sided pools, still as mirrors. Beneath their surfaces, vague shapes coiled and twisted—eel-like, serpentine. Glints of teeth in shadowed maws.

The sound of water plashing softly through hidden channels. The air, crisp and cold.

It was, she deduced, Captain Cornelius Kurdle's finest creation.

His beloved Moon Garden.

===

And Later….

He raised the goblet to her.

“It seems remarkable to me,” he said softly, “indeed endearingly so—that such a fine specimen as you has managed to evade the tentacles of entanglement that is marriage. You have, I presume, have you not?”

Captain Kurdles eyes glinted, black pupils shrinking to pinpoints. Somewhere nearby, something plopped into the dark pond beside the table, and a ripple lapped at the stone edge.

“That is to say, betwixt us... there should be no encumbrance. No obstacle to our companionship of which I should have mind?”

He paused. Miss Ghasm’s eyes looked to the misty distance whilst she reflected momentarily upon the series of her husbands who had, so very sadly and serially deceased fortuitously. Then she nodded to affirm she was at this time unmarried.

With some relief Kurdle spoke again to close the matter.

“I sense, Miss Ghasm, that you—much as I—adore the moon gleams where they glint in the gloom and sharpen the shadows. And may I say, Miss Ghasm, how delectable you look... a veritable thorn amongst the roses.”

He smiled without warmth, but with unmistakable delight. Insects hissed in the box hedges. Pale and spectral, datura blooms swayed gently like corpses swinging from a noose.

“So tonight is to be your first night in service, Miss Ghasm,” said Captain Kurdle coyly. “The 'free trial' I am offering to ensure you suffice and bring succour to my soul in the bed-chamber during these, my final months?”

He looked at her over the rim of his goblet, admiring her pale bloodless skin deathly wan in the moonlight. The wine inside, ruby red, turned black in the shadows. He swirled it slowly, watching how it clung to the glass like congealing blood.

“Brag not your might, dark belladonna,” he murmured to himself, almost singing, “for naught your deadly shades of night.”

“Indeed,” said Miss Ghasm.

She sat poised and still, every inch of her appearance calculated, the nacreous shimmer of her blue-black gown, the gnarled white bone-handle of her umbrella resting by her side. Her stole, sleek soft fox-fur, draped across her shoulders, yellow glass eyes beady above a snarl of fangs slyly evaluated Kurdle's figure.

“Though if I may suggest, I should prefer it, Captain Kurdle, if you were to call me—since it seems we are to be so closely associated—if you were to call me Kermillah. It is my proper name.”

Her voice was low, almost a whisper, to oblige him to listen all the harder. Her tone mesmerised him, curling round his thoughts like the mist curling around their feet. Her eyes, thunder-dark and still, held his with a glitter both secretive and intriguing.

Kurdle felt his thin blood stirring and oozing in the quivering chambers of his long-dormant heart. A shiver of delight creaked down his rickety spine. A smile, unbidden, cracked his dry lips.

His mind surged with grippingly gruesome thoughts. Plans. Schemes. Prospects. She was splendidly cold. Her haughtiness was a lure. How bright moonlight gleamed on her skin, white as bone china.

“Kermillah,” he repeated, tasting the name as if it were a rare fungus from his beloved mushroom mines. “Ker-mil-lah…” He let it linger, luxuriating in each syllable. “Such a trustworthy tenderness about you. Such a sincere-sounding name. It tickles so upon the tongue. So gently. So teasingly. Yet so scissors-sharp. How strange it is?”

“Well,” he said at length, “since we are indeed to be on such intimate acquaintance, I suppose I should prefer it if you were to call me by my first name too—Cornelius.”

“This much, Cornelius—and nothing more—for now,” his voice measured. His insipid smile bloomed. “Not Captain. Merely Cornelius.’

Smugness insinuated itself into his expression.

“And were we, with sufficient time, to know each other's hearts more deeply, I dare say I might admit to allowing…”

He trailed off.

A pause. Just long enough for Miss Ghasm to evaluate the bait, the tease, the glint of promise.

As gentlemen spiders of certain species present to their matrimonially intended, a silk-wrapped, cocooned and bundled insect hanging from a single thread and still squirming within—a distracting little nibble to ease seduction.

“Well, enough for now,” he said lightly, and lifted the crystal decanter with a rattling hand. He refilled the absinthe in Miss Ghasm’s glass with slow precision. Wormwood green, the liquid gurgled softly.

He smiled again. Secretly imagining—yearning for—the sound of his pet name Cornie upon her lips.

Miss Ghasm took a sip, the pink tip of her tongue flicking across dry lips with serpentine grace.

“Indeed, indeed, Captain—I mean, Cornelius. I should, of course, be delighted to oblige.”

She paused. Her dark eyes studied him closely, calculating. Then she continued.

“With intimate acquaintance—and should I, as Night Watch Nurse, purely within the bedchamber’s walls, naturally—may indulge, perhaps… in these your final years to allow…”

Her thoughts bloomed—swift, dark, and delicious. If her charm worked, hers would be the name he called out in his dreams.

Kermie. A name she had allowed no other of her husbands to use.

Was that a momentary flush of warmth suffusing her pallid cheeks?

It passed quickly. But perhaps… perhaps it had been there.

Above them, the mist curled around the trees. Shrill as glass, swarms of gnatterflies buzzed as they hunted. Mothsquitoes droned above a nearby pool. With a soft splash, something black and glistening surfaced. It faded, leaving only the ripple of dark water. Somewhere in the distance, the sound of a fountain in the hush of the moonlight and deep wells wetly whispered of their wishes.

And the two of them sat across from one another—two monsters in velvet and bone, sipping poison by candlelight.

Captain Kurdle broke their silent reverie.

“I wonder, Miss Ghasm, if perhaps you might permit a little serenade—a modest musical tribute to memorialise our first meeting?” Captain Kurdle’s voice oozed mock politeness, every syllable laced with mischief. He bowed slightly, one skeletal hand flaring outward like a rusted fan.

Around them, the Moon Garden exhaled a soft, sickly mist. Fungal spores hovered above the damp marble tiles, catching moonlight in oily swirls. The silvered surfaces of the ponds reflected nothing cleanly—only shadows that moved without source.

Miss Ghasm did not speak, but arched one thin brow in cool assent. She sat composed, bone-straight, in a tall iron-backed chair draped in black lace. Her sharp silhouette gleamed faintly beneath a shimmering insect-wing green cloak.

With a sharp snap of his bony fingers, Captain Kurdle summoned the nearest Ida. The creature groaned and creaked to life, swaying grotesquely toward the long, crooked dinner table. Its enormous feet struck the marble with heavy, slapping thuds.

“Humph,” it grunted as it arrived, its breath misting the air.

“Ida, my dears,” Kurdle began, fingers steepled theatrically, “might I trouble you to fetch my wyolin?”

He mimed a dainty bowing motion, raising invisible strings beneath his chin.

The Ida blinked unevenly. Sparks briefly danced in its head casing.

“My phiddle,” he added dryly, his thin lips curling into a tight, sardonic smile.

“Diddle? Ida get da diddle?” the creature parroted, massive hands fluttering as it lurched into a clumsy pivot. Nearly toppling, it righted itself with a wheeze and another thick “Humph,” before lurching off into the fog. Its footfalls faded into the night.

Captain Kurdle turned back to Miss Ghasm with a theatrical flourish, then accepted the violin when it was returned—gripping its neck as if throttling a snake. His hands, deathly pale and knobbled with age, were the colour of acid bleached bone. Liver spots bloomed like ink across the thin skin of his wrists.

“My dear Kermillah,” he croaked, “a little melody for you. A plaintive air, if you will.”

He tucked the violin beneath his jaw with macabre grace, lifted the bow, and began to scrape.

The sound was horrific.

Strings screamed under his touch—sour, brittle notes sharp as shrapnel. The melody, if it could be called that, limped unevenly through minor keys like a thing with too many legs. Each stroke was a fresh desecration, notes wrung out like dying birdsong, the bow tugging across the strings with arthritic spite.

He tapped one foot, not with rhythm, but with grim persistence. His face, wrinkled and glistening, twisted into a smile that bore no warmth. A fleck of spittle clung to his lip.

Within his beastly, wrecked chest, his thoughts churned—vindictive, vituperative, venomous. There was glee in the dissonance. He fancied this screeching scrape a kind of spell, a dark noise to summon delight or discomfort.

But when he dared glance across the table—he faltered.

Miss Ghasm was watching.

Her pale face, drawn and haughty, caught a slant of moonlight and looked carved from alabaster. Her thunder-dark eyes were locked on him, unblinking. The corners of her mouth twitched—not quite a smile, but not displeasure.

She was listening.

And more than that—she was interested.

Miss Ghasm tilted her head, as though considering an insect she might keep in a jar. She reached up and idly stroked her fox-fur stole. Her ring—a heavy obsidian setting—glinted like a single lidless eye.

He is pathetic, she thought, watching him. But he knows it. That gives him charm. A bit of grim comedy.

And the noise—how it howled. It was so profoundly bad it had become… almost beautiful.

She leaned forward slightly, catching a new gleam in the pond water beside them. One of the garden’s flytraps twitched open, yawning in time with the violin’s scrape.

Kurdle, emboldened by the flicker in her expression, closed his eyes for a moment.

She listens, he thought. Not just out of politeness. Not just to judge. She hears me. And I—

He paused.

I am not alone…

And as the music screeched on, awful and alive, the two terrible creatures at the table gazed at each other—not with affection, not yet—but with an appraising, morbid interest.

The battle had begun. They would not dance not to the music of love. These were but the first steps of the sinister battle of Wills.