“She never let me keep nothin’ from that garden ’cept her.”

A scream followed by a gun-shot thundered over the sound of pounding rain.

Jim and I ran through to the bed-room. There stood Jo, half-undressed, aiming the rifle at the figure of the smiling woman sitting on the bed, her collar unbuttoned to reveal dark bruising and red-raw rope burn around her throat.

“You stay there! Keep away from me,” Jo ordered, his hands trembling as he clutched the gun and jabbed it at her as though fending off an attack.

“You ought never to leave me,” said the woman, sitting as still as a statue. “It’s the loneliness, you see…”

“Stay back, you mad old bitch, or I’ll shoot,” Jo warned.

“Leave it alone, Jo. We’d best be on our way now. I don’t think shooting her will help,” said Jim, holding his hand out to touch the rifle like he was calming a spooked horse.

Jo turned to face him. “You don’t understand, Jim. It’s ’er. She isn’t the same woman. She isn’t flesh and blood. She’s something else—something evil.”

The woman’s mouth stretched open and she wailed a terrible, inhuman shriek. I covered my ears, as did Jim, but Jo’s hands stayed frozen on the rifle as blood started to trickle from his ears.

In an instant the woman flew across the room. She seized me by the shoulders and flung me against the wall as though I weighed no more than a sack of feathers. My head hit the wall and, as I tumbled to the floor, I saw her dash Jim’s head against the bed-end and wrench the rifle out of Jo’s hands. I heard a gun-shot as the room started to fade from view and I slipped into blackness…

I woke up on a mattress back in the store. My head throbbed. I tried to sit up, wincing at the sharp pain at the back of my skull and remembering that it wasn’t just the whisky that’d waged war on my head.

Jim was on the mattress beside me. I shook him awake and slowly, wordlessly he rose. The first light of dawn shone on the drawing beside us. The rain had ceased, the little kid was fast asleep, breathing loudly. We got up, stole out of the whare. We didn’t say anything. We were lucky to escape with our lives. We both knew it but dared not say it.

White clouds floated over a pink sky and a chill wind blew; the air smelt of wet grass. Just as we started down the path, I caught sight of something.

“Jim! The kid’s garden…”

Jim turned and followed the direction of my gaze. “That… that wasn’t there before.”

There was a fresh mound of dirt, large enough for a man’s grave, and the colourful upturned paua shells dotted around its base glinted in the early morning sunlight.

“You don’t think…”

My words fell away as the mound of earth started to move before our eyes. Loose dirt tumbled, bugs scuttled and fled, and the paua shells quivered as the grave started to quake and break apart.

“God, it can’t be,” Jim whispered.

A forearm thrust up through the crumbling mound. The arm was a pale, sickly colour but the familiar calloused hand and torn blue galatea shirt sleeve left us in no doubt as to who had been buried there. The hand clawed and groped at the dirt as Jo tried to climb out of his grave.

I turned to run back into the house but the woman was there, hair wild and mouth open in a twisted smile. She stepped toward me, the butt of her rifle scraping across the floor-boards.

“He’s mine, now. Forever,” she said.

I shoved Jim down the path, past the thing that was dragging itself out of the earth, and we fled through the paddock.