The Dry Garden

The first time I touched the board, I was in my cousin’s flat in Manchester, the grey drizzle tapping the window like a beggar asking for coins. She’d bought it from a charity shop, all aged wood and faded letters, and she laughed when I said I wanted to take it back to Dubai. ‘Nothing there for it to haunt,’ she said, but she was wrong. The city is new, yes, but new things still die.

Back home, I lived in a villa in the Springs, where the streets are so identical that even the palm trees seem to grow in a copy-paste pattern. My bedroom window faced a communal garden that nobody used, just a patch of sand and a few thorny bushes that the gardener watered every third day. When the Australian board came out of my suitcase, I felt a weird thrill, like I was smuggling something forbidden into a sterile place.

My friend Layla was the only one I trusted. We set up the board on my bedroom floor at midnight, using a shot glass for a planchette. The first session was gentle, a woman named Marian from Essex, who said she liked our ‘posh accents’ and told us to be careful with the board. We laughed, but she made the glass glide fluently, spelling out words with a confidence that made my fingers tingle.

Then the school term started, and I forgot the board in the back of my closet. Until Omar, a senior with a sharp jaw and a daredevil grin, asked me to bring it to the Saturday art class. He said he’d heard about it from a friend of a friend. I hesitated, but the way he looked at me made me feel chosen, so I smuggled it into my backpack.

The art room was empty except for us and the dusty sunlight slicing through the blinds. We pushed two easels aside and set the board on the floor. Omar had brought a bottle of water and a pack of cards, just for fun, he said. But when we started, the glass didn’t move for a long time. Then it shot to ‘NO’ before I even asked a question.

I asked who was there. The glass spelled out ‘THE GARDENER.’ I laughed. ‘That’s a weird name.’ Omar wasn’t laughing. He said, ‘Ask it what it wants.’ The glass dragged to ‘YOUR GARDEN.’ My skin prickled. I told Omar I thought we should stop. He said, ‘No, it’s just messing with us.’ But the glass moved again, faster now, pushing against my fingers like it had its own heartbeat.

It spelled: ‘I WATERED THE THORNS. THEY GREW. YOU ARE THE NEW SEED.’ Then the glass stopped, and the room felt colder. The sunlight outside turned orange as the afternoon wore on, and we packed up without saying much. Omar promised to meet me again next Saturday, but he didn’t show up.

That night, I woke to a scratching sound outside my window. I pulled back the curtain and saw the communal garden, but it wasn’t the same. The sand was black, and the thorny bushes had grown into twisted shapes, their branches reaching toward my window like fingers. In the middle of the garden stood a figure, tall and thin, wearing a dirty, wide-brimmed hat. It held a watering can, but instead of water, dark liquid dripped from its spout.

I blinked, and the figure was gone. The garden looked normal again. But when I went to close the curtain, I noticed my potted plant on the windowsill had wilted, its leaves curled and brown, though I had watered it that morning.

The next day, at school, I saw Omar in the hallway. He looked pale, dark circles under his eyes. He pulled me aside and whispered, ‘I couldn’t sleep. I kept hearing something in my garden. I think it’s following me.’ I told him about the figure, and he went white. He said, ‘We have to get rid of the board.’ But when I got home, the board was gone from my closet.

That night, I heard the scratching again, but this time it was closer. I didn’t look outside. I buried my head under my pillow, and felt a cold draft that wasn’t there before. My phone buzzed. It was Omar. He sent a photo of his backyard: a single withered palm tree, and beneath it, a dark shape that looked like a man with a watering can, but the can was tipped over, spilling something that pooled into a stain that resembled a face.

I didn’t sleep. I stayed up until dawn, and when the first call to prayer echoed from the mosque, I felt a strange relief. But as the day went on, I noticed a dark spot on my bedroom wall, like a watermark, that hadn’t been there before. It was in the shape of a hand.

Three days later, Omar stopped answering my messages. Then I got a call from his mother. She said he was in the hospital, dehydrated, with strange scratch marks on his arms. She kept saying, ‘He keeps talking about the garden. He keeps saying the weeds are growing under his skin.’

I sat on my bed, staring at the water stain on the wall. It had spread, now covering the whole corner, and I could swear I saw a face in it. The same face from Omar’s photo. The board was gone, but I could still feel it, like a cold stone in my chest. The gardener hadn’t come for the board. It had come for us.

I never told anyone. I stopped going to the art class. I even moved my bedroom to the other side of the villa. But last night, I looked out my window, and the community garden was full of wild, thorny vines, crawling over the sand, reaching toward the villa. And at the center, the gardener stood, tall and patient, holding a watering can. It tipped the can, and a stream of black water fell onto the ground. Where it landed, a small, green shoot pushed through the sand, growing just a little bit taller, aiming for my window. The water was not water. It was the color of oil, and it was making the garden grow.

I’m writing this from my phone, the curtains drawn, the air conditioner on full blast to drown out the sounds. But I can hear it now: a slow, rhythmic dripping, like something is watering the soil right outside my wall. And I know, deep in my gut, that the gardener is not interested in the board. It’s interested in the new seed. And I am the new seed.