The Midnight Gardener

Marta had always been a light sleeper, but the sound that invaded her nights was anything but a normal disturbance. It was a rhythmic, dull thud—’chunk, chunk’—as if someone were striking the earth with a heavy tool. At first, she dismissed it as a trick of the old house’s settling pipes, but the sound was too deliberate, too steady. It came from the direction of the neighbor’s yard, just beyond the high brick wall that separated our properties. Our neighbor, Mrs. Albright, was a frail widow in her eighties, who never set foot in her garden after sunset. So who, in their right mind, would be gardening at midnight?

Every night, around the witching hour, the ‘chunk, chunk’ would start. It would go on for maybe twenty minutes, then stop as abruptly as it began. Some nights it skipped, and those nights were the worst, because Marta would lie awake, waiting, her ears straining for the sound that never came. I tried to rationalize it—maybe it was a stray dog digging, or a branch scraping against the wall—but Marta was convinced it was something more sinister.

One night, unable to bear it any longer, Marta crept to the living room, hoping the distraction of late-night TV would drown out the noise. She settled onto the old couch, the flickering glow of the screen casting strange shadows across the room. The ‘chunk, chunk’ began again, and she found herself glancing repeatedly toward the kitchen window on her right, which faced the neighbor’s backyard. The wall was tall, over six feet, and even a man of average height would only show his head above it. But that night, as she looked, a shadow moved along the top of the wall. It was tall—impossibly tall—and she could see it from the waist up. The silhouette was of a man, thin and elongated, and in his hand, he carried a long-handled hoe.

Marta froze. The shadow didn’t walk so much as glide, its movement smooth and unnatural. It reached a spot near the center of the wall and stopped. Then, the ‘chunk, chunk’ resumed, but now it was synchronized with the shadow’s arm movements—each ‘chunk’ accompanied a swing of the hoe. Marta watched, transfixed, as the shadow worked the soil in the neighbor’s yard, even though no plants grew there, only hard-packed earth and weeds. After what felt like an eternity, the shadow turned its head, and for a split second, Marta could have sworn it looked directly at her through the window, though it had no face—just a void where features should be. Then it melted back into the darkness, and the sound ceased.

She didn’t sleep that night. The next morning, I found her pale and shaking, and she told me everything. I tried to dismiss it as a nightmare, but she was adamant. ‘It was real. I saw it. It was swinging that hoe, planting something.’ The idea of planting made my skin crawl. What could something that tall and shadowy be planting in Mrs. Albright’s yard?

Mrs. Albright had been quiet lately, even more so than usual. When I ran into her later that day, I asked if she’d heard the noises at night. She looked at me with a strange, knowing glint in her eye. ‘The garden needs tending,’ she said, her voice creaking like old wood. ‘But I can’t do it anymore. So he does it for me.’ I asked who, but she just smiled and shuffled away, leaving me with a chill that had nothing to do with the autumn air.

That night, I stayed up with Marta, determined to see the shadow for myself. The ‘chunk, chunk’ began at midnight sharp. We sat in the dark living room, our eyes fixed on the kitchen window. The shadow appeared, tall and lean, moving along the wall. It stopped, raised the hoe, and brought it down with a force that made the ground shudder. But as it worked, I noticed something odd—the hoe’s blade never seemed to penetrate the soil. Instead, it made a wet, thudding sound, as if hitting something solid beneath the surface. And with each strike, a faint pink mist rose from the ground, catching the moonlight.

We watched for what seemed like hours, but it was only minutes. Then the shadow stopped, straightened its back, and turned to face the house. This time, it didn’t have a void face. It had Mrs. Albright’s face—her weathered, hollow cheeks, her sunken eyes—superimposed on the tall, dark form. It smiled, a slow, wide grin that split the darkness, and then it sank into the ground, leaving only the hollow ‘chunk, chunk’ echoing in our ears.

We called the police the next morning. They dug up Mrs. Albright’s yard, and what they found made even the hardened officers turn pale. Beneath the soil, in neat rows, were the bodies of four people—missing persons from the last decade. Mrs. Albright had been a gardener for over fifty years, and somewhere along the line, she had developed a taste for more than just tending flowers. When they pulled her from her bed, she was gripping a small, tarnished hand mirror, and she whispered, ‘He’ll be lonely now.’ Marta and I never slept well again. And sometimes, when the night is quiet, I still hear it—the faint, rhythmic ‘chunk, chunk,’ but I never look out the window.