The Echo Garden

3rd June 2025 — Nina

First day here. The journey took over 10 hours, mum made us set off at 7am this morning, apparently so we could get settled and unpacked a bit before dinner. After battling miles of traffic though, the thought of unpacking is nauseating to say the least.

This house smells like an odd mix of tobacco and lavender. Mum says it’s “vintage,” which is her way of romanticising the fact that there’s damp in the bathroom and mice in the loft. Dad’s already made friends with the local DIY shop bloke.

I didn’t see anyone my age on our journey through the tiny village, just small groups of pensioners huddled together, likely gossiping about the new family come to town. There’s zero signal pretty much everywhere in the house with just one bar of 3G if I stand in the bathroom leaning towards the tiny rotten wooden window. We’re supposed to be getting broadband installed but not for another week. Even then it’s not expected to be particularly fast, so I guess this is me journaling now, like some Brontë heroine, except with less swooning and more sulking.

I found a greenhouse out back, mostly hidden by overgrown rose bushes and hydrangeas. I tried the door but it was locked and all the accessible windows are too small for me to shuffle myself in. Its glass panels are foggy, cracked, and shaded by overgrown vines. The key for it must be around here somewhere, the mystery has me intrigued. It looks forgotten. But somehow…it doesn’t feel empty.

3rd June, 1875 — Elizabeth

The greenhouse has once more grown warm, the sun having returned in earnest. There is a particular fragrance that arises when the light falls upon the glass—the mingling scents of damp earth, mint, and the sweet breath of roses. At times I fancy the flowers incline toward me as I pass among them, as though in some small way they know me. I lingered there for much of the day, removing weeds with care and watering just enough to sustain, never to overwhelm. It is delicate work, but I find great peace in it.

I must confess, part of my purpose in retreating there was to evade my sister. Her glances across the breakfast table have grown ever more severe. This morning she accused me, with no small amount of scorn, of “smiling too often.” I cannot comprehend her bitterness. This house, passed down from our grandmother, is steeped in memory and meaning. To me, it is a place of comfort; to her, it seems a prison of ghosts.

I planted something new today—something only for myself. I have hidden it well, deep beneath the soil where even her prying gaze and ever-present little trowel shall not uncover it. It is a secret I intend to keep.

4th June 2025 — Nina

I finally found the key to the greenhouse hanging on a rusty nail in the cellar. I nearly stepped on a mouse and tripped over a pile of paint tins. I probably inhaled twelve different kinds of dust spores in my search,

When I got inside the greenhouse I found an array of broken pots, dead vines, and one stubborn patch of red lilies that’s somehow still alive. As I thought, the glass is mostly cracked and missing in some places. The air feels stale but with a sweet undertone, it’s almost like the whole room is holding its breath, just waiting for it’s carer to return.

While sweeping out the corner near the potting bench, I found something—a little tin box wedged under the floorboards. There was a diary inside, the first entry is dated 1875 yet there’s no mould or damage on it’s leather. It starts with “The greenhouse has once more grown warm”

Creepy coincidence?

4th June, 1875 — Elizabeth

There was a storm in the night. I lay awake listening to the wind press against the glass of the greenhouse, the panes trembling faintly in their frames.

My sister was in one of her darker moods. She spoke cruelly before our parents—whispering that something is amiss with me, that I speak too freely to things which, as she insists, have no ears to hear. Plants. Shadows. Silences. She wishes them to believe I am touched in the mind.

I fled to the greenhouse the moment I heard her voice sharpen in the next room. The rain caught me before I reached the door, soaking through my dress and streaking the pale fabric with mud. I did not care. Within, the air was thick and warm, the glass still blurred from the storm’s temper. I drew my name in the condensation. It lingered until morning, as though the place had chosen to remember me.

There were sounds beneath the floorboards again—scuttling, or something heavier. Perhaps it is a rat. Perhaps something worse. I do not wish to think it could be the little kitten I laid to rest there last autumn.

My sister despises the greenhouse. She calls it that dead place. But I do not find it dead at all. It breathes. It listens. It waits.

Today, I buried something else—a broken comb of hers,. I pressed it into the soil, beneath the roots. I wish for the earth to take it as it has taken other things. I wish for it to know me. To understand.

5th June 2025 — Nina

So I’ve kept on reading the diary. Her handwriting is neat, tidy, but the things she says feel kind of off. Like she’s always talking to someone who isn’t there.

She keeps mentioning her sister, who sounds awful.

I went back to the greenhouse and the lilies are blooming even more now. I swear they weren’t this full yesterday. Is that even possible overnight? Still, I watered them, I don’t want them to die on my watch.

Also, I found a comb, it was buried near the bench. Old, blackened with age. Elizabeth mentioned burying a comb, maybe this is the same one?

Strangely, when I held it in my hand, it appeared to be warmer than it should be.

10th June, 1875 — Elizabeth

I have the strangest sense that someone is reading these pages. I cannot say how I know it, only that I feel her—like sunlight filtering through misted glass: faint, but undeniably present. At times, as I write, I perceive the nearness of another, leaning just behind my shoulder.

I often hide this journal now, safely within the old tin box. I bury it beneath the loose board near the garden bench, the one marked by a knot in the wood that resembles a blinking eye. That spot, more than any other, feels like it belongs to me alone.

The lilies are flowering early. Their petals are darker this season, more vivid, as though steeped in secrets. The roots have begun to push things up through the soil—buttons, old coins, a comb. And yet, there are items I never buried. It is as if the earth is remembering in my stead.

Last night, I dreamed of a girl. She stood in the greenhouse, one hand pressed to the pane, reading my words. Her garments were odd, close-fitting trousers and a thick woollen jumper. Her hair fell about her shoulders in wild disarray, as though she cared little for such things. Her eyes were filled with questions, as though searching for the answer to a riddle that refuses solution.

When I awoke, the air in the room was warm, unseasonably so. I nearly called out to her, on impulse. As if she might hear.

Perhaps she already does.

10th June 2025 — Nina

I had the same dream. But it felt more vivid this time, almost real. A girl in a pale blue dress, standing behind the misted glass of the greenhouse. At first I thought I was looking at myself in a mirror warped by time, but then she moved differently, slower and much more graceful. She raised her hand, and I raised mine. There was only glass between us, but it felt like something more. A veil. A thin layer of then and now.

When I woke, I could still feel the cool press of glass on my fingertips.

I brought the diary inside. Mum scolded me for tracking mud into the kitchen, but I know it wasn’t mud. It was something else, deep, red soil clinging to the soles of my trainers like it didn’t want to let go. It smelled of iron and moss, old and buried.

I stayed up late reading. Elizabeth didn’t just write about her sister and the garden—there are hints, scattered thoughts, that point to something darker. Buried grudges. Secrets pressed down like bulbs in the earth, waiting to bloom. I’m going to find out what she hid.

13th June, 1875 — Elizabeth

She draws nearer now, the girl. How strange it is to write such a thing, yet stranger still to feel it. I cannot say I hear her in the usual sense; oftentimes, when the wind stirs the ivy upon the roof of the old greenhouse, her voice seems to ride upon it, mingled in the rustle and hush of leaves.

I believe I must have been lonely before she came to me, though I had not known it. There was a quietness in me that I mistook for peace. But now that I perceive her, hovering just beyond the veil of the known world, I begin to understand that I have been waiting. Waiting for one who might discern the contours of my soul, however faintly drawn.

This morning, my sister caught me smiling at what must have appeared to her as nothing at all. Her expression turned to ice. “You are ever fond of speaking to shadows,” she said, with a laugh that bore no warmth. Her mirth chilled me more than any scolding might have done. Later, after supper, I saw her turn the key in the back door and slip it upon a chain, which she then hid beneath her knitted wrap. She would keep me from the greenhouse.

But I shall go, regardless. I always do.

13th June, 1875 — Elizabeth

I hear her now - the girl. Nina. The name came to me quite without warning as I knelt among the beds, pulling weeds. It arrived like a whisper upon the wind, curling softly into my ear. From time to time, I glimpse her shadow flickering between the leaves, always at the edge of sight. I do not believe she knows I sense her presence. But I do.

There is gentleness in her, an absence of menace. If a spirit can be said to carry such a thing, then hers is imbued with a quiet benevolence. She feels like hope, oddly enough. A peculiar sentiment, but there it is.

My sister has grown watchful of late. This morning she came upon me digging near the lilies. “What are you hiding?” she demanded, her tone sharp as pruning shears. I replied that I was planting bulbs, but I could see the disbelief in her eyes. They dropped to the soil as though it had betrayed her.

Later, by moonlight, I watched from the attic. She was in the greenhouse with a trowel. I know not what she hoped to find, nor what suspicions she has. Perhaps she senses something hidden. Perhaps she is right.

If anything befalls me, I implore you: look beneath the lilies. Not merely at the surface, dig deep. Far past the roots. Into the warm, heavy earth. Where secrets lie and do not decay.

16th June 2025 — Nina

I finally wrote in Elizabeth’s diary. I wasn’t sure why. Curiosity, maybe. Or desperation. I wanted proof. I wanted to believe that what I’d been feeling wasn’t just stress, or cabin fever, or whatever else adults think teenagers suffer from.

So I wrote, in pencil: Are you still here? What happened to you?

Then I closed the diary and slid it back into the tin. I left it in the greenhouse, under the bench. The air felt heavier, like the walls were listening.

I crept back out tonight with my torch and I opened the little tin again. The page was still open yet there was something new written below my words in same ink as Elizabeth’s. The same neat, delicate hand in curly script.

Dig.

17th June 2025 — Nina

I dug beneath the lilies today. My hands trembled with each handful of soil I removed. At first it was just worms and broken roots but I kept going, just like the diary said. Eventually I hit something soft but firm. Cloth. Beneath that there something harder, I could just make out a bone. Small. Fragile. A child’s skeleton, curled in on itself like it had never had the chance to uncurl. The sight of it stole the air from my lungs.

Beside the bones was another tin box, but this time, inside, a piece of paper I hadn’t seen before. Water-stained and brittle, but the ink was still visible. Elizabeth’s handwriting. Flowing. Careful. Final.

It read:

She hated me for being loved. She said I smiled too much. She put me with my secrets, where no one would find me. Until you.

I quickly re-covered the hole I had dug, stuffed the paper in my pocket and ran. I ran until my lungs burned and the air sliced my throat. I didn’t look back, not even when I reached the garden gate. My shoes were caked in mud. My hands were shaking. But I knew I’d done the right thing. I’d found her. I’d heard her.

18th June, 1875 — Elizabeth

I remember the cold, it was an unending cold that stretched beyond measure. Then came silence, deep and vast, as if I floated beneath the waters of some forgotten lake, abandoned and utterly alone.

Until her hands disturbed the earth. Until her voice, trembling yet unwavering, spoke my name aloud. She called me real. She read the story I bore, felt it in a way no other ever had. And in that moment, since the closing of my eyes, I was known.

I believe I wept, though not as one might think. She could not see such tears, for they were of the spirit. Something within me thawed just like frost yielding to the gentle warmth of the sun.

I never sought to haunt, nor did I wish to cause fear. I waited, simply waited, in hope that one might come who would see me. And she came.

She saw me.

Now, something stirs within me, an opening, as though light spills through the fissure of a cracked windowpane. I think this is what it means to be free. I believe this to be my last entry in my story.

18th June 2025 — Nina

I ran to the call box near the village shop, one of the only public phones that still worked. My hands were still stained with dirt when I picked up the handset, covering it in the same. I didn’t give them my name, just the address, I told them they needed to dig beneath the greenhouse lilies, deep, beneath the roots. I hung up before they could ask me any questions.

Later, the police came to our door to inform us that a child’s remains had been found in our greenhouse. An “unidentified historic burial.” they said. They think it could be over 100 years old, maybe even earlier. Mum said the child probably died of disease like small pox or cholera. But I know the truth.

I haven’t touched the diary since. I left it in the greenhouse. Hidden back under the bench, beneath the floorboard with the knot in it. It felt wrong to keep it, like keeping someone’s last breath in a jar. I never did find anything else when I dug, no other secret she buried, maybe she buried a piece of herself each time so she would not be forgotten.

This morning, I walked past the greenhouse. The red lilies had wilted overnight. All but one. One stood tall, as if still listening.

I nodded to it but said nothing.

19th June 2025 — Nina

I dreamt I was walking through the greenhouse. But it wasn’t broken or dusty any more. The glass gleamed, and sunlight spilled across a sea of green and colour. Flowers I didn’t recognise bloomed in places where before there was only rot.

Elizabeth stood among them. She was younger than I imagined, with that same pale blue dress. She smiled, not like a ghost, but like a girl. A girl who had finally been seen, and remembered.

When I woke, I felt peaceful. Like something had settled. I walked to the greenhouse before breakfast and took a quick peak into the diary, some unknown feeling pushed me to look.

I turned to the inside cover. There, written in the same delicate script as the rest:

Thank you, Nina. I can rest now.

— E.

20th June 2025 — Nina

The greenhouse feels different now. Not just quiet, still. Peaceful. The air inside doesn’t hum with old voices any more. It just feels like a garden again.

Mum’s talking about fixing it up, put in new glass and give it a fresh coat of paint. Maybe we’ll grow herbs or tomatoes next summer. I agreed easily but added that I wanted red lilies. I think Elizabeth would like that. To be remembered not with sadness, but with new growth.

I’ve started pressing flowers between the pages of a new diary. A fresh one. This time, there will be no talk of secrets or despair.

But I’ll keep her diary safe. Hidden. Because maybe one day, someone else will need to find their way back. Through the vines. Through the silence. To something that needs to be seen.

This will be my last entry in this diary but it is just the beginning of my story.