A pale shaft of moonlight spilled through the small window and lay across my desk, transforming the heaps of papers and clutter into a mysterious, shadowy landscape. Things look so strange at night.

The thin scraping sound came again, like nails dragged across glass. I looked to the window, squinting in the darkness. The lower panes were fogged with condensation, as the cold air outside sucked water out of the warm air in my room. This made it difficult to discern whether or not anything untoward was happening outside.

I was reluctant to leave the warm confines of my bed, so I closed my eyes and silently willed the sounds to cease. They did for awhile, and I was just drifting back into dreamland when the sound sliced through my foggy mind, bringing it back to sharpness as effectively as a focus knob sharpens an image through a camera's lens.

This time I could see something moving beyond the window: a pale shadow amongst deeper shadows, scraping slowly along the lower panes behind the thin layer of condensation.

I came to the conclusion then that I wasn't going to be able to sleep if I didn't put my curiosity to rest first. I have to admit that at this point a vague, indefinable dread had taken root somewhere inside me, even though my conscious mind knew there had to be a rational explanation for the phenomenon. I pulled the blankets aside and swung my feet to the carpeted floor. There was still movement outside the window when I knelt in front of it and used a dirty sock to wipe away the collected moisture.

I don't know what I expected to see. Any notions or expectations fled my mind at the sight of what moved beyond the glass.

It was a small, thin, translucent arm, scraping feebly back and forth - its long nails finding no purchase on the slick glass. From my vantage point, I couldn't see what the arm was attached to. It just seemed to dwindle away in the shadows beneath the window, as if it only had a corporeal existence in the path of the moonbeam.

I think I screamed then, The arm vanished after that, slipping out of the moonbeam into the shadows.

I turned the lights on, found my slippers, and brewed some coffee. The rest of the night was spent on the couch in the front room, watching an endless succession of inane TV shows. There's nothing better than TV to stop your mind from working. Sort of like a mental laxative - it loosens up your brain and lets unwanted thoughts dribble away. So there I sat in a puddle of my anxieties, lit by flickering images until they were overpowered by the rising sun.

With the onset of daylight, I felt brave enough to venture outside and take a look around. The flowerbed beneath my bedroom window looked undisturbed, except for one small detail. The garden gnome had been knocked over, flattening some marigolds. I picked it up and brushed it off, but in doing so broke off one of its arms. Cursing my clumsiness, I took it inside and got out the crazy glue.

It was then that I got another shock. There was a ball joint jutting out of the broken end of the arm. Upon further exploration, using a small hammer and chisel, I discovered that inside my garden gnome there was a miniature skeleton. It stands to reason that the material surrounding the skeleton is organic, topped off with a thick coat of lacquer. All these years and I never even guessed it was a real gnome.

I buried it with a dignified little ceremony under the peach tree in the backyard, hoping that its spirit would be able to finally rest as well.
J3b(5)