Something Malevolent lives at the bottom of my garden

Something Malevolent lives at the bottom of my garden

I thread my way through the nikau palms and tree ferns forming the boundary and emerge into the interior. Kihikihi crawls over the forest floor and its sword-like sandpaper-covered leaves grab my clothes and impede my progress, it delights in finding a patch of bare skin and drawing droplets of blood. My gumboots squelch into the ooze and release the pungent earthy smell of rotting vegetation. Something scuttles away in the undergrowth in front of me. I catch my breath, my pulse races.
I hear the familiar intermittent flutter of tui flight and look up to see it land in a puriri branch. It eyes me suspiciously. Its beak opens and closes and the white feathers at its throat bob up and down, but it is not for human ears this song, I cannot hear it, yet something listens.
High above in the canopy taraire, kahikatea, karaka, puriri and cabbage trees stretch their arms to the light like a Pentecostal congregation praising the Lord, while those of us on the ground, the kihikihi, ferns, scuttley things and intruding human have to live in a permanent dusk.
A breeze rustles the leaves and they murmur something I can't quite understand. I shiver involuntarily, although it is not cold.
The clear bell like call of the tui penetrates the bush. It launches from its perch and flutters to the garden.
This I hear and understand. It is time to leave. Much later I sat with the spirit and we agreed that a row of clivia plants will mark our boundary. Beyond this line I will not interfere. But he made his trees grow wide and tall and shade even clivia plants so they do not thrive. He wishes me away.