Dream House (11 page)

Alfred is hanging there, a rope running from his neck to one of the beams of the shed roof.

He's flailing about, struggling madly to stay alive, his purple lips looking almost as contorted as those of the face I saw in the film.

His horrified eyes meet mine.

It takes a second for me to understand what's happening in front of me and to snap out of my state of shock. I grab hold of his body to try to give him some support while with one hand I grope for the old chair to my left and slide it under his feet, allowing him to stand up and release his neck from the noose that is strangling him. As soon as he's freed himself, he collapses down into the chair, breathing heavily and avoiding any eye contact.

I sit on the floor in front of him, waiting for an explanation, too upset and astonished to say anything.

A long pause anticipates his words.

“Why did you do that?”

“Why did I save your life?” I reply, irritated.

“Why did you bother
helping
me?” he says.

“What was I supposed to do?” I ask, unable to help raising my voice, “let you die?!”

“You should have,” he says flatly, ashamedly honest.

Both sitting there inside the place that I'd so much wanted to see, we let the silence prevail.

It's getting dark, and I'm still sitting here in a corner of the shed, waiting for some answers. I don't say a word, but we both know that he'll
have
to talk sooner or later—neither of us will leave until he does. And I have all the time in the world.

It takes a few hours, but in the end he finally decides to acknowledge my existence and enlighten me about his motives.

“I thought I was dead,” he says out of nowhere.

“Yeah, well, you very nearly were,” I snap.

“No. I mean before,” he insists. “Before you came.”

“I know. But I
saved
you.”

“You don't get it. I'm not talking about today.”

“Then what
are
you talking about?” I ask.

“A long time ago. I killed myself,” he confesses. “Or at least, I thought I did.”

“And then what happened?” I say, staring at that face whose eyes are still avoiding mine.

“You,” he says, this time turning his face so I can clearly see his despondent expression.

I feel cold and hot at the same time, suddenly frightened of what's about to come.

“The day you came to this house, I saw you,” he continues, “and you saw me.”

“What do you mean?” I say, confused.

“After what I did to myself . . . after I'd committed suicide, nobody ever talked to me. I was invisible. And so I'd always supposed I was dead.”

“But
I
saw you,” I say, starting to understand what he's getting at.

“And not only that. You talked to me—so that must mean that I'm alive, mustn't it?” he says, almost as confused as I am.

I take a moment to ponder, but without finding an answer.

“I would guess so,” I tell him, and reach over to poke at his knee. “I can touch you—you're as real as anybody else to me.”

“Then how do you explain the fact that I can't die?” he asks. “I've tried to kill myself dozens of times since you arrived here: suffocation, hanging”—his eyes rise for a second to the cord hanging from the rafter—“I've tried all kinds of different things, but nothing seems to work. . . .
You
can still
see
me. And it's driving me crazy.”

I immediately remember the pills that fell from his pocket, his constant bad mood, and that footage—could it be that I'm able to see him even
though
he's a ghost? I can't take any chances, though: I have to make sure I know what I'm working with.

I tell him to sit still there and wait for me, and I run inside through the pouring rain. The camera is still on the table where I left it, so I snatch it up and, sheltering it from the rain with my body, hurry back round to Alfred. Before going into the shed I turn it on, empty the memory, and hit the Record button, then push open the door with my shoulder and point the camera directly at his face. He looks at me with a puzzled expression, but when he realises that I have a plan he gazes trustingly into the lens.

I let the camera film for about thirty seconds, when it suddenly slips from my wet fingers and falls to the floor. I pick it back up, quickly checking for scratches to the body or the lens, but it looks fine. Relieved, I stop recording and play the clip back.

Nervous to discover what the footage will tell us, I sit myself down next to Alfred and, with a shaky index finger, press Play.

The screen shows the door opening, and then just an empty shed. Absolutely not a human soul appears, not even for a moment. When the clip hits the twentieth second, I pause it, having seen enough.

That confirms it, then—Alfred is indeed dead.

But one word keeps popping into my mind.

How?

I look at him, then at the footage, and I can see no logical or plausible connection between the two. How can this be happening? How is it possible? How am I able to see him?

Pushing against the bubble of confusion that seems to be engulfing me, I ask myself what Alfred must be feeling: he doesn't want this life, yet he's stuck here. With
me
. Why am I the only one who can see him?

Abruptly, a thought strikes me. Is Avery able to see Alfred, too? I remember our conversation about him, about the legend of the Derfla and the fact that he didn't want me to get too close to the gardener—but why would he say that if he knew that Alfred was already dead? And how could he
not
know about Alfred's death, considering how much he knows about everything else?

Is he hiding something from me?

I suddenly feel as though I can't trust anyone but myself, and at the thought I get a feeling like a stomach cramp that makes me feel strangely nauseous and dizzy—so dizzy, in fact, that I start to stagger, and Alfred immediately jumps up, grabs my arm, and helps lower me down to the dirty shed floor between the piles of chipped plant pots and tins of weedkiller.

My vision is blurring, growing darker and dimmer by the second, and the only thing I can hear is Alfred's voice telling me to breathe deeply.

And then I pass out.

W
HEN I
come back to my senses it's way past midnight. Alfred is still next to me in the shed, waiting patiently for me to sit up. He's holding out a glass of water.

Seeing him like this, I would never have guessed that he was a ghost.

Wait a minute—if he really
is
a ghost, how come he can
hold
things?

I reach for the glass and grasp it steadily in my right hand, looking at the water trembling in time with my own shivers. As he steadies my head so that I can drink, I can't help but compare this Alfred to the one that I'd previously met: he's acting so differently, perhaps relieved by the fact that he doesn't have to hide from me anymore.

“So how did it happen?” I ask when I'm feeling better.

“What would you like to know, exactly?”

“Everything,” I say, a determined look in my eyes.

He pauses for an instant, and then begins, haltingly, to tell his tale.

“It happened nine years ago. It was the seventeenth of August. I remember that it was a really hot day, the temperature was well above the average. Damned hot. I'd taken a day off to stay with Lilly, my beautiful wife. She was in labour, you see. She was only twenty-seven years old, and I was thirty at the time.

“It was supposed to be a special day, that day—the beginning of our family. And then later I was told the—the sad news by our trusted doctor.”

He pauses for a moment.

“The . . .
bright
side of the story was that I had two wonderful newborns, twins. Seth and Benjamin, we'd decided to call them. I took them back to the house, put them in the nursery that we'd done out. Well, it was Lilly who'd done it out, really.

“I remember going into their room and watching them sleep. They were all that I had left. The morning after, I went to Lilly's hometown to start organising the funeral. And when I got back that night, the person that I'd got in to look after Seth and Benjamin had gone. And so had my house. And my two kids . . .”

His watery eyes show the agonised emotions that reliving these events is stirring up in him.

“I'm sorry,” I manage.

“People in the village started to blame me for it all,” he continues. “They started calling me all kinds of awful names, until they came up with the worst one of all—‘the Derfla.' ”

For a moment he stops fiddling nervously with the knotted piece of garden twine in his hands, as though his feelings are too much for him to handle. I keep quiet and wait until he's ready to speak again.

“I lost all my clients, one after the other, until I was working exclusively for the Bloom family. Reverend Bloom was the only one convinced that I'd been set up, that it wasn't my fault. That I'd never have done anything like that to my own kids. Didn't matter that the police had investigated me, didn't matter that they'd cleared my name. Other than him, nobody else believed it.”

He takes a deep breath before continuing.

“But that was enough for me. I was just grateful to have someone on my side, especially somebody as influential as Mr. Bloom was. But then the practical jokes began . . .”

“Like the picture,” I interrupt him.

“Like the picture,” he confirms with a nod.

“People wouldn't look at me in the street. They'd just . . . just completely ignore me. And the kids! The kids would scream every time they saw me, run away from me. It was awful. In the end, I couldn't take it anymore. I managed to keep going for four years, and then, five years ago, I decided to end it all,” he concludes.

“And you've spent all of the last five years here?” I ask, curious about what happened.

“Yes. I've never left the garden. And I've never gone into the house. I spend all of my time here. This shed has become my home,” he answers.

“Why the shed? Why not another place?”

“I've come to believe that there are two reasons for that: the first, which is the most obvious, is that I don't actually have a home anymore. And the second . . . The second is because this is where I took my own life,” he confesses, casting his eyes upwards at the wooden joist from which the rope still hangs.

“So you're
stuck
in here?” I ask.

“That's one way of putting it. But even if I
could
go anywhere else, I wouldn't leave. I don't have anywhere else to go,” he says, brushing away a tear with the back of his leathery hand.

Another question forms in my mind.

“Don't ghosts usually cross over, or something like that? Don't you want to leave this place once and for all?”

“I wouldn't mind that, but I can't leave,” he says.

“Why not? What's keeping you here?” I insist.

“The Blooms were the only ones who were nice to me, and I let them down—I disappointed them. The least I can do is to keep doing what I promised I'd do,” he says, sounding a little bit too much like me for comfort.

“Don't you think they would want you to find peace?” I ask.

“I can't know that for sure. I
have
to stay here and do my job,” he replies, as though he has no choice in the matter.

“I'll help you,” I offer.

But—suddenly switching back to the rude brute he was when I first met him—Alfred replies scornfully, “I don't need your help.”

I lie on my bed looking up at the pretty ceiling. I wonder why Avery never mentioned Alfred's death. Is he really unaware of it? But he knows so much about everything else, how could he not know about
that
?