The Garden of Remembrance

by Allan Watson

  Straining so hard I thought my racing heart might shatter, I managed to take one Herculean step forward and the murky bars of muted colour before me came into sharp focus. I knew where I was. I was standing inside the locked closet in the room where Denise and Alice were sleeping. This knowledge gave me the determination to shuffle forward one more step and I felt the rough grain of the wood against my face. By moving just my eyes I was able to peer down through the angled wooden slats into the bedroom. The only illumination came from the hall light creeping beneath the room door, but it was enough to make out two beds with small huddled shapes beneath the covers.

  Between the two beds a long shadow moved, and a new breed of fear gestated and sprang to life inside me. There was something standing over my two sleeping daughters and I couldn’t do a thing to help them. I had to waken them somehow, warn them of the danger looming silently over them like a dark fetish. My arms felt as if heavy weights were sewn onto them, but I gritted my teeth and moved them inch by slow inch until my fingers scratched against the door in front of me. I sensed the shadow turn slightly as if becoming aware of my presence. Although it was too dark to make out any features, I sensed it grinning at me and knew I was helpless to intervene. The shadow turned back to the sleeping girls and began to spread its arms outwards, long limbs changing to black, ragged wings.

  My own ragged cry awoke me from the dream. The table lamp burned softly as before but I scrambled from the couch and turned on the bright overhead light. A dark after-image of the shadow remained etched on my vision and I shook my head like a wasp-maddened dog to dislodge it. My legs felt shaky beneath me as I stumbled back onto the couch. The dream may have ended, but the fear lingered on. I was shivering from both fright and cold. I glanced at the clock and saw that four hours had passed since I had fallen asleep on the couch. That seemed impossible. The dream had began instantly the moment I closed my eyes and felt as though it hadn’t lasted any more than five minutes.

  Then I realised I could hear music playing. It was fiddles and accordions grinding out a swirling reel. The sort of thing I associated with old Scottish country dancing records. I wondered if I was imagining it and tilted my head this way and that, but the music remained. It seemed to be coming from the flat downstairs. People must have moved in while we were at Craigtoun Park. The music should have sounded jaunty, but all it did was disturb the sediment of my subconscious and make me feel as if I was going crazy. I half cursed our new neighbours for being so rude as to play their records at this time of night.

  The song finished and then the massed fiddles started up again with a lively Polka. An image of my mother laughing jumped into my mind. She was dancing with a man but his face was hidden from me. Once more it was as if some tantalising clue was being dangled in front of me. I grasped at the memory hoping to see more, but it tore into fine threads and drifted away from me. My mouth tasted of bitter cloves and cold ashes. I thought to get myself a drink of water from the kitchen and slowly rose to my feet. Something rolled away from my foot and I picked an empty lager bottle. As my fingers touched the glass neck a sharp noise came from the window. Tap, tap, tap. Without thinking I hurled the bottle towards the window and only the heavy curtain stopped it from breaking through the glass behind. From outside I heard the indignant cry of the gull as it flew off. It was a small victory but I felt pleased with myself.

  Retrieving the bottle once more from the floor I turned it over in my hands. I couldn’t remember drinking it. I had no memory of taking it out the fridge and returning to the couch. I sniffed the neck and inhaled the sharp fumes of the lager still impregnated onto the inner surface of the glass. I decided I was too tired and upset by my dream to even start questioning this latest puzzle when a muffled thump sounded from upstairs and then Alice was screaming loud enough to wake the dead.

  I took the stairs at a reckless speed, swinging myself around the curve like a stone from a slingshot. At the top I almost collided with Teri whose pale face told me her dreams had been no sweeter than my own. Without speaking we burst into the girls’ bedroom and found Alice lying between the two beds bawling her eyes out. I scooped her up and sat her on the edge of bed, feeling slightly resentful when Teri prised Alice from me and cuddled her.

  ‘Skuh-skuh-skeleton came back again!’ Alice sobbed. Teri shushed her and stroked her sweat drenched hair. Amazingly Denise was still fast asleep. Teri stared balefully up at me and said quietly, ‘What’s going on in this house Matthew? You don’t think it’s.........?’

  ‘Haunted?’ I finished for her. I didn’t know what to answer. I wished the house was haunted. It would have been an easier explanation. Something impersonal. Nothing to do with me. I wasn’t normally one for accepting the possibility of the supernatural but I would have gladly grabbed at this explanation if my own mind wasn’t telling me differently. Alice was already half asleep again in Teri’s arms.

  I said to her, ‘Of course it’s not haunted. There’s no ghosts or skeletons. It’s probably just to do with staying in a strange house, that’s all. You’ll see, she’ll be fine tomorrow. There’s nothing wrong with the house, it’s just bricks and mortar, it can’t harm us.’

  As if to mock my words the faint smell of blocked drains drifted through the room. I looked at the door of the locked cupboard and remembered being inside, standing helpless while something stood over Denise and Alice. Maybe it was the house after all. Perhaps it was slipping things into my head. Tricking me into thinking I was the one with the problem. Before I could consider this idea any further, a loud crescendo of accordions climbed the stairs and danced drunkenly with the bad smell.

  Teri looked at me in disbelief. ‘What the hell is that?’

  I shrugged. ‘Our new downstairs neighbours, I think. Just our luck to get some mad Highlanders living below us. I’ll speak to them tomorrow about the noise.’

  Teri lifted Alice and carried her towards the door. ‘Get Denise for me, Matt. They’re not sleeping in here tonight, not with that terrible smell. You’d better phone the agent tomorrow as well. We can’t put up with this every night.’

  I let Teri pass me and bent to pick up Denise gently so as not to wake her. She felt warm against me and I kissed her lightly on the cheek. I wondered where I was going to sleep. After my nightmare on the couch, the living room was out for sure. I still didn’t fancy the narrow room and this one smelled like a fouled latrine. That meant asking Teri if I could squeeze in beside her and the girls which I imagined would an exercise in futility. I was still mulling this over in my head when Denise did something that scared the life out of me.

  She whistled softly in her sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  Gran Crone died in her sleep on Easter Sunday when I was ten years old. I remember going with mum, James, and Brenda to the Red Road flats where she stayed, when the bad news was delivered over the phone. Mum’s two brothers were already there when we arrived. The adults shut themselves in the kitchen while we children sat in the living room watching television. Through the closed door we could hear Mum crying. Brenda cried too as if to prove she was more adult than James and I. At that point I didn’t feel the need to cry, my only emotion being vague disappointment that Gran Crone hadn’t thought to leave out our Easter eggs before passing into the next world. Eventually one of my uncles brought us glasses of coke and packets of crisps and gave Brenda a cuddle which made her cry all the harder.

  Gran Crone had been staying on her own since Grandfather Crone had been put into a mental hospital three years before. The last time I had seen him was at Dad’s funeral where he had embarrassed everyone by constantly whistling and making his strange hooting noises. Once or twice he even giggled shrilly in his high pitched voice. We were never taken to see him in the hospital. I got the impression he had done something really wicked to be locked away, but Mum never talked about it. One time she left us with a neighbour and went to the hospital with Gran Crone. When she came home she looked ill and burned the dinner. She screamed at us children
as if it were our fault and sent us to bed hungry and confused. She was nice as ninepence the following day, but she never again visited her father in the hospital.

  Although mum was unwilling to discuss the subject, the other kids at school had plenty of stories they were only too happy to share with me. Some had heard that Grandfather Crone was a serial killer who had sneaked up on a courting couple in their car and cut off their heads while they were shagging. Others claimed he had been caught eating a cat; he broke into houses and put handfuls of dead wasps into packets of Corn Flakes; he drank his own urine; he dug up bodies in the local graveyard and danced around the headstones wearing the dead peoples’ shrouds. The stories were endless. To the children in my school, Grandfather Crone grew into a dreadful Frankenstein’s Monster. A modern day bogey man.

  It could easily have been a rotting albatross around my neck being the grandson of such a dreadful fiend. I could have become an object of derision; a playground pariah. Instead, my suspect lineage had the opposite effect. I gained a measure of respect, I was never bullied as no-one wanted to take the chance that I might send Grandfather Crone round to visit them one dark night. I wondered if they would let him out for Gran Crone’s funeral.

  As far as I understood that Easter Sunday afternoon, one of my uncles had popped in to see Gran Crone in the morning, and unable to get an answer to his knocking, he had used a spare key to enter the house and found the old lady dead in her bed. I was curious to know how she died but was afraid to ask. It crossed my mind that Grandfather Crone might have escaped from the mental hospital and murdered her. I have to admit I found the thought strangely exciting. The minds of ten year old boys are breeding grounds of diseased fantasy.

  Becoming bored with the television and Brenda’s sniffling, I picked up my coke and slipped out the living room door saying I needed the toilet. I was going egg hunting. I was certain that Gran Crone must have hidden the chocolate eggs somewhere in the house, after all, she didn’t know she was going to die that morning. It was only a matter of finding them. If I accidentally stumbled across the eggs then surely no-one would deny us something that Gran Crone had clearly intended us to have. I could almost hear my uncles saying, ‘Ah, go on then son, your Granny would have wanted you to have them.’

  The first place I looked was the bedroom. I already knew that she kept our Christmas presents beneath her bed, so it seemed the most likely hidey-hole for the Easter eggs. As quietly as possible I turned the squeaky door handle and slipped into her room. At first I couldn’t see properly as the heavy curtains were drawn over the windows, the dim light covering the room like a grey, woollen blanket. I waited until my eyes grew used to the low light for fear I might trip over something and make a noise as the kitchen where the adults were consoling each other adjoined the bedroom. In the stillness of the room I could hear the low murmur of their voices through the tissue thin walls which were constructed of only wooden strapping and gyprock.

  As I waited, I could smell Gran Crone around me. Although a fastidiously clean old woman, she still had a hint of that fusty odour old people carry about with them. The perfume of the shroud. Old sour sweat and the expectation of sudden death. It should have comforted me but instead it made me grow nervous. I felt as if Gran Crone’s ghost was watching me from the shadowy corner of the room and she had an angry look on her face. I sipped at my coke for courage and told myself there was no such things as ghosts. Only James believed in spooks and he was six. At ten I was practically a reasoning adult.

  Bit by bit the bedroom clarified before me, the shadows contracting into the dull outlines of furniture. Stiffening my resolve, I took a careful step towards the bed and saw something that made me want to scream and piss my pants at the same time. While my eyes had been growing used to the gloom, I had been focusing so intently on the space between the valance and the carpet that I had failed to see the body on the bed.

  The blankets had been stripped back leaving only a white sheet which was pulled tightly over Gran Crone’s body and head. Somehow this made it more terrifying. I doubt if the old lady’s face even in death would have caused such outright terror to clutch at me. The glass fell from my hand and rolled across the carpet, vanishing beneath the bed.

  Through the wall I heard a fresh wail of grief from my mum. I envied her that wail. My terror demanded such a vehicle to release its crushing arms but I stood silent, transfixed by the covered shape on the bed. As I rode out the fear, my eyes played tricks with me and I imagined small movements beneath the sheet. A twitch of the leg, the slight flutter of a white hand beneath the sheet. In my mind I saw one of those hands snake out and slowly draw the sheet away from Gran Crone’s dead face. Her eyes wide open and reflecting silver light. The body sitting bolt upright and smiling with teeth like polished needles.

  I closed my streaming eyes which I hadn’t blinked for over three minutes. When I opened them again, the grim shape beneath the sheet was still as it always had been. Looking back it seems incredibly stupid of me not to have realised her corpse would still be in the house. Undertakers are no great believers in hasty collections, especially on a holiday weekend. I just hadn’t thought the Easter egg raid through properly. I no longer cared for the chocolate eggs. Forever after, the sight of one would always make me shiver and break out in goose flesh. I needed the glass however, it would be noticed missing and then I’d have some explaining to do. I was going to have to stick my arm beneath that bed. There was no way out of it.

  Moving before I lost my nerve, I got down onto my hands and knees and crawled across the carpet. Down so close to the carpet I didn’t have to look at the bed’s silent occupant. I told myself it would be over in seconds, one thrust of an arm and I could leave the dark mausoleum of Gran Crone’s bedroom. I reached the bed and quickly swept my arm beneath the frilly valance, my hand feeling the carpet giving way to bare linoleum. There was no glass. I lay flat on the floor and pushed my shoulder hard against the base of the bed, increasing the arc of my flailing arm. I found Gran Crone’s slippers and some old newspapers but still no glass.

  All the time I was growing more aware of what lay above me. I was becoming desperate. If Gran Crone did indeed decide to reanimate her shrivelled flesh and come after me - I would be helpless to defend myself in such a vulnerable position. I realised I would have to crawl beneath the bed, there was no other choice. Even as I put my head flat against the carpet, I heard a muffled creak somewhere above me. I hadn’t imagined it. It had been real. I decided I didn’t care about the glass any more. I just needed to escape from that room. Before I could retreat, a cool hand wrapped around my neck and the scream that had festered inside me for the last five minutes burst asunder like a demented locomotive shriek.

  An angry voice growled, ‘What the fuck are you doing in here you disrespectful wee bastard?’

  Even at Gran Crone’s funeral three days later, I still found it painful to sit. My uncle had a heavy hand.

  CHAPTER 8

  Breakfast on Monday morning was a solemn affair. Denise and Alice sat at the dining table in the window recess, munching their cereal with hardly a word spoken between them. Both of them looked tired and drawn. The television showed a cartoon of Bugs Bunny but neither of the girls so much as bothered glancing up at it; an ominous sign things weren’t as they should be. Teri and I sat on the couch with a plate of bacon sandwiches between us. We had barely touched them and those left on the plate were now stone cold.

  Teri stopped pretending to eat and said quietly, ‘There’s definitely something wrong with this house. You can call me stupid if you like, Matt, but I really think this place is haunted. I’m not sure I want to stay here a whole week.’

  I flicked my eyes towards Denise and Alice to see if Teri’s remark had carried over the blaring racket from the television. Neither of them made any sign of having heard, both still oblivious to anything else except the contents of their cereal bowls. They sat hunched like tiny soothsayers probing amongst chicken entrails for glimpses of th
e future. Maybe they had sensed something of what was to come, which would have explained their lacklustre manner.

  I had been chewing the same piece of bacon rind for over five minutes, and as Teri waited for a response to her words, I swallowed it whole, almost gagging as it slipped unwillingly down my throat. I coughed into my fist, playing for time, hoping Teri wouldn’t pursue the subject. I would have loved to have blamed the house. It would have been so easy to pass the buck onto the bricks and mortar which were unable to defend themselves against my accusation. If anything was haunted it was me. I couldn’t admit this to Teri but neither did I want to frighten her further by agreeing with her theory of the restless dead. She might be serious about wanting to cancel what was left of the holiday and go home. I didn’t want to leave St Andrew’s until I had found out what was really going on. The answer was inside my head and I wasn’t leaving until I had prised it out like a rusting bullet.

  ‘Well?’ Teri said, her stare hard and remorseless. ‘Surely you must have some sort of opinion on the matter. That’s two nights in a row Alice has fallen out of bed screaming about skeletons. And all that business with Denise walking in her sleep, not to mention that horrible smell. Something’s badly wrong with this place. Admit it.’