A Dream of You

This story appeared in an online magazine called The Absent Willow Review in January, 2011. The AWR also published my short story, "In the Valley of Dry Bones" which was later anthologized in 'The Best Horror, Fantasy & Science Fiction of 2009' - I'm generally my own worst critic, but I'm still fond of this story...

In the dream I am kneeling in the far back corner of the garden. My sister is standing behind me, toying with her shoestring necklace. The block letters spell out her name. Behind her, through the trees and beyond the fieldstone fence Blackwood Manor lingers in the pre-dawn mist. We are digging at the place where the old stone fence has fallen and the weeds and brambles of the nearby field have encroached upon our unkempt lawn. We often play here, my sister and I. We build our forts and imaginary worlds in the woodlands that surround us. In the dream we are still children. I am digging. My sister is standing behind me. Blackwood Manor is there too, watching and waiting as always.

In the dream I find an old suitcase. It is tattered and blue, damp with mud and groundwater. I look up at my sister.

I cannot remember the rest of the dream. It is an old dream. In truth I would have forgotten it entirely had it not been for my sister. We had not seen one another in a very long time. I was both surprised and delighted when she knocked on my door one night last spring. She looked distraught but I did not press for reasons. I decided that if she wanted to talk she would, and so we simply chatted while I made us dinner. We talked about the weather and several short stories I recently had published. We discussed my wife and daughter (they were out of town at the time) and children in general. We began talking in earnest about our childhood. We shared memories about the people and places that defined our youth. When our conversation finally, perhaps inevitably, found Blackwood Manor we both fell silent. It was as though we were reluctant to invoke the ghosts that lingered in that dark and dismal place.

But the revenants that loitered in our minds and memories and in every aspect of that house would not remain still. They stirred like dead leaves, caught within the whispered breeze of unspoken thoughts. It was my sister who released them. “I had a strange dream,” she told me. “We were at Blackwood, you and I. We were at the back where the old fence had fallen and the weeds and brambles of the nearby field began stealing our lawn. I was standing behind you, watching you dig a hole in the dirt.”

“I found an old suitcase,” I said.

Fear and confusion found life in my sister’s dark blue eyes. “It was a dream,” she said. Whether she was asking me or telling me remained unclear, but the revelation that we had shared something, be it dream or memory, unnerved her. “I hated that place,” she said. “Blackwood, I hated it. I always felt like it was…no, you’ll think me quite mad.”

“I already do,” I said. It was a feeble attempt at humour, misplaced at best, but she smiled anyway. “I always felt like Blackwood was alive, like it was watching us.”

Her smile faded. “Things happened there,” she whispered. “Things that cannot possibly be explained; like our dream, if in fact it was a dream. Is it even possible that we shared the same dream, Edward?”

I shook my head. I did not believe, then, that such things were possible. When I said as much my sister seemed relieved. It was far more likely that we had stumbled upon a latent memory during the course of our conversation, something time and distance had plucked from our past. It occurred to me then that maybe we had found something there, at the back of our garden in that tatty old suitcase, but for the life of me I could not remember what.

We fell silent for a time. It was not an awkward silence, but a comfortable quietness found so infrequently in the company of others that I suddenly realized just how much I had missed her. Alice and I had been born two years apart. She was my older sister, my tormentor and the target of my own torturous teasing. Blackwood was a country estate. A thick forest and the endless rolling hills of the neighbouring Mennonite farms stood between our home and the nearest town. There were other children close at hand. In the main they were Mennonite. They spent the better part of their lives working the fields and crops for their fathers – fathers who frowned upon the idle time that Alice and I revelled in. We fought, of course. All sisters and brothers do. But our friendship transcended the harsh words and occasional scuffles that occurred during the course of our youth.

It was my sister who eventually broke the silence. “Those poor children,” she whispered. When I asked her what she meant she seemed genuinely surprised by my confusion. “Please tell me you remember Odd Oscar Krupp.”

I did. Oscar Krupp lived on the property adjacent to our estate. The son of a local farmer, Krupp had been ostracized by Mennonite society for reasons those of us outside that community never really understood. There were rumours, of course, whispered hints of rape and murder lurking in the shadows of the small town. There were uncertain truths uttered in hardware stores and barber shops, schoolyard huddles and hurried conversations outside the local co-ops. But the rumours and the innuendoes never gave life to anything other than the cruel barbs and cold shoulders that followed Odd Oscar to his grave. Now that I have been back, now that I have seen Blackwood again, I am quite certain that Krupp committed crimes far worse than those we in our naïve innocence attributed to him.

There were things my sister knew, stories I had never heard before that night, the night she came to visit me for the first and final time. She spoke with a certainty that tore the tears from my eyes, revealing events and details with a clear sincerity that still haunts me today. The house in which Krupp lived was little more than a shack, four walls with an old tin roof and a single door. The glassless windows had been boarded shut and any paint that once coloured the shanty ruin had faded, peeled, and fallen years ago. “He would bring the children there,” she told me. “He would do unspeakable things in the darkness of that shack. In the end, when he was finished with them he would take their battered and broken bodies and bury them.”

When I asked her how she knew these things, she seemed confused and bewildered. “Somebody told me,” she said. “Somebody must have told me – our parents, perhaps.” It seemed, if not plausible, at least possible that our parents knew about Odd Krupp’s alleged crimes. We had left Blackwood Manor somewhat abruptly. My father always claimed that work had come up elsewhere, far closer to the city than Blackwood’s distance would allow. When I look back on it now, I understand why my father lied. He was protecting me. The truth can be a terrible thing at times. It proved far too much for my poor mother to handle. She left my father soon after we moved. The last time I saw her she was waving goodbye from the window of a city bus. “Off to get some milk,” she had told me. I later learned that she had hanged herself in a motel closet outside Chatham.

It was on the night my sister came to visit that we made the decision to go back to Blackwood. We had never been back there, not once in all the years that had passed since we left. After my mother left us, my father never spoke of it again. The creeping brambles and the sprawling Mennonite farms, Odd Krupp and the whispered accusations that followed in his wake soon faded. But Blackwood lingered, watching and waiting, haunting the formless memories of my youth like an ungodly ghost.

My sister left for Blackwood the following morning. I cannot say for certain why I chose to go with her. It might have been simple curiosity that led me back there for the first time in almost thirty years. Or perhaps I knew, on a deeper level, what I would find there – what I had found there so many years before.

The old Victorian had not changed during my absence. Or perhaps it had and the bond that existed between us made Blackwood appear fresh and familiar in my mind. The brushed brick façade and the narrow lancet windows had been lost among the broad leaves and tangled vines of the Engelmann Ivy. The forest had further encroached upon the house and the narrow, rope-like path that tied Blackwood to the outside world had nearly been lost among the weeds and wildflowers that mottled the lawn.

I cannot say how long I stood there, between the old brick pillars that held the rusty gate in place. I felt lost, both in time and in that house. The longer I looked at Blackwood, the more flawed it became until at last the image of a place untouched by time began to fade. I saw the broken windows, the missing shingles and the weather-beaten latticework above the porch and along the gables. The sound of my sister’s voice stirred me from my melancholic thoughts and I found myself moving again, up the narrow path toward the house.

“The back garden,” she whispered.

I realized then that I was holding a spade in my left hand. I could not remember bringing it with me, yet I knew that my sister had asked me to. She had asked me to dig, as I had in our dream, at the place where the old stone fence had fallen and the weeds and brambles of the neighbouring field had infringed upon our garden. She had asked me to uncover the threadbare suitcase, to re-discover its contents and perhaps put to rest the dream that had somehow found us both.

Alice stood there, beside the gap in the fence. I pushed the spade into the ground and then I turned and looked at her. Hers was a timeless beauty, her skin untouched by age and the elements, and I wondered that she had never been married. We had not spoken in such a long time. I fought through the tangled vines of memory for the last time I had seen her but I could not find it. I could not find that memory in my mind and it troubled me. Behind her, through the trees and beyond the fieldstone fence I saw Blackwood Manor, watching us through the pre-dawn mist.

I began digging. The ground, damp with dew, gave way with surprising ease. It took very little time to find the old suitcase. I knelt down beside the shallow grave and pulled the bag free. It was damp with dirt and groundwater and it smelled of death and decay. I thought about my father, and about the lie he had used to protect me. The truth can be a terrible thing at times.

I opened the suitcase. The vacant gaze that greeted me had once belonged to a child. The skull and the bones that remained carried with them the memories of a life short-lived, lost far too soon and in such a monstrous way. The necklace lay atop the tattered remains of the girl’s blue dress. It was a simple shoelace necklace, a child’s necklace. The block letters were an epitaph.