A Dream of You

by Jason Rolfe

In the dream I knelt at the far back corner of the garden. My sister Alice stood beside me, toying with her shoestring necklace. The block letters spelled out her name. Behind us, through the trees and beyond the fieldstone fence Blackwood Manor lurked in the pre-dawn mist. I was digging at the place where the old fieldstone fence had fallen and the weeds and brambles of the nearby field encroached upon our unkempt lawn. My sister and I often played there. We built our forts and imaginary worlds in the surrounding woodlands.

In the dream I found an old suitcase. It was tattered and blue, damp with mud and groundwater. When I turned and looked up at my sister I invariably awoke.

It was an old dream. In truth I’d have forgotten it entirely had it not been for Alice. We hadn’t seen each other in such a long time that I was shocked when she appeared on my doorstep late one afternoon. She looked distraught, but I didn’t ask why. I knew that if she wanted to talk about it she would, so I led her into the kitchen and we simply chatted while I made us both a snack.

“So, what have you been up to?” She asked.

“I’ve been writing a lot lately,” I told her. “Short stories, mostly, although I did send my agent a novelette last month, a bit of a weird tale about an antiquarian bookseller in Cairo. I haven’t heard back from her though, which generally means she hates it. She likes to find new and creative ways to let me down.”

“I’d love to read it.”

“I’d love to let you,” I said. “I can print you off a copy before bed if you’d like. Have you read anything of mine before?”

Alice frowned and shook her head. I saw the sad confusion in her eyes and wondered at the cause. But I kept my concern and my curiosity in check. If and when she wanted to talk I would be there for her. We’d grown apart over the years. To be honest I couldn’t even remember the last time we’d seen one another. It felt like forever.

“How is Marie?”

“Good,” I said. “She’s still teaching over in Kirksville – junior kindergarten. She’s actually going to be teaching Jane next year.”

“Jane?”

“Our daughter,” I said, surprised that she couldn’t remember my daughter’s name. “They’re up in Michigan visiting Marie’s parents. March break,” I added. “I almost went with them, but I thought I’d use the week to write instead. Not that I mind the interruption, Alice. God, but it seems like ages since I saw you.”

“I know,” she said. “We were joined at the hip when we were kids. Mom and Dad used to call us the Bobbsey Twins, remember? What happened, Alex? What happened to us?”

I shrugged. “Time, I guess. Distance makes the heart grow fungus, right?”

Alice smiled, but the sadness in her eyes persevered. 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. 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 denied our silence. They stirred like dead leaves, caught within the whispered breeze of unspoken thoughts until my sister released them. “I had a strange dream,” she said. “We were at Blackwood again. We were still children, playing at the back where the old fence had fallen. I was standing beside you, watching you dig a hole in the dirt.”

“I found an old suitcase,” I said.

Fear filled my sister’s dark blue eyes. “It was a dream,” she whispered. Whether she was asking me or telling me remained unclear, but the revelation that we’d 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 I’m crazy.”

“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 said, “things that can’t possibly be explained. Like our dream, if it was a dream. Is it even possible that we shared the same dream, Alex?”

I shook my head. It seemed far more likely that we’d stumbled upon a latent memory, 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 again. It wasn’t an awkward silence, but a comfortable quietness found so infrequently in the company of others that I suddenly realized just how much I’d missed her. We were 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.

My sister broke the silence. “Those poor children,” she said.

“What do you mean? What children?”

“Don’t tell me you’ve forgotten Odd Oscar Krupp.”

Oscar Krupp lived on the property adjacent to ours. 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’ve been back, now that I’ve seen Blackwood again, I’m certain Krupp committed crimes far worse than those we in our naïve innocence attributed to him.

My sister told me things I’d never heard before that night. She spoke with a certainty that tore the tears from my eyes, revealing events and details with a clear sincerity that still haunts me to this day. The house Krupp lived in 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 had faded, peeled, and fallen years ago.

“He brought the children there,” she said. “He did unspeakable things in the darkness of that shack. In the end, when he was finished with them, he would take their broken bodies away and bury them.”

“How do you know so much about it?” I asked.

She seemed confused and bewildered. “Someone told me,” she said. “Somebody must have told me – our parents, maybe.”

It seemed, if not plausible, at least possible that our parents knew about Odd Krupp’s alleged crimes. We’d left Blackwood Manor abruptly. My father told us he’d been transferred, and that given the commute, living in Blackwood no longer made sense. When I look back now, I understand why he lied. He was protecting me. The truth can be a terrible thing at times. It proved far too much for my poor mother. The last time I saw her she was waving goodbye from the window of a city bus. “Off to get some milk,” she’d said. I later learned that she’d hanged herself in a motel closet outside Kansas City.

“We have to go back there,” Alice said. “We have to go back to Blackwood, Alex. If you’re right, if our shared dream was really a latent memory, that means we found something there, something important. We have to find it again.”

We’d never gone back, not once in thirty years. After mom left us, my father refused to talk about it. The creeping brambles and the sprawling Mennonite farms, Odd Krupp and the whispered accusations that followed in his wake soon faded. But that night I learned that Blackwood still lingered, watching and waiting, haunting the formless memories of my youth.

We left for Blackwood the following morning. I can’t say for certain why I agreed to go. It might have been simple curiosity that led me back there. Or maybe I knew, on a deeper level, what I would find there – what I had found there so many years ago.

I stood beside the rental car, staring up at Blackwood Manor. I felt lost, both in time and in that house. The longer I looked at the old Victorian, the more flawed it became until at last the image of a place untouched by time began to fade. The brushed brick façade and the narrow lancet windows had disappeared 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.

The sound of my sister’s voice stirred me from my moody thoughts and I found myself moving again, up the narrow path toward the house.

“The back garden,” she whispered.

I carried a spade in my left hand, and while I couldn’t remember bringing it with me, I knew that my sister had told me to. She wanted me to dig, as I had in our dream, at the place where the fieldstone fence had fallen. “You have to find it, Alex. You have to find the suitcase.”

I pushed the spade into the ground and then I turned and looked at her. Alice was a timeless beauty, her skin untouched by age and the elements. I wondered why she’d never married. I fought through the tangled vines of memory for the last time I’d seen her but I couldn’t 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, and I found the suitcase in very little time. I knelt 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, about the lie he’d 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 remains carried with them the memories of a life short-lived, lost far too soon and in such a monstrous way. A necklace lay atop the tattered remains of a girl’s blue dress. It was a simple shoelace necklace, a child’s necklace. The block letters, spelling out her name, were an epitaph.

About the Author

Jason Rolfe writes speculative fiction. His short stories have recently appeared in Hypersonic Tales, The Absent Willow Review, Horror Bound Magazine, Crossed Genres, The Willows, and The Harrow. His book reviews can be found at Horror Bound Magazine.  You can visit Jason here.

©2009 Jason Rolfe