by Inelia Benz
Putting the letters in their box, she went to his study. The door was closed as always. She wanted to knock but something stopped her every time she lifted her hand, it was like a lack of willpower.
Jennifer wondered if she was feeling too embarrassed to apologize to Owen, as the thought entered her mind the lack of willpower increased dramatically. “Don’t be silly,” she said to herself and fought against it.
The effort was so great that when she finally managed to knock on the door, instead of a gentle rasp, which she had intended, a loud, urgent knock resulted instead.
The door swung open.
“How the hell did you manage that!”
“I am so sorry Owen, I didn’t mean to startle you, I just wanted to apologize about the letters, if I didn’t know it was going to upset you like that about that lady dying like that.”
“How the hell did you manage to knock!?”
“”I’m sorry?”
Owen stood back a little and gave her piercing look the kind of which she had never experienced before.
“I didn’t mean it, I was so embarrassed about having upset you that I had to force myself to knock and, well, it didn’t come out like I wanted it. It was meant to be...” She realized she was making things much worse than they already were, Owen looked very odd indeed, concerned, worried, stressed, something intense for which she had no name. “Ok. I am going to go now and start supper or something,” she said and turned to leave, but Owen reached her shoulder and gently turned her back.
“There are things...” he began, “there are things that you do that you are not supposed to do.”
“I know, it was none of my business anyway, but I got pulled into it, the whole love affair thing and had to find out what happened. I will stay away from any of your family’s papers.”
“Right,” he said. His expression softened as he looked into her eyes, “right.”
He took her hand in his and said, “you are not like anyone I have ever met. I can’t seem to figure you out. It’s fine about the letters, you can read anything you find, keep them if you like.”
Jennifer felt his warmth engulf her and her heart started racing. It was almost as though he was hugging her but he was only holding her hand. She quickly pulled her hand away, mumbled something about supper and quickly walked away from him.
Before turning the corner at the end of the corridor she looked back and saw him still standing there at the doorway, a light haze around him, his face... so much like Sean’s, but yet different, whole, complete.
She tore her eyes away from him and carried on toward the kitchen. She felt breathless, her cheeks were hot and she felt her heart thumping so hard she could hardly hear her thoughts.
That evening Jennifer sat and let dusk engulf her in the attic, night time crept slowly into the attic without noise or electrical lights to push it away. Owen had not come out for his supper that evening. He had stayed in his study. She left his plate out on the kitchen table with instructions on how to warm it up in the microwave in case he came out during the night and was hungry.
She touched the embroidery on the box of letters. She had forgotten to ask what had happened to Owen’s great-grandfather. She wondered what had become of him after the death of his love. Had he carried on living? Married? Had a family? Or had he also been married when the affair happened? There were no clues as to his marital status on the letters, maybe he had already had a son before he met “A”. Or maybe he met someone else after she died.
She opened the chest and put the box back to where it belonged.
She imagined the O’Neils to have traveled widely through the world. She had found objects from every exotic place on earth. But neither the Sanskrit scrolls nor the Chinese paintings had captured her imagination like those simple letters had. One day she thought she would write them up in a book. She would write about him and how he must have felt the day his lover did not turn up at their favorite spot in front of the sea.
It didn’t escape her attention that everything in the attic seemed to be male, things a man would keep. There was no trace of any O’Neil women. She wondered about that, what had happened to the women? What had happened to their things? Owen’s mother had died at childbirth yet there were no photos of her anywhere in the house, the attic had nothing belonging to his grandmother or great-grandmother, nor aunties.
It was a mystery she would have to investigate.
The days came and went in the house as though separate from the outside. Jennifer always had the feeling that she had just arrived from holidays when she went to the shops, even if she had been there the day before. It felt as though there was more time to the hours and minutes inside the house than outside.
It was strange.
She had worked out a routine that suited Owen’s needs a lot better than the time table he had given her the day she arrived at Oak Place.
Breakfast at mid-morning, lunch at mid-afternoon, tea at various times in the day, and supper on the kitchen table with heating instructions. She would always find the empty plate in the morning.
Owen kept to himself more and more as the weeks went by.
Sometimes he would come out of his study and chat away with her for hours, telling her about all sorts of strange things and watching her reaction with interest.
Still, there were things about him, and the house, that rang alarm bells somewhere inside her mind. Little things. Like, sometimes Owen would answer questions before she said them, and insist she had already asked them. Then there was the little matter of ghosts. Jennifer didn’t believe in ghosts, or at least she hadn’t believed in them before moving into Oak Place.
It was a bright afternoon, she had just arrived from the shops and after putting the groceries on the kitchen table she went to put her coat in her room, and there it was. Large as life, although transparent. An old man.
When she came to, Owen was fanning her face and asking her if she was alright.
“I heard a noise and came running, there you were on the floor,” he said.
She couldn’t remember fainting, it was more like a blackout, and more like time had been deleted from her memory. She felt for the baby, her belly was quite large now and she was afraid she might have hurt it when she fell.
Owen gave her some water to drink and helped her onto the bed.
“A ghost,” she said, her eyes open wide, scanning the room.
“What did it look like?” he asked as a matter of fact.
“Like a ghost of course, what do you think? All see-through and very old, but strong I guess, like a kind of white light.”
“Interesting.”
Owen seemed to be taking mental notes for a few seconds, or confirming a theory to himself, “yes, that would an old butler who died here in the 1800´s, he was much in love with my great-grandmother, the woman my great-grandfather married after the tragic death of his lover, you can find a whole bunch of her things in the wardrobe of the second guestroom to the left, first floor. This ghost was so in love with her that he has been the family ghost ever since, friendly chap, I wouldn’t worry about him at all if I were you. If you see him again just ignore him, he’ll go away.”
“Family ghost?”
“Yes, friendly chap.”
“How come I hadn’t seen him before?”
“He’s... very shy, doesn’t show himself to just anyone. He must like you, you can now consider yourself part of the family,” saying this Owen bowed and left the room.
Jennifer felt for her belly, her baby seemed none the worse for the experience.
No one had told her about ghosts.
Her mind wondered over to what Owen had said about his great-grandfather. A bunch of Owen’s great-grandmother’s things were stuck in a wardrobe, but she had cleaned all the wardrobes out, she was sure of it, so he was obviously wrong.
“In a small trapdoor at the back of the wardrobe!” Owen shouted from the other room, “pull the … the… light bulb down and it opens up.”
She waited until she heard Owen going into his study then run up the stairs. It was true, she pulled the light bulb inside the wardrobe a small trapdoor opened at the back of it and the area it revealed with stuffed with chests. She opened the one on top. It was filled with clothes, shoes, a diary, photographs, and hats. In short, everything it should be filled with. It was perfect.
That evening she heard Owen walking around the house talking in a foreign language, she went out to see what was going on, he had simply looked at her and in a deep and strange voice said, “forget.”
“Forget what?” she answered, at which point Owen dropped a stick he was carrying and stared at her dumbfounded, “forget,” he repeated, and she felt wheezy, her memories were folding over, then snapped back.
“What was that!” she shouted at him, “was that some kind of hypnosis thing? Don’t you dare try to mess with my head like that again Owen O’Neil,” she said and stormed back into her room, slamming the door behind her. She was furious.
She thought about leaving, Owen seemed like a nice boy, but if he was dabbling into occult things or hypnosis there was no way she would hang around to be his guinea pig. But then she thought about Sean. The last time she had asked him about Sean he simply said he didn’t know where Sean was. Then tried to rectify it by insisting he didn’t know anyone named Sean, lying was not one of Owen’s strong points. She was sure he would tell her all about Sean soon, how to contact him.
The dreams began soon after that, they were very bright, colorful dreams. They were like an enhanced version of reality. Sean was in them, they would sit together among the trees or by a lake. He would ask her about things, she told him about Owen and Sean was surprised to find out about his brother being alive. He would ask her where she was living, but try as she might she couldn’t remember the address in her dreams. All she could remember was that it was in London.
One of the things that most surprised her in the dreams was that she was not pregnant in them. She was so shocked the first time that she woke up instantly, but as time went by she learned to move in and out of the dreams at will.
Most of the times she dreamed of Sean they simply held each other in silence. At other times Sean would ask about Owen, small things, like his routine, his attire, his interests, that kind of thing. Jennifer would then find herself watching Owen more closely than was polite. She would watch the way in which he would play with a non-existing beard while he read, the way in which a small wrinkle would appear as he struggled with a new thought or concept. Or the way in which he would stop to think while in the middle of a sentence or with the fork about to touch his lips, he could spend quite a few seconds like that, completely still, until the thought was concluded and then would carry on as though nothing had occurred. Or the reaction he’d had when he found her “Strange Happenings, the newspaper of the unexplained” on the kitchen table. He was like a small child with a new toy, kept reading things out to her in complete awe and surprise and made more than one entry in his little notebook.
She would remember those little things and tell Sean about them, but after a while Sean started getting sad every time she spoke about Owen.
It was all fantasies of course, dreams to make things better, but they seemed so real to her that for a couple of hours after waking up she was still sure she had gone somewhere else, to a place that held Sean prisoner. Then the morning news, vacuum cleaning and getting the shopping snapped her out of it until the next time she moved into one of those dreams.
Owen hadn’t been the same after the hypnosis episode, he had apologized the next morning, said he had been trying out something he read in one of her newspapers, to get rid of the butler’s ghost, and had gotten carried away with it.
Whatever he had tried hadn’t worked, she saw the old man again three times, once in the living room, once staring at her from one of the paintings in the attic and once walking into Owen’s study, while he was in there. She ran to the door and tried to open it, it was locked. She knocked and asked Owen if he was alright, he came to the door looking pale and drowsy, could hardly speak.
“The old butler,” she said, “he walked right into your study.”
“Don’t disturb me in my study, I told you about that rule,” he managed to mumble out and banged the door closed.
A girl on her street had become a drug addict the previous year. Jennifer remembered how she looked when she was drugged. Owen looked like that, but worse, more like the time when she’d seen the girl in Dublin after she’d been thrown out of her parent’s house. She could hardly speak, was grey and shaky. So thin.
A drug addict. Owen must be a drug addict. She felt panic, how could she stay in the same house as a drug addict with a baby on the way? All this time she’d thought Owen was some kind of computer programmer or writer or something, locking himself away like that day after day, with all those computers and books.
No wonder that room was completely out of bounds to her. He probably didn’t want her to find his drugs.
“I am no drug addict,” he said walking into her in the kitchen and frightening the daylights out of her.
“I… I never said you were, I just…”
“You were thinking it, and you were thinking it very loudly indeed. You think everything too loud and one can’t get a thought edgeways in this place,” he said and sat down.
He looked completely normal, although a few moments earlier he had looked completely out of it.
“Think… too loud?” She asked. Maybe she hadn’t heard right.
“Oh, you heard right all right. You think too loud and you poke your nose where it doesn’t belong. And you don’t behave like a normal mortal, so you better tell me what the hell is going on here.”
“Me? Me not behave like a normal mortal? Have you looked at yourself lately? Do you think you are a normal mortal? I have never met anyone like you before, you are strange Owen, very strange,” she hissed the last words and felt him shiver.
He was going to do that forget trick on her now, and she knew it before he opened his mouth.
“Don’t you dare,” she said pointing her finger at him, “you try that hypnosis thing again and I am out of here, and you can tell Sean that as well.”
He went pale as he stared at the end of her finger in horror, “I wasn’t,” he ventured.
“Yes you were, you know you were, I can tell by…” she said and realized she didn’t know how but she could tell what he was about to do or say, “by the look on your face.”
He looked away, his face red with anger, or embarrassment, or a mixture of both.
There were a few minutes of tense silence, then he said, “yes,” before Jennifer asked if he wanted his tea now.
They ate in polite silence, she got up to put things away after they finished, but Owen didn’t leave the kitchen this time. He sat and waited until she had finished cleaning up.
“Okay,” they said as she sat down.
“You first,” she said.
“No, you first, ladies first,” he answered.
There was so much she wanted to ask him, about the old butler, about his own life, about reading people’s thoughts.
“Where do you go at night time?” He asked before she had time to get her thoughts in order.
In normal circumstances she would have said, “I go to bed,” but she knew Owen meant the dreams, the times she used to leave this reality and go to visit Sean. She took a deep breath and began to tell him all about the lake, the trees, the mountains, the streams, the flowers, birds and butterflies, then, last of all, she told him about Sean.
She felt bad about telling Owen she visited Sean in her dreams, but didn’t know why she felt bad. She didn’t tell him of the hours they spent together, holding each other, looking at the stars or the s
unsets. She didn’t tell him the dreams were less frequent now, she didn’t tell him that even when she felt Sean calling her she didn’t want to leave reality to be with him.
Owen wanted to know about his brother, he asked her what Sean’s believes were, his thoughts about life, what his thoughts were about the place he lived in, what his abilities were, could he read minds? She told him about the way Sean’s hair moved when the wind blew and the way he held his chin while he listened to her speak.
“A bit like you are doing now,” she added, and then blushed for no reason.
There was a forced silence, they both felt embarrassed even though there was no reason at all why they should.
“It’s your turn,” she said.
What he then told her she wouldn’t have believed, except she could tell if he had tried to lie, but that didn’t mean he told her the whole truth either.
“So you mean we live in a kind of quantum world, filled with all these other dimensions where other beings live, and that when I saw the old butler it was one of those being crossing over to our side?” She asked when he finished.
“Yes?”
“Well, actually I did a paper on quantum physics on my last year at school and my conclusion was that there very well could be parallel worlds as well as multiple possible outcomes, but of course if you mixed them both then you would have just about anything you could think of, which would of course make a theory, like magic, quite possible, but too slow to be a viable option for everyday use. Unless you could have access to some sort of accelerator, something which would make chaos theory work backwards even, so by the time you thought ‘I want such and such in my hand’, like say, a million pounds, then sometime in the past you would have placed the order for that happening now, like the butterfly wing and the storm thing.”
They both looked at their hands.
“It’s a good theory,” Owen said.
She could tell he was impressed. He probably wasn’t used to girls being clever, what with his mother dying at childbirth and not having any sisters.
“So you are not a drug addict, devil worshiper or anything like that then? Just some sort of witch?”