Dollenganger 05 Garden of Shadows

by V. C. Andrews

  there pretending. Tomorrow morning you will wake

  up in this room and you will have to face the reality of

  what is and what will be. Most of us have got to do

  that every day of our lives. The stronger you are, the

  less dependent you are on fantasy."

  She nodded reluctantly, a look of total defeat on

  her face. I could almost read her thoughts. "Garland

  would not be happy it has all come to this, I know.

  Christopher and I were the light of his life. And to

  think, my son sleeps in the same house and must not

  know I am only a short distance from him It's too

  cruel, too cruel."

  Her tears began again.

  "Nevertheless, it is what must be. I shall go

  now," I said. "I will be up here earlier than usual

  tomorrow only because the new servants aren't

  arriving until late in the morning." I picked up the

  bundle of her cut hair and started to leave.

  "Olivia," she called.

  "Yes, my dear?" I turned back to her.

  "Please, can't I keep a lock; just one small lock

  of my hair?"

  Benevolently, I handed her a bright chestnut

  curl. "You don't hate me," she said, "do you?" I saw

  the fear in her eyes.

  "Of course I don't hate you, Alicia. I hate only

  what you have become, as I am sure you hate

  yourself." Then I opened the door and stepped out. I

  closed it quietly behind me and turned the key in the

  lock, snapping it shut. The sound of her sobbing died

  away in the darkness of the hallway as I turned off the

  lights. The shadows held at bay rushed in, dropping a

  wall of blackness between Alicia and her sleeping

  child, who would wait for her in the world of light and

  life without.

  I moved swiftly down the hall until I came to

  the rotunda. From the sounds below, I knew that

  Malcolm was still downstairs, probably in the library

  at his desk. I imagined him sitting there staring

  hatefully at the doorway, maybe in expectation of my

  arrival.

  But I had no more interest in conversation with

  him tonight. All that had to be done was done. I was

  tired myself. I started for my bedroom, but stopped at the doorway of the trophy room. Something occurred to me, something I found deliciously vengeful and satisfying. I opened the door, snapped on the lights, and went to the desk behind which Malcolm often sat when he came up here to be by himself. I put the shawl filled with Alicia's cut hair, at the center of the desk and untied the knot so that the pile of beautiful

  chestnut strands lay open and exposed.

  Then I turned, went back to the door, looked

  back at the sight of her amputated hair on his desk,

  smiled to myself, and snapped off the lights. I stood

  there for a few moments listening to the sounds of the

  house. Tonight every creak seemed amplified. The

  wind wrapped itself around the great mansion,

  whirling madly, tying it in a chilled rope. It would

  take days of warm summer sunlight to defrost the icy

  wall over this house, I thought. And throughout that

  summer, Alicia would sit in a dark, stuffy room below

  the great attic, waiting for the birth of a child she had

  not wanted and would not be a mother to. It was truly

  a prison sentence and I was truly a warden.

  I did not cherish the role, but Malcolm had cast

  me in it and I knew the only way to defeat him was to

  perform it far better than he ever could have expected.

  He would live to regret this night, I thought, to regret what he had done to me and what he would make me

  do to her.

  I went to my bedroom quickly and rushed

  myself to sleep, which had become the only true

  escape from the madness of Foxworth Hall,

  something that was ironically true for both of us,

  Alicia and me.

  The weeks passed as I had predicted they would

  pass for Alicia--painfully, slowly. Every day, the

  minute I entered the room, she begged me to bring her

  Christopher.

  "If not here," she pleaded, "at least let him

  stand outside my window so I can peek at him, see

  him--I can't stand this any longer."

  "Christopher has finally adjusted to your

  leaving. Why upset him now? If you really loved him,

  Alicia, you'd let things be."

  "Let it be? I'm his mother. My heart is breaking.

  The days only seem to get longer. A week in here is

  like a year!"

  In the mornings she complained about being

  nauseated. In the afternoons she wept for Christopher.

  She was always tired, and more often than not, I

  would find her lying in bed, staring up at the ceiling.

  Her once rosy cheeks paled, and even though I insisted she eat everything I brought to her, her face began to take on a gaunt look. After two months shut away in that room, dark circles formed around her

  eyes.

  She usually kept a shawl over her head. After I

  had come in a dozen times and found her wearing it

  each time, I asked her why.

  "Because I can't stand the sight of myself with

  my hair like this every time I pass in front of the

  mirror," she said.

  "Why don't you just cover the mirror," I told

  her. I knew every woman had vanity, but I also knew

  that women like her had much, much more. Despite

  the fact that she had no cosmetics and her hair had

  been chopped away, I imagined that she still sat

  before the mirror pretending she was back in her

  beautiful bedroom suite preparing for an evening out

  with Garland, or planning what she was going to do

  with herself once her hair did grow back and she was

  free of this place.

  Eventually, she took my suggestion and draped

  a sheet over the mirror. The dissipation of her beauty

  was a part of harsh reality that she would now rather

  avoid. However, when I walked in with her tray of

  food and I saw the sheet there, I didn't remark about

  it. She looked up at me from her bed, her eyes

  bright with tears of boredom and anger. She no longer

  wore the shawl; there was no reason for it since the

  mirror was covered.

  "I thought you had forgotten my dinner," she

  accused me. There was a new sharpness in her words.

  Her rage caused her to pronounce the consonants with

  exaggeration and her voice dropped in tone, almost

  sounding manly.

  "Dinner? This is your lunch, Alicia," I said. The

  realization brought surprise and horror to her face. "Only lunch?" She looked at the small clock

  housed in an ivory cathedral on the dresser. "Only

  lunch?" she repeated. She sat up slowly and looked at

  me with frightened, frozen blue eyes. I knew that she

  had come to see me as her jailer. Whenever she

  thought of something new to do, she had to ask my

  permission. Her life was no longer her own.

  "How is my Christopher? Does he miss me

  terribly? Does he ask about me every day?" she

  inquired, hanging on my responses.

  "Sometimes," I said. "The boys help to distract

  him."

  She nodded, pathetically try
ing to conjure up his image in her mind. I thought of him myself, beautiful golden-haired Christopher, his face regaining its happy joy after the first few months of sadness at being separated from his mother. His eyes sparkled once again as I read him his favorite story every night before bed. Truly, I was beginning to think of him as one of my own. He and my two boys played so well together in the nursery. Mal and Joel adored him. He seemed to carry all the sunshine of his mother in her happier days. But that sunny joy wasn't seductive and lustful, it was bright and open, compassionate and innocent. He was more

  affectionate than either of my children. Sometimes I feared it was because both Mal and Joel had Malcolm's blood in them. Every morning he would run to me screaming, "I want hundreds of kisses. I want hundreds of hugs, o-weee-a!" Only yesterday, when I put him down for his nap, his beautiful blue eyes looked up at me and he asked, "Can I call you Mommy sometimes?" Of course I did not tell Alicia any of this. Instead, I kept the conversation always

  focused on her.

  "You look unclean today, Alicia. You should

  take better care of yourself," I said, reprimanding her. She turned abruptly on me, speaking through

  clenched teeth.

  "I'm this way because I live from day to day in

  this . . . this closet."

  "This is bigger than a closet."

  "And the only sunlight I get to see is the

  sunlight that comes through the windows here and

  upstairs. Yesterday I sat in the rays until the sun

  moved on and left me in shadows. I feel like a flower

  hungry for the nourishment of the sun, a flower

  withering in a closet. Soon I will be dried and dead

  and you can press me into the pages of a book," she

  said, her voice a mixture of anger and self-pity. "You won't be in here that much longer," I said.

  "It won't do you any good to sit and churn up your

  frustration day in and day out," I added in a matter-offact tone of voice. That only infuriated her more. "Maybe I should go outside for a quick secret

  walk. You can take the boys away from the house and

  . . ."

  "But, Alicia, the servants. How could I explain

  if they saw you? From where would I tell them you

  came? Who would I tell them you were? And if the

  boys heard about it . . . don't you see? What you are

  asking is impossible, just impossible." She nodded. "I

  do feel sorry for you," I said. "I hope you see that. Do you?" She looked up at me with scrutinizing eyes and then nodded. "No one is enjoying this, least of all me. Keep thinking about the future and you will survive the present," I advised. Suddenly a new idea came to

  her.

  "Send all the servants away," she said, her face

  filled with the excitement of a new and, as she

  considered it, clever idea. "Give them a holiday, just

  for a weekend. That's all I would need, one or two

  days of fresh air. Please."

  "You're speaking ridiculous thoughts. I would

  advise you to get a hold of yourself," I told her,

  gathering my own resolve. "You will only get

  yourself sick and maybe lose the baby. Now, feed

  yourself and the child within you," I added, and left

  the room before she could say another thing about it. When I returned to bring her her dinner that

  night, she did seem changed. She had bathed and

  dressed herself in a pretty blue chemise. However, she

  was sitting on her bed as if she were in the back of a

  car and on a journey.

  "Oh," she said when I came in, "here we are at

  the restaurant. What shall we have to eat?" She was

  pretending to be in a car with Christopher. I was

  amazed, but I said nothing.

  She looked at me with expectation, hopeful that

  I would become part of the fantasy. I put the tray

  down on the table and watched as Alicia continued to

  create an imaginary situation for herself, getting up

  and approaching the table as if it were a table in a

  restaurant. She did look brighter, happier.

  Alicia referred to me as she would refer to a

  waitress in a restaurant. Suddenly, I realized there was

  something strange about it all. She wasn't pretending

  just for the fun of it; she was actually experiencing

  this journey.

  She rattled on and on as if I weren't there, or as

  if I were really some stranger. I didn't like it, but I

  didn't know what to do about it.

  She dismissed me by saying, "You can take

  those now," referring to the dirty dinner dishes. She began to feed her imaginary Christopher,

  telling him that after they left the restaurant, they

  would drive to the park, where they would see

  animals and go on the merry-go-round. I understood

  that the attic was to be envisioned as the park. She

  was wearing the nicest of all the dresses I had

  permitted her to bring. Her stomach was not quite

  swollen enough to prevent it, and she had torn a strip

  off a beige slip and tied it like a ribbon in her short

  strands of hair.

  "Are you all right?" I asked her. She interrupted

  herself.

  "Pardon me, Christopher," she said to the empty

  chair beside her. "The waitress wants to know something. What was it, waitress?" she asked, singing the

  question.

  I pulled in the corners of my mouth and

  straightened my back. She was smiling madly. Did

  she think I was going along with this charade? I didn't

  repeat my question. Instead, I turned and carried the

  tray of dishes to the door.

  "She said they are out of ice cream," Alicia told

  her imaginary son. "But don't worry. Perhaps we'll see

  an ice cream parlor at the park, and we'll never come

  back to this restaurant again, will we?"

  I heard her laugh as I closed the door behind

  me. Madness, I thought, and for the first time since

  she had been brought back to Foxworth Hall, I

  couldn't wait for her to leave again.

  .

  The pretending continued. The room at the end

  of the north wing became Alicia's world of illusions.

  Sometimes when I entered, she and her imaginary son

  were in a car; sometimes they were on the ferry. A few times they were up in the attic. She was playing her Victrola and they had supposedly gone to see a puppet show. She made two hand puppets with her

  socks and used an armoire as the puppet stage. Every time I entered, she called me something

  else. Either I was the waiter, the ticket taker at the

  puppet show, an engineer on a ferry boat . . whatever;

  but never was I Olivia: I no longer saw any fear in her

  face when I arrived. She looked at me with a smile of

  anticipation on her face, waiting to see how I would

  react to her new inventions.

  It went on and on like this, and then one day I

  came in and found that she had taken the sheet off the

  mirror. It no longer bothered her to look at herself and

  what she had become because she did not see that

  image. She saw whatever she imagined. With a brush

  in her hand she was standing in front of the mirror and

  stroking the air as if there were strands down around

  her shoulders.

  The ironic thing about all this was that her

  complexion returned to its former peaches-and-cream

  richness. I knew that some women flourish
ed during

  pregnancy. I had not been one of those women, but

  Alicia had remained quite beautiful during her

  pregnancy with Christopher. The same thing was true

  of this pregnancy, now aided by her illusions. "What are you doing?" I asked her, and she

  turned away from the mirror. She hadn't heard me

  enter.

  "Oh, Olivia. Garland said Venus herself

  couldn't have more beautiful hair than mine. Can you

  imagine? Men can be so extravagant with their

  flattery. They don't know what it can do to a woman. I

  let him go on. Why not? Whom does it harm?

  Certainly not Venus." She laughed, but her laugh was

  as rich and as full as her laugh used to be when

  Garland was alive.

  She is going mad, I thought. Being locked up

  and pregnant, she is being driven into insanity. But it

  wasn't my fault, I concluded. It was another sin for

  Malcolm to bear. Perhaps he had known this would

  happen; perhaps he had expected it. She would give

  birth to his baby and he would have the child. But she

  would be so unstable, he couldn't turn over the large

  fortune to her. In fact, she flight have to be

  committed. He would have it all--the child, the

  money, and good riddance to Alicia. We would adopt

  Christopher.

  Such a scenario enraged me. Once again

  Malcolm Neal Foxworth would get his way, defeating

  everyone, even me. I couldn't allow it.

  "Alicia, Garland is dead. He couldn't have told

  you that now. You must stop this, stop all of this

  ridiculous pretending before it drives you insane. Do

  you hear me? Do you understand what I am saying?"

  She stood there, her smile unchanged. She heard only

  what she wanted to hear.

  "There's nothing he won't buy for me, nothing

  he won't do for me," she said. "It's terrible, I know;

  but all I need do is mention something I see or want,

  and the next day, the very next day, he will have it

  delivered. I'm so spoiled, but I can't help it.

  "Anyway," she went on, turning back to the

  mirror and brushing the air, "Garland says he likes to

  spoil me. He says it gives him pleasure to spoil me

  and I have no right to take that pleasure away from

  him Isn't it wonderful?"

  "I've brought you the maternity clothes, Alicia,"

  I said. I thought that if I confronted her with that, I

  might be able to snap her back to reality quickly. I