The Ghost Behind the Wall

  He greeted David and Terry with a smile and patted the edge of the bed to show David where to sit. Terry stood by the bedside and smiled uncertainly at him.

  “It’s good to see you,” he said. “We thought we were going to lose you for a while there.”

  Mr. Alveston smiled and lifted a frail hand in the air. “I want to go,” he whispered. “I want so much to go, but I can’t.”

  Terry made a sympathetic face and glanced at David anxiously. Talking about wanting to die in front of his son worried him.

  “Now.” Mr. Alveston patted David’s hand where it rested on the covers. “The book. I expect you must have been worried that you would never find out. It’s on my shelf. Go on, fetch it.”

  David leaned over to the shelf next to the bed and soon found the red-bound book that Alison Grey had given to Mr. Alveston.

  “On the fourth page. You’ll see him. You’ll know him.”

  David opened the book on the fourth page—and out of the page there looked back at him the face of the ghost. The photo was in black and white, it was old and faded somewhat, but perfectly clear. The boy was standing against a brick wall, holding one wrist in the other hand, staring at the camera. His hair was short at the sides and with a curly mop at the front. He was wearing a sleeveless sweater, a shirt rolled up at the sleeves, and short trousers that came down to his knees. He looked out across the years with a serious face, slightly lowered, as if the camera made him anxious. His long face, the slight bags under his eyes, the large, square teeth—it was him, all right: the boy who had become a ghost.

  “That’s him, isn’t it?” asked Mr. Alveston.

  “Yes, that’s him. Who is it?”

  “I haven’t got the slightest clue.”

  “You must know!”

  “I should know. I’m sure I used to know, but I don’t now. It’s gone. Let me tell you something. I have—I used to have—a marvelous memory. Everybody said so. Not for where I put things, or names or dates, or that sort of thing. For people. I never forget a face. But when I try to think of this face, I get nothing. Just a blank.” Mr. Alveston looked down at the page. “It’s as if something has been taken away from me.”

  “Excuse me, but is there something I don’t know?” asked Terry. He had no idea what this conversation was all about.

  Mr. Alveston smiled and looked up at him. “Yes, your poor father, he hasn’t got a clue what we’re talking about. Well, you see, Terry, we’ve seen a ghost. Yes, yes, you heard me correctly. A ghost. David saw it when he was playing in the ventilation system. I saw it, too. It was the ghost who wrecked my apartment. Ah, now, I see you don’t believe me. Well, why should you? You are very much of this world. Sometimes the young and the old see things that people in the middle can’t understand. I assure you, every word I say is true. Yes.” He laughed at the expression on Terry’s face. “I’m an old man at the very end of my life. Why should I make it up?”

  “Of course, if you say so,” said Terry. But he was really thinking something very serious. He was thinking that if this poor old man thought it was a ghost that had wrecked his apartment, there was no way on earth that the police were going to believe him when he said it wasn’t David who did it.

  “Seeing a ghost isn’t so unusual. But in this case there is a problem, for me. I feel sure that it is this ghost who is keeping me here in this world. I have come a very long way. There is a door just out of reach that I have to go through to leave this life, and this boy—this ghost—is standing between me and that door. I want so very much to be able to get there. Do you understand? Going through that door is the last task of my life and he won’t let me do it.”

  Mr. Alveston had been talking eagerly, but now his head lay back on the pillow and he closed his eyes. Just that short talk had exhausted him.

  “Look—we’re scaring your father.” He smiled in amusement. “Poor Terry!” Mr. Alveston beckoned them to come close so that he could speak in a whisper.

  “I want to ask you a favor, both of you. I want you to find out who the boy in that photograph is. Look in my other photograph albums. I have many photographs. Maybe you can find his name. I have to know who he is.…”

  “I promise,” said David. “But you’ll have to tell them to let us in. They wouldn’t let us near your things last time.”

  Mr. Alveston nodded.

  “I’ll help,” said Terry, although he didn’t believe a word of it. “But can I ask one thing?” The old man lifted his hand to say, Ask away. “You know that the police think it might be David who did this to your apartment.”

  “Of course it wasn’t David…”

  “It’s just that—maybe it isn’t such a good idea to tell them that this boy you saw—that it was a ghost…”

  “Tell the police about a ghost? Oh, no. I’m not stupid. Of course I won’t do that. No, don’t worry. I’ll tell them … a good story.”

  Terry smiled. Mr. Alveston had his lapses, but when he was on the ball, he was as sharp as a nail. “It’s a deal,” he said. “I’ll help.”

  Mr. Alveston needed to rest. He told David to take the photo out of the album, and then they said good-bye and left.

  At the hospital door, Terry told David to go and wait by the car. “I want to have a word with the nurse,” he told him.

  “Why can’t I come?”

  “They don’t always tell everything when there’s a child there,” said Terry. He wanted to ask how Mr. Alveston was doing.

  The nurse shook her head. “He could pop off at any time,” she said. “To be honest, I think that’s what he wants. All we can do is keep him comfortable. He isn’t in any pain, I don’t think,” she added, to try and make Terry feel better about it. Terry nodded, but that wasn’t what scared him. He was worried about David. He wondered if he ought to tell him that the old man was going to die.

  And he was scared his son was going to end up in prison.

  Terry didn’t believe in ghosts, but he was a man of his word as far as he was able. When he got home, he got right to work with carrying out his promise and gave Alison Grey a ring. He told her about Mr. Alveston wanting to find out who the boy in the photograph was. He didn’t tell her about the ghost, of course, or the strange story about the boy stopping the old man from leaving this world. He just said it was a memory Mr. Alveston was having trouble with.

  Alison said she’d see what she could do, but she wasn’t sure whether or not to help. She knew how fond Robert Alveston was of David—he’d told her himself. She’d been seeing David at least once a week for a couple of months, and she felt sure that she knew him well enough to say that he was fond of Mr. Alveston, too. And yet it was impossible to think that the latest attack on the old man’s apartment had nothing to do with David. It was just too much of a coincidence.

  Privately, the police had told her that David was very unlikely to be prosecuted for the attack. Apart from Mr. Alveston’s evidence that someone else had done it, something had gone wrong with the fingerprint tests. The whole apartment had been covered in child-sized fingerprints, which they were sure were going to be David’s. But when they looked closely at them, they found that they weren’t. In fact, they were like miniature versions of Mr. Alveston’s. Of course, that was impossible. Something must have gone wrong with the tests. There were a few of David’s, too, but all the evidence showed that his had been made before the apartment had been wrecked. That meant there was no real evidence, and there was nothing to do but let the case drop.

  “That doesn’t mean he didn’t do it,” the inspector told Alison. “It just means we can’t prove it.”

  Sis thought the very worst of David, too. “He wants to look through Mr. Alveston’s things so he can steal something,” she said when Alison told her about David’s request to look for the photo. “That’s why they wrecked the joint—pulling it to pieces hunting for valuables.”

  Alison sighed. “But Mr. Alveston is so fond of him. What can I do?”

  “That boy has taken advantage o
f him.”

  “Mr. Alveston isn’t stupid,” pointed out Alison. “He’s as bright as you like on a good day.”

  “Yes, well, there’s not many of those at the moment, are there?” said Sis.

  It was true. Mr. Alveston had recovered from the pneumonia, but it had left him trapped in a strange world in between life and death. He spent a lot of time asleep, but it was not an easy sleep. He seemed no longer to be able to tell the difference between past and present. It was often difficult to tell if he was talking to you, or if a memory had taken over his mind so vividly that it had blotted out the here and now. Yet when he did know what was going on around him, he was frighteningly clear.

  “He told me the other day that it was like being lost in a huge maze filled with the past and present all jumbled up together,” said Sis. “He said it was like wandering up and down and to and fro, trying to find the way back to the present. And then he said”—and Sis lowered her voice, because what he had said scared her—”then he said that the present was getting harder and harder to find.”

  “It’s the oddest case I’ve ever come across,” said Alison. “I’ve never known anyone able to think about what’s happening to them so clearly.”

  “Have you noticed how troubled he gets about his childhood?” asked Sis. “I was visiting him the other day and he woke up, looked at me, and said, ‘I’ve lost it, Sis.’ And when I asked him what he’d lost, he said, ‘My childhood. I’ve lost it.’”

  Alison rubbed her face uncomfortably. “Maybe that’s why he wants David to find out who that boy is.”

  Sis had to admit that he had asked her if David had found out who it was in the photograph yet.

  “It does seem to be rather important to him,” said Alison, and Sis had to agree that was right.

  For another few days, Alison put David and Terry off, not sure what was the best thing to do. Then Terry gave her another call, suggesting that if she didn’t trust David enough, maybe she herself could bring the albums by. Two days later she appeared at the door, to David’s joy, with a great heap of books in her arms over half a yard high.

  “It seems Mr. Alveston took a lot of photos,” she said.

  The albums were filled with people. It was amazing that Mr. Alveston should have had such a full life yet ended up so alone. Terry made some tea and brought out a plateful of biscuits, and they sat down around the table to flip through the albums. It was a long job. Time after time someone thought they had found the boy in the photograph, and time after time it turned out not to be. There were just so many pictures of people who looked a bit like him, but not quite enough.

  “It must be a relative,” said Alison, warming to the hunt.

  One after the other the old books were opened, examined, and put to one side. It wasn’t until they were in the very oldest book, the one that went right back to the few faded pictures of when Mr. Alveston himself had been a child, that they had any success.

  It was Terry who found him. “I’ve got him!” he exclaimed. David peered across—and there he was, the boy who had become a ghost, standing next to a little girl sitting in a little cart. They were both staring at the camera, and they were both smiling—the boy, shyly, but the girl with her face lifted up in delight.

  “Is there a name?” asked Alison. Terry pried the picture out of its place, but on the back there was nothing.

  They had another picture, but it told them nothing. The search went on.

  By the end of the evening they had no less than five pictures of the boy, and they still hadn’t solved the mystery. But then they hit the jackpot. David spotted the face this time. It was in a photograph that they’d overlooked several times because it was in a group, and the face was too small to see well.

  It was a family picture, two adults in deck chairs on the beach with their children around them. The boy was kneeling on the ground with his arms folded, scowling at the camera this time. There were four other children—two older boys standing to the side, a girl sitting in the sand, and a baby on the mother’s knee. The names were written on the back: Charlie, Thomas, Eric, Ellen, Helen, Robert, and Owen. But which name belonged to whom?

  “Charlie, Thomas, Eric, Robert, or Owen?” asked Terry. “Which one?”

  Alison peered closely at the photo. “Robert,” she said. “Robert. That’s his name.”

  “Whose?”

  “Mr. Alveston’s. Robert. That’s his name. Oh my God!” Alison’s hand flew up to her mouth. “It can’t be, can it? Oh my God, that’s spooky!”

  But it was. They looked at other photographs of Mr. Alveston at various times of his life. Now that he was an old, old man, the resemblance was not so clear, but when he was younger, you could see it perfectly. It was the same face, all right. Mr. Alveston himself was the ghost.

  Alison began to weep. She lifted a tissue to her eye. “Forgetting your own childhood,” she wept. “That’s just so sad.” Then she lifted her face up again. “And he said! He said he’d lost his childhood. He knew. He knew.”

  And all three of them sitting there felt the mystery of it prickle down their backs.

  13

  The Ghost and Mr. Alveston

  There are unknown things in this world. David had stumbled across one of them.

  Slowly, it began to make a kind of sense. It was Mr. Alveston himself who had said that ghosts might be memories. If anything, wasn’t it more likely that a ghost might be a living person’s memory rather than the spirit of a dead one? At least memories were still alive.

  Inside Mr. Alveston were the memories of all his past lives, and one of them had got out and walked off. The child in him had run away. He had lost his memory in a way no one could have dreamed, and now his ghost was on the loose. No wonder the boy felt so lost. No wonder he was so scared of the old man. No wonder he was keeping him in this world. When Mr. Alveston died, the ghost would die, too.

  The boy had already had his turn to be alive, but he didn’t know that. He was lost, lost in the endless ductwork behind the walls of Mahogany Villas, and he had no way of finding his way out. What would happen if the old man died before the ghost was back where it belonged? Would it be doomed to live forever like a shadow behind the walls? What if Mr. Alveston couldn’t die unless his ghost was back inside him? Would he lie there forever in his hospital bed until he turned to dust and bones?

  David knew at once that for both their sakes—for Robert Alveston the old man and Robert Alveston the boy—ghost and man had to get back together again. And who was going to help them do that?

  * * *

  David should have gone in straightaway to tell Mr. Alveston what was going on, but he didn’t. He dreaded telling him. Alison visited the old man the day after, though, and on the way home, she called on David with a message. The old man had been amazed, fascinated, appalled when she told who it was in the photograph. He begged David to come and see him as soon as he could.

  “That’s all right, he can go down this evening,” Terry said. David did as he was told, but when he got to the hospital, he couldn’t bring himself to go in. He wandered around a bit and stared at the silent windows staring back at him, and went away without going in.

  Mr. Alveston couldn’t get up to go and get the ghost, so the ghost would have to be brought to Mr. Alveston. But who else knew the ghost? Who else was small enough to go into the ducts to get him out? David knew exactly why Mr. Alveston wanted to see him, and he didn’t like it one little bit.

  The ghost was dangerous. Each time David had gone into the ducts, it had been worse. The last time the ghost had tried to stop him from getting away by grabbing him by the ankle and David wasn’t sure he would have escaped if he hadn’t fallen down the duct. Suppose the ghost decided to keep him in there forever? He was lost and lonely; he wanted a friend. If David were to die in the ducts, then the ghost would have a friend, all right—a friend who would never go away, a friend who would stay with him forever. Then there would be two ghosts in Mahogany Villas. Mr. Alveston would nev
er die, but he would continue to get older and older and older, and David himself would be trapped forever behind the walls in the dark, tight ducts.

  Oh, no. David was happy with the ducts bricked up and the darkness locked away out of sight. But what about Mr. Alveston? And what about the poor ghost?

  A week went by. David wondered who he could turn to for help, but there was no one. Who would believe him? He could hardly believe it himself. He was hoping that Mr. Alveston was going to leave this world all on his own, as he so much wanted to, but each day found the old man still hanging on. The doctors and nurses shook their heads and marveled at how tightly the spirit hung on to life and expected him to be gone in the morning. But the morning came and there he was, pale and still and gray and tired on the pillows, waiting for David to come and visit him.

  “I can’t believe you!” hissed Terry when he found out. “Over a week gone by! Messages begging you to come practically every day and you still haven’t been! How could you? After all the trouble you’ve caused him and all the help he’s given you! How could you?”

  “It’s not a visit from me he’s waiting for,” muttered David, half to himself. But his dad was too busy stopping his allowance, banning his TV watching, and grounding him for weeks ahead to even listen.

  “And if you aren’t there tonight, I’ll strangle you. Personally. With these bare hands!” Terry flexed his pale white optician’s hands under his son’s disgusted nose and stamped off into the kitchen to cook dinner.

  * * *

  No way was David going back into those ducts, whatever Mr. Alveston said to him. But maybe he could just get close to a grille and have a quiet word.…

  The only trouble was, where? The grilles in his apartment had been bricked up. The hall outside was too public. But there was somewhere David knew of where he could get close up without being seen.