The Garden Bench

Our family history is tangled like the overgrown wisteria that crawls up the side of our rented farmhouse in the Canterbury plains. I’m Ash, fifteen, and my little brother Birch is twelve. Our parents, Mara and Theo, live here with us, along with my older half-brother, Cael, from Mum’s first marriage, and my step-siblings from Dad’s previous marriage: Iris (23), Juniper (21), Sage (18), and Rowan (17). We’re the Hazeldine family, and we all share this sprawling, drafty house with its peeling paint and the endless paddocks beyond.

It was Juniper who first noticed the old man. She was only six, bouncing on the rusted trampoline near the back porch, when she froze mid-air, her eyes fixed on the kitchen window. Through the smudged glass, she saw an old man in a wheelchair, his head tilted as if staring out at the garden. But when we ran inside, there was no one there. We chalked it up to a child’s imagination, a trick of the light, a shadow cast by the apple tree. But Juniper was adamant, and she started talking about ‘the man in the chair’ as if he were a family friend.

Then the singing started. At night, from Juniper’s room, we’d hear a low, melodic hum, not quite a lullaby, more like a dirge. Dad and Iris (her mother) would find her asleep, but she’d wake with dark circles under her eyes, insisting that her friend had put her to sleep and taken her somewhere. One morning, she didn’t wake up at all. Her skin was cold, her breathing shallow, and she wouldn’t respond to shaking or calling. For six hours, we watched her, terror clotting in our throats, until finally she gasped, her eyes snapping open. She told us, ‘He took me to the garden, but it wasn’t our garden. It was all gray and the flowers were made of ash.’

We tried to dismiss it, but things began to change. The garden, once a wild tangle of lupins and foxgloves, started dying in patches. The soil turned a sickly pale, and a single wooden bench appeared near the back fence, old and weathered, as if it had been there for decades. None of us had placed it there. The first time I saw the old man, I was fourteen, and I’d gone out to the garden to escape the noise of the house. He was sitting on that bench, not in his wheelchair, but his legs were like twisted branches, and his eyes were milk-white. He didn’t look at me, but I felt a pull, like he was reeling me in with an invisible thread. He spoke, but his lips didn’t move. ‘You’re next, Ash. You’re the one who can see.’

I didn’t tell anyone, because who would believe me? But Birch, my younger brother, he started having nightmares. He’d wake up screaming, babbling about a man with a wispy beard and a voice like gravel. He said the man told him to ‘dig’. So Birch dug. We found him one afternoon, knee-deep in the flower bed, his fingers raw and caked with dirt, and in his hands, a small, rusted locket. Inside was a faded photograph of a woman with hollow cheeks and eyes that seemed to follow you. On the back, in smudged ink, was written: ‘My darling, Etta. Forgive me.’

Now, I’m not one for superstition, but when you live in a house where the wallpaper peels in the shape of faces and the pipes groan like someone’s in pain, you start to listen. And the singing has come back, but now it’s without a source. It seeps from the walls, hums through the floorboards, and I can’t tell if it’s coming from inside my head or from the garden. The old man’s bench is always occupied now, even when we can’t see him. I feel his gaze on my back as I walk to the shed, and at night, I hear the wheels of his chair rolling across the ceiling.

Last week, I had the dream. I was in the garden like Juniper described, but it was gray and dying. The bench was there, and he was sitting on it, holding the locket. He didn’t speak, but I understood: ‘You’re the one who can end it. You have to find Etta’s grave and give her the locket. Tell her I’m sorry.’ I woke up with the locket in my hand, the cold metal pressed into my palm, and the smell of damp earth filling my room. I know now that this won’t end until I do as he asks. But the garden is vast, and the markers are faded, and I don’t know if I’ll find Etta before the garden claims me too. And every night, the singing grows louder, and the bench gets closer to the house.