Short Stories: The Garden Dance, Part I

It was a lovely, warm spring day, and my brother Jimmy and I were arriving at a garden dance being held at Ketterland Mansion. We had been surprised during the recent winter when we received our invites in the mail, but we were certainly pleased to have been invited and were eager to attend: in every year for the past thirty-three years, the landlady of Ketterland Mansion held a dance at her home, and the event had become to be held in such by high esteem by the people of the town of Ketterland that it was an honour just to be invited.

While the dance itself was highly regarded, little was known about the woman herself: the people who had gone to the dances rarely spoke of her, other than to say how much of a wonderful person she was. Despite only a small group of people knowing what she looked like, it was common knowledge in the town that she was middle-aged but highly beautiful. However, no one knew her name, and she was referred to (and apparently even addressed as) "The Landlady".

The respect the dance earned probably came from the amount of people invited to each dance and the routine used to invite them: at the beginning of every winter, a hundred random inhabitants in Ketterland received letters from The Landlady informing them that they had been invited to her annual garden dance in the spring; the letters also told them to ensure that they would be free for the second weekend of April. Near the end of the winter, the same group of people would then receive a package containing their outfits for the occasion (we received a black suit each), plus a reminder to keep the date of the event free of any other engagements. To date, everyone who had been invited had attended.

"Well, we're here, and we are on time," I said to Jimmy while looking at my watch as we climbed the stairs to The Landlady's front door. "Do you want to knock or shall I?"

"You're the older brother," Jimmy replied.

"A 'yes' or a 'no' would have sufficed, but I'll assume that's a 'yes'." I was about to knock when I noticed a doorbell instead. "Ah!" I gasped as I pressed the button.

We waited for about a minute before the door opened and a man without a visible face ushered us in and closed the door behind him. He directed us to the backyard of the mansion then he returned to answering the front door while Jimmy and I marvelled at the sight of the massive garden in the backyard of Ketterland Mansion. The entire place looked like the sort of garden you would see in a Princess Diaries film, rather than anyone's backyard (even someone with a mansion), although it was sloped. At the very back of the garden was a view of a mountain range I had never noticed before, and in front of the mountains was a lake I never knew existed either: the garden was situated at least fifty feet above the water.

To our surprise, the garden was deserted. Besides the faceless man who answered the door we had not seen anyone since we arrived. We had a look around for twenty minutes before returning to the mansion; however, upon trying to re-enter the building, the faceless man appeared again.

"You're early," he said in a low and strangely echoed voice, and I realised at that point my watch was an hour early. "The rest of the guests won't arrive for another twenty-five minutes. Could I interest you in a hot chocolate?"

"Yes please," came our reply, and the faceless man pulled out a thermos and two cups from his jacket, poured us a hot chocolate each and put two ice cubes from the opposite end of the thermos in them.

"Cheers," he said after he passed us our cooling-down hot drinks; then he put two cubes in the thermos and drank the rest of the liquid straight from it.

The man again returned to the front door. With little else to do at that moment in time, Jimmy and I found a place to sit down, have our drinks, and wait for everyone else to arrive.

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As I wrote this, the story ended up being longer than I thought it would be. I will post part II tomorrow, and if that part concludes the story I will give all the background to The Garden Dance plus some insight into the odder parts of this piece. My brother's name in this story is fictional.