LEARNING ENGLISH THROUGH LITERATURE

The gardener´s spirit

My name is Damon Hudson, but when this story happened my name was Stefan and I was 17 years old. I had one brother, Jimmy, and our parents were dead. We lived alone on a farm in a big house, in the village of Yorktown.

 Everybody said the Hudson’s gardener was hiding something. The people said that he was crazy and he used to speak to himself. On the other hand, I believed that he was a normal guy, with a dark story and a difficult past.  However, as the days passed I started to change my mind about him.

Everything started when I woke up in the middle of the night, I walked to the bathroom and when I finished washing my hands I saw my older brother lying on the floor, surrounded by blood. When I didn´t feel his heartbeat, I started crying. I felt so crushed because I couldn’t save him. Even though I was very scared and confused I got to call the police, but they didn´t answer me. Then I decided to ask for help so I phoned to my gardener and friend, Billy. Twenty minutes later he arrived in my house and we buried the body together.  I noticed that Billy was acting weird and sweating. I couldn`t sleep, so I decided to investigate. At  First, I looked inside my house to see if there was any clue that told me who was the murderer, but I  didn´t find anything. Then, I walked around the farm to look for traces of murderer because there was mud.  An hour later I found near the entrance to the farm what I was looking for:  I found boot’s footprints, there were very similar to the one´s Billy had left while we were burying my brother. So I realized that the murderer was Billy.

The next morning I questioned him. He said that he was innocent, he did not remember anything that could or couldn´t have happened the night before, or who had buried Jimmy. At first I thought he was lying, but then I decided to call my uncle, because he was a very wise man, and he told me that, long time ago, a family had died in that same house, and the spirit of the father stayed there, and every night he got into a man´s body and killed people related to that person… So I realized: Billy was possessed by that man´s spirit.

I practically ran down the stairs to find Billy, and a couple of hours later I saw him walking around a pig, a dead pig, holding a bottle of wine. I realized he was drunk. So I went running to exorcise him, but he escaped. I tried to chase him, but I didn´t got to make one step: he crashed into something that I couldn’t see, because I was very surprised. His heart stopped beating minutes later, and he passed away. The spirit went to hell with him, he deserved it. I didn´t cry that time: on the contrary, I grabbed a lighter and gasoline, set his body on fire and went home laughing like never before. My life changed completely after that happened. When the madness passed, I moved to the city and looked for a new job. I became a gardener, but not an ordinary one: a gardener like Billy.
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