It was a strange house, the house at the end of Dumbledore Lane.

For one thing, it was painted pink. For another, the garden reached nearly to the second floor, with hundreds of colors and plants that intertwined in strange ways. It was chaos and yet harmony, and it looked nothing like the other gardens, with their sparse rose bushes and chemical green grass.

Yes, it was a strange place, a place unlike other places, the house at the end of Dumbledore Lane.

There would come a time in the future where the word Dumbledore meant something specific, when it called to a particular memory in the human subconscious, but this was 1971 so it didn’t yet. Dumbledore didn’t mean anything, apart from being an old English word for bumblebee. It was just the name of a street. The street on which Alice Peregrine Smith lived. The street on which there was a strange old house at the very far end.

Alice Peregrine had just moved to the town, to her house, to Dumbledore Lane. Now that she lived on Dumbledore Lane, Alice waited for the whisper to come back. The whisper that said, you’re not really here.

When Alice had lived in the city, this whisper had been loud.

Her life in the city had been flavored like a ten-year-old butterscotch ball covered in hair buried underneath a sofa. Something had gone stagnant a long time ago. Her life had become dusty in a way that was hard to explain. As if the pictures on the walls had said, you’re not really here, and Alice had agreed. All the time, when she was at the dinner table, when she doing her homework, when she was brushing her teeth, she was secretly somewhere else. Her parents called her obedient and were content to leave it at that.

The trouble was, the place where Alice secretly lived was not a good place at all. She lived inside a memory.

Alice would look at pictures in her father’s medical books, and this was a mistake, because she often found things she wished she could unsee. And yet somehow, all these pictures were not as bad as the memory she had locked away inside of her. It was as if she tested the badness of what she knew but had forgotten by comparing it to these photographs of surgery and human harm. She began to keep track of the worst photographs. She catalogued them. They were her collection. Alice had several photographs that she would sometimes stare at when she was home alone. She was a twisted child, of course. Her favorite past time was to frighten herself while seated on a hideous brown tweed sofa, alone in a dark apartment that smelled of dryer lint, alone with only a sickly yellow lamp to light her photographs of surgery.

The truth was, the bloody photographs weren’t so bad. It was only black and white, after all. The worst photograph was of a boy who came back from the war without a chin.

This photograph was in a book about plastic surgery. The doctors fixed the boy with no chin, and wasn’t that nice. Now he had a chin. These photographs showed before and after. These photographs were the worst, however, not because of how frightening it was to see a human boy without a chin, but because after he got his chin put back in, he didn’t look any better.

Alice recognized the look in his eyes. It was the look of a human who was just… gone. Who had seen so much evil, he had died. He didn’t need a chin. He needed his soul back.

But it was not going to come back. The only things that come back, Alice thought, are terrible whispers.

Now that she lived on Dumbledore Lane, Alice waited for the whisper. The whisper that said, you’re not really here.

But the trouble was, sometimes she was here. She left the memory and looked at the real world. Only because she was curious about the house at the end of Dumbledore Lane.

One afternoon she walked down to the house and introduced herself to the owner. He was an old man, a very old man, and he was aggravating. At once, he reached out to shake her hand, like she was a person, and then he insisted on making her tea, which made her feel like he lived in a world that wasn’t real, a world in which people were nice to each other.

All told, he was immensely irritating. He had had a marvelous life, clearly. He was out of his mind. He laughed when he saw bees, and he didn’t even laugh like someone who has heard a punchline, he laughed like someone who’s simply delighted by the arrival of a joke. Ridiculous. He was silly. He was a silly old rich man—not rich on money, but rich on having only ever seen good things, his entire life. He lived in a nursery. Alice hated him. That was the only reason he could be so happy. Because he had never seen the real world.

And yet Alice liked him, a little, because when he looked into her eyes she felt like a person, and that had never happened to her before.

His name was Rupert. All summer, she helped him in his garden. They didn’t say much, but they had tea every afternoon. Finally, Alice decided it was time.

The next afternoon, she walked over to his house carrying her book of surgery.

“I’ve come to show you the worst thing I’ve ever seen,” Alice said.

“Oh?” said Rupert.

She thunked the book down onto her knees. She flipped to the photograph of the boy with no chin. They stared at the photograph together without speaking. Alice trailed her finger to the boy’s eyes, the boy who had seen too much, just like Alice had seen too much. This was her proof, her scientific discovery. She was a twisted little child, and she had proven through research the fatal truth about humankind. Now, she shared her research, in a firm, quiet voice.

“When you die inside,” Alice said, “you don’t come back.”

Rupert did not say a word. He stood up and silently went into the house.

Alice was torn. She was torn between being smug, because she’d been right all along, and between heartbreak because she had broken Rupert’s heart. She had wanted him to face the facts. Now she felt as if the darkness in the world had grown a little larger, and she didn’t know what to do.

Rupert returned with a photograph framed in gold. Alice liked the way the gold frame was dented and tarnished, as if the old man had let it live out its life in peace, as a quiet thing instead of an ornament. For some reason, it made Alice think of a cemetery, something mossy and misted over, an untouched frame that housed the dead.

Rupert set down the photograph.

It was a portrait of the boy with no chin, but it was a different photograph, one taken a few years later.

“That is me,” Rupert said.

Alice looked up in alarm. He was a horrible adult. He was cruel and petty and worst of all—patronizing. He was telling her a lie. He was telling her a lie so she could keep believing Santa Claus myths about the truth inside of everything. He wanted her to be happy for his own enjoyment. She would never speak to him again.

But when she stared into his eyes, when her gaze traveled to the odd scars on his jaw line, her stomach dropped, and suddenly she was terribly angry, because she had never expected to be surprised by good like this.

“It’s not!” Alice said. “It’s not you!”

“When you die inside,” Rupert said, “you are born again.”

They just sat there together on the wooden steps, and they stared at the picture of the boy with no chin. Bees droned past them. They sat in silence, they sat in the garden, they sat in the house at the end of Dumbledore Lane.