There was very little to do to the building, Joanna thought, as she walked around the house. It would be ideal as her new school. It was 1980 and like many other houses in the area, it was about 70 years old. With a bit of redecorating it would do just fine.

There was an elderly couple who lived upstairs and they kept most of the garden, leaving her just a small yard and access to a small cellar. But after all, that was all she needed.

She certainly didn’t want the trouble of looking after the garden, and the elderly couple had perfectly adequate green fingers.

She hired a painter to do most of the decorating and work was progressing quite smoothly. One evening, though, she was rather surprised to find him waiting outside on the pavement for her when she arrived. He was covered in plaster and splashes of whitewash. His bags were packed, lying on the ground by his feet, and he was obviously quite upset.

“Gianni, what happened? Don’t tell me you already have to leave today?” Joanna wailed, knowing from experience that workmen have their own inexplicable timetable when it comes to starting and finishing jobs.

“No, sinjura. No. I can’t work here anymore. I’m sorry, sinjura, but I can’t. You have ghosts here. I had better not tell you what I saw but, I tell you, there is no way you will get me back in there,” he sobbed.

He said he had run out of the house so fast that he had knocked over a woman and her pushchair on the pavement.

Joanna sighed. This was one problem she could do without. She had dozens of other things to do but she managed to persuade Gianni to go back and continue working by promising to stay with him all the time he was there.

She spent several days sitting in the rooms with him while he worked, at his insistence. She knitted to pass the time, feeling quite comfortable in the house. She was completely unconvinced by his story and, when he finished the job, she was irritated that she had had to waste so much time because of what was obviously a fervent imagination.

He refused to tell her what he had seen. She concluded that he had probably heard noises coming from the cellar. The thought crossed her mind that it was a closed room and that no voices from outside the building could have filtered through. But she soon dismissed her doubts and didn’t give the matter another thought, anxious to get on with all the other work she needed to get through before the school opened.

She couldn’t afford to let her imagination get the better of her

Years went by without incident. The school prospered and students soon filled all the rooms. They started to run out of space, especially for storage.

The cellar could only be reached from the yard, down four or five steps, so it was not really very convenient, but eventually they were forced to start using it as a storeroom. A louvred door allowed air to circulate and there wasn’t much damp.

Then the couple upstairs started to complain that there were rats in the cellar. Joanna was very sceptical; after all, she had never found any droppings and none of the paper and books stored there showed any signs of vermin. But to humour them, she put some rat poison down and pulled the louvred doors shut, pulling an old stone bench across the door. She hated rat poison and was terrified that some student might go into the cellar and find it.

But one of her teachers was quite surprised when she saw her dragging the heavy bench.

“But if you put that there, what is going to happen to the man who stays down there?” she asked.

Joanna looked at her blankly.

 “Stays where?”

“The old man, you know, the one who wears a checked shirt...Well, I say he stays there; he is always working down there, pottering around,” she explained.

Joanna was stunned. Her teacher explained that she saw the man regularly. She just assumed that he worked for the people upstairs. There was obviously nothing menacing about him – the teacher seemed to regard him as quite a benevolent character.

Who could the man be? Joanna knew that the couple upstairs did their own gardening and, after all, the cellar was full of the school stores. But she checked with the people upstairs anyway. No, they didn’t have any handyman or gardener.

“And anyway, even if we did, why should he use your cellar?” they asked.

Her first thought was to keep the story quiet. The last thing she wanted was to alarm the students. She persuaded the teacher that the man had only been there temporarily and tried to forget about it. She herself was often alone in the house in the evenings and it had such a happy, sunny feel. She couldn’t afford to let her imagination get the better of her.

Months went by. A student was sitting down with her in her office late one afternoon, waiting to be picked up after a lesson, and they ran out of small chat. The girl tried to find something to talk about to fill the silence before it became awkward.

“I haven’t seen the gardener for a while,” she said.

Joanna did not look up from her paperwork and merely mumbled acknowledgement. But as she realised what the girl had said, her heart sank.

“Gardener? Who do you mean?”

“The one that used to come to water the garden. You know. The one who always wore a checked shirt. Such a nice man. He always used to smile when he saw me. Did he retire? He wasn’t that old, though. Perhaps he’s sick or something,” she twittered on.

Joanna almost sighed out aloud in relief when she heard the girl’s mother hoot her horn outside. She sat there in the quiet building for a while, musing over the man who had been seen by so many people. A man she knew did not exist, not in flesh and blood anyway.

She never found out any more about him. The school remained in use for over two decades but she never heard of any more encounters with the strange man in the checked shirt.

This is the eighth in a series of short stories The Sunday Times of Malta is running every Sunday. It is taken from The Unexplained Plus (Allied Publications) by Vanessa Macdonald. The first edition was published in 2001 and reprinted twice. It was republished, with added stories, as The Unexplained Plus. The Maltese version of the book, Ta’ Barra Minn Hawn (Klabb Kotba Maltin), is available from all leading bookstores and stationers and from www.bdlbooks.com.