A Nest of Nightmares

So now she had to. It was foolish to be afraid of opening the chest, Helen thought. She had opened it before and she knew there was nothing in it. She turned on the lamp, and Julian flinched and squinted and put his hands to his eyes at the sudden flash of soft yellow light.

Helen raised the lid. She saw shadows, the faded yellow and black of old newspapers. Something deep inside that paper nest stirred faintly, and the packing rustled and settled around it.

The chest was empty. Helen stared into it, not trusting her eyes. Dark and deep and empty. She put her hand in and felt the smooth wood of the walls. Bile rose in her throat at the faint whiff of decay, but whether she had smelled it or only remembered smelling it, Helen could not have said.

Beside her Julian was silent, also staring into the chest.

‘You see?’ she said, making an effort. ‘It’s empty.’

Julian nodded and looked up at her gravely.

‘There’s nothing in the chest,’ Helen said. ‘It was only a dream. Now let’s go back to bed.’

But it had been no dream, she thought, taking Julian’s soft little hand in her own. They had both heard the baby cry.

The chest is haunted, Helen thought as she climbed back in bed beside her sleeping husband. There was a kind of relief in the thought: the problem had been identified. But her spirits sank again at the thought of trying to explain her certainty to Rob. He would be scornful of her silly fears; he would not understand. And yet she had to tell him, she had to make him believe her, because she would not go on living with that chest. There was something evil about it. The past, whatever its past had been, still lived on inside it, manifested in a baby’s cry, a foul odour, and the teasing visual image of the chest packed with newspaper.

How to make Rob understand? She could already hear his objections, his refusal to sell the chest. It was a beautiful piece of furniture and they had paid a lot for it. Was she crazy?

Helen tossed and turned, wide awake, trying to find a way out. Perhaps she should say nothing to Rob and simply get rid of the chest while he was at work. Afterwards, she would face his anger as the lesser of two evils. At least then the chest would be gone.

By morning, Helen had neither slept nor decided what to do. She watched Rob as he rose and moved around the room getting dressed.

‘Do you believe things can be haunted?’ she asked him.

He gave her a quizzical look. ‘You mean like a house?’

‘A house, a room, a piece of furniture.’

‘I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘All sorts of people have seen them, you know. At least, something they call ghosts. Don’t you think that something, like a strong personality or a violent occurrence, could leave an impression, like a recording, on the place where it happened?’

He shrugged and sat down on the edge of the bed, buttoning his shirt. ‘I heard some kind of theory about that. That ghosts are like photographs or movies or recordings that receptive people can tune in to.’

‘Do you believe it?’

‘I don’t know. I’ve never seen one myself.’

‘What if we lived in a haunted house. If we saw a ghost. Would you want to move?’

‘Well, that depends on the ghost, and the house. How would this ghost make itself known?’

‘It might cry and howl and wake us up at night.’

He laughed and patted her blanket-covered leg. ‘Wake you up at night. I don’t think it would bother me much.’

‘It wouldn’t bother you? To hear it crying all the time?’ She was trembling and moved further beneath the covers, hoping he wouldn’t notice.

Rob shrugged and stood up. ‘I don’t think I’d sell the house on account of it. It doesn’t sound like a problem the magnitude of our plumbing.’

‘But what if it did something else? It might be dangerous,’ Helen said. Rob was leaving the room, tired of the abstract discussion. Tears came to her eyes and she buried her face in the pillow. It was hopeless. He wouldn’t understand. He wouldn’t agree.

She dragged through the day after he had left, wanting a nap but not daring to leave Julian unattended. It seemed that every time her back was turned he escaped to the living room where she would find him raising the lid for another look inside, or pressing his ear against the chest, or simply standing before it, staring intently, as if it told him things no one else could comprehend. She could almost hear Rob scoffing at her for imagining things, but she knew Julian’s interest in the chest was neither normal nor safe. She knew she had to get rid of the chest.