The Travelling Bag

by Susan Hill

  ‘There isn’t a lamp on,’ he said, ‘You must have made a mistake – it was probably the street light, reflecting on the glass.’

  ‘Oh. Reflecting on the glass. Yes, of course.’

  At supper, Wallace pushed his food around his plate but ate nothing. The next morning he had dark circles beneath his eyes. He did not touch his breakfast.

  ‘Let him stay off. It’s Friday, he’s probably developing a cold. Today at home and then the weekend will see it off.’

  The boy lay on the kitchen couch, covered in a blanket. ‘Is Solange coming back here forever?’

  Belinda was writing up lesson notes at the table. Outside the sky was sulphurous. A wind had got up.

  ‘What do you mean? She isn’t coming back here at all. She died, Wallace.’

  His small face was peaky pale, eyes large and anxious. ‘She was here in the night.’

  ‘Of course she wasn’t.’

  ‘I knew you wouldn’t believe me,’ Wallace said, but then squeezed his eyes tightly shut and would not answer any of her questions.

  Several times that night, while a storm broke overhead and his room was vivid with blue-white lightning, Wallace woke crying out with fear and pushing something away from him with raised arms.

  ‘She did go into his room that time,’ Norman said. ‘He’s remembering that, dreaming about it. These things take a while to fade.’

  After Wallace, Fern refused to eat, though she apparently had no nightmares and did not appear ill at first. But then she began to lose weight, so rapidly that her bones gleamed beneath the skin.

  ‘Bit of a mystery.’ The GP rolled down his sleeves. ‘She’s perfectly sound, everything as it should be, heart, lungs, all that, but I’ll run a couple of tests, cover all bases.’

  It was the same with Wallace. All tests were normal.

  ‘A week in the sun – Madeira, Tenerife, that sort of thing?’ Though he sounded doubtful. But neither of them could take the time out. Only Laurie continued hungry and cheerful.

  Wallace woke two or three times every night screaming, and begged not to be left, so that in the end they put a mattress for him on their own bedroom floor. Fern never woke, but had become skeletal. And then the smell came back, filtering rankly into every room, together with a thin pus-coloured smoke that slipped through cracks in the door frames. They choked on it.

  ‘I can’t live here, I can’t stand it any longer and isn’t that exactly what she wants? So let her have it, let her win.’

  ‘She?’

  ‘You know, you’ve always known, for God’s sake.’

  ‘I don’t understand any of it,’ Norman said. His face looked grey, the whites of his eyes jaundiced.

  ‘We don’t have to understand, we just have to go.’

  ‘But why would she want to hurt us? If you’re implying that she is haunting us, why? Besides, it isn’t possible.’

  The following week he had to travel to a conference in Newcastle, staying away for two nights. The thought of being alone in the house paralysed Belinda with such fear that she could not swallow her food.

  At nine on the first evening, she telephoned but got a voicemail.

  ‘Please will you come round – or anyway, ring me back? Terrible things are happening here, we are being … we are …’

  As she put down the receiver, she heard the door of the front room open and close. She ought to go upstairs to the children but dared not even cross the hall. Footsteps, accompanied by the tap of two sticks, went instead, slowly along, tap-tap, slowly up, bump, bump. If it had not been for the thought of the children she would have lost all courage and cowered alone in the kitchen, but the woman, or the ghost of the woman, whoever was menacing this house and this family, was on her way to them.

  Belinda flung open the kitchen door.

  ‘Get down the stairs, get down, get away from here. What are you trying to do? What do you want from us? What did we ever do but give you a home? Why do you hate us? Why do you want to harm my children?’

  The silence was absolute, as if felt had been stuffed and pressed deep in her ears.

  ‘What do you want?’

  The silence thickened. Her limbs, which had seemed immoveable, freed themselves and she flew up the stairs. No one stood in her way. The terrible silence was here too.

  She had left the door of her bedroom ajar. The two older children were sleeping there, curled to face one another on their separate small mattresses. They were pale, and stick-thin.

  As she backed out of the room, Belinda saw the shadow on the opposite wall. She stopped dead. The shadow shifted very slightly.

  ‘Get away from here, leave us alone.’ Her voice came out as a strange hiss.

  The shadow stirred again, like a tree in the wind, but did not go. The silence was like the silence of deep snow. She could not hear the children breathing. Slowly, the shadow broke up, like a reflection in water hit by a stone, then dissolved and faded, until the wall was blank again.

  There had been a faint trace of the old smell but that too had evaporated. She felt calmer, sure that for now, all was well again. Nothing troubled the house. The silence had become simply quietness, through which normal sounds filtered – a car in the street, the water pipes, the boiler firing in the kitchen, Wallace clearing his throat.

  It was the noise of the doorbell shrilling that startled her, so that she leapt in fright. She went back to the children but they had not stirred. The bell rang again, for longer.

  ‘Who is it?’ She did not remove the door chain.

  ‘Pastor Lewis. I got your message …’

  Bitterly cold air streamed in when she opened the door, as if there was a frost.

  ‘Whatever is it? You look shocked out of your wits Belinda, come into the warm.’ The familiar kitchen, humming quietly, restored her.

  ‘I’ll make us a drink. Do you prefer tea, Pastor, I can’t remember …?’

  ‘You sit down, I’ll make us tea. I’m sure I can find everything.’

  She was glad to sit.

  ‘Now tell me what this is about while I do the tea.’

  He listened, said nothing, only let the story come out, in broken phrases at first and then in a stream, everything – it astonished her how much she remembered, detail after detail.

  He set down the pot and cups.

  ‘Drink it hot and sweet.’

  ‘I don’t usually take …’

  ‘This is not a usual situation.’

  Everything that had swirled round her mind, like fragments in a shaken kaleidoscope, began to settle. A picture formed.

  ‘It sounds like madness.’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘Pastor Lewis, you talked to Solange, you seemed to get on quite well.’

  ‘I was on my guard, all the same.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I’m not easily taken in but of course I wanted things to resolve themselves. I wanted her to see some reason.’

  ‘But she didn’t, did she?’

  ‘It would appear not.’

  ‘When she died, I felt as if we had come out into the sunshine after living under a great blackness. I felt light as a feather.’

  ‘I believe in evil, Belinda … or why would the Lord’s prayer have us ask to be delivered from it? We must believe in it.’

  ‘Oh I do. She is evil, more so now than when she was alive. There is a pure evil now, isn’t there, she need hold nothing back.’

  ‘Evil, and the powers of evil, yes. But perhaps not ghosts, Belinda.’

  He lifted his cup of tea. And then the sounds came.

  First, footsteps ran down the stairs and across the hall. The front door opened, letting in a wild gust of wind. The Pastor’s cup smashed into the saucer, breaking it, sending scalding tea across the table. The front door slammed shut and for a moment the house was absolutely still and silent again, before the crying began from upstairs.

  Fern was half awake, sitting up and making a slight moaning sound, but she settled aga
in easily. Wallace was asleep, buried half under the covers, his pale hair sticking out round his head. They both looked thin and still.

  ‘They’re fine, Belinda, whatever disturbed them – the wind most probably. They’re not harmed. Your nerves are like bare wires.’

  ‘Why is she doing this? How is she doing it? Look at them. They barely eat, they have no life in them. They go about like flickering candles.’

  Pastor Lewis stood looking at the children gravely, his face working, as if he were struggling with something and torn apart.

  ‘I am not of a church that will perform exorcism,’ he said after a long time, ‘but it may be that we should look into it, in this case.’

  A great relief took hold of her.

  ‘Now you kiss your little ones and tuck them in. It will be morning before you know it.’

  She was more grateful to him than she could express, thanking him again and again as she went from the elder two into Laurie’s room.

  Her scream stopped Pastor Lewis dead and froze his limbs, froze his nerves and the marrow in his bones. Laurie’s bed was empty.

  They raced round the whole house, calling out, but the house did not contain him.

  Clever, cunning, Solange had taken the one thing she wanted but which she had, until the last moment, pretended to ignore.

  He was never found, nor was any speck of physical evidence, no foot- or finger-print, not the least trace of any human being, other than those of the living family. Pastor Lewis struggled on at the chapel for some weeks before breaking down in both body and mind, and, for all anyone knew, in spirit.

  Norman and Belinda moved, though not far away, to a bland box of a house, which was quite new and so held no past or memories. Not that the absence eased them or applied any balm to their hearts.

  But Wallace and Fern began to eat again and to grow, to have colour in their cheeks and flesh on their bones. Solange had done with them, playthings and decoys as they had been.

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