by Lisa Tuttle
He shook his head emphatically and walked closer to the chest. ‘Baby,’ he said firmly.
‘No,’ she said sharply, seeing Julian’s hands straying to the lid. ‘What did I tell you about that? Let Mommy open it.’
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.
The baby was crying again. Helen’s eyes came open on darkness. The muffled sound came from the living room, from within the wooden chest. She clenched her teeth together. It would pass. The sound would fade and die away. She wasn’t going to get up this time and go to the living room and open the chest and assure herself it was still empty. She would wait it out. And tomorrow she would take the chest out and sell it to the first furniture-dealer she found, and worry about the lies or explanations for Rob later. She wondered if Julian was awake and listening, too. She could imagine him in the living room, crouching beside the dark bulk of the chest.
She shivered and moved closer to Rob’s warmth. When would it stop crying? How long did she have to listen to it?
It occurred to her then that if Rob could hear it she would not be alone, and she would not be so afraid. And he might understand. Heartened, she sat up and began to shake her husband, calling his name. Waking him in the mornings on the rare occasions when he overslept was hard enough; waking him in the middle of the night was all but impossible.
‘Rob! Wake up, wake up, wake up.’ She tickled him and blew in his ear, but got in response only the sluggish motion as he moved away from her, still holding on to sleep.
‘Rob, wake up. Wake up. This is important. Rob. Damn.’
Sighing noisily, Helen rose and went across the landing to the bathroom to fetch a wet towel. Drastic measures were called for. For a wonder, the crying had not died away. She hoped it would go on long enough for Rob to hear it. Returning from the bathroom, she glanced into Julian’s room and saw his bed was empty. Well, she knew where he was. Right now the important thing was to wake Rob.
The wet towel did the trick. At last he was moving, fending her off, eyelids fluttering to reveal flashes of blue.
‘Whatsamatta – whatsamatta – hey – Helen, what’s wrong?’
She let out a sigh of relief as he sat bolt-upright in bed, indisputably awake. She clutched his arm. ‘Hush. Listen. Tell me what you hear.’
He stared at her. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘Hush, just listen,’ she said. She could hear it still, but faintly – a distant, gasping cry that was fading.
Rob was silent for a moment frowning, then he shook his head. ‘What did you hear?’ he asked quietly. ‘Someone at the door? Someone in the house?’
Helen shook her head, despairing. If he hadn’t heard it, then he would not. The crying had faded altogether now; she could no longer hear it.
‘A baby,’ she said hopelessly. ‘A baby crying.’
Rob swore and threw himself back on the bed. ‘You couldn’t go and check on her yourself? You woke me for that?’
‘Not Alice,’ Helen said. ‘It was another baby crying. I’ve heard it the past two nights. The sound doesn’t come from Alice’s room. It’s in the living room. Inside the chest.’
Rob turned over, burying his face in the pillow, and did not answer. Helen had no heart to try to explain what she meant, to struggle with his anger and sleepy incomprehension. He had not heard and he would not understand. She lay back down, longing for the obliv
ion of sleep.
But she couldn’t stop thinking of the chest. It was almost as if it was calling to her. She wanted to go to it and raise the heavy lid and look inside yet again, to assure herself that there was nothing there. But she knew there was nothing inside. How many times did she have to look before she believed?
There is no baby there, she told herself. No crying, no newspapers, nothing. I will stay here in my bed and go back to sleep.
Helen heard Julian’s footsteps on the landing, going towards his room.
It’s over, she told herself. Even Julian knows that. And this is the last night I will suffer this. In the morning the chest goes.
She did not sleep again. She lay in bed until it was light, and the thought of the chest was like a suffocating weight. When she heard Julian stirring in his room, she knew it was time to get up. While she was in the bathroom, she heard the front door open and slam and knew that Julian had run outside, as he often did, to bring the morning paper in for his parents.
In the kitchen she went through the motions of making a pot of coffee while her mind puzzled over the fact that she had not yet heard a sound from Alice, and the oddity that Julian had not rushed into the kitchen, eager to be praised for bringing her the paper. Moving slowly, wearily, Helen went back to check on her family.
Rob, she saw from the doorway, was still sacked out, the alarm buzzing steadily and to no effect directly into his ear. The interruption of his sleep during the night meant she would have another battle to wake him, and he would be grumpy all day.
And Alice –
– was not in her crib.
Helen stared down, disbelieving, at the bare sheet. Alice was much too small to have got out of bed on her own. ‘Julian,’ she called, rushing into the living room. ‘Julian!’
He was sitting on the floor beside the open chest, the newspapers spread out around him. He was tearing the newspaper into strips and dropping them into the chest.
Already understanding, Helen stepped closer to the chest and looked down into it. It was no longer empty, but nearly half-filled with newspaper. The strips Julian had so industriously shredded lay like packing over and around the central bundle, something which had been wrapped in sheets of yesterday’s paper. All the paper Julian had found in the house had not been enough to make the interior of the chest an exact replica of the image he had seen, but it was quite enough to do the same job the second time. Only there was no smell now. It was too soon for that.
As Helen reached down into the chest for the bundle, Julian let out a loud noise of displeasure and stood up. It wasn’t supposed to be taken out; it was supposed to be hidden away in the chest forever. He tried, futilely, to get the bundle away from his mother.
She held it up out of reach. It was still warm. Her hands shaking, Helen began to unwind the many layers of newspaper that Julian had wrapped around her baby.
A FRIEND IN NEED
Photographs lie, like people, like memories. What would it prove if I found Jane’s face and mine caught together in a picture snapped nearly twenty years ago? What does it mean that I can’t find such a photograph?
I keep looking. My early life is so well documented by my father’s industrious camera work that Jane’s absence seems impossible. She was, after all, my best friend; and all my other friends – including one or two I can’t, at this distance, identify – are there in black and white as they run, sit, stand, scowl, cry, laugh, grimace, and play around me. Page after page of birthday parties, dressing-up games, bicycle riding, ice-cream eating, of me and my friends Shelly, Mary, Betty, Carl, Julie, Howard, Bubba, and Pam. But not Jane, who is there in all my memories.
Was she ever really there? Did I imagine her into existence? That’s what I thought for twelve years, but I don’t believe that anymore.
I saw her in the Houston airport today and I recognised her, although not consciously. What I saw was a small woman of about my own age with dark, curly hair. Something about her drew my attention.
We were both waiting for a Braniff flight from New York, already five minutes late. A tired-looking man in uniform went behind the counter, made a throat-clearing noise into the microphone, and announced that the flight would be an hour late.
I swore and heard another voice beside me, like an echo. I turned my head and met her eyes. We laughed together.
‘Are you meeting someone?’ she asked.
‘My mother.’
‘What a coincidence,’ she said flatly. ‘We’ve both got mothers coming to visit.’
‘No, actually my mother lives here. She went to New York on business. Your mother lives there?’
‘LongIsland,’ she said. It came out as one word; I recognised the New Yorker’s pronunciation.
‘That’s where you’re from?’
‘Never west of the Hudson until two years ago.’ Her sharp eyes caught my change of expression. ‘You’re surprised?’
‘No.’ I smiled and shrugged because the feeling of familiarity was becoming stronger. ‘I thought I knew you, that’s all. Like from a long time ago, grade school?’
‘I’m Jane Renzo,’ she said, thrusting out her hand. ‘Graduate of Gertrude Folwell Elementary School and Elmont High, class of ’73.’
Jane, Jane Renzo, I thought. Had I known someone by that name? There were distant resonances, but I could not catch them. ‘Cecily Cloud,’ I said, taking her hand.
‘What a great name!’
Our hands unclasped and fell apart. She was grinning; there was a hint of a joke in her eyes, but also something serious.
‘But it doesn’t ring any bells?’ I asked.
‘Oh, it does, it definitely does. Sets the bells a-ringing. It’s the name I always wanted. A name like a poem. I hated always being plain Jane.’ She made a face.
‘Better than Silly Cecily,’ I said. ‘The kids used to call me Silly until I got so used to it that it sounded like my real name. But I always hated it. I used to wish my parents had given me a strong, sensible name that couldn’t be mispronounced or misspelled or made fun of – like Jane.’
Jane. Memory stirred, but it was like something deep in a forest. I couldn’t get a clear sight of it.
‘We all have our own miseries, I guess,’ she said. She looked at her watch and then at me, a straightforward, friendly look. ‘We’ve got time to kill before this flight gets here. You want to go and sit down somewhere and have some coffee?’
The rush of pleasure I felt at her suggestion was absurdly intense, inappropriate, as if she were a long-lost friend, returned to me when I had nearly given up hope of seeing her again. Trying to understand it, I said, ‘Are you sure we haven’t met before?’
She laughed – a sharp, defensive sound.
Hastily, afraid of losing our easy rapport, I said, ‘It’s only that I feel I know you. Or you remind me of someone. You never came to Houston when you were a kid?’
She shook her head.
‘College?’
‘Montclair State.’ We had begun to walk together in search of a coffee shop, down the long, windowless, carpeted, white-lit corridor. It was like being inside a spaceship, I thought, or in an underground city of the distant, sterile future. We were in Houston, but we might as easily have been in New York, Los Angeles, or Atlanta for all the cues our surroundings gave us. It was a place set apart from the real world, untouched by time or season, unfettered by the laws of nature.
‘It’s like the future,’ I said.
Jane looked at the curving walls and indirect lighting and gave me an appreciative smile. ‘It is kind of Star Treky,’ she said.
We came to rest in a small, dim, overpriced restaurant which was almost empty, in contrast to the bar on one side and the fast-food cafeteria on the other. I saw by my watch that it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner. We ordered coffee, causing the middle-aged waitress to sigh heavily an
d stump away.
‘Actually, I’d rather have a shot of Tullamore Dew,’ said Jane. ‘Or a large snifter of brandy.’
‘Did you want – ’
She shook her head. ‘No, no. Better not. It’s just that the thought of seeing my mother again has me wanting reinforcement. But I’d be less capable of dealing with her drunk than I am sober.’
I looked at her curiously because she had struck me from the first as a capable, almost fearless person. ‘You don’t get along with your mother?’
‘Something like that. I moved out here to get away from her, and she still won’t let me be. She calls me every night. Sometimes she cries. She won’t believe that I’m grown up and that I have my own life to live, a life I’ve chosen. She’s still waiting for me to give up this silliness and move back home. My sisters got away because they got married. But in her eyes I’m still a child.’
The waitress returned, setting our coffees down before us with unnecessary emphasis. I watched the dark brown liquid slide over the rim of my cup, to be caught in the shallow white bowl of the saucer.
‘You’re lucky if you and your mother can relate to each other as people,’ Jane said.
I nodded, although I had never given the matter any thought; I’d simply taken it for granted. ‘We have disagreements, but we’re pretty polite about them,’ I said.
This made Jane laugh. ‘Polite,’ she said. ‘Oh, my.’ She peeled the foil top off a plastic container of coffee whitener. ‘You’re so lucky . . . to have had a happy childhood and a mother who knows how to let go.’
It seemed at first acceptable, the way she so calmly passed judgment on my life, as if she knew it; then, suddenly strange.
‘I think I had a fairly normal childhood,’ I said. ‘Very ordinary. At least, it always seemed that way to me.’ It had been suburban, middle-class, and sheltered. I saw my experiences reflected in the lives of my friends, and I found it hard to believe that Jane had come from a background terribly dissimilar. ‘You were unhappy as a child?’
Jane hesitated, stirring her coffee from black to brown. Then she said, ‘I don’t remember.’