A Nest of Nightmares

THE MEMORY OF WOOD

It was a beautiful chest. The hard, dark old wood gleamed in the sunlight, looking rich and exotic against the bright green grass.

Helen and Rob saw it at the same time and glanced at each other swiftly, smiling in shared delight. Helen shifted the baby in her arms, looked down to see that Julian had not strayed, and followed her husband. They made their way among the furniture, the bits and pieces of a life scattered on the big front lawn, towards the thing they had, in that instant, made up their minds to buy.

‘It’s lovely,’ she said softly, watching her husband run his hand across the smooth grain of the lid.

‘It’ll cost,’ he said. His voice was dreamy.

‘But we need it. Don’t we?’

‘We could keep blankets in it,’ he said. ‘Let me see how it opens.’ He crouched on the grass and she moved near, standing over him. The chest wasn’t locked; the hinged lid came up smoothly and quietly under his hands.

Helen clutched the baby closer and drew back, nearly stumbling. Her stomach twisted. The stench was horrible: sweet and rotten, with something nasty underneath. She made a small, despairing sound.

Rob looked up at her, frowning. ‘I thought I – ’

‘That smell.’

‘Yes . . .’ He was still frowning, puzzled. ‘I thought I caught a whiff of something horrible, but – ’ He sniffed loudly, obviously, moving his head above the open chest. ‘Nothing, now.’

‘Are you sure?’ Cautiously, she breathed through her nose again, and smelled nothing unusual, but she hesitated to move closer, to lean into the chest as Rob was doing.

‘I’m sure,’ he said.

She looked down at the chest, her pleasure broken.

Rob lowered the lid gently and stood up. ‘It could go in the living room, beneath the Clarke print. Next to the red chair.’

‘People would use it as a table then, put drinks down on it and spoil the finish.’

He smiled at her. ‘We could put out coasters when we serve drinks.’

‘Take baby for a minute, would you?’ She flexed her arms when the weight was gone, and bent over the chest, stroking it with her finger tips. The wood was as sleek and satin-smooth as she had imagined. ‘Whose estate was this?’ she asked. ‘Somebody really took care of this chest. She must have rubbed it with oil and polished it every week to get the wood like this.’

‘Some old woman who just died,’ Rob said, glancing up at the elaborate gingerbread of the house. ‘She was all alone, no family, no children. An old maid.’

Helen hesitated, wanting to turn her back and walk away. She told herself she was being silly. Her fingers found the edge of the lid and she lifted.

They both sniffed, and looked at each other. They smelled nothing but the sun, the grass, the faint scents of musty furnishings exposed to the open air, the perfumes of people drifting around them.

‘Maybe,’ said Rob.

‘We didn’t imagine it.’

‘No, but maybe it wasn’t the chest at all. It might have been a coincidence that we smelled it when I first lifted the lid. Maybe it was someone passing by – ’

Helen giggled. ‘Anyone who smells like that and is still walking around – !’ She lowered the lid.

‘It’ll cost,’ said Rob. ‘But not like it would if we bought it from a dealer.’

Julian let out a crow of pleasure and began running away at top speed on his fat, stumpy legs. Helen looked around and saw that he had sighted a leashed poodle. She winced, seeing his inevitable tumble a split second before it happened, and started after him, to comfort him. But Julian took the fall with his usual uncomplaining good nature; it was baby Alice, safe in her father’s arms, who began to scream as Rob bent down to examine the chest again.

They spent more than they could realistically afford, but less – they were certain – than the beautifully made chest was worth. They were well pleased with themselves as they drove home from the estate sale, the chest in the back seat with Julian.

None of their furniture had been bought new; all of it had come as hand-me-downs from family or had been bought at garage sales, auctions, flea markets, and junk shops. What had started as economic necessity had grown into a point of pride. No shoddy, mass-produced contemporary furniture for Helen and Rob. They favoured dark wood, intricately carved high-backed sofas and chairs with velvet cushions, glass-fronted bookcases, and ancient, hand-made wardrobes. The chest was simple, but old and beautiful. It would fit in with the rest of their furniture.

When they had put it in place that night, in the living room near the red-velvet chair and the ornately tasselled floor lamp, beneath the black-and-white lithograph of a man on a lonely road, Helen opened the lid. Her hand flew to her mouth and she gagged at the rich and rotten smell of something dead. With an effort, Helen held back the rush of sickness, but tears came to her eyes.

‘Rob,’ she called weakly.

He came at once with the beers he had fetched to toast their new treasure. ‘Darling, what’s wrong?’

‘The smell,’ she said hopelessly.

Rob went to the chest and leaned into it. Watching, Helen felt the sudden urge to pull him back to safety. He looked around, shrugging. ‘Honestly, darling, I can’t smell anything. Some old dust, maybe.’

She let herself breathe again. He was right; the smell was gone. But it must be lurking within the chest, every opening releasing it.

‘It was the same horrible smell,’ she said. ‘The minute I opened the chest, there it was.’

He gazed into the chest thoughtfully; put in one hand to stroke the interior. ‘I suppose it could be something . . . maybe some food that went bad, or maybe a rat got inside and died there long ago. Wood holds a smell for a long time.’

Helen nodded bleakly. The odour, brief though it had been, had disturbed her profoundly. ‘I wish we hadn’t bought it. I can’t bear that smell. I don’t want it in the house.’

Rob frowned and said, ‘You wanted it as much as I did. We agreed on it.’

‘I know. I fell in love with the way it looked. But I didn’t know – honestly, Rob, I can’t live with it!’

‘Do you smell anything now?’

She shook her head. ‘No, but I did when I first opened it. I know I did. And if that’s going to happen every time I open it – ’

‘It won’t. We’ll fumigate it. We’ll clean it out with disinfectant and then put some of those whaddaya­callems inside. Sachets. Oranges stuffed with cloves. I used to make them for my aunts every Christmas, and they’d put them in the big trunk where they kept the quilts. It’s a great smell, that orange and clove among the blankets.’ He looked at her earnestly, eyes compelling her agreement. Weakly, to avoid an argument, Helen nodded. But she didn’t believe his prediction. That horrible smell was somehow trapped in the chest, and it would not go away. Wood had a memory for smell that soap, disinfectant, and perfume could not erase.

She thought of the chest of drawers that was now in the baby’s room. She had inherited it in college, when her roommate left to get married. Helen never knew whether Jenny had spilled perfume in the bottom drawer or if the smell had simply lingered from the clothes she had kept there – in either case, although Helen had cleaned out the drawer with soap and water and lined it with fresh paper, whenever she pulled out that bottom drawer she was tempted to look around, thinking that Jenny had come into the room. The fragrance was transmitted from the drawer to whatever clothes she kept there, although it was faint and did not last long. But the scent never left the wood, although it had been nearly six years since the chest had been Jenny’s.

Wood remembers, she thought, and as if he had read her mind, Rob said, ‘Look, as long as any of the bad smell lingers, we don’t have to use it to store anything. It’s still a beautiful-looking chest, even if we don’t use it. We don’t have to keep opening the lid. But I’m sure it won’t last. Tomorrow why don’t you teach Julian how to make a pomander out of an orange and cloves?’

She smiled at him, relieved that they weren’t going to argue after all. ‘Julian will only stick the cloves up his nose,’ she said. ‘If he doesn’t eat them first.’ She closed the lid.

A baby’s crying woke Helen in the night. This was not unusual. What was unusual was that she didn’t think it was Alice crying, and the sound didn’t come from the nursery. Some odd trick of acoustics, or perhaps her sleepy mind, made the sound seem to come from the direction of the living room.

Nevertheless, Helen got up, tied her dressing-gown around her, and went into the next room to check. She found Alice sleeping soundly. As she looked down at the sleeping baby, she heard the crying again, distant and muffled.

A feeling of dread pushed at her heart. Moving slowly, she followed the sound. It had died away again by the time she stood in the living room, but it seemed still to ring in the air. She turned on a lamp and looked around the room, her eyes and attention drawn by the chest. It was no longer beautiful, but dark and menacing. Hastily, Helen switched off the light. Darkness was better. She didn’t want to see the chest and think about opening it. She waited, praying she would not hear the crying again, praying that it had not come from the chest.

She waited long minutes in the darkness and the silence, and then went back to bed. In the morning she decided it had been a dream.

Helen was ironing in the kitchen half-listening to the soap opera on the television set out of sight in the next room. The baby was in her mechanical swing, creaking back and forth beside her, and Julian was playing in the living room. Helen’s mind was just registering the fact that her son was being too quiet when from the living room came a soft but definite thud, and Julian made the noise he made to signify disgust or displeasure. Alice’s face puckered and she began to cry. Helen caught a whiff of something rotten.

‘Julian,’ she said sharply. She set down the iron and rushed into the living room, ignoring the baby’s cries.

She found her son standing before the open chest, a look of intense interest on his face as he stared down into it. Apprehension twisted her stomach and she caught Julian’s arms and pulled him away from whatever it was that so fascinated him. He cried out his annoyance and hit her ineffectually, squirming to get free. Helen held him tightly and turned him away from the chest. Then, curious, about what in that empty wooden box could have caught his attention, she turned back for a look.

It wasn’t empty. For just a moment she saw – or thought she saw – the chest stuffed with bundles of old, yellowed newspapers. But when she frowned and began to move closer, she saw that of course it was empty. There was nothing inside it. The chest was empty as it had been when they brought it home the day before.

Helen turned her attention to her wriggling son. ‘Julian,’ she said, trying to keep her voice calm but firm. ‘That’s a no-no. You must not open the chest. Understand me? The chest is not a toy. You are not to open it. You must not play with it. Understand?’

He scowled up at her, obviously disagreeing but finding his small vocabulary inadequate to tell her so. Alice, in the kitchen, was still crying. Helen sighed.

‘Go on and play with your toys, Julian. Not the chest. I mean it.’

She let go of him and went to close the lid. For a moment she stared down into the chest, wondering about the newspapers. What had made her imagine the chest was filled with newspapers, something wrapped in newspaper and packed away in the chest? No answer occurred to her, so she closed the lid, then went to see about the baby.

Alice simply wanted to be held and, after a few minutes of attention, she had calmed down and was agreeable to being put back in her swing. Helen went back to the living room to check on Julian.

And found him, as she had more than half-expected, again standing before the open chest, clearly fascinated by whatever he imagined he saw inside.

‘Julian.’

Obviously he did not hear the threat in her voice, for he looked up brightly, blue eyes shining and round face puckered with interest. ‘Baby,’ he said.

‘Julian, what did I tell you about that chest?’ She advanced upon him.

The bright interest went out of his face, and he looked stubborn. ‘Me see,’ he said firmly.

‘It’s not a toy, Julian. I told you before you are not to play with it. You must not open it. Don’t open it again.’ She shut the lid.

‘Me see,’ he said again, his chubby hands creeping for the edge of the lid.

‘No.’ Helen caught his hands and held them. ‘No. Leave the chest alone, Julian. I mean it. You’re going to be in big trouble if you do that again.’ She looked into his stubborn face and knew he would go to the chest as soon as her back was turned. Threats did not work with him, so she would have to distract him.

‘Well, big boy,’ she said cheerfully, hoisting him up in her arms. ‘Why don’t you play with your old mommy for a while? You want to play with your choo-choos? You want to play choo-choo trains with Mommy?’ She carried him away, bouncing him slightly in her arms and asking questions, taking him away from the sight of the wooden chest.

For the rest of the day she kept an eye on Julian, never giving him the chance to go back to the chest. But in the evening, sitting with her family watching television, she was struck by how often Julian turned his head to look at the chest. In particular, she was struck by the way he looked at the chest.

Later, when Julian had been put to bed, she tried to explain her unease to Rob. ‘He’d get a look on his face, as if he’d heard something, and then he’d turn and look straight at the chest. As if the sound came from the chest. Except that there wasn’t any sound. Why is he so fascinated by it? Why does he want to keep opening it?’

‘Because you’ve made such a big deal out of it,’ Rob said easily. ‘He opened it once, out of natural curiosity, and you hit the ceiling. Naturally that made him curious. He can’t figure out what is so special about it. He’s a kid who doesn’t like to be told no, especially without a reason.’

‘If you could have seen him, Rob, staring into . . . He was seeing something, I’m sure of it. But there’s nothing there.’ She stopped short of telling him what she had briefly, oddly imagined: the old, crumpled newspapers which seemed to fill the chest.

‘So? It’s big and dark and empty. To a kid, it’s interesting. Why are you so worried about it?’

She saw from his face that he expected some irrational response, that he was ready to make fun of ‘women’s intuition’. She said calmly, ‘Rob, he could get hurt. If he decided to play inside it, he might shut himself in and suffocate.’

‘Oh come on, Helen. You’d hear him and find him long before that could happen.’

‘What if the lid slammed down? It’s heavy enough to break his hand.’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Rob said. ‘But there are lots of other ways he could get hurt around the house – more likely ways. It’s silly to worry – ’

‘It’s not silly! I’ve caught him opening the chest twice, and he’ll try again, I know it.’

‘All right, all right.’ He held up a placating hand. ‘Don’t get upset. Maybe we could put something on the chest that he’d have trouble getting off.’

Helen nodded grudgingly and the discussion was over, but she was far from satisfied. She wished they had never bought the thing.

Something was wrong. Helen swam up out of sleep, drawn by the sound of a baby crying.

Then she was wide awake, listening and remembering. This was no dream. A baby was crying, somewhere in the house. It was not Alice – to Helen’s ears the cry sounded like that of a much younger infant, a newborn child. The muffled sound came, she thought, from the living room.

She looked resentfully at Rob. He could sleep through anything. There had been a time, just after Julian’s birth, when Helen had seen Rob’s regular, undisturbed slumber as a sign of hostility towards her and their child. Logically, she knew he did not will his sleeping patterns. And she was used to it, now.

Gradually the crying was fading, and Helen thought she might be able to go to sleep after all. Then she heard the soft, unmistakable patter of Julian’s feet in the hall, going towards the living room, and she sat up in bed. Had Julian heard the crying, too?

Heart thumping unpleasantly, Helen got up and went to check.

Julian was standing in the dark living room, a few feet from the chest. He turned and looked at his mother when she came into the room. He pointed to the chest. ‘Baby,’ he said.

Helen felt the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. ‘No,’ she said. ‘No baby. Come back to bed, Julian. You must have been dreaming.’

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 oblivion 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.