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.’