Free Stories of the Strange and Sinister (Valancourt 20th Century Classics) by Frank Baker Page A

the medicine cupboard and found a bottle of sleeping tablets, which the doctor had prescribed for my wife, in her last months. I had always meant to throw them into the dustbin; but now I took one, and never having taken sleeping pills before, I was soon in a dead sleep.
    I think I dreamt of Dorothy. I don’t know. But it seemed another age when I woke up, although it was really only another day. I didn’t let myself think of the sack – not until about four in the afternoon, when I went into the front room, a room I hardly ever use now.
    Why did I go there, anyway? What sent me? I think it was a message from my wife. I think she said to me, ‘Ted, go and dust my picture.’ Her picture – a fine pencil drawing of her head, as a young girl, one of our treasures, hangs above the fireplace in the front room. And when I went in there . . .
    It seems unnecessary to write it down.
    Again, I cannot remember removing the sack. I don’t think I touched it. I do remember smut on the glass of the picture. Then I closed the door, and came to where I am now, and sat down, and tried to think of it all calmly.
    It is so difficult to write calmly of the movements of the sack in these last days. I can’t get them in proper order. In the bath, one night; but which night? Never again on the bed. And that was kind of it. Then for two whole days I saw no sign of it. And I said to myself, pathetic really, the wind has snaffled it away.
    I wish I had been right. I wish I hadn’t come in the next day, after I had been down to the PO to draw my pension – I wish I hadn’t come in to see it laid flat upon the table where now I write all this.
    Flat, yes, flat. Except for two little mounds, that reminded me of breasts. But otherwise, quite flat, as though it had been pressed, almost ironed out.
    For the first time, without touching it, I looked very closely at the coarse woven material. I cannot have imagined it. I could see the shapes of bones in the material. ‘Rag and bones’ – the call came from my childhood. I remember no more – except that I ran out of the room, out of the house, only longing to feel the autumn air upon me.
    And was that the last I saw of it? No, it cannot have been. Since I know now that it is, or should be, in the outhouse. And when I write ‘should be’ I mean only that it was there this morning, over the coal. It looked as though it had crawled there.
    I must not go out to check on this. I must first tell how I went to my neighbour, and talked about it.
    ‘Mr Knowles,’ I said, ‘Mr Knowles – ’ And then I stopped. I could see that something in my expression, or my tone of voice, had got him. ‘Come in,’ was all he said. And in his sitting-room, where his sister sat silent and aware, doing a jig-saw puzzle on a little antique table, he said to me, ‘What’s the trouble?’
    I knew he knew what the ‘trouble’ was. And so it was easy simply to say, ‘The sack’.
    There was not the smallest change of expression in his face.
    ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I realize.’ And then a long pause, and the sister went on doggedly searching out another piece for her jig-saw.
    ‘You realize ?’ I said. He merely nodded.
    There was a long silence, till at last he asked me to sit down. I didn’t. I felt aggrieved. I felt, for sure, that he had done me wrong; and that he knew it.
    I started to speak. I wanted to protest. I wanted to say, ‘That sack you gave me – ’
    But he got in first. ‘I’m sorry.’ That is how he began. And I could see he was sorry.
    Suddenly, his sister got up. ‘Would you like a cup of coffee?’ She left the room before I could answer; and I never saw the coffee. Because the brother so quickly spoke, and I so quickly left the house, when I heard what he had to tell me.
    ‘I shouldn’t have given it to you,’ he said. And then, in a blank kind of voice, as though it really meant nothing to him: ‘It has a history. I shouldn’t have kept it. I always knew that. It should