by Adam Nevill
But Sandra had become more preoccupied and her self-involvement suggested to Douglas that her possession by the enigma had intensified. Only he didn’t know for sure because she’d become uncommunicative on the subject.
After the suitcase entered their home, Douglas was sidelined for the first time in their marriage and that upset him. Sandra stopped seeing him in the same way as she had done only a few weeks before. She avoided his company in the evenings, when they usually spent hours together, even if in a companionable silence. Her answers to his questions, and her responses to his attempts to begin conversations, were stiffened by what he interpreted as a patronising tone. Infuriating silences then commenced in which she would stare at the screen of her pad, or the pages of a book, with an amused smile playing on her face. He’d never seen that precise expression before in their decade together. All of his attempts to interact with Sandra were irritating her, perhaps profoundly.
‘Not right now.’
‘I’ve a few things to do.’
These became familiar expressions when he returned home from work and suggested they go out for dinner or see a film, or begin the boxset of a new television series. But he was not much in her thoughts.
At the same time, Douglas began to wake in the night, broken from his sleep by dreams that he couldn’t remember, before becoming beset by the sort of anxiety he felt when he was late for work. Whenever he awoke in this way he’d find Sandra’s side of the bed empty. Worried to the point of nausea, he’d scramble from the bedclothes and bump his way downstairs.
Sandra would always be sitting in the unlit living room, fully dressed and nursing a mug of hot milk. Not something he’d ever known her drink before. She never seemed pleased to see him and either claimed that she couldn’t sleep or would say, ‘I’m just dealing with this in my own way.’ She began to sleep late and would nap in the afternoons behind closed curtains.
This state of affairs continued for another two weeks.
Periodically, during working days, Douglas made a habit of calling the house from the workshop. Sandra never picked up. He questioned her on her whereabouts several times, but she always had an alibi that was plausible enough to make his concern appear unreasonable, even juvenile, as if he were an insecure and possessive teenage boyfriend.
Sandra also began to use more make-up and Douglas found her newly reddened mouth uncomfortably arousing. Had they not found a lipstick in the old suitcase? The paste in the tube had dried out and crumbled, but what stains were visible had indicated that the cosmetic had once been red.
She changed her hair too. Dyed it red and pulled it back tightly so that her expressions appeared more severe and eager. ‘Fancied a change’ was all she said. ‘Do you like it?’ But she clearly did not care whether he liked her hair or not.
Over the previous few years their sex life had not so much dwindled as settled into one long period of gentle intimacy that occurred each week, and usually on a Saturday evening a few hours after they had eaten. Douglas had never told Sandra, though he expected she knew, but he found the predictable arrangement just about right for his tastes and energy levels. He suspected that if they had ever tried to initiate a more active sex life, he would have stopped enjoying their weekly period of intimacy, and might even have begun to make excuses to avoid additional relations. Their rhythms, however, appeared to have always ticked over in synchronicity. If they missed a week due to illness it was never a problem for either of them.
There was a quality in Sandra’s new style and demeanour, though, that made Douglas want his wife with an urgency close to savagery. He worried that he should not be feeling like that at all, and he knew that his passion had been caused by his wife appearing to him like a new woman. The predictable and familiar had become strange and intoxicating. But her indifference to him made Douglas want her even more still, and in a way that confused him, though his excitement exceeded his bafflement. He liked the feeling a great deal.
Sandra consistently ignored his tentative advances during the evenings and mornings that were still some distance from their usual rendezvous on Saturday night. This game that she dominated made him irritable but soon increased her desirability to almost unbearable levels. Her sly, knowing smile was the most infuriating thing of all.
Sandra preferred to spend her time with the suitcase that Doug had brought home from the wood bordering the construction site. It was saturated with foul-smelling groundwater, the leather exterior almost decomposing with mildew and dripping with soil, so he had placed it upon a polythene sheet on the garage floor.
As Douglas had narrated his tale of how he’d found the case beside the cattle trough and construction site, Sandra’s first reaction had been shock. But this was followed by relief, as if she were acknowledging the completion of an unpleasant task in a necessary process. Later that night, as they’d climbed into bed, she’d whispered, ‘You saved it.’
Douglas had thought that an odd thing for his wife to say. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well . . . they would have dug it up, wouldn’t they? Or built houses over it.’ She referred to the case as if it were the equivalent of ancient treasure, like Saxon gold.
Douglas had no idea for how long the thing had been in the ground, but the style and making of the case he estimated as dating from the sixties. The locks were corroded on the outside but the inner mechanism still held fast, so he’d been forced to cut through the rotting outer material and lining with a Stanley knife. The sensation of slicing the hide had made him think of parting dead flesh.
‘Careful, Doug,’ Sandra had said, her fingers arranged in two fans before her face, as if she were watching her husband defuse unexploded ordnance from the Second World War in their garage. ‘Careful with it.’
‘You don’t even know what’s inside. And what about me finding it . . .’ For the remainder of the day after he’d found the damn thing compressed and concealed beneath those large stones, he’d felt cold and peculiar. ‘This isn’t natural, pet. Me finding it was intended. But why me? Why us? And how? Are you not worried any more? We should see somebody, another doctor.’
‘Get it open,’ Sandra had said with impatience.
‘I want to do everything differently. There’s more, you know,’ Sandra had said, after she’d finally offered herself to Douglas sexually.
This happened on a Sunday morning, three weeks after Doug had brought the case home. ‘When buggers sing hymns,’ she’d said after the sex and when they’d sheepishly been able to discuss the intense episode. And what she’d said about church had shocked Douglas. Sandra had never said anything remotely like that before. They were ambivalent about religion. The spiritual realm was something they’d never discussed. Funerals and weddings were the only times they’d ever attended church together.
Douglas didn’t demand an explanation for the same reason he didn’t query the changes in her appearance and attitude, because he didn’t want her to change back to what was familiar. Not yet anyway. He also doubted that he’d ever forget what happened in the kitchen.
Sandra had returned to the house from the garden shed. Earlier that week, Douglas had transported the case to the shabby little outbuilding, but Sandra would often ‘go for a mooch’ as if she were looking for some clue within the hideous trunk. She’d forbidden him to throw it away.
The previous evening, when they usually made love, Sandra had insisted on cataloguing the contents of the suitcase, again. She’d brought it back into the house and taken it upstairs. She’d then placed each artefact inside a transparent freezer bag until their bed was completely covered with the aged, browning, and stinking contents of the old suitcase. The packages had resembled evidence bags.
The following morning, Douglas had walked into the kitchen, intent on making coffee, but his wife had fixed him in place with the most licentious stare that he’d ever seen on a woman’s face. He’d not even suspected her capable of such an expression. Wearing a long waterproof coat that he’d never seen before, with
her Wellington boots, and her face painted and bright red lips dripping with rain, and her hair wet, sleek and tightly shaped in a bun, she’d said, ‘Now. Take it.’
And in the very place in which they prepared food and washed their clothes, Doug had done as instructed and had taken his wife backwards and hurriedly. A position they’d not engaged in since they first courted, because of his knees. Sandra had guided his hands about her body and barked short commands like ‘Here!’ and ‘Like this, over me’ and ‘Don’t hold back.’
Doug had pushed the top half of her body over the kitchen counter, raised her sopping coat and her dry dress, then pulled down her flimsy underwear and tights to the middle of her thighs using one hand. But even in his fury and abandon, he stopped short of obeying the final command that Sandra issued right before a noisy climax.
‘Put your hands round my throat.’ At that point she’d also pressed her face into a loaf of bread and tore at it with her teeth, as if she was trying to find a leather strop inside the packaging.
Douglas had not even recognised the voice that had slipped from his wife’s mouth.
The following week, Douglas began to spy on Sandra.
He took two days off work and left the house at the usual time, in the usual way, like a man who had lost his job but was too afraid to tell his wife. He’d never spied on anyone before but it came to him naturally and felt oddly familiar. The whole procedure rewarded him with a curious giddy excitement. He sat in his car at the end of the street and made lists:
Riverbank.
Swampy turf near culvert and illegally dumped bin bags containing household waste.
Long grass beside corrugated concrete.
Three empty fields; rusted wire fence.
On the first day of his surveillance, Sandra left the house around noon and drove away in her car. She wore her new coat and Wellington boots and resembled a woman driving to the park to walk a dog. From a distance, when she’d been standing on the drive, she’d looked as if her eyes were half-closed as she spoke to someone on her phone.
Douglas called her mobile phone several times after she left the house, but Sandra never picked up his calls.
She returned after five hours. By then, Douglas had driven away and returned to the street four times and each time had noted that she hadn’t returned to the house. The fifth time he drove into their road, he spotted her car on the drive.
Sandra was asleep when he entered the house. That morning’s dishes remained unwashed. It had also gone dark but she’d left all of the curtains open downstairs and this made Douglas anxious.
Later that evening when she came downstairs, Douglas asked her nothing about her day and, as usual, Sandra failed to volunteer any details. He realised that she might have been going out for weeks, while he was at work, without telling him.
On a whim, he checked their joint account online and noticed that she’d withdrawn three hundred pounds from an ATM while she’d been out that day. He found fifty pounds in her purse wrapped around a receipt for what looked like gardening equipment, purchased from their local B&Q.
Secateurs, washing line, heavy duty gardening sacks, pliers, a cordless electric drill, electrician’s tape, spade.
The next day Doug followed Sandra’s car. And then he followed her on foot from a carpark to the High Street and to a café. In there, his wife met two people in a manner distinguished by more than conventional enthusiasm.
The couple must have been in their seventies. Douglas knew all of Sandra’s friends and these were new acquaintances, but they had seemed genuinely joyous to be in each other’s company. They clasped and clutched each other with what Douglas suspected was a combination of delight and relief.
After they took off their long coats and hats, Douglas saw that the elderly man and woman were dressed plainly and conservatively in ordinary clothes. The meeting that followed was long and animated, and at one point the elderly man presented Sandra with several sheets of paper that she signed. She kept one of them and folded it into her handbag. A packet of coloured pens was also produced from the elderly woman’s handbag, and the threesome appeared to draw or colour-in something that had been placed upon the table.
They eventually parted with hugs all round. Sandra’s hands were clasped and shaken. The man planted kisses upon Sandra’s cheeks, and the elderly woman upon her mouth, in a lingering fashion. Here, there was more than mere familiarity; there was a suggestion of a grotesque intimacy.
Doug was unsure who to follow after the meeting broke up. He chose to follow his wife, but she drove home and he immediately regretted not following the elderly couple to find out who they were. He couldn’t rid his mind of the image of his wife being kissed on the mouth by the elderly woman.
That evening he was unable to restrain himself from mentioning that he’d followed her, that he was terribly worried about her, that things were getting out of hand for each of them, that they were normalising what was unnatural and no longer even questioning it, that she had changed so as to be almost unrecognisable, that their sex life was a cause for concern, that she was meeting people whom he didn’t know, and that everything was just wrong . . . Douglas spoke at length and let all of his grievances flow. And finally he said, ‘We have to get rid of that bloody case. We have to. Don’t you see? We have to.’ He omitted to say ‘before it’s too late’, because that notion was unbearable.
As he spoke, Sandra’s contempt for him was evident. Silent assessments were made behind her elaborately painted eyes as she judged him for what he’d said. Yes, she was considering him, but not the situation that he spoke of. Douglas was sure of it. Sandra was already committed to something, that’s what his instincts screamed at him. But she was now judging his potential participation, or his worthiness as a participant in something that he dreaded but could not determine.
Eventually, she said, ‘If you ever follow me again I will leave you.’
‘Who were those people?’
Such warmth and excitement did their memory summon that Sandra’s glossy lips drew back to reveal all of her teeth.
‘Who?’ Douglas shouted.
‘They paid me a visit and explained everything.’
‘What, here? Who . . .’
‘They’ve been here before. They attend, every now and again.’
‘Who are they?’
‘I’m not sure how to describe them, and they wouldn’t like that anyway. A movement, I guess. You could call them a part of that.’ She said ‘movement’ lasciviously, as if relishing the memory of an obscenity. ‘But who they are is not important. It’s the places they know of that matter.’
‘Like here?’ he wanted to ask, but couldn’t bear to voice an idea that he’d already accepted. If he’d known it would come to this then he would have been stronger and resisted the visions and destroyed the case, he thought, but he wasn’t sure. And Douglas was no longer certain that Sandra was even Sandra any more.
He left the living room, his legs shaking from the maelstrom of his anger and fear and also from a desire for his wife that was making him wretched. He felt sick at the anticipation of what might happen next without knowing what that would be. But whatever they were being led into, if he went along with it, Sandra would reward him.
For the first time in weeks, he didn’t want to be inside the house with her. He wanted to walk to the closest pub.
Douglas went upstairs to change out of his work clothes and he saw what she had arranged upon their bed:
The red plastic handbag with the broken strap.
The rubber apron, brittle and stiff with age.
The old khaki raincoat with the labels removed.
The two masks made from sacking with childish faces drawn upon the front.
Four rusting knives, and two hooked implements that were probably agricultural tools.
A misshapen lump of lead at the end of a short length of rope.
A heavily stained nightdress of white cotton.
Eight unbroken glass jars
containing human hair.
When Douglas returned to the house a few minutes before midnight, Sandra had gone. She had taken the case and its contents with her.
For the next three days, Douglas didn’t see his wife, nor could he reach her by phone. But her car was parked on the drive on the evening of the third day when he returned from work.
He found her in the bathroom. She was standing under the shower and her entire body was shaking as if she was frozen. Her face streamed with water and ran with eyeliner to produce long rivers of inky tears. She made Douglas think of a frightened child.
His wife had messily stuffed some of her clothing inside a rubber refuse sack, but then appeared to have given up on the endeavour. Her black raincoat was draped over the sink unit. A pair of spattered Wellington boots had been discarded beside the bathtub.
Douglas spoke to her softly. ‘Where have you been, Sandra? What have you done?’
‘Do you know what they’ll do to me?’ was all she offered by way of explanation. ‘She was so young . . . I can’t, Doug. I can’t go away. I’d rather die. You could do it now . . . with your hands.’
Douglas bowed his head and rested his weight against the sink, his hands gripping the porcelain. So this was it. ‘Where?’
‘In the kitchen. All of it. Under a sheet. And bits . . . in the dining room.’ Her voice then dropped to a whisper that he barely heard over the shower’s cascade. ‘I got carried away. They said I would. There’s so much . . . The first one was delivered.’
Doug turned to leave the room.
Sandra was almost screaming at him when she cried out, ‘What will you do?’
‘I know where to put it,’ Douglas said, over his shoulder. ‘I’ll be shown.’
He jogged down the stairs and turned on the kitchen lights, then bent over and vomited hard onto his trousers and shoes.
When he recovered enough to stand up straight, his hands took over and without thinking he began unpeeling the refuse sacks from the roll that Sandra had left beside the toaster.
