The Box Contains One Occupant
The summons arrived at half past midnight, which Mr. Cornelius Fetch considered an entirely unreasonable hour for any errand of a clerical nature, and from Mrs. Alderton of Fenn Cottage on the marsh road, which he considered worse still.
He was the parish clerk of St. Agatha's, Holtwick, a position he had occupied for eleven years with diligence and without particular incident, and it was precisely because he was diligent that Mr. Petherwick, the solicitor, had telephoned to say that the inventory could not wait. The widow Alderton had presented herself at the office that afternoon in a state of considerable agitation, insisting that if no one came before morning she would lock the parlour door and the counting could be done through the keyhole for all she cared. As Mr. Petherwick had laryngitis, and as his clerk Dobbins had taken ill of something unspecified, the task fell to Mr. Fetch, who noted in his ledger — a habit of long standing — the time of the call, the temperature of the evening (cold, and the marsh fog already upon the lower road), and a small memo to himself that this was precisely the sort of assignment for which he was not paid.
He brought his forms. He brought his pen and his india-rubber and a spare nib in his breast pocket. He brought a lamp, because Mrs. Alderton had mentioned in her agitation that the gaslight in the parlour was behaving oddly, by which he understood her to mean that the mantles wanted replacing. He did not bring anything else, because there was nothing else one needed for an inventory of a modest cottage on the marsh road, however many hours it might take, however peculiar the widow's state of mind, however much the fog pressed its face against the carriage glass during the quarter-mile from the village.
Fenn Cottage stood back from the road behind a low gate and a garden that was, even in October and even at this hour, visibly overgrown in a way that suggested not neglect but withdrawal — as though the garden had chosen, quite deliberately, to draw close to the house. The light in the parlour window was yellow and irregular. Mr. Fetch had been told it was behaving oddly, and he saw now that this was an accurate characterisation, though he could not have said precisely what the irregularity was. It was not flickering. It was something else. Something more like breathing.
He knocked.
Mrs. Alderton was a small woman of perhaps sixty, wearing black that had been worn for some time before her husband's disappearance, as though she had anticipated the need. She led him into the hallway without greeting, and into the parlour without preamble, and then she stood in the doorway and would come no further.
"Everything that is in this room," she said, "is to be counted."
"That is, indeed, the purpose of my visit," said Mr. Fetch, opening his ledger.
The parlour was of the kind one found in cottages of this age and district: a fireplace with a mantelpiece bearing a clock and two china dogs, a writing desk of moderate quality, a settee, four chairs, a bookcase containing perhaps forty volumes, a small table near the window on which sat an oil lamp that had not been lit, and on the floor beside the settee, beneath a white lace cloth of the sort one laid over food to keep the flies from it, a hatbox.
It was the hatbox that Mr. Fetch noticed last, which in retrospect he found instructive, because the hatbox was what the room was about. Everything else — the china dogs, the unlit lamp, the four chairs drawn slightly away from the settee as though they had edged back over a period of months — everything else was peripheral. The hatbox was fourteen inches in diameter, grey cardboard, tied with a dark ribbon that was damp to look at. Beneath the lace cloth it sat, and Mr. Fetch stood looking at it for longer than was strictly necessary before he wrote hatbox, one, contents unknown in his ledger.
"What are the contents?" he asked.
"That," said Mrs. Alderton from the doorway, "is not my place to say."
"It is, rather, the entire point of an inventory."
"Then write: one occupant."
Mr. Fetch looked at her. She was not, as far as he could determine, being whimsical. She was standing with her hands flat against the doorframe, and she was watching the hatbox the way one watched a dog one did not entirely trust.
"Mrs. Alderton," he said, with the particular patience he reserved for parishioners who brought livestock to vestry meetings, "an inventory is a record of objects. An occupant is a person, or — in certain legal contexts — an animal of sufficient—"
"He came back," she said. "Not as he was. But he came back."
The gaslight did the thing that was not quite flickering.
Mr. Gerald Alderton had vanished in March, walking the marsh road on an evening when the water table was high and the path between solid ground and soft was a matter of local knowledge that, apparently, he had not possessed. The body had not been recovered. The constable had recorded it as an accident. The parish had prayed. Mrs. Alderton had, as noted, already had the appropriate dress.
This was what Mr. Fetch knew. He had been present at the memorial service, had noted the attendance in the register — forty-three persons, which he had thought creditable for a man who had only been in the parish four years and had not been notably sociable.
What he had not known — what no one had troubled to mention — was that the hatbox had arrived on a Thursday in July, left on the doorstep before dawn, addressed in a hand that Mrs. Alderton had identified as her husband's, though she acknowledged that the letters were formed differently than before, more carefully, she said, as though whoever had written them was no longer entirely certain of the shapes.
This she told him from the doorway, in a low and steady voice, while Mr. Fetch stood in the centre of the parlour with his pen held very still above his ledger.
"Have you opened it?" he asked.
"Once," she said. "In July. When it arrived."
"And?"
"I closed it again."
The ribbon was dark with moisture. The lace cloth over the box was dry, but the boards beneath the box, Mr. Fetch now noticed, were slightly darker than the surrounding floor — a faint, irregular stain that spread perhaps six inches in every direction, as though something had been leaking, slowly, over the course of several months.
He became aware, in the way one becomes aware of a sound that has been present for some time before one identifies it, that the hatbox was not entirely silent. It was not a sound exactly. It was more a quality of the air near the box, a slight and rhythmic displacement, so subtle that one could quite reasonably argue it was the settling of the house, the pressure of the fog against the walls, the simple acoustics of an old building on a damp night.
One could argue it. Mr. Fetch found, to his considerable discomfort, that he was not arguing it.
He wrote, in his careful clerk's hand:
Parlour. Contents as follows: mantelpiece clock (one, working); china dogs (two, matched pair, no chips noted); writing desk (one, oak, moderate quality); chairs (four); settee (one); bookcase (one); volumes therein (approx. forty, not individually catalogued at this time); oil lamp, table model (one, unlit); hatbox, grey cardboard, ribbon-tied, lace cloth (one).
He paused. He looked at the box. The gaslight did its thing.
Contents of hatbox: to be assessed.
He was being, he told himself, entirely professional. The contents could not be assessed without opening the box, and opening the box was a matter that required — he believed quite sincerely, and not merely because he did not want to open the box — the presence of a solicitor, a constable, and possibly a medical examiner, depending on what the contents proved to be. He was a parish clerk. He recorded facts. He did not open boxes in haunted — in irregular — circumstances at one o'clock in the morning on the marsh road.
"I cannot open it tonight," he told Mrs. Alderton.
"I know," she said.
"It should be opened in the presence of—"
"I know," she said again, and there was something in the repetition that silenced him. Not grief. Something that had been grief for a time and had since become something more practised. Accommodation. The way one learned to live beside a thing one could not remove.
"You have been living with this," he said slowly, "since July."
"He is very quiet," she said. "Mostly."
Mr. Fetch gathered his ledger. He capped his pen. He told Mrs. Alderton, with great formality, that he would return the following morning — the following day, he corrected himself, at a reasonable hour — with Mr. Petherwick and such other persons as the situation required, and that the box would be opened correctly, with proper witnesses, and that everything would be recorded, and that she should, in the meantime, leave the parlour door closed.
She said she always did.
He made his way into the hallway. The lamp he had brought cast a narrow corridor of yellow light across the floor and partway up the stair. He was reaching for his coat on the hook by the door when he saw it.
On the third step from the bottom, where the light just reached, there was a wet footprint.
It was not shaped quite like a boot. It was not shaped quite like a foot. It was the impression of something that had at some point been a foot, and had passed through an intermediate stage, and had arrived at its present configuration through a process that Mr. Fetch did not wish to consider at any length. It was facing downward, toward the hall, toward him. There was no corresponding print on the second step, nor the first, nor the hall floor.
Whatever had made it had not continued down the stair.
Mr. Fetch put on his coat. He opened the front door. He walked down the garden path with a speed that was not, he told himself, a run, and out through the low gate, and along the fog-thickened marsh road toward the village, without once looking back at the parlour window and its strange, breathing light.
He did not look back. This was important to him, that night and afterward. He had not looked back.
He arrived home. He sat at his desk and he opened his ledger to the inventory, and he sat for a long time looking at the line that read contents of hatbox: to be assessed, and after a long time he drew a single, careful line through it and wrote beneath:
Contents of hatbox: deferred pending witness. Widow's declaration noted: one occupant, living.
He stared at that last word for rather a long time.
Then, because he was a thorough man and because the ledger had to be complete and because there was nothing else he could appropriately do at quarter past one in the morning with the fog pressing against his window and a wet footprint on someone else's stair, he made a small, neat asterisk after living, and at the bottom of the page, in the margin, wrote:
* Status uncertain. Further investigation required.
He closed the ledger.
He did not open it again until morning, by which time he had persuaded himself, almost entirely, that the sound he had heard in Mrs. Alderton's parlour had been the house settling.
The scratching on his own front door, which began at some point in the small hours and ceased before dawn, he did not record at all.