#FridayFlash – The Trunk
The story starts, as stories often do, with the opening of a box. Or in the case of Katy’s new purchase, a trunk. It caught her eye in the antique shop on Stowell Street, all pale leather and metal clasps. She didn’t particularly need an antique trunk when she had a perfectly serviceable suitcase in the cupboard, and Katy didn’t think she’d ever actually use it for travelling, but the impulse to buy was too strong to ignore.
The shop owner seemed particularly keen to sell the trunk, and he even let her haggle the price down from £300 to £150. It was a large trunk, and at the time, Katy reasoned that he needed the space for something else that languished in the stock room instead of on the shop floor. Now she was alone in her living room with the trunk, Katy decided to inspect it again. Perhaps there was a reason he’d let her have it for half price.
Katy popped the catches, unbuckled the straps holding the lid closed, and lifted the lid. She screamed. Curled inside the trunk was a body, its dark brown skin taut and shiny with age. Tufts of hair clung to the skull, its lips pulled back in a snarl to reveal uneven teeth. Its hands were clasped beneath its head, like a child at bedtime. Images of preserved peat bodies from late night documentaries flashed in her mind. Katy dropped the lid and scrambled backwards away from the trunk.
Moments passed, but they felt like hours. She stared at the lid, willing her pulse to slow down and her mind to stop racing. When did the shop keeper slip a body into the trunk? And why? Where did it come from? Why did it look like it had been pried out of a bog?
Her voice of reason, which always sounded like her Aunt June, told her to take the trunk back for a refund.
Katy inched towards the trunk. She tried to push it off the coffee table, and found it slid across the wood with ease. She lifted one end, and found the trunk no heavier than when she first hauled it up the stairs. Surely the body must weigh something? She lifted the lid.
The body was gone, replaced by a mound of beautiful silk dresses in every shade of beige she could imagine. One was trimmed with pearls, another with lace, and another with feathers. A costume designer on a show set in the 1920s would have a field day. Katy picked up the first dress and lifted it out of the trunk. In daylight, it was tired and shabby, the sheen gone from the silk. The feathers hung in ragged strips, dust clinging to their tips.
“What the hell?” Katy dropped the dress, and picked up another. It also looked patchy and worn in daylight, with holes in its lace trim and a cigarette burn near the hem.
She put the second dress back and closed the lid. There was no way a trunk could contain nothing, then a body, then dresses. Perhaps it once held some kind of plant, one of the psychotropic ones she’d seen on TV, and she’d inhaled the spores. This could all be a hallucination.
Or the shop keeper did it to you, to get you to buy it, said Aunt June.
Katy’s phone lay on the sofa behind her, and she picked it up, dialling the number of the antiques shop. The owner answered on the third ring.
“What is with this trunk you sold me?” she asked.
“What do you mean?”
“This is going to sound crazy, but I opened it when I got home and there was a peat bog body curled up in it. Now it’s full of flapper dresses. What have you done to it? Or to me?”
“I haven’t done anything to it, or to you. Is it closed now?” asked the owner.
“Yes.”
“Open it again.”
“Why?”
“Just open it.”
Katy did as instructed. The dresses were gone, replaced by three rows of books. They were hardbacks, with old-fashioned dust covers. By the looks of them, most of them were classic novels. She recognised the Penguin logo on the spines.
“It’s full of bloody books now!”
“And if you take one out?”
Katy lifted out a copy of James Joyce’s Dubliners. On closer inspection, the dust cover was torn in places, the once-bright colours now subdued and faded.
“They look better in the trunk.”
“I think they’re ghosts.”
“What?”
“I think what I saw, and what you’re seeing now, are ghosts of things that have been kept in the trunk before. I opened it when I first acquired it and it was full of vintage whiskey, but it was completely undrinkable. Next time I opened it, it was old letters and diaries that faded when I tried to read them. Then a uniform from the Boer War that crumbled before I could get it appraised.”
“Where did you get it from?”
“A house clearance from an old lady that died without any family.”
“Well I don’t want it any more. I can’t believe you sold it knowing what it did.”
“I had to do something with it, and I didn’t want it in my house any more after I found the dead baby in it,” replied the shop owner, his tone coloured by indignation and sadness.
“Oh wow.”
“Yes, wow. Tell you what, I’ll give you your £150 back, but please, keep the trunk. I’ll send my nephew round with your money now.”
The line went dead. Katy stood up, and she heard a muffled knock.
“That was quick,” she said, moving toward the door.
The knock came again, only it didn’t come from the front door.
It came from inside the trunk.
