A short story from The Unexplained Plus, a collection of first-hand accounts

Aunts can be very fond of their nieces. When the aunt in question is childless, then they can be very fond indeed, pouring out on their relative all their maternal instinct.

Such was the case with Rosa. She adored Consiglia and made sure that the little girl came over to see her as often as possible. By the time Consiglia was eight, she would spend several afternoons a week there, following her aunt around.

That particular afternoon, there was a pleasant breeze blowing and Rosa tried to get as much of her laundry done as possible. Consiglia traipsed up the stairs behind her to the roof but Rosa never really felt comfortable with the little girl up there near the wall, and so she made her sit in the washroom at the top of the stairs while she hung out her load.

Consiglia didn’t really mind but there wasn’t much to do. She eventually found a piece of plaster and started drawing little pictures and patterns on the floor. She started singing quietly to herself, totally un-selfconsciously, in the way that eight-year-olds do.

And then she spotted him. A handsome, 20-year-old boy, standing at the bottom of the staircase. He was dressed like a Turk, not the turbaned, baggy trousers type, but as a soldier, with a red skull-cap edged in black with a black tassel, and an immaculate uniform. He had a huge cardboard box in his arms and he took the lid off with a flourish to reveal what seemed to the little girl to be paradise itself: layer upon layer of brightly-wrapped chocolates.

The Turk smiled benignly and proffered the box to the girl at the top of the stairs. Consiglia was tempted but the message about taking sweets from strangers had been well drummed into her head. She looked through the door behind here at the roof but could not see her aunt.

“No, thanks,” she said.

The Turk leant his head over to one side, lifting one eyebrow enquiringly and held out the glittering sweets again.

The Turk is going to take me! The Turk is going to take me!

This time, though, he took a step up towards her. Consiglia couldn’t explain why – his friendly expression had not changed one jot – but she suddenly felt quite frightened. And yet the chocolates rustled enticingly in their cellophane.

“Put it down there and I’ll come and take them,” she decided.

The Turk just looked at her.

“I’m afraid. My aunt will be angry with me,” she added.

And then the Turk took two or three steps up and said calmly: “Take!”

Consiglia was overcome by a shudder. She put her hands over her ears and screamed. She screamed and screamed, eyes screwed up in fear.

“The Turk is going to take me! The Turk is going to take me!”

Within seconds her aunt was behind her, a look of anxious concern on her face. She enfolded the shaking child in her arms and rocked her backwards and forwards until Consiglia stopped sobbing. She opened her eyes timidly but there was no one there.

“I don’t understand these children. One moment she’s happily talking to herself and playing, the next she’s screaming,” Rosa muttered to herself.

As soon as she stopped crying, Consiglia fled outside, leaving her aunt at the top of the stairs. She told her aunt what she had seen, but nothing that her aunt said to reassure her could convince her that the Turk was not hiding just around the corner of the stairwell, or that the box was no longer lurking on the bottom step.

Rosa shook her head and went downstairs to have a look around but, even then, Consiglia refused to budge. Rosa began to get a little impatient. She scooped the little girl up into her arms and carried her down the stairs. Consiglia covered her eyes, burying her face in her aunt’s comforting shoulder.

Consiglia never saw or heard the Turk again. But as time went by, she was to learn that there were many other strange occurrences in the house. Her uncle would often find his wood-working tools moved around in his shed and there were often strange noises that the family could never really find a logical explanation for.

Consiglia stopped going to visit her aunt and to this day still feels uncomfortable near the house. She found out that the family that lived in the house before her aunt used to hear the sound of a bird’s wings flapping violently in one of the rooms but never found anything there.

And they often heard the sound of a girl crying.

Whatever there was in the house, her aunt could not take it and soon moved out to Cospicua. Another aunt moved in. She was once woken up by a terrible nightmare. Or at least, that is what she tried to persuade herself that it was. There was a woman in her room who shrieked madly: “I’ll stay here until I kill you all. You’ll all die here.”

Nightmare or not, the prophecy seemed to come true. Her grandmother and grandfather both died in the house, and even her aunt Rosa was brought back to the house to be looked after during an illness and died there.

Several other people moved into the house; none ever stayed any length of time. There is now a foreigner living in the house and Consiglia once ran into her and told her about the strange Turk. She did not seem at all fazed by the idea, quite the contrary.

Seventy years have passed since Consiglia saw the Turk and she is still fascinated by the episode.

“If I close my eyes, I can still see him as clearly as I did that day on the stairs. His smart buttons, the tassel on his hat. And that box of chocolates…

“I would love to have the chance to go back to the house, to see if I could feel anything. But I have always been too shy to ask... But I do wonder,” she said, “what would have happened if I had taken one of those chocolates.”

She shuddered. She evidently didn’t think that it would have been anything good.

This is the 31st in a series of short stories The Sunday Times of Malta is running every Sunday. It is taken from The Unexplained Plus (Allied Publications) by Vanessa Macdonald. The first edition was published in 2001 and reprinted twice. It was republished, with added stories, as The Unexplained Plus. The Maltese version of the book, Ta’ Barra Minn Hawn (Klabb Kotba Maltin), is available from all leading bookstores and stationers and from www.bdlbooks.com.