Anna and her husband doted on their new baby. Just before it was born, they moved from a flat into a large house in Valletta with splendid views over the harbour. They thought it would make a lovely family home.

The baby disrupted their lives, as they always seem to, but they did not care at all. They soon settled into a routine, and in the confusion of nappies and late-night feeds, they paid little attention to the strange things that started to happen.

A broom fell over, knocking open the tap, and water poured through the house. The first time it happened, they put it down to bad luck, perhaps a most unlikely thing to happen but still just bad luck. But it happened again and again, once when Anna was out. She returned to find the whole ground floor flooded. The smell of gas would fill the house for no reason. The room upstairs would never warm up.

But the first incident that really shook them out of their apathy happened late one night. They had already gone to bed, bolting the huge front door that was so common in Valletta. They were amazed when it suddenly flew open. Leo ran downstairs and shut it again but they had to admit that something strange was going on.

The next incident was even more worrying. Anna went out to church early one Sunday morning, leaving the three-and-a-half-month-old baby asleep on the bed next to her husband.

“Make sure he doesn’t roll over!” she fussed as she went out.

Not wanting to point out that the baby could barely even raise his head yet, Leo just nodded.

“I’ll keep my arm over him all the time,” he reassured her.

He had only been laying down a short while when his arm flopped down on to the bed and the reassuring warmth of the gently breathing baby was replaced by the soft sheets. He sat bolt upright, trying to work out whether he had fallen asleep.

Where was the baby?

Suppressing a moment of panic, he looked around and saw the little baby lying face down in the far corner of the bedroom, still fast asleep.

Leo looked at the baby in total amazement. He was sure that he had not fallen asleep and could still remember the suddenness with which the baby seemed to have been pulled out from under his arm. And yet even if the baby had somehow managed to roll away, how did it fall off the bed and not even cry? And how did it get to the other side of the room?

Whatever ‘it’ was, its sense of humour was tinged with a cruel, malicious edge

Leo had no explanation. Little did he know how many other things would also perplex him over the coming years.

Once, at night, Anna heard a strange noise coming from the kitchen. Leo said: “Oh, leave it; it’s probably just the cat.”

But Anna went down to find that the loaf of sliced bread had seemingly exploded, showering slices of bread onto the floor. But the slices were not spread everywhere as would have been the case if it had really just been knocked to the floor (what by, she preferred not to think). The slices were in a neat row, a narrow path of bread leading to the door.

Whatever ‘it’ was, its sense of humour was tinged with a cruel, malicious edge. One night, when the baby was not yet a year old, Anna left him fast asleep in his cot. She went downstairs to get a bottle of milk ready for his next feed but when she went up again, the cot was empty. She pulled up all the blankets in the futile hope that the baby could be hiding under them. He was nowhere in the room.

Anna stood there, unable to think clearly, trying to figure out what could have happened, when she saw the baby’s little hand waving outside the glass pane of the widow.

The house had little round metal balconies, mostly decorative as they were only a foot deep. The balcony was linked to the room by a waist-high door, which they kept bolted, and then over it was a high window, closed with an old-fashioned latch attached to the vertical rod which rotated to lock the window at the top. The little stool that Anna kept near the cot had been pushed over to the window and the heavy latch had been opened.

Outside, sitting in the balcony in his red pyjamas, his legs angling between the metal bars, was the baby, the baby who could not even walk yet.

Anna went white with fright. The balcony was five floors up; she preferred not to think about what could have happened as she pulled the baby inside and back into the safety of the cot. She preferred not to think about it, but how could she not, whenever she was alone?

To be continued next week

This is the 38th 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.