Vanna was busy at the kitchen sink when she spied her daughter going up the stairs to her room.

“Lilian, could you get me down your dirty washing, please?” she shouted up to her.

Lilian ignored her.

“Iva, Lilian, answer me please. Will you bring it down?”

Again, no answer. All she heard was a little chuckle. Moments later, her daughter came home. She insisted she had not been inside the house at all in the last hour or so. Lilian shook her head in frustration. It was the ħares again.

This playful spirit was always playing tricks on her, pretending to be one of her 11 children and sometimes making her wonder if she was losing her mind.

Another time, she saw her son Wenzu combing his hair in front of the hall mirror.

“Wenz, if you’re going out, could you get me some eggs, please?”

The youth just peered into the mirror, straightened his jacket collar and went out without acknowledging her.

Not sure whether he had heard her or not, she dried her hands on her apron and ran outside behind him. In the road, two of her children were playing with some friends but there was no sign of Wenzu.

“Where’s that brother of yours?” she asked.

The children looked up in surprise.

“He hasn’t come back, ma. I haven’t seen him since this morning.”

The number of times she saw someone who turned out to be far away at the time, the number of things moved around of their own accord… all the incidents started to get on Vanna’s nerves. She was getting obsessed with the whole thing. She never told her children anything about the ħares but she confided to her husband that she had had enough.

Reluctantly, he accepted to move. They rented out the house and her husband organised a team of relatives to help move the big, heavy furniture to their new house, just a few doors down the road. Vanna sincerely hoped that the ħares would not follow her there.

She never told her children anything about the ħares but she confided to her husband that she had had enough

As moving day approached, Vanna was exhausted. The spirit seemed more mischievous than ever and she heard his little chuckle of delight several times whenever he had managed to trick her. By late afternoon, she sank down into one of the few remaining pieces of furniture, a comfortable, comforting old armchair.

Her head sank down onto her hands and her eyes shut, heavy with the straining of the day. As she sat there relaxing, she felt someone slip her heavy earrings out of her lobes and she breathed a sigh of relief, until she realised there had not been anyone there. She opened her eyes. Her earrings were gone.

She called in two of her children and started looking all over the armchair. They lifted the cushions, checked down the creases of the chair, on the floor.

They lifted the chair to check underneath it but they were nowhere to be seen. The children, who knew nothing about the ħares, just thought that their mother was getting tired, until they too heard the little chuckle.

As Vanna sank back into the armchair with tears of frustration in her eyes, she and the children spied the earrings, at virtually the same time. They were dangling from the ceiling above her, with nothing to hold them there, just defying gravity.

The ensuing frenzy of activity was farcical. The children were dispatched to fetch a broom and the three of them jumped up and down, trying to knock the earrings off. But ‘off’ what?

Once they hit them, they fell to the ground and Vanna hurriedly slipped them back into her ears. It was the final straw, or so she thought. She called out to the children and rushed out of the room.

But her husband knew nothing of all this. He called to her to light a few paraffin lamps as it was getting too dark for them to see what they were doing.

Vanna would have preferred to leave the house but she sent the children on ahead and lit the first. As she went to the second, the first blew out. She relit it and yet again, as she moved to the second, the first was blown out.

By now furious and frustrated, she lit it for the third time, and this time, in front of her husband and a few of his rela­tives, the lamp was suddenly smashed by a piece of wood which appeared from nowhere. Glass shattered and paraffin sprayed all over the floor.

Silence fell across the room. No one moved for a few seconds.

Vanna stood there as white as a sheet, shaking from head to toe, still holding the lighted taper… Eventually, one of the men moved, frightened of the naked flame and the leaking paraffin.

The taper was blown out and Vanna was led away to her mother’s house down the road until the remaining furniture was removed. She never went back into the house again.

The ħares did not follow Vanna and she never heard any stories from the people who moved in. Perhaps he has moved on. Or perhaps he is still sulking.

This is the 28th 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.

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