The French Dresser.

“What a gorgeous dressing table.”
Sophie ran her hand lovingly around the time worn curves of the old mirrored dresser. “This would be perfect in our bedroom.”
“How old is this ?” asked Trevor, turning to the man behind the counter of the antique shop.
“Turn of the century Sir. It’s French. From a little workshop on the outskirts of Paris. It is a superb example of the style of that period.”
“Oh darling, let’s buy it. It’s gorgeous.”
Sophie hugged Trevor’s arm as though she were preventing him from escaping.
“OK, we’ll take it. When can you deliver ?”

The van arrived at their picturesque country cottage the following afternoon. The cottage stood isolated on the side of a hill with a magnificent view across the rolling countryside.
Sophie ran to the door and supervised the delivery men around the jumble of unpacked tea chests from their recent move.
The men left with an over generous tip and Sophie raced back upstairs like a child on her birthday.
“It’s perfect,” she thought as she paced up and down in front of the dresser.
Then opening and closing the doors and running the drawers in and out.
Stencilled onto the bottom of each drawer, faded with time was a name: ‘Hotel de Marne.’ This added to Sophie’s pleasure in the piece. Its sense of history. Its unknown past. All those ladies with a hundred stories to tell who’d sat at this very table and prepared for an evening at the Theatre, or a Ball, or something more intimate.

The afternoon was spent digging through tea chests for clothes and toiletries to put in the drawers. She arranged her favourite perfumes neatly around the elegant surface, leaving her more garish modern designs inside a drawer.
She spent fifteen minutes brushing her hair just so she could sit and use the mirror with its flower engravings around the edge. The mirror had a slight flaw at one point that made her face look crooked from a certain angle. Far from bothering Sophie, she thought this added to the character of the piece.

Trevor liked it as much as his wife.
“It could have been made for this room,” he said, after being dragged upstairs to admire it as soon as he got home.
He was even pleased with the French connection. His German grandfather had lived in France for several years, and somewhere in the back of his mind, Trevor felt a vague affinity with the country.

As she prepared for bed that evening, Sophie sat at the dresser taking extra time in her normal routine. Her make up was removed with detailed care. Her hair was brushed for longer than necessary. Her nightdress was adjusted, just so.
Trevor lay on the bed half reading a book, but more amused by Sophie’s pleasure in her new ‘toy.’
“Come to bed darling. It’ll still be there in the morning,” he laughed.
She looked at him through the mirror.
“I just love using it. It makes me feel so, so………….
“Pretty ?” said Trevor.
Sophie stood to face her husband. She had a look that left him in no doubt how she felt. As she approached the bed, Trevor put his book on the bedside table and threw back the sheets invitingly.

It was four in the morning when Trevor opened his eyes. He’d been sleeping the deep sleep of tired contentment, but something had woken him. He looked around the room and saw Sophie at the dresser, combing her hair in the moonlight.
Surprised, he raised his head from the pillow and checked the bedside clock.
“Sophie, it’s four in the morning. Come to bed.
There was a sleepy murmer from beside him. He turned to see Sophie fast asleep. He quickly turned to face the dresser. There was nobody there.
He sat up sharply, his skin tingling as he looked around the room. Nothing.
Everything was perfectly normal.
In the morning it all seemed unreal and not worth mentioning to Sophie.
In the light of day, Trevor wasn’t even sure if he’d even woken up at all.
The next few days passed uneventfully and the experience was forgotten.

“Drive carefully,” said Trevor as he closed the car door for Sophie.
He stood and watched as she disappeared down the narrow lane.
Her mother was coming to stay for a few days to check out the new house and Sophie had arranged to go and collect her.
This meant staying over for the night and returning the next day.
Trevor returned to the empty house and looked at the mountain of paperwork he had to get through.
He worked straight through until after nine, before realising how hungry he was.
The paperwork was put to one side and he went to see what scraps he could find in the kitchen. He’d not given a thought to getting anything in to eat.
He opened the fridge door and laughed. Sophie had made him a plate of sandwiches, cellophane wrapped and ‘ready to go.’ She knew him well. He opened a beer and settled in front of the TV. After channel hopping for a while, he settled on a film he’d seen a dozen times. Before long, his eyes got heavy and the empty bed he’d been avoiding didn’t seem so bad after all.

He didn’t know how long he’d been asleep. It was the light that woke him.
The first thing he saw was the bedside clock reading four a.m.
For a few groggy seconds he tried to think why it was light at that time of morning.
He looked at the bedside lamp. It was off.
A movement in the corner of his vision made him turn to look. His stomach tightened as a bolt of fear shot through his body.
In the dressing table mirror was the reflection of a woman combing her hair. There was no one sat at the dresser. The mirror was lighting the bedroom with a flickering orange glow. It seemed to be coming from behind the woman, like an open fire in the room behind her.
This was no ghostly image, she looked completely real. She was pretty, yet she seemed past her prime. Somehow, used.
She looked straight at Trevor and smiled. It wasn’t a kind smile. More patronising and cold.
Trevor lay rigid, frozen to the bed. Not daring to move. The woman stood up. Her head and shoulders appeared above the mirror, no longer just inside its frame. She had a black feather boa draped around her neck and halfway down her gawdy red nightdress.
The woman moved towards the bed, walking smoothly out of the mirror as though it were an open window. Her body was solid, yet it came through the wooden dresser towards the bed where Trevor lay, paralysed with fear.
Perspiration poured out of every pore in his body. He wanted to close his eyes, yet he daren’t. He couldn’t.
As she reached the bed, his head swam, his eyes defocused and he blacked out.

It was past eleven the next morning when Trevor finally woke.
He lay with his eyes closed, feeling very uneasy but not quite knowing why.
When he opened his eyes the first thing he saw was the dresser.
The horror of the night returned. Trevor leaped out of bed and reached the door in one swift movement. The safety of the open door gave him the courage to stop and look back. Everything was perfectly normal. Another dream ? Surely not. It had all been too real. And yet……
Thank heaven Sophie would be home tonight.

His unplanned lie in had upset his plans and he spent the rest of the day trying to finish off yesterdays paperwork. His mind though, was not on the job.
When the phone rang, Trevor jumped out of his chair with fright. Sophie’s voice immediately lifted his spirits, like hearing the cavalry approaching over the hill.
The news though, was bad. There was thick fog and they were going to be late. “Don’t wait up,” she insisted.
As if to twist the knife, she also had ‘good’ news about the dresser.
“Mother says the Hotel de Marne was an infamous Parisian Brothel in the war.”
Sophie sounded excited.
“Apparently it was pillaged and burnt to the ground in the middle of the night because the girls were accused of collaborating with the German soldiers.
One of the poor women was trapped and burnt to death. Then it turned out that they hadn’t been collaborating at all, they lured the German soldiers to their beds before strangling them with their feather boas.
Just imagine if that thing could speak.”

The words echoed around Trevor’s head as he replaced the phone.
He poured himself a large whiskey and turned on the television.
There was a Lemmon & Matheau film on. One of the few films he would go out of his way to watch. An hour later, he’d laughed till he ached. He’d also drunk several large whiskeys. The previous night and Sophie’s tale seemed to have been magnified out of all proportion.
He decided to take Sophie’s advice and go to bed, but he was determined to stay awake until Sophie got home. He went to the unpacked tea chests and rummaged around for a few minutes before pulling out a large hardback book; ‘Glorious Country Gardens.’ He poured himself another large whiskey, went to bed and planned his cottage garden for next summer. As he sat in bed reading, every once in a while he cast a wary glance at the dresser.
By the time he’d finished his whiskey, he was having great trouble focussing his eyes to read any more. His determination to stay awake crumbled.
“She’ll wake me when she gets home,” he thought, as he turned off the light and slid beneath the covers.

He’d been asleep for an hour when he vaguely felt the covers being pulled back and Sophie climb quietly into bed beside him.
He tried to force himself from his slumber to greet her but he was too far gone.
He felt an arm across his chest and Sophie’s head snuggling into his neck.
He mumbled something about a good journey but it was totally incoherent and he slipped back into deep sleep.

An hour later he was woken sharply by the shrill ring of the bedside phone. Trevor’s arm reached out for the receiver.
“Who on earth can this be.” He groaned.
He put the receiver to his ear.
At the sound of Sophie’s voice, his eyes shot open.
The first thing he saw was a red nightdress hanging over the dresser mirror.
“Darling, the fog’s too bad,” said Sophie.
“We’re going to stop over at a hotel. See you in the morning.”
Trevor didn’t answer. He couldn’t.
He turned to look over his shoulder. Sophie heard a blood curdling scream from her husband as the receiver fell to the floor, followed gently, by a single black feather.

END.