1.

            The old trunk was crafted of fabric the color of dried mud. Repeating L’s and V’s repeated themselves in a pattern familiar to anyone with a passing knowledge of old Louis Vuitton bags. It was fringed in creamy brown leather worn shiny after decades of traveling. I thought it was a pretty ugly bag.

            My wife, who loves old, forgotten things found it charming, and gravitated towards it immediately. I thought it was one of the least interesting items in the old flea market.

            We were pressed intimately together among the organized clutter of an antique store. Old tchotchkes, doodads, and whatchamacallits loomed from piles tossed awkwardly into old toolboxes and milk cans. The store was clean but had a forlorn air to it, and I kept superimposing dusty cobwebs draped over everything.

            “Isn’t this bag so cute? I bet it’s been all over Europe.”

            “I mean, probably,” I shrugged and ran my hand over my bald head. “We’re in Colmar.”

            Colmar is a touristy city in the Alsace region of France, right near the border with Germany. It’s the “Sicily of France.” According to the locals. In the same way Bruges is the Sicily of Belgium, or Utrecht is the Sicily of the Netherlands. Europeans like to tell Americans that their cities are like Sicily because they’re reasonably sure that we’ll know what Sicily is.

            Basically, Colmar is a very pretty little city crossed by canals. The French keep their window-gardens well pruned and radiant, and their shutters painted in vivacious colors which managed to look vivacious without clashing. The best part was that if you attempted to speak un peu de Français then the locals were quite welcoming (It’s a tourist spot, after all).

            She pushed past my glib reply. “It’s got a story, and it’s cute.”

            “It’s ugly.”

            “You’re ugly,” she countered and grabbed the bag. “I’m getting it.”

            I followed her and dutifully snatched the bag, “I predict this will go on exactly one trip while it’s with our family and, incidentally, I am as handsome as a young Marlon Brando.” I said defensively, but I was jerked awkwardly backward by the severe weight of the thing. I frowned and fumbled with the latches so that I could discard the antique bricks located therein. However, the polished brass latches were stuck shut. “Broken,” I murmured. I indicated the bag to Christine, “Broken,” I repeated with an air of finality.

            “We’ll figure that out,” she was already making her way to the cashier.

            “I’ll figure it out,” I muttered.

            “What?”

            “Colmar is so great!”

            She nodded her head in agreement doing me the favor of suppressing her grin while I purchased the bag from a very kind old man with deep smile lines carved into his chestnut-brown face. He spared the bag a quick frown, but he took my money. 

            The bag hibernated in our hotel room for the rest of the trip while we enjoyed wo more days of coffee and steamed clams in the shadow of St. Martin’s Church. We departed to our temporary home in Germany, somewhat regrettably because I don’t know if you know this, but Colmar is the Sicily of France.

2.

            The bag sulked in the back seat of our car during the return trip through an overcast Rhineland. We pulled into our little house on the sunny slope or, “am sonnenhang.” Our cozy little triplex lived up to the name well. We lived in a humble cream and terra-cotta cottage carved into the side of a grassy hill nestled among magnolia trees and fastidious neighbors who kept their gardens beautifully.

            I held the door open for Christine as we chattered and recounted our trip, the many trips we’d already taken, and the trips we were going to take soon. We were pleasantly weary in the familiar way one feels after arriving home after a long drive. I deposited our antiques in the foyer; We would rifle through them tomorrow.

            Our cat, Baba, waited for us in the door to the living room. Baba was typically aloof in the way that most cats are, but today he stared moon-eyed at us and then arched his back and spat before tearing off downstairs. This was very unusual behavior for Baba and I wondered if the pet sitter had forgotten to feed him. I had seen him act like that before, when another male cat would enter his domain. I turned towards our antiques and then to Christine, “He wishes you’d let me buy that model ship.” I said and started up the steps to go to sleep. Christine reminded me that the ship had cost four-hundred Euros while she followed me.           

            I awoke in the dead of night with Christine sleeping contentedly next to me. I padded out of bed towards the bathroom, listening for anything which might have woken me up. I had the bleary impression that a sound had jerked me out of sleep.

            A soft rasping like fingernails against carpet broke the silence and I assumed that Baba was on the prowl downstairs. It wasn’t until I noticed Baba curled up at my wife’s feet that a sick feeling descended into my gut. When the sound came again, I jolted silently in alarm.

 I padded down the steps to peek over the landing. My reading chair regarded me quizzically while I scanned the living room for hunched intruders hiding in the corner. Nothing, only the soft blue glow from hazy moonlight through the skylight. 

            Rasping again. No, scratching from the foyer.

            I descended the steps in my bathrobe. Needles of fear gently stabbed into the back of my neck while approached the closed, fogged glass foyer door. Something moved on the other side of the pebbled glass, with a frantic back-and-forth motion like someone scrubbing the floor however when I pushed the door open I saw only the pile of souvenirs. 

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            Everything was as I’d left it, except for the old Louis Vuitton, which was perched dead center in the room, claiming the space. I distinctly remember leaving the bag against our front door and wondered if Christine had moved it for some reason.

            Then, a long sharp scrape rasped on the inside the case, and the bag bulged slowly as if stirring in its sleep.

3.

            The next morning, Christine had the bag open on the kitchen table while the spring sun brightened our coral-painted walls with a cheery hue. I chewed on my cereal with dark bags under my eyes and focused on counting the wood grains in the breakfast table. I didn’t mention the night’s incident because the mention of night-scratching would only ruin my wife’s day. I felt guilty as if I had allowed an intruder into our home, and I resented my own failure.  

            I suggested that maybe we keep the case in the shed.

            “We’re not doing that, it’s an antique and rats will get into it,” she said matter-of-factly.

            I kept my grimace to myself while the bag side-eyed me..

            The day passed without event, and eventually the bag found its way into the downstairs bedroom where it would luxuriate until our next trip. I did my best to ignore it, but Baba was exactly no help in this regard; He perched in front of the door most of day and wouldn’t stop yowling at it. I felt increasing anxiety as the light purpled into dusk and hoped that the night passed without incident. It didn’t.

            Our triplex has three narrow floors with a staggered staircase climbing one side of the house. The master bedroom is on the top floor, and the downstairs bedroom is on the ground level, two floors down. I mention this to convey that I should not have been able to hear anything in the guest room from behind our heavy German door. The implication was that the soft scratching I heard was coming from outside the guest room.

            Feeling sick, I inched down the flight of steps to perch on the lower landing where I could observe the downstairs hallway safely.

            The bedroom door gaped open, the old parcel at the foot of the stairs. The bag looked utterly mundane sitting there. Christine must have filled the bag with clothes at some point because I could see what looked like a rumpled shirt and glove protruding from the open zipper.

            A sharp hiss pierced my ear, and I turned to see green eyes reflecting the moonlight, and sharp fangs gaping at me from a wet, pink mouth. I almost fell down the steps and Baba hissed once more and scuttled off to hide. His soft growl wafted from his favorite hiding place under the couch.

            I shuddered and turned back to the bag.

            The hand which I had mistaken for a glove withdrew back into the bag like a hermit crab, and the zipper churned slowly closed.

4.

            I was tense every day after that, and the days became a grim journey into night where doubtless new terrors awaited me. Christine had briefly forgotten about the Louis Vuitton, so she hadn’t noticed when I wrapped it in belts and stuffed it in a locked closet downstairs with the key kept securely in our master bedroom.

            For several days nothing happened. I still felt a cold tension seize me whenever I came within sight of the door, so I avoided the downstairs entirely. Guilt compressed my chest at letting some entity invade our home which I was supposed to keep safe. I had allowed my family to be put at risk. Worse, I was keeping it from Christine and she was growing concerned at how standoffish and tense I had become. I could never relax, because even when I was alone in the house I felt like there was someone turning over in the downstairs bed, dozing until nightfall.

            I suggested to Christine that she and a few of her friends go to Belgium together, there was an art festival this weekend which she had been hoping to go to. No, I would stay home and watch the cat, I could use a few days to myself to relax. I didn’t have a plan, but I didn’t want my wife in the house while I scrambled to figure it out. She left a few days later.

            I contemplated the bag in the bedroom like one might worry over an infected wound. I had no plan that first night and went to sleep with every light on, locking the door to the master bedroom and pushing the dresser in front of it.

            That night I spent a sleepless night listening to the bag dragging its way across the floor like a prehistoric slug. The pebbled material it was bound in rasped throughout the house as it established its territory.

5.

            The next day I sped down the Autobahn at a healthy 130 kilometers-per-hour while dark evergreens sprinted past me on either side. I peered at the bag through the rearview mirror; It was now wrapped in no less than six belts and a sturdy length of chain I had purchased from the local hardware store.      

I waited until I was sure that there were no cars to witness me (the Germans have very strong feelings about littering… and about everything, really) and tossed the monstrous parcel into the Rhine. The inky water swallowed it with a satisfying galumph, and I drove home feeling very pleased with myself.

            The scratch coming from downstairs that night was steady and insistent. I flipped the light switch up and down a few times before I realized that the entire house was without power.

            Rain pattered heavily against the windows, and thunder rolled nearby. It was a dark and stormy night. A downy flash of lightning briefly lit my bedroom long enough for me to see my bedroom door, hanging ajar. The slow dragging became sinister, repeating thuds. I heard the familiar sound of the stairs quivering under heavy weight. My skin prickled with sweat as the open door took on sinister new implications.

            I grabbed a flashlight out of my bedside table and slunk out of bed to peer over my landing, the bag was there, its geometric silhouette hunched in the dark on the fifth step. I could hear water from the Rhine pattering onto the floor below. The feeble yellow beam from my light caught something withdrawing quickly into the bag like an insect scuttling back into its burrow. The zippered opening in the bag gaped open at me like a mouthful of brass teeth, and the flipped-up brass latches reminded me of the eyes of a crab.

            Something inside was questing its way towards the opening. I saw gray skin and scuttling protuberances twitching inside the bag, then a harsh zipping sound broke the silence as a gaunt hand snapped out to grab the railing. A feeble arm with loose gray skin became taut as it pulled the weight over the edge of the step, flopping onto the sixth step with a familiar thud.

            I believe that I closed the door and fainted.

            I’m positive that whatever is living inside that case hates me. I can feel its burning need every night when it wakes up. It wants to hurt me, and every night it becomes more active. I never hear dragging anymore, instead I hear the frantic slapping of its palms on my downstairs tile, or the frustrated rattle as it tests my bedroom door.

            My cat has been missing for two days, and Christine will come home tomorrow. I wonder if my invader knows that, too.

            It seems inevitable that tonight I’m going to find the bag at the foot of my bed, latches thrown open and the case gaping and empty, its inhabitant nowhere to be seen but close by.