The Extra Chair

• 4 minute read
• Ages 9-13
• Horror Stories for Kids

We were five at dinner. My parents, my brother, my sister and me.

There were six chairs at the table, because the table came with six, and the sixth one had always been at the end nearest the kitchen door and nobody had ever sat in it.

It was where things got put. Bags, folded washing, the newspaper.

The rule

My mother had one rule about it that she stated perhaps twice a year, always in passing, never as though it were important.

"Do not put anything on that chair at night."

That was all. Not do not sit in it. Do not put anything on it after dark.

We followed it without discussing it, the way children follow the small strange rules of their own house, and it was not until I was about twenty-five and describing my childhood to somebody else that I heard how it sounded.

The night I forgot

I was fifteen and I came in late with a bag of books and put it on the chair and went to bed.

I woke up at some point in the night, and the house was quiet, and I lay there for a while trying to work out what had woken me.

Then I remembered the bag.

And I lay in the dark for a long time deciding whether to go down and move it, and eventually I did, because I could not sleep otherwise.

The kitchen

The house was completely dark and I went down without putting the light on, because I knew the way.

I came round the door into the kitchen and the chair was where it always was, at the end of the table.

My bag was on the floor beside it.

The morning

I asked my mother at breakfast whether she had come down in the night and moved it.

She said no, and asked why, and I told her.

She put the teapot down.

"On the floor beside it," she said. "Not thrown. Not across the room."

"Beside it."

And my mother nodded slowly, several times, the way people do when something has confirmed a thing they hoped they were wrong about, and then she said we should have the chair out of the house, and it went to the tip that weekend and we ate with five chairs after that.

What I asked her later

Years afterwards I asked her what the rule had been for, and where she had got it.

She said her mother had told her the same thing about the same chair, and that she had never asked either.

"But you knew what putting it on the floor meant," I said. "You reacted."

"I knew it meant something was using it," she said. "That was all I ever knew. My mother's rule was not about keeping something out of the chair."

She looked at me.

"It was about not leaving anything of ours in a place where something else sits."