The Sundial

by Shirley Jackson

  “Essex,” Mrs. Halloran said.

  “Mrs. Halloran?”

  “I am bewildered. Come into the library and explain all this to me.”

  _____

  The question of belief is a curious one, partaking of the wonders of childhood and the blind hopefulness of the very old; in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something. It might be suggested, and not easily disproven that anything, no matter how exotic, can be believed by someone. On the other hand, abstract belief is largely impossible; it is the concrete, the actuality of the cup, the candle, the sacrificial stone, which hardens belief; the statue is nothing until it cries, the philosophy is nothing until the philosopher is martyred.

  Not one of the people in Mrs. Halloran’s house could have answered honestly and without embarrassment the question: “In what is it you believe?” Faith they had in plenty; just as they had food and beds and shelter, they had faith, but it was faith in agreeably concrete things like good food and the best beds and the most weathertight shelter and in themselves as suitable recipients of the world’s best. Old Mr. Halloran, for one, would have been considerably more lighthearted in a faith which promised him everlasting life, but in the concept of everlasting life Mr. Halloran could not believe, since he was dying. His own life showed no signs of continuing beyond a hideously limited interval, and the only evidence he ever saw of everlasting life was in those luckier ones around him who continued young and would stay so after he was dead. Not-dying from day to day was as much as Mr. Halloran could be fairly expected to believe in; the rest of them believed in what they could—power, perhaps, or the comforting effects of gin, or money.

  _____

  Fancy was a liar. She had been with Aunt Fanny and dared not admit to running away. She had not been frightened, but she enjoyed teasing people weaker than herself. Not a servant, or an animal, or any child in the village near the house, would willingly go near her.

  _____

  Being impossible, an abstract belief can only be trusted through its manifestations, the actual shape of the god perceived, however dimly, against the solidity he displaces. Not one of the people around Aunt Fanny believed her father’s warning, but they were all afraid of the snake. Miss Ogilvie, indeed, never again sat in that corner of the drawing room near the snake’s bookcase, although it had formerly been one of her favorite spots.

  _____

  “It could have been in the firewood,” Essex said, pacing the library floor.

  “But the gardener could not have been clipping the hedge,” Mrs. Halloran said.

  “I have no idea what to think. Aunt Fanny has behaved very strangely.”

  “I will not dispute that. Essex, you may stay.”

  Essex was silent. Then he said, “People can be persuaded to accept almost anything. Last night I thought myself degraded, fouled, rendered contemptible, cringing. Today Aunt Fanny and her snake have enlightened me; two catastrophes cannot make a right, but I think I had never any expectation of leaving. Aunt Fanny has been very kind.”

  “I genuinely hope she will feel better,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Now I will have to let Miss Ogilvie stay, and Maryjane.”

  _____

  But Aunt Fanny continued very odd. Physically, she was well enough to make it unnecessary to call a doctor, but she went about smiling and happy, almost gay. She laughed like a young girl who has found a first lover, she ate hugely of pancakes for her late breakfast, she sang. Mrs. Halloran believed she had gone mad, but Aunt Fanny mad was so much more palatable than Aunt Fanny sane that Mrs. Halloran bit her tongue, averted her eyes, and winced only occasionally.

  Immediately after her breakfast, which everyone had stayed to watch her eat, Aunt Fanny fell asleep, her head on the table, a smile on her face. Asleep, she spoke at length, and, although afterward none of them could remember with exactness the words Aunt Fanny used, they sat appalled and frightened, and certainly heard Aunt Fanny speak as she never had before.

  Aunt Fanny was listening to her father, repeating to them what he told her. With a happy smile on her face and her eyes shut, she listened with a child’s care, and spoke slowly, word for word. Aunt Fanny’s father had come to tell these people that the world outside was ending. Neither Aunt Fanny nor her father expressed any apprehension, but the world which had seemed so unassailable to the rest of them, the usual, daily world of houses and cities and people and all the small fragments of living, was to be destroyed in one night of utter disaster. Aunt Fanny smiled, and nodded, and listened, and told them about the end of the world.

  At one point she said sadly, “All those poor people, dying at once,” and, again, “We must consider ourselves extremely fortunate.”

  Those few people gathered in Mrs. Halloran’s house, which Aunt Fanny now seemed to believe was her father’s house, would be safe. The house would be guarded during the night of destruction and at its end they would emerge safe and pure. They were charged with the future of humanity; when they came forth from the house it would be into a world clean and silent, their inheritance. “And breed a new race of mankind,” Aunt Fanny said with sweetness.

  _____

  Immediately following this revelation, Aunt Fanny, waking, asked for and drank a small glass of brandy, after which she retired to her room and fell into a deep sleep which lasted until late afternoon. While Aunt Fanny slept, Fancy played with her doll house and then went down into the kitchen, where she was not welcome. Miss Ogilvie washed out the underwear she had worn the day before, and used a small hand iron to finish up the underwear already dry. Maryjane lay on the chaise in her bedroom, reading a true confession magazine brought her secretly by one of the maids, and eating peanut brittle. Essex sat in the library under a bust of Seneca and did a crossword puzzle. Mr. Halloran dozed before the fire in his room, and wondered that the years had been so short. Mrs. Halloran sat long alone, her open hand resting on the pages of a Bible she had not opened, or even remembered, for many years.

  When Aunt Fanny awakened she was perfectly aware of all that had happened, including her own revelations, and—probably resembling in this all souls who have been the vehicle of a major supernatural pronouncement—her first reaction of shivering terror was almost at once replaced by a feeling of righteous complacence. She did not know why these extraordinary messages had been sent through her own frail self, but she believed without question that the choice had been good. She was completely subject to some greater power and, her own will somewhere buried in that which controlled her, she could only become autocratic and demanding.

  For a few minutes she lay quietly on her bed, wondering, and then she rose and went to look at herself in the mirror. There seemed as yet no outward change to her, so she thought to put on her dead mother’s jewels, and, at last, decked in diamonds never cleaned since they were put away on her mother’s death, Aunt Fanny made her way upstairs to the wing which was occupied by Maryjane and Fancy. She knocked on the door of their sitting room, and heard Maryjane ask who it was, then tell Fancy to get up and unlock the door.

  “It is Aunt Fanny, my dears,” Aunt Fanny said, and the door was opened. Fancy had been putting away her doll house, and Maryjane was lying back, her confession magazine underneath her. “Aunt Fanny,” said Maryjane. “It was kind of you to come. My asthma is worse, much worse. Will you tell them downstairs?”

  “But now you may give up having asthma, Maryjane,” Aunt Fanny said.

  “Why?” Maryjane sat up. “Is she dead?”

  “You know perfectly well,” Aunt Fanny said irritably, “that she is well on her way to being reborn into a new life and joy.”

  “Reborn?” Maryjane fell back. “That’s all I need,” she said.

  “Shall I push her down the stairs?” Fancy asked, as one repeating an incantation rather than as one asking a question; perhaps she had to recite this regularly to her mother.

  “Is Fancy subnormal, do you think?” Au
nt Fanny asked.

  “She’s Lionel’s own child,” Maryjane said.

  “Well, tell her to stop saying that. Evil, and jealousy, and fear, are all going to be removed from us. I told you clearly this morning. Humanity, as an experiment, has failed.”

  “Well, I’m sure I did the best I could,” Maryjane said.

  “Do you understand that this world will be destroyed? Soon?”

  “I just couldn’t care less,” Maryjane said. “Unless they save a special thunderbolt for her.”

  “Everything, Aunt Fanny?” Fancy was pulling at her sleeve. “The whole thing? All the parts I’ve never seen?”

  “All of it, dear. It has been a bad and wicked and selfish place, and the beings who created it have decided that it will never get any better. So they are going to burn it, the way you might burn a toy full of disease germs. Do you remember when you had the measles? Your grandmother took your teddy bear and had it put in the incinerator, because it was full of germs?”

  “I remember,” Fancy said grimly.

  “Well, that is just what they are going to do with this diseased, filthy old world. Right in the incinerator.”

  “Did your father really tell you all this?” Maryjane asked.

  “It is as though something I had known all my life, and believed without ever really knowing what it was—some lovely, precious secret—had suddenly come into the open. When my father spoke to me he only reminded me of what I had always known, and forgotten. I am very happy about it.”

  “Who is ‘they’?” Fancy asked insistently.

  Aunt Fanny shook her head. “I am sure we will hear more about it,” she said.

  “What I don’t see,” Maryjane said petulantly, “is how it is going to help my asthma. Lionel used to rub my ankles.”

  Aunt Fanny put her hand gently on Maryjane’s arm. “Those who survive this catastrophe,” she said, “will be free of pain and hurt. They will be . . . a kind of chosen people, as it were.”

  “The Jews?” Maryjane said indifferently. “Weren’t they chosen the last time?”

  “I wish you would take me seriously,” Aunt Fanny said, her voice sharpening. “It’s not as though I had any choice in all this, I only say what I’m told, after all. Naturally you are included in any plan for the inhabitants of this house, but I can hardly see what earthly use you will be to us if you persist in saying every silly thing that comes into your head. After all, Maryjane, I am sure that there must be a great many people who would be glad to be saved when the world is destroyed. After all,” and she rose and turned to the door.

  “You’re wearing your mother’s diamonds,” Maryjane said. “You know by rights they should have come to me. Lionel always said so.”

  “I’m interested,” Fancy said. “Aunt Fanny, I’m terribly interested. It ought to be a pretty big fire.”

  “Dreadful,” said Aunt Fanny.

  “I’d like to see it,” Fancy said.

  “Well, I’m sure your Aunt Fanny will let you watch,” Maryjane said. “Fanny, if you’re going downstairs remind them about my tray, will you?”

  _____

  Aunt Fanny swept downstairs and into the drawing room where Essex and Miss Ogilvie were drinking martinis with Mrs. Halloran. Essex, moving belatedly to hold the door for Aunt Fanny, was caught helpless, holding his glass aimlessly while Aunt Fanny passed him regally to take her chair unassisted.

  “A truly unusual day, Orianna,” she said. “Essex.”

  Essex sat down.

  Aunt Fanny gestured to Essex, said “A glass of sherry, if you please,” and then, to Mrs. Halloran, “Now that we know what is going to happen, Orianna, I think we had better decide where we stand.”

  “If I did not detect somewhere in that the air of a prepared speech,” Mrs. Halloran said, “I would be afraid of you, Fanny.”

  “Thank you, Essex.” Aunt Fanny noticed Miss Ogilvie nodded, and went on, “There will be no more of that, Orianna. You will be civil.”

  Mrs. Halloran opened her mouth and closed it again.

  “Let us not forget that your origins are low,” Aunt Fanny said. “There are areas of refinement not possible to one of your background. One area of refinement,” she explained with sweet patience, “is—if you will permit me to put a name to it—the supernormal. There you must allow me superiority, and it is the supernormal which has laid siege to this house, and captured it undefended. A little more, please, Essex?”

  “I have never seen this before,” Essex observed to the sherry decanter. “Aunt Fanny is possessed.”

  “Drinking spirits,” Miss Ogilvie said, nodding wisely.

  “Spirits indeed,” Aunt Fanny said. She smiled approvingly at Miss Ogilvie. “We are in a pocket of time, Orianna, a tiny segment of time suddenly pinpointed by a celestial eye.”

  “Now, you cannot suspect that of being a prepared speech,” Essex said to Mrs. Halloran.

  “I wish Aunt Fanny would stop babbling sacrilegious nonsense,” Mrs. Halloran said, and there was an ominous note in her voice.

  “Call it nonsense, Orianna, say—as you have before—that Aunt Fanny is running in crazed spirits, but—although I am of course not permitted to threaten—all the regret will be yours.”

  “I feel it already,” Mrs. Halloran said.

  “The experiment with humanity is at an end,” Aunt Fanny said.

  “Splendid,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I was getting very tired of all of them.”

  “The imbalance of the universe is being corrected. Dislocations have been adjusted. Harmony is to be restored, inperfections erased.”

  “I wonder if anything has been done about the hedges,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Essex, did you speak to the gardeners?”

  “The ways of the gods are inscrutable,” Aunt Fanny said, her voice high.

  “Inscrutable, indeed,” Mrs. Halloran said. “I personally would never have made such a choice. Put it, Aunt Fanny, since you will not be silent, that the first harmony to be established is that between you and myself.”

  “I cannot be silenced,” Aunt Fanny said, shouting, “I cannot be silenced; this is my father’s house and I am safe here. No one can drive me away.”

  “Distasteful,” said Mrs. Halloran, shrugging. “Essex, will you fill my glass? And I believe Aunt Fanny will have more sherry. We have time before dinner. Miss Ogilvie?”

  _____

  “She is doing it again,” Essex said later, coming to stand by Mrs. Halloran on the terrace. “Listening. Nodding.”

  “If anything had been needed to perfect Aunt Fanny’s exquisite charm,” Mrs. Halloran said, “it would be this prophetic lunacy.”

  “I believe she has lost her mind,” Essex said.

  Mrs. Halloran turned to move slowly down the wide marble steps, and Essex came soundlessly beside her. “It is a lovely night,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Aunt Fanny may be certifiable, certainly. It is not impossible in my husband’s family. But it is irrelevant.”

  “If Aunt Fanny is not mad,” Essex said. “Had it occurred to you? We may expect a world cataclysm in the very near future. Unless of course it is not impossible that in your husband’s family they may be mistaken.”

  “What concerns me most is her defiance,” Mrs. Halloran said. “It is not usual in Aunt Fanny.”

  “I suppose the destruction of the world will not turn on Aunt Fanny’s manners. I would not let her mingle freely with your friends, however, or at least not with strangers.”

  “Essex,” Mrs. Halloran said. She stopped by the sundial and put her hand down gently; under her fingers the letters said WHAT IS THIS WORLD? “Essex, I am not a fool. I have gone for many years disbelieving most of what people told me. But I have never before been requested to take an immediate opinion on the question of the annihilation of civilization. I have never known my sister-in-law to get any message accurately, but I canno
t afford to ignore her.”

  “Does that mean that you find yourself believing Aunt Fanny’s claptrap?”

  “I have no choice,” Mrs. Halloran said. She moved her finger caressingly along WORLD. “Authority is of some importance to me. I will not be left behind when creatures like Aunt Fanny and her brother are introduced into a new world. I must plan to be there. Oh, what madness,” she said, her voice agonized, “why could he not have come to me?”

  After a minute Essex said, “I see. Then I suppose I must withdraw my word claptrap, and substitute something more politic.”

  “Claptrap will do.” Mrs. Halloran laughed. “I am positive of it, but I insist upon being saved along with Aunt Fanny. I have never had any doubt of my own immortality, but put it that never before have I had any open, clear-cut invitation to the Garden of Eden; Aunt Fanny has shown me a gate.”

  “Then I will have to book a ticket, too. I cannot believe Aunt Fanny, but I will not doubt you.”

  Mrs. Halloran turned and started back toward the house. “I do wish Aunt Fanny had never thought of it,” she said, and sighed.

  “At least we are not enjoined to live in celibate poverty,” Essex said.

  “I agree that I would not be so willing to believe in Aunt Fanny if her messages dictated that I give away all my earthly possessions. But then, of course, Aunt Fanny would never accept such a message; it could not have been meant for her.”

  “I wonder if there are others. Other places, on the earth. Learning these same unbelievable things, right now.”

  “That presupposes the existence of other Aunt Fannys. I cannot bear to think of it.”

  “When we believe,” Essex said seriously, “we must do so wholly. I am prepared to follow Aunt Fanny because I agree with you: it is the only positive statement about our futures we have ever heard, but once I have taken her side I will not be shaken. If I can bring myself to believe in Aunt Fanny’s golden world, nothing else will ever do for me; I want it too badly.”

  “I wish I had your faith,” Mrs. Halloran said.

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