The Accursed

by Joyce Carol Oates

  “And you deduce from this—?”

  “Josiah, it is not ‘I’ who ‘deduces’ any of this—it is the chain of logic. The Scheme of Clues is rather more like a map, that describes an actual terrain. It is no coincidence that the Wilsons’ dog is howling at night, at a time when suspected ‘satans’ are roaming on the Princeton University campus, seeking victims among our students. And there is the example of the FitzRandolphs’ daughter Wilhelmina, who has been sighted in secluded places like the pathway beside Lake Carnegie, in the company of unidentified men—‘gentlemen,’ we would hope!”

  “Wilhelmina? With men? But who?”

  Josiah did not like the prospect of his friend Willy being in the company of men; the thought was alarming to him, as a betrayal.

  For Willy adores me. That is a constant.

  “Wilhelmina has even been sighted,” Dr. van Dyck said, in a lowered voice, and with a curiously lewd twist of his lips, “on Fifth Avenue, in New York City, striding in the company of one or another Bohemian artiste. For she is taking art lessons, you know, with the notorious Henri, rumored to have actually murdered a man, somewhere in the West.”

  “Is she! That’s a good thing, I should think.”

  “A ‘good thing’? Are you serious, Josiah? There are nude models at the New York School of Art, it is said—nude. And of both sexes.”

  Josiah frowned, considering. Recalling the soft pressure of Willy’s lips against his, and the fragrance that seemed to lift from her skin, Josiah did not think it was such a good thing, that Willy was attending life-modeling classes, in which nude models were sometimes male.

  Dr. van Dyck continued, tapping the silver letter-opener against the Scheme of Clues: “You see, here, connected by this yellow dotted line, an incident designated as T that occurred in the Princeton Cemetery . . .”

  Josiah frowned at the yellow dotted line. What madness was this!

  “ . . . which is one of the primary reasons I asked you to come here today, Josiah. Not having been invited to your dear sister’s funeral, I have nonetheless gone to visit her grave several times, to pay homage to her; for Annabel was somewhat undervalued, I believe, in her intellect, and in the sparkle of her wit, because she was so attractive, and so dazzled the outward eye. It did seem unfortunate to me—that your family would not have dreamt of urging Annabel to continue with her studies, as you naturally, as a boy, continued with yours, at a first-rate university. Instead, Annabel attended a two-year college, and made her ‘debut’ in New York, and—became the fiancée of a dashing young military officer. Johanna had told me, Annabel had a talent for storytelling, and illustration. However—to the case at hand”—seeing Josiah’s stricken face, Dr. van Dyck did not dare continue this line of thought—“keeping in mind my friend Holmes’s methodology, I returned to the cemetery the other day, to the Slade mausoleum, thinking to examine the vault for fresh fingerprints—”

  “ ‘Fingerprints’? But whose?”

  “—the Fiend, perhaps—in one of his human forms. This would be a scientific procedure, at least. And I hoped to check the area about the gravesite for footprints as well, in the melting snow. When I arrived, however, there was a person at the tomb before me—it turned out to be your young cousin Todd—who, seeing me, took fright and ran like a guilty criminal through the maze of gravestones, his head bent and his hair sticking up in bristles like those of a wild creature. I called after him—‘Todd! Todd! It is only me, Pearce van Dyck!’—but he fled all the more desperately, as if I were the Fiend.” Dr. van Dyck laughed, almost gaily. “At the base of the mausoleum I did discover, all around, a remarkable number of footprints, only some of which could have belonged to the boy. From which I hesitate to draw any conclusions but must inform you, Josiah, that often in cases like this you will find an individual or individuals within the afflicted community in league with the demonic forces.”

  Josiah protested that he very much doubted that his cousin Todd, twelve years old, and “immature” for his age, was in league with any forces whatsoever. “Todd is a very ‘alone’ sort of boy.”

  Curtly Dr. van Dyck said, “But perhaps it was not ‘Todd Slade’ whom I saw in the cemetery, Josiah—but a child-sized demon who resembled him.”

  Josiah threw up his hands, exasperated at last.

  “But, sir, are we all imposters?—‘demons’? How could we judge, seeing the outward shapes of people?”

  “That is a very sage question, Josiah. A truly metaphysical question, which I have been pondering, you can be sure, since—since my dear wife announced to me, some ten months ago, her ‘miraculous’ news.”

  Dr. van Dyck had consumed two glasses of sherry, while Josiah had been able to swallow only a single mouthful of the oversweet, cloying liquid. Josiah saw that his former professor’s face was flushed, and his eyes oddly gleaming; he seemed short of breath, as in the throes of great excitement; unless Josiah was mistaken, Dr. van Dyck’s very skull seemed subtly misshapen, with a frowning bulge at the brow, and a small, twisted mouth. As Josiah rose to his feet, and his host rose with him, it seemed to Josiah too that the elder man was shorter than he recalled, with a just perceptibly malformed upper back, hidden beneath a loose-fitting tweed jacket. At the opening of his shirt collar, heated arteries visibly pulsed close beneath the damp skin.

  In hearty spirits, Dr. van Dyck walked with Josiah to the front door of the house, and shook hands with him in parting, bidding him to extend his warmest greetings to Winslow Slade, and to all the other Slades whom he saw so infrequently now. “Tell them—well, perhaps it’s premature to tell anyone—that ‘van Dyck is on the trail’—‘van Dyck is in pursuit’—it may not be consolation for their loss, but I hope it will be reassuring.” Unmistakably, Josiah’s former professor was shorter than he had been, with visibly foreshortened legs; and eyes that gleamed with an unnatural luster, behind even scholarly metal-rimmed eyeglasses.

  “You must return another time, Josiah!—and see it.”

  “It—?”

  “Forgive me: I mean to say, of course, him.”

  THE OCHRE-RUNNERED SLEIGH

  Josiah? Josiah? Come to us, do!

  How very singular a vision it was, and how unexpected—Josiah stopped in his tracks, staring.

  Having left the residence of Professor Pearce van Dyck, Josiah had set off restlessly in the direction of Battle Park, an open, partly wooded area not far from Stockton Street, and about a mile and a half from Crosswicks; the over-heated study of his former professor, no less than the over-heated ratiocination of the man, had left Josiah feeling suffocated and muddle-headed and badly yearning for fresh air.

  “Why, what is this? A ‘flood of snow’ . . .”

  Without Josiah having been aware of it, a sudden snowstorm had whipped up, while he’d been visiting with Dr. van Dyck. The suety rain-clouds had vanished, replaced by swollen snow-clouds; not that the air was cold, but the snowfall was thick, and slow-drifting, as if the flakes were but ornamental, each fiercely glittering.

  Josiah had thought to tramp about the battlefield, as he’d done often as a college student, needing to be alone; he took little heed of the slow-swirling snow, or a damp wind out of the Northeast, or encroaching dusk.

  So it was, while making his way across the snow-encrusted field, upon which, generations before, his famed ancestor Elias Slade had fought heroically against Cornwallis’s men, Josiah chanced to see, less than one hundred feet away, a remarkable sight: a beautifully shaped antique sleigh with high curved runners, drawn by a single snorting black horse.

  “Why, who is this? Strangers . . .”

  The sleigh was driven by a hunched figure in a dark overcoat and hat pulled down low onto his forehead; a gnome-like figure, flicking his whip over the horse’s withers.

  In the sleigh were several women, that is—young ladies.

  The sleigh was such a romantic sight, drawn across the snowy field, through a curtain of slow-falling snow, as dusk was imminent, that Josiah paused to stare, smilin
g; for surely he should know the ladies in the sleigh, if not the driver . . . Yet their faces were gaily turned aside from him; they took no note of him. One was thickly bundled in a splendid black fur coat and matching hat, of sable or mink; another, smaller of frame, wore a winter coat of ermine; the third, a high-crowned hat of Persian lamb and a matching coat whose tight-curled fur struck Josiah’s eye as uncommonly beautiful. It was strange that the ladies did not call out to him, to offer him a ride, for there was a place empty in the sleigh beside the lady in the Persian lamb fur; nor did the gnome-like driver, whose face appeared wizened, so much as glance in his direction. Josiah wiped snow from his eyelashes, listening to the gay chatter of the ladies, and taking note of a curiosity about the sleigh: for the runners, though sleek and curved and delicately wrought at their ends, gave off a peculiar ochre or rust glint, and did not appear to be slicing through the snow so much as skimming its brittle surface.

  Why do you stand mute, and not call out to the party? You, the heir of Crosswicks, have only to raise your hand, to be carried to your home in a style befitting one of your blood.

  And, when Josiah stood unmoving, as if paralyzed—Josiah! Josiah! Come to us, do!

  Just in time, Josiah realized that it was one of his unwanted voices, in a mockery of seduction.

  Unmoving he stood, vigilant, as snowflakes swirled dreamily about him, and the ochre-runnered sleigh was driven silently past at a distance now of fewer than thirty feet. Very gently, sleigh bells sounded. The horse’s breath steamed, and the horse’s coarse black tail switched. In rapt admiration for the muscled grace of the high-stepping horse Josiah stared, and for the antique beauty of the sleigh. His heart was moved by the fey, tinkling laughter of the ladies in which he heard, or seemed to hear, his sister Annabel’s airy laughter; though which of the young ladies, their faces now hidden in shadow, might have been Annabel, he could not, in a sudden fit of trembling, have said.

  And so, the sleigh passed, and disappeared in a flurry of snow.

  Leaving only an echo of bells, and the laughter of the ladies, which brought to Josiah’s mind the glassy notes of wind chimes sounding from a veranda or gazebo of a summer’s evening long ago.

  Why do you stand mute? Unmanned as a eunuch?

  Are you not a Slade, and prepared for the crossing-over?

  “SNAKE FRENZY”

  Soon after, there came the outbreak of female nerves, or hysteria, at the Rocky Hill Seminary for Girls, on a Monday morning in early April 1906.

  Historians curious about this (minor, neglected) outbreak of the Curse may consult the Princeton Packet for April 3 of that year, which reported the incident with prominent headlines on the front page of the local weekly:

  “SNAKE FRENZY” REPORTED AT THE ROCKY HILL SEMINARY

  28 STUDENTS, 3 FACULTY MEMBERS SUCCUMB

  FAINTING AND “EPILEPTIFORM” SEIZURES

  It was Wilhelmina Burr’s misfortune to find herself at the center of this bizarre episode, never satisfactorily explained by neutral observers as by research scientists at the university but rather brushed aside, as female hysterics.

  Wilhelmina was directing the girls’ choir in the music hall at the school—(a neo-Classic building set upon a ridge overlooking the Millstone River and an intervening marshy and muddy stretch of land)—when, suddenly, a wanly pretty girl named Penelope van Osburgh faltered in the midst of her soprano solo in Mr. Selby’s ever-popular “The Rural Retreat”—

  Shady groves and purling rills,

  Walks, where quiv’ring moonbeams play,

  Skreen the worldsick breast from ills,

  Lull the cares of sorrowed day!

  —staring with widened eyes past the choir mistress’s head; and, now gone deathly white, pointed to the ornamental molding that bordered the ceiling, saying, “Oh, it is alive!—the serpent!—there!—it has wakened!—it has moved!—it is coming now for us.”

  For some stunned seconds the hall was locked in silence: Wilhelmina might have heard the tiny ticking of her watch, had she had the presence of mind to attend to it; then, the stricken girl began to breathe hoarsely and shallowly, whispering, “The serpent!—the serpent!” Still pointing at the ceiling, she sank into the arms of the girl beside her in a dead faint.

  After which, all the girls began to scream, and faint—and Chaos erupted in the music hall.

  It had long intrigued Wilhelmina, that the elegant neo-Classical music building was so curiously decorated, in its moldings; she had noticed, the first time she’d entered the music hall, how, at the ceiling, there were sinuous sculpted white forms not quite visible: possibly Italianate vines, or Grecian tendrils, or “frozen waves,” or, indeed, languorously outstretched serpents. That these were “white” was a misnomer for, with the passage of time, the moldings had become discolored with dust, but unevenly; so that there were suggestions of shadows, and not a uniformity of hue. In a play of light, in quite ordinary circumstances, the moldings did seem to “move”—to a degree. Wilhelmina had noticed this herself, and had dismissed the optical illusion as a phenomenon of light, of no significance whatsoever.

  Yet now, it seemed that the “serpents” had roused themselves from their long slumber, and were moving. How the Rocky Hill Seminary girls shrieked! A second girl slumped to the floor in a faint, and a third, and, as Wilhelmina came to help her, she collided with two terrified girls who thrust themselves into her arms as if they were young children; for the snakes were now writhing, and had begun to slither down the walls and window frames, just perceptibly visible, and horribly, on all sides.

  Wilhelmina, the only adult in the room, amid a gathering of some thirty adolescent girls, found herself utterly panicked, and perplexed: for she could not see definitively that the snakes were slithering down from the molding, yet, judging by an unusual agitation of the air, and the terrified cries of the girls, it was reasonable to conclude that something was amiss; something was very much amiss; and she was responsible for protecting her girls from it.

  Another girl began to scream, pointing past Wilhelmina: “Oh! There! The black snake! He is roused, he is angry, he is coming for us!”—and now a greater terror ensued as the girls lunged and rushed about, whimpering, and sobbing, and white-faced, with no idea of how to escape the snakes, as (it seemed) the snakes could not be actually seen. Yet it was clear, the snakes were slithering toward them from all sides, along the polished hardwood floor.

  Miss Burr shouted for order, and was unheard; rushed about to calm, to scold, to intervene, even to threaten. But there were too many panicked girls, emotion ran too high, like a sudden wildfire, on a windy day; all that the instructress could do was try to prevent the girls from trampling and injuring one another, in their haste to exit the hall.

  “Take care! Please! There are no snakes! Where are these snakes! I see no snakes! Priscilla! Marian! Please do not push, you must leave the hall in an orderly fashion—please. Girls!”

  Wilhelmina herself was nearly sobbing now, in frustration and mounting fear.

  Trying to prevent the girls from injuring one another, Wilhelmina stumbled, and staggered, for there seemed to be—something—wriggling, and writhing—and sinuous—at her feet; a slithering muscular shape like a bas-relief come to life . . .

  A splendid creature, not wanly white but blackly iridescent, touched with scales that glinted silver, and puce, and ochre; its underbelly finely ribbed, and as creamy-pale and smooth as the fairest-skinned girl at Rocky Hill; its broad, flat, intelligent head held high, tongue flicking, and tawny gem-like eyes glowing as if in recognition.

  Beyond this, Wilhelmina knew no more. For amid the hysteria of her girls she too fainted, her petticoats crackling around her and her high starched collar cutting into her throat as she fell heavily to the hardwood floor.

  ELSEWHERE IN THE SCHOOL someone sounded the fire alarm. The Rocky Hill fire wagon, with a half-dozen eager volunteer firemen aboard, arrived within minutes. Unfortunately, this contributed to the hysteria, as the fire alarms a
nd sirens were deafeningly loud; and shortly it seemed that the girls throughout the school, not just the choir members, had succumbed to the mysterious frenzy—screaming at the sight of (invisible?) serpents that slithered, and slid, and squirmed, and coiled, and leapt, and writhed, advancing threateningly at them from all sides. The firemen were amazed and baffled, for they could discover no fire, and could not see the snakes, though the screaming girls pointed them out, and ran from them, in the chill of early April, clad only in middy-blouses and blue woolen skirts and matching stockings; muddying their shoes and, in some cases, falling into the soft-thawing earth, in their desperation to save themselves. Several teachers were now involved, trying to restore calm; of these, one was a young man, a mathematics instructor, named Holleran, of a nervous disposition, who seemed to be seeing the snakes himself, or their agitated impressions in the moist earth, and fell into a faint; or, as Dr. Boudinot later described the phenomena, epileptiform seizures , of unaccountable origin.

  In all, the worst of the “snake frenzy” lasted scarcely an hour, as by degrees the snakes seemed to vanish; whether the creatures escaped into the muddy bog beyond the music school, or simply disappeared, to be discovered in their original, benign and bland forms in the aged molding in the music hall, the following day; yet, the effects of the hysteria were not easily cast off. Symptoms varied considerably from girl to girl, and from instructor to instructor; some felt the upset for the remainder of the day; some could not return to the seminary for a week; and others, including the Latin teacher Miss Cowper, and poor Mr. Holleran, were never again to be entirely free of the snake vision for the remainder of their lives. The seminary headmistress, Miss Singleton, a physically fit woman in her early sixties, would claim to have never seen a single snake, not anywhere on the school property; yet, she too was nervously affected, and was perceived to have lost some of the poise and self-confidence for which she’d been known.