Hangsaman

by Shirley Jackson

  Perhaps tomorrow I shall pick up one of the houses, any one, and, holding it gently in one hand, pull it carefully apart with my other hand, with great delicacy taking the pieces of it off one after another: first the door and then, dislodging the slight nails with care, the right front corner of the house, board by board, and then, sweeping out the furniture inside, down the right wall of the house, removing it with care and not touching the second floor, which should remain intact even after the first floor is entirely gone. Then the stairs, step by step, and all this while the mannikins inside run screaming from each section of the house to a higher and a more concealed room, crushing one another and stumbling and pulling frantically, slamming doors behind them while my strong fingers pull each door softly off its hinges and pull the walls apart and lift out the windows intact and take out carefully the tiny beds and chairs; and finally they will be all together like seeds in a pomegranate, in one tiny room, hardly breathing, some of them fainting, some crying, and all wedged in together looking in the direction from which I am coming, and then, when I take the door off with sure careful fingers, there they all will be, packed inside and crushed back against the wall, and I shall eat the room in one mouthful, chewing ruthlessly on the boards and the small sweet bones.

  And then, taking another house (the small unfortunates, looking up and not daring to wonder which house will be next, seeing the inevitable hovering hand hesitate over one house, choose perhaps another, or descend awfully and with decision upon the one where they hide), I might be amused by violating all the inhabitants; perhaps—and this might be the funniest of all—set fifty mannikins naked crammed into one room with Arthur Langdon in the center, and poke and prod at them and laugh when they sobbed and tried to move where they were packed in so tight. Or take the Old Nick doll and drag it by one foot up and down the campus paths, banging it gently against the door of every house and against the heads of any dolls who look out. Or, undressing one of the dolls with infinite care—although the dolls are so small it is almost impossible, surely, to undress one without tearing the tiny clothes and sometimes even snapping the thin arms—I might wind a long strip of cloth about it and stick the cloth to the doll with a pin in back and set the doll on a tiny chair on the roof of one of the houses and shout in my ringing voice from the heavens that this is a queen and they must all climb up to the roof and kiss the queen’s toe.

  Or take all the houses and stack them crazily one on top of another with the dolls inside and then on top of the teetering stack of houses set the Arthur Langdon doll and turn it on its head and then with one full laughing breath . . .

  “Hello? Is that Natalie Waite?”

  She stopped, wondering horribly if she had been speaking aloud and he had recognized her voice. But then he said, “I thought I recognized you even in this darkness; what are you doing wandering about on a night like this?”

  “It was too stuffy inside.”

  “I thought so, too. Thought I’d just wander over to the library. You going that way?”

  “No,” said Natalie, although she had been going along the path that led to the library. “I’m going the other way.”

  He glanced down at the row of houses, as though knowing surely which one she would be wanting. “Have a nice time over the holiday?” he asked.

  “Fine.”

  “How is your father?”

  “Fine. Working hard.”

  “Hope to meet him one of these days.”

  “He says he’ll be coming to see me here very soon.”

  “Hope to meet him. Well,” he added vaguely, taking a step along the path toward the library. Then, as though just reminded of it, he turned back and said, “I suppose you’ve heard our news?”

  “No,” said Natalie.

  He laughed embarrassedly. “We’re having a baby,” he said, and since such a bare announcement obviously impressed him as lacking in some effective emotional quality, he went on to say weakly and without any note of conviction in his voice, “We’re very happy about it.”

  “Congratulations,” said Natalie, thinking, Elizabeth? “That’s wonderful.” There seemed to be very little else to add; when they actually had a baby it might be possible to say soberly that it was a pretty thing, or that it resembled Arthur, or that it was incredibly small, and look at its tiny hands, but at present she could only say again, “How wonderful for you both.”

  “We’re very happy about it,” he said. “Well, good night.”

  “Good night,” Natalie said. She did not wait for him to leave—perhaps for fear that he should turn back with such another startling announcement—but went quickly on down the path, toward the house which Arthur Langdon had noted and to which she had known all along that she was going.

  * * *

  Once she started toward the house—it was diagonally across the campus from her own and she could have reached it much more easily by going directly to it, rather than wandering along the edges of the campus to reach it obliquely—she went quickly, almost running at last up the walk. This house was rococo where her own was classic, and its hallway was colorful and filigreed with gold. She went in silently, knowing exactly how to go, and up the stairs, putting her feet down lightly and barely brushing the bannister with the tips of her fingers, her most vital intention to move without noise and not to be noticed if possible. She met no one on the stairs, but when she reached the second floor, she stood hesitating, looking down the hall where lines of open, lighted doorways looked much like those in her own house. She would have to pass them all, and the question was whether to walk with dignity or make a run for it. There was a light, she could see, shining through the transom of the door at the end of the hall and she straightened her shoulders, almost laughed at herself, and then began to walk with quiet sure steps down the hall. She attracted no notice from the first open room; no one even looked up, but the second open room was filled with girls, lounging on the bed and the floor, and someone noticed her and called, “Hey, here she comes.” Without turning her head, she was aware of the girls crowding to the doorway, and knew what their half-audible voices said and how their eyes looked, following her down the hall. The noise brought girls to the doorways all up and down the hall, and even ahead of her Natalie saw doors opening. She pretended to be trying not to smile and she walked without turning her head to the last door on the left. When she hesitated before the door, she heard the great mocking silence up and down the hall, and an echoing burst of laughter and jeering which almost obscured her knock. Then she lost her courage, feeling them all watching her, and, knowing that this door was rarely locked, she opened it without invitation and slipped inside. Standing then with the door safely shut behind her, she took a long breath and laughed; outside she could hear giggling and the sound of footsteps coming softly down almost to the door and then turning back—the sounds of many girls all together saying to each other hilarious things meant to be heard beyond the door.

  Natalie said, “I’m sorry, I really am. I came to say I was really terribly sorry. I shouldn’t have gone, and I’m sorry.”

  “I’m never really angry with you anyway,” Tony said.

  “It was horrible,” Natalie said.

  “Of course.”

  “I told you they would be. Did they hang on you?”

  “They were all there. Even my brother.”

  “They fed me,” Natalie said. “They didn’t do anything else except feed me, I think. May I come in?”

  “What are you afraid of?” Tony asked. “Me?” She was sitting cross-legged on the bed; she had not moved when Natalie opened the door and now she only lifted her head and smiled. She was playing solitaire with the ancient fortune-telling cards called the Tarot, cards old and large and lovely and richly gilt and red; Natalie, glanced down at them and could almost feel their remembered softness which from long use was so little like cardboard now, and almost, she thought, like parchment. Tony and Na
talie believed that they were the only two people in the world who now loved Tarot cards, and used them—so reminiscent of antique, undreamed games—for games of their own, invented card games, and walking games, and a kind of affectionate fortune-telling which was always faithful to the meanings of the cards as recorded in the Tarot book, but which somehow always came out as meaning that Tony and Natalie were the finest and luckiest persons imaginable. Of all the suits, Tony most favored swords, and the card named Page of Swords was always her particular card; Natalie liked the card named the Magician, and thought that the face on the card resembled her own. Tony’s solitaire with the great cards covered half the bed, and Natalie could see that the Magician had been moved out to fill a space, and the page of swords lay upon the queen of cups. “Come along,” Tony said. “You’re back now, at any rate.”

  Natalie came away from the door and stopped in the middle of the room to slip off her shoes. “Wet,” she said.

  “You come to me miserable and helpless and soaked and probably starving,” Tony said pleasantly.

  “I have fifteen dollars, though,” Natalie said, remembering suddenly what had not seemed actual to her before. “My father gave it to me.”

  “Splendid,” Tony said absently, regarding the cards on the bed, “now I shall have a stamp to write home for money.” She stretched. “Seven of pentacles on eight,” she said. “The trouble with these infernal cards is I never can tell whether my solitaire comes out or not.”

  Natalie, moving across the room, stopped suddenly to listen. “They get worse and worse outside,” she said.

  Tony lifted her head to listen for a minute. “Beasts,” she said. “Have they fed?”

  “A little while ago. I nearly got trampled to death on the stairs.”

  “Do you suppose,” said Tony, marveling, “do you suppose they’ve got hold of a man out there?”

  “Sounds like it, poor devil. Those cards are certainly not meant to give sensible answers—you can’t make a solitaire come out with them.”

  “I suppose not.” Tony swept the cards together and began to shuffle them. “I like the way they feel, though. And ordinary cards are so dull and silly.” With the cards still in her hand, she got up easily, and without seeming to have an objective went casually over to the door and opened it. “Get away,” she said amiably.

  The girls outside scattered shrieking, and Tony closed the door and went back over to sit on the bed again. “Someday I shall be allowed to torture them,” she said. “I believe I shall take them one by one and peel them like apples.” Idly she spread the cards out before her. “Tomorrow we can get a new deck if you like,” she said. “One full of jacks and spades and diamonds, and I can play solitaire with that and leave the Tarot deck for you to read dubious futures in and my solitaire still won’t come out.”

  “If you had a deck of cards with only one card in it . . .” Natalie said.

  “Someday,” Tony said vaguely.

  “The Langdons are having a baby.”

  “Page of swords,” Tony said. “Imagine breeding Elizabeth to Arthur. The American Kennel Club will of course have to destroy all the cubs.”

  Natalie realized happily that she was very sleepy; it was a feeling of warmth and comfort and security, and she said without thinking, “You said I’d be right back here.”

  “Did I?” Tony laughed. “Damned queen of pentacles.” Again she lifted her head and stared for a long minute at Natalie. “You’d better sleep.”

  Sleepily Natalie stood up and came to the bed. “Move over,” she said and without waiting squeezed onto the bed between Tony and the wall.

  “Just as I got my cards set out,” Tony said. She gathered the cards together and slid off the bed onto the floor. “Take the damn bed,” she said. “There was a letter for you from the Student Committee, I picked it up at your house yesterday. They said you haven’t been to any classes for two weeks.”

  “I haven’t?”

  “You’re to go see them at ten tomorrow morning,” Tony said. “I lost the letter somewhere.”

  “Too bad,” Natalie said. Sleepily she pulled the blankets over her head. “Door,” she said.

  Tony again went almost silently to the door, opened it, and with a large and menacing gesture drove away the girls outside. When she came back into the room she sat quietly on the floor next to the bed, shoving the cards away.

  “I’ll read to you,” she said. After a minute her voice began quietly, “‘. . . She screamed in genuine alarm as Alice came out of her room with only her shoes and stockings on, and her large matinee hat, a most coquettishly piquantly indecent object! Poor Fanny went red at the sight of her mistress and didn’t know where to look as Alice came dancing along, her eyes noting with evident approval the position into which I had placed her maid.

  “‘“Mes compliments, mademoiselle!” I said with a low bow as she came up.

  “‘She smiled and blushed, but was too intent on Fanny to joke with me. “That’s lovely, Jack!” she exclaimed after a careful inspection of her now trembling maid, “but surely she can get loose!”

  “‘“No, no, Sir!” cried Fanny affrightedly; “Yes Jack do!” exclaimed Alice, her eyes gleaming. She evidently had thought out some fresh torture for Fanny, and with the closest attention, she watched me as I linked her maid’s slender ankles together in spite of the poor girl’s entreaties!’”

  Effortlessly, Natalie found herself falling asleep, warm and happy. She was agreeably aware of the slow relaxations of her hands, her feet, her face, and felt the lines beside her mouth smooth out and her face fall into nothing more than a covering of bone; she thought vaguely that at this moment she must look as she would when dead, and heard then Tony rising to go once more to the door. “Will you leave us alone?” Tony said quietly.

  A confused murmur outside, and then Tony said, “What would I expect of you, poor things? Go off to bed—there won’t be another sound from here.”

  Much, much later, Natalie was sound asleep aware of Tony’s slipping into the bed beside her. Side by side, like two big cats, they slept.

  Opening her eyes in the morning Natalie saw first that it was barely light outside and then turned to see Tony’s eyes regarding her.

  “—Morning?” Natalie said.

  “Come on, lazy,” Tony said.

  They got out of bed together, enjoying the quietness of the morning when everyone else was asleep, and enjoying, too, the feeling of being together without fear. They did not speak much, but moved as though speech were not necessary: first Tony, rolling out of bed, turned a somersault on the floor and rose laughing silently, then Natalie, stretching and turning to the window to see the rising sun, bent and touched her toes without bending her knees. Together, warning one another not to laugh, they went down the hall full of the sounds of sleep from rooms on either side, into the showers, where they bathed together, washing one another’s backs and trying to splash without sound. Then, dry and shivering from a cold shower, they went back to Tony’s room and dressed.

  “I have to get the money from my room,” Natalie whispered remembering when she saw her clothes.

  “I’ll get it,” Tony said. “You finish dressing.”

  Natalie laughed helplessly and silently as Tony slipped out the door in a battered blue bathrobe. Although she could not see the campus and the path Tony must take from the window of the room, she set her elbows on the windowsill and contemplated the rising sun and wondered with amusement on Tony’s probable progress across the sleeping campus to Natalie’s room in an old blue bathrobe and the insolence of being awake before anyone else.

  “Did you get it? Anyone see you?” she asked anxiously when Tony came back into the room. Tony tossed Natalie’s raincoat onto the bed and shook her head.

  “I could have danced up and down the paths,” Tony said.

  Dressing quickly, then, because although they w
ere awake before anyone else, time went on without them, and they might yet be caught by some early riser, they combed each other’s hair and slipped into coats and opened the door softly and went out into the hall. Natalie thought as she followed Tony down the hall how easy it would be to create some kind of sensation in this, or any other, house; how easy it would be to write some kind of message, probably obscene, or else menacing, and leave it under each door, and was proud and pleased with herself because she had not, and it was too late now.

  They tiptoed down the stairs, afraid at this moment of waking some curious person who might ask them where they were going, and reached the front door in safety. Once Tony had opened the door they knew they were surely out, and they gave up trying to go quietly; Tony let the door slam behind them in a gesture calculated to awaken every sleeper within hearing, and, followed by Natalie, ran down the path—running not from fear, but because it was early morning and they were together and they had fifteen dollars and a world ahead of them and no one to know at any time where they were.

  The college was located, with singular lack of imagination, on School Street, and was approximately a mile from the center of the town from which it derived its name. The college owned most of the land along School Street, and all the land behind School Street; where the college land ended, there were nothing but fields and trees. On the one side of the college, where School Street ended and Evergreen Street began, there was a quiet and slightly decayed residential section, inhabited largely by single professors and married students. On the other side of the college, where School Street ended and Bridge Street began, there was—with the odd literal quality that characterizes the inventors of towns—a river with a bridge across it. Bridge Street turned into Main Street when its function as a street over a river ended, and Main Street was, inevitably, the street which led into the center of the town. The stores at the Bridge Street end of Main Street had a bare, utterly straightforward look; they had intruded boldly into a section formerly devoted to small dirty shops with dubious wares, building and asserting themselves under the banners of “improvement” and “help our city grow,” and they found themselves now, their banners still valiant and their cleanliness untarnished, unpaid for and unpatronized, since the people who shopped and longed for a cleaner city drove naturally to the center of town to the grimy stores they already knew. On one corner, here, was a new grocery, all chromium counters and great glass windows, with red and black and white signs shouting, “Veal chops, special,” and, “Our coffee is the best in town,” and, “Holiday bargains”—the holiday unspecified in case the sign should not be taken down before Christmas, or Easter, or Judgment Day. Nestled comfortably close to the shining grocery was a stained small hollow calling itself a “Coffee Shop,” with a crude counter in front exhibiting candy bars and gum to the public, and, within, another counter supported by three stools, at which no doubt the weary shopper could sit and drink coffee made, at least by assumption, from the best coffee in town sold next door. Across the street was an antique shop, flaunting its dirt by rights of the unwritten law which requires that antique shops should soil the white gloves of matrons who drop in, laughing, to see if they can match the brasses on Grandmother’s breakfront. Next to this, an empty showroom which had at one time exhibited pianos, had at another time housed an importer of fine woolens and which was now borrowed annually by the Girl Scouts for their White Elephant Sale, by the Campfire Girls for their Handiwork Show, by the P.T.A. for their home-cooked Food Sale, by the Crippled Children’s League, by the D.A.R., by all the organizations who take in, and sell, one another’s washing. Beyond this charitable center which was at this time—due no doubt to the impending holidays—empty of beggars, was a tiny one-column tailor shop, odorous and hardly large enough for a winter coat in need of repair. And next to the tailor, but possessing odors enough of its own from imported cheeses, was what called itself an “Epicure Shoppe” and dealt largely in elaborately packaged foreign foods; this shoppe was the only one in the neighborhood which had any kind of trade at all, since it was virtually impossible to find Norwegian herring in sour cream or authentic Turkish delight or espresso or English tinned biscuits anywhere else in town. Farther down the block was the town’s one movie house which showed exclusively foreign films and dazzled the honest townfolk with Blood of a Poet seven times a year. The college students went to the large movie houses in the center of the town, and it was only such folk as lady librarians, traveling in packs, and ambitious interior decorators, coming from the newly adapted apartments in the city’s older residential sections, and an occasional French faculty member, who ever went into the small unpolished theater to see Blood of a Poet or The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari or M.