The Sadness of Spirits

by Aimee Pogson

  There are two details I know about the key maker: he was the master of many keys, and not all of his keys were material.

  He could charm and coerce. He could push, prod, and force. He had the key to everything, but he underestimated the woman within me.

  My song marks me mysterious, even to myself. I watch others smiling, talking with each other and laughing, and I wonder if there is a way in. If I could only look them over long enough, I might find a mechanism to unlock them, to step inside. If I could understand the strange gears of happiness, I might be able to discover it in myself.

  “You have such an intensity about you,” people say. “Didn’t your mother ever teach you to smile?”

  My mother taught me to walk these forest paths, to keep our secrets. She taught me about spirits and the way they can claim the body for their own. She taught me the many stories that circulate in this place and how they pertain to us.

  They are our stories, perpetuated by others.

  I want to slip into their minds, peer through their eyes, try to find a way out. I don’t care if in the process of doing this I tear their minds apart.

  I want to understand how they see me, if only to change the way I see myself.

  There is nothing more witchlike than my hair, so shiny and dark. There is nothing more frightening than understanding I am just as much the key maker as I am his victim.

  When I turned fifteen, my mother pressed a key into my hand and told me to keep it. There was no story because the stories had all been told. There was no story because there was no narrative that could be understood for certain.

  We were sitting in my bedroom, and the dim light fell through the curtain. Beyond was the yard and the border where there used to be a fence. Beyond that the forest, dense enough to make a woman feel like she could disappear, not so dense as to ensure she wouldn’t be found.

  “My mother gave this to me,” was all my own mother said. “And now I’m entrusting it to you. It’s a part of our history. We have to be sure we never forget.”

  I held the key in my hand, feeling the rust flake off into the creases of my palm. In that moment I understood that no matter where I went, I wouldn’t be able to escape because I would always carry that key. I would always have it even if I accidentally lost it, even if I buried it deep beneath the soil in an attempt to forget.

  They say the woman within me had wandering fingers. They would slip along fresh apples, past the glistening beads of bracelets and necklaces before thrusting them into her bag. The shop owners would look at her with sympathy before calling the police and requesting that she be taken to jail. The authorities were always gentle with her. They were always kind.

  The eight-by-eight cell with its single barred window represented peace to her, and everyone knew it.

  Sometimes she stayed for as little as an hour, but sometimes for as long as a day, but the key maker always came. If he didn’t possess the key to her cell, he could make one. If her cell was well guarded, he could wield the key of his influence, his constant charm and authority.

  Back at home, she sat at the window and studied the landscape. Yard to fence to the forest beyond. There had to be a route she hadn’t thought of, another alternative that would lead to freedom, but she could never find a way.

  I walk the forest paths, turning this way and that, singing, and I sense that someone is with me. A girl a couple of years younger is following me, listening to the sound of my voice. At first I think it is just a coincidence—she is wandering as I am wandering—but I don’t know why she would want to wander here. She appears the next day and the day after. I wonder if she has friends, if she is here on a dare. I try to lose her by slipping through heavy bramble, past the shadows of the tallest trees, but she always finds me.

  One afternoon I stop and confront her. “You’ve been following me,” I say. “I want to know why.”

  I’m expecting the usual request to hear a song or questions about why I’m so sad, but she only says, “I noticed you come out here a lot and I wondered why.”

  “I’m just walking.”

  “I know.”

  “Don’t you wonder why I’m walking?”

  “It’s very peaceful here. That makes sense to me.”

  I turn away from her then, but when she is waiting for me at the forest path the following day I allow her to come along. And I allow her to come the next day and the day after that until it begins to seem we are something like friends.

  This is the part we often forget: there were also two children, a boy and a girl. They watched in fear as the key maker raged through their house, raised his fists against their mother.

  They were taught that children should be seen and not heard. They didn’t utter a word of protest when their mother told them to be quiet, to stop crying. They didn’t ask questions when their mother told them to pack their bags with a few pairs of clothes, a book, their favorite toys, and to hide those bags under their beds.

  They were told they were taking a trip.

  They were told they were going to a better place, which is perhaps where these stories always begin.

  “What does it feel like,” the girl asks me, “to sing in the way that you do?” Her name is Caroline, and I appreciate the slow, halting way she asks me questions, as if she understands that not all stories are communal.

  “It’s singing,” I say. “I wouldn’t say it’s any different.”

  That’s a lie, but I don’t know how else to explain it to her or even if I should. Some people talk about the muse as if it’s some sort of divine being that comes down from above, but my songs come from somewhere deep inside me, somewhere so deep it’s as if it isn’t even me at all. The songs come and there is nothing I can do to stop them. I can’t think. I can’t move. I can’t control my lips as they open and close to form the notes that really aren’t mine.

  “I guess you could say it’s like a wave,” I say finally. “The music comes and washes over me. It has nothing to do with who I am.”

  She nods, and I imagine I see a trace of skepticism, a smirk playing on the corner of her lips, but perhaps I’ve been conditioned to expect that reaction. I see only what I think I should see.

  “I brought some cookies,” I say because I want to please this newfound friend. “Let’s find a place to sit down and eat them.”

  She smiles and gestures toward a clearing, and this time I know her expression is true.

  I hold the key in my hand sometimes. I don’t know if it’s the key to unlock the bedroom door or the key to unlock the gate. And I will never know because the fence is gone and our doors no longer have locks.

  The fence is gone, but somehow I am still here, as is my mother, as is the woman within me.

  “What is it like to be a part of the town legend?” Caroline asks me. “Are you sometimes afraid of the ghosts?”

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” I say. “No rational person would.”

  “I heard there’s a key,” she says. “Have you ever seen it?”

  “Have you ever thought about running away?” I ask. I peer into the distance, but all I really see are trees.

  “No,” she says. “Have you?”

  “All the time,” I tell her. “I think about it all the time.”

  This is where the story breaks down. The woman within me was looking for a way out, and she found it in the form of a merchant who brought his cart to the house three times a week. The plan was simple: stow the children in the back and ride away into the next town and then the next until she and the kids were somewhere different, somewhere safe.

  Or she dug a hole under the fence. She made it bigger day after day, which sounds easy enough, but it involved furtive trips to the shed for the shovel and only enough time for a few shovelfuls to be moved a day. She transferred the soil to the garden or to the perpetual pile of grass clippings the gardener kept. She covered the hole with tree branches or a carefully created sheet of grass. Really, she used anything she could find.


  Or she found a key and let herself out one day. Forgot the telltale creak of the gate, the way her husband might hear.

  Or she gave up entirely, waited in her room until he came for her, unlocked the door.

  A person can break down, they say. It’s possible that by the end she simply stopped trying.

  I sing as I walk through the woods, Caroline by my side. She is quiet when I sing, listening to the sound of my voice or perhaps to the sound of her own busy thoughts. I don’t mean to ignore her, but when the music comes it is insistent, filled with note after note of longing and melancholy.

  Sometimes I catch her watching me out of the corner of my eye, and she is smiling. She is trying not to laugh, and I wonder if she is that happy or if there is something I simply don’t understand.

  “Do you think it would help you,” she asks one day, “to share some of what you know?”

  “There’s nothing to know,” I say, and then I hesitate. My hand goes to my chest where a key is hidden beneath my shirt. I know I shouldn’t share it with anyone, but the whole awful loneliness of my past presses down on me, and I unhook my necklace, hand the key over.

  They say he found the woman within me in the woods or the next town or in the bedroom where she waited beside the billowing curtains. He dragged her, hands in her shiny hair, to the yard between the fence and the house. He brought the kids, too. A boy and a girl.

  There was a knife or a gun or a machete the gardener used to maintain the yard.

  They ran or didn’t run, tried to protect themselves or understood that it was futile.

  Their screams curled into the air, animal-like, scorched with betrayal and fear. It was nothing you would ever want to hear. At least this one detail everyone can agree on.

  Caroline takes the key and grips it tight. “I knew there was a key,” she whispers. “Everyone said it was just a story, but I knew.” She slips it in her pocket, and my heart stops in my chest. “You’re so gullible,” she says. “You should have known I only wanted the key.”

  I don’t know what to say. I can hardly breathe. A song would serve me well now, a high and angry song that would shake her to the core, but I am emptied of music.

  “I don’t know what makes you think you’re so special anyway,” she says. “Look at you. Always singing and acting so dramatic. We all have problems. So what?”

  Her voice is a sneer, and as I stand, a small and shaken version of myself with no words of my own, she turns and walks away, my key tucked safely in her pocket.

  This is where my family comes in: the key maker took another wife, a woman who had long dark hair and green eyes, as did my mother, as did I. He must have seen the resemblance but thought nothing of it. The new wife came from a distant town and knew nothing of the murders until the people around her began to talk.

  There were whispers, snippets of fact and story that came together to create a disorienting whole. The new wife could choose to believe or choose not to believe, but believing had its price.

  They say she went for long walks at night, through the garden, along the perimeter of the fence, back and forth across the roof of the house, where the moon caught her hair and cast her in dark shadows. As she walked she sang in an unearthly voice. She sang like a woman possessed by troubled spirits. She sang like someone touched by the deaths of a woman and two children.

  Her voice was my voice, haunted by the violence around her, frightened by her own unexpected complicity in it.

  I wanted to chase Caroline, slap her hard across the face in the way my mother slapped me as a child, and reach into her pocket to collect the key, but I let her go. I felt there was nothing else to do.

  Instead I sit at my bedroom window, watching the night sky, feeling the absent weight where the key should be. I think about DNA, those winding strands of ourselves that are dictated to us by the people who came before. The key maker and his wrath. The key maker and his talent for manipulation, the opening of every locked door.

  Then I think about my great-great-grandmother standing on the roof of our house, her voice swelling in the moonlit air. It may not have been pure sorrow she was singing of; it may have been her attempt to put the broken pieces back together. The only narrative is the one we create. Our history is only part of the picture.

  Pushing back the curtain, I clear my throat and begin to hum, quietly at first and then louder and clearer. This time I am not waiting for that unknown source within me. I am following my own lead. I am singing my own song, and where it takes me is breathtaking and bold, a haunted place where only I can go.

  AIMEE POGSON teaches creative writing at Penn State Erie, the Behrend College, where she also serves as coeditor of Lake Effect. She received her MFA from Bowling Green State University.