Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

“I don’t want to sleep in the front room!” cried Frances.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  Frances paused, and wondered how to frame her reply. “I’m scared of that closet.”

  “That closet?” Elinor laughed. “There’s nothing in that closet. Just my clothes and my shoes and my hats. You’ve seen inside that closet.”

  “Let me sleep in the room Lucille and Malcolm are in. They can sleep in the front room.”

  “They’ve already settled in, and they’re doing fine where they are. I’m not going to move them.”

  “Then let Queenie sleep in there! Let me have my own room back, Mama!”

  “Queenie needs to have a bathroom of her own. And I want her to be near me, darling, so I can hear her if she calls.”

  “Let me go over to James’s, then.”

  “James has his hands full with Danjo.” Elinor’s voice wasn’t as soft now as when Frances had made her first plea. “Do you have any other suggestions?”

  “I’ll even go stay with Grandmama.”

  “Miss Mary-Love would never let me hear the end of it, if I sent you over there when I have got an empty bed in this house. I don’t want to hear another word. You’re going to sleep in the front room until Queenie is well enough to go home and until we’re sure that Carl is not going to bother her anymore. Do you understand?”

  “Elinor!” Queenie called through the window.

  Elinor stepped over to the window and peered in. “Queenie, can I do something for you?”

  “You sure can. I couldn’t help hearing all of that and I want you to put me in the front room, and let Frances have her room back.”

  “Queenie, I hope you weren’t taking Frances’s nonsense seriously.”

  “She doesn’t want me in her bed, and I can understand that. She wants her own little room back. If this were my room, I wouldn’t want to give it up either.”

  “Queenie, I’m not letting you move. Now you listen, you need your own bathroom, and I want you where I can sit out here on the porch and talk to you through the window. That’s why you are where you are, and there is no reason on this earth why Frances can’t sleep in the front room. It is only six feet away. The front room is not at the end of the earth.”

  Frances listened to this conversation with trembling.

  “Frances,” said her mother sternly, “come with me.”

  Frances followed her mother down the hall into the front room. Elinor unhesitatingly went over to the closet and pulled open the door. “Now do you see that there is nothing inside this closet? I have got so much stuff in there that there is not room for anything to be hiding in there.”

  The child made no reply, but only hung her head.

  “Frances, have you been talking to Ivey Sapp? Has Ivey been telling you stories about things that are supposed to eat up little girls?”

  “No, ma’am!”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Well, if Ivey does start to try to fill your head with nonsense like that, I don’t want you to listen to her. Ivey doesn’t always know what she’s talking about. Ivey gets things wrong.”

  “Then there are things that eat you?”

  “Not in this closet,” replied her mother with a disquieting evasiveness.

  “Where are they then?”

  “Nothing’s going to eat you, darling,” said Elinor as she closed the closet door and seated herself on the edge of the bed. “Come here, Frances.” Frances went over timidly to her mother and Elinor lifted her up beside her.

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Now, we go out together sometimes on the river in Bray’s little boat, right?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Are you afraid then?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Why not? Other little girls would be afraid. Lucille Strickland won’t go out in a boat on the Perdido.”

  “It’s ’cause you’re there, Mama, that’s why I’m not afraid.”

  Elinor hugged Frances close, and said, “That’s right, you’re my little girl, and nothing’s ever going to happen to you. Besides, you of all people never have to be afraid of that river. So why are you afraid to stay in this room, when you know I’m right across the hall?”

  “I don’t know,” said Frances, troubled. “’Cause it might get me before you could come in and save me.”

  “What is ‘it’?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Then how do you know it’s there?”

  “I can feel it, Mama!”

  Elinor pried her daughter’s arms from around her waist, pushed her aside, and looked directly in her face. “Now, listen to me, Frances,” she said in a patient but determined voice, “there is nothing in this room to hurt you, you understand? If you see anything, it’s only your imagination. It’s shadows, it’s dust catching the light. If you hear anything, it’s only your imagination. It’s the house settling on its foundations, or it’s the furniture creaking. If you feel anything touching you, it’s your nerves going to sleep or it’s a mosquito landing on your arm. That’s all it is. You’re dreaming. You’re dreaming that you hear something, you’re dreaming that you see something, you’re dreaming that something is trying to pull you out of bed. Do you understand? Nothing will happen to you in this room because I won’t let it.”

  Her mother showed her that some of her clothes had already been brought in and hung up in the chifforobe. Elinor pulled out drawers and made her daughter admit how sweet the sachet inside smelled. She opened the curtains and showed Frances that the view of the levee and Miss Mary-Love’s house was very nearly the same from here as from her own room. At the last, Elinor turned the key in the lock of the door of the small closet, and said, “Look, Frances, I’m locking the door. So you don’t have to worry. If there’s anything inside there, it won’t be able to get out now. You’ll be perfectly safe. And just remember, if you hear anything or see anything or feel anything, don’t pay any attention. It’s just your imagination. You’re my little girl, and nothing can happen to you.”

  Chapter 32

  Locked or Unlocked

  That first night of Queenie’s return to Perdido, Frances played out her entire repertoire of procrastination tricks, but ingenious as she was, at last she was roused out of her father’s lap on the porch and told that she must absolutely go to bed.

  “Why are you being like this?” her father asked.

  “She’s afraid to go to bed,” Elinor explained.

  “You have slept by yourself since you were a little girl,” cried Oscar in surprise.

  “She’s not afraid of being by herself,” Elinor continued, “she’s afraid of the front room.”

  “What’s in the front room?” Oscar asked. “I can hardly remember the last time I was even in there. I remember looking at the new curtains, but that was years and years ago! Elinor, have you taken in a boarder that I don’t know anything about?”

  But Frances didn’t laugh and clung to her father more tightly still.

  “Elinor,” said Oscar, seeing that his daughter really was frightened, “cain’t we let her sleep with us?”

  “No,” said Elinor. “Then she’d want to sleep with us forever.”

  “I wouldn’t!” protested Frances. “Just tonight!”

  “Then tomorrow night, then the night after that.”

  “Your mama,” said Oscar, “wants you in the front room, so I guess I’m just gone have to carry you up there.”

  Oscar did so, and laid her in the bed beneath the covers. He waggled the curtains to show her that no one was hiding behind them, ostentatiously knelt down on the floor and peered under the bed, opened the door of the passage that led to Frances’s own room where Queenie was already asleep, and rattled the knob of the closet to show that it remained locked. He kissed Frances good-night and left the room. Snaking his hand back through the door, he pushed the button that turned out the overhea
d light.

  After her father had shut the door, Frances could no longer assure herself that the front room was connected with the rest of the house. She was cut off from her parents’ protection; they would never hear her if she called. The front room was real enough but those doors no longer communicated with the house in which Elinor and Oscar Caskey lived. Those windows no longer looked out on the same familiar scene. Frances trembled now to think what unimaginable space might lie behind those doors, what unexpected somber landscape might be imperfectly discerned through those windows. She lay rigidly in the bed, staring into the unsettling blackness, listening in a terrified stupor for something to begin shifting about inside the closet. Gradually her eyes became accustomed to the dark, and she faintly made out the room’s objects as inky shadows against more blackness. The cast-iron chandelier above the foot of her bed was her point of reference. She stared at it with concentration. It seemed to sway but there was no air moving in the room. Frances balled herself up and burrowed beneath the covers. Her stifled breath was hot and wet under the starched sheets.

  Occasionally she heard creaks. Once she was startled by what sounded to her like a marble dropping to the floor and rolling a short distance.

  Eventually she fell asleep. She must have, for Zaddie awakened her in the morning, pulling back the curtains on a dim overcast day. Frances felt the relief a man feels when he has narrowly escaped a terrible death, as when a pursuing animal is momentarily distracted and turns aside, forgetting his quarry.

  “Y’all having breakfast out on the porch this morning, Frances,” said Zaddie, kneeling at the side of the bed, and slipping on the child’s socks for her.

  “Zaddie, I’m hungry! Can I have three pieces of toast today?”

  “You sure can! I tell you what, if you’ll finish up your dressing, I’ll go downstairs right this minute and put that bread in the oven.”

  “I can dress myself,” said Frances. “You don’t have to help me.”

  “I like to! You’re my little girl!”

  Frances hugged Zaddie. “Zaddie,” she whispered, “I’m so glad you didn’t go away to that college for colored people.”

  “Well, if I’d done that, who’d take care of my little girl? Sure not nobody in town loves you like I love you!” Zaddie laughed, and left Frances alone once again.

  Frances made a little show of her morning bravery, witnessed only by herself. With no apparent hesitation she pulled open the door of the chifforobe and placed her folded nightclothes in the darkest corner of the bottom shelf. She went alone into the connecting passage, actually shutting herself in, and took her time in selecting a fresh towel. Returning to the room, she dropped a pin so that she could lean down and peer, as if inadvertently, under the bed. Perhaps, after all, the danger in the room had been no more than her imagination. Perhaps, after all, there was nothing to fear. Zaddie called her from the hallway. “Frances, toast’s ready!”

  Frances grinned to herself and looked around the room. As she was about to leave, glowing in her confidence, she decided to try to rid herself of her last piece of fear. She’d rattle the knob of the locked closet door.

  “Coming!” she called to Zaddie, and thinking only of the food she was about to eat, she ran across the room and turned the knob of the closet door, waiting for that comforting rattle that would show her that whatever was inside—and there wasn’t anything anyway—still couldn’t get out at her.

  But the knob did not rattle. Instead it turned smoothly in her grasp, and the door swung open to reveal the vista of crowded fur and feathers, showing Frances that the danger all night long had been inestimably greater than she had imagined.

  Somehow, during the night, the closet door had been unlocked.

  Frances ran to her mother, and told Elinor—with all the firmness that she could muster—that she was never going to sleep in the front room again.

  “Hush!” said Elinor. “Are you still going on about that room?”

  Frances nodded dolefully.

  “Did anything happen last night?”

  “No,” replied Frances in a hot whisper, kneeling on the swing and burying her face against her mother’s neck. “But this morning when I got up the closet door was unlocked.”

  Elinor made no response to this.

  Defensively, Frances cried: “You locked it yesterday afternoon, Mama! I saw you! Daddy jiggled the knob last night and it was still locked! And when I got up this morning, it was unlocked! Please let me sleep with you and Daddy tonight.”

  Elinor took her daughter to the front room, pulled on the handle of the closet door, and demonstrated that it was indeed still locked.

  “Who locked it?” cried Frances, staring at the door in another agony of terror.

  “No one!” cried Elinor. “It was never unlocked. You dreamed it, darling.”

  “I didn’t!”

  “You are worrying Oscar and me to death with this business, Frances. I don’t want to hear it mentioned again. I want you to get it through your head that you are going to stay in this room until Queenie is well enough to go home, do you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” replied Frances despairingly.

  That night, Frances was summarily put between the covers, hastily kissed, and promptly abandoned to the darkness of the room and the infidel closet.

  . . .

  For the several weeks of Queenie’s convalescence, Frances nightly went through her agony in the front room. One night her terror would perhaps be a bit less, and she would think, I’m getting used to it. Nothing’s ever happened. The next night, however, her fear would be greater, and she would think, It’s just waiting until I’m completely off my guard. Elinor did not repeat the experiment of trying the lock, but would merely say, “It’s nonsense, Frances, complete nonsense. You know there’s nothing in that closet anyway except my clothes and hats and shoes.” During the day the door was always locked. It was only at night that the closet began to play its tricks. Then the door was sometimes locked, sometimes not. Every night, after Frances had lain in bed for a time without even thinking of trying to fall asleep, she would quietly rise and walk over and try the knob. No matter which way she anticipated, locked or unlocked, she was always wrong. As time passed, she began to make a game of it, and would stand before the door and make a prediction as to whether the knob were locked or unlocked—whether it would turn cleanly, or jar in her hand. She always chose wrong.

  She became accustomed even to this maddening pattern, and her bravery in attempting the door always seemed in her mind to defuse the real danger of the closet. After thus proving herself, she was allowed to sleep undisturbed for the remainder of the night.

  One night, however, she awakened suddenly, borne up out of sleep with the presentiment that something was very wrong. The room was very dark, and the house was quiet and still. She somehow knew that everyone in the house was asleep but her. Without thinking, she rose in the bed, kicked the pillows aside, and pulled open the drapes over the front window. The room became less dark. Frances now could see the black outline of the closet door. She could see the brass knob, gleaming a faint gold. She had locked the closet door herself. She was certain no one had come into the room to undo that brave piece of work. If she tried the knob now, however, would the door be locked?

  She would pull on the knob. If the door remained locked, then she’d be safe and could go back to sleep; if it were unlocked, then whatever was inside would jump out and kill her.

  Frances prayed her usual ineffectual prayer and started to climb down from the bed.

  A rectangle of light, white-blue and cold, suddenly gleamed around the closet door. It was bright enough to show the colors of the carpet fringe. The left-hand side of the rectangle of light began to grow wider; the other three sides remained the same narrow strips. After a moment of observing this merely as a phenomenon of geometrical progression, Frances realized that it was the result of the door of the closet slowly opening.

  . . .

  The h
allway down the center of the second floor of the Caskey home was wide, with a long runner of dark blue carpet over the parquet floors. At one end was the door with stained glass leading to the narrow unscreened porch at the front of the house. At the other end was the landing and a great window, half-way between the first and second floors, looking out over the back yard and the levee. Frances fled down this corridor, desperate to cry out. The doors of all the other bedrooms were shut. She could scarcely believe that her parents were actually behind one of them, Queenie behind another, Lucille and Malcolm sleeping peacefully behind the third. She took hold of the banister knob at the top of the stairs and turned and looked back down the hallway. A whiteness, not like sunlight or lamplight or moonlight, now formed a rectangle—very like the first one around the closet door—around the front room door that she had pulled shut behind her. To be as bright as it was, the room must have been filled with the unnatural bluish-white illumination. Frances was certain that the closet door was opened full. Whatever had been inside the closet now completely possessed the front room. Perhaps it was looking under the bed for her, just as she had always checked under the bed for it. As Frances stared, transfixed, waiting for that door to open as the other one had only moments before, the refulgence began to seep out into the hallway like mist. By its light she could now make out the pattern of the wallpaper; she could see the lines in the parquet along the walls.

  Frances dared not disturb her parents. She felt certain that the minute they stepped into the hallway the glow would somehow dissipate and she would be returned to the front room, chastised for her cries and her fear. She decided, therefore, to go downstairs to Zaddie, who slept in a small room off the kitchen. Zaddie would give her a blanket, and Frances would roll up in it on the floor and be perfectly content. The light from the closet could do as it pleased.

  It did not occur to Frances that whatever was in the front room might mean danger to anyone but herself. Whatever was in the closet, whatever caused the door to lock and unlock, whatever produced this misty light and now wandered about the front room, was interested in Frances alone.