Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror

by Joyce Carol Oates

  At her approach, the uniformed man greeted her, “Miss Schön?” and took her suitcase and satchel from her as if they weighed nothing and walked briskly through the crowded, noisy station to a long black car shiny as a hearse parked outside. In a daze of relief and excitement Magdalena hurried in his wake. Miss Schön! A man had called her Miss Schön! She saw how others watched her with curiosity and respect as the driver opened a rear door of the car and helped her climb inside. Never had Magdalena seen a car so luxurious as this except in photographs; the rear was cushioned in soft gray plush, the windows were so clean and clear, just perceptibly tinted, you would hardly know there were windows at all. Through the traffic-crowded streets of downtown Edmundston they seemed to glide soundlessly as in a dream, and along a wide, windy avenue, and through a park where the grass was stubbled with slow-melting snow, and then they were ascending into a high, hilly residential district of cobblestone streets, clean-swept brick sidewalks, and large, beautiful old houses behind wrought-iron fences and stone walls. Magdalena stared, enchanted. She’d become breathless as if she’d been running. She would have liked to ask the driver many questions but was too shy to speak. For his part, the driver was utterly remote, formal. He’d spoken with her only once as they’d started out, to ask if she was comfortable, and Magdalena had stammered yes, thank you. Never in her life had anyone asked her such a question! The driver sat on the other side of a glass partition and she could see only the back of his head, and the back of his vizored cap; there was a rearview mirror above his windshield, but Magdalena could see no face in it.

  As the train had entered Edmundston, Magdalena had lost sight of the beautiful glittering ocean; she’d been propelled, as through a tunnel, past a confused succession of factories, warehouses, the rears of run-down houses and tenement buildings disconcertingly similar to those of Black Rock; its speed ever slowing, like a great beast run to earth, the train had passed over a canal of the color of rust. Everywhere was hazy, sepia-tinged smoke or mist she knew would smell and taste like something burnt. But in the residential district in which her aunt Kistenmacher lived, the air was clear and sparkling as if rain-washed. Even the clouded sky opened to piercing blue as the driver brought them steeply uphill on a cobblestone street named Charter, to their destination.

  Magdalena continued to stare as the long shiny black car glided soundlessly into the driveway, past ten-foot stone pillars, one of them marked 1792. The Kistenmacher house was not the largest of the houses Magdalena had been seeing, nor the most impressive; it was a three-story narrow house of aged brick of the hue of pinkish flesh, softened by time; moldering with time; in the facade were crude blocks of granite that had darkened with rain. The roof of the house was unusually steep, with rotted shingles and a prominent chimney listing to one side at its peak. Several of the black-lacquered shutters needed repair, repainting. Winter-damaged ivy clung to the brick like scraggly claws, and lichen grew in the cracked bricks of the elegant front stoop with its tall columns and graceful, if partly rotted portico. But Magdalena felt tears sting her eyes, for she’d never seen, up close, any house so beautiful.

  Will I be living here?

  I, Magdalena Schön?

  The girl whose mother had not loved her; had sent her away.

  Magdalena’s next surprise was Erica Kistenmacher.

  Within minutes of being shown to her room on the third floor, by a woman in a dark dress and a stiff-starched white apron, Magdalena was taken to see her great-aunt. “Mrs. Kistenmacher has been waiting for you since dawn, Miss Schön,” the woman said quietly. There was an air in this remark of the most subtle reproach but when Magdalena murmured anxiously that she was sorry, the woman seemed not to hear, nor did she even look at Magdalena. She was of no age that Magdalena could have guessed, older than her own mother; with thin gray hair neatly contained by a hairnet, and a solid, stocky though not plump body, deftly defined motions as she led Magdalena along a corridor without a backward glance. Magdalena had been told that her great-aunt was lonely and required a “companion” and so she had come to imagine the Kistenmacher house as empty except for her great-aunt and now she saw how erroneous such a notion was. Rich people require servants, she was to be a servant here as well. The woman rapped lightly on a door, and after some delay the door was opened not by Magdalena’s great-aunt as she’d naively expected, but by another somber, unsmiling middle-aged woman; a nurse; stockily built too, with a flushed face, in a white uniform and starched white cap over leaden-gray hair. Not greeting the anxious girl but rather scolding Magdalena at once, she said, “Miss Schön, at last, come in, hurry!—so we don’t get a draft. And don’t tire Mrs. Kistenmacher, she’s in a state of nerves as it is.” Magdalena stepped into a room so airless and overheated it took her breath away, and the nurse quickly shut the door behind her. It was a spacious, high-ceilinged bedroom so crowded with furniture and fabrics, vases and glassware, glittering figurines, candlestick holders, scattered books, mirrors with old glass that subtly distorted the reflections they framed, that Magdalena had difficulty seeing her great-aunt until the woman whispered, “My dear! Come!” On a divan in a patch of wan sunlight, covered by a satin quilt, there lay a white-skinned, doll-like old woman with one of her arms tremulously lifted, her fingers stretched in Magdalena’s direction and her face creased in joyous expectation.

  Many times, Magdalena’s father and mother had spoken of the young woman Erica Schön who’d traveled to Boston from her home in southern Germany to work as a nanny for a rich family; who, at the age of nineteen, had married a much older man, a widower; they’d moved to Edmundston, Massachusetts. For years, Erica Schön was out of contact with her family; she’d married defiantly, outside the Roman Catholic Church. A photograph of Magdalena’s father as a boy, taken with his youthful aunt, many years ago, was all Magdalena had had to help form her image of her great-aunt Kistenmacher; but the young woman in the photograph with her crimped hair, almost-pretty face, long nose and intelligent, squinting eyes bore no resemblance at all to the woman on the divan. Somehow, Magdalena was not prepared for her great-aunt to be so old. Stammering a greeting, Magdalena took the woman’s lifted hand—what thin, icy fingers!—thinking She’s a stranger. It’s a mistake. She will send me away, like my mother.

  But the old woman was delighted with Magdalena, saying in her hoarse, hissing voice that she recognized her at once, for Magdalena had the “Schön face”—a heart-shaped face—“But so much prettier than most of us!” Though the frowning nurse hovered near, Magdalena was urged to sit on a stool close beside the old woman, who gazed at her hungrily, and continued to squeeze her hand. With dismay Magdalena saw that her great-aunt’s clouded left eye was fixed upon something over Magdalena’s shoulder; the entire left side of her face was frozen, in an attitude of pained exactitude; her left arm lay limp beside her, the childlike fingers curled, useless. Your aunt Kistenmacher has had a stroke, she must be fearful of her death. If you are good to her, she may be generous to us. Yet Magdalena hadn’t much idea of what a stroke was, nor had her parents explained. Magdalena surmised within a few minutes that the poor woman was nearly blind in her “good” eye; and very hard of hearing; it seemed unlikely that she could walk unassisted, or perhaps at all; her voice was gone, or she hadn’t the strength to project it beyond a rasping whisper. Most disconcerting was the way in which, not knowing what she did, she occasionally interjected a word or a nonsensical syllable (“eh,” “yi”) into her speech. She smelled of sweet talcum and something harshly acidic, like medicine. How pale her skin, papery white and so thin Magdalena could see the delicate blue veins quivering beneath like nerves; her face was finely creased, as if it had been many times crumpled and released, like silk. Yet she trembled with excitement, thrilled with Magdalena as a child with a new playmate. Magdalena couldn’t understand her completely but she seemed to be asking Magdalena to speak of her home, her family, most of all her father, but when Magdalena began speaking she interrupted her repeatedly, smiling with half her
face, her bright eye fixed upon Magdalena’s face. With her groping right hand she touched Magdalena’s hair, stroked the thick braided coils at the sides of Magdalena’s head; she’d once worn her hair like that, she seemed to be saying. She touched Magdalena’s face—the “Schön face”— and drew her fingertips across Magdalena’s lips. Magdalena had to suppress the impulse to shiver, though the room was very warm. “Do you know me, dear? I am your Aunt Erica,” she said, “please call me ‘Aunt Erica,’ dear,” and Magdalena said, uncertainly, “—Aunt Erica.’” The words sounded false in her mouth, as if the syllables were wrongly accented. Eagerly Aunt Erica cupped her right hand to her ear whispering, “Eh? Eh? What?” so Magdalena repeated in a louder voice, her face burning, “‘Aunt Erica.’” The frowning nurse in white had positioned herself behind the divan and was staring at Magdalena with open hostility. But Aunt Erica was squeezing Magdalena’s fingers in hers, and smiling with half her mouth, so pleadingly that Magdalena felt her heart ache with love; unless it was pity; that raw, exhausting emotion she felt for the crippled people, usually men, she saw on the streets of Black Rock, victims of accidents in the great iron foundry in which her own father and older brothers worked. The elderly invalid was whispering hoarsely what sounded like, “I knew you would come to me one day, dear child, I had faith you hadn’t abandoned me like the rest of the Schöns,” and in the midst of these words a nonsensical outcry Yi! like a cry of pain, and Magdalena, frightened, mutely nodded, for how else to respond; her aunt’s frail fingers gripped her own much stronger fingers tight; the stale, sweetish-sour odor was overpowering; and when Aunt Erica began to cry, sobs racking her limp body, Magdalena began to cry, too; for she was so tenderhearted, the sight of another’s tears always provoked her own.

  “—I’m so h-happy to be here, Aunt Erica—th-thank you for inviting me—”

  But at this point the nurse stepped brusquely forward as if she’d been waiting for just such a development. Adjusting the quilt higher on the invalid’s shoulders, and scolding, “Now you see, Mrs. Kistenmacher, didn’t I warn you?—a night of bad nerves, and now you’ve made yourself feverish over this girl you don’t even know.”

  What a surprise to Magdalena Schön; for the first time in her sixteen years she had a room to herself.

  On the third floor of the beautiful old Federal-style house on Charter Street, Edmundston, with a view of the river approximately a mile away, to the south; and, if she leaned out her window, craning her neck, of the ocean several miles to the east, a vaporous strip of light alternately silver, blue-green, plum-colored, black. She knew this was the fabled “Atlantic Ocean” though she hadn’t truly seen it since the morning the train had brought her into Edmundston; a dreamlike morning itself now rapidly retreating into the past.

  There were hours when Magdalena was lonely in her neat, clean, attractive room at the top of the Kistenmacher house; but she was not homesick. She did not believe she would ever be homesick for the crowded rooms of Black Rock.

  Though sometimes in the night by lamplight she read her prayer book, which had been a gift for her confirmation in the Roman Catholic faith from her parents, her lips silently and urgently moving. Sometimes she fell asleep with her rosary entwined in her fingers and woke in the morning startled to discover the crystal beads stretched snakelike across her throat.

  Her Aunt Erica did not attend church of any kind, having the excuse of being an invalid. “If God wants to seek me out, He knows where I am,” the elderly woman one day whispered to Magdalena, with a wink of her good eye. Magdalena laughed at such witty boldness though she was inwardly shocked—a little.

  Perhaps, sending her off to Edmundston, so far away, Magdalena’s parents had tacitly assumed she would drift away from the faith of the Schöns. Not once, she realized, had they cautioned her about seeking out a church where she could attend mass. Neither one of them loved me, they sent me away. But why was Magdalena dry-eyed? Her heart beat rapidly with another kind of excitement.

  The tall, narrow, lattice-paned windows of Magdalena’s room were the most wonderful thing about the room, emitting light in the early morning from the direction of the river. Even as she slept this warm light entered her sleep, beckoning to her. Wake! Wake! Hurry! Come! She seemed to hear a voice lifted in song, unknown to her; neither male nor female; clear as struck glass, unspeakably beautiful. Magdalena, come! In the white lace-trimmed cotton nightgown her aunt had provided for her, barefoot, her waist-long hair in loose dense wavy coils down her back, Magdalena tiptoed to a window to gaze out in wonder. These spring days, the sky was likely to be brilliantly blue, or layered in fine-etched clouds of subtle gradations of silver; the sun shone warmly, or a light rain fell, or a heavy rain buffeted by winds and laced with lightning. How new, how fresh, every morning, how Magdalena’s eyes stared! Not wishing to recall how for all of her life until just recently, five hundred miles westward in Black Rock she’d shared sleeping quarters with others, often a bed with a sister, or two sisters; the windows of the ground-floor tenement flat in which the Schöns lived, impossible to keep clean, looked out grudgingly upon a weather-stained ruin of a wall next door, or upon a potholed, muddy street, or a trash-filled vacant lot; there had been nothing to see, and so she had trained herself to see nothing. Here in the Kistenmacher house she was obliged to share her room with no one, a pretty girl’s room of filmy white curtains, white walls and white satin fabrics; she was obliged to share her thoughts with no one. She would not be judged, she would not be found wanting, she would not be scolded, she would not be slapped, she would not be the object of family pity—Leave Magdalena alone, she can’t help it.

  From every angle at her window in the early morning light she saw a beautiful sight, or a curious sight, or an intriguing sight. Gazing out upon cobblestone streets steeply falling away from view like streets in a child’s storybook, the cobblestones often glistening with rain fallen during the night; one morning in early April she saw flocks of robins bathing themselves in puddles in the street, and heard the high, sweet, many-times-repeated cries of other birds she could not recognize, with crested heads and olive-grey feathers; she heard the curious clawlike cries of seagulls; she studied the roofs of neighboring houses, all of them as old as the Kistenmacher house, and most of them considerably larger and in better repair, and she wondered at the lives within; her eyes moved upon tall handsome chimneys of brick and stone; and tall, graceful, green-budding trees she believed to be elms; and in the near distance, downhill from Charter Street, there were several church spires that gleamed fiercely in the sun and even on overcast days were luminous as if lit from within by their own secret light. And there was the river, and the bridge that spanned the river, partly obscured from Magdalena’s view by buildings; the bridge that drew Magdalena’s eye again, and again. The river, she’d learned, was the Merrimack River, and the bridge was the Merrimack Bridge; beyond the bridge was a part of the city known as “lower Edmundston” or simply “lower town”—the waterfront area of tenement buildings, aged buildings (like the Old Custom House) dating to colonial times, warehouses and fisheries, docks, boats of all sizes and types from small fishing boats to ocean freighters. All of the female occupants of the house on Charter Street, including even the invalid mistress of the house, were prone to speak of “lower town” with an air of unease, as if “lower town” might be inhabited by dangerous persons. Magdalena had the idea none of them had ever visited it.

  (Yet hadn’t Aunt Erica’s husband Mr. Kistenmacher, deceased now for eighteen years, had dealings as a broker with shipping lines that operated out of Edmundston harbor? Of the meager facts about the man that Magdalena had gathered, this was one that intrigued her.)

  §

  In this time of surprises the most remarkable and in some ways the most disconcerting was Magdalena’s immediate discovery that, in her great-aunt’s house, as niece and “companion,” she had so little to do.

  “Aunt Erica, I can do that,” Magdalena said eagerly, at their first meal in
a small formal dining room, when the maid Hannah appeared out of the pantry to clear away plates; but Aunt Erica patted Magdalena’s wrist as one might subdue a headstrong child, shaping with her lips the admonishment “No.”

  “But, Aunt Erica, at home—”

  The older woman squeezed Magdalena’s wrist to silence her, so that somber, sturdy Hannah in her dark dress and stiff-starched white apron wouldn’t hear. Her hoarse, cracked voice was almost, fierce—“This is your home, dear child, and there are new rules here.”

  It stunned Magdalena to realize she wasn’t to be a servant after all.

  Of course she’d assumed, as her parents had assumed, that she would be “helping out” her aunt. Of all her sisters and brothers, Magdalena was the most cooperative, good-natured and uncomplaining about household chores; her happiest memories of home were preparing meals with her mother, rolling and cutting noodle dough, baking brown bread; even laundry day which involved hours of tedious back-aching labor, including hanging wet, heavy men’s coveralls, denim jackets and work-shirts, sheets, quilts, blankets on a straining rope in the back yard, had not fazed her. Magdalena had been a strong, capable worker even as a child; she’d liked to take orders from her mother and older sisters because it was a way of pleasing them. A way of being loved.

  Now in the house on Charter Street she was “Miss Schön” to the real servants. Apart from cleaning her own room and washing out her clothes, which she insisted upon doing, she had no tasks other than being a companion to her aunt, and this involved only a few hours of the day, depending upon Aunt Erica’s health and disposition. Magdalena sat with her and talked, or listened to the older-woman speak in her rambling, disconnected way; sometimes Magdalena read poetry, mainly verse by women poets of whom she’d never heard, or the Bible; though gazing at her intently with her good eye, Aunt Erica would soon fall asleep, her face slack and mouth wetly agape in an expression of childlike surrender. Magdalena didn’t know whether to continue reading, or tiptoe quietly away; she guessed that her aunt took comfort from her mere presence and could hear her words even while asleep. If I have the power to make Aunt Erica happy, she thought. Once, while Magdalena was reading poetry, her aunt fell into a doze and began to hum in a singsong rhythm, the right side of her pale, wrinkled, doll-like face suffused with tenderness. Without opening her eyes, Aunt Erica murmured, “The music of your voice, child. My own childhood in it.”