The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  Copyright © 2013 Claire Mulligan

  All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication, reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior written consent of the publisher—or in the case of photocopying or other reprographic copying, license from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency—is an infringement of the copyright law.

  Doubleday Canada and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House of Canada Limited

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Mulligan, Claire, 1964-

  The dark / Claire Mulligan.

  eISBN: 978-0-385-67178-1

  I. Title.

  PS8626.U443D37 2013 C813′.6 C2012-906561-7

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover Terri Nimmo

  Cover images: Melanie Ezra/Millennium Images, UK; Moggara12/Dreamstime.com

  Published in Canada by Doubleday Canada,

  a division of Random House of Canada Limited

  www.randomhouse.ca

  v3.1

  For Gibson, Marlow and Eleanor

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Part One Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Part Two Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Three Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Part Four Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Chapter 47

  Author’s note

  Acknowledgements

  “On Monday of this week the famous Fox house at Hydesville again furnished the people something to talk about. It will be remembered that in 1848 modern Spiritualism originated in this house while it was the home of the Fox sisters. At that time it was claimed by the Fox family that the spirit of a peddler who had been murdered and whose remains had been buried in the house wished to communicate to the world through the young Fox sisters, Maggie and Katie Fox. Persistent efforts to find any human bones failed, however, and that fact led many to discredit the demonstrations. Now, after a lapse of more than half a century, the old house has given up its dead.”

  ARCADIAN WEEKLY GAZETTE

  “What is known is that by the winter of’92-’93 Maggie had become critically ill and lay bedridden in a Ninth Street Tenement house. There, a Mrs. Mellon, a non-spiritualist physician of the Medico Legal Society of New York, attended Maggie for several hours a day. ‘Mrs. Fox Kane was unable to move a hand or foot,’ the physician recalled. ‘And yet the knocks were heard now through the wall, now through the ceiling, and again through the floor.’ ”

  Nancy Rubin Stuart,

  THE RELUCTANT SPIRITUALIST,

  THE LIFE OF MAGGIE FOX

  CHAPTER 1.

  ROCHESTER DEMOCRAT & CHRONICLE

  Wednesday, November 23, 1904

  HUMAN BONES DISCOVERED

  Children Find Body and Tin Peddler’s Box In Collapsed Cellar Wall of Fox “Spook” House at Hydesville. Find Corroborates an Old Story. Was a Peddler Murdered?

  Testimony of Mrs. Alvah June Mellon of the Medico Society of New York, December 1904

  The bones have been found? Found at long last? I am not amazed. My patient divined they would be, and by children yet, bored and full of jack-mischief and playing where they oughtn’t. “Bored children are worse than hobgoblins” was what she said, and as if she knew this better than anyone.

  Bored those children may have been, but also brave to enter that blighted little Hydesville house, so famed for its hauntings, so long abandoned by all. Braver yet to continue on down down into the dark of the cellar keep (or foolish, the line is needle-thin). As like those children wished they had turned back, and then it was too late.

  Now, my statement of eleven years ago told only of the astonishing phenomenon that occurred just before my patient’s death, of the knocks and patterings, that is, and how they sounded through the walls and ceilings and floor, though my patient, by that time, could move neither hand nor foot.

  The brevity of this original statement was unavoidable. I was duty-bound to the Society at the time, as well as to a promise I had made my patient. And, too, I had my own griefs to manage. But now the story of the Fox family can fulfill its course. The bones of the “peddler” have been found, after all, and I am beyond the thick of things. I am, to be frank, an aged step from my own long home, by which I mean it is high time my gratitude were made manifest, for without doubt my patient, though bedridden and deathly-ill, saved my mortal life and my immortal soul, perhaps, to boot.

  To begin: On the first day of February’93 I was sent to one of New York’s 9th Street tenements from which reports had come of an indigent who, though set on dying, had no one to care for her, nor hear her last words, nor ready her for the last envisioning.

  I arrived at the tenement in the fading light of later afternoon and trudged up a good many storeys until so high that even a brass band or a howling mob would become a muddled discord, and I found, at last, the garret. I stood in the vestibule, an Edison bulb crackling over my head, and from that vantage I saw a small woman in a small bed. She wore spectacles and a bedjacket of bishop’s blue but no head cap, as if she thought herself impervious to malignant draughts. Her grey-palled hair was neatly braided in two, alike a child’s; and her countenance, though drawn and pale, had a pleasing cast. You were once a very pretty creature, I thought then. I should add that she was reading, intently reading by candlelight.

  “A reader! So that is what you are.”

  She looked up with considerable surprise, then regained what I soon learned was her considerable composure. “I am a reader, but not a dear one, I assure you,” she said, and shut her book and set it hastily aside.

  “I was only attempting a little jest,” I said. “A little jest often breaks the ice with my indigents.”

  “And how many have fallen through and perished?” She gave a small and knowing smile, cornered with mischief (I would come to know that smile well).

  I did not trouble with a retort, nor could I think of one. Instead I put on my professional airs and hefted my satchel and entered the garret to begin my duty. Now this garret was of the usual garret size and bleakness (though it did have three nicely linked windows) and within it raged the usual garret battle between the chugging heat of the basement furnace and the sweeping draughts of the outside world. For furnishings there was only a slat-back chair and a night table and that small bed, and in the scant light these appeared sm
udged and leaden, as if rendered with a penny pencil. There was, yes, a bible box on the nightstand, but no wardrobes, nor chests, by which I mean no hiding place for even the smallest mechanical to account for the otherworldly sounds that attended her final hour, and of which I will tell in good time.

  “Ah, a whom-ever,” she said as I approached.

  “A what?”

  “A whom-ever. Someone whom I don’t wish to know. Or else someone whose name escapes me. But I suppose you must have a name or two.”

  Her manner was flat-out rude, and so I considered a nonce before giving my usual explanation: “I am Mrs. Alvah June Mellon. From the Medico Society. We care for the abandoned, the aged and the dying. And you, I must say, fit all three categories nicely.” I took out my notebook and stylus. “To begin, I should need your name.”

  “But who sent you? How ever did you find me out?”

  “The tenement landlord, duck. We’re busy about these wretched tenements, as you might guess, and so the landlords know us well.” I chanced, then, a look at the tome she had set aside on the bedclothes. It was Arctic Explorations in Search of Sir John Franklin 1853,’54,’55 by that Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. The book, though battered as if from constant reading, was beautifully bound and heavy with plates. “I recollect this. It was all the rage in its day. I can’t claim I’ve read it, mind.”

  “I’d like you to leave now, Mrs. Whom-ever. Or vanish. I’m not particular.”

  I kept my temper in check, but only with effort. “I was just making a little small talk. A little small talk often helps ease into an acquaintance. Anywise, I’ve no interest in your silly book. Why must everyone search for the famous when they’re lost, when they’ve died. It’s not as if their lives are worth more. God sees even the fall of a sparrow. Surely He does. Everyone says so … everyone.” I cleared my throat.

  My patient studied me then in much the way a seamstress does when measuring one for a new fit-out. “If everyone says so, then, behold, it must be true.”

  “And all that searching for him, that Sir Franklin, why it was wasted effort. He and all his men were dead as hobnails by the time that glory-hunting Dr. Kane even started on his expedition. He had no hope of bringing Franklin back from those Arctic wastelands, nor any of Franklin’s men.”

  “Indeed? Well, that ‘glory-hunting’ Dr. Kane was my husband, no matter what in tunket you’ve heard. And so if you require a name, then you may have Mrs. Kane and none other.”

  At which I realized just who I had in my care. “You’re one of the Fox sisters! From the heyday of all that Spiritualism. The one, yes, the one the papers set up with Dr. Kane. You’re a recognizable.”

  “A celebrity, that’s the word. Or I was once.” She reluctantly admitted herself then to be Margaret Fox Kane, the middle sister of the three. “Ever in the middle between Katie and Leah. And now I am the last.”

  “The last?” I said. And then I recalled how perhaps five years past there had been a lot of brouha among the Fox sisters three: public accusations and public confessions. Betrayals and recriminations. Reputations assaulted. Familial bonds rent asunder. That sort of thing. “Do not take offense, duck,” I continued. “But I think your Spiritualism is all chalk and nonsense. The dead are dead, the living live. And I, for one, would no more ask the dead their opinion than knock on the door of a rich man’s estate and demand to partake in his luncheon. Because, really, who can bear to know what the dead think of them?”

  She studied me again, all kindness now. She had the most candid brown eyes and gave the sense that if the truth ever escaped her, it was only because she allowed it to do so. “Well, that proves it.”

  “Proves what?”

  “That you’re not the angel of death. Nor one of his minions. I was convinced you were when you appeared in the vestibule, all in your black garb and haloed by that sulphurous Edison bulb.”

  I was fleshy in those days, as I am now, and of good height, and I have this broad pink face from my Irish kin and a mass of crinkled hair, coppered at youth, silvered by then. And I wasn’t wearing black. I was wearing my best fit-out of Bismarck brown, and over this I had tied my work apron, which was white as cloud and abulge with on-hand supplies: bromide pills and iodine ointment, bandage wads and catgut ligatures. As well, certainly, a stethoscope and pocket mirror for the gauging of life and breath. And two guides, one on the etiquette of mourning, the other on the etiquette of dying (people may call them whimsical, outmoded tomes all they like, but they do offer succour. I have them even yet), by which I mean I scarcely looked like the angel of death.

  “Do I have a scythe?” I demanded. “Am I of the masculine persuasion? Am I gaunt? Boney? Do I have a grim leer?” I was peeved, to be frank, and so I added there were worse things that could visit.

  “Oh, the good grief, like what?” my patient asked, and then she laughed. She had a delightful, chortling laugh. Infectious. We are all part of a universal prank was what that laugh suggested. I asked then if I might examine her. She said no. I said I would not leave until I did so. “I must. It is for the records,” I explained. “The records are ever demanding.”

  “Are they? Dandy-fine. And then you’ll leave me be?”

  “Yes,” I said. I fetched my medical lamp from its safe compartment in my satchel, lifted the chimney glass, trimmed the wick and lit it with my safety matches, then watched the ingenious mantle grow a steady white light, brighter and cleaner even than the light of day.

  “Whatever else have you got in that satchel of yours? A gasolier?”

  My satchel, though capacious, could scarcely fit a gasolier, and I told her this fact. I then took up her wrist. I discovered a wiry pulse—indicating ossification of the veins—which, along with her yellowed eyes and tender skin suggested a general failing of the organs due to a long dependence on stimulants and alcohol, exacerbated by a complete uninterest in living. After this brief examination I told her I would be visiting her every afternoon.

  “But you said you’d let me be. No. This will not do.”

  “By which I meant let you be for today.”

  “But I want to be alone when my last comes.”

  “You can’t die alone, duck. It’s simply not done.” I brought out my notebook again and the pencil and a square of Indian rubber. “Now, I will require names. People to contact for your funeral arrangements, that is. And people to hold vigil and record your last words. They can be the same souls, naturally.”

  “Ah, but there are no souls left to contact,” she replied without the least hint of self-pity.

  “Come, duck. You can’t be all stark alone. Someone must be searching you out. Someone must be praying for you, worrying for you every moment. Someone must long to hear your last words. And as like they’re going mad from trying to find you, as like they’ll not ever recover from … and wish that …” I faltered and scrubbed a page with the Indian rubber, as if at some old unwanted wordings. (I own I was thinking of my son just then, and how I never found him on the battlefields of Bull Run, though I searched and searched.)

  “Ah, hell and such,” my patient muttered, then sighed as if all-resigned.

  Surely she is accepting her fate, I thought. But she maintained there was no one. She was the last of the Fox sisters three, the last of the Fox family even, and she was determined, quite determined, to die alone. “And do not even consider seeking assistance from the Spiritualist Society,” she added. “I am in bad standing with them. I do not want their interference, any more than I want yours.”

  I reminded her then (quite firmly, I allow) of that supreme solace: the good death. Of the importance of finding peace with your Maker. Of giving your last words to your loved ones. Of composing your mortal form for its last envisioning. “Oh, I know the good death is going from fashion, as if death had fashions like hats or hems, and that some folks wish to die in their sleep and so pass on without a single thought for others, but that is a dreadful habit, and selfish, to boot.”

  “Well, yes.”


  “And if there is truly no one, then I will be here for your last. I will record your last words if need be. Such is my duty.”

  She gave that resigned sigh again. “Dandy-fine. But you must promise not to go to the Spiritualist Society.”

  “Of course I promise. I cannot gainsay my patients’ wishes, even if those wishes are chalk and nonsense. My Society is clear, quite clear on this.”

  “I’ve no doubt … Oh, and you must bring me some medicine, then—Rousseau’s brand and a whacking lot of it.”

  I took a bottle of Dr. Mongar’s laudanum remedy out of my satchel. “Will this suffice?”

  She eyed the bottle, all-cheered. “Proclaim the Medico Society sent you all you like. I say you’re God-sent.”

  “Many do,” I owned, and poured her a tumbler-full.

  “But I should call you Mrs. Mellon.”

  “That is better than Mrs. Whom-ever.”

  She chuckled and agreed, then drank down the laudanum with practised ease and set the tumbler on the nightstand just aside her bible box. This bible box, I should mention, was clearly made for a large, family bible. On the lid was a pretty bas-relief carving of entwined lilies.

  “That is a handsome item,” I said, and indicated the box. “I could read a passage for you. Scriptures are ever a comfort.”

  “It doesn’t hold a bible. I doubt it ever did. Only letters and accounts and clip-outs and other such ephemera.” At which she hefted up the box’s oddly thick and heavy lid. I had only a glimpse that day of the bible box’s contents. (For the records, however, I should mention that she eventually bequeathed the bible box to me, and that I have the box and all its contents in my possession still.)

  Now, many of the letters were penned by the immediate Fox family and their friends, such as those reformist-minded Quakers Amy and Isaac Post, and that infamous newspaperman Horace Greeley. But there was also a pack of love-sopped, demanding letters written to my patient by that Dr. Elisha Kent Kane. These “love letters” of Kane’s caused much brouha, more of which I will relate in good time. Also of note was the quantity of newspaper clip-outs, pamphlets, advertisements and endorsements pertaining to the Fox sisters, and a nearly equal quantity of such materials pertaining to one Reverend Chauncey Burr. He was the Fox sisters’ very own nemesis, and of him, too, I will relate.