The Dark

by Claire Mulligan

  The most important and revelatory papers, I need mention, were those penned by my patient’s father, John D. Fox, to his favoured daughter, Leah. These papers are an account of how he deserted his wife and first three children—Leah, David and Maria—and for ten long years. How he was a drunkard who gambled and blasphemed; how he was an all-about failure as a father and husband. How he, to be frank, hung his soul out for the Devil to snatch. And then how and why he returned to his family those ten years later, but as a tee-totalling, God-fearing Methodist (at which juncture he fathered my patient and her sister Katie). John’s conversion was all-thanks to one Brother Able, and as I shall tell in good time, that story is the under-stitching of the one at hand.

  To resume. My patient shut the bible box and I put it aside for her. The laudanum was grabbing hold and her face taking on a dreamy cast. I was not amazed when, soon enough, she was laying out the past like a bolt of fine, densely patterned cloth and that, like many who are peephole to eternity, the past seemed as the present, the present of no import. Not that I solicited her story. I surely did not, not at first. All of us at the Medico Society know better than to encourage tales of regret and woe. Such tales become a burden. They hamper one’s duty and lead to melancholic thoughts. At the least they become entwined with one’s own interpretations, filtered through one’s own imaginings. With Mrs. Kane, however, my curiosity soon overcame these reservations. To explain: My patients often speak of the past, but their purposes vary. Some seek absolution. Some a road to comprehension. Some merely like to hear themselves prattle on. But Mrs. Kane—or Maggie, as I called her by the end—had a more obscure purpose and this purpose, I came to think, had something to do with my own presence.

  I should add that my patient spoke of her younger self as if she were some girl she had known intimately, but who had been a separate person withal. Such is what comes, I thought then, from taking on so many voices, and from making so many mistakes, mistakes that are incomprehensible to one’s present self (to this latter fact I can well attest).

  “I surely loathed Hydesville,” she began. “My younger sister, Katie, and I both did. Hydesville was naught but a crossroads, a hamlet, the forlornest place in the world, we thought, and didn’t we just surl like wet cats when our parents moved us there from the lit-up bustle of Rochester. We hated being away from our adored sister Leah, who taught music in Rochester, and from her daughter, Lizzie, who was near our age and ever up for jack-fun, at least at first. This move happened in, yes, the autumn of’47. David, our grown brother, lived in Arcadia, near to Hydesville, and he was doing dandy-fine cultivating peppermint. Our father, John Fox, hoped to do the same. He was a blacksmith by trade but failed-up at near everything he put his hand to.”

  She paused and reached for the laudanum. I considered, then gave her a measure more. “That Hydesville house,” she continued. “It was one of those little saltbox affairs, all damp and dull and ever strewn with little clumps of dank dirt no matter how we cleaned our shoes, to our poor, fretting mother’s dismay. It had no near-on neighbours and was quiet and dim as tomb within, even in the broad of day. And it was rumoured to be haunted by a murdered peddler. And here begins Spiritualism, Mrs. Mellon, the whole grand shebang of it: those rumours of a haunting, two bored and mischievous sisters, an encounter, and a curse.”

  MAGGIE SHOULD STOP, turn back, but as always she clambers on past caution, clambers higher and higher up this tree that is older than reckoning. Past a hangbird’s nest. Past branches sagged with apples of carmine and rose. She clambers as high as she can, up and up, into this azure and gold October day of 1847.

  Her sister Katie peers up from below. “Get on down, Mag. You’ll break your neck or something.”

  “But I can see the world from here,” Maggie calls back. Maggie is fourteen. Katie is eleven. Their world is the hamlet of Hydesville, which is in the township of Arcadia, in the county of Wayne, in the state of New York. Their world is fields of peppermint, stands of woodlands, lines of drumlins, and the Ganargua River, muddy and mosquito-shrouded.

  “Please, Mag! Let’s get outta here. The tender’s hound is real fierce and we’re too far in. I can’t see the road no more.”

  “That doesn’t mean it ain’t there, silly thing,” Maggie calls, as she works her way down. It is a more fraught climb than up. She feels her cheeks flushing red, adding, no doubt, to that “healthful country prettiness” their mother insists she has. A prettiness, Maggie supposes, that must be better than none at all.

  She drops to the green. Her pinafore, laden with thieved apples, bangs her knees.

  Katie steadies her. And then the murderous barking statues them both. The sound is near, then far. Now everywhere at once.

  “Run!” Maggie yells, and grips Katie’s hand. Their brogans are slicked with rotting apple pulp and they slip once, stumble twice. Leaves flap at their braids. Quack grass lashes their knees. Brambles tear their stockings, which are already laddered with darning.

  Maggie halts her sister in a copse of gnarled trees. For once Maggie is glad they are both smaller statured girls than average. Slips of things, as people say.

  “Hold your breath, Kat. Listen.”

  No hound. Only the dread-quiet of something watching.

  Then a peabody cries. A hare darts near.

  “Damn-it-all, where’s the fence?” Maggie whispers.

  “Were it the other way?” Katie whispers back. Tears runnel her pale skin, her thin arched nose. Her eyes are grey or lavender depending on the light and are heavy-lidded, giving the impression of a sleepy nature, except when she is terrified, as now. Now they are as round as marbles.

  “Here,” Maggie says. “Up! Up! Get up the tree.” She stirrups her fingers for Katie. Katie points, rigid. They see him: a teeth-bared, savage-eyed creature, big as a wolf. He is three trees distant and stalking onwards. Katie sobs. Maggie grabs her waist. “Get up. Up!” she yells.

  Katie’s pinafore is also weighted with apples, hindering her movements. “I can’t!” she shouts. Maggie snatches up a fallen, jagged-edged branch and tears after her. They scream in unison as the hound breaks into a loping run. Katie stumbles and falls. Maggie stands over her sister, branch clenched like a spear. Katie prays face down in the grass.

  “Damn it! Damn-it-all,” Maggie incants. “I hate this place. I hate this place.”

  A distant whistle sounds. The hound halts. It is so close Maggie can smell its rank hair. Another whistle. The hound snarls and slinks off.

  “He’s gone, Kat. He’s gone.” Maggie helps her up. They walk quick, breathing hard, shriven with fear. Finally they reach the split-rail fence. They climb over it and into the dusty ruts of the public road. “We’re safe now. Really,” Maggie adds.

  They keep walking, mind, putting the orchard at a distance. Overhead, geese call out warnings of winter. The woodlands are ablaze with dying leaves. The wind carries the smell of field burn, of something rotting, and now the faint smell of peppermint from the fields abutting the road. In August these fields are said to be oceaned with blossoms of pink. Maggie sniffs and thinks of peppermint sticks and peppermint tonics. The peppermint, she decides, is the one good thing about Hydesville.

  From the verge Maggie spies their rented saltbox house, set there in its lonesome pocket of field, black shutters the only embellishment on its squat two storeys. She spies their father’s smithy aside the road, the buttery, the necessary, a low stone wall, three balm o’ Gileads in a row. A close grouping, small and plain as a doll set. No sign of the wagon or their old dun horse. Their parents must still be in Newark buying supplies for the long wintering-in.

  Maggie’s heart steadies. Already she is recalling the incident in the orchard as exciting rather than terrifying. Already she is angry at the tender for letting his hound chase them like that. She takes her sister’s hand. Katie’s face is pale. Her eyes have darkened to slate and her jaw is clenched. Her fingers? They tremble. Ah, no, Maggie thinks. One of Katie’s peculiar little fits is coming o
n. They last only a few moments, these fits. Katie stands rigid, trembling, vacant-eyed; on three occasions she has fallen and drummed her heels. When she does return to herself, she can’t recall a thing. “It’s as if I plain ole vanish,” she has told Maggie.

  To distract her sister, to keep her in herself, Maggie stands with arms akimbo and pretends fussed perplexity, pretends, that is, to be their mother. “Now, girls. Girls!” she says in a raised, nervous voice. “What do you mean you hate it here? We’ll get rich growing peppermint, won’t we? Oh, and we’ve only been here in Hideawayville, I mean Hydesville, for two months. It’s not so awfully dull. You’ve got me and your pa, don’t you? And your dear brother, David, and a passel of kin are near enough. And your father is building us a place of our own, isn’t he? And we couldn’t stay with the Posts forever, could we? Oh, and Rochester was so rackety, wasn’t it? All those carriages and, oh, all the night lamps made my poor old eyes ache. Here, folks respect the gloaming, don’t they? They know it’s God’s signal to shutter themselves in nice and safe. And can’t you just wait for winter. We can all go to bed at four o’clock so’s not to waste the candles and rushies. Won’t that be a lark!”

  Katie’s jaw unclenches. Her hand steadies. She giggles, as she always does when Maggie shows off her talent for mimicry. Katie’s talent is for eavesdropping; she hears well beyond the ken of others, hears voices in far rooms, hushed conversations below stairs, footfalls up paths.

  “Someone’s coming,” she says now. The girls turn and see him. The peddler has a pronounced limp and uses a walking stick, and his rucksack bends him at the hips as if he is perpetually bowing. His wears a black cap, a frocked black coat, and grey trousers, and these garments are stiffed with grime and reek of onions and old sweat, damp leaves and dried shit. He is not much taller than Maggie and Katie.

  When he reaches them he spits tobacco. Doffs his cap. “Good day to yous,” he says.

  “Well, yes. Good enough,” Maggie answers.

  His eyes are gold with a burst of green about the pupil. His face is sun-darkened to the mid of his forehead. Above this line is a pale dome. Maggie imagines it hinging open to show the worm-coils of his brain. Peddlers. Don’t they disembowel cats? Thieve babies? Sell cure-alls that cure one of nothing except mortality? Didn’t a peddler disappear in the Hydesville area some five or ten years past? Some say his throat was slit for his silver thimbles, others for his five hundred dollars, others for his secret sins upon children. All agree, however, that he is buried in the cellar of a house near on. Mayhap in our very own cellar, Maggie thinks, and nearly smiles. Wouldn’t that be quaint. Wouldn’t that just explain why the place gives me the willies. Why, I’d bolt in a shot given the half the darned chance.

  “Something pretty for yous pretty girls?” this peddler now asks. “I’s got perfume sachets and rose-essence. I’s got broaches and pocket combs. I’s got shaker’s yarb and castor ile and bitters for the ague. I’s got shadow puppets and baby’s whistles. I’s got delaine lengths and needle sheaves and I’s got silk thread near invisible and strong as wire, I swear.”

  The girls shake their heads. The peddler wearily nods and trudges on past them. He is not a rod distant when Maggie looks at Katie. She wants to cheer her sister further, that’s all, and so she composes a rhyme on the spot: “Peddler man, Peddler man with all your wares. We’ll give you a gaffe, if you don’t beware. We’ll salt you and pickle you and chop you up to keep. We’ll throttle you and bottle you and put you in our cellar deep.” Maggie smiles, proud of this quick contrive.

  The peddler turns and sputters. He raises a fist. “Throttle me? I’ll throttle you, you little bitches! Apologize, damn you.”

  He limps back towards them. The girls’ shrieks are edged with laughter. They turn to run. He fumbles at his trousers. “Get on back here. I’ll give you a gaffe and right in your nasty hinnies!”

  “Don’t you look, Kat,” Maggie orders. She knows they should just run, but she is aburn with fury, abuzz with a curious elation. She hauls an apple out of her pinafore. “Horrid ole pig!”

  The first shot lands square on his chest. He staggers, unbalanced by his rucksack.

  Katie glances at Maggie. “Nasty, lousy man!” she yells, and hurls an apple of her own. It strikes his shoulder. He yelps and curses. Now the girls hurl apples fast as ever they can. One sends his cap flying clear off his head. The peddler tips backwards, his huge rucksack beneath him, his feet and arms waving in the air. He looks, in all, like a helpless beetle on its back.

  Maggie advances on him; Katie yanks on her pinafore strings. “Don’t keep on. We gotta go. Let the ole nasty be.”

  But Maggie is not finished. She thinks of their eldest sister Leah, and of the day she accompanied her to a Rochester bank and witnessed with awed delight as the clerk shrank under Leah’s imperious gaze, then admitted that, yes, he must have been the one who miscounted, that he, certainly, was the sorry one. And that, by all means, he would never cheat a lady who had such a sickly daughter, at which Maggie had obligingly coughed and groaned.

  Did Leah back down? Did Leah let it be?

  Nope, Maggie thinks, and kneels beside the peddler.

  “Apologize, damn you,” the peddler says.

  Maggie sees it then—his member, his prick, worming out of his pants.

  “Never, never, never,” Maggie chants, and picks up his fallen cap. Only now does she grab Katie’s arm. They race down the verge towards their saltbox house, hardly imagining the peddler would limp-limp after them, following them as if determined to do so all his living days.

  “You’ll die alone and ranting for your lies, you hoyden bitches” is what he says a short time later, when he reaches the foreyard.

  But the girls, all locked inside that little house, only laugh to beat the band.

  CHAPTER 2.

  “It was a curse, Mrs. Mellon, what that peddler said. A curse that’s come to pass.”

  “What chalk and nonsense. Are you alone? Am I a figment? A patch of thought? And are you ranting? No, duck, you are completely yourself.”

  “Completely myself? That’d be a first since the beginning-of-it-all.”

  “I suppose you’ll next be telling me what happened to that peddler, once he caught up with you.”

  “Why, we chopped him up and buried him in the cellar, just as we threatened. Why-ever not?”

  “Oh, you are a one.”

  My patient agreed, then asked, “Do you believe in ghosts, Mrs. Mellon?”

  “The hour! I am amazed. I’d not realized it was so late. I’ll leave you the lamp. Turn it down here, the mantle-gauze lets it burn steady and for a good length of time.”

  “But my question. Spirits. Ghosts. The Invisibles. Do you believe?”

  “I believe in draughts, which are likewise unseen, but which cause more grief than any ghost. And you with no head cap. Do you think yourself exempt from their influence? Do you wish to hasten your demise?”

  She touched her bare braids. “No, not now.”

  “Then I’ll be sure to bring you a proper cap next time as protection against them.”

  “That’d be sterling, thank you.”

  “Ah, and I’ll bring spoon victuals as well. There’s some measure of life left in you yet.”

  “Yards of it, I’m sure. But my question, again. Ghosts.”

  I was too busy with packing up my satchel to answer straightaways. She was patient, however, this perplexing patient of mine.

  “Do I have a choice, duck? At my age? In my occupation?”

  “Your occupation? As a physician, you mean?”

  “What else?” I asked, and snapped my satchel shut.

  On my second visit to Mrs. Kane I brought spoon victuals and a nightcap, as promised. The cap was a simple one of white muslin that suited, I thought, her elegant bed jacket of bishop’s blue.

  She thanked me quite kindly, then swallowed down a good quantity of arrowroot pudding and of beef tea, to boot. (I had insisted she eat before taking her
medicine.)

  “You did not explain what happened to the peddler,” I said at length.

  “The good grief, didn’t I?”

  “No, duck.”

  “He would have been forgotten, understand. Katie and I would have been forgotten too. We would been ordinary girls who had once heard an ordinary ghost. We would have had run-of-the-mill, uncharted lives. But then Leah arrived from Rochester.” She chortled. “Leah Fox Fish Brown Underhill. My eldest sister collected names the way a squirrel collects nuts. I was ever mired in ambivalence about her. Oh, but you should search out her memoir, Mrs. Mellon. She had it ghost-written, as it were, later in her life. The Missing Link in Modern Spiritualism, that’s the title. If ever you read it, do so with a pot of salt, no, a bucket.”

  “Surely, but for now you might as well tell me what she discovered, your Leah,” I said, not noticing then how my patient, the sly creature, had evaded my question about the peddler and his true fate.

  LEAH FOX FISH—stately mannered, tragic eyed—holds fast as the hired buggy lurches in the ruts. The driver looks down at her. “Those are your people? At the spook house? I thought you was a gawker. Been naught but gawking and old-hen chatter about that peddler’s ghost knocking about the saltbox, and how he got his throat slashed with a butcher knife, and how his ghost is claiming that he’s buried in the cellar. The gossips are on and on about how that cellar’s been dug up in spades, but naught a bone’s turned up yet.” He shakes his head, his tobacco spittle just missing Leah’s cloak. “So those are your people,” he says again. “Lord help ya.”

  I suspect the Lord is otherwise occupied, Leah thinks. Says for the driver, “Yes, my people, indeed.”