I do not remember how I learned to read, only that the sound of human voices gradually rose above the stridor of those flies. I say that it rose, but it felt more as though I descended, leaning through the words (which no longer seemed like wrought iron—or flies—or crustaceans—or any solid thing, but like so many bolt-holes) and hanging precariously over another world, whose doings I took in with avid eyes.
Every day it came nearer. The jealous buzzing of the books that I had not chosen rose to a din, the handles of the barrister bookshelves rattled, but I paid no attention, forcing myself—against trivial but unyielding impediments, such as my body—toward a place that felt more like home than home did. Sometimes I came away from my father’s study with the sand of its shores under my nails, or a furry blue leaf entangled in my hair. When I stole a look at myself in the shadowed, subaquatic depths of the mirror in the hall, I could see strange reflections in my eyes: languid wicker airships crewed by clockwork octopuses, a church thatched with feathers, a quarry from whose unfathomable depths a winding line of ragged, gaunt laborers dragged barrows heaped with muddy phonographs.
My idyll was cut short through my own weakness and cupidity. I was very often hungry as a child. I do not mean to imply that I was deliberately starved—that was not one of my father’s particular unkindnesses—only that in our strictly regulated household there was no hope of securing so much as a heel of bread until the clock in my father’s study had informed him that it was mealtime. But my stomach did not heed the clock, so I ravened. Sometimes I dared to set ahead the clock, but not by much. Sometimes I secreted a biscuit or a piece of cheese in my pinafore during a meal, and put it aside to nibble while I read, but my willpower was not strong and I invariably fell upon it a short time later and then was as hungry as if it had never been. Sometimes to chew on a bonnet string gave me a little relief, but it was accompanied with dread, since I knew that I would be punished if the ends were seen to be damp or frayed.
So as the clock ticked, and the golden parallelogram slid across the floor, and the weight on my left thigh grew heavier, and the weight on my right grew lighter, and my soul leaned into another world, held back only by the ignoble cravings of my stomach, I took to eating books.
I exaggerate. I did not eat whole volumes. I tore off the corners of pages and bit and sucked and chewed and when they eventually dissolved, I swallowed them. But it felt like eating, and placated my belly, and so I resorted to it more and more often, and even stole away one tasty book to hide in the shed against my next incarceration. I grazed ever farther afield, depredating whole swathes of my father’s library (even today, I must be part book), and learned discrimination. I found that I disliked the coarse yellow stuff of the cheaper books and magazines, which disintegrated quickly into a sort of paper gruel that was gluey and gritty at once. The thick white glossy clay-coated stock on which some illustrated books were printed squeaked nastily under my teeth and sometimes dealt paper-cuts to the corners of my mouth. The best paper rendered down into a sturdy cud that lasted, and had a simple, bready flavor.
You will excuse, I hope, a brief excursion into pedantry. The compulsion to eat paper bears the same name as a measurement of font size. It is known as pica (from the Latin pica, or magpie), and is said to reflect, like the compulsion to eat dirt, chalk, or ice, a nutritional as well as a psychological abnormality. I believe that the homology with a type size is instructive, and that pica reflects, also, an abnormality in relations with the printed word. I loved books not spiritually, but carnally. And although I did not know it, I was practicing to channel the dead, who have always found in the printed page their most reliable medium.
Though possibly I was just trying to bite my father, in proxy.
In any case the time came that I had always known would come. When the uproar arose from the study, I set down my embroidery (a mere prop; my work never advanced by more than an X or two), rose, went out the back door, and crept through the loose and rotting latticework (more X’s) into the muddy space under the back porch. The feet of giants creaked overhead. It grew colder, darker. I heard the sound of the dinner bell. My stomach boiled obediently. I became aware of the pointlessness of my position. My father was not even looking for me, confident that I would eventually return.
I did, and was beaten, scalded, shut up in the shed. Thereafter my father’s study was kept locked. The key now hung around his neck. I would not until years later even consider resorting to the Cheesehill library, for that would entail mingling with my social inferiors. Only one book remained to me, hidden in the shed: a gnawed copy of Moby-Dick. I might have done worse.
I believe my father attributed my assault on his book collection to spite and never considered that I might have taught myself to read. Well, I believe that it is uncommon enough.
Now, however, I turned from reading to writing. It was not quite for the first time: As soon as I had learned my letters I had employed them in fell curses scratched on our boundary rocks and fences, calculated to alarm the superstitious children of the neighborhood. More recently I had exercised my talents in a stolen ledger on a few pitiful stories in which young girls defied their captors in magnificent invective, the account of which made up the majority of the narrative. It will be apparent from these examples that the written word played then a merely prosthetic role, supplying an eloquence that in speech I lacked, and giving weight to infantine fantasies of puissance.
But now it became something more for me. My ledger, barely a quarter filled, became my daily consort. Concealed in the shed, where I kept it, I poured into it all the thoughts I could not frame in speech, trivial and great; I wrote about my housework, my rabbits; I wrote fragments of stories; I wrote to read myself writing. As I did not speak like a little girl—did not speak—I did not write like a little girl. My syntax was baroque, my style orchidaceous. The phrases tumbled out, with inflections first heard decades and centuries before my birth. I had read them all before, in arrangements only a little different. Though they addressed the concerns and characters of my little life, they did not seem like mine. They were stamped with a maker’s mark I could not quite make out; they belonged to others and to elsewhere. Not to readers; I did not dream of fame. No, to the world of books, beloved and now lost to me. It seemed to me that I heard the buzzing of flies again and louder than ever, that my own voice (always faint enough, in any case) was completely drowned out by the din that rose from the page. I saw that the other world I yearned for was already inside me. To reach it I had merely to turn myself inside out.
How to do that I would learn. It would take me some years.
I became fluent—on paper. To summon this fluency into my throat was not then possible. I suppose that ordinary children begin by saying a word or two, graduate to sentences, then stories, and only much later and with difficulty learn to poke, pleat, and tuck the airborne phenomenon that is speech into a page-sized package. It is perhaps like folding a parachute? For me it was the opposite. My parachute came folded, and only much, much later would I tweak it out and call a wind to fill it.
But the intricacy of those folds! Slowly, my distress at feeling that I had no voice and without a voice, no self, gave way to wonder and delight. What was a self? A wishbone stuck in my throat. On paper I could be anyone. There was nothing to be stuck in or to stick, only boundless elasticity, boundless subtlety, clarity, rarefaction, light and space and freedom; in a word, joy.
I reveled in counterfeit. I wrote about myself in the third person and in hagiographic terms; I described a life that I did not live, and it seemed realer than my own. It eventually consumed my ledger; in searching for more paper in my mother’s writing desk, I came upon a little envelope of loose stamps, which inspired me to write a series of scurrilous letters to the editor of our local paper in the name, first, of fictitious entities, then of certain actual persons2 who had aroused my dislike. This caused a minor stir. It died down. No one blamed me, of course; recall that I had never formally been tau
ght to write, or even to read. What’s more, my style was scarcely juvenile. If anything, it was senescent, with the gaseous orotundity of an earlier era.
One day I procured some writing paper and with excruciating care drafted the following letter, or one very like it:
Harwood Joines, Esq.
Dear Sir,
I am very obliged to you for your review of our product, the Galvano-Magnetic Thingummy. You have identified shortcomings that even my own team of trained Galvanists did not recognize, and the solutions you suggest display astounding technical acumen. You are wasted in—that quaint name again?—Cheesehill! I would like you to come to my factory and train my workers in your methods. Would you do this for me, Harwood? I employ your first name, because already I think of you as a friend. Great minds must stick together! I see a fruitful partnership in our future. All expenses for your travel will be reimbursed when you arrive, so please do not hesitate, but come as soon as may be, no advance notice required. We shall not stand on ceremony, you and I.
Affectionately,
Your Brother in Science,
Samuel B. Alderdash
Proprietor, Galvano-Magnetic Thingummy
I folded and sealed this in an envelope to which I had transferred a canceled stamp steamed from another envelope that I had found in the trash. To conceal the inadequacies in the postmark that I had carefully drawn on with faint stipples of ink, I ripped, crumpled, and dirtied the corner of the envelope, as if it had been mangled in transit. Then I slid it under the other mail awaiting my father on the hall table, minutes before he swept it all up and bore it with him to his study.
My heart was slightly, unpleasantly out of time with the hall clock.
My father came out again and stood in the hall, his arms hanging, staring past me. His eyes were wide and glossy; the pink pockets of his lower lids gaped. I realized that I had never before seen him happy. I could bear it only because I knew what was in store for him.
After a few words with my mother, he shut himself in his study. My mother silently packed his bag. At the dinner bell he emerged to request that his food be brought to him on a tray. I ate my dinner with unusual relish, alone with my mother. My father departed early the next morning. From my bedroom window I watched him square his briefcase on his knees as the carriage jerked into motion.
He came back very late that night and murdered my mother.
Letters to Dead Authors, #1
In April 1919, seven months before her death, the Headmistress wrote the first of a series of letters to deceased authors. We know the date because the envelope in which it was returned, stamped undeliverable, is postmarked. It appears from her own testimony (Letter #2) that she was not initially aware that the addressee of her first letter was dead, but once this was brought home to her, she recognized the merit of the practice, and was to continue writing to him and other deceased authors until the end of her life. Dating of these subsequent letters is infuriatingly approximate, since we possess only undated copies (the originals are presumably still lost in the mail), but they seem to have appeared with increasing frequency as time went on, approaching the function of a daily journal, and providing an invaluable record both of the clouds then gathering over the Vocational School and of Joines’s declining health, mental as well as physical. She herself notes (Letter #11) that she has addressed herself to a fictional character (Letter #10), though subsequent lapses go unremarked.
Like the Final Dispatch and other materials here assembled that register the passage of time, these letters will be distributed at regular intervals throughout the volume, but readers should keep in mind that they are not contemporaneous with the Final Dispatch, but conduct us up to the point where it began.
Incidentally, there is no evidence that any of her addressees ever wrote back. —Ed.
Dear Mr. Melville,
You will not have heard of me, as I am of small account by the great world’s reckoning. Nevertheless I have made discoveries that should interest any man of imagination—and you have imagination, Mr. Melville, do you not? When I read Captain Ahab’s vow to strike through the “pasteboard mask” of visible things, I knew that I had to do with a man who had run an inky finger down the chinks in the Wall, and had wondered what wind it was that blew through it.
Mr. Melville, I have found the door in that wall.
Having caught your attention, as I hope, I will now tell you about myself.
I am a woman no longer young, tall, gaunt, with a strong brow. My dress is somber and guided by scientific principles (specifically, acoustics), not by fashion; I am no Lucy-Go-Lightly. I was born in the small town of Cheesehill, Massachusetts, and grew up odd and lonesome, since I had a stutter, and was shy to boot. Nor were my parents sympathetic, but sought, my father did, to scare my tongue straight. You may imagine what efficacy that had. Only my rabbits—
A fit of coughing has disordered my thoughts. But I was speaking of my childhood. I was an ardent reader, Mr. Melville, and one of your books concealed providently in a flowerpot eased many a desolate hour spent locked in the garden shed with the potatoes, though I do not mean to asperse the potatoes, whose company, on balance, I preferred to that of most of Cheesehill’s other inhabitants. I feel a special affinity to writers, even though, to tell the truth, it seems a silly sort of life, making up stories. While I too work with words, it is as an explorer and a scientist. Nonetheless I write to you, and not to Mr. Tesla, Mr. Roentgen, Mrs. Curie, or even Mr. Edison, for it seems to me that writers have made greater progress than scientists (myself excepted) on a venture of the highest importance to our world today, tomorrow, and yesterday: communication with the dead.
Which brings me to my point. I am the Founder and Headmistress of a boarding school and research facility, the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children, where we teach children to channel the dead and, finally—though a little less finally than everyone else—to travel to their realm. My pupils are all stutterers. Why? Because stuttering, like writing, is an amateur form of necromancy.
I was myself a child when the first ghost spoke through the frozen moment in my mouth. The study of the dead became my passion. In playground games of school, I taught the other children everything I learned. As a young woman, I sought out the notable spirit mediums of the day, and eagerly applied to them for instruction, but was disappointed; if they had answers (and most of them were mountebanks), they guarded them closely. I was thrown back upon the dead, who did not fail me. I developed my own methods, and having seen firsthand the need for vocational training in the trade, resolved to found a school for spirit mediums.
Returning to Cheesehill, I poured my funds into the purchase and rehabilitation of a derelict property well suited to my needs, and with my childhood companions as talent scouts, scraped together an entering class—each and every one a stutterer like me. Their speech was broken; they were cracked vessels; I would make them perfect. Not by sealing the cracks! By sweeping away the last remaining shards. I would raise a new Eden, in which a primordial silence would rise again, and the din of human voices would no longer drown out the quiet confidences of the dead.
The first time I traveled to the land of the dead, it was an accident, and I nearly lost my life. It was also by accident that, crying out, I found my voice and with it, eventually, the way home. For to travel there one must summon up in words, not just the ground one walks upon, but even oneself, walking. My life’s work, like yours, depends on my ability to construct a convincing fiction. Indeed, I would welcome any “tips” you might have for me! But I am seeking more material help as well.
I have recently lost a student. It will happen, given the natural vivacity of children and the nature of our studies. But now my school is under seige. Philistines with no more understanding of Eternity than may be gleaned from the platitudes carved on tombstones are baying at the gates. Save the children! is their rallying cry. Rank hypocrisy, as these children are those same “st
uttering imbeciles,” “degenerates,” and “mental defectives” they were so eager to pack off to any quack who promised to cure them or keep them out of sight. Emily herself (not a prepossessing child) would be amazed to hear the fanciful terms in which she is described in the press. Precious bundle? Little lamb? A big bundle, more mutton than lamb! Her doting parents’ treasure, their pearl without price? She knew exactly what she was worth to them.
But as a result of this rhetoric (for the land of the living is also shaped by words), some of our more excitable parents have already withdrawn their children from their studies, with a catastrophic loss of revenue to the school.
May I press you for a donation? Even a loan would be of signal service. I have poured the whole of my inheritance into outfitting my school and now must scrimp and scrape to buy necessities. I know your means are modest, but the need is great, the cause honorable. And one day the world will flock to my door, and then this grateful recipient of your patronage will have the wherewithal to make you very comfortable indeed.
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