Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  He stopped, a strange look coming over his face, and hurriedly adjusted the laces of the bag around his neck. He had gone a pale yellowish color and I could make out the darker hairs on his upper lip. He jerked his head like a cat freeing itself of a hairball and then, grimacing, worked something out from between his lips that fell into the bag and hung there, waggling.

  He stepped quickly across the hallway and tugged on a dangling cord. A distant bell rang, and steps hurried toward us.

  “There’s Whit and McDougal coming,” he said. “You don’t want them to catch you wandering around the way you’re dressed. Hurry, go, go, I can’t help you anymore!” He took off down the hall, toward where two dark figures were bustling toward us, robes agitating.

  “But where? Where should I go?” My cry was plaintive.

  “To the supply room!” came his reply.

  “But I don’t know where it is!” I said, then with an “Oh!” of frustration turned back the way we had come. Only then did I see, under the great front staircase, another, narrower flight of stairs going down. Presumably it led to the kitchens and pantry, a janitorial closet, perhaps a laundry. It seemed reasonable to suppose that the supply room was also below, and so it proved.

  “At last!” cried the supply warden, the small gray curtain drawn over her mouth on a wire frame billowing with her breath. A narrow fawn-colored person—perhaps a light-skinned mulatto—with great, staring eyes, she dropped the pile of blankets she had been listlessly folding, planted her hands firmly on the counter, and leapt athletically all the way over it (she was wearing bloomers) in her eagerness to shake my hand. I fell back a step in circumspection, having hardly expected such a reception—my person was not such as to inspire anyone to transports of enthusiasm—but then took her hand. “Margaret Dearth!” she cried, and then more slowly, as if still making up her mind, “and you are Jane.” It was just my name, but it felt like a kind of unction.

  “Yes, I am Jane,” I agreed, though it seemed to me that I exaggerated. But That’s more like it, I thought; after all, I was invited to come, perhaps everyone knows that but Mother Other, what a surprise she will get and how foolish she’ll feel when she finds out. “You kn-n-n—” I took a deep breath to silence the Voice, and started over. “You knew I was coming, then.”

  “Of course!” She beamed behind her curtain, or so she seemed eager to convey with her winks and nods. “You had to be coming, or there wouldn’t have been a uniform for you. One might even say, without too much exaggeration, that the existence of your uniform obliged you to come, sooner or later, just to fill it. Come, let me show you what I have made for you while I waited.”

  She drew me by the hand—which she had not yet released—behind the counter and back through shelves upon shelves of stacked, neatly folded sheets, towels, caps, handkerchiefs, and other less recognizable items, into a dim and cluttered corner at the very back. The warden began sweeping small items heedlessly off a cluttered shelf, thimbles, spools of wire, and other objects I could not make out in the darkness, letting them clatter and roll away into the shadows. “Here it is,” she breathed. “Come closer.” I came closer. “Blow.”

  “Blow?”

  “Like this.” There was a soft, sweet sound, like several flutes playing at once.

  “What is it? It is a remarkable thing, but I cannot quite make it out.” In fact I could not see much of anything in the darkness.

  “I call it a chth.” (That is the best I can do with the spelling of what was less word than hiss.) “It is a hole in the air, to blow through. How it is constructed is a very technical and wonderful thing, but in use it is something like a bagpipe. The land of the dead acts as the bag; all you need to do is blow. I will wrap it in brown paper for you and you can try it out for yourself later on. Here is your uniform. Now be off with you.” I found myself out in the hall again, a stack of clothes in my arms, the parcel balanced on top of it.

  Where was I supposed to change? Bewildered, I looked back at the supply room door. It had been open a chink when I arrived; now it was emphatically closed. The warden had been kind, in fact she seemed to have taken an unaccountable liking to me, but her parting words had sounded very final. Yet my street clothes seemed to give such universal offense that I was loath to keep them on a minute longer. Perhaps if I explored some more I would find a dressing room or lavatory in which I could slip on my uniform. Of the other doors I opened on that floor, however, one led to a big, banging kitchen, one to a storeroom piled ceiling-high with old furniture and theatrical props, and one, quickly closed again, to unmixed darkness. I went back up the stairs to the hall I had recently quit.

  There, the first door I tried opened onto a room humming with machines. On long tables crowded with shining glass tubes and reels of clean copper wire, cranks and pistons and flywheels, ashine with oil, were rocking or spinning or flashing back and forth. Rubber bladders alternately sagged and filled, and rabbit ears of looped wire covered with parchment trembled in tune with unseen influences. Nobody seemed in attendance on all this activity, though, and I moved on.

  Behind another door I discovered a row of older girls identically bent over identical black-enameled devices out of which sheets of white paper were wonderfully unfurling, amid a rattling and tapping that would have given even the Fox sisters pause. It took me a moment to recognize them as typewriters, the spirit-rapping, just keys striking platen. I laughed aloud and slammed the door.

  Farther down the hall, I eagerly pushed open, by leaning my shoulder into it, a swinging door that was also a singing door, for its hinges emitted a high sweet musical note, and found myself in a very large, gloomy room, lit only by a few dim bulbs in wall sconces set low in high wood panels that were almost black with age and grime, and by the long but narrow windows through which the dark day appeared even darker. This room, evidently the refectory, was full of long tables, thickly varnished and much scarred. Long benches provided the seating for these; only on the raised platform at one end, where stood a single mahogany table, were there a few chairs, no doubt reserved for the faculty, or perhaps only for the Headmistress, her intimates, honored guests.

  Overlooking this table hung a portrait of a white woman in a black dress, her extreme pallor unnaturally relieved by matching daubs of red in each cheek, holding a paper cone to her ear. Though it was a stiff, unflattering painting, it was an astonishing one—more astonishing than any other painting I had ever seen, though I could not have said exactly why. Somehow it gave me the feeling that I should not be able to see it at all. And yet I could see it, though not well. It flickered, in some sense that seemed to have nothing to do with the light, which, weak as it was, was steady.

  Roving unchallenged through the building as if it were my home—as it was!—had made me bold, and now, forgetting my objective, I set down my stack of clothes on a table and went to take a closer look. Only when I climbed up on the platform did I notice that a blond girl in a school uniform identical to the one I had just been issued was standing in the shadows before the painting, her hands joined behind her back, looking up at it, or rather, as I now saw, talking to it.

  “What are you doing?” I asked in an easy, conspiratorial tone, like one who is sure of her reception, so far had I forgotten myself in the novelty of my situation.

  The girl shook her head sharply, without taking her eyes off the painting, and kept on talking, though she mumbled so that I could not understand what she was saying.

  “Is that the Headmistress?”

  The girl grimaced in simultaneous assent and reproval.

  Undaunted, I took up a position next to the girl and gave myself over to studying the painting. I could identify nothing out of the ordinary and yet the conviction persisted that I beheld something strange if not frankly impossible.

  Somewhere in the building a clock began to toll, and a Negro boy came in (it was Ambrose Wilson, who would later need taking down a peg). “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “You’r
e not b-bothering the picture-talker, are you? That’s not allowed. What if you brrr-oke her concentration? Don’t think for a minute that you wouldn’t be blamed! Now get out of the way, we’re changing shifts. Isn’t there somewhere you’re supposed to be?” Waving me out of the way, he assumed the same position as the girl and began mumbling. After a moment she fell silent and let her head drop.

  “Y-you’re the new student, aren’t you?” she said at last, raising her heavy-lidded, rather globular gray eyes. She sighed. “Why don’t you come with me. I’ll show you where you can get yourself in Compliance. I can see that you haven’t the l-least idea how to behave.”

  She jumped off the platform and walked briskly back down the rows of tables, and I hurried after her. As I snatched up my things from the table—the door was already swinging shut behind her—the package the supply warden had given me slid off onto the floor and sprung open. I leapt to gather it up. I could not see the chth anywhere. Of course I had not seen it in the first place and so did not know what to look for. Or feel for; the blond girl, who had stuck her head back through the door, stared in bored disdain as I swept my fingertips across the dark floor. In the end, to be on the safe side, I scooped up whatever was there—dust, pencil shavings, a desiccated broccoli floweret—and deposited it all on the paper wrapper, which I folded and slid into the pocket of my pinafore.

  Then I made haste to follow my guide, whose pigtail was disappearing through the doors. “I’m ’lorence,” she said as I caught up with her.

  “Lawrence,” I said neutrally, thinking, Is that not a boy’s name?

  She shook her head. “’lorence. F-f-f-f-lorence. Through here.” She opened a door onto another long corridor at right angles to the first, evidently leading into one of the wings of the building, lined on the left with regularly spaced, curtainless ogive windows, through which I could make out a segment of the curved drive and, beyond the shifting foliage of the trees, patches of a field where identically clad children stood in ranks, their arms rising and falling in synchronized movements made fantastically undulant by irregularities in the glass.

  “This is the girls’ dormitory,” Florence said, going through another door into a high, ill-lit space containing many small iron beds as neat and narrow as graves, their heads against opposite walls, their feet separated by about a yard, leaving an alley down which Florence led me, tapping each footboard with a fingertip as she passed it, as if counting. “I expect you’ll get poor old Emily’s—I mean, Bed Seventy-four.” Beside each bed, separating it from the next, was a small stand with a drawer; on a few of these were personal items, a photograph or a book, but most were bare. “Here.” The bedframe rang as she rapped it.

  “Thank you,” I said, still clutching my uniform. All feeling of freedom and fellowship was gone, and it was with my usual sullen diffidence that I said, “Is . . . is there anywhere to change?”

  She looked at me uncomprehendingly, made a sweeping gesture that encompassed the room.

  “I mean, somewhere p-p-private?”

  “Private!” she scoffed. “Go on, get your uniform on, and then I’ll take you to the washroom to put your hair in Compliance. I’m spending my Restorative Time on you because I can see you need someone to show you what to do, but please don’t imagine that I’m enjoying it!”

  Hunched and miserable under her pale stare, I drew off my pinafore, carefully pressed when I set out, but now wrinkled and blotched with stains from the glass of milk I had drunk at the railroad station in Chesterfield, and pulled my uniform over my head, eclipsing her lunar gaze.

  Readings

  from Principles of Necrophysics: “The Mechanics of Channeling the Dead”

  This text, probably composed sometime in the first half of the last century, is still in use today as a general introduction to the subject, not so much for incoming students—these lose no time before beginning hands-on (or mouths-on) practice—as in public lectures, parent-orientation meetings, and press conferences. It appears here complete with the original plates. —Ed.

  It is hard to believe that stuttering and stammering were ever regarded as speech impediments. Today we know that they indicate a natural aptitude for ghost-speaking. This is partly because to yield your mouth to the voice of another, you must suppress what you may be used to thinking of as “your own” voice. But more important, it is because stuttering and stammering cause a local fluctuation in the directionality of time. A fruit fly taped to the lip of a stutterer will live hours longer than a fruit fly at large, and sustained stuttering can stop or even reverse time, as the juvenile Founder6 discovered when, grieving over a dead bunny, she saw its glazed eye brighten.7 For, just as it takes time to make a speech, it takes speech to make time. Only a speaker can spin a wodge of matted moments into a yarn. This yarn, we call life. But when we stutter, repeating or drawing out the same phoneme, the spinning wheel stops. The mouth stands still, as time flows on around it, and lets the past catch up. Or, as we would say, it travels back in time.

  When the stutterer’s mouth, caught up in the tidal bore it has itself induced, is carried into the past, it takes with it any objects of modest size in its vicinity.8 A painting of the Founder in a stiff nineteenth-century style appears to hang on the wall of the school refectory. Day and night, working in shifts, a single advanced student stands in front of it, talking it into the past. The picture is, thus, not really there; it has not been there since it was first hung, more than a hundred years ago. But everyone who enters the refectory remembers having seen it, as indeed they did see it, a moment before. Photographs, of course, show a blank wall. Even the nail on which the painting hung is missing. Even the hole for the nail!

  If one of the students responsible for the painting fell silent, however, it would resume its place on the wall without fanfare. Time is elastic: the stutter’s mouth does not rip the painting out of time but, like a heavy object on a trampoline, draws time smoothly back with it. Thus it creates a tunnel or funnel into the past. If you brought your eye close enough to a stuttering mouth you might glimpse another world. That world is the land of the dead.

  It is a fallacy that the dead lie in the remote past. In fact, they follow hard on our heels. Have you never glanced over your shoulder for no good reason? Some others, we suspect, wait for us in the immediate future, and glance over their shoulders in turn, finding us, perhaps, as uncanny as we find them.

  Now, when we say that the dead are in the recent past, we do not mean the past present that preceded our own present by a slivered second or two. We mean the past past, the present’s past.9 We did not, in other words, pass through the land of the dead a little while ago without knowing it—the reading that certain jocular critics have given to our teachings. A little while ago it was also the present, as it is always the present (for now), and the land of the dead was then, just as it is now, in the past—that present’s past. Never current, it is dragged behind us like a net behind a boat, filling up with those we leave behind.

  Now, unlike a boat, the present cannot turn around and go back the other way, nor can its passengers pull in that net like fishermen to see what we have caught. Jump overboard we can, but that measure is usually irreversible. No, however closely they follow us, we cannot ordinarily see or hear our dead, no matter how they call to us. But when the mouth of the stutterer is carried back to the land of the dead, a favorably disposed ghost can align his or her mouth with the child’s and speak through it to the present.10

  This was advanced necrophysics, forty years ago, but a modern audience is rightly unsatisfied with this explanation. For the dead do not, cannot, speak in the present. If they could, the mouth through which they speak would surely have to be in the present, too, and we have shown that the mouth must travel to the past to fill with the voices of the dead. But if they don’t speak in the present, how can we hear them?

  The astonishing answer: We cannot! We do not hear them, we merely discover retrospectively that we have heard them. (Remem
ber that blank wall.)

  Now, if the dead are only a few seconds in the past, then surely they do not have time to finish saying much before the present falls upon them like a guillotine and cuts them off. But this is not a problem for a skilled ghost speaker. Pleating the fabric of time like a kilt, she dips repeatedly into the past, retrieving and relaying the message in slivers. If she does her job well, the listener has the illusion of continuous speech, for though no word is heard, at every moment a word has just been heard.

  Ghost speakers must train for a long time to avoid any of several common mistakes: One may pause for too long an interval between breaths, creating a dragging or syncopated effect. One may pause for too short an interval, then deliver all the words simultaneously, in a meaningless heap. Finally, one may pause for what amounts to a negative interval, starting back for the next word before one has finished the last, or simply overshoot (or undershoot) one’s target, with the result that one delivers the words in reverse order or, more frequently, repeats words or parts of words—a result that, coincidentally, may sound (have sounded) a great deal like stuttering.11

  These technicalities are of interest mainly to the scientist. Once we have mastered the art, it no longer requires conscious effort to speak as and for the dead. Eventually we become aware that we have been doing it all along, that every one of the words we speak was said first by someone else. We say “I,” and can no longer remember who we meant. Our diary entries are so many obituaries of persons unknown. We are ghosts, channeling ghosts, who channeled ghosts. The part of us that occupies the present is a dimensionless ring through which phantoms flow, and that is why our student IDs feature, in place of a photograph, a hole.

  Letters to Dead Authors, #3