Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  In an alcove in the northeast stairwell a mechanical woman was seated, breast-feeding a bird; from the concealed tubing, drops of real milk beaded on the black beak.

  On the Headmistress’s desk a white carnation stood in an inkwell vase, slowly turning black.

  In the hall outside her office door, a flock of knee-high, rather soiled wind-up clouds rolled out an open door, across the hall, and in the opposite door. One banged into the doorframe, churred angrily for a moment, then jittered sideways enough to bumble through.

  On a plinth in the garden, surrounded by a brick walkway, an oversized bust of the Headmistress bulged and wallowed strangely. When I drew near I heard a faint buzzing coming from the statue and realized that it was really a very fine mesh sack, given sculptural form with cunning tucks, darts, and gathers, and filled with a quantity of gnats all excitedly airborne and keeping the sack distended through the wind of their wingbeats and the impact of their bodies against the mesh. The bust subtly changed coloration as the gnats concentrated momentarily in the bridge of the nose, say, or one cheekbone, though it depended on the angle of the light whether these thickenings appeared as brighter or darker areas. “On special evening occasions we use fireflies,” Clarence said, and indeed I did eventually get a chance to see the bust flickering, greenly glowing, and undulating in the summer night.

  Clarence led me through a gate into a boggy fenced area through which a brick path wound. Tea-colored water pooled in the sunken areas, and the rank air was avid with mosquitoes. Clarence told me that an inverse sculpture garden had been constructed here, a series of allegorical sculptures that looked from the path like so many holes in the ground. However, “There were . . . problems,” said Clarence, with a sidelong glance. I encouraged him to elaborate, and he told me that a child had fallen into one of the sculptures, where he endured the company of a long-deceased rodent or small cat all night before he was found, feverish and raving. Certain things the child said in his delirium made the Headmistress narrow her eyes. She had herself lowered into the largest of the holes—Clarence seemed to derive some private amusement from recalling this event, for which a team of oxen had been employed—and discovered that the intricate details commissioned from the sculptor and attested to in his sketches were not there; she had been gulled. “What’s the difference?” the sculptor had the nerve to ask, when confronted. “Why pour my talents into a hole in the ground? The real artistry lay in shaping your opinion about the hole, and that I accomplished.”

  “Unfortunately, my opinion has changed,” said the Headmistress.

  The other sculptures were inspected and found similarly wanting, and the garden was subsequently abandoned, the holes allowed to fill with water and dead leaves. Only one of the artist’s sculptures, the Headmistress’s first commission from him, was found to be everything the sculptor had claimed. Clarence took me to see it; it was in another part of the garden. It showed the inverted Headmistress seated on a rearing, blindfolded horse, though showed is not the right word, as all one could see from above ground was a rectangular slab of marble, what would have been the base had this been a more typical statue. A little farther along was another rectangular slab. I nodded to it, said, “Another underground statue? I thought—”

  “No, it is just that you cannot see the hole in the air, since air and the absence of air are both transparent; you would have to fill the hole with something, a colored gas, smoke . . . Though it would probably leak right out . . .”

  I was witness to the construction of a few new additions to the collection. The Headmistress oversaw the preparations with barely contained eagerness, intervening often to correct details, most of which could make no difference to anyone but her, as far as I could see. For instance, she had all the concealed screws holding together a mahogany cabinet—if it can be called a cabinet that had, as far as I could make out, no doors—replaced with left-handed screws, which (these proving difficult to find) she had to commission from a metalsmith in Pittsfield. This accomplished, she had the apparently finished cabinet disassembled a second time so that its interior walls could be faced with mirrors, which I am sure no ray of light ever touched after the screws were tightened (widdershins). When the cabinet was reassembled, however, after a long intent look, she turned away in evident disappointment and even disgust, as a connoisseur might from a cheap knockoff. There was, it seems, some ineffable quality of the objects and entities resident in the land of the dead that could not be reproduced in the substances of our world. Why did she keep trying? Homesickness, perhaps.

  Letters to Dead Authors, #9

  Dear Mr. Stoker,

  My voice weakens. It seems to sink back into me, as if my body had every day more need of it, and for a program more urgent than the advertisement of my suffering. Soon I will be talking only to myself.

  Maybe that is one definition of death.

  I doubt it.

  Speaking, I cough; coughing, I bleed; speaking is bleeding, now. I stretch my spotted handkerchiefs on embroidery frames that I label with the date and time, for future study. I can look at them for hours. To me they are eloquent.

  You know, I have always been a sort of anticipatory corpse. I look back upon myself, as if from the point of view of another, later born, to whom I seem a figure out of history, oddly clad and not perfectly three-dimensional. Among other, realer people, I am an absence in a dress. So I have no doubt that I will survive my death. I have already done so.

  The cat came back—thought she were a goner but the cat came back—

  Just one thing bothers me. If I am no one, how can I return? If every word is a chord—if every voice is a chorus—if every self is a hole through which these ghostly voices pour—and if every ghost is an assembly of other ghosts themselves assemblies, all of them recruited in one another—then either there is no one there at all—ranks upon ranks of zeroes—or a bland Everyone without distinctions—or an impossibly ancient solitary Someone, the first being ever to speak and thus uniquely ghostless.

  The cat came back, yes, but who is she? A cave Cassandra, a pedestrian fish, an ambitious alga. A nobody, a manybody, like everybody else. A name. A shell. A Trojan horse with nothing inside it.

  But that nothing will open the gates.

  Let us think about real horses instead, how they are hairy and great, and do not say “I,” but are there all the same, shitting where they please. Horses cannot be parted from themselves, I think, and so they have no ghosts, I think. About cats I am less sure.

  If there is no self, who on earth is writing this letter? I had better end it.

  But I am forgetting what I wished to say: There has been another fatality. The stupid boy ran too far with a passing remark of mine (in an address on Concrete Speech) on the subject of blood. Did he hope to please me by subtracting his tuition from the coffers, and subjecting us to impudent attentions from the law? The chief of police made himself a nuisance with his doddering inquiries and hints about chickens coming home to roost. He claims to have known my father; I told him I was sure he had, and my grandfather and no doubt great-grandfather too! Then I pretended to allow my father to say, “Hello, Tom,” and the chief pulled so odd a face I would have laughed out loud had not the black crepe drawn over the mirror reminded me that the proprieties demanded a more somber countenance.

  You may be curious about the substance of my thoughts on blood. They are as follows. If every substance we emit is a form of speech, bleeding is of these the ne plus ultra—the last word—because it is so often literally the last word. In it, form and content consummate their bond, since death, source and destination of all speech, is also its eventual consequence. Furthermore, blood offers a particularly fine demonstration that all speech is haunted. Do not our fathers and our mothers consort in every clot of it? Smeared on a glass slide, it reveals to the inquisitive lens a family tree in miniature, each leaf a grinning corpuscle crying out, “Forget me not!”

  I have in my reticule such a slide, wh
ich I had the foresight to prepare before the law arrived to curtail my researches. After I had put it away, I sat on a piano stool beside the corpse and listened hard, for I hoped his wounds might “ope their ruby lips,” as the Bard has it, and tell me something of interest, rather than continuing that red filibuster that had probably ruined a carpet that, though secondhand and somewhat worn, was a bona fide Persian. I heard, perhaps, a hissing, very faint. One of his thigh wounds—he had stabbed himself in numerous places: thighs, calves, forearm, groin—seemed to purse around a word, but it kept silent, it was done with speaking. I had missed the recitation.

  Or had I? I put my face to it and, speaking, felt time slow and eddy around my mouth.

  Unfortunately, it was at this point that the chief entered the room, leading Detective Munch (rhymes with lunch). He let out an exclamation, and I was forced to straighten up, and see the wound’s fresh-wetted lips blow a bubble to mock my hopes as time enforced its tyranny again. The chief of police cleared his throat. I believe he thought that I was attempting to drink the boy’s blood like your own Dracula! Nor did he inform me once during our interview that I had a smear of blood on my chin. Was not that unmannerly?

  Your Friend,

  Headmistress Joines

  10. The Final Dispatch, contd.

  This is how it happened.

  All was in readiness for the inspector’s visit. Wholesome scenes of youthful industry were on repeat in every room. The most obliging spirits had been given their lines, the least obliging students sent to the playfield. So I was undismayed, when I repaired to my office to fortify myself with a glass of paregoric, to see that the door was open and that the ubiquitous Miss Exiguous stood just inside it holding, with a ridiculously sacerdotal air, a man’s hat.

  A white cat curled around the doorjamb as I approached and scooted away, and I heard a calm voice—yours—saying, “She will be here presently.” I entered my office; a man I did not recognize but who wore the ill-fitting suit of petty officialdom and thus had to be the Regional School Inspector came toward me with his hand outstretched in greeting.

  “I would like to tour the facilities, of course, and observe a class or two,” the Regional School Inspector was saying. “Then take a gander at your records. But first, a little chinwag, eh?—about some of the stories that have been going around. As I think you know—”

  I heard a sudden ruction and turned. Miss Exiguous seemed to be trying to hold the door closed against some impetuous force. “No, you bold creature, you may not come in!” she exclaimed. “The idea! Return to your scheduled coursework immediately.”

  There was a bang, a scuffle, a sharp cry from Miss Exiguous, and Finster’s head, braids swinging, poked momentarily through the door. “I have something to—I want to give information”—she gasped out, before a male hand, fastening on her ear, hauled her back over the threshold—“against the Headmistress!” could be heard at surprising volume, considering that it was receding down the hall, and muffled as by a hand.

  The Regional School Inspector met my eyes. With an apologetic smile that was little more than a wince, he said, “I think we shall have to hear her out, don’t you?”

  “Certainly not!” Miss Exiguous said, rubbing her shin, but then saw my face. Hastily, she threw open the door and called Mr. Mallow back. Finster was propelled before the School Inspector as forcefully as she had just been repelled from him.

  She slouched between Mr. Mallow and Miss Exiguous, head hanging. Now that she had her way, impudence had given way to girlish shyness, and shy is not a word one would generally apply to Finster. Nor is girlish.

  “And what is your complaint against Headmistress Joines, my dear?” the School Inspector said. Finster cut her eyes toward me. “Do not be afraid, you are under my protection. Speak clearly, and do not tell fibs, and no one will hurt you.”

  “Shh-shh-she bothers me,” she mumbled. “She watches me. I don’t know why she has to watch me all the time! And she gives me things.”

  “What things?”

  “Strange things. Nasty little dolls, made of dirty old sticks and things. Th-th-they”—she sucked in her lower lip in an exaggeratedly childish expression—“fwighten me.” I recognized this for playacting, but I took the blow anyway, and unfamiliar tears sprang into my eyes. A barely nascent tenderness was spoiling into an old familiar hurt. It was rabbits all over again.

  “Anything else, child?” said the School Inspector.

  But of course she did not love me, or even like me. I had taken her mother away. That her mother had mothered indifferently, at best, did not matter. It had not mattered to me.

  “And . . . And she touches me, during the exercises.” My head came up.

  “Oh! Only the way she touches all the children, to correct their carriage, and their embouchure, and so on!” Miss Exiguous said defensively.

  “But I don’t like when she touches me! I don’t want her to! I don’t, I don’t!” Cracking, Finster’s voice boomed, dropped an octave—to the register of a grown man—before resuming its childish accents.

  Then I knew my enemy.

  When I forget that I have seen it all before, I move through these events as liquidly as I did back then. As if anything could happen and not just the terrible thing that had to. As if the past were a great open space and not a solid mass as of pulped paper through which I follow my own inky footsteps, these, toward the inevitable moment when that small mouth opened and my father’s voice came out.

  His voice plunged into me as if my skin, my meat, my bones, the marrow of my bones, my blood and water were no impediment but an invitation. (You will recall that I said something similar of my mother’s face. The effect of course was quite different.) It was not my ears that knew him; his voice rushed past my ears on its way to deeper places, and I had already practically forgotten the sound of it by the time it was rubbing against my internal organs. My kidneys remembered it, however. My duodenum, my heart. My bladder remembered it and released a tiny jet of urine into my unmentionables. My large intestine remembered it, reversing hours of peaceful peristalsis in two seconds flat. Seemlier parts remembered it too, but no part remembered it joyfully.

  “That’s not the child speaking!” I cried, and looked around for corroboration.

  “Why”—said the School Inspector, and if I had not been so upset, I might have laughed to see his face—“who else could it be?”

  I folded my arms, pinning my trembling hands to my ribs. “On the whole I am not surprised. My father always lacked stick-to-it-iveness.”

  The School Inspector laughed nervously. “You are saying it is . . . your father’s ghost.”

  “Speaking through the girl,” I agreed, though my voice faltered, for already I sensed that I had made a mistake.

  He looked grave. “It is not very like a man’s voice.”

  “There are limits to what a child’s vocal cords . . .” put in faithful Miss Exiguous, but I shut her up with a look, for I was roused now and would not stoop to placate and explain.

  “Why is she saying these things?” piped my father, in a mockery of a child’s voice. “What does she mean?” Goaded, I raised my hand, and she shrank from me. “Don’t let her touch me!” Her voice crackled like a fire.

  “No one will let her hurt you, my dear,” said the School Inspector. “You are perfectly safe. Headmistress Joines, please collect yourself.”

  “As if there were something sinister in—in caring for a child!” It was the first time I had acknowledged it since rabbits, caring that is, for anything but my work, and something in my chest opened—probably a pulmonary vessel, but it felt like my heart. I saw, of course, that I was doing myself no good, but I could not stop blackening my name. “When it is really all the children I have not cared for that should be charged to my account! But no, you like cruelty, you like pain, it is tenderness you want to stamp out . . .” A fit of coughing interrupted me, and I yanked out my handkerchief and buried my face in it. N
o one spoke until I finished.

  Then in the silence, as I dabbed blood and sputum off my lip, my father piped up again. “And when I’m in bed, she—”

  I flew at Finster then, intent on clamping my hand over her mouth, unwilling—unable!—to hear another nasty, sly, insinuating word. Swinging, my fichu caught on the oil lamp. I swiped at the vessel, thinking to catch it from the air, but only dashing it more forcefully to the floor. Perhaps to another it might even have appeared that I meant to do it. The flames roared up at the child’s feet, her splattered skirt caught fire, she saw my hand coming down, and with a scream that was, at least, entirely her own, she threw herself down her own throat.

  I have said it many times, but it bears repeating, that in the land of the dead, it is what we say about the world that determines what world we see, and so it is not possible to tell a story about the past without living that past again, and not as a memory, but as current events. So when I say she screamed, what I mean is that she is screaming, and when I say that tears sprang into my eyes, I mean that I am crying, and when I say that I was going after her, I mean that I am going, I go, the aperture that is all that is left of her is still shimmering in the air and turning from it I am leaping down my own throat. Here I go, I fall, I fly, I swallow myself . . .

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  It is customary in telling stories from school, I understand, to include a few rib-tickling accounts of youthful antics. Antics have never been to my taste, but obedient to the genre, I will attempt to put one down.

  I was hiding in the bushes, having slipped away from a boisterous game of Enough of Your Lip, in which I had already received four headstones (I was never athletic). I was a city girl, and both open fields and enclosing woods made me uneasy, the first with the thought of watching something approach inexorably from far away, the second, of something creeping close unseen. But the snug green warrens under the bushes felt like a haven. Crouching in the duff, twigs scratching my shoulders, I felt my breath calm, my heart slow.