But I am wrong.
Oh, it is a world all right. Tiny and particular as any world of mine, but it is not mine. She does not even look up as she urges two of her creatures, a sort of animate sombrero and a—what is it? A pony, but with claws, and a forked tongue?—through a labyrinth, the blossoms on whose blooming hedges snap and whisper as they pass. Her mouth moves—“left, right, right, left”—and I know beyond proof that she is a righteous guide, not even tempted to slip up, to slip in the extra right turn that would take them down the dogleg where the biggest flower of all gnashes and waits.
She looks older than I remembered.
And now I wonder whether it is Finster at all. Do I see her as she sees herself, here where one may invent oneself and in any fashion one pleases, or in some other way? I will not describe her. I will do something quite different: I will say what she is. (What she is for me, I mean. What she is for herself is for her alone to know, is dark to me, finster, hidden in Finsterness.)
She is myself. She is myself, that is, before they damaged me. A self I cannot remember or understand. Real because I cannot understand her.
And now I will say what I am. (What I am for her. What I am for myself, I no longer know.)
I am the damage that threatens her.
And not just in what I have already done, by bringing her to my school in which children die, some, not many, but some, and for which I have killed or imagined killing, I don’t care which, but in seeking to seize her, to know her, to write her into my story. I drove her, not to her death, but to mine. As if to keep her there forever, a stuffed kitten in a pinafore, working sums at a pygmy blackboard.
But when I saw that she was describing something I had never seen before and could not imagine and that yet came into existence between her hands, wonderful in its smallness and detail, I no longer wished to possess her but to return her to the living as soon as possible, so that she might pursue her program of living in a world not made by me. Here it was, the thing I had been looking for, my living, blooming death, the not-me that, in the end, I was. And all I had to do to claim it was let it go.
I did not see any other doorway by which she might return to the living and so I swallowed her. And felt her inside me like my own death, intimate and strange. For a moment I seemed to become her, and was afraid that I would lose her in making her mine, but instead she made me hers, and I gloried in my strangeness to myself. Then through my mouth gave birth to her, weeping in joy and pity at what I did, like any other mother.
Are you there?
You delivered her, I’m sure, with your usual phlegm. Probably fielded her with one hand, kept the other poised over the keys. Not knowing that I could have nothing of greater importance to say.
Send her home in disgrace, it will set her up for life. Nothing like a grudge to inspirit the young. Let her mother comfort her; even hyenas nuzzle their young. We’re not comforters, my dear. Succor is not our métier.
[Pause.]
I think I will go home too.
[Pause.]
I do not open my mouth, I open the world in which my mouth is. It swings apart on jaw hinges, and through the gap in the world, the world begins to spill. I am the hole through which existence pours itself torrentially through itself, and this torrent is what I have called my life. Murders, frightened children, their no less frightened parents, dead rabbits, fires, they spill through me and dissipate like mist.
The unutterable takes the shape of a word. I seem to know it. I am about to say it. I will say it now.
The Stenographer’s Story, contd.
Reader, she was dead. It is hard to explain how it happened—how a voice rattling around a brass trumpet became a body quietly cooling in a chair. She was not there in the flesh, and then she was, but there was no soft pop of displaced air, no creak of wood and wicker adjusting to a sudden weight. She did not drop from the ceiling or open like an umbrella. Perhaps it is most accurate to say that it did not happen. I merely noticed that it had already happened, that by the time I noticed that she was dead, I had already known it for some time, had settled into the knowing like a watcher at a wake. She sat across from me with her hands, in fingerless net gloves, folded in her lap; as upright as if strapped to a backboard, with fixed and yellowish features and an open mouth, in which her drying tongue could be made out.
I am quite sure, however, that she was not here a few moments ago when Finster spilled out of a fold in space onto the carpet and, howling, went straight to bed. At least, that is where I sent her, and just in time, too, for hard on her heels came the next corpse—I mean the corpse.
Beside me, the trumpet blared the silence.
I had a question, when I began this document: Who am I? My curiosity was not idle, for the answer would determine my responsibility for the work done here tonight, and in the hours to come. And now the answer was clear. I was—I am the headmistress of the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children.
Already I could barely remember what it had been like to be anyone else, so I suppose it was fortunate that I had written it all down. If I was conscious of a slight feeling of letdown, I lost no time in shooing it away, for I would need all my fortitude and cunning for the enormous distances I had yet to cover, and that were only now truly apparent to me. It was as if I had scaled a great mountain, only to find that it was only a foothill of the far greater eminences beyond, which multiplied in blue hazy echelons as far as the eye could see. There was work to be done before I slept; I knew my duty and had even had an inkling, in writing these pages, of how to discharge it. I would not look back again, nor ever trouble to remember who I had once been, whom I had once taken myself for, a mean figure who now bore, I thought, hardly any resemblance to the figure I now cut, in which I already recognized some of the Headmistress’s pride of bearing, and as I rose and stepped forward to confront the body I even coughed once or twice.
I lifted her heavy arm to free her reticule, which was wedged between it and the arm of the chair, and groped inside the latter for her—for my keys. I slid them inside my waistband. I arranged everything as she would have wanted. Then I straightened my papers and rang for Clarence.
A curiosity: In moving her arm I discovered, scribbled in ink on the inside of the cuff of the left sleeve of the dress, like a schoolgirl’s crib-note, these words: “We do not exist, but we are responsible for our figments.”
Addendum
The following, undated, but of comparable vintage, was paper-clipped to the final page of Grandison’s report. —Ed.
I will not comment on the “confession” some have seen in these pages except to note that anyone who is moved to sweep off to gaol those implicated in them should bear in mind that they were dictated from the land of the dead by a woman in the terminal stage of a mortal disease and show many signs of confusion of mind. It has been sufficiently demonstrated, I believe (and our constabulary concurs), that the events described are not only scrambled in the telling but impossible. Even if we accept that a woman sick unto death could wield a coal hod with a force and efficacy that would be remarkable even in a healthy one, then cap this feat by hoisting a grown man’s body into a rather small receptacle, there remains the inconvenience that she had departed the land of the living well before the inspector’s arrival—and never returned. This well-attested fact has been disputed by careless readers who point out that the Headmistress herself states that she departed the land of the dead to carry out this murder. Indeed! If you believe everything you read, why then, pray make your bow, for I am the King of Ding-a-Ling.
To more judicious readers it should be evident that as she herself noted, a person cannot carry out the murder described while simultaneously dictating a running account of proceedings to her secretary through a transmitting device. Such readers will require no better proof that the so-called murder was a hallucination, likely induced by that same party whose baneful influence the Headmistress herself suspects. I am only sorry that the
Headmistress died believing herself the murderer that her father undoubtedly really was.
The overwrought suggestion that the fictitious murder served as a sort of “blueprint” for a real murder to be carried out by another in her stead does not deserve a response.
Finally, I will remind the speculative that the outraged corpse discovered on our grounds has still not been positively identified as that of the Regional School Inspector. It is not impossible that it is the body of some other person whose absence has not yet been noticed. If two disappearances seem one too many to account for a corpse, perhaps they are linked! I speculate only, but is it not possible that the Regional School Inspector, over whom so many tears have been, I will not say wasted, but shed, chose murderous means to stage his own disappearance, using a luckless drifter as a mannequin on whom to hang the semblance of his self?
I for one believe that the inspector is enjoying his anonymity and a glass of rye in one of our larger urban centers. One need not be a Peary—or a necronaut—to feel the call of another world.
Editor’s Afterword
My publisher would like to advertise the mystery solved, but I have prevailed, and lay it before the reader in all its convolutions.
The case as I see it is as follows. Either the Headmistress murdered the Regional School Inspector, in more or less the fashion she has described, or her secretary did.
The former’s motivation is sufficiently clear from her testimony, but there are ambiguities in her account that call its veracity into question, as she herself points out. The latter’s motivation can only be guessed at, but it is obvious that she hoped, if she did not already know, that she would inherit the school. Hence her interests would be on this point indistinguishable from the Headmistress’s. Furthermore, we know that she was in possession of a note betraying the inspector’s growing unease with his involvement in her deceased swain’s ectoplasm ring, and thus had even more reason than the Headmistress to believe the inspector a danger to the school. She was at least an accomplice to the crime. Whether she was in fact its principle hangs on the contentious chronology of the Final Dispatch, and the difficulty, even for its author, of telling fact from figment in it. Frankly, I see no way to settle all its ambiguities.
And then, perhaps I am too much a convert to the precepts of necrophysics to believe that a case is ever closed, the past ever past. No, one day another mouth will open and through another’s throat a father’s voice will ring out. Another mother will plead in vain for mercy. Another daughter will do what must be done.
Other characters, too, will take their encores. There will be another Clarence, silently orchestrating the daily life of an institution. There will be another Miss Exiguous, insinuating herself where she is not wanted, though her name and her features will be different. One day I might discover anachronistic inflections in my own speech. Maybe my prose has already betrayed, to an astute reader—or a computer program analyzing word usage frequency patterns—the presence of an interloper. If so, he—or she!—is surely a minor character. Mine not the alpinism of the soul! But to have a role, however small . . . I would not turn down that chance. Meaning is nothing but pattern recognition, I sometimes think, and this at least I do share with Headmistress Joines: the age-old dream of a meaningful, a legible universe.
I have recently received an invitation, on SJVS letterhead, and signed by a familiar hand. I have accepted it, for I am a twenty-first-century man (though my manners and appearance would not have excited remark fourscore and ten years ago) and do not really believe in ghosts. I will take care not to turn my back on the Headmistress, all the same, and keep a weather eye out for sharp or heavy objects in my vicinity, for am I not a sort of school inspector?
But I am optimistic. The SJVS teaches that history is already written, and returns in endless reprints. But that does not preclude revision.
Now and then, a Finster gets away.
Appendix A: Last Will and Testament
I, Sybil Joines, of Cheesehill, Masschusetts, being feeble in body but sound in mind, and conscious that the former soon must perish, though the latter speak on in another, and lest local authorities, sound in body but feeble in mind, should choose not to recognize the legitimate authority of my person (or, as I prefer, my voice) when alienated from my body, do hereby give and dispose of my worldly estate, goods, chattels, as well as all posts and privileges at my disposal, in the following manner and form:
In primis, I hereby nominate, constitute, invest with full powers of attorney, and appoint as my successor that person, to be known by certain demonstrations, specified in a signed and sealed document that will be found in my effects, in whom I speak again, this person also to serve as the executor or executrix of my will, and, effective the moment of my decease, to be considered in all matters as my proxy, with all rights and duties pertaining thereunto, and indeed as myself, being possessed of all my qualities without alteration or diminution, a station that I charge my confederates on pain of dismissal to recognize, endorse, and defend against contestation, irrespective of any perceived deficiencies of education, bearing, personal magnetism, manners, class, or any other quality supposed prejudicial to fulfillment of the duties of Headmistress, these duties to be held for his or her natural life; this person also to legally assume the name of Sybil Joines, as soon as practicable, along with all my possessions with the exception of my brooch, my bombazine dress, and other garments in which (after laundering) I desire my body to be decently enveloped prior to its dispatch as follows;
In secundis, I give and recommend my mortal remains to the U.S. Mail, desiring that they be introduced under the oversight of my executor or executrix hereafter mentioned into an oversized envelope with the stamped legend RETURN TO SENDER and delivered without undue delay or mutilation to the Post Office, in the assurance that that venerable institution will convey it faithfully to its intended destination in the Dead Letter Department.
Under no circumstances are my remains to undergo cremation. Fire will play no part in my future. Nor loam. Paper will be my crypt, the only worms that sieve my corse, bookworms.
In testimony whereof, to this my last will and testament, I have set my hand and seal this Ninteenth day of July, Anno Domini, One Thousand Nine Hundred and Seventeen (1917).
SYBIL ADJUDICATE JOINES
Signed and declared by the above named Sybil Joines as and for her last will and testament in the presence of us present at the same time who at her request in her presence and in the presence of each other have hereunto subscribed our names as witnesses.
Ms. Winnifred Other
Ms. Dorothea Exiguous
Jane Grandison the executor, sworn November 18, 1919, and letters Testamentary granted unto her. The said Testator died on November 17, 1919, at or near 4 a.m.
Appendix B: Instructions for Saying a Sentence
This exercise is taken from the “kit” of a traveling admissions officer of the Vocational School and was used to assess the latent talents of prospective students. Assiduously following its instructions will allegedly give any reader the experience of channeling the dead. I hesitated to include it in this collection, as it makes but poor reading, but of course it was meant to be not simply read, but executed. Its true meaning thus lies not in the words here reproduced, but in those other words that, following instructions, you will utter, or the dead will utter through you.
Frankly, I have never been able to figure out what sentence it is I am supposed to say. A superstitious fear has always prevented me from finishing it. —Ed.
Tense your vocal cords and, beginning the controlled emission of breath, produce a tone from your throat. Sustain this tone, so long as your breath holds, throughout the following operations.
Now purse the lips, leaving only a minute aperture, as if you were going to whistle. Meanwhile, press your breath forward into your hollowed mouth (in which your tongue should be held low, tense, and delicately pointed), allowing only the slightest seepage of
breath from between the lips. (If prolonged the effect would be of a moan or grunt, but the next step follows quickly.) Considerable pressure should build in the throat before the release as, from their forward and gathered position, you pull the lips quickly, wincingly apart and back, curling and raising the upper lip as you draw down and square the lower, allowing the hitherto muffled note to leap forth. Not unaltered, however, for in the meanwhile, the tip of the tongue advances, approaching (but not touching) the palate in back of the lower teeth, while the dome of the tongue presses upward toward the roof of the mouth, tightening on the breath that passes over it.
Already, however, the vowel sound is changing, for your lips and tongue are softening as you open your mouth and let an open vowel roll forth. Now, however, you should all at once chew down on it, humping the back of your tongue to touch the flanking molars, tensing the tip, and jutting out your jaw, while tightening and slightly flaring the lips—raising the upper one as if to growl, drawing in the lower at both corners.
Now raise the pitch of your sustained tone. The tongue slides forward slightly, now nearly touching the roof of the mouth. Quickly lower the tip of the tongue, as if peeling it off some clinging surface, while bringing the lips together, corners drawn back, into the shape one might form to play the flute. Now soften and part the lips, but bring your upper and lower teeth together. Advance the tip of the tongue to the lower teeth and press it softly against them as you raise the tongue until it just touches the roof of your mouth, leaving only a wet and narrow passage over your tongue. Buzz briefly, softly.
Lower the pitch of the tone again, as you allow your mouth to fall partway open, though not as far as earlier. Then pull your tongue quickly back, wedge the tip behind the lower teeth, while the back of the tongue rises and presses against the palate and, securely wedged against the upper back teeth on both sides, seals off the mouth passage entirely for an instant, engaging the nasal cavities. This seal is immediately broken with a minute click followed by an unvocalized release of air.
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