The Invited

by Jennifer McMahon

  AUGUST 5, 2015

  She was dreaming about the fire. She was in the factory beside other women who had to shout to be heard over the deafening thrum of the looms, the machines making the walls and floor vibrate, turning the mill into a living thing.

  “Fire!” someone shrieked. “Run!”

  And then she smelled the smoke, turned and saw the flames, how they licked up the far wall like the tongue of a great demon, gobbling the dry wooden beams, the painted floor and ceiling. She ran to the front doors, her and a throng of women and girls in their plain dresses with work aprons over the top, hair pulled back. They pushed, they pounded and clawed and screamed, but the heavy wooden door did not budge.

  Trapped. They were trapped.

  She thought of the windows. Thought that if they were calm, if they could all get to the windows and break through them, they could escape. But the women, in full panic now, screaming, choking on the smoke, which had grown black and thick, kept pushing at the doors, at the women between themselves and the door. She was pinned there, pressed tight by the bodies around her. She could not move.

  Helen opened her eyes, took a gasping breath of cool air.

  She was not in the factory being crushed against the locked door while flames overtook the building.

  But where was she?

  Who was she?

  I am Helen, she told herself, taking a deep breath, trying to slow her racing heart. I’m married to Nate. We used to live in Connecticut, where we were both middle school teachers. Now we live in Vermont and are building our own house.

  She reached for Nate beside her, but he was not there.

  She rolled over, realized she was not in her bed but on the plywood subfloor of the unfinished house.

  Her head ached and felt foggy.

  It was the smoke. The smoke from the mill.

  But that was only a dream.

  There was a little pile of half a dozen bricks from the mill beside her, one side of each stained black. There was a flashlight beside them, turned off.

  She’d snuck back up to the house after Nate had gone to bed and brought the bricks into the house, hoping that they might trigger something, that they might pull someone back. But after sitting in the dark with the bricks for a while, she had realized her mistake. Hattie had come back not just because of the beam but because she had a connection to this place. What reason would one of the mill workers have to show herself to Helen? To come back to a little half-built house at the edge of a bog in Hartsboro, forty miles from where the mill once stood. She’d been debating going back down to the trailer but decided that she’d stay a little while in case Hattie decided to show up again. Maybe Hattie would give her a sign about what she was supposed to do next. She must’ve dozed off on the floor, waiting in vain.

  She sat up, pushed the button on her watch: 3:33 a.m.

  She was in the opening between the kitchen and the living room, under the hanging tree beam, facing into the kitchen. She studied the corner where she’d seen Hattie three weeks ago. She looked up at the beam, at the dark shape in the dim moonlight that filtered through the windows.

  There were voices behind her. Whispering. Talking so low, it sounded more like radio static than human voices, but she knew that was what they were. She could recognize the ebb and flow of conversation, of two people trying not to be heard.

  Was Nate here?

  She had an absurd thought then: that she would turn and he’d be there, talking with his white doe; that the deer was actually Hattie, just like Riley said. They’d be sitting together, and the deer would be whispering to him, speaking perfect English, singing him a little song maybe…Mares eat oats and does eat oats and little lambs eat ivy. Or maybe something else. Something strangely romantic—Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me—as she looked up at him with her big, glossy doe eyes.

  She heard a giggle, but it was all wrong—low and crackly, like it was coming through a far-off AM radio station. She didn’t want to see, didn’t want to know what was there.

  Slowly, she forced herself to turn her head and look, to see who, or what, was behind her.

  There, sitting in the living room in the place the new brick hearth would go, was Hattie. She was on a stool. Where does a ghost get a stool? Helen wondered. Hattie was wearing the same white dress she’d had on the last time Helen had seen her, but there was no rope around her neck. She was smiling, laughing. And at her feet, a young woman sat, having her hair braided by Hattie. The woman shared Hattie’s dark hair and eyes. Helen saw the young woman wore a plain blue dress, but it was tattered and burned, stained brown and yellow from smoke. And she carried the smell of smoke on her; Helen caught a whiff of it in the air.

  This must be Hattie’s daughter, Jane. The one no one knew what had happened to.

  But Helen knew.

  The pieces clicked into place. She didn’t know the details yet, but she was sure of one thing: Hattie’s daughter, Jane, had died in the fire at the mill.

  “Jane?” Helen said, and the woman looked up at her, opened her mouth to speak, to tell Helen something, something important, Helen knew, but no sound came out.

  The room flickered with light; the beam of a flashlight dancing through the window.

  “Helen?” Nate called, coming through the door, shining his light on her. “Helen, my god! What are you doing out here?”

  “I…” She glanced to the center of the living room. Hattie and Jane were gone.

  I don’t know what I’m doing here. Maybe I’m going crazy.

  “I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “So I came up here. Thinking about the kitchen. What kind of countertops do you think would work with a slate floor?”

  “Well, come back to bed, okay? It’s, like, three in the morning. I was worried sick when I woke up and couldn’t find you.”

  “Sure,” Helen said, “of course. I’m sorry, I’m just…excited, I guess.” She smiled what she hoped was a reassuring everything’s fine smile.

  As they walked out the front door, she looked back over her shoulder and thought she just caught the outline of a simple stool sitting in the darkness. She closed the door.

  CHAPTER 20

  Jane

  SEPTEMBER 3, 1943

  When Jane woke up, she didn’t know it was to be her last day on earth. She roused her children and husband, made coffee and oatmeal just like every other morning. Her husband, Silas, read the paper.

  “More news about the war, Daddy?” her son asked.

  “We sunk a Japanese submarine,” her husband said.

  “Boom!” shouted the boy.

  “No shouting or explosives allowed at the table, please,” Jane pleaded.

  Her daughter scowled into her oatmeal, whispered to her doll.

  Jane looked at the photographs of the people in the newspaper and thought she herself was not unlike them: a paper woman, one-dimensional. That’s what her family saw. But really, she was more like the chains of paper dolls her daughter would cut from leftover newspaper: folded together, she looked like one, but once you opened her up, you saw she contained multitudes.

  There were stories, she knew, about people who led double lives. Spies. People who had affairs.

  Everyone had secrets.

  Everyone told lies.

  She comforted herself with these facts. She told herself she was not alone.

  Her husband, he knew nothing about her. Not really. He called her a good girl. She had told him she was an orphan and he had taken pity on her, said, “How terrible to have no one in the world.” And she had cried. It wasn’t just for show. She had cried because she knew he was right.

  She missed Mama.

  She missed her with the dull ache of a phantom limb, like some basic part of her had been ripped away.

  And almost every night, in the darkest hours, she was back
in that old root cellar in Hartsboro.

  She would remember, with chilling detail, how she’d hid in the root cellar for what felt like days, though surely it was only hours. Time moved slowly in the dark, when you were alone with just your own grim thoughts and spiders to keep you company.

  Crouched down on the bare dirt of the root cellar floor, listening carefully for the scuttle of a rat, she went over everything that had led her there to that moment. The root cellar was the only thing left from her mother’s family home, which had burned to the ground, killing Jane’s grandmother years before Jane was even born.

  “Someone from town started that fire,” Mama told her once, when Jane had asked about the fire that had killed her grandmother, destroyed everything her mama knew and loved, leaving nothing behind but a cellar hole lined with rocks, some charred wood, lilac trees in the dooryard. And the old root cellar off behind the house. The fire didn’t damage that at all. Over the years when she was growing up, Jane would go there and just sit, look at the jars of canned goods her grandma had put up long ago. It was like going to a museum. The museum of What Came Before. Of the Breckenridge family house. Of glass jars full of applesauce and string beans labeled in her grandmother’s careful hand. She never stayed long and never closed the door, because there were spiders and rats living down there.

  “Why did they start the fire, Mama?” Jane had asked.

  “It was me they were trying to kill.”

  “But why?” she asked. “Why would they want to burn you up?”

  “Fear is a funny thing,” her mother said.

  “Why are they afraid of you?”

  “People fear anything different, anything they don’t understand.”

  Jane knew this to be true, even at a young age.

  Her mama had a gift, but not everyone saw it that way. It was funny, though—even the people who spoke ill of her, called her a witch and the devil’s bride, they’d come sneaking out to the bog, asking Mama for love charms, healing spells, asking her to tell them their future or looking for a message from a spirit who had passed. People were afraid of her mother, but they also depended on her, sought her out in times of need (though they would never admit this out loud).

  Jane herself had been ridiculed, called the devil’s daughter. She’d been held down in the schoolyard, stuck with pins to see if she would bleed. Jane had none of her mother’s powers. The spirits did not speak to her. She did not see signs of what was to come in tea leaves at the bottom of the cup. She longed for the voices, the signs, but they did not come. What she did have, what she held on to fiercely, was fury. Fury that she had not been born special like her mama. Fury at the way she and her mother were treated. Fury at what the people in town had done to her grandmother.

  All her life, she carried a box of matches in her pocket, waiting.

  Earlier that morning, when the children had circled her in the yard outside the school, Lucy Bishkoff had pulled up her dress and pulled down her underthings to see if she bore the mark of the devil on her skin. Jane felt something breaking inside. A dam letting go, her fury pouring through, overtaking her. And then, for the first time in her life, she heard a voice, loud and clear: not the voice of a spirit, but the voice of her own rage. Punish them, it said. Punish them all.

  When everyone was still outside, she went into the schoolhouse, snuck back to the supply cupboard, made a nest of crumpled paper, lit the edges with a match. Then she went back out and waited. Once everyone was inside, sitting down for lessons, she used the strongest branch she could find to bar the door.

  Crouching in the root cellar hours later, her heartbeat pounding in her ears, she smelled the smoke on her clothing. Heard the screams of the children. They screamed and screamed and screamed in her mind. But she told herself they deserved what they got. The whole town deserved to be punished.

  She waited in the dark root cellar, listening to the echoes of the screams, waiting. But Mama did not come for her.

  Eventually, she grew tired of waiting; her legs had turned to pins and needles and she was cold all over. She cracked open the door, stepped outside, the afternoon sun blinding. She staggered, squinting like a mole-girl, and moved toward home, willing herself to be slow and cautious. Where was Mama?

  When she got to the bog, she saw that what was left of their little house was smoldering. Gone. All gone. There was a crowd gathered at the opposite end of the bog, by the big white pine. She moved closer, stealthily, and saw what they were all looking at.

  * * *

  . . .

  At first, when she ran away from Hartsboro as a girl of twelve, she didn’t know who she was without Mama.

  She’d spent her whole life being Jane Breckenridge—daughter of Hattie, the witch of the bog, the most powerful woman in the county.

  Then she was a no one. A street urchin with no last name. Smith, she said when she had to make one up. I’m Jane Smith. I come from downstate. By the Massachusetts border. My parents, they died when I was a baby and I was raised by an aunt, then she died. Now I’ve got no one.

  People take pity on you when you are young and pretty and have a sad story to tell. People are drawn to sorrow.

  She was taken in by a kind Baptist family in Lewisburg—the Millers. They had a large farm outside of town. Jane learned to rise in the dark hours before dawn to milk the cows, gather eggs from the hens, collect wood for the old cookstove in the kitchen. She went to church and prayed, read the Bible each night. Learned to fit in. To be someone else.

  And now, now Jane was a married woman with children of her own. Her son, Mark, he was a good boy. At eleven, he looked more and more like his father every day. He took after him, too—did well in school, was strong and well-liked. But her girl child, Ann, Jane worried for her.

  And, if the truth be told, Jane was actually frightened of her.

  The girl knew things. Things no six-year-old should know. Things that she said her toys and dolls told her. She had a favorite doll that she was always whispering to. It was a doll Ann had made herself from rags and scraps from her mother’s sewing basket—she loved to sew, Jane’s girl. The doll was a funny-looking thing: a patchwork of colors with a pale face, an embroidered mouth like a red flower petal, and two black button eyes. Her hair was a tangle of black yarn braided together.

  “What’s your dolly’s name?” she’d asked Ann, not long after she’d made her.

  “She’s Hattie,” Ann said.

  Jane stepped back, clapped a hand over her mouth to keep from screaming. Ann giggled, thought Jane was laughing, too. “It’s a silly name, isn’t it?” she said, grinning. “It must mean she likes hats!”

  Jane had never told her about her grandmother. About her real name or where she’d come from. No one living knew the truth about Jane.

  “Hattie says hello,” her little girl told her. “She says she knows you.”

  Jane felt as if she’d been submerged in cold water—the water back at the center of the Breckenridge Bog. She felt it pulling on her, sucking her down.

  “Of course she knows me,” Jane said, forcing the words out through her too-tight throat. “She’s your doll. She lives here in our house.”

  “No,” she said. “She says she knows you from before.”

  Jane didn’t respond. How could she?

  Before.

  Before.

  Before.

  She tried to remember before, and what came back strongest was the smell of that damp root cellar she hid in, waiting for Mama to come. But she never did.

  And what she saw when she got to the bog and peered through the circle of people gathered there:

  Mama was hanging from a rope tied to a branch of that old pine, dangling, lifeless. She swung in small, slow circles like a strange pendulum.

  Jane had to cover her mouth with her hand to keep from screaming back then as well. She bit down, che
wed at her palm until she tasted blood.

  She sat there, crouched down in the bushes, and watched as the men cut her mother down, stuffed her dress full of rocks, and dragged her out into the middle of the bog, the deep place where the spring came up.

  “The spirits will protect us,” Mama had always promised.

  Now, years later as an adult with children of her own, Jane felt her chest grow cold and tight as she remembered her mother saying those words. And how earnestly she’d believed them.

  “Hattie says she loves you,” her daughter told her, clutching the terrifying doll in her arms. “Do you love her, too?”

  “Of course I do,” Jane said.

  When she went in to tuck her daughter in at night, she covered the doll’s face with a blanket; sometimes, if Ann was already asleep, Jane would take the doll out and hide it under the bed or in a dark corner of her closet.

  But somehow, each morning when Ann woke up, Hattie the doll was beside her once more, peering up at Jane with her shiny button eyes when she came in to draw back the curtains and say “Good morning.”

  “Hattie says you shouldn’t go to work today,” Ann announced this morning as she clutched at her gruesome little doll. Its button eyes seemed to watch Jane, to give a familiar little glint when she dared look in her direction.

  “Whyever not?” Jane asked, spooning more oatmeal into Ann’s bowl. Mark and his father had gone outside to feed the dog and chickens.

  “Something bad is going to happen,” Ann said, pushing the bowl away. “She says you’re going to make something bad happen.”

  “Me? All I’m going to do is run those old looms.”

  “Please, Mama,” she said, her brow furrowed like an old lady’s, not like a little girl’s.

  “Don’t be silly,” Jane told her. “Eat your breakfast and get ready for school. I’m going to work, just as I do every day.”