“You sent for me?” I said to her.
She did not turn. She was beyond the reach of my voice, of any voice, I imagine; but one of the palsied old women answered my question.
“He was like this when we found him this morning,” she said. “He had a bad night, and Judith and the two hands were up with him until daybreak. Then he seemed to fall asleep, and Judith sent the hands, turn about, to get their breakfast.”
While she spoke my eyes were on the bottle I had left there. Two nights ago it had been full, and now it stood empty, without a cork, on the mantelpiece. They had not even thrown it away. It was typical of the pervading inertia of the place that the bottle should still be standing there awaiting my visit.
For an instant the shock held me speechless; when at last I found my voice it was to ask mechanically.
“When did it happen?”
The old woman who had spoken took up the story. “Nobody knows. We have not touched him. No one but Judith has gone near him.” Her words trailed off into unintelligible muttering. If she had ever had her wits about her, I dare-say fifty years at Jordan’s End had unsettled them completely.
I turned to the woman at the window. Against the gray sky and the black intersecting branches of the cedar, her head, with its austere perfection, was surrounded by that visionary air of legend. So Antigone might have looked on the day of her sacrifice, I reflected. I had never seen a creature who appeared so withdrawn, so detached, from all human associations. It was as if some spiritual isolation divided her from her kind.
“I can do nothing,” I said.
For the first time she looked at me, and her eyes were unfathomable. “No, you can do nothing,” she answered. “He is safely dead.”
The negress was still crooning on; the other old women were fussing helplessly. It was impossible in their presence, I felt, to put in words the thing I had to say.
“Will you come downstairs with me?” I asked. “Outside of this house?”
Turning quietly, she spoke to the boy. “Run out and play, dear. He would have wished it.” Then, without a glance toward the bed, or the old women gathered about it, she followed me over the threshold, down the stairs, and out on the deserted lawn. The ashen day could not touch her, I saw then. She was either so remote from it, or so completely a part of it, that she was impervious to its sadness. Her white face did not become more pallid as the light struck it; her tragic eyes did not grow deeper; her frail figure under the thin shawl did not shiver in the raw air. She felt nothing, I realized suddenly.
Wrapped in that silence as in a cloak, she walked across the windrifts of leaves to where my mare was waiting. Her step was so slow, so unhurried, that I remember thinking she moved like one who had all eternity before her. Oh, one has strange impressions, you know, at such moments!
In the middle of the lawn, where the trees had been stripped bare in the night, and the leaves were piled in long mounds like double graves, she stopped and looked in my face. The air was so still that the whole place might have been in a trance or asleep. Not a branch moved, not a leaf rustled on the ground, not a sparrow twittered in the ivy; and even the few sheep stood motionless, as if they were under a spell. Farther away, beyond the sea of broomsedge, where no wind stirred, I saw the flat desolation of the landscape. Nothing moved on the earth, but high above, under the leaden clouds, a buzzard was sailing.
I moistened my lips before I spoke. “God knows I want to help you!” At the back of my brain a hideous question was drumming. How had it happened? Could she have killed him? Had that delicate creature nerved her will to the unspeakable act? It was incredible. It was inconceivable. And yet …
“The worst is over,” she answered quietly, with that tearless agony which is so much more terrible than any outburst of grief. “Whatever happens, I can never go through the worst again. Once in the beginning he wanted to die. His great fear was that he might live too long, until it was too late to save himself. I made him wait then. I held him back by a promise.”
So she had killed him, I thought. Then she went on steadily, after a minute, and I doubted again.
“Thank God, it was easier for him than he feared it would be,” she murmured.
No, it was not conceivable. He must have bribed one of the negroes. But who had stood by and watched without intercepting? Who had been in the room? Well, either way! “I will do all I can to help you,” I said.
Her gaze did not waver. “There is so little that any one can do now,” she responded, as if she had not understood what I meant. Suddenly, without the warning of a sob, a cry of despair went out of her, as if it were torn from her breast. “He was my life,” she cried, “and I must go on!”
So full of agony was the sound that it seemed to pass like a gust of wind over the broomsedge. I waited until the emptiness had opened and closed over it. Then I asked as quietly as I could: “What will you do now?”
She collected herself with a shudder of pain. “As long as the old people live, I am tied here. I must bear it out to the end. When they die, I shall go away and find work. I am sending my boy to school. Doctor Carstairs will look after him, and he will help me when the time comes. While my boy needs me, there is no release.” While I listened to her, I knew that the question on my lips would never be uttered. I should always remain ignorant of the truth. The thing I feared most, standing there alone with her, was that some accident might solve the mystery before I could escape. My eyes left her face and wandered over the dead leaves at our feet. No, I had nothing to ask her.
“Shall I come again?” That was all.
She shook her head. “Not unless I send for you. If I need you, I will send for you,” she answered; but in my heart I knew that she would never send for me.
I held out my hand, but she did not take it; and I felt that she meant me to understand, by her refusal, that she was beyond all consolation and all companionship. She was nearer to the bleak sky and the deserted fields than she was to her kind.
As she turned away, the shawl slipped from her shoulders to the dead leaves over which she was walking; but she did not stoop to recover it, nor did I make a movement to follow her. Long after she had entered the house I stood there, gazing down on the garment that she had dropped. Then climbing into my buggy, I drove slowly across the field and into the woods.
I. An area located near Roanoke, Virginia.
II. A slang expression meaning to become less assertive or visible.
III. A caul is a thin piece of the amniotic tissue that forms over a baby’s head. It is rare, and was once considered a good omen for the child.
IV. A basket made from thin strips of white oak.
V. A psychiatrist.
VI. A heavy cotton fabric with a floral print.
VII. The Western State Hospital (later the Staunton Correctional Center) at Staunton operated from 1828 to 2003.
Acknowledgments
From Les: This book arose out of my fascination with nineteenth-century women writers and was particularly inspired by a display put together by Rebecca Baumann, Head of Public Services at the Lilly Library, for an exhibition on Frankenstein. I pitched it to my longtime pal Lisa Morton, who jumped on board immediately and then did the hard work of tracking down some really obscure titles. Claiborne Hancock and the rest of the Pegasus team—Maria Fernandez and Sabrina Plomitallo-Gonzalez in particular—lavished the book with care and attention. Many thanks to my agent Don Maass, who is always ready to implement my strangest ideas. I’m always grateful to my writer-friends, especially Laurie R. King, Neil Gaiman, Nicholas Meyer, Bonnie MacBird, and Cornelia Funke, who are constantly encouraging. My family is ever supportive of my research and writing. Finally, without my wife Sharon, none of my writing would ever exist. She has always been, and remains, “the woman.”
From Lisa: My thanks must go first and foremost to my incredible friend Les, for inviting me to this party. I’ll echo him on thanking Claiborne, Maria, Sabrina, and everyone at Pegasus, and Don Maass. I’d like
to also recognize the Eaton Collection of Science Fiction & Fantasy at the University of Riverside, the HathiTrust Digital Library, Archive.org, and the Iliad Bookshop in North Hollywood. And finally, because there’s frequently a weird man behind a weird woman, special thanks to Ricky Grove.
About the Authors
LISA MORTON is a screenwriter, editor, anthologist, and the author of the acclaimed Ghosts: A Haunted History. She is a six-time winner of the Bram Stoker Award, a recipient of the Black Quill Award, and winner of the 2012 Grand Prize from the Halloween Book Festival. A lifelong Californian, she lives in North Hills, California, and can be found online at www.lisamorton.com.
LESLIE S. KLINGER is the New York Times bestselling editor of The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft, The New Annotated Dracula, and The New Annotated Frankenstein. He also edited the anthologies In the Shadow of Edgar Allan Poe, Ghost Stories (with Lisa Morton), and the Horror Writers Association “Haunted Library of Horror Classics” series (with Eric J. Guignard). His latest books are New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft: Beyond Arkham and Annotated American Gods (with Neil Gaiman). Nominated for two Bram Stoker Awards and the World Fantasy Award for his horror-related nonfiction, Klinger serves as Treasurer of the Horror Writers Association.
Endnotes
2. The Moonstone Mass (1868): by Harriet Prescott Spofford
I. Money or wealth, usually applied to that acquired via theft or fraud.
II. Nineteenth-century explorers and merchants sought the Northwest Passage, a sea route from the Atlantic to Pacific Ocean navigating through the ice to the north of Canada. It wasn’t achieved until nearly forty years after this story was written.
III. Whale-oil, that is—made from blubber.
IV. Igneous rock formed deep beneath the earth’s surface.
V. The idea of a warmer climate at the North Pole held sway for many years prior to its exploration. This myth is mentioned in the opening letters of the Arctic explorer Robert Walton in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.
VI. Shivering, as in an ague or fever.
VII. A spike-shaped or needle-like structure.
VIII. Amazement or astonishment.
IX. Variant spelling of “lodestone,” a piece of naturally magnetic rock.
X. Transmigrations of the soul.
XI. A subarctic woodland shrub, Linnaea borealis, until 2013 the only known member of the genus Linnaea.
XII. A race of giants, mentioned in Genesis.
XIII. An Alpine mountain pass.
XIV. Sharp peaks.
XV. A Persian king, builder of the city of Istakhar.
XVI. It is said that after Galileo was forced to recant his embrace of the teachings of Copernicus, he muttered this phrase: “And still it moves …”
3. Lost in a Pyramid, or the Mummy’s Curse (1869): by Louisa May Alcott
I. This refers to the Great Pyramid, sometimes known as the Pyramid of Cheops or the Pyramid of Khufu. King Khufu (whose Greek name was Cheops) built the Great Pyramid to stand over his tomb; it was completed in 2560 B.C., and is one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. When this story was written, European exploration of the Great Pyramid had been going on for over two centuries. Khufu also appears in Jane C. Loudon’s 1827 novel The Mummy! A Tale of the 22nd Century.
II. Alcott is taking fanciful liberties with her description of the pyramid’s interior, which by 1869 had become such a tourist destination that the entrance was covered with graffiti left by hundreds of earlier European visitors. By the beginning of the eighteenth century, the pyramid’s interior had already been thoroughly plundered.
III. Jumal is an Arabic boys’ name meaning “handsome”
IV. Alcott is probably describing here a “mummy-pit,” which were mass burials that are found in early travelers’ accounts of Egypt. They seem to have disappeared by the early 20th century due to European collectors seeking mummies as souvenirs and relics.
V. In the 1830s, as “Egyptomania” swept through England, a surgeon named Thomas Pettigrew gave public performances of unwrapping mummies (he personally conducted around 40). Pettigrew claimed that seeds found during the unwrappings (“mummy wheat” or “mummy peas”) could be planted and would grow, although many suspected fraud on the part of Pettigrew.
VI. There were actual attempts made to grow “mummy wheat,” but the seeds never germinated and in fact dissolved several months after being placed in soil.
VII. This is a reference to Thomas Moore’s 1817 poem “The Light of the Harem,” which is a description of a garden with a “harem of night-flowers.”
VIII. The phrase “blooming Eve” likely originated in Horatio Walpole’s 1791 play The Mysterious Mother, in which it’s used to describe a young woman at the peak of health and beauty.
IX. “Mechante” is a French word referring to a bad character trait.
X. There is a longstanding Scientific Club at Oxford University, but Alcott is probably not referring to that specific organization here.
XI. Apoplexy is the word formerly used for strokes.
5. An Itinerant House (1878): by Emma Frances Dawson
I. From the 1859 poem “The Wanderer” by Owen Meredith.
II. This may be a reference to the novel Jacob Faithful by Captain F. Marryatt, in which a character named Stapleton laments his wife’s continuous cheating.
III. The Niantic was a whaling vessel that ran aground in San Francisco in 1849 and served as a hotel until it was demolished in 1872.
IV. Dropping hot wax or scalding water on skin was a common way in the 19th century of testing for the presence of life.
V. Galvanism, or applying electricity to test muscular response, was first used in 1805.
VI. Magnetic sleep is a 19th-century term for the hypnotic trance.
VII. This is the final line from the poem “Liz” by Robert Williams Buchanan.
VIII. Rancho Saucelito, where the popular city of Sausalito is now located, although located just two miles from San Francisco, was mainly accessible only by boat at the time this story was written, so it was still wild enough to hold bear and elk.
IX. San Francisco saw two major uprisings of vigilantes, the last in 1856. The vigilantes hanged, kidnapped, and banished corrupt politicians, criminals, and immigrants.
X. Proverbs 17:13 reads in full, “Whoso rewardeth evil for good, evil shall not depart from his house.”
XI. A real street that runs through the heart of San Francisco between Nob Hill and the Tenderloin.
XII. “Witches Dance” is found in the first movement of Paganini’s Violin Concerto No. 5 in A Minor (1830).
XIII. This may refer to “The Devil’s Dream,” a popular 19th-century jig and favorite of fiddlers.
XIV. “The Long, Long Weary Day” is a Civil War song from 1861.
XV. “The Bells” was a hit play from 1871.
XVI. This may be a reference to the sweet-smelling Jasminum grandiflorum
XVII. There’s no obvious reference for this; it may be an alternate title.
XVIII. The Gobelin tapestry factory is located in Paris, and has been in continuous operation since 1602.
XIX. Heinrich Heine (1797–1856) was a German poet and writer who also produced several profitable travel memoirs.
XX. Kent uses this line to threaten Oswald in Act 2, Scene 2 of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
XXI. A quote from Edgar Allan Poe’s story “Manuscript Found in a Bottle.”
XXII. From Owen Meredith’s “Tannhauser; or, the Battle of the Bards.”
XXIII. A few sources actually credit this quote to St. John the Divine, but the attribution is uncertain.
XXIV. The “German psychologist” is Franz Mesmer (1734–1815), who created the theory of “animal magnetism,” which held that miraculous healings could be effected by aligning a body’s magnetic energy.
XXV. This is probably a reference to the architectural practice of moving entire houses rather than tearing them down and rebuilding.
XXVI. “Poor Jo” is the crossin
g sweeper in Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). The character was so popular that when the novel was first dramatized, the title of the play was “Bleak House, or Poor Jo.”
XXVII. In Greek mythology, Io was a mortal lover of Zeus who was turned into a heifer.
XXVIII. As a noun, a gad is a chisel or long stick; as a verb, it means to roam about aimlessly.
XXIX. This phrase is most commonly associated with Dickens’ 1861 Great Expectations.
XXX. The Wilkes Expedition (1838–1842) was an exploratory mission to map the Pacific Ocean and surrounding areas. Nathaniel Hawthorne had lobbied to be included as official historian of the expedition, but in the end the commanding officer Charles Wilkes took on that job himself.
XXXI. Dr. Johann Karl Passavant was a German physician and writer who was frequently quoted in spiritualist writings.
XXXII. From Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s 1893 play The Spanish Student.
XXXIII. Reisebilder translates to “travel pictures,” and is the title of Heine’s series of travel books.
XXXIV. Stephen Heller (1815–1888) was an accomplished pianist and composer.
XXXV. The King’s Rival; or, The Court and the Stage is a five-act play by Tom Taylor and Charles Reade, published in 1850 and set in the court of Charles II; Frances Stewart, a real-life beauty who refused to become Charles’s mistress, is a main character.
XXXVI. Mercutio speaks this line in Shakespeare’s 1595 Romeo and Juliet.
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