by Otto Penzler
There were some seconds, perhaps fifteen, of tense stillness. It seemed to me that the air of the room grew more and more oppressive with the sense of a straining, silent struggle, but that feeling might have been caused by the pain of Longridge’s grip. Then I felt rather than saw that the child was being drawn back to the cabinet. Longridge crouched forward in his intense effort, never stirred, never loosened his crushing grip.
Mrs. Grant burst out crying; Magnus cried in a high-pitched, squeaky whisper: “Keep still! Keep still! Don’t break the circle!” I heard the Admiral rap out an oath; then I saw that Mrs. Morrel was swaying on her chair.
The child seemed to be about two feet from Mrs. Longridge, bent forward as though her arms were round her neck and she was holding on to it.
Then Mrs. Morrel rose from her chair, swaying, clutching at the air with twisting arms; then she pitched forward on her face, half in the cabinet and half out of it.
As she came to the ground the child cried in quite another voice, a deeper, louder voice:
“I can’t get back!”
We were all on our feet at once.
Longridge cried: “Come along! Come along!” thrust me aside, and picked up the child.
Magnus sprang to the gas, but in his excitement, instead of turning it up, he turned it off, and we were in pitch darkness. The door opened; a sheet of light from the hall fell into the room, and in it I saw Longridge’s face, very white and glistening with sweat. He was carrying the child in his arms, wrapped in his wife’s sable cloak. I only caught a glimpse of them as he hurried out of the room. His wife followed him quickly, and slammed the door after her.
I made for the door. I ran into a chair; then I ran into Professor Walters. Just as my hand touched the wall I heard the house door bang.
The Admiral struck a match. I opened the door, ran down the hall, and opened the house door. A big, closed motor-car was gliding swiftly down the street.
I came quickly back to the room. The gas had been lighted, and everyone was talking at once, wildly. I hurried to Mrs. Morrel, who still lay where she had fallen, and raised her. To my amazement it was no more than if I were lifting a child of twelve. As I laid her on the sofa my sleeve-link caught in her dress. It tore a patch out of that strong new silk as if it had been tissue-paper. The bodice had fitted like a glove; it hung about her shrunken bust in great wrinkles. Her face was bloodless and shrunken; her black hair and eyebrows were a curious, dead, lustreless white; and, oddest of all, the iris, and even the black pupils of her eyes, had gone grey, as if the colour had been bleached out of them.
Mrs. Grant had a bottle of strong smelling-salts, the Admiral got some brandy from the servant, and we tried our best to revive her. Our efforts were useless. She was dead.
We sent for a doctor. He could do nothing. He talked about heart-failure, and seemed to have it firmly in his mind that Mrs. Morrel was an albino.
Eric Magnus and I were the last to leave, and we came away together.
As we turned up the street he said:
“It was a good thing that I noticed the draught when the door of the room was opened to let the child slip in.”
“I noticed a breath of cold air; in fact, I noticed several during the evening,” I said. “But if the door was opened, why didn’t the light from the hall lamp fall into the room? It was burning brightly.”
“Oh, it was turned down, and then up again,” he said confidently.
“It might have been,” said I; and for the next twenty yards he said nothing.
Then he broke out:
“It was a splendid fake—splendid! I never saw a better! What accomplices! It was first-rate acting—absolutely first-rate!”
“Yes; acting that turned the lady’s hands icy.And accomplices? An accomplice of Mrs. Morrel’s in a two-thousand-pound sable cloak! That is a bit hard to swallow,” I said.
“Hired, my dear fellow—hired,” he said confidently.
“It might be,” I said. “A hired cloak and a form of heart disease which turns a swarthy woman into an albino.”
“Oh, yes, that was odd; but I have no doubt that it sometimes acts like that.”
“Haven’t you?” I said.
We separated at the end of the street, and I was glad to be rid of him. I wanted to think it out quietly. I could not; my mind was in a whirl, and it would not clear.
The next day I set about trying to find out something about the Longridges. I was quite unsuccessful; I could not find a trace of them. They were unknown in spiritist circles by name; no medium of my acquaintance recognised either of them from my description. Also, I could find no one of the name of Longridge among our captains of industry. I was forced to the conclusion that, like so many other people, they had come to the séance under false names. So many people are ashamed of their interest in spiritism.
NIGHT-SIDE
Joyce Carol Oates
ARGUABLY THE GREATEST LIVING writer in the world to have not yet been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature (she has been regarded as a favorite by readers, critics, and bookies for about twenty-five years), Joyce Carol Oates (1938–) has enjoyed a career known for its excellence, popularity, and prolificacy. Born in Lockport, New York, in the northwestern part of the state, she began to write as a young child, attended Syracuse University on scholarship, and won a Mademoiselle magazine short story award at nineteen. Her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), has been followed by more than a hundred books, including fifty novels, thirty-six short story collections, three children’s books, five young adult novels, ten volumes of poetry, fourteen collections of essays and criticism, and eight volumes of plays; eleven of her novels of suspense were released under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly. An overwhelming number of her novels and short stories feature such subjects as violence, sexual abuse, murder, racial tensions, and class conflicts. Many of her fictional works have been based on real-life incidents, including violent crimes.
As prolific as her writing career has been, so, too, has been the extraordinary number of major literary prizes and honors awarded to her, including a National Book Award for them (1969), as well as five other nominations; three Pulitzer Prize nominations; two O. Henry Awards for short stories; and a Bram Stoker Award for the novel Zombie (1995). Her bestselling books have been We Were the Mulvaneys (1995; aired on television in 2002 with Beau Bridges and Blythe Danner), an Oprah Book Club selection; and Blonde (2000; made for television in 2001 with Poppy Montgomery), a novel based on the life of Marilyn Monroe. The 1996 film Foxfire (starring Cathy Moriarty, Hedy Burress, and Angelina Jolie) was an adaptation of Oates’s 1993 novel Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.
“Night-Side” was first published in the collection Night-Side (New York, Vanguard, 1977).
Night-Side
JOYCE CAROL OATES
6 February 1887. Quincy, Massachusetts.
Montague House.
Disturbing experience at Mrs. A—— ’s home yesterday evening. Few theatrics—comfortable though rather pathetically shabby surroundings—an only mildly sinister atmosphere (especially in contrast to the Walpurgis Night presented by that shameless charlatan in Portsmouth: the Dwarf Eustace who presumed to introduce me to Swedenborg himself, under the erroneous impression that I am a member of the Church of the New Jerusalem—I!). Nevertheless I came away disturbed, and my conversation with Dr. Moore afterward, at dinner, though dispassionate and even, at times, a bit flippant, did not settle my mind. Perry Moore is of course a hearty materialist, an Aristotelian-Spencerian with a love of good food and drink, and an appreciation of the more nonsensical vagaries of life; when in his company I tend to support that general view, as I do at the University as well—for there is a terrific pull in my nature toward the gregarious that I cannot resist. (That I do not wish to resist.) Once I am alone with my thoughts, however, I am accursed with doubts about my own position and nothing seems more precarious than my intellectual “convictions.”
The more hardened members of o
ur Society, like Perry Moore, are apt to put the issue bluntly: Is Mrs. A—— of Quincy a conscious or unconscious fraud? The conscious frauds are relatively easy to deal with; once discovered, they prefer to erase themselves from further consideration. The unconscious frauds are not, in a sense, “frauds” at all. It would certainly be difficult to prove criminal intention. Mrs. A——, for instance, does not accept money or gifts so far as we have been able to determine, and both Perry Moore and I noted her courteous but firm refusal of the Judge’s offer to send her and her husband (presumably ailing?) on holiday to England in the spring. She is a mild, self-effacing, rather stocky woman in her mid-fifties who wears her hair parted in the center, like several of my maiden aunts, and whose sole item of adornment was an old-fashioned cameo brooch; her black dress had the appearance of having been homemade, though it was attractive enough, and freshly ironed. According to the Society’s records she has been a practicing medium now for six years. Yet she lives, still, in an undistinguished section of Quincy, in a neighborhood of modest frame dwellings. The A—— s’ house is in fairly good condition, especially considering the damage routinely done by our winters, and the only room we saw, the parlor, is quite ordinary, with overstuffed chairs and the usual cushions and a monstrous horsehair sofa and, of course, the oaken table; the atmosphere would have been so conventional as to have seemed disappointing had not
Mrs. A—— made an attempt to brighten it, or perhaps to give it a glamourously occult air, by hanging certain watercolors about the room. (She claims that the watercolors were “done” by one of her contact spirits, a young Iroquois girl who died in the seventeen seventies of smallpox. They are touchingly garish—mandalas and triangles and stylized eyeballs and even a transparent Cosmic Man with Indian-black hair.)
At last night’s sitting there were only three persons in addition to Mrs. A——. Judge T—— of the New York State Supreme Court (now retired); Dr. Moore; and I, Jarvis Williams. Dr. Moore and I came out from Cambridge under the aegis of the Society for Psychical Research in order to make a preliminary study of the kind of mediumship Mrs. A—— affects. We did not bring a stenographer along this time though Mrs. A—— indicated her willingness to have the sitting transcribed; she struck me as being rather warmly cooperative, and even interested in our formal procedures, though Perry Moore remarked afterward at dinner that she had struck him as “noticeably reluctant.” She was, however, flustered at the start of the séance and for a while it seemed as if we and the Judge might have made the trip for nothing. (She kept waving her plump hands about like an embarrassed hostess, apologizing for the fact that the spirits were evidently in a “perverse uncommunicative mood tonight.”)
She did go into trance eventually, however. The four of us were seated about the heavy round table from approximately 6:50 p.m. to 9 p.m. For nearly forty-five minutes Mrs. A—— made abortive attempts to contact her Chief Communicator and then slipped abruptly into trance (dramatically, in fact: her eyes rolled back in her head in a manner that alarmed me at first), and a personality named Webley appeared. “Webley’s” voice appeared to be coming from several directions during the course of the sitting. At all times it was at least three yards from Mrs. A——; despite the semi-dark of the parlor I believe I could see the woman’s mouth and throat clearly enough, and I could not detect any obvious signs of ventriloquism. (Perry Moore, who is more experienced than I in psychical research, and rather more casual about the whole phenomenon, claims he has witnessed feats of ventriloquism that would make poor Mrs. A—— look quite shabby in comparison.) “Webley’s” voice was raw, singsong, peculiarly disturbing. At times it was shrill and at other times so faint as to be nearly inaudible. Something brattish about it. Exasperating. “Webley” took care to pronounce his final g’s in a self-conscious manner, quite unlike Mrs. A——. (Which could be, of course, a deliberate ploy.)
This Webley is one of Mrs. A—— ’s most frequent manifesting spirits, though he is not the most reliable. Her Chief Communicator is a Scots patriarch who lived “in the time of Merlin” and who is evidently very wise; unfortunately he did not choose to appear yesterday evening. Instead, Webley presided. He is supposed to have died some seventy-five years ago at the age of nineteen in a house just up the street from the A—— s’. He was either a butcher’s helper or an apprentice tailor. He died in a fire—or by a “slow dreadful crippling disease”—or beneath a horse’s hooves, in a freakish accident; during the course of the sitting he alluded self-pityingly to his death but seemed to have forgotten the exact details. At the very end of the evening he addressed me directly as Dr. Williams of Harvard University, saying that since I had influential friends in Boston I could help him with his career—it turned out he had written hundreds of songs and poems and parables but none had been published; would I please find a publisher for his work? Life had treated him so unfairly. His talent—his genius—had been lost to humanity. I had it within my power to help him, he claimed, was I not obliged to help him …? He then sang one of his songs, which sounded to me like an old ballad; many of the words were so shrill as to be unintelligible, but he sang it just the same, repeating the verses in a haphazard order:
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
—Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.
When thou from hence away art past,
—Every nighte and alle,
To Whinny-muir thou com’st at last:
And Christe receive thy saule.
From Brig o’ Dread when thou may’st pass,
—Every nighte and alle,
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane:
And Christe receive thy saule.
The elderly Judge T—— had come up from New York City in order, as he earnestly put it, to “speak directly to his deceased wife as he was never able to do while she was living”; but Webley treated the old gentleman in a high-handed, cavalier manner, as if the occasion were not at all serious. He kept saying, “Who is there tonight? Who is there? Let them introduce themselves again—I don’t like strangers! I tell you I don’t like strangers!” Though Mrs. A—— had informed us beforehand that we would witness no physical phenomena, there were, from time to time, glimmerings of light in the darkened room, hardly more than the tiny pulsations of light made by fireflies; and both Perry Moore and I felt the table vibrating beneath our fingers. At about the time when Webley gave way to the spirit of Judge T—— ’s wife, the temperature in the room seemed to drop suddenly and I remember being gripped by a sensation of panic—but it lasted only an instant and I was soon myself again. (Dr. Moore claimed not to have noticed any drop in temperature and Judge T—— was so rattled after the sitting that it would have been pointless to question him.)
The séance proper was similar to others I have attended. A spirit—or a voice—laid claim to being the late Mrs. T——; this spirit addressed the survivor in a peculiarly intense, urgent manner, so that it was rather embarrassing to be present. Judge T—— was soon weeping.His deeply creased face glistened with tears like a child’s.
“Why Darrie! Darrie! Don’t cry! Oh don’t cry!” the spirit said. “No one is dead, Darrie. There is no death. No death!… Can you hear me, Darrie? Why are you so frightened? So upset? No need, Darrie, no need! Grandfather and Lucy and I are together here—happy together. Darrie, look up! Be brave, my dear! My poor frightened dear! We never knew each other, did we? My poor dear! My love!… I saw you in a great transparent house, a great burning house; poor Darrie, they told me you were ill, you were weak with fever; all the rooms of the house were aflame and the staircase was burnt to cinders, but there were figures walking up and down, Darrie, great numbers of them, and you were among them, dear, stumbling in your fright—so clumsy! Look up, dear, and shade your eyes, and you will see me. Grandfather helped me—did you know? Did I call out his name at the end? My dear, my darling, it all happened so quickly—we never knew each other, did w
e? Don’t be hard on Annie! Don’t be cruel! Darrie? Why are you crying?” And gradually the spirit voice grew fainter; or perhaps something went wrong and the channels of communication were no longer clear. There were repetitions, garbled phrases, meaningless queries of “Dear? Dear?” that the Judge’s replies did not seem to placate. The spirit spoke of her gravesite, and of a trip to Italy taken many years before, and of a dead or unborn baby, and again of Annie—evidently Judge T——’s daughter; but the jumble of words did not always make sense and it was a great relief when Mrs. A—— suddenly woke from her trance.
Judge T—— rose from the table, greatly agitated. He wanted to call the spirit back; he had not asked her certain crucial questions; he had been overcome by emotion and had found it difficult to speak, to interrupt the spirit’s monologue. But Mrs. A—— (who looked shockingly tired) told him the spirit would not return again that night and they must not make any attempt to call it back.
“The other world obeys its own laws,” Mrs. A—— said in her small, rather reedy voice.
We left Mrs. A——’s home shortly after 9:00 p.m. I too was exhausted; I had not realized how absorbed I had been in the proceedings.
Judge T—— is also staying at Montague House, but he was too upset after the sitting to join us for dinner. He assured us, though, that the spirit was authentic—the voice had been his wife’s, he was certain of it, he would stake his life on it. She had never called him “Darrie” during her lifetime, wasn’t it odd that she called him “Darrie” now?—and was so concerned for him, so loving?—and concerned for their daughter as well? He was very moved. He had a great deal to think about. (Yes, he’d had a fever some weeks ago—a severe attack of bronchitis and a fever; in fact, he had not completely recovered.) What was extraordinary about the entire experience was the wisdom revealed: There is no death. There is no death.