Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  That pedestrian image banished all frisson of the uncanny until a few days later, when I received a cease-and-desist letter from a party representing herself as the Headmistress of the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children, and threatening legal action if I did not immediately cancel plans for an anthology of “pirated” documents produced by and about the early Vocational School, to all of which she claimed exclusive rights. Plans I had not yet confided to anyone. No—plans I had not yet made!

  I suspected a prank, though I was struck in passing by certain arcane phrases and archaic usages characteristic of early Vocational School writings, and, somehow, found that my breath quickened as I read on. But when my eyes, swiftly and still scornfully descending the page, came to rest on the signature at the bottom, I thrust back my chair (scoring four claw marks in the varnish—I would lament those later) and strode into the kitchen to stare into the sink with unseeing eyes, a mad conviction growing in me that not only did the Vocational School live on, but so did that exceptional, rather dreadful, and indubitably deceased woman whose acquaintance I had made through a pile of yellowing papers, dreams, and the whispers of drainpipes and dead leaves. That the letter writer’s claims were true. Oh, not her claims to copyright, those certainly had no legal merit, but her claims to be the fourth-generation reincarnation—in the special sense of a person channeling another’s ghost—of Sybil Joines.

  Of course, any halfway competent forger could reproduce the capsizing loops and botched cloverleafs of that unmistakeable signature. My conviction was not rational. Let us say that I was possessed by it.

  Below the signature was a URL; I typed it into my browser and found myself regarding a plausible academic website. Vintage photograph of the Vocational School on the masthead, stock images of alleged students with pencils poised, application instructions for would-be distance learners. You may ask why I did not turn up this website in my initial research, and indeed I asked myself the same question. Later I learned that it had only just been launched; I must have been one of its first visitors. Once again I had the uncanny feeling that the SJVS was created expressly for me, was summoned forth by my interest in it, towing its history behind it like a placenta.

  A couple of phone calls connected me to someone who, in a hoarse, imperious voice that crackled like an old Edison recording, identified herself as Sybil Joines. I addressed her with awed courtesy and agreed to everything she said. Placated, she eventually warmed to me. Not only did she consent to the publication of this anthology,1 but she gave me access to a great deal of immensely valuable material in the Vocational School’s own archives—much more material, in fact, than I can include here. (I hold out hope for an omnibus edition.)

  A note to scholars: Any historian of the Vocational School is faced with peculiar difficulties. Its scribes and archivists alike were in agreement that a self is a mere back-formation of a voice that itself belongs to no one, or to the dead. Thus authorship would be a vexed question even if all Vocational School documents were signed, as many were not. The current headmistress of the Vocational School, for instance, derives her authority from the demonstration that she is the mouthpiece for the previous headmistress, who was the mouthpiece for the previous headmistress, and so on. In a sense, she is who she is precisely because she is not who she is, and to insist too stringently on biographical “fact” is to miss the point.

  It is a fault of our age to consider all that is eccentric—and by eccentric I mean merely and precisely what lies farther than usual from a certain, conventionally defined, probably illusory center—as representing only one of two things: the symptom of a malady whose cure would restore the patient to a place in the center; or a new center, toward which all must hasten. What is true, we nearly all agree on; what we nearly all agree on must, we think, be true. But I would suggest that there are minority truths, never destined to hold sway over the imagination of the entire human race, and furthermore, ideas—less defensible, but to me, even more precious—that are neither true nor false but (I have sat here this age trying to compose a marrowsky better than fue or tralse, but hang it:) crepuscular. One might even say, fictional. Entertaining them, we feel what angels and werewolves must feel, that between human and inhuman there is an open door, and a threshold as wide as a world.

  Because I am a—faintly regretful—member of the majority, and know my way back to the center, despite my excursions to its fringes, I can speak to something that interests true eccentrics not at all: the utility of the crepuscular. For no one has ever got to a new majority truth, a new center, without passing through these twilight zones and thus eccentrizing themselves.

  But for every colonist there are countless expeditionists who will wander forever through deliciously ineffable sargassos, and when they write home, communicate both less and more than their correspondents would wish. For in the crespuscular every word is a marrowsky, if it is not one of those stranger compounds, those werewords, for which there is no name (word-ferns, word-worms, word-mists and -algae). What we know as meaning is not the principle cargo of such words. The Headmistress speaks this language like a native, for while the Vocational School may have appeared on county maps in the vicinity of Cheesehill, Massachusetts, its real address was in the crepuscular zone.

  Because the eccentric troubles the center like a lingering dream, there has been a great deal of nonsense written in recent years about the Headmistress of the SJVS. Some have gone so far as to doubt her existence (“And quite right, too,” I can hear her say). But she did exist, was as sane as any person of original views passionately held, and whatever fugitive pains urged her on, her central motivation was and always would be the hunger for understanding. Though it is necessary to stress that for her the deepest understanding would feel like incomprehension, and would be communicable only in the way that a disease is.

  So although there are mysteries to interest both philosophers and policemen in these pages, I do not propose to offer any solutions. My vision of a scholarly work with the popular appeal of a crime novel has exposed itself for the mercenary fantasy it was. The eccentric, muscled back into the white light of judgment, is just so much more center. Its value, however, is in the darkness that it radiates from the farthest reaches of the spectrum, discovering, in the black-and-white page, shades of imperial violet.

  Anyone who has visited the land of the dead, in fact or fancy (and there is not as great a difference between the two as you might suppose), will have guessed that this book can be entered at any point. For less experienced travelers, I have planned a route. Its reduplicate tracks, laid down over a single evening—one by the Headmistress, one by her stenographer—will convey the reader surely, if not safely, to the end. Interspersed between these two interwoven strands, according to a strictly repeating pattern, are additional readings of a more scientific, sociological, or metaphysical nature. Those who, lacking a scholar’s interest in minutiae, want to get to the end more quickly, may wish to skip over these parts, and who knows, may even be wise to do so. But true eccentrics may find in them something—a map, a manual—that they have long been seeking.

  1. The Final Dispatch

  Dictated by Headmistress Joines to Stenographer #6 (J. Grandison),

  November 17, 1919

  This remarkable document was dictated by Headmistress Joines from the land of the dead over the course of one long night, her last, through a transmitting device of her own invention. All expeditions to the netherworld were accompanied by a running commentary in this manner. Though often disjointed and equivocal, these dispatches not only provided invaluable data on unexplored regions of the necrocosmos, but were a mortal necessity for the necronaut, for whom the narrative thread was quite literally a lifeline.

  Because we live in time, when we visit the land of the dead, we must carry our own time with us, or experience literally nothing and never even know we were ever there. Time is speech-time, according to Vocational School doctrine: We talk ou
r way through the timeless land of the dead in a sort of bathysphere made of words, creating both ourselves and the landscape through which we move. In a very real sense the dispatch is the journey. This one was executed in haste, poor health, and emotional extremity, and in consequence, is more than usually disorienting. Only the hardiest and most experienced readers should risk it.

  Although it conveys the impression of a single unbroken monologue, we know from the testimony of Joines’s stenographer and successor, Jane Grandison, that it was interrupted by intervals of silence of varying duration. Since silence is just as important as speech in Vocational School thought, I have given some thought to how I might reproduce its intervalling effect for readers who might flip flippantly through blank pages or other crude transliterations.

  Eventually I decided to divide the dispatch into its longest continuous parts, interpolating other documents between them. It should be borne in mind, however, that they do make up a single unabridged transmission. Thus the ideal reader will read the entire book in one sitting, starting at about four in the afternoon, and will come to the end at about the same hour as the Headmistress came to hers. —Ed.

  Borne on racing white-streaked black. Swirling to the glassy brink of the cataracts, then plunging in din and tumult so constant as to seem a kind of stillness. Around me others fall, so many as to seem like no one. We thunder down. Then smash against the fundament of the world. One smth smithereen, I flash past scenes too fleeting to collect. But someone is speaking, and as I recognize the voice, ground forms under my feet. The others stream on, forsaking me.

  [Static.]

  Are you receiving?

  [Static, sound of breathing.]

  Someone rises from the deluge. A bony big woman tented in mourning crepe and bombazine bothered all over with jet beads and netting. The great curved shield of her bosom has more of whalebone than of flesh behind it. The glossy carapace brings beetles to mind. An important personage. She is gripping a lorgnette and glaring about as if looking for someone.

  A suspicion dawns on me that I am speaking of myself.

  The personage opens her, my mouth. I am saying something. It is this, that I am saying something, which is this, that I am saying something, which is [several words indistinct]—

  Stop.

  Compose yourself.

  Resume.

  Say that my name is Sssss . . . Sybil Adjudicate Joines; that I am yet something short of two score and ten years old, my precise age being uncertain due to frequent prosecutions of what is, in effect, a kind of time travel; that I have worn crepe from the age of eleven and do not now expect to p-p-p-p-put it aside.

  Please correct phonotactic violations.

  Say that I am the headmistress of a vocational school, that I teach children with what were once known as speech impediments to channel the dead. Having been one myself, once. A child, that is. With a stutter. Say that the dead speak through me. Or let them say so, it’s all one. Say that I dispatch this message from the land of the did dad dead, where I have spent many pleasant hours. (They aren’t hours, there are no hours here, but we would be here all day, if there were days here, if I tried to explain how the lack of time drags on regardless.) Say that I live at the school with my students, that they are like family to me, which might sound agreeable if one did not know that my mother was hanged and my father burned alive.

  Say that a child is missing.

  [Static, sound of breathing.]

  Are you receiving?

  The Stenographer’s Story

  J. Grandison, November 17, 1919

  The young Jane Grandison transcribed the Headmistress’s final dispatch from her usual post beside the great brass trumpet of the receiving device. She apparently composed the following autobiographical text during the aforementioned lulls in that dispatch, scrolling a new sheet of paper into her typewriter whenever the Headmistress fell silent, and replacing it with the old one when the Headmistress resumed. I imagine two growing piles of paper on the table beside her, first one, then the other mounting higher (this is not the place to venture an opinion on the vexed question of whether the piles ever got mixed up), though the reference to “night” in the second paragraph, which might be taken to suggest that she did not begin her own text until Joines’s was already well under way, introduces doubt as to the accuracy of this picture. Nonetheless I have reproduced this alternating movement here, as true to the spirit if not the reality of her method. So, like the Final Dispatch, the Stenographer’s Story may be found distributed through the volume.

  In addition to offering invaluable insight into the personalities of both the first and the second Sybil Joines (if I may commit the ontological solecism of differentiating them), the text gives a vivid picture of the first impression made by the Vocational School on a nervous instrument so finely tuned as to suggest a diagnosis of neurasthenia, though I am no expert. —Ed.

  The Headmistress’s tiny, tinny voice has fallen silent. The brass trumpet flower—Pythian oracle, hierophant—is unreverberant, its mechanism still. Only a faint hissing emanating from among the ivory hammers, copper coils, India-rubber bladders, and paper diaphragms tucked like organs inside its mahogany case attests that the channel is open, the miracle continues.

  So I have a minute, and maybe more, to figure out what to do. The night is long. There will be time for everything that is required. But to know my duty it will be necessary to know who I am. When did that begin to be a question? Maybe already that first day.

  I was eleven years old, could write my name backwards and upside down, but not pronounce it, and had seen several dead people already. The prospect of hearing them, too, did not particularly alarm me. So I had informed my aunt when, with exaggerated surprise, she brought me the letter from the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children: “We are pleased to offer you a place . . . Room and board . . . Reply soonest.” Since I saw that she had made up her mind to be rid of me, pride would have prompted me to say so in any case, but I spoke as I felt. Now, as the glossy, black, indignant-looking automobile we had retained in Springfield brought me ever closer to the school, my breath did come quicker, but it was with curiosity and excitement, not dread.

  I braced my hand against the ceiling as the car jolted over a rock. The road had deteriorated after Cheesehill and was now little more than two ruts running in parallel. My escort, a pinched, powder-white woman in weeds, rapped twice on the back of our driver’s seat with her cane.

  “You there! We shall be rattled to pieces!”

  Seal-brown fingers tightened on the wheel. “Got to beat that storm, ma’am, with the roads in this condition, or I won’t be making it home this side of tomorrow.” Indeed for some time the wind had carried the tang of rain, and a break in the trees showed the thunderheads heaping up over the ridge, though on us the sun still shone.

  “Storm? Storm? Are you frightened of a storm, at your age? If need be, the school can put you up for the night.”

  The driver made no reply but drove, if anything, faster.

  The dead people I had seen were my mother and Bitty. Of influenza. My father might have been dead too for all I knew, having skived off before Bitty was weaned. Truthfully, to hear them speak again would have been a very great shock. But I did not at all expect to. Their silence, when it came, had been complete.

  My reflection slid stilly over the hurtling trees, leaning over me in an admonishing way, like a censorious second self. I looked steadily through it, drinking in the strangeness of all I saw, wonderful to me, however unremarkable in itself: dark woods; muddy fields; a small, rank, weedy lake where, off the stove-in, upturned bottom of a red rowboat, a solitary heron was just tilting into flight. I half rose in sympathy with its effortful ascent.

  “Stop fidgeting, girl.”

  One might sink a hatpin in Miss Exiguous, I thought, coolly assessing the jet-tipped pair anchoring her black felt hat. Without returning my glance, she shifted un
easily on the seat and I perceived with dreary unsurprise that, like my aunt, she was one of those who feel toward colored folk the way some feel toward a spider or a snake: that even the mildest members of the species make uneasy company.

  Deliberately I returned my gaze to the window, though now that I was sitting back, I could see nothing of interest: only branches, sky, myself. I was a runty girl, small, dark, and odd looking, as I could have confirmed in the glass had I wished. A sufficiency of mirrors had already taught me not to hope. Not for a pretty face, at least, and the kind of luck that comes with it.

  Not that my face was hideous, but it had a plain, hard, assessing look incompatible with beauty. It expressed my nature truthfully enough. I was not a gay girl.

  Now I kept that face turned, with the pertinacity of a praying mantis, toward where I imagined the Vocational School to be. I had been shown a picture of a big black building, and a big black dress with a big white man-faced woman in it, and a line of children, some of them colored like me, with black bands around their sleeves. I had been told that “someone with your gifts, girl”—gifts!—would be admitted on scholarship, room and board included. It scarcely mattered. For inducements little greater than these I would have gone to Mongolia, or the moon.