Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  “The consumption of the final morsel happened very quickly, and the word disappeared. As it did so it emitted a sound that is hard to describe. It might have been a very high-pitched or very fast declaration. It seemed to contain many sounds, though it was over in no more than an instant.

  “If I could hear that sound again, it seems to me I would understand everything that is now obscure to me. But perhaps I should not strain, through an act of violence, to translate dead matter into sense. When I myself am dead matter, I will speak the language of things. Then at last I will understand what it is that the world has been trying to tell me, all my life.”

  Letters to Dead Authors, #6

  Dear Mr. E. A. Poe,

  The Cheesehill Gazette has published a defamatory letter from A Pupil at a Local Educational Establishment, alleging rats in my kitchen and bats in my belfry. Though I shall hunt down the author and punish her, I am rendered nostalgic. How it brings back my own precocious assays at fraud and calumny. What is that hissing?

  It is just the snow scouring the windowpanes. The appearance is of a blackboard striving to erase itself. Incidentally I went out this morning without a muffler to lead the second form in oral calisthenics and must have caught a cold in my throat. I cannot seem to get warm—

  Coughing fit. It went on and on and with such force that my vision spangled. I fumbled in my reticule and dragged out a handkerchief (and the drawing compass that was snagged in it, which I had to disengage by feel). I seemed to hear words in the strangled noises I was forcing into its folds: “Sorry, sorry.”

  I cannot think of any apologies I owe. It must have been a ghost.

  Afterward I folded the damp cloth between my hands and squeezed my hands between my knees. I felt limp. The hissing seemed to have moved inside my head. I opened my mouth, in case someone had something to say. “Look down,” said Cornelius, his tone malicious. I looked down, parting my hands. The handkerchief fell softly open like an old worn book.

  Beauty!

  The red.

  And the red. The blood that soaked my handkerchief had doubled at the fold: two wings, a scarlet tanager spread on snow.

  I felt an obscure satisfaction, as if I had hit upon a solution to a long-standing problem. The stain seemed meant: a message, in the body’s own ink. What it told me I will not say, though perhaps you can guess.

  So cold. Clarence has just brought me more coal and plied a poker in the stove. Unfortunately a cold draft swept in behind him and so any benefit is undone.

  Apropos of nothing, I cannot find my rabbit’s foot. Where it normally rests, on the desk before me, my handkerchief is slowly stiffening. I cannot stop looking at it. There is a taste in my mouth that binds me to it. If I dipped my pen in my mouth . . .

  But I have written all I care to, tonight.

  Respectfully,

  Headmistress, the Vocational School, etc.

  P.S. Please excuse the blots. It is only blood. You know about blood.

  7. The Final Dispatch, contd.

  I had never seen a person looking the way she looked when she came home. She was dead, of course. I understood that. I was acquainted with death through my rabbits. But my rabbits still looked like themselves, when dead, whereas my mother had become something like a landscape or a pile of trash. I thought of tree trunks that when the light is right resemble crouching figures, I thought of clouds in which laughing faces can be seen, and fungi that seem to have noses, cheeks, and ears. As with tree, cloud, fungus, the resemblance to a familiar form convinced my eyes but not what I will quaintly call my heart.

  That was not because this so-called face was bluish gray and very cut up around the lips. My mother’s real face could have been bluish gray, I thought, and still I would have known it. I would not have been able to look at it the way I looked at this—this bag of frozen squirrels, this cow pie, this pan of bubble-and-squeak. I had never been able to look at my mother’s face before, not at, because it had no surface on which my eyes could rest. Her face swam upstream in my gaze, overtaking my impulse to look, and arrived at the source before I knew that she was coming, then turned to greet me as if she had been there all along and I were the one belated. She opened me like the door to her own room.

  No one can say that I have not accepted my mother’s death. This is an open-casket chronicle. Nor am I an undertaker, to doll her up, shoo away the flies, and whisper Shh, she’s sleeping. My mother was not sleeping. My mother was not here. They had replaced her with this thing.

  This thing was not my mother. But though it was not my mother I thought that it might know where my mother had gone. So I pulled up a chair to the coffin—which was laid out on a low table in our drawing room—and asked it.

  Where was my father? I cannot locate him in this scene. Probably upstairs, moaning, “Bea, Bea,” repining too late, as usual. Possibly savaging a pillow. Feathers drift down over his disconsolate figure, their soft touch like a healing angel’s kisses, I don’t think. It should but does not surprise me that I was left alone to experiment with my mother’s corpse.

  I did not cry or plead like an ordinary child but interrogated the imposter in a monotone, speaking rapidly and without any of my usual tricks, on the contrary seeking out the sounds that were hardest for me, my s’s above all, my d’s, b’s, and m’s, so that I might stammer as violently as I had stammered when I talked to Hopsalot that last time. I was hoping to fetch my mother back, as I had brought him back, long enough for her to tell me something. I don’t know what. Goodbye, perhaps. It is trite but one comes to expect it.

  No, I will not perjure myself for the sake of a cynical quip. I do not know what I wanted. But at her death a question had opened in me like a door, perhaps the one my mother had just gone through. “Where are you?” it might have been. “What are you, now? How should I comport myself toward you? Do you need anything? Can I help?”

  What do we owe the dead? I have never received a satisfactory answer. But the empty place in me where my mother was still issues its imperatives, though there is no one to receive my offerings, or tell me I have done enough at last.

  All night I stammered, and time stammered with me. I dragged it back, it jerked ahead again, I dragged it back, farther back. By the first blue hint of dawn her mouth had tunneled back, I thought, to the day before. I saw a warmer light on it, glinting off a sliver of tooth. Sunlight, or maybe electric light, factory light. And still it was mute.

  Abruptly I was weary with this playacting and sat up, feeling adulthood closing over me like bark. I rubbed my dry eyes. Then I let fall my hands, from which all strength had fled, for I had heard a sound. The most ordinary sound in the world, one might think: a cough. But from that still form, terrible.

  Again I bent over the dry, unmoving mouth.

  “Harwood,” my mother said.

  Later I would try to convince myself that she had said it imploringly, or accusingly, or in any other way that would help me construe it as a message and a directive. But in fact her voice was perfectly neutral. It sounded if anything a little bored. But it was my mother’s voice.

  Now I cried, without dignity, gasping and snorting, eyes and nose streaming, drops falling even into the coffin, onto the impervious face.

  My father’s name was the last thing I would ever hear my mother say, though I talked and talked, trying to get more out of her, I even talked for her, saying, “I will never leave you, my darling; I will watch over you, my little girl, my only, forever,” and things to that effect. I remember very clearly how these sentiments creaked out of me in the airless wee voice I used back then when I wished to pretend, for the power it gave me with the other children, that I was possessed by a ghost. Oh yes, just as little boys play at murder with toy guns, so I did in fancy what I would later do in fact. Our lies tell the truth about our leanings.

  Could I have been channeling her after all, thinking I was pretending?

  No, my mother never told me fairy tales.


  [Pause.]

  She was gone, I’m sure of it. My mother took to death as to her native element. Whereas of my father’s death, I have often had the uneasy sense that, like so many of his projects, it would not “take.”

  [Pause, static.]

  Because I am in the land of the dead, where every word is true, I felt, while I was telling you how I leaned my forehead against her coffin, some cold edge press against my brow, as if the sky had bent against my head, and when I mentioned satin I nearly choked on its white billows. As for lilies, I scarcely have to mention them to smell their reek. And once again I am talking, talking, talking, bent over a dry unmoving mouth, listening for an answer that never comes.

  Are you receiving?

  My mother’s face has become a travesty, so I look at her hands, which are more honest in their repose, confiding their familiar freckles to me, though her familiar ring is wasp-waisting her finger which therefore must be, must have been swollen.

  My eyes are wet. It must be rheum.

  [Pause, static, sound of breathing.]

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  She sweeps down the hall, her heavy skirts chivvying dust bunnies along, and light from the shuttered windows stripes her for an instant and then again and then again. Lorgnette chafes her stiffened bodice. At her waist, in a silk reticule, bulky shapes: ear trumpet, tongue depressor, speculum. In her hands a gleaming ferule. Her mouth is stretched around a wire mold. They say she wets her lips with printer’s ink at bedtime and wears this armature all night. After rubbing it with erasers inside and out she winds a cloth around the whole contraption: It becomes a snout. But today it is not wrapped, and saliva flows down her chin, wetting her neat linen bib. I note this, as I note everything that may be useful to me.

  The Headmistress began to warm up at five for the morning calisthenics, to “open the hatches,” as she said, employing every tool in her kit: the camphor-and-menthol atomizers, the gnathodynamometers, the cotton pads, the rubber bulbs, the steel-and-porcelain ratchet gag. When, barely buttoned into their uniforms and blued with a dash of ice water from the basin, the students heard round a corner the rap of her heel or saw the trembling shadow of her snout, they would flee down the corridors or lower themselves into chests and come out much later in a fountain of moths and with faces like moths, all eyes.

  All day, the Headmistress came and went, her route decided “more by rhetoric,” she explained, “than by expediency,” through that puzzle box of classrooms, dormitories, living rooms and dying rooms: rapping down haunted galleries, past laboratories filled with models and machines, and oubliettes filled with wrongdoers, through gymnasia where children flung themselves over and over through their own mouths and out again; rustling through the curtained laying-in room where those expecting mouth objects lay in the half-dark, staring at pictures of holes and of darkness, their lips thickly smeared with goose fat, attended by smaller children who massaged their throats through the swaddling. She would pass down a row of the youngest students arranged by size and bend an ear to each mouth in turn. With cotton soaked in morphine she would soothe strained tonsils; she’d offer ink-and-ipecac purges and poultices of paper pulp and cantharides, and to complainers, the advice, “Pretend you aren’t here.” Shushing chatterers, bating breaths, tying gags with a reef knot (never a granny), distributing baffles and tightening muzzles, inspecting creels and wind socks, and tuning high voices with a firm hand on the windpipe and a whiff of smelling salts, she reigned: schoolmarm and monarch, high priestess and inquisitor in one.

  Bullish, rumpled, Mother Other would stump along behind in her leaden shoes, harrying the children into place, slapping a pointer into the hand of the unvoice teacher, setting up without question or comprehension the masks, the bellows, the paper cones. She’d appear suddenly in the dictation room with a wobbling armful of paper balloons; she’d ball up newspapers to fill an artificial lung or pop a tongue depressor into a passing mouth. Meanwhile Whit and McDougal padded to and fro, palpating creels with white-gloved hands and removing any mouth objects found within, wrapping them in diapers to wick away saliva and protect them for what remained of their journey, and flitting away with them cradled reverently in their arms. Somehow they always seemed to know when one was due, as if like spiders thrilling to the vibrations in their web they had some special sensitivity to the fabric of the Veil. Often they managed to be there to help deliver it, coaxing the mouth a fraction further open and hooking the item out with a crooked finger. Sometimes one of the students, confused, fought them.

  “You can’t take it! It’s mine!” Victoria scuttles away, huddled protectively over the creel, which swings wildly. “G-get back! G-g-g-get offa me!” Runs, knocking over a chair, another chair. Disappears down the hall.

  By evening, “Wh-wh-why say anything”—on the phonograph, Edison—“if it’s not the dernier cri?” the Headmistress would croak, in crepe and whalebone on a horsehair divan, surrounded by ear trumpets, taxidermy, and memorial hair art. “What good is it to be Headmistress of the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers and Hearing-Mouth Children, if I can’t be more famous than the F-F-Fox sisters and better-looking than Cora Hatch?” She took a sip from the “brain,” that curiously shaped decanter that Mother Other, to provide ease from the friction of leadership and the traffic of ghosts, kept filled with Stickney and Poor’s Paregoric, “1 8/10 grains Opium to each fluid ounce,” and fingered her earlobes, then with calipers measured her mouth and again launched into “My w-word, wh-wh-why,” etc.

  When visitors came, the Headmistress would arrange demonstrations, lavishing particular attention on wealthy relatives who might be persuaded to pony up for a scholarship or a sports field. She required Mr. Lenore, our drama teacher, to rehearse “impromptu” séances to a script, observing, without a blush, that it was a mistake to think that merely because the medium was a fraud, the dead were not really present. Cheating was underrated: “It may be precisely when we counterfeit that we ring true.” Along a course minutely planned to give the impression of spontaneity, she led visitors at a stroll, pumping them for information all the while. A discreet aside to any student would send a runner ahead in the itinerary with amendments to the plan: This visitor hopes to hear from a maiden aunt, preferably through the mouth of a well-brought-up young lady; this other from a tot, carried off by scarlet fever; while this one would like to see a boy student, blindfolded, mouth stretched around an ivory wind tunnel, his tongue forced down with a stirrup, his cheeks held apart from his teeth by two flanges locking in place, while his instructor strokes his distended throat with a peacock feather.

  O’Donnell was a favorite among the boys, with his erect stance, his white teeth, his blond hair, artfully tousled (by Mr. Mallow under the instructions of Mr. Lenore) before the arrival of his audience. Smithson was first among the girls for her curls and the pearly nails on her little pink fingers, and Dixon next for her glossy dark skin and the theatricality with which she drew herself upright, raised her chin, jerked, and shook out a booming masculine voice. I, less picturesque, was never chosen.

  Some visitors, flushed, speaking a little too loudly, would request a private tête-à-tête with one or another of these prodigies, would confess the desire to test the fabric of the Veil, to let the winds of the afterlife cool their hot cheeks, to watch a mouth object delivered, perhaps, into their own eager hands, or even assisted a little with a judicious finger. To these requests the Headmistress or her delegates would smoothly reply, “R-r-regrettably it is not p-possible; the children require the supervision of an expert at every stage, there is always a r-risk of the accidental summoning of a hostile rev-rev-revenant, the school has tried many times to take out a policy against wraith-related m-m-m-mutilations or deaths, but insurers have not been cooperative . . . Are you feeling all right?”

  Readings

  from “A Visitor’s Observations”

  On Punishment

  I turn now (for I am still gathe
ring my thoughts on weightier matters) to that natural couple, pain and pleasure—or, as they are formalized in school life, punishment and play.

  The Vocational School devoted considerably more time to the former. The Headmistress expected perfect conformity with her rules, and when met with defiance did not hesitate to send a pupil to the oubliette. As the latter was in use on the day I might have toured it (a girl was suspected of pocketing the Headmistress’s lucky rabbit’s foot—apparently a grave offense!), I was not invited to explore, but it appeared quite as dark and dolorous as one would expect. Its primary purpose, however, was not to cause distress, but to forcibly “unclog the pipe” or “remove the blockage” that was impeding passage to the dead. Less severe punishments might take any number of forms. I will list the more unusual:

  A tongue-lashing (not a scolding, but actually lashing the tongue with a miniature cat-o’-nine-tails, its paper lashes inscribed with mordant accounts of the detainee’s misdeeds).

  A boot (not footgear, but a contraption designed to immobilize the jaw, something like a horse’s bit).

  A beating (not, as one might reasonably imagine, of the child, but of a sort of drum, called—in a pun that was really just a retrenchment to the literal—an Ear Drum, the timbre of which was supposed to be keenly distressing to the listener).

  Read-alouds of descriptive passages such as the following: “A saddle, decorated with a stamped design in some unfamiliar alphabet, perhaps Amharic, with, looped around the pommel, reins that had broken and been reknotted,” or “A book, the pages covered with brindled fur, over which a scholar ran a desiccated finger.” (I confess I could not fathom the tears and pleas for mercy these elicited.)

  A perhaps related punishment was inflicted by directing the child’s attention to an object in his vicinity. The objects were not in themselves such as should inspire terror: no instruments of torture were to be discovered among them, nor was there, in fact, any implication that they might be used. They did not represent a threat of punishment but, in fact, the punishment itself, to whose efficacy the horror on my informants’ faces was sufficient testimony. No particular objects were dedicated to this role. Anything might serve: a bent twig, the handle of a porcelain mug, a balding push broom. After its period of service, the object was restored to its previous, unexceptionable status. (Perhaps to do otherwise would have been deemed an injustice to, a sort of libel of, the innocent object.)