Riddance

by Shelley Jackson

  The game involved a ball and a court with two sides where players in colors held various positions within complicated zones delineated with chalk. The whistle blew while I was forging a path past a feral forsythia; the players ran about like agitated ants; I took a step forward to see what they were doing, and was thwacked in the face with a wet branch. Once my vision cleared, and I had attained the edge of the playfield, I saw that the players had taken up their positions again, the ball having moved somewhat closer to one end (that of the white tunics), and come to rest in a different one of the many subdivisions of the playfield.

  “I say! I think that child is ill,” said Dr. Peachie, who with Dr. Beede had joined me at the sidelines. A boy had run off the field and appeared to be retching into a cloth bag. Another student bent over him, and then took off toward the school building.

  Dr. Beede peered at the boy over his glasses and began unhurriedly moving toward him, gesturing to us to follow. “It’s not what you think,” he said.

  The boy rocked, rocked, and relieved himself into the bag. A few minutes later, Whit and McDougal came hurrying up, pulling on their gloves, and having given the bag a gentle squeeze, carefully turned a knobbly yellow object out of it into a white cloth one of them produced from the pocket of his robe.

  “Good lord, what is that?” asked Dr. Peachie.

  “An ectoplasmoglyph,” said Whit, who was patting the object dry with a corner of the towel. He raised it up and regarded it appraisingly, turning it over and over with the tips of his gloved fingers.

  “You mean that thing is pure ectoplasm?” Dr. Peachie exclaimed. “May I—”

  He reached out, but Whit swiftly flipped the corners of the towel back over the object, and snugged it under his arm. “The Headmistress would not like it, Dr. Peachie.”

  The whistle blew—Whit and McDougal departed with their prize, watched by Dr. Peachie, who still seemed much struck by what he had seen—the teams ran hither and thither—and this time, my view unobstructed, I saw what they were about. Instead of moving the ball, they were moving the playfield, one team ceaselessly scuffing out and redrawing its numerous lines according to what appeared to be complicated rules of precedence and interdependence, while the opposing team did all in their power to hinder them, slyly redrawing freshly erased lines, rubbing out new ones, standing in the path of those not yet completed, or knocking a stick of chalk out of a player’s hands with a quick elbow, right under the referee’s nose. The ball reposed in its place unmoved (and heaven help any child who, accidentally or through craft, nudged it even an inch from its resting place!). It took only a slight perceptual adjustment, however (as when we perceive the dock as gliding past the boat, rather than the reverse), to imagine it flying back and forth across the field.

  “I think I will rest a little before supper,” I said. Drs. Beede and Peachie turned back along with me. “Somehow I feel a little discouraged,” I added.

  “Yes, it’s a shame—what I wouldn’t give to run some tests on that object!” Dr. Peachie said.

  “No, I mean—do they never just play?”

  “Oh, I see what you mean,” said Dr. Peachie.

  “No, never,” said Dr. Beede.

  Letters to Dead Authors, #8

  Dear Mary Shelley,

  Intermediate Death Studies. The students bend their heads over their compositions, fidgeting with their gags. Outside, the sun, a purplish stain in the haze, sinks behind dead trees. It is a dispiriting sight. I prefer the stainless black of night.

  I have long contemned those spiritualistes who regard the Beyond with the same proprietary air that they would an heirloom sugar-dish, confident that their dear Departeds can be tempted away from exchanging platitudes with Ludwig van Beethoven and Pocahontas by the opportunity to festoon their descendants with ectoplasm. The dead have their own concerns. The grief or guilt of the living is not one of them.

  Pray tell me then, how I should explain this scene? It is mid-afternoon; somewhere the students are doing tonsil lifts under the eye of Mme. Once. I am in conference with a visiting parent—a woman with a giant fleshy nose, pince-nez, and a look of dyspepsia—when the new girl, Finster, bangs into the office, gags, grabs her throat theatrically, and says in a low, sharp, unmistakeably male voice, “I thought I told you never to touch my spoons.” Mrs. Woodbridge lets out a shriek and collapses. When she comes to, she immediately writes a cheque for a full year’s tuition. I whisk away the cheque—and the child, who will receive an extra biscuit at supper—before she can change her mind. “It was he! It was my dear father!” Mrs. Woodbridge kept saying. But it was not her father. How do I know?

  Because it was mine.

  Mrs. Shelley, well do I know how expectation can deceive, moulding alien sounds and sights into the figments of a domestic idyll. But I neither wished nor expected to hear my father’s voice. Now I am anadiplosis is the repeti—

  Excuse me, little Upshaw posed me a question, and I lost my thread. I do not have the spirit to continue tonight. Perhaps I will pick up my pen again tomorrow.

  (Next day, early:)

  Perhaps I was mistaken, about my father. But I am rarely mistaken about the dead. But perhaps I was. Perhaps there are other fathers with a penchant for spoons and savagery. Perhaps nothing is more common. In any case I have heard nothing more from him. But I should not have taken up my pen, the eastern horizon is stained with pink. Dawn approaches; how I hate it. The sky peels up, bleeding, to admit another nasty day. I will to bed.

  Vehemently,

  Your Friend (as I hope),

  Sybil Joines

  9. The Final Dispatch, contd.

  So I am back at the beginning of the chase. First whiff of the fox.

  It is a cold November morning. This very morning, if I remember correctly. The Regional School Inspector is expected, and I have been making my rounds, looking over uniforms, giving the staff their lines, directing Clarence to retire our more ominous-looking learning aids to the cellar for the day.

  Now Miss Exiguous, Mr. Mallow, Mother Other, and I are in one of the small gymnasia where advanced students put in extra practice. In a corner a tall girl is running rapidly and silently through a series of mouth shapes. In another a small boy at stretch stands leaning a little forward, showing excellent form as he uses his weight, slight as it is, to force his mouth farther down a blunt-tipped wooden cone that must already be challenging his tonsils. “Gag for the gain, Ballard,” I bawl, and see a flicker of pain pass across Miss Exiguous’s features; she will be reprimanded. The truth is that I play the hearty, horsey gamesmistress as much to amuse myself as to buck up the children.

  And in the center of the room, there she is: Finster, as I live and breathe.

  An unfortunate choice of expressions.

  I have to restrain myself from plunging at her, for this is only a figment, I am pretty sure, a bit of the past propped up and put through its paces, though in admirable detail. See, for instance, how her hair, as didactically parted as all my girls’—as yours—is inching up into ripples despite the cruel tightness of the braids. A fine fuzz rises like a mist from the back of the neck.

  Miss Exiguous is holding Finster before her by the upper arms and shaking her a little, her fingers sinking into the scanty flesh. The girl, forcing her arms away from her body despite the effort this must cost her, stares past Miss Exiguous at me—haughty, pugnacious, defiant. P-p-p-plosives explode. (Secretary, stet.) Miss Exiguous releases one arm, leaving behind her handprint in red, to pluck a handkerchief from her iron bodice and work it distastefully down her bosom, dabbing away the dots.

  “What is it?” I demand. “Why this atmosphere of suppressed Schadenfreude, and why am I being subjected to what resembles a scene from a pantomime? Do let poor Finster go, Miss Exiguous.”

  “Finster has been showing off,” says Miss Exiguous, reluctantly stepping back, “channeling rogues and foreigners to frighten the little ones. And now she has sent Mother Other’s ca
t to the land of the dead!”

  It takes me a moment to understand what I am being told for this is a pretty advanced class of mischief and I am inclined to believe that someone has been making up stories. But when Mother Other assures me that she saw with her own eyes the dispatch of her cat I am not so much angry as proud that Finster’s skills are so far above grade level. But I put on a stern face.

  “Finster, I must commend you for your precocious abilities,” I say, “while condemning the hubris and lack of discipline that tempted you to this wanton display. In dealings with the dead, we must never put aside caution. The dead are not always kind.” She gives me a quick mocking look. Have I said something funny? “You, a beginning student, have not had enough training to discriminate between malign and benevolent visitants, let alone to open a gateway to the land of the dead through which any sort of creature might blunder in or out! That is an experiment very likely to prove fatal, and you—and we,” I add sotto voce, with a glance at Mother Other, for this is no time to lose another student—“are very lucky that it was a cat and not yourself who went through it! You will repair to the dormitory immediately and sit quietly on your bed with your hands in your lap, reflecting on your foolhardiness, until the lunch bell is rung.” I hand her a cork. She inserts it, but again I see something ironical in the roll of her eye as she bobs a shabby curtsey and, shooed along by Miss Exiguous, departs. The saucy thing.

  “What about my cat?” exclaims Mother Other.

  “It will find its own way back, I expect,” I say, with a gesture that refers the tribe of cat to its own devices.

  “But—”

  “Winnifred. You cannot expect me to go haring off after a cat at a time like this.” For during the absorbing work of the morning I had not forgotten that all the while, somewhere not too far away, a [crackling] Regional School Inspector was [crackling] tightening his box tie, adjusting his cravat, smoothing his hair, donning his hat, picking up his scarred cane (its grip darkened by hair oil) and rapping it once on the floor, was exiting his small office, gliding down the gloomy stairs, was raising the crooked end of the stick to alert the cab driver already summoned by his amanuensis, was refusing assistance to hoist himself into his seat and attempting to conceal his surprise and dismay at the loss of the shiny brass button that his exertions had caused to shoot into the cab, was feeling for the button with the tip of his cane as the vehicle lurched into motion, was making a quick dart to investigate a rattling sound (his head disappearing from view), was rising red-faced and discomfited with nothing in his hand as the vehicle rattled past the last house on Main Street, was ducking again as the cab creaked and boomed over the old bridge across the Slow River, tan and smoothly swollen with recent rains, was cutting off a curse as the vehicle bounced over the gravel-filled ditch where erosion was carving the bank out from under the end of the bridge and he struck his head against the corner of his briefcase, which was slowly working its way off the edge of the slippery leather seat, was rising with the button clutched triumphantly in his hand and sitting back to watch with a sanguine expression as fields gave way to trees whose bare, black branches were made even gloomier by the gray sky and wisps of mist, was opening his palm to regard his prize with idle pleasure that turned to surprise and dismay as he beheld a button, yes, but the wrong button, cheap and tarnished, was casting it into the depths of the cab with a disgusted look, was disappearing again to root for a long time among pebbles, horsehairs, pine needles, and crumbs, finding and discarding again and again the wrong button, and once, the right button, not recognized as such, before giving up in disgust, as the cab turned off the main road between Cheesehill and Chesterfield onto the narrower road toward the Vocational School; that the cab was crossing the Slow River again and then again as it squiggled toward us down the ravine, then emerging onto fields with scattered brakes, skirting the frog pond, its jingle and creak startling the frogs into silence, except one, which continued yelling its slogan at regular intervals, passing through the gates and up the graveled drive, approaching the school, which came angling up like an ocean liner in the chill mist, was crunching to a stop, whereupon the [crackling] Regional School Inspector, taking hold of the door handle, and, not waiting for the cab driver, was forcing open the reluctant door, stepping down onto the gravel, and starting up the steps toward the front door.

  The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

  I swim up from sleep, frowning, my mouth working—who? who? I cannot remember who I am, where. Open my eyes on a blue barely morning world, the sough of sounder sleepers, ranked bedsteads, the—the dormitory, got it, and I, a student here for some months now, am Grandison, whose first name I cannot pronounce—but it does not matter, here; gone are the routine humiliations of the classroom and its sequelae on the playground—yes, I, Grandison, am waking and telling over the letters of my name like rosary beads. Inside my head it is not quite silent—transmissions are passing through me, radio waves perhaps, looping languidly through the countryside on their way somewhere more important, but more likely ghosts, which are quite a lot like radio announcers, faraway people saying important things, but so quietly that ordinary people cannot hear them no matter how hard they try; but I can.

  For I have the knack. And now, unseen inside the cave of my sheets, I exult. No one can any longer persuade me that it is by mistake or deceit that I am here; I belong. My lips move against the coarse bedsheets as I form an O for the pleasure of feeling the words already taking shape in my mouth: “I was standing on the edge when my uncle came up behind me . . .” But I do not even need to move my mouth to hear them. To one with the knack of hearing, the place is reverberant with whispers.

  But it seems that not everyone can hear them, even here. Not even the instructors, who stand in front of the beginning students lecturing them on how to speak to ghosts while brushing aside the ghost who is shouting in their ears the whole time, trying desperately, poor dismal creature, to make herself heard.

  It was still early. The dormitory was silent except for the whickering of ghosts and the drone and whistle of the sleepers; a soft gray-blue glow filled the ogive windows and delineated the ribs of the slightly arched ceiling, picked out each each humped quilt, each iron headboard, and the shoes set side by side under the bed. Somewhere in the bowels of the building a thump more felt than heard meant a hob of coal dumped down beside the iron stove, a groan was the heavy iron door swinging open so the coal could be shoveled on the banked fire within; I had not seen it done but I heard the same sounds in the same order every morning and had come to imagine the scene thus. A bird lightly bumped the window glass and reeled away, not much hurt, I thought, or a ghost told me, it was not too good if I could not tell the difference between what I thought and what the ghosts said to me but that was the way things were probably going to be here, there was someone talking almost all the time, saying, for instance, “Are you the One?”

  “Oh, stuff it!” I said (and a muffled complaint rose from the next cot over): They were always trying to make you feel important, it was one of their tricks. So I brought the wings of the pillow up around my ears and felt the soft rushing of my blood close in around me and grew sleepy once again.

  And woke up again with a snort to the muted uproar of a general arising; quilts flung off with the sound of sails snapping in a changing wind; a pell-mell rush to the washroom to the clop and shuffle of untied shoes on bare feet; someone already crying, a slap, a muffled curse. The bright gray light had lost its blue. The ghosts had receded, summoned to a stronger electromagnet, perhaps, such as the Headmistress. Through her mouth a gale of voices blew, so many and so furious it was hard (for me) to see her face; it seemed to be made up only of a rushing, a tending, an intending that was not her own. What she was, herself, was impossible to make out behind or through all that commotion and yet she had a powerful persona that was not only the borrowed authority of the ghosts. It was partly a straight back, broad shoulders, strong jaw, and a dress like the sails of a man-o�
�-war. But also a partly repressed but palpable emotion more powerful than any ghost could muster (for lack of the requisite glands): perhaps unhappiness, perhaps hate. Or fear . . .

  Could the Headmistress be afraid of ghosts? The idea, true or not, made me laugh a little with pleasure as (skipping the icy ablutions to be had in the washroom) I struggled into my wrinkled dress, stamped my feet into my shoes, and followed the others down the stairs and out the door.

  Readings

  from “A Visitor’s Observations”

  On Certain Objects in the Collection

  Throughout the school and its grounds one could find the most original statuary, objets d’art, and other items whose purpose, decorative or functional, I could not guess. These fell into two main categories (not easy, at first, to tell apart): “travel souvenirs”16 inspired by things the Headmistress had seen in the land of the dead, and “figures of speech,” inspired by proverbs, cliches, and dead metaphors.

  The Wrong Tree and the Blue Streak are examples of the latter category, as are the Spoon in the Wall and the bronze statue in the west wing of a running cat with a graphically severed tongue writhing in her mouth. Passing references to these in various documents (“At 3:30 the second-graders have to bark up the wrong tree”) caused me considerable confusion before I realized they were actual objects, some of them in daily use! These “figures of speech,” eerie at first, lose their mystery once the viewer hits upon the idiomatic expressions that unlock them. The “travel souvenirs,” however, open to no key on earth. I was able to prevail upon Clarence, the majordomo, to take me on a tour of them. Here are some of the things I saw: