I was well aware of the poor figure I cut, for though never pretty I had been kept in better trim under my parents’ care. Although an heiress I would not come into my money until I came of age and the hag who had the keeping of me was a skinflint. My cheap gingham dress fit me like a sack; my ugly boots, bought large for reasons of thrift, made me clownish.
Still, one does not readily shed feelings of superiority inculcated since infancy. So when the other children fleered at me, I felt, at first, more surprised and indignant than hurt. They had mistaken me for someone else and would soon learn what manner of person I was and jump to my tune. I even felt sorry for the most excitable of them, who would find it hardest to recast themselves in the mold of friendship. I tried, a few times, to launch the routine with which I had had some success when I was younger, pretending to be possessed by a spirit. I was laughed down. The mockery made me stutter even more comprehensively, which excited mockery of a yet more pointed, inventive, and hilarious sort.
One day I had a particularly bad stuttering episode that happened to coincide with a visit from, this is interesting, a school inspector. You might think children would not care about the impression they made on a school inspector and perhaps it was just a pretext to torment me but they gathered around me on the playground afterward to give me grief for sullying the reputation of the school with my pronunciation of the word deciduous, while the teacher, not meeting my eyes, having been extremely disappointed in me, as she had already disclosed, allowed the door to swing slowly shut, and left me to my fate.
“What’s wrong, c-c-c-cat got your tongue?”
I felt the scathing rays of their regard shoot into me and play over my privacies in mocking disbelief. I felt that they could see me naked, from the inside. Why did their eyes shoot rays when mine only received them? If I met their eyes, it was apparently not to parry or pierce in turn, but to extend a general invitation. If I lowered my eyes to keep them out, however, I shut myself out too, and joined the others in gawping at the riddle that I was.
I saw a wrinkled scab of dried pea soup stuck to my skirt and a clump of burrs stuck ridiculously to one stocking. My clothing bunched and dangled. Inside it was a gross, inert, and solid object made improbably of meat. How could such a thing reason, let alone speak? But that was itself a thought, so I was all right, except that I could not remember how one converted thoughts to words, words to intelligible sounds. My mouth did not seem to have any moving parts. Did I even have a mouth, or was there just a smooth convexity underneath my nose, like a forehead or a knee? Tongue fused to palate, teeth locked, windpipe cinched tight, I felt heat rise through me until I was a blazing column. My hair stung my scalp. My earlobes were coals.
I can guess what a ghost must feel, trying to move a living mouth to speak. A bodiless wisp pitting its will against muscle and bone. Pumping the lungs through the voice box, working the jaw on its hinge, while pursing and pouting and flapping the tongue. An insane task of coordination, with a mystery at the core: How could meat mean? Just where did meat meet meaning? What, really, was meaning? For that matter, what was meat? “M-m-m-m-m . . .” I said, meaning all this, more or less. (Secretary, stet.)
In doing so, I now recognize, I had actually found a solution; I had seen how, failing to say something, though not saying nothing, I had nonetheless expressed exactly what I was thinking: That speech was impossible. But my tormentors, unimpressed, closed in. I fell upon my body again, to pump out a phrase, any phrase, not hoping it would be clever, only that it would be language. “D-d-d-don’t! L-l-leave m-me alone! I’ll—I’ll—” [sic]
I have always remembered, as the key to a great puzzle, that it was in this moment not of insight and mastery but of doubt and dispossession that the dead rose up in me at last. Saying, in a deep slow growl entirely out of keeping with my appearance, something entirely out of keeping with my desires, but perfectly calculated to puzzle and unnerve my tormenters: “Little children, gather ’round, and I will tell you how I died.”
One fading shout of laughter from someone in the back.
“You’re not dead,” a little girl finally pointed out. Say what you like about Dotty, she has pluck.
“Oh, yes,” I said—he said, through me. “I most certainly am. For the last wolf to live in old Connecticut ripped my throat out on a winter’s afternoon in 1759, while crows called back and forth above me, and I saw a red rainbow of my own blood arc over me before a buzzing darkness rose up and gathered me in.”
They got quiet then. I suppose they could sense, though they did not understand it, that I was not myself—that whoever was speaking, it was not me. Well, it was a man’s voice. That is something one can usually tell. The gonads rattle, that’s your giveaway.
I think I should mention, listener, that I’m not at all sure I am the one who delivered the line you just took down. Gonads are not my stock in trade. I am not sure I even know what they are, though I have my suspicions.
As I said, it was very quiet after I said that about the blood. The funny thing is that though it was not my voice or my memory, I saw, naming it, the arc of blood, and the pale blue sky, a crow swinging in a pine to the left of me, and another weighing heavy on a bare branch to the right, and I even felt the snow cold under my neck, and the blood hot on it, and a tremendous wrongness where my throat used to be, and a steam rising from it through which a lean, efficient muzzle was already descending again.
I lifted my head, my mouth jerked open, I peeled my lips back from what he wanted to say, and so it was said: “My name is Cornelius Hackett, and I am a dead man. Do not confuse me with the person whose mouth I temporarily employ. I am older and smarter than she is. I have killed one man and bedded many women. Children I beat or beget, and that is the extent of my dealings with them; their opinions do not interest me. I am irritated to find myself dead. I have been irritated since 1759, at least. You will not irritate me further. Is that understood?”
From the back of the crowd, my audience began to slink away.
“I imagine that you are nodding,” said Cornelius, conversationally. “But do you know, I cannot see you, though I can hear you, or could hear you, if you were saying anything. ‘Yes, Master Cornelius,’ for instance.”
“Yes, Master Cornelius,” said my increasingly horrified audience.
“We are going to play a little game,” said Cornelius. “We’re going to play it every day. It’s called school.”
So it was that, still a schoolgirl myself, I became a teacher, and taught the other children what I did not know myself until I taught it (or Cornelius did, through me): the way to summon up the dead.
My students were—we all were, myself to a large extent included—terrified of Cornelius, and had no real desire to call up another Cornelius, or to come any closer to the dead than the side of a casket, and yet Cornelius had to be obeyed, Cornelius had to be satisfied, to be if possible pleased, and so we sought and even fought one another for privileges that in actuality we did not want.
But my own lot had improved immeasurably. As Cornelius’s creature I was an object of dread, no doubt, and no one wished my company less than those who sought it most ardently, but it is better to be feared than scorned, and I moved in power. It is true that I wielded it only for him and because of him, but Cornelius had done what probably no living person could have done, and installed me at the top of the social order.
I liked it there! I amused myself giving orders. I established new rules: From now on we will wear polka-dotted neckerchiefs! From now on we will wrap our books in oilcloth! From now on we will carry in our pockets small animals folded out of paper, and give them names! Then I would break the rules myself and laugh at those who followed them, and they would follow suit, whereupon I would punish them.
“Dotty, I require your pencil.” Silently, she handed it to me. “And is that a new scarf?” It was. I lost it that same day. I did not care. I had no need to hold on to anything anymore. I would have someone else’s s
carf tomorrow.
One thing never changed: I rated above all else the skill—for so I described it, with Cornelius’s endorsement—of stuttering, and rewarded the practice of it. (How perplexed our teachers were. How often they were obliged to suffer through the Ch-ch-charge [secretary, stet] of the L-light Brigade!) Gradually, the dead began to introduce themselves, and thus I began to train a cadre of ghost speakers, the first and, some of them, the best this country has ever known. A few of them are with me to this day. You know our Miss Exiguous. Miss Dorothea Exiguous, Dotty Hobbs that was, for I gave them names to suit their new estate. I am faithful to those who are faithful to me. Those who are not—
You will be faithful, will you not?
And so I began, not yet knowing what I did, to build my school. I used Cornelius, who believed that he used me. One of the things that I eventually learned from him was how to master him. And then it was my school in fact as well as name.
I will allow no one to take it from me. No one.
Do you know, dear listener, that I am never sure how I am going to get back from the Mouthlands? One might imagine that to return to the real world one simply reversed the process by which one got there, throwing oneself through one’s mouth in the other direction, like a butterfly net inverted to release a bee. But for the necronaut, to a very large degree, the land of the dead is oneself. Thus to throw oneself through oneself in a more than illusory sense, one would have to throw the world through the world—thread trees through their own knotholes, pass needles through their own eyes, bundle whole planets down rabbit holes and drop the holes through after them.
Such things happen. I am not saying that they are impossible, but I cannot guarantee that, having performed such feats, you would find yourself back home.
The usual method of return is both easier and more difficult. Easy, because it may happen quite by accident; difficult for much the same reason. The way is capricious, opening in one place, at one time, in one fashion, and differently the next. You fall down a well, go up a flight of stairs, open your office door, on which someone has been knocking for quite some time, you creep into a dumbwaiter or a shed, and the flames curl up, the flames curl up, the flames [crackling]—
I leap through them—
And am back in the land of the living, where someone is knocking at my office door. At a nod from me you leave your post to open it (something wrong there) and the School Inspector enters (something wrong) with his hat in his hand.
The Stenographer’s Story, contd.
The water went down, leaving the grass all slicked with mud. Skeins of weeds, and straw, and here a twisted apron, and there a scrap of tatting, stretched out from snags in perfect parallel, as if still tugged by a phantom torrent. The spiders that had been driven by the flood into the trees spun them full of webs that sparkled like bridal veils in the morning, before the dew burned off.
I still had Dr. Peachie’s shirt but had stuffed it into a drawer in the Headmistress’s office that I knew she did not open. After a day or two I had the opportunity to take it out. It was still damp and smelled of cat. And a little of cadaver, I thought ghoulishly. I spread it out on the desk. There was something in the breast pocket, a handkerchief bound turban-like around some knobbly object that proved to be a small ectoplasmoglyph. Poked in beside it was a folded note, creased and inky, but still legible.
Elihu says he can get this to you and he will let me know you rec’d it. I will expect yr reply by same carrier in a week’s time.
Listen, my boy, I am not very easy in my mind. Just imagine how I felt when I saw that letter in the C.G.! I very nearly choked to death on a finger of toast. I gather everyone knows the letter-writer is a crank, but how could you let that happen? Please find the leak and stopper it. Do not doubt that I am firm in our great Purpose but one more piece of bad publicity and I will have no choice but to close the school. We must put the next phase into effect as fast as possible, the problem is to find our man, I am sounding out candidates as fast as can but must be circumspect. I do not know but that it would be better to take the helm myself as you have urged, still it would look bad.25 Only something must be done instanter. That lunatic seems bound and determined to blacken the name of Cheesehill. She is shockingly careless with the misfortunate creatures. (What is going on there? Do they truly visit the Next World or is that moonshine?)
I threw it in the trash, alarmed and repulsed, along with the shirt and handkerchief. Then I pulled it out again, to hide away as evidence, in case “our man” should come. Perhaps Dr. Peachie’s death had upset the letter-writer’s plans, perhaps not. Close the school! That must not happen.
The mouth object was a little damaged, no doubt from being crushed against a tree branch in the flood; I smoothed away the scar, and filed it with all the others.
Later that day the Headmistress said, apropos of nothing, “We are free to imagine that he was carried by our balloon to the land of the dead, like a youthful Wizard of Oz.” Outside, a spade was ringing against stone as with rhythmic strokes the groundskeeper cleared the carriage house of mud. “If so, one might in theory fetch him back. It would be curious if it was death that saved his life.” She looked sharply at me. If I imagined that she cared, I would have thought that she was testing my reaction.
“It is a shame that Dr. Beede’s tutelage was wasted,” I only said. “I suppose he will have to put off his retirement a little longer.”
“He is quizzing the younger children about their studies again,” she said, turning away from the window, and, picking up a dry pen, drew it slowly across a blotter, its sharp point raising a series of parallel scars. “Finster is among them,” she added. Finster had stepped up her campaign lately, as if hurrying to have her vengeance before the Headmistress passed beyond her (or anyone’s) reach, and I took her meaning.
I set down the manuscript I was correcting and rose. “With your permission, I will see if I can draw him off,” I said.
She raised her head and regarded me mildly. “We have nothing to hide,” she said, her hand not relenting in its violence to the page.
“Of course not,” I said. “My motives are entirely selfish. I have been afflicted with the bloat, and wanted to coax a digestive from his black bag. That is, if you can spare my services.”
“I would be a sorry employer indeed to require my transcriptionist to forge on in despite of ‘the bloat.’” Smiling at the homely term, as I had intended, she set down her pen.
Having inveigled the doctor with tea and cakes into abandoning his inquiries, engaged him in trivial gossip, and ushered him firmly to his carriage, I returned. The spatter of gravel could be heard receding down the drive as I sealed the office door behind me. I took my place again, and we resumed our work.
A half hour later, “You are a smart girl,” she said, not lifting her head from her work. “Take a dollar from my bag and buy yourself a trinket.”
“I don’t want trinkets.”
She raised her head. “Buy whatever you do want, then, girl. Do you think I am interested in how you spend your money?” She put down her pen and shook the cramps out of her hand.
“What I want does not cost money,” I said. She raised her eyebrows. “I want more responsibility.”
“Do you indeed.”
I clenched my hands in my lap. “Yes, Headmistress.”
Unexpectedly, her voice deepened and rushed with winds. “The day is coming when you will have more responsibility, whether you want it or not.”
“What?” I said, inelegantly.
“What?” she said, and pressing a wad of gauze to her mouth, coughed a red flower. Smearing the spot gently with her thumb, she frowned, in a distracted and slightly impatient way, as if, compared to her other troubles, dying were a mere inconvenience.
At the clink of glass on glass, she reached out a hand without looking up, and I settled in it a snifter of paregoric.
The blanched fold of skin pinched between her brows was ju
st softening when there was a knock. Miss Exiguous opened the door a crack, her eyebrows raised in apologetic obsequy, and threaded herself through it. (She could of course have opened the door all the way, but that would have spoken of self-regard.) Now she crossed the room in what was meant as a girlish swoop, knees cracking, drew an ivory fan out of her sleeve, and began furiously fanning the Headmistress. “I do wish we could forbid visitors. They tire you so!”
“The school requires patronage.”
“I know, I know, but what, what,” she said, “a shame! That someone doing such important, such necessary work, should be obliged to pander to—”
“I do not pander.” The telephone on her desk chimed softly with the jiggling of the Headmistress’s knee.
“Of course not! Of course not! I misspoke. The quintessence of dignity! But that you allow yourself to be wearied, and I know you are wearied, by the importunities of a boorish paterfamilias or, such presumption, a journalist, is”—the fan was closed to permit the extraction of a handkerchief from the other sleeve, which was applied to the outer corner of one eye—“beyond words magnanimous.” She dropped to her knees. “Allow me to unlace your boots and chafe your feet.”
The Headmistress leaned back in her chair and with one cold eye open on the aureole of thinning reddish hair within which her subordinate’s skull could be clearly seen, let my senses extend through narrow corridors, lofty galleries, narrow lightwells and plunging airshafts, dumbwaiters, crawl spaces, and attics. The school was settling down again. The evening noises rose. I took another sip of paregoric; I opened my throat to another world; a cold wind whistled through my teeth and fogged the glass.
I mean her teeth. What a very odd mistake to make. But as I said before, I have become very good at guessing her feelings. It is almost as though I felt them myself.
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