McSweeney's Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories

by Michael Chabon

  Meg said something about of course you’ll be spending the night and I have food enough for a week if this storm lasts as long as they’re predicting. Jennifer started to protest—no, they’d simply call a tow truck, they’d be out of her hair in a matter of hours—but then she started to like the idea of staying on the mountain, maybe even for a few days until the blizzard petered out. Give Helen a good scare. Make her think they’d met some terrible end in a snowbank, via wolves or avalanche. It would serve her right to worry a little, and cast an unexpected pall over her claustrophobically orchestrated wedding week.

  “We’d love to stay,” Jennifer said.

  After dinner the three sat around the fire and drank a cloying blackberry-tasting liqueur that was nonetheless quite addictive. Jennifer had begun to warm to Meg, who told them about her son, a driftwood artist in Mendocino, her dead husband, a former appliance dealer, her grandchildren, relocated to the East. Maureen asked how Meg could live in a log cabin, so far away from other people.

  “Don’t you get scared?” she asked.

  Meg’s manner grew vaguely chilly. “Why do you ask?”

  “You’re here all alone; it’s so isolated and spooky. . . .”

  Meg stood from the couch and put her gnarled hands on her hips.

  “If you girls are reporters, I’ll call the police right now.” She pointed an unsteady finger toward the bedroom.

  Maureen giggled nervously. “Are you serious?”

  “Perfectly,” Meg said.

  “We’re not reporters,” Jennifer said. “Really we’re not.”

  Meg didn’t seem ready to believe them.

  “I’ve told every reporter I will not talk about this cabin to them. I will not feed people’s terrible need to think the worst of innocent dead folks.”

  Jennifer experienced a stabbing ice pick of a thought— this was the cabin where that man killed his family.

  “Maybe it’s best if we just call a tow truck and be on our way,” Jennifer said, wanting anew to get out of the cabin and far away from Meg, whose eyes had developed a shifty, tweaked cant.

  This calmed Meg down.

  “I’m just tired of fending off rumors. I’ve been doing it my entire life, and I’m tired of it. I just want to be left in peace.”

  “Of course,” Jennifer said. “But I still think we should call the tow truck.”

  “No,” Meg said sharply.

  She smiled.

  “No,” she repeated. “I won’t allow it. I’m not that much of a monster.”

  She refilled their liqueur glasses and the three of them experienced a newly discomforted level of silence.

  “I suppose now I’ve piqued your interest, haven’t I?” Meg said. “I suppose after my outburst it would be inhospitable not to tell you.”

  “You don’t have to tell us anything,” Jennifer said. Someone had killed himself in this cabin, someone had made a meal of his wife and kids, someone had been dismembered and used for firewood. “I for one would like to get a good night’s sleep.”

  Meg regarded her queerly. “There’s very little chance of that.”

  “How comforting,” Jennifer said. Maureen giggled.

  “It’s not so bad,” Meg said. “It happened a very long time ago.”

  What happened so very long ago, according to Meg, was this. Meg’s great-aunt—a woman named Sarah—was considered a bit of a strange, and possibly cursed, girl. Her entire family had been killed in a fire that she, miraculously, survived. Sarah claimed she escaped from her room in the attic, while her parents and sisters died in their beds on the second floor. She claimed that their rooms were already ablaze, that she’d been led by a voice that guided her through the smoky halls and stairways to the front door and safety.

  An orphan, Sarah was sent to live with a religious aunt in Smithville. Her aunt suspected Sarah of being possessed by an evil spirit, and had her exorcized by a priest, who died of a heart attack days after. A ballet teacher who disliked Sarah was crippled in a train accident. A rival for the affections of a man Sarah loved was facially disfigured by a neighbor’s otherwise mild German shepherd. At the age of twenty-one, Sarah became engaged to a local banker’s son, who was a known ladies’ man, and Sarah was convinced that he was already carrying on a few side affairs. Sarah befriended four of the prettiest girls in town, women with whom her fiancé was known to flirt on his lunch breaks from the bank. She asked them to be her bridesmaids, and the five of them came to this cabin for a weekend before the wedding.

  “According to one of the surviving girls, the five of them got very drunk and ran around in the snow. Then Sarah asked the girls to try on their bridesmaid dresses and stand in front of a mirror so she could see how they looked. The first girl did so. Then the second girl, the third girl. Finally, the fourth girl tried on her dress and stood in front of the mirror. The dresses were high-necked, white. They looked like bridal gowns themselves, with a thin string of silver beads at the neck—like a wire garrote, one of the girls later said. At any rate, the last girl stood in front of the mirror and started to scream. Another girl claimed that her friend started bleeding from the neck, just beneath the silver beads. Soon the entire dress front was a creeping bloom of blood. But when she looked at her friend directly, the dress was white. The blood was visible only in the mirror. Even stranger, however, was this: the girl didn’t seem to know she was bleeding. She thought her dress was on fire. She ran out of the house, clawing at the neckline. She was barefoot, and she disappeared into the woods. The girls looked for her. A search party looked for her, for days. She was never found.”

  Jennifer refilled her liqueur glass and didn’t comment.

  “Sarah sounds like a witch!” Maureen said, thrilled.

  Meg took a long sip of her liqueur. “People will say that about the unlucky, the prescient, the superstitious. Sarah was very superstitious.”

  “Did she marry the banker’s son?” Maureen asked.

  Meg nodded. “She did. And apparently, the man had been having an affair with the girl who disappeared. The police figured the girl had gone crazy with jealousy or guilt and leaped off the bluff just beyond.” Meg gestured toward the wall behind her. “It drops two hundred feet to the Penatoqua River. They assumed her body was swept downstream and out to the Pacific.”

  “Is Sarah still alive?” Jennifer asked.

  “She died twenty-five years ago. She’d always been a dollhouse fanatic, and I think that hobby kept her alive after her husband died. Fly-fishing accident. She went to all the miniaturists’ conventions, even had a store down in Smithville.”

  “Dollhouses,” Jennifer said dully.

  “Our half sister is a dollhouse collector,” Maureen said dopily.

  “She probably prefers the term miniaturist,” Meg said.

  “We actually don’t know what she prefers. We don’t know that much about her,” Jennifer said. She realized that she was drunk, very drunk, in a heavy, syrupy, vaguely seasick way.

  “What Jennifer means is that we didn’t know she existed until recently,” Maureen said. “But we’re all as close as any family now, aren’t we?”

  Jennifer didn’t answer.

  “That was always the problem with Sarah,” Meg said. “The poor girl just wanted a proper family. Tried everything in her power to get one. Every time she got close, however, something went wrong.”

  “Some things simply aren’t meant to be,” Maureen said.

  “Indeed,” Meg said. “Some might say there are those among us who are cursed. We destroy what we think we want once we’re in danger of getting it. I think that’s why Sarah was so fond of her dollhouses. It was the only family she could really control.”

  Meg stared at her liqueur glass, her eyes stunned and sad-seeming.

  “Well,” she said suddenly. “I’ve kept you awake telling you scary stories. It comes with the territory out here. And you girls are probably itching to get to bed.” Meg led them to the side bedroom, where Jennifer had used the phone. She
gave them towels and an oil lamp.

  “I have some old nightshirts in here,” she said, opening the closet. She shoved aside some hanging things wrapped in plastic and retrieved two folded plaid flannel nightshirts from a back shelf.

  “Also,” she said, pausing before the open closet, “I don’t know if either of you are interested, but I have two of Sarah’s bridesmaid dresses.”

  “You do?” Maureen shrieked.

  “I’m not interested,” Jennifer said.

  “I am,” Maureen said. “Can I see them?”

  Jennifer grabbed a towel and a nightshirt and excused herself to the bathroom. The dark of the house closed in around her; the bathroom was lit by a single candle; all she could see was the black silhouette of her head in the mirror as she washed her face in the basin of water Meg had provided. Her heart felt like it was attacking her own insides, an enemy organ, a small ticking bomb. She’d never felt so uneasy, so certain that something was terribly, dreadfully wrong. It was too weird; there were too many spooky coincidences. The dollhouses. The white bridesmaid dresses. The fly-fishing accident. The pictures in the photo album. Meg, whose name she presumed was Margaret. She started to think she’d been coaxed into a trap, unwittingly, like a stupid animal. It made her start to wonder: How much did they know about Helen’s past? How did they even know that she was the person she claimed to be? Their father had certainly never told them about this other daughter, this former wife; they had accepted Helen’s existence because the news had been delivered by a lawyer, and because the monstrous deceit it implied was so completely unlikely. Only a man whom you could never imagine doing such a thing had the potential to do such a thing. That was how she and Maureen and their few surviving relatives had rationalized it. It could never in a million years have happened. Thus, naturally, it had happened.

  But what if it hadn’t? What if Helen was a fake, some kind of resurrected witch, pretending to be their father’s daughter? What if she’d even been involved in their father’s death? His body had never been found; he’d been swept away by a current while fishing alone on a mild stretch of the Penatoqua. The rangers had found his rucksack, his coat, his uneaten lunch. Downstream, they’d found his pole.

  Jennifer splashed some more water on her face, and pressed her shaking hands against her cheekbones. She was drunk, and she knew she was letting her imagination get the best of her. But she couldn’t get Helen’s smiling face out of her head, that innocent, high-voiced and mostly daft way she had of talking that now seemed malice-tinged and eerily sinister.

  When she returned to the bedroom, Meg and Maureen were inspecting a dress spread over the bed’s pompon coverlet.

  “Jennifer, look at this,” Maureen said. She was fingering the fabric of the neckline; the tiny silver beads had tarnished and stained the fabric beneath them a blackish gray.

  “It’s beautiful,” Jennifer said. But she didn’t think it was beautiful. The neck was so narrow it made it hard to swallow just looking at it. And the beads, now that they’d tarnished, looked even less like decoration and more like the blade of a straight-edged razor.

  “Sarah said that these dresses were the best way to test a person’s loyalty,” Meg said. “Those who failed the test would, as she put it, get their eternal deserts.”

  “Superstition or witchcraft?” Maureen asked, clearly not expecting an answer.

  “Can we put that away now?” Jennifer asked, hardly able to keep the panicked testiness from her voice.

  Meg wrapped the dress back in the plastic zipper bag and returned it to the closet. She told the girls to help themselves to bread and jam if they woke early. She wished them a pleasant sleep, and withdrew. Jennifer heard her in the living room, blowing out lamps and candles. With each breath, the dark came closer and closer, a dense, impermeable substance. It made her feel like she was being buried alive.

  “You okay?” Maureen asked.

  “I’m . . . just a little freaked out,” Jennifer admitted.

  “You? Why?”

  “What do you mean, why?”

  “You actually believe that stuff about the blood on the dress? It’s just a stupid ghost story.”

  Jennifer shrugged. “It’s more than just that. It’s . . . everything.”

  Just then she remembered the scrapbook album under the bed. She pulled it out and began flipping through it.

  Maureen grew alarmed. “You don’t have Meg’s permission to look at that.”

  Jennifer put her finger to her lips. She turned the warped cardboard pages until she came to the picture of the bride. This time she clocked the name: Sarah Mills Herrick. She read the small squib of text accompanying the photo. It mentioned that the bride was given away by her aunt and ward, Peggy Dischinger.

  She thrust the album into Maureen’s lap.

  “She looks just like Helen, don’t you think?” Jennifer said.

  Maureen squinted. “Well . . .”

  “Stop it! She looks exactly like Helen!”

  “Okay, maybe a little bit. Don’t get mad just because I don’t agree with you.”

  Jennifer caught her reflection in the mirror above the dresser: again, nothing but a black silhouette. She was becoming a stranger to herself, a blank of negative space.

  “I think you’re drunk,” Maureen said. “And I think you’re overreacting.”

  “I’m not overreacting,” Jennifer said. She turned back a page in the album, to a jaundiced newspaper clipping. The headline read BRIDESMAID VANISHES ON DAVIS CREEK ROAD. There was a photo of a large-lipped, narrow-eyed woman. She appeared feline, self-satisfied, confident. Tragically so, given what happened to her.

  “Maureen!” Jennifer pointed to the article.

  “So?”

  “Meg said she’d never heard of Davis Creek Road.”

  Maureen studied the headline.

  “I’m sure there’s an explanation.”

  “Such as?”

  “Maybe it hasn’t been called that for decades,” she said. “Even the operator had never heard of it.”

  Maureen continued flipping backward through the album. Thirty years earlier—1906—another wedding announcement. Another Helen look-alike, her hair curled and dark, but the face was unmistakably Helen’s face. This woman—named Vera Herrick Dow—was also, according to the accompanying article, “given away by her aunt and ward, Margaret Dischinger.”

  Jennifer bit her lip, wondering how much she wanted to reveal her own paranoia to her sister.

  “Helen was raised by her aunt Margaret,” she said quietly.

  Maureen rolled her eyes. “Please. Helen has nothing to do with this.”

  “I can’t believe you’re not more freaked out,” Jennifer said. “The coincidences are too great. You’re making me feel like I’m crazy.”

  Maureen smiled. “That’s what sisters are for.”

  Maureen got up from the bed and walked toward the closet. She started to take off her clothes—her sweater, her jeans.

  “What are you doing?” Jennifer asked.

  Maureen didn’t answer. She opened the closet door. Jennifer heard the high-pitched whine of a zipper.

  “Maureen!”

  Maureen held the bridesmaid’s dress against her chest. Then she lowered it and stepped into the skirt, pulling it up over her waist, threading her arms through the sleeves.

  She turned around. “Button me up, will you?”

  Jennifer stood numbly. The dress didn’t have buttons; it had many tiny metal hooks running the length of Maureen’s spine, from her waist to just under her hairline.

  The hooks were painstaking.

  “Get the oil lamp,” Maureen said, once Jennifer had finished. “I want to test my loyalty.”

  Maureen walked over toward the mirror. Jennifer approached her from behind.

  “Give it to me,” Maureen said. She grabbed the lamp from Jennifer. The oil sloshed inside the hollow stand, the flame stretched high, blackening the inside of the glass chimney.

  “See?” she sa
id, placing the lamp on the dresser so that it illuminated her front and she was visible, finally. “No blood.”

  Jennifer looked at her sister’s reflection in the mirror. Her plainish features appeared unusually bewitching, in an anemic sort of way.

  “Great. That proves a lot. What does that prove?”

  Maureen didn’t answer her. She appeared stricken, suddenly. Or surprised. She gestured frantically at her neck.

  “Maureen?”

  Maureen reached behind her head and flailed at the buttons. Jennifer realized her sister wasn’t breathing.

  “Maureen!”

  Maureen fell onto the floor and started laughing.

  “You suck,” Jennifer said. But she laughed too. It was a relief, actually, the low-level adrenaline having peaked and now, finally, subsiding entirely, her heart shrinking back into its cage. She realized she was tired. She was drunk and she was, in fact, behaving like a nut.

  Jennifer feigned a kick at Maureen’s middle.

  “That’s supposed to make me feel better?” she asked.

  “No,” Maureen said. “After you try the dress on, then you’ll feel better.”

  “Forget it.”

  “Humor me,” Maureen said.

  “Nope.”

  “Come on. Then you’ll know you’re just imagining shit.”

  Jennifer agreed. Her body, postpanic, felt rubbery and liquid, both weightless and susceptible to the slightest gravitational pull. She helped Maureen unbutton the dress, she removed her own nightshirt, she stepped into the dress’s barbed, crinoline-lined skirt. The sleeves were tight around her arms; the seams, with their disintegrating strips of flashing, prickled. Most offensive was the smell—old lavender and, to her nose, closet dust with a gamey undertone of urine.

  Jennifer turned and looked out the window as Maureen hooked her in—each hook winching tighter the circumference of her ribs, compacting her organs. Beyond her own half-visible reflection, the snow continued to fall. And fall. And fall and fall and fall. It was mesmerizing, like watching the night sky come undone, every fixed point of light shifting in tandem and collecting at the bottom, one large crash site of stars. She felt herself drifting to sleep to the rhythm of all those plummeting ex-planets, her lids lowering just enough to make a scored, lashy muddle of the world.