Riddance. Shelley Jackson
that the victim was already dead when immolated, having been struck with a blunt object from behind with enough force to stave in the skull. Observing no particular abundance of blood near the site, the police detective gave his opinion that the fatal blow was struck elsewhere, the body having been transported at some point during the night to this low-lying and densely wooded part of the school grounds and there set alight. The clothes and personal effects of the victim were presumably consumed by the fire. A bottle of paraffin was found beside the body.
To add to the macabre circumstances surrounding this grisly find, the Headmistress of the school, Miss Sybil Joines, was discovered deceased of natural causes in the early morning hours of the night in question. A representative of the school, Jane Grandison, stenographer, denied any knowledge of the Regional School Inspector’s whereabouts after about 4 p.m. when he left the Headmistress’s office to conduct a final inspection of the grounds.
Her offer to attempt to contact the deceased, employing the method of spirit communication taught at the school, was declined by the authorities, who called it a “tasteless publicity stunt.”
The student who discovered the body was not available for interview but we have learned that her mother has withdrawn her from enrollment at the school, citing extreme emotional distress.
The police are interested in questioning a drifter seen loitering around the grounds earlier in the week.
I read, then reread the clipping, from which little polygonal shards kept drifting down to settle in the nap of the stained and smelly carpet. I had never heard of the Sybil Joines Vocational School. That alone would have pricked my curiosity, since I had flattered myself that I knew quite everything there was to know about the spiritualist movement in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century America. But my discovery also resonated with another of my research interests, the proliferation and popularization of what one might call speech studies: stuttering “cures”; elocution; orthoëpy; Major Beniowski’s “anti-absurd” or “phrenotypic” orthography (it luks lyk this), Pitman and Gregg shorthand, and other methods of supplanting the arbitrary signs of written language with a sort of “score” based on the sounds of speech. I am only human: the murder intrigued me too. Had the mystery been solved? Suppose I could solve it?—with the methods of scholarship, of course!
I closed the book on its interesting passenger and pressed it to my chest. I had the sudden feeling that someone was looking over my shoulder: not another ghost but an up-and-coming scholar in my own discipline, slavering to take from me the “lead” that was—but for how long?—mine, all mine.
But I think I felt something more than greed, even then: the sensation that a hole had suddenly gaped in a world that had hitherto seemed decently if not prudishly buttoned up. Most of us avert our eyes when this happens, but I looked. And saw . . . A flutter of aquamarine and viridian, a pounce of stripes, a spatter of—molten ice, frozen fire—the smell of music! I express myself clumsily, and yet I believe some of you at least will know what I mean when I say that my first thought was Yesss and my second, I remember this. How indeed could I have forgotten that time I burrowed under the covers to read by flashlight past my bedtime in that warm and golden tent-cave—delicious illicitry—and then, thinking I was crawling back up toward the head of the bed, actually made my way deeper, through a tunnel that went on and on, from whose roof fine roots stretched down to fascinate my forehead, until I came up in the center of a snow-thick forest, where some mechanical angels were rehearsing a hymn of clicks and chirps before an audience of spiders? I had longed for such another opening my whole life.
I suddenly noticed a pair of eyes shining back at me from a gap in the opposite bookcase and started, dropping the book. Doubtless it was again the cat. The proprietor jerked aside the towel-curtain and stood looking at me without enthusiasm. “None of these books are at all valuable,” he said. “Please feel free to toss them around.”
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll be buying this one.” He worked out the tax with bad grace and a pocket calculator, but took my money, though he watched the book vanish into my satchel with evident regret.
My subsequent researches did nothing to dispel my amazement. Even today I find myself marveling that an institution that in its heyday raised a public scandal on more than one occasion, and whose theoreticians pursued a vigorous debate with notable intellectuals of the time, should have been effectively forgotten for so many decades. The decline of the spiritualist movement explains it only in part. I believe the memory was actively repressed: If the dead do live on, the public would prefer, on the whole, not to know about it.
Once I began to look, however, I found references to the Vocational School everywhere. Other articles about the murder turned up on microfiche, and I assembled enough supporting material for a modest paper. It was well received. I began another, more substantial paper, aware that other scholars’ interest had been piqued, but confident that I had staked my claim.
It is a common occurrence, and not just among scholars, for a new obsession to awaken reverberations in the most unlikely places. Probably there is nothing really uncanny about it; the observer is newly alert to these echoes, that’s all. But it was pretty peculiar, all the same, how rapidly my archives grew. In a thrift store in Madison I found a Vocational School yearbook (containing some very interesting photographs of school activities). Walking down a street in Philadelphia, I was dealt a blow on the temple by a paper airplane that had spiraled down from some open window above me, accompanied by muffled laughter; it proved to be a page from a book about the spiritualist community Lily Dale on which the Vocational School was mentioned in passing. And in one of a number of bags of interesting old books and papers left on a New York curb, as by indiscriminate and probably illiterate housecleaners clearing an apartment whose former occupant had died, I found, tied up with twine, a sheaf of yellowing papers covered in the characters of an unfamiliar alphabet, each page numbered, dated, and labeled in a childish hand, “Betty Clamm, SJVSGSHMC”!
The Internet contains, it sometimes seems, all stories that have been and will be told. It is like that mythical Interstitial Library whose stacks readers sometimes wander in dreams, and whose itinerant librarians sometimes leave on your pillow astronomical bills for library fines levied on overdue books that you have never heard of, bills written in the already faint and soon to disappear stains of those mysterious night sweats from which you awaken terrified and out of breath. So I was not too surprised to stumble upon a reference to the Vocational School in the moribund listserv of a group of scholars whose common interest and broader topic was the work of a French philosopher whose name I did not recognize and cannot now recall but who seemed to employ a great number of obscure but wonderfully poetic terms composed of unlikely combinations or odd usages of otherwise ordinary words. I was skimming the discussion, which got quite heated, enjoying the feeling that I didn’t know what was going on, when I caught a phrase in passing: “. . . like those turn-of-the-century concerns that lined their pockets through the spiritualist fad, e.g., the SJVS.” Naturally other scholars would have come upon references to the Vocational School somewhere in their reading, just as I had. What surprised me a little more was the reference I spotted a few days later in a customer review of a pair of waterproof loafers I was considering. Well, one does not expect to find reference to obscure cultural institutions of another century (“like something an SJVS student would wear”) in the context of protective footwear! Still, they were of a conservative style and it was not really difficult to imagine a middle-aged scholar—say, one of the members of the aforementioned listserv—pulling them on and trudging off through the winter slush to his library kiosk.
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