Riddance. Shelley Jackson
to rest on the signature at the bottom, I thrust back my chair (scoring four claw marks in the varnish—I would lament those later) and strode into the kitchen to stare into the sink with unseeing eyes, a mad conviction growing in me that not only did the Vocational School live on, but so did that exceptional, rather dreadful, and indubitably deceased woman whose acquaintance I had made through a pile of yellowing papers, dreams, and the whispers of drainpipes and dead leaves. That the letter writer’s claims were true. Oh, not her claims to copyright, those certainly had no legal merit, but her claims to be the fourth-generation reincarnation—in the special sense of a person channeling another’s ghost—of Sybil Joines.
Of course, any halfway competent forger could reproduce the capsizing loops and botched cloverleafs of that unmistakeable signature. My conviction was not rational. Let us say that I was possessed by it.
Below the signature was a URL; I typed it into my browser and found myself regarding a plausible academic website. Vintage photograph of the Vocational School on the masthead, stock images of alleged students with pencils poised, application instructions for would-be distance learners. You may ask why I did not turn up this website in my initial research, and indeed I asked myself the same question. Later I learned that it had only just been launched; I must have been one of its first visitors. Once again I had the uncanny feeling that the SJVS was created expressly for me, was summoned forth by my interest in it, towing its history behind it like a placenta.
A couple of phone calls connected me to someone who, in a hoarse, imperious voice that crackled like an old Edison recording, identified herself as Sybil Joines. I addressed her with awed courtesy and agreed to everything she said. Placated, she eventually warmed to me. Not only did she consent to the publication of this anthology,1 but she gave me access to a great deal of immensely valuable material in the Vocational School’s own archives—much more material, in fact, than I can include here. (I hold out hope for an omnibus edition.)
A note to scholars: Any historian of the Vocational School is faced with peculiar difficulties. Its scribes and archivists alike were in agreement that a self is a mere back-formation of a voice that itself belongs to no one, or to the dead. Thus authorship would be a vexed question even if all Vocational School documents were signed, as many were not. The current headmistress of the Vocational School, for instance, derives her authority from the demonstration that she is the mouthpiece for the previous headmistress, who was the mouthpiece for the previous headmistress, and so on. In a sense, she is who she is precisely because she is not who she is, and to insist too stringently on biographical “fact” is to miss the point.
It is a fault of our age to consider all that is eccentric—and by eccentric I mean merely and precisely what lies farther than usual from a certain, conventionally defined, probably illusory center—as representing only one of two things: the symptom of a malady whose cure would restore the patient to a place in the center; or a new center, toward which all must hasten. What is true, we nearly all agree on; what we nearly all agree on must, we think, be true. But I would suggest that there are minority truths, never destined to hold sway over the imagination of the entire human race, and furthermore, ideas—less defensible, but to me, even more precious—that are neither true nor false but (I have sat here this age trying to compose a marrowsky better than fue or tralse, but hang it:) crepuscular. One might even say, fictional. Entertaining them, we feel what angels and werewolves must feel, that between human and inhuman there is an open door, and a threshold as wide as a world.
Because I am a—faintly regretful—member of the majority, and know my way back to the center, despite my excursions to its fringes, I can speak to something that interests true eccentrics not at all: the utility of the crepuscular. For no one has ever got to a new majority truth, a new center, without passing through these twilight zones and thus eccentrizing themselves.
But for every colonist there are countless expeditionists who will wander forever through deliciously ineffable sargassos, and when they write home, communicate both less and more than their correspondents would wish. For in the crespuscular every word is a marrowsky, if it is not one of those stranger compounds, those werewords, for which there is no name (word-ferns, word-worms, word-mists and -algae). What we know as meaning is not the principle cargo of such words. The Headmistress speaks this language like a native, for while the Vocational School may have appeared on county maps in the vicinity of Cheesehill, Massachusetts, its real address was in the crepuscular zone.
Because the eccentric troubles the center like a lingering dream, there has been a great deal of nonsense written in recent years about the Headmistress of the SJVS. Some have gone so far as to doubt her existence (“And quite right, too,” I can hear her say). But she did exist, was as sane as any person of original views passionately held, and whatever fugitive pains urged her on, her central motivation was and always would be the hunger for understanding. Though it is necessary to stress that for her the deepest understanding would feel like incomprehension, and would be communicable only in the way that a disease is.
So although there are mysteries to interest both philosophers and policemen in these pages, I do not propose to offer any solutions. My vision of a scholarly work with the popular appeal of a crime novel has exposed itself for the mercenary fantasy it was. The eccentric, muscled back into the white light of judgment, is just so much more center. Its value, however, is in the darkness that it radiates from the farthest reaches of the spectrum, discovering, in the black-and-white page, shades of imperial violet.
Anyone who has visited the land of the dead, in fact or fancy (and there is not as great a difference between the two as you might suppose), will have guessed that this book can be entered at any point. For less experienced travelers, I have planned a route. Its reduplicate tracks, laid down over a single evening—one by the Headmistress, one by her stenographer—will convey the reader surely, if not safely, to the end. Interspersed between these two interwoven strands, according to a strictly repeating pattern, are additional readings of a more scientific, sociological, or metaphysical nature. Those who, lacking a scholar’s interest in minutiae, want to get to the end more quickly, may wish to skip over these parts, and who knows, may even be wise to do so. But true eccentrics may find in them something—a map, a manual—that they have long been seeking.
1. The Final Dispatch
Dictated by Headmistress Joines to Stenographer #6 (J. Grandison),
November 17, 1919
This remarkable document was dictated by Headmistress Joines from the land of the dead over the course of one long night, her last, through a transmitting device of her own invention. All expeditions to the netherworld were accompanied by a running commentary in this manner. Though often disjointed and equivocal, these dispatches not only provided invaluable data on unexplored regions of the necrocosmos, but were a mortal necessity for the necronaut, for whom the narrative thread was quite literally a lifeline.
Because we live in time, when we visit the land of the dead, we must carry our own time with us, or experience literally nothing and never even know we were ever there. Time is speech-time, according to Vocational School doctrine: We talk our way through the timeless land of the dead in a sort of bathysphere made of words, creating both ourselves and the landscape through which we move. In a very real sense the dispatch is the journey. This one was executed in haste, poor health, and emotional extremity, and in consequence, is more than usually disorienting. Only the hardiest and most experienced readers should risk it.
Although it conveys the impression of a single unbroken monologue, we know from the testimony of Joines’s stenographer and successor, Jane Grandison, that it was interrupted by intervals of silence of varying duration. Since silence is just as important as speech in Vocational School thought, I have given some thought to how I might reproduce its intervalling effect for readers who might flip flippantly through blank pages or other crude transliterations.
Eventually I decided to divide the dispatch into its longest continuous parts, interpolating other documents between them. It should be borne in mind, however, that they do make up a single unabridged transmission. Thus the ideal reader will