Riddance. Shelley Jackson

      The Stenographer’s Story, contd.

      Another pause. The room is quiet, though today’s events have left their spoor: the smell of smoke and lamp oil, shivers of glass, a stain on the carpet. Nothing that cannot wait, so I shall resume what I can still call “my own” narrative, though I keep wanting to type not “I,” but “she” or “the girl,” probably because, as the car rattled on, the feeling only grew that I was not myself, but some third party—an unattributed pronoun in an unfamiliar story. The clouds came thicker; the day grew darker; we turned at last onto a better-kept road, and almost at once deserted it again for a narrow unmarked drive that plunged down into a thrashing, tree-choked ravine and across a swollen brook, then turned and followed this for a while, crossing it several more times before veering away across slanted muddy fields.

      “That,” said Miss Exiguous, extending her cane across me to rap the window, “is the Vocational School.” Though the sun duly broke through the clouds, illuminating the scene, I saw only a clutch of swaying trees, huddled together as if conspiring to hide something from view. But as we slid closer, these parted and fell back as if in capitulation, and there it stood amid its several outbuildings, black and angled, like a house in a book in which something frightening is going to happen. Black birds screamed and fell through the wind. A few orphaned raindrops tapped out a telegraphic message on the roof of the car.

      Once more we crossed the stream, now wide and shallow and edged with rushes, and motored up to a heavy iron gate, through whose grim old-fashioned ornamentation an incongruously bright new chain had—no. That was added only recently, after the troubles began. The gate stood open when I arrived (if with no great air of welcome), had probably not been shut in years, in fact, as weeds grew up through it. So we rolled through without hindrance, then hissed and spat up the gravel drive to a point still somewhat short of the entrance, as if the driver did not care to come too close.

      “Out you get, missy,” he said, extending a hand in through the open door, for though Miss Exiguous was already walking up the drive I had not moved. I scooted stiffly across the seat. For a moment I clung to his lean long fingers as he looked curiously down at me, and then he gently detached himself, went around and wrestled my battered suitcase, a relict of my father, out of the back. “I’ll carry that in for you,” he said, but I saw that he was eager to leave, and shook my head against his protests. “Sure? Then I’ll be off. No, child, you keep that—well, all right, thank you, then.” He glanced at Miss Exiguous. “I hope you know what you’re getting yourself into, or maybe it’s better if you don’t. Well, so long! Keep your chin up!” The car slithered as it backed and turned, and shot a piece of gravel into the back of my leg. I cried out and bent over, clapping a hand to the spot.

      When I stood up, the feeling of estrangement that, until then, had been contained within me broke free to affect all that I saw. Everything was hard and shining and separate. The drive was separate from the shrubs on its verge, in which separate sparrows shrieked, and from the trees beyond. The trees, unnaturally bright against the storm-dark sky, were separate from one another and from the field on which their separate shadows fell, and the shadows, too, were separate from the field on which they were inflicted by the light. The grass drew itself apart from the mud, the mud from the thistles whose stickers were very similar to one another and yet not the same, and the thistles from the sky. And everything shrank from the school.

      Miss Exiguous had disappeared under its tall narrow portico, where a door must have opened to receive her and closed again. The car, too, was gone, and with it my last chance, I thought confusedly. But to do what, go where? I felt the bones in my fingers, crushed against the handle of my suitcase. From the building, a low hum or murmur rose, swelling and sinking with the wind.

      I am invited, I thought stoutly, I have a right to be here, and I started up the drive. The front door seemed very far away. My suitcase, big enough—yes, quite big enough to transport a body—knocked painfully against my ankle bone at every step. In each perforation of my too-large oxfords, a crescent shadow waxed and waned as its angle to the light changed, or disappeared in my own larger shadow, and inside my loose black stockings, on which tiny fuzz balls clung, my ankles individually flexed and strained. All these phenomena were separate from one another, and so was I separate from them all and even from myself, this girl crunching up a white gravel drive, to the very foot of the entrance steps. This is what they call a haunted house, I said to myself. It is not what I thought. The ghost—I am the ghost.

      But the door was opening and a white girl in a school uniform was coming out. “H-h-hello,” I said, loud with relief, “I am—”

      Then I saw that her eyes were taped shut, her mouth open not in greeting but for some other exercise. She felt her way to the top of the stairs and started down, feeling for the edge of each step with her foot. The shadow of the portico slid off her head, like a veil snagged on a splinter, and the sun slipped a bright sickle into her mouth. When her investigating foot discovered the flagstone at the base of the stairs, she stepped confidently forward onto the drive, and struck against me with the full length of her body.

      It had not occurred to me to move. It had in fact not occurred to me that I was really there, and could be touched.

      I staggered back, dropping my suitcase, and for a moment I held the hard little chicken wings of her elbows and we struggled together. It was not clear whether we were trying not to fall or to accomplish some other project entirely. She was even shorter than I, so I could see how her skull showed through her thin flat hair like something rising through silty water that one had much rather stayed where it was. A fine white down covered her forehead, barely thickening into eyebrows, and hazed even her sharp cheekbones, on one of which a mud-colored mole stood out. Through the blindfold I could see her eyeballs shift as though to follow something moving inside her head.

      Now she drew herself up, forcing out a series of little huffs through her nostrils, as her mouth,