Riddance. Shelley Jackson
perceiving anything obviously outlandish, one begins to feel that one has entered another world in which planar surfaces curve; parallel lines meet; and up, down, left, and right have all been subtly twisted out of true.
One day the Headmistress handed me the key to this mystery with one of her characteristically gnomic remarks: “A building, like a person, is a free-standing hole.” Like all holes, it has a special affinity with the dead; only consider how many more haunted houses there are than haunted paddocks or playing fields. But this affinity can be amplified, tuned. When a hallway is adjusted with dropped ceilings and wainscoting to the exact proportions of the trachea, larynx, or oral cavity, who knows but what it may even speak.
I do not know whether this contributed to the eerie way that, when the wind blew up from the valley in the late afternoon, and was channeled down the hallways through a great oculus that was winched open at this hour (in which a wedge-shaped piece of wood, very thin at one end, acted as a reed), the hall and indeed the whole building hummed with a note so deep that it was more felt than heard—a mood, not a sound. The doors to the classrooms opening and closing acted as finger holes to a flute, changing the pitch. Over time I was able to pick out more and more elements of this symphony, as for example the grace notes supplied by the almost inaudible whistles and peeps that issued from tiny holes or spiracles drilled in the walls here and there.
After some months of listening to this curious music I realized that I was anticipating its changes. Unlikely as it seemed, the students, teachers, and menials passing through the doors did so in an intricate but repeating pattern. Remarkable! Perhaps the Headmistress had used musical principles to schedule both classes and the rounds of the domestic help—a logistical challenge, no doubt, but theoretically possible. But the building was a perpetual bustle at this time of day: teachers flapping by in a whirl of black robes; students, some loitering, some hurrying, their oversized shoes slipping off their heels to percuss the floor at every step; maids with expressionless faces and exaggeratedly humble posture, passing up, down, and across the halls, closing doors, opening others. Could all this activity really be choreographed? And if so, what was it for?
I was offered on different occasions various answers: The house was a receiving device, in which the students could be made to vibrate in tune with the dead. The house was a pedagogical tool. The house was a philosophical disquisition about language, death, and no doubt, architecture too, given that capacity for recursion for which language is notorious. It was all these things. But I did not really understand its song until I learned who5 had been a tenant at the Cheesehill Home for Wayward Girls, and saw that the house was also a ghost story.
I felt, I would say, relieved. Not just that I had saved my theory by finding the link I had predicted between language (in its architectural form) and loss. But also that there was a familiar, a human basis for the grief that came over me in those moments when, at twilight in the gardens, watching a firefly make its slow way through the still air, I caught a snatch of the school’s eerie song, and looked back to see a woman’s head in silhouette, turning away from a lit window . . .
You may judge how far I had already come from conventional thinking. Ghosts? A commonplace. But the half-heard, half-imagined song of an old house, that confounded and even, I will admit, frightened me. Why then do I find myself humming it now?—in a manner of speaking, at any rate, it being pitched so deep. I do not transpose it into a higher register. No, I hum it in its own register, which is—as I said—that of emotion: I hum it with my soul. It does not make me happy. But then I have often noticed that the behaviors people feel compelled to repeat are not necessarily those that make them happy.
There is a whole wing of the school, incidentally, that has no material form. It exists only in the form of verbal descriptions, rumors, and reminiscences.
Letters to Dead Authors, #2
Dear Mr. Melville,
It has come to my attention that you are dead. I wish I had known that before writing my last letter; I would have expressed myself differently. I had naturally hoped to persuade you to come to the aid of my school. A testimonial from a great man, a national treasure—
But a corpse cannot write a letter to the Times.
A corpse cannot read a letter, either. That is common sense. Perhaps I am a zany for writing this; perhaps it is true what Mrs. Brock and the other hens at the Harmonial Sisterhood said of me. But is it really so much more sensible to levitate tables, and converse with dead Lincolns, and have your likeness taken with ectoplasm pluming from your nostrils, as Victoria Littlebrow did last August in Chicago, at the home of the Beatific Twins?
Which reminds me: I hope my last letter did not give you the impression that I am one of those Very Veiled Ladies clutching at the cold hands of drowned daughters and overlooking the ice bucket in the medium’s lap. My researches are driven by a passion for inquiry, not by wishful thinking, and are pursued on the very latest equipment, as the Reflectograph; Communigraph; Dynamistograph, or Cylinders of Matla; and many other devices of original design.
My students receive, in addition to vocational training, a superior general education. Here history is taught by people who lived it, Boolean algebra explained by Boole himself. Our students might study thermodynamics with Jim Maxwell or natural selection with Chaz Darwin. Our school is a hive of industry. Even now, from behind the paneling comes a dry, insectile chirring: my stutterers practicing their scales in the next room, under the bloodshot eye of Mr. Lieu. Some of them cannot pronounce the letter A. Some the letter B, or C, or D. And I have lately spotted (in our little town of Cheesehill of all places) an E, and scheme to bring her to us. Eventually we will silence the whole alphabet.
Do you know, once I could not pronounce my own name? It does something to a child, something I intend to do to my students. I have assigned them new names according to their gifts. You are the ’d’ms and ’v’s of a new Eden, I tell them.
Why do I continue to trouble your repose, you may ask: Are there no living authors to whom I can turn for guidance or companionship? Perhaps I am more comfortable with the dead than the living, though there seems to me scant difference between a dead and a living writer. This is not so much because dead writers seem alive still in their words, as because the living ones seem already dead in theirs.
A book is a block of frozen moments—of time without time, which can nonetheless be reintroduced to time, by a reader who runs her attention over it at the speed of living. Just so does a traveler turn a landscape into a sequence of moments, in one of which she glimpses a javelina disappearing into an arroyo, in another, the fence she can hop for a shortcut home. The comparison is not frivolous: In the book, the author’s voice has become a place.
This place is the land of the dead.
I do not mean that figuratively. I consider writers my fellow necronauts, pulling on their Ishmaels and their Queequegs like mukluks and trudging across the frozen tundra of the page.
Incidentally, you would marvel if you could see me, for I am wearing a cunningly constructed device that pulls open the mouth and stretches the tongue, which in my opinion can never be too long. On the latter I am wearing a sort of costume made of paper. One of my principle communicants on the Other Side, Cornelius Hackett, said something today (through my mouth, of course) that I did not quite make out, but that may have been “little dress.” It is also possible, as one student suggested, that it was “littleness” (humility?) or even “fickleness.” Though to what in this world have I been as faithful as I have been, my whole life long, to death?
I will know soon enough if my “little dress” pleases the dead. It certainly pleases me to see, in the mirror, my neatly turned-out tongue jumping in my mouth, like a pupil at morning calisthenics. On the other hand, my shadow on the wall, wagging with the flame, is fearsome. It almost looks like the head of someone who has been partially flayed with a blunt instrument, possibly a spoo—
I just very nearly set my hair on fire with the candle! And then, in putting myself to rights, scorched the ruffle on my tongue. Let this remind me to keep my