Riddance. Shelley Jackson
four in the afternoon, and will come to the end at about the same hour as the Headmistress came to hers. —Ed.
Borne on racing white-streaked black. Swirling to the glassy brink of the cataracts, then plunging in din and tumult so constant as to seem a kind of stillness. Around me others fall, so many as to seem like no one. We thunder down. Then smash against the fundament of the world. One smth smithereen, I flash past scenes too fleeting to collect. But someone is speaking, and as I recognize the voice, ground forms under my feet. The others stream on, forsaking me.
[Static.]
Are you receiving?
[Static, sound of breathing.]
Someone rises from the deluge. A bony big woman tented in mourning crepe and bombazine bothered all over with jet beads and netting. The great curved shield of her bosom has more of whalebone than of flesh behind it. The glossy carapace brings beetles to mind. An important personage. She is gripping a lorgnette and glaring about as if looking for someone.
A suspicion dawns on me that I am speaking of myself.
The personage opens her, my mouth. I am saying something. It is this, that I am saying something, which is this, that I am saying something, which is [several words indistinct]—
Stop.
Compose yourself.
Resume.
Say that my name is Sssss . . . Sybil Adjudicate Joines; that I am yet something short of two score and ten years old, my precise age being uncertain due to frequent prosecutions of what is, in effect, a kind of time travel; that I have worn crepe from the age of eleven and do not now expect to p-p-p-p-put it aside.
Please correct phonotactic violations.
Say that I am the headmistress of a vocational school, that I teach children with what were once known as speech impediments to channel the dead. Having been one myself, once. A child, that is. With a stutter. Say that the dead speak through me. Or let them say so, it’s all one. Say that I dispatch this message from the land of the did dad dead, where I have spent many pleasant hours. (They aren’t hours, there are no hours here, but we would be here all day, if there were days here, if I tried to explain how the lack of time drags on regardless.) Say that I live at the school with my students, that they are like family to me, which might sound agreeable if one did not know that my mother was hanged and my father burned alive.
Say that a child is missing.
[Static, sound of breathing.]
Are you receiving?
The Stenographer’s Story
J. Grandison, November 17, 1919
The young Jane Grandison transcribed the Headmistress’s final dispatch from her usual post beside the great brass trumpet of the receiving device. She apparently composed the following autobiographical text during the aforementioned lulls in that dispatch, scrolling a new sheet of paper into her typewriter whenever the Headmistress fell silent, and replacing it with the old one when the Headmistress resumed. I imagine two growing piles of paper on the table beside her, first one, then the other mounting higher (this is not the place to venture an opinion on the vexed question of whether the piles ever got mixed up), though the reference to “night” in the second paragraph, which might be taken to suggest that she did not begin her own text until Joines’s was already well under way, introduces doubt as to the accuracy of this picture. Nonetheless I have reproduced this alternating movement here, as true to the spirit if not the reality of her method. So, like the Final Dispatch, the Stenographer’s Story may be found distributed through the volume.
In addition to offering invaluable insight into the personalities of both the first and the second Sybil Joines (if I may commit the ontological solecism of differentiating them), the text gives a vivid picture of the first impression made by the Vocational School on a nervous instrument so finely tuned as to suggest a diagnosis of neurasthenia, though I am no expert. —Ed.
The Headmistress’s tiny, tinny voice has fallen silent. The brass trumpet flower—Pythian oracle, hierophant—is unreverberant, its mechanism still. Only a faint hissing emanating from among the ivory hammers, copper coils, India-rubber bladders, and paper diaphragms tucked like organs inside its mahogany case attests that the channel is open, the miracle continues.
So I have a minute, and maybe more, to figure out what to do. The night is long. There will be time for everything that is required. But to know my duty it will be necessary to know who I am. When did that begin to be a question? Maybe already that first day.
I was eleven years old, could write my name backwards and upside down, but not pronounce it, and had seen several dead people already. The prospect of hearing them, too, did not particularly alarm me. So I had informed my aunt when, with exaggerated surprise, she brought me the letter from the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children: “We are pleased to offer you a place . . . Room and board . . . Reply soonest.” Since I saw that she had made up her mind to be rid of me, pride would have prompted me to say so in any case, but I spoke as I felt. Now, as the glossy, black, indignant-looking automobile we had retained in Springfield brought me ever closer to the school, my breath did come quicker, but it was with curiosity and excitement, not dread.
I braced my hand against the ceiling as the car jolted over a rock. The road had deteriorated after Cheesehill and was now little more than two ruts running in parallel. My escort, a pinched, powder-white woman in weeds, rapped twice on the back of our driver’s seat with her cane.
“You there! We shall be rattled to pieces!”
Seal-brown fingers tightened on the wheel. “Got to beat that storm, ma’am, with the roads in this condition, or I won’t be making it home this side of tomorrow.” Indeed for some time the wind had carried the tang of rain, and a break in the trees showed the thunderheads heaping up over the ridge, though on us the sun still shone.
“Storm? Storm? Are you frightened of a storm, at your age? If need be, the school can put you up for the night.”
The driver made no reply but drove, if anything, faster.
The dead people I had seen were my mother and Bitty. Of influenza. My father might have been dead too for all I knew, having skived off before Bitty was weaned. Truthfully, to hear them speak again would have been a very great shock. But I did not at all expect to. Their silence, when it came, had been complete.
My reflection slid stilly over the hurtling trees, leaning over me in an admonishing way, like a censorious second self. I looked steadily through it, drinking in the strangeness of all I saw, wonderful to me, however unremarkable in itself: dark woods; muddy fields; a small, rank, weedy lake where, off the stove-in, upturned bottom of a red rowboat, a solitary heron was just tilting into flight. I half rose in sympathy with its effortful ascent.
“Stop fidgeting, girl.”
One might sink a hatpin in Miss Exiguous, I thought, coolly assessing the jet-tipped pair anchoring her black felt hat. Without returning my glance, she shifted uneasily on the seat and I perceived with dreary unsurprise that, like my aunt, she was one of those who feel toward colored folk the way some feel toward a spider or a snake: that even the mildest members of the species make uneasy company.
Deliberately I returned my gaze to the window, though now that I was sitting back, I could see nothing of interest: only branches, sky, myself. I was a runty girl, small, dark, and odd looking, as I could have confirmed in the glass had I wished. A sufficiency of mirrors had already taught me not to hope. Not for a pretty face, at least, and the kind of luck that comes with it.
Not that my face was hideous, but it had a plain, hard, assessing look incompatible with beauty. It expressed my nature truthfully enough. I was not a gay girl.
Now I kept that face turned, with the pertinacity of a praying mantis, toward where I imagined the Vocational School to be. I had been shown