Riddance. Shelley Jackson

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СКАЧАТЬ (myself excepted) on a venture of the highest importance to our world today, tomorrow, and yesterday: communication with the dead.

      Which brings me to my point. I am the Founder and Headmistress of a boarding school and research facility, the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children, where we teach children to channel the dead and, finally—though a little less finally than everyone else—to travel to their realm. My pupils are all stutterers. Why? Because stuttering, like writing, is an amateur form of necromancy.

      I was myself a child when the first ghost spoke through the frozen moment in my mouth. The study of the dead became my passion. In playground games of school, I taught the other children everything I learned. As a young woman, I sought out the notable spirit mediums of the day, and eagerly applied to them for instruction, but was disappointed; if they had answers (and most of them were mountebanks), they guarded them closely. I was thrown back upon the dead, who did not fail me. I developed my own methods, and having seen firsthand the need for vocational training in the trade, resolved to found a school for spirit mediums.

      Returning to Cheesehill, I poured my funds into the purchase and rehabilitation of a derelict property well suited to my needs, and with my childhood companions as talent scouts, scraped together an entering class—each and every one a stutterer like me. Their speech was broken; they were cracked vessels; I would make them perfect. Not by sealing the cracks! By sweeping away the last remaining shards. I would raise a new Eden, in which a primordial silence would rise again, and the din of human voices would no longer drown out the quiet confidences of the dead.

      The first time I traveled to the land of the dead, it was an accident, and I nearly lost my life. It was also by accident that, crying out, I found my voice and with it, eventually, the way home. For to travel there one must summon up in words, not just the ground one walks upon, but even oneself, walking. My life’s work, like yours, depends on my ability to construct a convincing fiction. Indeed, I would welcome any “tips” you might have for me! But I am seeking more material help as well.

      I have recently lost a student. It will happen, given the natural vivacity of children and the nature of our studies. But now my school is under seige. Philistines with no more understanding of Eternity than may be gleaned from the platitudes carved on tombstones are baying at the gates. Save the children! is their rallying cry. Rank hypocrisy, as these children are those same “stuttering imbeciles,” “degenerates,” and “mental defectives” they were so eager to pack off to any quack who promised to cure them or keep them out of sight. Emily herself (not a prepossessing child) would be amazed to hear the fanciful terms in which she is described in the press. Precious bundle? Little lamb? A big bundle, more mutton than lamb! Her doting parents’ treasure, their pearl without price? She knew exactly what she was worth to them.

      But as a result of this rhetoric (for the land of the living is also shaped by words), some of our more excitable parents have already withdrawn their children from their studies, with a catastrophic loss of revenue to the school.

      May I press you for a donation? Even a loan would be of signal service. I have poured the whole of my inheritance into outfitting my school and now must scrimp and scrape to buy necessities. I know your means are modest, but the need is great, the cause honorable. And one day the world will flock to my door, and then this grateful recipient of your patronage will have the wherewithal to make you very comfortable indeed.

      At present, I confess, the case is otherwise. To put it baldly, I am broke.

      Expecting your imminent reply, I am,

      Very sincerely yours,

      Miss Sybil Joines

      Postscript: If you are not in the position to lend me money, could you lend me, instead, your name? A testimonial from a great man like yourself could do much to warm the frigid public eye toward this earnest Seeker.

      2. The Final Dispatch, contd.

      Someone is missing, a child is missing, calamity, havoc, ruination, snatch her back, fetch her home, remember her, recover her, save her!

      These words pl pulse through me, urging me onward, and yet they have no meaning.

      Save her? From death? It’s life that’s the emergency. Death is the haven—sequined bough to which the sparrow homes, beetle’s duff and worm’s earth, whale’s harpoonless hiding place. This I teach. Maybe a little too well: my kids go early and eager. It is a lie that only a Munch (rhymes with lunch) could believe, that my students are driven by the rigors of their training to destroy themselves; though I am rigorous. Death is not departure but arrival. We are latchkeys kept by wanderers against a future homing. With our last strength, we fit our bodies into this locked world, and turn.

      But this time, when I saw the barrel rolling, heard the oiled pins click, I stuck a stick in it. Dove after her, howling to the shades to hold her back.

      Her who?

      [Static, sound of breathing.]

      Finster. Eve Finster, that must have been her name, the girl I sought. Unless it was another girl, but I don’t know who, but it might have been.

      Ahead, I glimpsed her narrow shoulders twisting in her pus-yellow organdy, what nonsense, her black linsey-woolsey, a little scorched, as she wriggled trout-like through the [inaudible]. Then she and I alike were lost in din and tumult to fetch up here, that is, nowhere, that is, in the land of the dead.

      White everywhere, complicating into color, into form, fading again to white. White sky. White plains onto which white cataracts thunder down from an impossible height: souls, pouring without surcease into death, and roaring as they fall. The cataracts—the one stable landmark, the one feature on which all travelers report—are in such incessant motion that they seem immobile: one immense hoary figure, frozen in place, head bowed. Sometimes a bulge travels down the length of it: a fire in a shirtwaist factory, a great ship sunk in icy waters, a [word indistinct].

      But my business is not with the deluge, but with the one drop that does not belong here. To find her is the problem. Like all children she is changeable as thought, passing through form after fugitive form—newt, spoon, little toy car. She does not remember who she is. So I remind her. “Finster!” For a moment her name imposes order on the flux and I see her. Then she changes.

      I lower a bucket to scoop her up, this bucket here, which is enameled red and emblazoned fire and has a crescent of clean water swinging and ringing around the bottom, and is a bucket I made to catch her in, am making now, as I describe it. For I too make my changes, but with method. The bucket comes up dry and different, oaken staves and rusted hoops and a fly on the cracked rim rubbing its hands. But I recognize her, think I do, in the fly, which flies; I follow. Road, I propose, and a road pours out of me. She is a tiny black speck against the, say, warm brown dust. A net, I suggest, and raising it, stride toward the speck. Dust rims the stiff black hem of my skirt. I bring down the net. She scoots away: wind-up mouse, thistledown, cloud.

      I gather my resources, my pitons and plotlines, grammar hooks and grapnels, and go after her. The cloud, a small ground-loving one, leaves the road for a path I do not know (I who thought I made all the paths), her own path, thread-thin and tangled, through dendrite forms that one might call trees, in an optimistic mood. I feel something unfamiliar: Fear? Delight? I plant the butterfly net by the path; call it a mailbox, one of a battalion of mailboxes pertaining, mostly, to cranks and hermits, and frequently upset by hooligans; and the path widens to a road.

      I СКАЧАТЬ