The truth scared me.
“Because you can’t,” you said, and I feigned not to care.
I remember your face then, the way you’d posed so that the shadow cut your face right in half. I remember the look in your eyes in that moment, the way they got hard and like a set of mirrors, like you weren’t there anymore or you’d gone way down deep inside yourself.
“Katie, don’t—” I cried, but it was too late.
Already the light seemed to have gone all watery and pale, like it was shining down from a faraway star. And a minute after that came the cold, a black hateful kind of cold that made your breath frost the air, and that on a summer day.
That’s how you know. The cold. Like vapors from the grave. The rest is just tricks without the cold.
And you were always a tricky one, weren’t you, Kate?
Tricksy, tricksy, tricksy. But not everything was tricks. Not Hydesville. And not that day in the hotel, either. Not when all that light went out of the room, and the cold started up and the tap, tap, tapping began, like a man with claw hammer deep buried in a mine.
Oh, I remember. It was a terrible thing, Katie, a terrible thing, your eyes rolling up to whites like that and you sitting straight like a rod had been driven down your spine, your hands upturned upon your crossed knees, giggling as the room grew darker and darker still, until I could not see to see. The tapping got louder and this time there was no playacting. This time there were no tricks, were there, Katie?
How used to them I had become by then, all the posing and the playacting, all the tricks! I could summon up the taps myself, Katie — sometimes anyway. I won’t deny that, no matter how much it would please you. I had a touch of the gift myself—
But you—
I remember. I remember it all so clearly. The way the room seemed to fall away into a black void. The way that blackness seized us up so careless, like a pair of rag dolls, boneless and limp, and carried us off. Like being caught in an undertow and swept out to sea, it was, the black stuff pouring in at your mouth and your nostrils, shoving aside everything that was you, until you drowned in it and there was nothing left but void and darkness. Yes, and I remember the way the tapping became a knocking, the knocking a thunderous boom boom boom boom, so that I cried aloud for the terror of it and clapped my hands over my ears. And between the booms, the voice. That cold and creeping voice, whispering at me, coaxing and wheedling, saying—
— wake up Mrs. Maggie wake up—
— and Emily Ruggles bends over me in the gloom.
“You were dreaming,” she says, and here it is March and I can see her breath in the air.
My mouth is parched. All I can manage to croak is a single word. “Water.” She cradles my head and lifts a cup to my lips, ice crackling against my tongue.
“What were you dreaming of?” Her mouth twitchy and eager, hungry like the crowds who turned out to see us all those years ago, when I was a girl. That was the one part I had never expected, that hunger, the way they looked at you just like they could eat you up.
Just you remember, Leah used to say. It’s not you they want. It’s what you do. And so she held her power over us, with the clever tricks she taught us and the thought of those hungry crowds, and how she alone stood between us.
“What were you dreaming of?” Emily prompts me again, and maybe she senses it, too, that hunger and how unseemly it is, here in my final hours, for she goes on to add, “I only want to help you, Mrs. Maggie.”
It’s hard to be sure. But I know that hunger when I see it — I’ve seen it so many times — and what I feel is a rush of pity for the girl. I’ve done her a great disservice, showing her all our tricks like that, and letting her catch a glimpse of the bigger truth inside the lie at the same time. It’s the truth she’s so hungry to possess, and never will; Emily doesn’t possess so much as a jot of the gift. Or it doesn’t possess her. Because that’s what it is — possession. We’ve been possessed since we were girls, Katie and I, and now it draws to a close at last. Now I stand for the last time on the threshold where I’ve spent a lifetime lingering, and on the other side there are worse things waiting. That voice, whispering, always whispering.
A lie’s the thing, it always has been. I try to work up the moisture to spit it out. Once again the ritual with the cup. The rime of ice is gone. The water is cool, salving to the lips. The room has warmed. I kick at the covers. Emily folds back the counterpane, neat as a pin. She’s a kind girl, Emily. She deserves the lie.
And how easy it comes to the lips, the habit of a lifetime. “Tis only the Summerland,” I whisper, gasping for a breath of the March air that billows out the sheers. “I see it now, all stretched out before me, green and lovely as a day in June. The passage draws near, Emily, dear.” For a lie goes down easier with a taste of the truth inside it.
And then here you are again, Katie, leaning over me, your face so white in the moonlight, saying, “Mrs. Maggie, Mrs. Maggie, Mrs.—”
— Maggs—
“It’s always half measures with you, isn’t it, Maggs? Not the lie and not the truth either, but some misbegotten thing in between, monstrous and malformed.”
Such nerve, you have, calling me the monster, you so handy with the lie from the start. From the start, Katie, from Hydesville. Remember Hydesville, Katie, that ramshackle old house popping its joints in the wind screaming down off the lake? March it was, and no man had ever seen such a winter: snow piled as high as a tall man’s shoulder on the north face of the house, the cramped rooms inside stinking of ash and rancid fatback, and in the bedroom we all shared the reek of tapers dipped in animal fat. It had been a long time since Daddy could afford candles, and if it hadn’t been for Leah sweeping us off like a couple of performing birds, it might have been longer still.
Eighteen-forty-eight, that was, you just a girl with your first blood upon you and right away the tapping commences, just a faraway sound at first, like the door rattling its hinges in the wind. Like the time my blood had come in three years before that — a whisper in my ears upon the edge of sleep, a tap, tap, tapping, quiet as my heart against my ribs. Then nothing, and when I think about that time now, a lifetime gone, I wonder if I might have escaped the whole thing, if my piddling gift might have slept forever. Such a happy life that would have been, I sometimes think, a husband and a houseful of little ones, neither the riches of a king nor the crumbs off a poor man’s table — and I’ve had both, haven’t I? — but something steady and standing in between.
Then your blood came in, and me trying to sleep, huddled close against you as the room grew colder and then colder still, no natural cold, but something deeper and blacker, with iron in its bones and hatred in its heart. The darkness deepened so that I could hardly see my hand before my face, and the real knocking commenced — not from one of your childish tricks either, was it, Katie? Not from an apple bobbing on a string to bang against the floor, or your toes and fingers cracking, but a spirit knocking and more, scurrying like footsteps across the ceiling and banging the furniture around the room like a housewife banging on her pans.
A light guttered to life. A wavering taper pushed back the dark, and in that flickering glow I saw my father’s face. If I live a thousand years, I hope never to see another man’s face like that one. All drawn and pale, it was. Why, it was as white as a freshly laundered sheet, and his eyes the size of saucers, shot through with blood and the pupils so round and black that you could hardly see the color at all, and such a pretty blue they were. My mother clutched at him, crying aloud, “What is it, John? What is it?”