But he doesn’t answer, just stumbles out of bed in his nightshirt, him so prayerful and wary of his modesty.
“Girls?” he cries. “Girls?”
And, oh, how you shrieked with laughter, a high-pitched screech so unlike you that it’s a marvel your mouth could produce such an awful sound. All erect you sat, with your nightdress draped across your crossed knees and your hands turned up atop your thighs. I could feel that piercing shriek run all through me like the horrors.
Great fists hammered the walls, shivering the boards. In the kitchen, the table danced like a drunken man on a Saturday night — you could hear it — and the chairs dashed themselves to kindling against the walls. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that I heard all this as through a veil. Someone had flung a veil over me, and everything came through to me all blurry, only it was a veil of whispers, it was a veil of words.
As the knocking grew more violent, that voice grew louder, until it was screaming inside my head, guttural and hateful. It scoured out the inside of my skull, it erased everything I ever thought I was, and it knew me. It knew me, Katie. Knew every lie I’d ever told, every grudge and secret thought I’d nursed inside my crooked heart, no matter how base and hateful. It knew me. What do you think Emily Ruggles would think of that, Katie? What would she think of the blood-red hatred that seized me then, and of the awful things it asked me to do. To my father, as he stumbled from the room in search of that awful knocking’s source. To my mother, huddled under the bedclothes against that hateful cold, her breath a flag of vapor in the dark. And to you, Katie. To you most of all. Oh such horrible red thoughts that I weep to recall them. Such red, red thoughts.
How long it lasted, how long I wrestled with that awful spirit like Jesus in the desert, I cannot say. Only that a time came when it was over — when a bright sun dawned glittering off the snow outside the window. The stink of sweat and terror faded. Even our father slept then, giving up at last, unable to locate the origin of all that terrible racket.
Three nights.
On the second night our neighbors crowded into the room, disbelievers every one — Mary and Charles Redfield and the Dueslers and the Hydes and others too, that old house rocking around them. Every one they came in doubt and every one they left believers, that unearthly cold shivering their bones, their faces scrubbed clean with terror, pale and blank as eggs.
The next night, hundreds. It was them that brought Leah, those hundreds, and the chance they represented. Hundreds crowding into the bedroom shoulder to shoulder, rank with the stench of unwashed bodies, hundreds spilling out into the kitchen and beyond, into the street itself, where a raw wind came tearing off the lake, chilling everyone to the bone. How I envied them that warmth. For inside the bedroom, it was colder still. How can I convey it, that cold? Like being buried to your shoulders in ice, it was, or worse, the cold of all dead things and dead places on this earth, the cold of the grave yawning open to receive you.
And you, Katie, with your hands upturned upon your knees and your hair hanging over your eyes, in a night dress thin as gossamer, all untouched. Your crowning moment that was, your best trick of all, breathing in the stillness, “Do as I do, Mr. Splitfoot,” and the spirit did. One two three you snapped your fingers and one two three the spirit rapped in answer.
Gasps of disbelief and wonder. Do you remember that, Katie? Gasps of wonder and disbelief — proof incontestable of this raging spirit that hurled furniture around like kindling and responded to the quiet admonition of a little girl. Do you remember that?
And all this time in my head, that rageful voice, entreating, wheedling, screaming in frustration, for I would not do as it demanded. I would not take up the knife in the kitchen or lift a leg from a dismembered chair. I would not turn my home into an abattoir. But oh such effort did I have to exert to resist. Sweat sprang out on my forehead despite that glacial cold, and by the guttering flame of the taper I could see that my hands, all of their own accord, had clenched themselves into white-knuckled fists and so it would be ever after. That hateful voice whispering and cajoling in my head, my constant attendant, and when Katie called the spirits, a spiteful and powerful spirit it became. In those moments it took every ounce of strength I possessed to resist it. A life embattled we have shared, Katie and I, a life that enriched us beyond measure one moment and plunged us into poverty the next, always the voice beyond the rappings, urging us to horrors that we must struggle to resist. Two husbands we have known between us, but Mr. Splitfoot was our one and only true betrothed. Many nights I stood over my own dear husband’s bed, clutching a knife in my hand, my whole body wracked with the effort of turning Mr. Splitfoot away.
We were children, Maggs, I can hear you say it now. We didn’t know. Isn’t that enough?
But it is not. For a time came, and early, when we did know, and even then we did not, could not, stop. There was too much of fortune in it, and too much of pleasure as well, in giving yourself over to something larger than you had ever known, something sinewy and vast. Even from the start, Mr. Splitfoot ruled our hearts.
Mr. Splitfoot, Mr. Splitfoot—
— and here is a figure leaning over me, its face cast in shadow by the candle it holds aloft.
“Katie,” I cry, “Katie—”
But it’s only Emily, leaning over to smooth the hair from my brow.
“You were talking in your sleep, Mrs. Maggie.” So gentle-like. “What was it you were dreaming?” That hunger in her eyes.
But what shall I say? Some truths are better left unsaid. Sometimes the lie is kinder. “I miss Katie, dear”—taking her hand—“I miss her so much.”
And here is the truth inside the lie. I miss you, Kate. Every morning I wake afresh to find you gone away from me. Every morning I grieve you like the first. Gone, gone, gone — and who else to confide in here at the end of all days, about matters so fraught and fearsome?
“We all miss her, dear,” Emily says, withdrawing to her needlework, and after a time I’m not sure who it is I’m looking at anymore, time seems so slippy and uncertain. Only there is a chill in the room, a faraway rapping, and you’re sitting here beside me once again, your strong hand in my own, bony as a bird’s and heavy-veined. You were always so strong, and I the weak one. Why, see how old I’ve become, and still a sixteen-year-old in Hydesville in my heart, before it all began. Or so I could believe but for the whisper in my ears, but for my one true love and paramour, goading me, always goading me to blood and madness.
Blood and madness. For once it came to me, it never fully departed, that voice. It lingered, whispering, insinuating, urging me on to bloodshed and hatred. But only once did I succumb.
I begged you not to do it. How I begged you.
Nineteen, I was, and you just fifteen — mere girls with the petty jealousies of sisters, the thoughtless malice and spite. There in that lush hotel room, with the sounds of the street rising to us in a hushed murmur, muffled by the heavy velvet curtains that draped the windows. And the taps at first, the raps and knocks, the boom boom boom, so loud that floor itself seemed to rock, and I marveled that no one else could hear it. Those heavy curtains billowed out like the thinnest sheers. A great wind filled the room, like the rank breath of the dead, and in it the voice, such a voice it was, guttural and full of hate, and then worse — wheedling, insinuating, flattering. And promising. Yes, promising.
What was yours mine, your vast gift in exchange for my paltry one. You with your eyes rolled back, your legs crossed, your palms face up on your thighs, beneath your dress of robin’s-egg blue.