Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

You were always playing tricks on me, too, weren’t you, Kate? Full of tricks from the day you were born. Remember how we held the stage when Leah paraded us from city to city like a pair of trained lovebirds, tapping and preening? Every girl’s dream to be a bird, feted on every side, and oh, we were feted Kate, how our names did ring upon every tongue! And even then you were a tapping, preening little thing, all dressed up in your skirts of robin’s-egg-blue. Do you remember how the people used to gather before a sitting, how they would come from near and far, crying your name aloud and reaching out to touch you? Do you remember how easy it all was, how eager they were to believe? What a glorious trick that was, Kate! That was the best trick of all! Who could have seen that it would all turn out as it has? We were children, Maggs . I can hear you say it. We didn’t know. Surely that’s something. Surely that’s enough—

You were at them again, your tricks, last night, weren’t you? Emily dozed — even the most faithful watchers doze — and as she nodded over her needlework, you were up to your old tricks, rapping and tapping and knocking oh so quietly, so only I could hear. It got cold in the room then, just like it used to when we were girls, all those years ago. Do you remember the cold, Kate? The cold of the grave, so black and deep it prickled up the hairs along the back of your neck and turned your breath to vapor?

The Summerland indeed.

And here you are with another blanket to comfort me. Look at me, Kate! Look how frail I’ve become. I’ve become old , I say, and a young girl’s melancholy creeps into my breast. How funny it is, the way we never age inside our hearts, whilst outwardly this catastrophe every day renews itself. Tutting—

— you must calm yourself, Mrs. Maggie—

— Emily — it is Emily, isn’t it? In the gloom it’s hard to see — tucks the blanket in tight around me. She means kindness, I know, dear Emily. Why, I remember when she came to us, how dumbfounded she was to be among us at last: the mothers of Spiritualism! I remember her first sitting and afterward teaching her the secrets of material manifestations. How shocked she was at this cheerful fraud! Yet I’ll admit, and I admitted then, that there is something of the illusionist’s craft in our art; it helps the sitters to suspend their disbelief, to quote Mr. Coleridge.

But there is truth, as well.

There is the matter of the cold. And of Hydesville.

That was March, too, wasn’t it? More than forty years have passed since then — I was sixteen that year, and you still a slip of a girl — yet I still remember the winter of 1848, spilling right over into spring, such a fierce year it was. At first, I thought that no one noticed the cold because it was already so cold in that house, with the wind tearing down off Lake Ontario and rattling the timbers like bones. Pop, pop, pop , went that house, like an old man cracking his joints, and it wasn’t much warmer in the house than it was standing in the street. What was a little tapping to me?

That’s what I said in New York, Katie, remember that? The biggest stage of all, right there in New York City, and you stuck in the audience whilst I held the spotlight. How that must have chafed, you always so loved the stage. But there you sat with your face of stone. I saw you! I saw you when I peeked between the curtains before the show. You and the whole house, and what a house it was! A hundred people, all of them in their Sunday best, and the house all shining and gilt by the gaslight chandeliers, and me there to say our whole lives had been a lie.

Leah — the third Fox sister, she styled herself, as if she ever had any traffic with the dead — the way she made us back in Rochester. That’s what she always said. I made you! I was the one who booked the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, I was the one who made you! The Fox Sisters of the Famous Events in Hydesville, that Occurred in the Spring of 1848 , tapping and preening like little birds, always her little birds, and we hardly knowing her before Hydesville, her seventeen years our senior, a grown woman and a family of her own. The Queen of Lies! Our sittings with the great and small alike. Oh, Katie, how grand they all were! Mr. Cooper and Mrs. Stowe, the great Sojourner Truth and Mr. Horace Greeley himself, our patron and protector, to them all delivering, each and every one — Lies! And most of all the hundreds, the thousands! that followed, innumerable to count, with their sittings and their gauzy apparitions, their spirit lights, their automatic writing: Lies, all lies. And we the Sisters of the Lie, who birthed a monstrous truth.

“Our whole lives,” you said backstage, your voice quavering with resentment.

“Our whole goddamn lives, Maggs,” you said. “You with your toes popping and your knuckles cracking, all the tricks of the trade. The spirit hands and the voices and the Summerland itself.” All a lie — though it didn’t keep you from taking your half of the money, did it? Seven hundred and fifty dollars each, a small fortune in 1888, like sand through our fingers, it went. You folded it away in your purse with an edge of fierce defiance in your voice. I can hear it now, your fury at all my lies, saying, “But it wasn’t all a lie. Not all of it, Maggs.”

Even lies have some truth inside them, and truth some lies. The Summerland is a cold, hard place. It’s a cold, hard place we go when we die. And there are voices, there is a voice to make you shudder and run all cold inside. Nobody’s going to pay their good, hard-earned money to hear such a monstrous truth — or believe it when they do. Some things cannot be countenanced or believed, not if you want to go on living or crawl inside a bottle where the voice goes silent for a while. Not unless. So we lied. Our whole career a lie built upon a truth, and our renunciation of it a truth built upon a lie.

I sleep a little then, a little slice of death somebody once told me, but I know that it’s not true. Not the sleep of oblivion, but the sleep of nightmare, breeding monsters—

Then Emily is bending over me. It’s morning, a bright shining March morning to make you forget all these truths—

— that awful voice—

— for a while. The confusion has lifted. I’m clearest in the mornings.

“Here, Mrs. Maggie, take some broth,” she says. “I made it special.”

So I take a sip to please her. You have to please people, that’s what we do, you know. But the truth is I don’t want it, I haven’t any appetite any more. Then it’s dark, and here you come bending over me again, saying Mrs. Maggie, Mrs. Maggie, are you there. Your voice is coming from far away, like a voice from the bottom of a well. Why you should call me Mrs. Maggie I don’t know. Plain old Maggs has always been good enough for all these years. I can hear you say it now— Maggs, Maggs, Maggs , your voice dripping with scorn.

You always scorned me so, saying I couldn’t summon the spirits, not the way you could. Yet I never denied it. I never denied the ascendancy of your gift. Why, I remember a time when you said as much, as though I had denied it. We were mere girls then. I wasn’t yet twenty and you just then fifteen-years-old, in your dress of robin’s-egg blue and your hair done up so pretty, with some stray wisps falling down around your eyes, as if they’d just worked loose and you hadn’t planned it that way from the first, so artful, to frame your face just so. In a fine hotel room in New York City, that was. How rich it had seemed, the fine velvet upholstery and the gilt moldings and the golden and red brocade on the curtains, that new smell on everything, as if it was fresh made. Leah said we could afford such fine things by then, the very best, I remember the way she said it: We can afford the very best now, girls , as though she had anything to do with it. That was Leah for you. She was out at the shops, I remember. We had just arrived in the city — where was it we had been before that? I wonder — and she was always out at the shops. We have to look the part, girls , she always said so cheery, but why she should have to look it, I never did understand. I sometimes think that it was just to spite Leah that we renounced it all, and condemned it as a sin and blasphemy.