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

But that day, that day the sky was clear and blue as the blue in your dress, as though they’d been special made to match. You had tied back the heavy curtains and posed yourself in the most flattering fall of light, as though there were anyone there to see it but me. You were always on stage. Every time in my life I ever saw you, you were on stage.

You said, “Come to the window, Sister. It’s so pretty out.”

So I did. For a time we were quiet, just looking out the window. Fine carriages rolled by three stories below, full of the richest sort — who could say, some of them might have paid for private sittings, we were that well loved in that day. And cabs too, and dray carts rattling over cobbles and flinging up horse apples, which was what our father always called them, remember that? People pushing and shoving on the sidewalks, and newspaper boys, and ballad-sellers singing out the titles of the latest songs, a penny each for the sheet music so that pretty girls in pretty parlors could play them for their pretty boys. We never learned to play, of course, that was not our station in the world, but our station had changed, hadn’t it? And I could almost smell the street below — the hay scattered out across the cobbles, and the horse apples, too, and the smell of perfumes and the like in the press — I could smell it in my mind, the way you can, you know.

And you, whispering right in my ear, “I can do it better, Maggs.”

For some reason that made me feel so ashamed. “Do what?” I said, all innocent, though of course I knew.

I always knew. Both of us knew.

“Why I can call the spirits better,” you said, all innocent, flouncing across the room to pose yourself on a little loveseat they had sitting there, arranging your dress just so.

“You can’t,” I said. I said, “I can do it twice as good as you. I’m older,” the only card I had to play.

“Then do it,” you said.

But I didn’t want to, that’s what I said. I couldn’t, of course, not then and only sometimes later. The spirits came to me of their own accord, I couldn’t summon them. I just wanted to sit at the window and watch the street, I always liked the city so. It reminded me of how far we’d come from Hydesville, where it had always seemed dark to me, and cold. And how we didn’t have to be there anymore, not ever again. That’s what I thought in that day — that we’d never be poor again — not knowing the miseries to come. I was just a girl, so young.

Even then I liked the lie better than the truth. I liked the toe cracking and the finger popping and all the other tricks Leah had taught us, she was as tricksy as you were, almost.

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.—”