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

— 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?”

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?