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1. June 1925
The girl who would speak for the dead stood alone on the cobblestone
drive after the rain. Body poised, she balanced on one broad
stone, her arms to either side, her bare toes clutching the cool,
pitted surface. The polished stones all around her glowed in
the soft daylight. She gathered herself together and continued
jumping from one cobble to another, moving toward the little
red-brick house just off the curve of the drive; moving away
from the towering white house and its black-framed windows behind
her. The girl, slight and short, had a spring in her arms and
legs that made her appear a few years younger than her age. Landing
on each stone, she felt her toes slip and her heels slide before
catching and holding. As she regained her balance, the girl grinned
and waved her arms . She bent at the knees, hunched her shoulders,
and launched herself again. When she landed on the next stone,
she had to quickly crouch to keep herself from being carried
off her perch.
The girl had been thirteen years old for three days. Her brother
had turned thirteen with her, but having already developed a
certain cynicism toward birthdays, he did not share her enthusiasm.
This difference was not the only one between them. They looked
more like cousins than twins, or even brother and sister.
On the morning of her birthday, the twenty-third of June, the
girl had gone to the sun porch where her mother always drank
coffee. Her mother sat at the breakfast table with Mary, the
last of the live-in help at the estate. Her mother’s long
dark hair, wound up in a loose bun, looked about to spill down
her long neck. In her thin pale fingers, the girl’s mother
cradled her cup against her chest, as if huddled around its warmth.
Mary was in her fifties and had a round face the color of polished
chestnut. When Mary asked a question, her even tone gave the
girl the impression that the question had been asked not once
but twice—the second time, slowly, in a somewhat louder
voice.
Mary noticed the girl’s entrance first. “Look who
went to bed a little girl and woke up a young woman.”
The girl’s mother turned from the window
and the river beyond. “Good morning, Emily,” she
said. “Happy birthday.”
“Thank you, Mama.”
“Sit down with us, Em,” Mary said.
“But get yourself a cup first,” Emily’s mother
said.
“A cup?” Emily asked. “Of coffee?”
“There’s no tea in the kitchen,” Mary said,
her eyes gleaming through the steam rising from her cup. Up until
that morning, any interest Emily showed in her mother’s
coffee had been met with a careless and absolute refusal. “Everything
in its time,” her mother liked to say.
When Emily returned with her coffee and took the seat beside
her mother, Mary said, “Cream and sugar, miss?”
“Yes, please.” Emily did not know how she liked
her coffee, or if she liked it at all, but both Mary and her
mother took cream and sugar.
“Two spoonfuls?” Mary asked, opening the sugar
dish.
“Yes, please.”
Emily lifted the cup to her lips.
“Careful,” her mother said. “Hot.” She
watched Emily with a languid intensity that sometimes made strangers
nervous.
“Here’s to a long life, Emily Stewart,” Mary
said.
Emily’s mother lifted her own cup, and the three of them
sipped their coffee. Emily’s eyes widened as the flavor
of the beans, sugar, and cream washed over her tongue in bittersweet
softness.
“It’s a great pleasure of life, Em,” Mrs.
Stewart said, “to sit here and drink coffee.” She
took a sip from her cup and her gaze dislocated itself from Emily’s
eyes. “Go tell your brother to lift his gloomy head and
come get his cup.”
Now, three days later on the cobblestones after the rain, Emily
leaped to an odd, protruding stone along the side of the drive,
almost falling in the little stream of water hurrying down the
concrete gutter toward the gate. Emily turned on her toes and
jumped back up the drive, taking a zigzagging course from stone
to stone: I may fall, I may fall, I may fall. The fresh
smell after the rain somehow made Emily think of her father reading
some book or other on the porch, his features mildly concentrating
on the words within. Emily had only been five years old when
her father left for France and the War. Her memories of him resembled
snapshots taken on a sunny afternoon (a smile, a pose, a gesture),
but these snapshots were slow in fading away—they drifted
up into focus when something like the smell of rain or light
on a windowsill stirred them.
Emily stepped off the drive and went toward the
river until the trees shrouded the house from her. She stood
on the bank and wiggled her toes in the wet grass, watching the
geese circling each other in the current. She moved a small muscle
in the place where her foot met her ankle, and the muscle touched
a tendon, and the tendon a small bone, and a dull crack arose
around her. The sound seemed to arise in the air above her and
all around her at once. Her foot never appeared to move. She
could almost see the distinct sound float up over her head, something
like a feather, if feathers were only so many scattered reverberations.
She had discovered this ability only a week before while lying
in bed and had fascinated herself with the trick since, studying
its tones and sensations. Emily found that if she concentrated,
she could make the sound in her ankle a little louder, slightly
clearer, more insistent. She reserved the trick for her times
alone on the riverbank, for her quiet moments in bed or the bathtub,
for her isolated hours in the little red-brick house. Each day
she thought of sharing it with Michael, and each time thought, Not
yet. Such a strange thing seemed connected to all the mystery
in the world, to unknowable secrets. Emily breathed the cool
river wind and worked the muscles in her ankle, making a series
of sounds, trying to create a rhythm. She squeezed her eyes closed
and listened to the sounds dissipate in the air around her, as
if each one had never been.
#
2. Michael
The following afternoon, Emily’s brother
sat in the shadow of an oak tree beside the river, his skinny
legs stretched out in the grass before him. His gray eyes looked
out at the water, and small locks of light brown hair blew across
his pale forehead.
Emily approached her brother, watching to see if he noticed
her. This was an old game of theirs. The game had no name, but
a good one might have been “Hello, Unsuspecting Stranger,” something
their mother sometimes said when catching them unaware.
“Michael?” Emily said, arriving at his side.
“Yes, Em?” Michael said, as if he had been expecting
her for some time.
“Alone again, I see.”
“You caught me.”
Michael had discovered that he could not tolerate most people
well before his tenth birthday, and had already developed the
habit of speaking in condescending tones. He tended toward a
cautious, dismal nature, but he smiled when others laughed at
his clever remarks. He had a fascination for details that emerged
unpredictably and fastened itself from one thing to another.
He had once given over the history of locomotive power for the
succinct and prolonged ticks on a telegraph line that spelled
out Morse code, without a backward glance.
“What are you doing, Michael?”
“Thinking.”
She sat down in the grass beside him.
“You’ll get grass stains on your skirt,” he
said.
The sun was beginning to set. The insects had started their
slow evening incantations. On the river, a pink ribbon from the
horizon rippled and spread against the current, borrowing some
of the failing light streaming from the sky behind them.
“What are you thinking about with your big brain, Michael?” Emily
asked.
“I was thinking about heaven. Suppose, just for a moment,
that there is no heaven. Suppose that heaven is a place people
made up.”
“Of course there’s a heaven,” Emily said.
“I know... but suppose just for a moment that there isn’t.
Have you ever tried that?”
The thought had crossed her mind, once or twice. “No,” she
said. “What got you thinking of all this?”
“Good question,” he said. “Do you want to
know what else I was thinking? I was thinking about death. About
me dying, you know, us dying.”
“You are the only thirteen-year-old boy who sits around
thinking about death, Michael,” she said. It seemed to
her something their mother might say.
“What if heaven is just a place people made up?” He
paused. “What if Daddy... what if he’s just—”
“He is in heaven,” she said.
“Don’t get mad, Em.”
“I’m not mad,” she said. “Just don’t
talk like that. I don’t want to hear any more.”
“But if nobody died there would be no need for heaven,
Em. I mean, for people to talk about heaven.”
“That’s what you think?” Emily said, standing
up.
“I think so. Only dead people need heaven.”
“What do you think Mama would say about all this?”
Michael half-shrugged. His relationship with their mother had
always seemed strange to Emily. In the evenings, sometimes, Michael
and his mother had discussions in the parlor about the neighborhood
or school, and when Emily caught some of these conversations
it seemed to her that they talked like an old married couple.
Michael often got up from his chair and put himself at a distance
from others in the room, standing by a window or examining things
on a shelf. Their mother was never quick to draw Michael back
from these sudden, remote breaks. Besides all of this, Michael
knew that Emily would never betray their discussion to their
mother.
“All right,” he said. “You asked what I was
thinking.”
“So now you don’t believe in heaven, Michael? Is
that it?” She felt as if she had been duped into a conversation
about her father lying in a box underground.
“I didn’t say that, Em.” He lazily folded
his hands on his chest. “I was just thinking. Maybe it
was something I ate.” Emily rose, turned, and went back
toward the house. The deepening sunset caught in high corners
of the mansion’s third-floor windows and on the still upper
branches of the trees. Twilight already crowded the red-brick
house down the drive, lending a blue tint to its green shutters
and a misty cast over its roof and steeple.
#
3. Goblins
Emily strolled along the street outside the gate in the bright
sunshine. It was Wednesday afternoon. Emily and Michael had been
sent on a break by their tutor—Mr. Holt—whom their
mother hired to keep them involved in studies on Wednesdays during
summer vacation. Mr. Holt relished these twenty-minute breaks,
and all breaks, by smoking a cigarette or two, sometimes humming
or whistling a tune to himself.
Emily made her way to the far end of the estate and passed
through the west gate, following the winding path over the rolling
lawn and through clusters of trees along the fence, beside the
river, and in irregular bursts across Ravenwood. She reached
the river to find Michael sitting by his accustomed tree. She
sat beside him. “We should have a dog,” she said.
“Mama doesn’t like dogs.”
“Don’t you like dogs?”
“That is not the question.”
“How can someone not like dogs?”
“I like dogs fine,” he said. “Mama doesn’t.”
Somewhere on the other side of the house, Mr. Holt whistled
a short and sweet pastoral strain, like the song of a strange
bird with a long memory.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Michael asked.
She considered. It seemed to Emily that she would be expected
to say no, perhaps adding that ghosts were for little children
to believe in. “Sometimes.”
“At night?”
“Yes.”
“It’s easy to believe in ghosts at night,” Michael
said. “Of course there aren’t supposed to be ghosts,
or bogeymen, or goblins, or any of that, are there? Not really—only
in stories. But if you look out of the window at night, there
are goblins out in the trees, lots of them, and you can almost
hear them.”
They looked out over the river, almost listening to the goblins.
“I think about ghosts sometimes,” Michael said. “Lots
of times.”
“You are a ghost,” Emily said.
“I think about them,” he said, ignoring her remark, “and
sometimes I believe in them... I was thinking that this place
is perfect for ghosts.”
Emily had always thought the mansion ideal for all kinds of
night creatures. She recalled the old family pictures on the
walls and shelves inside; she thought of her great-aunt Regina,
who had died accidentally by the river at the age of sixteen.
Their grandparents, their great-grandparents, had all died here.
Their mother’s older brother Michael, who had simply disappeared
out of the family history one day years before—their lost
uncle, whom Mrs. Stewart had offered her son as a namesake and
who she never spoke of. Their father.
Emily said, “I thought you didn’t believe that dead
people—”
“Never mind that. I’m just talking. Can’t
you just see them out by the river? Out in the trees?”
“In the house,” she said, her mind passing out
of the shadow of the mansion and moving toward the little red-brick
house. “The tea house.”
“I had a dream last night,” Michael said. “About
a ghost. I wake up in the house, and I’m sitting in the
living room. And there’s lots of moonlight coming through
the windows. I’m there alone, and then I’m floating
around the room—everything is so quiet, and I know you
and Mama aren’t there, Mary isn’t there, but Daddy
is there. I didn’t actually see him, but I knew he was
there. It was as if he were the walls and floors and moonlight
all at once, and I was floating around on his voice.”
“Do you remember his voice?” She sometimes believed
that her father’s voice was clear in her memory, but at
other moments felt a dread that her memory only fashioned odd
fragments together over time into some new voice that wasn’t
her father’s at all.
“No,” he said. “I don’t think so. But
in the dream it was his voice. You know?”
“Yes. What did he say?”
“I can’t remember. But it was something about everything.”
Mr. Holt’s whistle approached from up the riverbank.
Soon he would step out onto the porch. The twins made no effort
to return to their studies, though they both knew he would come
to collect them in a few moments. The fragile, lilting tune moved
away, around the corner of the house and out of hearing.
#
That night, Emily dreamed she stood outside the
house in bright moonlight. She walked past the tea house and
into the shadows among the trees, expecting to hear something
slow and haunting, something the boughs of the trees might sway
to, something like music.
In the darkness she could hear a company of goblins laughing
and calling to each other, goblins made up of moonbeams and rotting
leaves. She saw them jumping among the branches and darkened
trunks all around her. It was a celebration—they were expecting
her. But she was afraid. The goblins moved too quickly to be
seen straight on; she could only sense their forms out of the
corners of her eyes. The goblins sang a song that was not quite
words but still somehow contained her name. The goblins sang, “Em-i-ly...
Em-i-ly... Em-i-leeeeeeeeeeeee...”
#
4. The Ghost of Regina Ward
A dusty silver patch of moonlight lay across Emily’s
bed when she opened her eyes. The clock on the stairwell landing
ticked heavily in the stillness of the house. Her awakening mind
followed the sound downstairs, where she found the moonlight
making the seams in the floorboards black and bottomless; making
the doorways yawning caverns and the staircases irregular, treacherous,
and secretive; making the andirons in the fireplace appear as
pointed, barely concealed teeth. On the wall, the dim photographs
of the family—of the generations of Ravenwood—hung
as faint suggestions of personality in the depths of picture
frames. She lay in bed and blinked at the ceiling.
Getting up from bed, Emily walked on bare feet out into the
hall. She cocked her head and listened again, concentrating on
the dream she had awakened from, of goblins in the trees—the
dream already beginning to dissolve as she stood in the dark
hall. On the stairs, the clock ticked.
A half-formed thought of the safety of her bed sheets held
Emily in the doorway, and was joined by another to remind her
that in the forests of her sleep, goblins danced. And so because
she did not want to re-enter a forest full of dancing goblins,
and because the clock ticked so loudly, and because she was not
quite far enough removed from sleep to make any decisions better
than a drifting sort of acquiescence, Emily did not return to
bed. But the goblins in the forest had already made the night
theirs, and Emily’s wakefulness lingered close to dreaming.
She turned toward the top of the stairs, and in the hallway
of her own imagining (very similar to the hallway that stretched
before her) she saw the ascending figure of a girl in a white
nightgown like her own, a girl a few years older, whose hair
caught the moonlight and shone in a luminous mass around the
absence of a face. Emily recognized the faceless girl—she
saw in the unseen face the girl from family photographs. Regina.
A pleasurable chill crawled over her scalp and along her legs.
The girl at the stairs took a step forward, her delicate foot
falling silently on the hardwood floor.
Emily turned from the girl and looked down the hall away from
the stairs at the open door to Michael’s room. She watched
Regina approach her from behind in her mind’s eye, watched
the girl move with the same intent observation and pass into
her, changing her flesh into something translucent, the memory
of flesh. Emily walked carefully towards Michael’s room,
her fear of the shadows and the dead gone, as she had become
the ghost who ruled the night. She entered Michael’s room
on weightless feet and crossed to the windows on the other side
of his bed. The woods appeared beautiful and dark and welcoming
from this height. In the groves beyond the footpaths, the goblins
would be preparing to receive their queen.
As she turned to her sleeping brother, Emily felt
a strange pity for this defenseless mortal creature. She slipped
into the corner by the windows and curled up, arms folded over
her knees, knees to her chest. Her passing whims had coalesced
into an inspiration. After a moment, a soft cracking noise like
knuckles rapping on the air rattled the quiet. Sets of two and
three sounds followed—tentative, almost random. A series
of single, double, and triple knocks echoed in the dark bedroom
like short and certain sentences.
A creak came from Michael’s bed, then a brief
rustle.
Emily wondered if he could see her and waited.
He made no sound; he did not lie back down. Another knock rose
from the shadows, and he cocked his head to one side. Again Emily
fought the urge to laugh. She released a few more measured knocks.
The air shook with the deliberate presence of the sounds—they
rebounded from the walls and gathered just above the bed, just
above his head. His vulnerable form, rigid and stricken, crouched
alone in the dark. But not really alone, and he knew it.
A single knock, speculative, provoking, as full
of purpose and meaning as any of the patterned breaks had been.
And from the corner, a small, furtive creak.
Michael’s head turned slowly toward the sound.
The light from the window illuminated a path on the floor and
made the darkness of Emily’s spot in the corner darker
by contrast. Emily had reached out along the floor to steady
herself (she had shifted her balance during the last set and
released the quick, low groan of the floorboards) and her fingers
encountered a small rubber ball in the dark beside her. Michael,
she knew, had rediscovered the ball, an old toy of his, a few
months before; for a time, he had bounced it while walking around
the estate and across the school courtyard. Before long, he had
forgotten the ball again, abandoning it in the corner.
Emily laughed silently, her body shaking with delight.
She created six more knocks and, as the last one faded, rolled
the little rubber ball out into the path of light on the floor.
Her brother drew a quick breath.
Emily said, “Michael.” Her voice,
sweet and simple in her dark corner, seemed unearthly even to
her. She stood up in the moonlight and took two steps toward
his bed. She made no threatening gestures, only stood there.
In the moment after she revealed herself to him, he hunched farther
over in his bed and said, “Oh God.”
She laughed and began to move to the door.
“Oh,” Michael said. “It’s
you.”
She went out into the hall, leaving him alone
to laugh without breath.
She stuck her head back into the room. “Boo.”
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