Riddance Read online

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Copyright © 2018 by Shelley Jackson

  First published in the United States in 2018 by Black Balloon, an imprint of Catapult (catapult.co)

  All rights reserved

  Jacket and book design by Zach Dodson, assisted by Veera Krouglov

  ISBN: 978-1-936787-99-9

  eISBN: 978-1-948226-00-4

  Catapult titles are distributed to the trade by Publishers Group West

  Phone: 866-400-5351

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018903614

  Printed in Canada

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Shibire,

  who will read it someday

  Contents

  Editor’s Introduction

  1

  The Final Dispatch: “Borne on racing white-streaked black.”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “The Headmistress’s tiny, tinny voice has fallen silent.”

  Readings: “My Childhood”

  Letters to Dead Authors, #1: Melville. “You will not have heard of me . . .”

  2

  The Final Dispatch: “Someone is missing, a child is missing, calamity . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “Another pause. The room is quiet, though today’s events have left their spoor . . .”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” How I Conceived the Plan to Visit the Vocational School; On the Architecture of the Vocational School

  Letters to Dead Authors, #2: Melville. “It has come to my attention that you are dead.”

  3

  The Final Dispatch: “[Extended static, several words indistinct] . . . someone is missing . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “‘Wake up!’ The Intake Coordinator, if that was what she was . . .”

  Readings: from Principles of Necrophysics: “The Mechanics of Channeling the Dead”

  Letters to Dead Authors, #3: Brontë (Charlotte). “I am—but I shall not introduce myself.”

  4

  The Final Dispatch: “It is easy to forget what you are about, in the land of the dead.”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “I traipsed dumbly around behind Florence . . .”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” On Eating and Other Oral Activities

  Letters to Dead Authors, #4: Charlotte. “I have seized my Eve, my ‘’v’’!”

  5

  The Final Dispatch: “But if we are all dead, then there is certainly no rush . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “Mother Other was waiting in the hall when I emerged.”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” On Methods of Listening

  Letters to Dead Authors, #5: Hawthorne. “I stop by the dormitory at night to imagine the ghosts rushing in and out . . .”

  6

  The Final Dispatch: “The road, the ravine, the fields, the . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “‘No, no, no, no, no! I said, listen with your mouth.’”

  Readings: from Principles of Necrophysics: “A Report on Certain Curious Objects . . .”

  Letters to Dead Authors, #6: E. A. Poe. “The Cheesehill Gazette has published a defamatory letter . . .”

  7

  The Final Dispatch: “I had never seen a person looking the way she looked . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “She sweeps down the hall, her heavy skirts . . .”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” On Punishment

  Letters to Dead Authors, #7: Brontë (Emily). “Doctor Beede tells me, one finger probing greedily . . .”

  8

  The Final Dispatch: “I have just spent a summer in my mother’s hand.”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “I was lying in my bed, putting in a little extra practice.”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” On Play

  Letters to Dead Authors, #8: Mary Shelley. “Intermediate Death Studies. The students bend their heads . . .”

  9

  The Final Dispatch: “So I am back at the beginning of the chase.”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “I swim up from sleep, frowning . . .”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” On Certain Objects in the Collection

  Letters to Dead Authors, #9: Stoker. “My voice weakens. It seems to sink back . . .”

  10

  The Final Dispatch: “This is how it happened.”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “It is customary in telling stories from school . . .”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” On Articles of Dress

  Letters to Dead Authors, #10: Mina Harker. “Now it is my mother whose voice I seemed to hear.”

  11

  The Final Dispatch: “[Crackling:] Where am I?”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “I have told how I gained a reputation as a necronaut . . .”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” A Secret

  Letters to Dead Authors, #11: Jephra. “There has been another libelous letter in the Gazette.”

  12

  The Final Dispatch: “[Static, three or four sentences indistinct] . . . thought it was a piano factory . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “The months passed, the years.”

  Readings: “Documentarian of the Dead”

  Letters to Dead Authors, #12: Herman. “Something is going on in my school that I don’t understand.”

  13

  The Final Dispatch: “I am down at the swampy verge of our lawn . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “The voice crackles, drops out, returns as pure sound . . .”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” On the Patois of the Vocational School

  Letters to Dead Authors, #13: Ishmael. “I have grown gaunt— no one knows how gaunt . . .”

  14

  The Final Dispatch: “Well, here we are again in my office. It looks real . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “‘There is an excellent private sanatorium in Pittsfield . . .’”

  Readings: from Principles of Necrophysics: “The Structure of the Necrocosmos”

  Letters to Dead Authors, #14: Jane E. “I have had a disappointment.”

  15

  The Final Dispatch: “Do you hear it too? That low, cool, reasonable voice . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “The alarm, though we did not recognize it for what it was . . .”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” On the Difficulty of My Task

  Letters to Dead Authors, #15: Jane. “At first my Theatrical Spectacle bid fair to be another disappointment . . .”

  16

  The Final Dispatch: “I flew like a phoenix out of the fire, and like a phoenix I was reborn.”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “The water went down, leaving the grass all slicked with mud.”

  Readings: from “A Visitor’s Observations.” A Private Conversation

  Letters to Dead Authors, #16: Bartleby. “The story may have already reached you . . .”

  17

  The Final Dispatch: “The inspector set his hat on the spindly legged occasional table . . .”

  The Stenographer’s Story: “Reader, she was dead.”

  Editor’s Afterword

  Appendix A: Last Will and Testament

  Appendix B: Instructions for Saying a Sentence

  Appendix C: Ectoplasmoglyphs #1–40

  Editor’s Introduction

  I owe my discovery of the Sybil Joines Vo
cational School to a bookstore and a ghost.

  Afternoon in a then-unfamiliar city, some years ago—heavy, overcast sky—the almost continuous grumble of distant thunder. I was in town for an academic conference, but had slipped out of the warren of little rooms in the ugly and prematurely dilapidated “new building” where the conference was being held and walked rapidly off campus into the deserted streets of the business district, feeling a little guilty about missing my colleague’s presentation, but unable to stand a moment more of our special brand of fatheadedness.

  It was one of those melancholy downtowns not meant for walking, where the buildings take up whole blocks and there is nothing to be seen from street level except the stray sheet of paper listlessly turning itself over and over, or a street sign that suddenly starts vibrating and then as suddenly stops. It was with relief that I turned onto a block of small shops, though they were unprepossessing enough: a shuttered cigar store, a bodega in which an exhausted-looking man in a stained polo shirt consented to sell me a bottle of warmish water, and an unlit bookstore whose door yielded to an experimental push, revealing dark narrow aisles between leaning shelves, blocked here and there by jumbled landslides of books among which were many comfortable little hollows furry with what was probably cat hair—the place had an animal smell. A ragged floral towel curtained a doorway into the back of the shop, where something bumped and rustled.

  I stooped to pluck out a book from a tightly packed bottom shelf, then withdrew my hand with a cry. A bead of blood was forming on the back of my finger. The impression that one of the books had bit me faded as the scrabbling sounds of a retreat made itself heard in the lower reaches of the shelves: the cat, no doubt, surprised in one of its hideaways. I stooped again and hooked a finger in the cloth binding at the top of the spine; the volume was stuck fast; I pulled harder and jerked it out, along with a neighboring book and a thin pamphlet, but felt the binding rip under my finger; guiltily I shoved it back in without looking at it, but had to get to my knees to retrieve the pamphlet (a 1950s-era educational brochure on hydroelectric dams) and the other book (an elocution handbook from the 1910s or ’20s), which had fallen open to a page where a newspaper clipping must have been used as a bookmark, printing the pages it was pressed between with its phantom image. Ghosting, it is called in the rare-book business, and that is apt, for this image was only the first of the ghosts that from this moment on would throng to me.

  The clipping itself had slipped out. I looked for it, found it, brown and brittle with age, under my own knee, replaced it against its fainter double, and only then saw what it was.

  Shocking Murder Latest Death at School for Stammerers

  The Cheesehill, Massachusetts, school for stammerers that has been so much in the news lately can add another death to its grim tally, and this time the verdict is murder.

  It is our unpleasant duty to report the discovery of a charred body on the grounds of the Sybil Joines Vocational School for Ghost Speakers & Hearing-Mouth Children, recently in the news for the accidental death of a student, the second this year. The victim has been tentatively identified as Regional School Inspector Edward Pacificus Edwards, who had been reported missing the previous night after his duties took him to the Vocational School, his vehicle having been discovered empty some hours after he had been believed to have gone home. An autopsy confirmed the police detective’s opinion that the victim was already dead when immolated, having been struck with a blunt object from behind with enough force to stave in the skull. Observing no particular abundance of blood near the site, the police detective gave his opinion that the fatal blow was struck elsewhere, the body having been transported at some point during the night to this low-lying and densely wooded part of the school grounds and there set alight. The clothes and personal effects of the victim were presumably consumed by the fire. A bottle of paraffin was found beside the body.

  To add to the macabre circumstances surrounding this grisly find, the Headmistress of the school, Miss Sybil Joines, was discovered deceased of natural causes in the early morning hours of the night in question. A representative of the school, Jane Grandison, stenographer, denied any knowledge of the Regional School Inspector’s whereabouts after about 4 p.m. when he left the Headmistress’s office to conduct a final inspection of the grounds.

  Her offer to attempt to contact the deceased, employing the method of spirit communication taught at the school, was declined by the authorities, who called it a “tasteless publicity stunt.”

  The student who discovered the body was not available for interview but we have learned that her mother has withdrawn her from enrollment at the school, citing extreme emotional distress.

  The police are interested in questioning a drifter seen loitering around the grounds earlier in the week.

  I read, then reread the clipping, from which little polygonal shards kept drifting down to settle in the nap of the stained and smelly carpet. I had never heard of the Sybil Joines Vocational School. That alone would have pricked my curiosity, since I had flattered myself that I knew quite everything there was to know about the spiritualist movement in late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century America. But my discovery also resonated with another of my research interests, the proliferation and popularization of what one might call speech studies: stuttering “cures”; elocution; orthoëpy; Major Beniowski’s “anti-absurd” or “phrenotypic” orthography (it luks lyk this), Pitman and Gregg shorthand, and other methods of supplanting the arbitrary signs of written language with a sort of “score” based on the sounds of speech. I am only human: the murder intrigued me too. Had the mystery been solved? Suppose I could solve it?—with the methods of scholarship, of course!

  I closed the book on its interesting passenger and pressed it to my chest. I had the sudden feeling that someone was looking over my shoulder: not another ghost but an up-and-coming scholar in my own discipline, slavering to take from me the “lead” that was—but for how long?—mine, all mine.

  But I think I felt something more than greed, even then: the sensation that a hole had suddenly gaped in a world that had hitherto seemed decently if not prudishly buttoned up. Most of us avert our eyes when this happens, but I looked. And saw . . . A flutter of aquamarine and viridian, a pounce of stripes, a spatter of—molten ice, frozen fire—the smell of music! I express myself clumsily, and yet I believe some of you at least will know what I mean when I say that my first thought was Yesss and my second, I remember this. How indeed could I have forgotten that time I burrowed under the covers to read by flashlight past my bedtime in that warm and golden tent-cave—delicious illicitry—and then, thinking I was crawling back up toward the head of the bed, actually made my way deeper, through a tunnel that went on and on, from whose roof fine roots stretched down to fascinate my forehead, until I came up in the center of a snow-thick forest, where some mechanical angels were rehearsing a hymn of clicks and chirps before an audience of spiders? I had longed for such another opening my whole life.

  I suddenly noticed a pair of eyes shining back at me from a gap in the opposite bookcase and started, dropping the book. Doubtless it was again the cat. The proprietor jerked aside the towel-curtain and stood looking at me without enthusiasm. “None of these books are at all valuable,” he said. “Please feel free to toss them around.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll be buying this one.” He worked out the tax with bad grace and a pocket calculator, but took my money, though he watched the book vanish into my satchel with evident regret.

  My subsequent researches did nothing to dispel my amazement. Even today I find myself marveling that an institution that in its heyday raised a public scandal on more than one occasion, and whose theoreticians pursued a vigorous debate with notable intellectuals of the time, should have been effectively forgotten for so many decades. The decline of the spiritualist movement explains it only in part. I believe the memory was actively repressed: If the dead do live on, the public would prefer, on the whole,
not to know about it.

  Once I began to look, however, I found references to the Vocational School everywhere. Other articles about the murder turned up on microfiche, and I assembled enough supporting material for a modest paper. It was well received. I began another, more substantial paper, aware that other scholars’ interest had been piqued, but confident that I had staked my claim.

  It is a common occurrence, and not just among scholars, for a new obsession to awaken reverberations in the most unlikely places. Probably there is nothing really uncanny about it; the observer is newly alert to these echoes, that’s all. But it was pretty peculiar, all the same, how rapidly my archives grew. In a thrift store in Madison I found a Vocational School yearbook (containing some very interesting photographs of school activities). Walking down a street in Philadelphia, I was dealt a blow on the temple by a paper airplane that had spiraled down from some open window above me, accompanied by muffled laughter; it proved to be a page from a book about the spiritualist community Lily Dale on which the Vocational School was mentioned in passing. And in one of a number of bags of interesting old books and papers left on a New York curb, as by indiscriminate and probably illiterate housecleaners clearing an apartment whose former occupant had died, I found, tied up with twine, a sheaf of yellowing papers covered in the characters of an unfamiliar alphabet, each page numbered, dated, and labeled in a childish hand, “Betty Clamm, SJVSGSHMC”!

  The Internet contains, it sometimes seems, all stories that have been and will be told. It is like that mythical Interstitial Library whose stacks readers sometimes wander in dreams, and whose itinerant librarians sometimes leave on your pillow astronomical bills for library fines levied on overdue books that you have never heard of, bills written in the already faint and soon to disappear stains of those mysterious night sweats from which you awaken terrified and out of breath. So I was not too surprised to stumble upon a reference to the Vocational School in the moribund listserv of a group of scholars whose common interest and broader topic was the work of a French philosopher whose name I did not recognize and cannot now recall but who seemed to employ a great number of obscure but wonderfully poetic terms composed of unlikely combinations or odd usages of otherwise ordinary words. I was skimming the discussion, which got quite heated, enjoying the feeling that I didn’t know what was going on, when I caught a phrase in passing: “. . . like those turn-of-the-century concerns that lined their pockets through the spiritualist fad, e.g., the SJVS.” Naturally other scholars would have come upon references to the Vocational School somewhere in their reading, just as I had. What surprised me a little more was the reference I spotted a few days later in a customer review of a pair of waterproof loafers I was considering. Well, one does not expect to find reference to obscure cultural institutions of another century (“like something an SJVS student would wear”) in the context of protective footwear! Still, they were of a conservative style and it was not really difficult to imagine a middle-aged scholar—say, one of the members of the aforementioned listserv—pulling them on and trudging off through the winter slush to his library kiosk.