The Weird Part 123

Mr. Coeslak won't stay in the house after dark, but he agreed to find someone to look after Samantha and Claire. Then their father couldn't find Mr. Coeslak, but the babysitter showed up precisely at seven o'clock. The babysitter, whose name neither twin quite caught, wears a blue cotton dress with short floaty sleeves. Both Samantha and Claire think she is pretty in an old-fashioned sort of way.

They were in the library with their father, looking up Mulatuppu in the red leather atlas, when she arrived. She didn't knock on the front door, she simply walked in and then up the stairs, as if she knew where to find them.

Their father kissed them goodbye, a hasty smack, told them to be good and he would take them into town on the weekend to see the Disney film. They went to the window to watch as he walked into the woods. Already it was getting dark and there were fireflies, tiny yellow-hot sparks in the air. When their father had entirely disappeared into the trees, they turned around and stared at the babysitter instead. She raised one eyebrow. 'Well,' she said. 'What sort of games do you like to play?'

Widdershins around the chimneys, Once, twice, again.

The spokes click like a clock on the bicycle; They tick down the days of the life of a man.

First they played Go Fish, and then they played Crazy Eights, and then they made the babysitter into a mummy by putting shaving cream from their father's bathroom on her arms and legs, and wrapping her in toilet paper. She is the best babysitter they have ever had.

At nine-thirty, she tried to put them to bed. Neither Claire nor Samantha wanted to go to bed, so they began to play the Dead game. The Dead game is a let's pretend that they have been playing every day for 274 days now, but never in front of their father or any other adult. When they are Dead, they are allowed to do anything they want to. They can even fly by jumping off the nursery bed, and just waving their arms. Someday this will work, if they practice hard enough.

The Dead game has three rules.

One. Numbers are significant. The twins keep a list of important numbers in a green address book that belonged to their mother. Mr. Coeslak's tour has been a good source of significant amounts and tallies: they are writing a tragical history of numbers.

Two. The twins don't play the Dead game in front of grownups. They have been summing up the babysitter, and have decided that she doesn't count. They tell her the rules.

Three is the best and most important rule. When you are Dead, you don't have to be afraid of anything. Samantha and Claire aren't sure who the Specialist is, but they aren't afraid of him.

To become Dead, they hold their breath while counting to thirty-five, which is as high as their mother got, not counting a few days.

'You never lived here,' Claire says. 'Mr. Coeslak lives here.'

'Not at night,' says the babysitter. 'This was my bedroom when I was little.'

'Really?' Samantha says. Claire says, 'Prove it.'

The babysitter gives Samantha and Claire a look, as if she is measuring them: how old, how smart, how brave, how tall. Then she nods. The wind is in the flue, and in the dim nursery light they can see the milky strands of fog seeping out of the fireplace. 'Go stand in the chimney,' she instructs them. 'Stick your hand as far up as you can, and there is a little hole on the left side, with a key in it.'

Samantha looks at Claire, who says, 'Go ahead.' Claire is fifteen minutes and some few uncounted seconds older than Samantha, and therefore gets to tell Samantha what to do. Samantha remembers the muttering voices and then reminds herself that she is Dead. She goes over to the fireplace and ducks inside.

When Samantha stands up in the chimney, she can only see the very edge of the room. She can see the fringe of the mothy blue rug, and one bed leg, and beside it, Claire's foot, swinging back and forth like a metronome. Claire's shoelace has come undone and there is a Band-Aid on her ankle. It all looks very pleasant and peaceful from inside the chimney, like a dream, and for a moment she almost wishes she didn't have to be Dead. But it's safer, really.

She sticks her left hand up as far as she can reach, trailing it along the crumbly wall, until she feels an indentation. She thinks about spiders and severed fingers, and rusty razorblades, and then she reaches inside. She keeps her eyes lowered, focused on the corner of the room and Claire's twitchy foot.

Inside the hole, there is a tiny cold key, its teeth facing outward. She pulls it out, and ducks back into the room. 'She wasn't lying,' she tells Claire.

'Of course I wasn't lying,' the babysitter says. 'When you're Dead, you're not allowed to tell lies.'

'Unless you want to,' Claire says.

Dreary and dreadful beats the sea at the sh.o.r.e.

Ghastly and dripping is the mist at the door.

The clock in the hall is chiming one, two, three, four.

The morning comes not, no, never, no more.

Samantha and Claire have gone to camp for three weeks every summer since they were seven. This year their father didn't ask them if they wanted to go back and, after discussing it, they decided that it was just as well. They didn't want to have to explain to all their friends how they were half-orphans now. They are used to being envied, because they are identical twins. They don't want to be pitiful.

It has not even been a year, but Samantha realizes that she is forgetting what her mother looked like. Not her mother's face so much as the way she smelled, which was something like dry hay, and something like Chanel No. 5, and like something else too. She can't remember whether her mother had gray eyes, like her, or grey eyes, like Claire. She doesn't dream about her mother anymore, but she does dream about Prince Charming, a bay whom she once rode in the horse show at her camp. In the dream, Prince Charming did not smell like a horse at all. He smelled like Chanel No. 5. When she is Dead, she can have all the horses she wants, and they all smell like Chanel No. 5.

'Where does the key go to?' Samantha says.

The babysitter holds out her hand. 'To the attic. You don't really need it, but taking the stairs is easier than the chimney. At least the first time.'

'Aren't you going to make us go to bed?' Claire says.

The babysitter ignores Claire. 'My father used to lock me in the attic when I was little, but I didn't mind. There was a bicycle up there and I used to ride it around and around the chimneys until my mother let me out again. Do you know how to ride a bicycle?'

'Of course,' Claire says.

'If you ride fast enough, the Specialist can't catch you.'

'What's the Specialist?' Samantha says. Bicycles are okay, but horses can go faster.

'The Specialist wears a hat,' says the babysitter. 'The hat makes noises.'

She doesn't say anything else.

When you're dead, the gra.s.s is greener Over your grave. The wind is keener.

Your eyes sink in, your flesh decays. You Grow accustomed to slowness; expect delays.

The attic is somehow bigger and lonelier than Samantha and Claire thought it would be. The babysitter's key opens the locked door at the end of the hallway, revealing a narrow set of stairs. She waves them ahead and upwards.

It isn't as dark in the attic as they had imagined. The oaks that block the light and make the first three stories so dim and green and mysterious during the day, don't reach all the way up. Extravagant moonlight, dusty and pale, streams in the angled dormer windows. It lights the length of the attic, which is wide enough to hold a softball game in, and lined with trunks where Samantha imagines people could sit, could be hiding and watching. The ceiling slopes down, impaled upon the eight thickwaisted chimney stacks. The chimneys seem too alive, somehow, to be contained in this empty, neglected place; they thrust almost angrily through the roof and attic floor. In the moonlight they look like they are breathing. 'They're so beautiful,' she says.

'Which chimney is the nursery chimney?' Claire says.

The babysitter points to the nearest righthand stack. 'That one,' she says. 'It runs up through the ballroom on the first floor, the library, the nursery.'

Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long black object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. The babysitter takes it down, twirls it on her finger. There are holes in the black thing and it whistles mournfully as she spins it. 'The Specialist's hat,' she says.

'That doesn't look like a hat,' says Claire. 'It doesn't look like anything at all.' She goes to look through the boxes and trunks that are stacked against the far wall.

'It's a special hat,' the babysitter says. 'It's not supposed to look like anything. But it can sound like anything you can imagine. My father made it.'

'Our father writes books,' Samantha says.

'My father did too.' The babysitter hangs the hat back on the nail. It curls blackly against the chimney. Samantha stares at it. It nickers at her. 'He was a bad poet, but he was worse at magic.'

Last summer, Samantha wished more than anything that she could have a horse. She thought she would have given up anything for one even being a twin was not as good as having a horse. She still doesn't have a horse, but she doesn't have a mother either, and she can't help wondering if it's her fault. The hat nickers again, or maybe it is the wind in the chimney.

'What happened to him?' Claire asks.

'After he made the hat, the Specialist came and took him away. I hid in the nursery chimney while it was looking for him, and it didn't find me.'

'Weren't you scared?'

There is a clattering, shivering, clicking noise. Claire has found the babysitter's bike and is dragging it towards them by the handlebars. The babysitter shrugs. 'Rule number three,' she says.

Claire s.n.a.t.c.hes the hat off the nail. 'I'm the Specialist!' she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the floppy shapeless brim sewn with little asymmetrical b.u.t.tons that flash and catch at the moonlight like teeth. Samantha looks again and sees that they are teeth. Without counting, she suddenly knows that there are exactly fifty-two teeth on the hat, and that they are the teeth of agoutis, of cura.s.sows, of white-lipped peccaries, and of the wife of Charles Cheatham Rash. The chimneys are moaning, and Claire's voice booms hollowly beneath the hat. 'Run away, or I'll catch you and eat you!'

Samantha and the babysitter run away, laughing as Claire mounts the rusty, noisy bicycle and pedals madly after them. She rings the bicycle bell as she rides, and the Specialist's hat bobs up and down on her head. It spits like a cat. The bell is shrill and thin, and the bike wails and shrieks. It leans first towards the right and then to the left. Claire's k.n.o.bby knees stick out on either side like makeshift counterweights.

Claire weaves in and out between the chimneys, chasing Samantha and the babysitter. Samantha is slow, turning to look behind. As Claire approaches, she keeps one hand on the handlebars and stretches the other hand out towards Samantha. Just as she is about to grab Samantha, the babysitter turns back and plucks the hat off Claire's head.

's.h.i.t!' the babysitter says, and drops it. There is a drop of blood forming on the fleshy part of the babysitter's hand, black in the moonlight, where the Specialist's hat has bitten her.

Claire dismounts, giggling. Samantha watches as the Specialist's hat rolls away. It picks up speed, veering across the attic floor, and disappears, thumping down the stairs. 'Go get it,' Claire says. 'You can be the Specialist this time.'

'No,' the babysitter says, sucking at her palm. 'It's time for bed.'

When they go down the stairs, there is no sign of the Specialist's hat. They brush their teeth, climb into the ship-bed, and pull the covers up to their necks. The babysitter sits between their feet. 'When you're Dead,' Samantha says, 'do you still get tired and have to go to sleep? Do you have dreams?'

'When you're Dead,' the babysitter says, 'everything's a lot easier. You don't have to do anything that you don't want to. You don't have to have a name, you don't have to remember. You don't even have to breathe.'

She shows them exactly what she means.

When she has time to think about it (and now she has all the time in the world to think), Samantha realizes with a small pang that she is now stuck indefinitely between ten and eleven years old, stuck with Claire and the babysitter. She considers this. The number 10 is pleasing and round, like a beach ball, but all in all, it hasn't been an easy year. She wonders what 11 would have been like. Sharper, like needles maybe. She has chosen to be Dead, instead. She hopes that she's made the right decision. She wonders if her mother would have decided to be Dead, instead of dead, if she could have.

Last year they were learning fractions in school, when her mother died. Fractions remind Samantha of herds of wild horses, piebalds and pintos and palominos. There are so many of them, and they are, well, fractious and unruly. Just when you think you have one under control, it throws up its head and tosses you off. Claire's favorite number is 4, which she says is a tall, skinny boy. Samantha doesn't care for boys that much. She likes numbers. Take the number 8 for instance, which can be more than one thing at once. Looked at one way, 8 looks like a bent woman with curvy hair. But if you lay it down on its side, it looks like a snake curled with its tail in its mouth. This is sort of like the difference between being Dead and being dead. Maybe when Samantha is tired of one, she will try the other.

On the lawn, under the oak trees, she hears someone calling her name. Samantha climbs out of bed and goes to the nursery window. She looks out through the wavy gla.s.s. It's Mr. Coeslak. 'Samantha, Claire!' he calls up to her. 'Are you all right? Is your father there?' Samantha can almost see the moonlight shining through him. 'They're always locking me in the tool room. G.o.dd.a.m.n spooky things,' he says. 'Are you there, Samantha? Claire? Girls?'

The babysitter comes and stands beside Samantha. The babysitter puts her finger to her lip. Claire's eyes glitter at them from the dark bed. Samantha doesn't say anything, but she waves at Mr. Coeslak. The babysitter waves too. Maybe he can see them waving, because after a little while he stops shouting and goes away. 'Be careful,' the babysitter says. 'He'll be coming soon. It will be coming soon.'

She takes Samantha's hand, and leads her back to the bed, where Claire is waiting. They sit and wait. Time pa.s.ses, but they don't get tired, they don't get any older.

Who's there?

Just air.

The front door opens on the first floor, and Samantha, Claire, and the babysitter can hear someone creeping, creeping up the stairs. 'Be quiet,' the babysitter says. 'It's the Specialist.'

Samantha and Claire are quiet. The nursery is dark and the wind crackles like a fire in the fireplace.

'Claire, Samantha, Samantha, Claire?' The Specialist's voice is blurry and wet. It sounds like their father's voice, but that's because the hat can imitate any noise, any voice. 'Are you still awake?'

'Quick,' the babysitter says. 'It's time to go up to the attic and hide.'

Claire and Samantha slip out from under the covers and dress quickly and silently. They follow her. Without speech, without breathing, she pulls them into the safety of the chimney. It is too dark to see, but they understand the babysitter perfectly when she mouths the word, Up. She goes first, so they can see where the finger-holds are, the bricks that jut out for their feet. Then Claire. Samantha watches her sister's foot ascend like smoke, the shoelace still untied.

'Claire? Samantha? G.o.ddammit, you're scaring me. Where are you?' The Specialist is standing just outside the half-open door. 'Samantha? I think I've been bitten by something. I think I've been bitten by a G.o.dd.a.m.n snake.' Samantha hesitates for only a second. Then she is climbing up, up, up the nursery chimney.

A Redress for Andromeda.

Caitlin R. Kiernan.

Caitlin R. Kiernan (1964) is an American author who has steadily moved beyond a reputation as an heir to the legacy of H. P. Lovecraft and Southern Gothic literature, to become one of the most original and audacious weird writers of her generation. In addition to her many award-winning novels and stories, Kiernan has written scientific papers that reflect her love of herpetology and paleontology, also reflected in her fiction. Perhaps more than any other writer of the past thirty years, Kiernan places the reader somewhere alien and inhabits points of view that seem both luminous and edgy. 'A Redress for Andromeda' (2000) is a perfect example of Kiernan's ability to portray the uncanny in original and terrifying ways.

Where the land ends and the unsleeping, omnivorous Pacific has chewed the edge of the continent ragged, the old house sits alone in the tall gra.s.s, waiting for Tara. She parks the rented car at the edge of the sandy dirt road and gets out, staring towards the house and the sea, breathing the salt and the night, the moonlight and all the wine- and apple-crisp October smells. The wind whips the gra.s.s, whips it into tall waves and fleeting troughs the way it whips the sea, and Tara watches the house as the house watches her. Mutual curiosity or wary misgiving, one or the other or both, and she decides to leave the car here and walk the rest of the way.

There are a few other cars, parked much closer to the house, though not as many as she expected, and the porch is burning down in a mad conflagration of jack-o'-lanterns, a hundred candle-lit eyes and mouths and nostrils, or at least that's how it looks to her. Walking along the sandy road as it curves towards the ocean and the high gabled house with its turrets and lightning rods, that's how it looks; the house besieged by all those carved and flaming pumpkins, and she takes her time, walking slowly, listening to the wind and the sea slamming itself against the headland. The wind is colder than Tara thought it would be, and all she's wearing is a white dress, one of her simple shirt-waist dresses fashionable forty or forty-five years ago, a dress her mother might have worn when she was a girl; the white dress with its sensible cuffs and collars, and black espadrilles on her feet, shoes as plain as the dress because Darren said to keep it simple. It isn't a masquerade, he told her. Nothing like that at all. Just be yourself. But she wishes she'd remembered her coat. It's lying on the pa.s.senger seat of the rental car. She thinks about going back for it, and then decides she can stand the chill as far as the front door.

Tara knows a little of this house's history, but only what Darren has told her about it. She knows it's called the Dandridge House, because the man who built it in 1890 was named Machen Dandridge. Back in the sixties it was one of those places that hippies and occultists liked to haunt, someplace remote enough that n.o.body would notice if you sacrificed a farm animal now and then. Darren told her ghost stories, too, since a house like this has to have a few ghost stories, but she took two Xanax on the drive up from Monterey, and the stories have all run together in her head.

It's not much farther before a narrow, sandy trail turns off the sandy road. There's a rusty mailbox on a post that's fallen over, and no one's bothered to set it right again. Tara follows the trail towards the wide, pumpkin-crowded porch that seems to wrap itself all the way around the house. Her shoes are already full of sand, sand getting in between her toes, and she stops and looks back towards her car, all alone at the edge of the road. The car seems far, far away.

There's a black-haired woman sitting on the porch steps, smoking a cigarette and watching her. When Tara smiles the woman returns the smile.

'You must be Tara,' the woman says and holds out her hand. 'Darren told us that you'd be late. I thought someone should wait out here for you. A friendly face in the wilderness, you know.'

Tara says thank you and shakes the woman's hand. This close, the jack-o'-lanterns seem to have grown even brighter. They hurt her eyes after so many miles of night. She squints at them and nods to the woman on the steps of the house.

'You didn't have any trouble finding us?' the woman asks.

'No,' Tara says. 'No trouble at all. Darren gives good directions.'

'Well, it's not as if there's much of anything else out here,' the woman says. She releases Tara's hand and glances past all the jack-o'-lanterns towards the cliffs and the sea. 'You just keep going until there's nowhere left to go, and here it is.'

'Who carved all these?' Tara asks. 'There must be a hundred of them.' She points at one of the jack-o-lanterns, and the woman on the steps smiles again and takes another drag off her brown cigarette, exhaling smoke that smells like cloves and cinnamon.

'One hundred and eleven, actually,' she says. 'They're like birthday candles. One for every year since the house was built. We've been carving them for a week.'

'Oh,' Tara says, because she doesn't know what else to say. 'I see.'

'You should go on inside,' the woman tells her. 'They'll be waiting. It's getting late,' and Tara says nice to meet you, we'll talk some more later, something polite and obligatory like that. She steps past the smoking woman, towards the front door, past and between the grinning and grimacing and frowning pumpkin faces.

'Yes, she's the one that I was telling you about last week,' Darren is saying to them all, 'the marine biologist.' He laughs, and Tara shakes someone else's hand. It's getting hard to keep them straight, all these pale people in their impeccable black clothing. She feels like a pigeon dropped into a flock of crows. Sure, it's not a masquerade, not a costume party, but she could have at least had the good sense to wear black. A tall, painfully thin woman with a thick French accent touches the back of Tara's hand. The woman's nails are lacquered the red-brown color of kelp, and her smile is as gentle as was the woman's out on the porch.

'It's always so nice to see a new face,' the French woman says. 'Especially when it's such a fine and splendid face.' The woman kisses the back of Tara's hand, and then Darren's introducing her to a short, fat man wearing an ascot the color of a stormy summer sky.

'Ah,' he says, and shakes Tara's hand so forcefully it hurts. 'A scientist. That's grand. We've had so few scientists, you know.' She isn't sure if his accent is Scots or Irish, but it's heavy, like his wide, jowly face.

'We've had medical doctors, yes,' the fat man continues. 'Lots and lots of medical doctors. Once we had a neurologist, even. But I've never thought doctors were quite the same thing. As scientists, I mean. Doctors aren't really much more than glorified mechanics, are they?'

'I never really thought of it that way,' Tara says, which isn't exactly true. She manages to slip free of the fat man's endless, crushing handshake without seeming rude, then glances towards Darren, hoping that he can read the discomfort, the unease, in her eyes.