this world so infertile in wonders, this world where even the living seem dead . . .
But who is screaming so bitterly in the moonless night?
It’s time to go
The soup is getting cold, father’s going to get angry
It’s time to return
The wolf is keeping vigil, the owl spreads its wings
Distorted by thick layers of thought, a voice reverberates in echo in the darkened countryside. Her sister is yelling for her from the threshold of the house. The night wind stirs the branches of the ashes and elms. Wrapped in her shawl, Maggie scans every preposterous flickering shadow where disembodied hands and heads are moving. She’s surprised when only Old Billy responds to her, but doesn’t dare enter the pond of shadows that separates the barn from the house. For several days now, at twilight, an apprehension has made her bristle. An icy reptile of terror sliding between her thighs, on her stomach, enclosing her within its scaly rings, biting her breasts and neck.
Suddenly, a clear and frolicking voice resonates in the open air:
Tramp, tramp, tramp, the girls are runnin’
Lie still, sweet comrades, the girls will come soon!
Little by little the dancing silhouette of an elf or leprechaun emerges from the nothingness beyond. It’s Katie, her scrape-kneed little sister, triumphantly returning from chasing after ghosts.
Some Details About the Meeting
On the last day of March in the year 1848, in the last hour, just before the clock on the first floor chimed midnight, Margaret Fox stifled a fearful cry by biting the end of her pillow.
“Katie, Katie!” she breathed quickly. “Wake up! Something’s happening . . .”
“I wasn’t sleeping,” responded her bedfellow.
“Then you heard it?”
“Of course, and I don’t think it’s done yet . . .”
No sooner had she spoken than a dry crackling, like bones breaking, resounded from the side of the staircase. Margaret counted seven knocks; the muffled chime of the clock seemed to be giving a musical response.
“Midnight!” she stammered. “Oh, I’m dying of fright! There’s someone there, it’s certain! A runaway slave maybe, or an Indian from the reservation who’s going to take revenge on us with a knife used for skinning buffalo . . .”
While Katie remained silent, her big eyes open like a sleepwalker’s shining in the moonlight, Maggie felt an icy blade of terror slide down between her shoulders and, tempted to call for help, was unable to issue any sound but the kind of squeak coming from a chicken being slaughtered. A small hot hand covered her lips.
“Shh,” Kate whispered, “our parents are sleeping . . .” Her little otter’s nose had such an air of rebellious exultation that their fear immediately turned to bewilderment and a wild, nervous laugh escaped from her. “Hey, listen, now Father is snoring . . .”
“Unless that’s Mother!” Maggie corrected, laughing even louder. “But what about the knocking at this hour?”
“It’s not the first time.”
“What, don’t you ever sleep?”
“It seems to me like it’s getting louder each night. Maybe someone’s trying to get through to us . . .”
“Are you crazy? There’s no one here except our parents and you and me! At least . . .” Fear crept between her skin and the cotton sheet all over again. Frozen, mouth dry, breath held, hands clasped around her throat, Margaret shuddered with the feeling that all of her senses were pointing her toward who knows what kind of abyss—her sight, her sense of smell, her hearing, every inch of her skin—perceived the moment with excess intensity. Powerless, however, she felt like a block of plaster inside of which a frantic bird was desperately flapping its wings.
The noises stopped both inside and out. The wind lay quietly down at the feet of tall trees. Even father had stopped snoring. The silence became so total that the thought of nothingness quickly reached a kind of perfection.
“Something’s there!” Maggie quavered from the bottom of her terror, her voice collapsed into the register of a very old woman. Through the open shutters, a ray of moonlight slid over a drawn silhouette perfectly motionless just in front of her bed. Her eyes bulging at this apparition, the adolescent let out a howl empty of any substance, convinced that she herself must be dead or unconscious.
“Come on!” said the shadow. “Follow me to the staircase . . .” Recognizing the muffled voice of her little sister, Maggie let out a mouse’s squeak. Immediately the catalepsy that had nailed her in place fell away like a lead suit of armor. She threw back the sheets and, unperturbed by that rush of air, walked fearlessly behind Katie.
“It most often comes from right there,” she said, pointing to an interior wall. “Other times it rises up from the basement.”
“I can’t hear anything now,” the adolescent noted with a survivor’s relief. Kate raised her little mammalian face up to her on which two pupils blacker than night surfaced.
“That’s because he’s waiting,” she said.
“What? And first of all, who are you talking about?”
“I don’t know. Maybe he’s waiting for us to give him a sign.”
With a slow look up and down, Maggie examined the ceiling’s beams, the somber wood walls, the worn steps that sank into themselves in the dark, the dying glow of the woodstove, and the surrounding darkness.
“But who? Who are you talking about?” she repeated.
“The spirit!” Kate shot back.
“You mean a . . . a ghost?”
Her sleepy consciousness was filled with the image of a huge coffin, laid out with a huge glowworm inside it. Overtaken by a shapeless sense of panic, Maggie finally swooned and tumbled half-unconscious down to the foot of the stairs from the terror of being devoured by the glowworm. The fall resulted in a house filled with commotion. Their grumbling father, lamp in hand, and mother, distraught, came to the rescue of the fainted one whose younger sister imagined could be cured by hugs and tickles.
They led her, a big ragdoll with tangled legs, back up to her room. While their mother had already set about trying to revive her with salts and slaps, their father lit a tallow candle at her bedside table.
“What on earth were the two of you doing on the staircase at this hour?
Withdrawn, resolutely silent, Kate smiled at her own thoughts.
“It’s impossible to put oneself into such a state!” their mother added. “Smart young girls such as yourselves! What, were you going berry-picking for jam together
