A low roar of voices fills the house as even the spectral rappings did not.
But the thing in the cellar commands her. Even if she and Kate and their joint imagination have planted it there—and she can’t say for certain anymore—the peddler’s ruined body has swelled, spread like a foul demon vegetable in the nether regions of their farmhouse. Maggie can’t long keep it from her thoughts.
When the rappings began, Marta Weekman, who’s nine but seems younger, told Maggie and Kate matter-of-factly that she once lived in their house and suffered there. It knocked, Marta said, and when her father answered, there was no one. Her pa raced round in bare feet to see was the knocker here concealed or there, and this—her befuddled father’s evident lunacy—terrified her worst of all. One night she felt a hand trail over her sheets as fingers play on water or a harp, and when the hand reached her face, it was cold. She lay rigid till dawn, too stricken to speak or cry out, and refused to enter her room again after dark. Not long after, her family moved out.
Maggie hopes it won’t touch her.
On the other hand, what might it feel like, being touched by a hand from Beyond? Wondering—like when she wonders about God or the devil—makes her feel light and unpinned from her body, wide-awake and willing to a fault.
She curls tight, listening to the swell of voices. Safe among her family and neighbors, Maggie wonders, is Marta Weekman downstairs with her parents? Or have they had their fill of the spook house? She wonders about the rappings, about herself and Kate, whose breath now warms her wrist. All these people milling about in the strangeness of night, including the peddler with limp head dangling over a great gash. Who are we? How have we come to be here? Now. Together.
Inside, in full morning sun, Mrs. Redfield kneels, surrounded by a hushed assemblage—more arrive every hour—of villagers. She asks in a voice unfamiliar and soft, urgent enough to make a blacksmith blush, “Is there a heaven to attain?”
In broad daylight, the question floats down among the farmhouse congregation like a feather. It rocks on the air like a baby’s cradle. Each word a creaking prayer. Is. There. A heaven. To. Attain.
Right on cue, Mr. Charles B. Rosna arrives with comfort.
Rap. Rap. Rap.
“Is Mary there?” Mrs. Redfield, on her knees, bows her head. Her shoulders shake, but only just. “Is my Mary in heaven?”
However petty Mrs. Redfield is, she deserves an answer. But it was a poor night’s rest, and already Maggie’s weary of the work and the day. She saunters off, trying not to imagine the rueful silence in her wake. Does their bold new world exist when she’s not present? When she and Kate step offstage? Who was it said the world’s but a stage? Mr. Shakespeare. She thinks fondly of Amy Post reading aloud from a leather volume while she and Kate lazed on their stomachs, bicycling back the air with stocking feet, their skirts in an unladylike sprawl. Amy’s a Quaker and can’t approve of the plays, which Maggie’s managed through her own cunning to borrow from her pastor’s library, but Amy makes an exception for the poems.
After that, the spirit is reticent. People come and go, and it doesn’t please them to go. They linger by wagons, stamping with the horses. They murmur into their gloves. Kate is young yet to rate the lash for immodesty, so after they procure a furtive lunch of bread and too-ripe cheese, she climbs the attic ladder to view it all from the rafters.
By evening, men and able boys have commenced digging in the cellar. Debate rages among them and floats up through floorboards.
“We can’t lower this water.”
“I never have seen or heard a thing I can’t account for on reasonable grounds.”
“Account for it, then.”
“I see no human agency at work.”
“Rats. None but rats in the walls.”
“The Fox elders never seen any rats.”
“There’s that cobbler fellow down the way. Might be an insomniac hammering his leather all night.”
“He’s outside now, taking his nips on Obadiah’s wagon while we dig.”
“Waste of a night’s rest.”
“Why does the spirit rap only with those girls present? It’s fine sport for them.”
“These children were the first to befriend it. Maybe it trusts them.”
Maggie wonders if Kate feels the same excitement she does with some two dozen strong-armed men in sweat-stained shirtsleeves laboring just below the floorboards, or is Katie too young for that?
The men dig and dig, metal picks ringing on packed earth, until a great, violent scraping sounds and one man barks, “There! You’ve done it again. Here comes the water racing.”
The men stamp mud up the stairs, their spirits dampened. They emerge singly and in pairs to convene round the kitchen, mutter, and warm their hands with Pa’s coffee.
There is no rapping that night.
Long past bedtime, youngsters sprawl under tables, whispering with ears pressed to the planks. They kneel and play at jacks as big frighten little with grotesque, silent pantomimes of the dead man, heads dangling limp on boyish necks. The house smells of warm cider. Mr. Hyde slyly kisses Mrs. Hyde behind one ear. A dog barks far off, and keeps barking. But gradually, the good neighbors trickle out. Ma leaves the men and the stragglers to it. She steers her girls out after Mrs. Hyde, and the Fox women sleep on a hard bed in strange bedcovers, dreaming of phantoms. They sleep straight through their morning chores.
3 A Candle and a Chance
They’ve gone. Clara hears his voice from a long way off, waking with her head on her father’s shoulder. His thin arm in lint-specked dinner-jacket sleeve folds Clara close, prevents her drooping forward and toppling down the stair. He has removed his tie and looks uncharacteristically rakish for a man of his years, smiling sideways with his ruined teeth. Clara smiles back fuzzily, lulled and small.
She feels and looks, she supposes, exactly like a child who’s surrendered to sleep whilst spying on the grown-ups downstairs. Except she’s nearly forty years old and aching soundly, the grown-ups have gone home, and the smile on her father’s lips is not one of exasperation or bemusement but concern.
“Well, then.” A voice behind them startles her out of her wits—or into them. It belongs to the Widow Bray, seated at the same narrow table Clara collided with earlier. “You nodded off in mid-entrance, Clara. At least we two waited for the dessert tray to arrive.” The widow and her vast shadow set the candleholder on the table, tame ample skirts into submission, and join the other two on the step. O cozy horror.
Clara lifts her father’s sheltering arm away and stands with a palm on the wall to steady herself. She sidles past them, crossing to the abandoned chair. To retreat outright would be unforgivable, and she and Father have very little but forgiveness left to offer one another.
“Clara,”
