Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror Read Free

her great-aunt's house was near the water so that she could stare and stare at it forever.
     
     
    2.
     
    Now came the time of surprises. Now Magdalena was continually surprised, like a child wandering in a hall of marvels.
    Her first surprise was at the Edmundston train station. It had been arranged that she would be met there by her great-aunt's driver and so, stepping down uncertainly from the coach car, struggling with her suitcase and satchel, she glanced quickly about. The confusion and commotion of so many disembarking passengers, so many strangers, threw her into a panic. What if no one is here? What if this is a mistake, a dream? They have sent me away to be rid of me. Then she saw a dark-uniformed man with a vizored cap standing on the platform calmly holding a sign— Kistenmacher . It took Magdalena a moment to realize that Kistenmacher, a stranger's name, now referred in some crucial way to her.
    At her approach, the uniformed man greeted her, "Miss Schön?" and took her suitcase and satchel from her as if they weighed nothing and walked briskly through the crowded, noisy station to a long black car shiny as a hearse parked outside. In a daze of relief and excitement Magdalena hurried in his wake. Miss Schön! A man had called her Miss Schön! She saw how others watched her with curiosity and respect as the driver opened a rear door of the car and helped her climb inside. Never had Magdalena seen a car so luxurious as this except in photographs; the rear was cushioned in soft gray plush, the windows were so clean and clear, just perceptibly tinted, you would hardly know there were windows at all. Through the traffic-crowded streets of downtown Edmundston they seemed to glide soundlessly as in a dream, and along a wide, windy avenue, and through a park where the grass was stubbled with slow-melting snow, and then they were ascending into a high, hilly residential district of cobblestone streets, clean-swept brick sidewalks, and large, beautiful old houses behind wrought-iron fences and stone walls. Magdalena stared, enchanted. She'd become breathless as if she'd been running. She would have liked to ask the driver many questions but was too shy to speak. For his part, the driver was utterly remote, formal. He'd spoken with her only once as they'd started out, to ask if she was comfortable, and Magdalena had stammered yes, thank you. Never in her life had anyone asked her such a question! The driver sat on the other side of a glass partition and she could see only the back of his head, and the back of his vizored cap; there was a rearview mirror above his windshield, but Magdalena could see no face in it.
    As the train had entered Edmundston, Magdalena had lost sight of the beautiful glittering ocean; she'd been propelled, as through a tunnel, past a confused succession of factories, warehouses, the rears of run-down houses and tenement buildings disconcertingly similar to those of Black Rock; its speed ever slowing, like a great beast run to earth, the train had passed over a canal of the color of rust. Everywhere was hazy, sepia-tinged smoke or mist she knew would smell and taste like something burnt. But in the residential district in which her aunt Kistenmacher lived, the air was clear and sparkling as if rain-washed. Even the clouded sky opened to piercing blue as the driver brought them steeply uphill on a cobblestone street named Charter, to their destination.
    Magdalena continued to stare as the long shiny black car glided soundlessly into the driveway, past ten-foot stone pillars, one of them marked 1792. The Kistenmacher house was not the largest of the houses Magdalena had been seeing, nor the most impressive; it was a three-story narrow house of aged brick of the hue of pinkish flesh, softened by time; moldering with time; in the facade were crude blocks of granite that had darkened with rain. The roof of the house was unusually steep, with rotted shingles and a prominent chimney listing to one side at