The Dark Read Free

tales become a burden. They hamper one’s duty and lead to melancholic thoughts. At the least they become entwined with one’s own interpretations, filtered through one’s own imaginings. With Mrs. Kane, however, my curiosity soon overcame these reservations. To explain: My patients often speak of the past, but their purposes vary. Some seek absolution. Some a road to comprehension. Some merely like to hear themselves prattle on. But Mrs.Kane—or Maggie, as I called her by the end—had a more obscure purpose and this purpose, I came to think, had something to do with my own presence.
    I should add that my patient spoke of her younger self as if she were some girl she had known intimately, but who had been a separate person withal. Such is what comes, I thought then, from taking on so many voices, and from making so many mistakes, mistakes that are incomprehensible to one’s present self (to this latter fact I can well attest).
    “I surely loathed Hydesville,” she began. “My younger sister, Katie, and I both did. Hydesville was naught but a crossroads, a hamlet, the forlornest place in the world, we thought, and didn’t we just surl like wet cats when our parents moved us there from the lit-up bustle of Rochester. We hated being away from our adored sister Leah, who taught music in Rochester, and from her daughter, Lizzie, who was near our age and ever up for jack-fun, at least at first. This move happened in, yes, the autumn of’47. David, our grown brother, lived in Arcadia, near to Hydesville, and he was doing dandy-fine cultivating peppermint. Our father, John Fox, hoped to do the same. He was a blacksmith by trade but failed-up at near everything he put his hand to.”
    She paused and reached for the laudanum. I considered, then gave her a measure more. “That Hydesville house,” she continued. “It was one of those little saltbox affairs, all damp and dull and ever strewn with little clumps of dank dirt no matter how we cleaned our shoes, to our poor, fretting mother’s dismay. It had no near-on neighbours and was quiet and dim as tomb within, even in the broad of day. And it was rumoured to be haunted by a murdered peddler. And here begins Spiritualism, Mrs. Mellon, the whole grand shebang of it: those rumours of a haunting, two bored and mischievous sisters, an encounter, and a curse.”

    M AGGIE SHOULD STOP , turn back, but as always she clambers on past caution, clambers higher and higher up this tree that is older thanreckoning. Past a hangbird’s nest. Past branches sagged with apples of carmine and rose. She clambers as high as she can, up and up, into this azure and gold October day of 1847.
    Her sister Katie peers up from below. “Get on down, Mag. You’ll break your neck or something.”
    “But I can see the world from here,” Maggie calls back. Maggie is fourteen. Katie is eleven. Their world is the hamlet of Hydesville, which is in the township of Arcadia, in the county of Wayne, in the state of New York. Their world is fields of peppermint, stands of woodlands, lines of drumlins, and the Ganargua River, muddy and mosquito-shrouded.
    “Please, Mag! Let’s get outta here. The tender’s hound is real fierce and we’re too far in. I can’t see the road no more.”
    “That doesn’t mean it ain’t there, silly thing,” Maggie calls, as she works her way down. It is a more fraught climb than up. She feels her cheeks flushing red, adding, no doubt, to that “healthful country prettiness” their mother insists she has. A prettiness, Maggie supposes, that must be better than none at all.
    She drops to the green. Her pinafore, laden with thieved apples, bangs her knees.
    Katie steadies her. And then the murderous barking statues them both. The sound is near, then far. Now everywhere at once.
    “Run!” Maggie yells, and grips Katie’s hand. Their brogans are slicked with rotting apple pulp and they slip once, stumble twice. Leaves flap at their braids. Quack grass lashes their knees.