Stranger Things Happen (6 page)

"I'm going to come back."

"That's not a good idea," she said. The dogs watched him leave,
crowding close around her, their black tails whipping excitedly. He
went home and in a very bad temper, he picked up the quilt to
inspect it. He was looking for the black hairs he had seen that
morning. But of course there weren't any.

The next day he went back to the library. He was lifting books
out of the overnight collection box, when he felt something that
was neither rectangular nor flat. It was covered in velvety fur,
and damp. He felt warm breath steaming on his hand. It twisted away
when he tried to pick it up, and when he reached out for it again,
it snarled at him.

He backed away from the collection box, and a long black dog
wriggled out of the box after him. Two students stopped to watch
what was happening. "Go get Mr. Cassatti, please," Carroll said to
one of them. "His office is around the corner."

The dog approached him. Its ears were laid back flat against its
skull and its neck moved like a snake.

"Good dog?" Carroll said, and held out his hand. "Flower?" The
dog lunged forward and, snapping its jaws shut, bit off his pinky
just below the fingernail.

The student screamed. Carroll stood still and looked down at his
right hand, which was slowly leaking blood. The sound that the
dog's jaw had made as it severed his finger had been crisp and
businesslike. The dog stared at Carroll in a way that reminded him
of Rachel's stare. "Give me back my finger," Carroll said.

The dog growled and backed away. "We have to catch it," the
student said. "So they can reattach your finger. Shit, what if it
has rabies?"

Mr. Cassatti appeared, carrying a large flat atlas, extended
like a shield. "Someone said that there was a dog in the library,"
he said.

"In the corner over there," Carroll said. "It bit off my
finger." He held up his hand for Mr. Cassatti to see, but Mr.
Cassatti was looking towards the corner and shaking his head.

He said, "I don't see a dog."

The two students hovered, loudly insisting that they had both
seen the dog a moment ago, while Mr. Cassatti tended to Carroll.
The floor in the corner was sticky and wet, as if someone had
spilled a Coke. There was no sign of the dog.

Mr. Cassatti took Carroll to the hospital, where the doctor at
the hospital gave him a shot of codeine, and tried to convince him
that it would be a simple matter to reattach the fingertip. "How?"
Mr. Cassatti said. "He says the dog ran away with it."

"What dog?" the doctor asked.

"It was bitten off by a dog," Carroll told the doctor.

The doctor raised his eyebrows. "A dog in a library? This looks
like he stuck his finger under a paper cutter. The cut is too
tidy—a dog bite would be a mess. Didn't anyone bring the
finger?"

"The dog ate it," Carroll said. "Mrs. Rook said the dog would
eat me, but it stopped. I don't think it liked the way I
tasted."

Mr. Cassatti and the doctor went out into the hall to discuss
something. Carroll stood at the door and waited until they had
turned towards the nurses' station. He opened the door and snuck
down the hallway in the opposite direction and out of the hospital.
It was a little hard, walking on the ground—the codeine seemed to
affect gravity. When he walked, he bounced. When walking got too
difficult, he climbed in a taxi and gave the driver the address of
the Rook farm.

His hand didn't hurt at all; he tried to remember this, so he
could tell Rachel. They had bound up his hand in white gauze
bandages, and it looked like someone else's hand entirely. Under
the white bandages, his hand was pleasantly warm. His skin felt
stretched, tight and thin as a rubber glove. He felt much lighter:
it might take a while, but he thought he could get the hang of
losing things; it seemed to come as easily to him as everything
else did.

Carroll thought maybe Rachel and he would get married down by
the pond, beneath the new leaves of the six o'clock oak tree. Mr.
Rook could wear his most festive nose, the one with rose-velvet
lining, or perhaps the one painted with flowers. Carroll remembered
the little grave at the top of the path that led to the pond—not
the pond, he decided—they should be married in a church. Maybe in a
library.

"Just drop me off here," he told the taxi driver at the top of
the driveway.

"Are you sure you'll be okay?" the driver said. Carroll shook
his head, yes, he was sure. He watched the taxi drive away, waving
the hand with the abbreviated finger.

Mrs. Rook could make her daughter a high-waisted wedding dress,
satin and silk and lace, moth-pale, and there would be a cake with
eight laughing dogs made out of white frosting, white as snow. For
some reason he had a hard time making the church come out right. It
kept changing, church into library, library into black pond. The
windows were high and narrow and the walls were wet like the inside
of a well. The aisle kept changing, the walls getting closer,
becoming stacks of books, dark, velvety waves. He imagined standing
at the altar with Rachel—black water came up to their ankles as if
their feet had been severed. He thought of the white cake again: if
he sliced into it, darkness would gush out like ink.

He shook his head, listening. There was a heavy dragging noise,
coming up the side of the hill through the Christmas trees. It
would be a beautiful wedding and he considered it a lucky thing
that he had lost his pinky and not his ring finger. You had to look
on the bright side after all. He went down towards the pond, to
tell Rachel this.

"When you're Dead," Samantha says, "you don't have to brush your
teeth … "

"When you're Dead," Claire says, "you live in a box, and it's
always dark, but you're not ever afraid."

Claire and Samantha are identical twins. Their combined age is
twenty years, four months, and six days. Claire is better at being
Dead than Samantha.

The babysitter yawns, covering up her mouth with a long white
hand. "I said to brush your teeth and that it's time for bed," she
says. She sits crosslegged on the flowered bedspread between them.
She has been teaching them a card game called Pounce, which
involves three decks of cards, one for each of them. Samantha's
deck is missing the Jack of Spades and the Two of Hearts, and
Claire keeps on cheating. The babysitter wins anyway. There are
still flecks of dried shaving cream and toilet paper on her arms.
It is hard to tell how old she is—at first they thought she must be
a grownup, but now she hardly looks older than they. Samantha has
forgotten the babysitter's name.

Claire's face is stubborn. "When you're Dead," she says, "you
stay up all night long."

"When you're dead," the babysitter snaps, "it's always very cold
and damp, and you have to be very, very quiet or else the
Specialist will get you."

"This house is haunted," Claire says.

"I know it is," the babysitter says. "I used to live here."

Something is creeping up the stairs, 
Something is standing outside the door, 
Something is sobbing, sobbing in the dark; 
Something is sighing across the floor.

Claire and Samantha are spending the summer with their father,
in the house called Eight Chimneys. Their mother is dead. She has
been dead for exactly 282 days.

Their father is writing a history of Eight Chimneys and of the
poet Charles Cheatham Rash, who lived here at the turn of the
century, and who ran away to sea when he was thirteen, and returned
when he was thirty-eight. He married, fathered a child, wrote three
volumes of bad, obscure poetry, and an even worse and more obscure
novel, 
The One Who is Watching Me Through the Window
,
before disappearing again in 1907, this time for good. Samantha and
Claire's father says that some of the poetry is actually quite
readable and at least the novel isn't very long.

When Samantha asked him why he was writing about Rash, he
replied that no one else had and why didn't she and Samantha go
play outside. When she pointed out that she was Samantha, he just
scowled and said how could he be expected to tell them apart when
they both wore blue jeans and flannel shirts, and why couldn't one
of them dress all in green and the other in pink?

Claire and Samantha prefer to play inside. Eight Chimneys is as
big as a castle, but dustier and darker than Samantha imagines a
castle would be. There are more sofas, more china shepherdesses
with chipped fingers, fewer suits of armor. No moat.

The house is open to the public, and, during the day,
people—families— driving along the Blue Ridge Parkway will stop to
tour the grounds and the first story; the third story belongs to
Claire and Samantha. Sometimes they play explorers, and sometimes
they follow the caretaker as he gives tours to visitors. After a
few weeks, they have memorized his lecture, and they mouth it along
with him. They help him sell postcards and copies of Rash's poetry
to the tourist families who come into the little gift shop.

When the mothers smile at them and say how sweet they are, they
stare back and don't say anything at all. The dim light in the
house makes the mothers look pale and flickery and tired. They
leave Eight Chimneys, mothers and families, looking not quite as
real as they did before they paid their admissions, and of course
Claire and Samantha will never see them again, so maybe they aren't
real. Better to stay inside the house, they want to tell the
families, and if you must leave, then go straight to your cars.

The caretaker says the woods aren't safe.

Their father stays in the library on the second story all
morning, typing, and in the afternoon he takes long walks. He takes
his pocket recorder along with him and a hip flask of Gentleman
Jack, but not Samantha and Claire.

The caretaker of Eight Chimneys is Mr. Coeslak. His left leg is
noticeably shorter than his right. He wears one stacked heel. Short
black hairs grow out of his ears and his nostrils and there is no
hair at all on top of his head, but he's given Samantha and Claire
permission to explore the whole of the house. It was Mr. Coeslak
who told them that there are copperheads in the woods, and that the
house is haunted. He says they are all, ghosts and snakes, a pretty
bad tempered lot, and Samantha and Claire should stick to the
marked trails, and stay out of the attic.

Mr. Coeslak can tell the twins apart, even if their father
can't; Claire's eyes are grey, like a cat's fur, he says, but
Samantha's are 
gray
, like the ocean when it has been
raining.

Samantha and Claire went walking in the woods on the second day
that they were at Eight Chimneys. They saw something. Samantha
thought it was a woman, but Claire said it was a snake. The
staircase that goes up to the attic has been locked. They peeked
through the keyhole, but it was too dark to see anything.

And so he had a wife, and they say she was real pretty.
There was another man who wanted to go with her, and first she
wouldn't, because she was afraid of her husband, and then she did.
Her husband found out, and they say he killed a snake and got some
of this snake's blood and put it in some whiskey and gave it to
her. He had learned this from an island man who had been on a ship
with him. And in about six months snakes created in her and they
got between her meat and the skin. And they say you could just see
them running up and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to
the top of her body, and it kept on like that till she died. Now my
daddy said he saw it. 
—An Oral History of Eight Chimneys

Eight Chimneys is over two hundred years old. It is named for
the eight chimneys that are each big enough that Samantha and
Claire can both fit in one fireplace. The chimneys are red brick,
and on each floor there are eight fireplaces, making a total of
twenty-four. Samantha imagines the chimney stacks stretching like
stout red tree trunks, all the way up through the slate roof of the
house. Beside each fireplace is a heavy black firedog, and a set of
wrought iron pokers shaped like snakes. Claire and Samantha pretend
to duel with the snake-pokers before the fireplace in their bedroom
on the third floor. Wind rises up the back of the chimney. When
they stick their faces in, they can feel the air rushing damply
upwards, like a river. The flue smells old and sooty and wet, like
stones from a river.

Their bedroom was once the nursery. They sleep together in a
poster bed which resembles a ship with four masts. It smells of
mothballs, and Claire kicks in her sleep. Charles Cheatham Rash
slept here when he was a little boy, and also his daughter. She
disappeared when her father did. It might have been gambling debts.
They may have moved to New Orleans. She was fourteen years old, Mr.
Coeslak said. What was her name, Claire asked. What happened to her
mother, Samantha wanted to know. Mr. Coeslak closed his eyes in an
almost wink. Mrs. Rash had died the year before her husband and
daughter disappeared, he said, of a mysterious wasting disease. He
can't remember the name of the poor little girl, he said.

Eight Chimneys has exactly one hundred windows, all still with
the original wavery panes of handblown glass. With so many windows,
Samantha thinks, Eight Chimneys should always be full of light, but
instead the trees press close against the house, so that the rooms
on the first and second story—even the third-story rooms—are green
and dim, as if Samantha and Claire are living deep under the sea.
This is the light that makes the tourists into ghosts. In the
morning, and again towards evening, a fog settles in around the
house. Sometimes it is grey like Claire's eyes, and sometimes it is
gray, like Samantha's eyes.

I met a woman in the wood, 
Her lips were two red snakes. 
She smiled at me, her eyes were lewd 
And burning like a fire.

A few nights ago, the wind was sighing in the nursery chimney.
Their father had already tucked them in and turned off the light.
Claire dared Samantha to stick her head into the fireplace, in the
dark, and so she did. The cold wet air licked at her face and it
almost sounded like voices talking low, muttering. She couldn't
quite make out what they were saying.

Their father has mostly ignored Claire and Samantha since they
arrived at Eight Chimneys. He never mentions their mother. One
evening they heard him shouting in the library, and when they came
downstairs, there was a large sticky stain on the desk, where a
glass of whiskey had been knocked over. It was looking at me, he
said, through the window. It had orange eyes.

Samantha and Claire refrained from pointing out that the library
is on the second story.

At night, their father's breath has been sweet from drinking,
and he is spending more and more time in the woods, and less in the
library. At dinner, usually hot dogs and baked beans from a can,
which they eat off of paper plates in the first floor dining room,
beneath the Austrian chandelier (which has exactly 632 leaded
crystals shaped like teardrops) their father recites the poetry of
Charles Cheatham Rash, which neither Samantha nor Claire cares
for.

He has been reading the ship diaries that Rash kept, and he says
that he has discovered proof in them that Rash's most famous poem,
"The Specialist's Hat," is not a poem at all, and in any case, Rash
didn't write it. It is something that the one of the men on the
whaler used to say, to conjure up a whale. Rash simply copied it
down and stuck an end on it and said it was his.

The man was from Mulatuppu, which is a place neither Samantha
nor Claire has ever heard of. Their father says that the man was
supposed to be some sort of magician, but he drowned shortly before
Rash came back to Eight Chimneys. Their father says that the other
sailors wanted to throw the magician's chest overboard, but Rash
persuaded them to let him keep it until he could be put ashore,
with the chest, off the coast of North Carolina.

The specialist's hat makes a noise like an
agouti;
 
The specialist's hat makes a noise like a collared
peccary; 
The specialist's hat makes a noise like a white-lipped
peccary; 
The specialist's hat makes a noise like a
tapir; 
The specialist's hat makes a noise like a
rabbit; 
The specialist's hat makes a noise like a
squirrel; 
The specialist's hat makes a noise like a
curassow; 
The specialist's hat moans like a whale in the
water; 
The specialist's hat moans like the wind in my wife's
hair; 
The specialist's hat makes a noise like a
snake; 
I have hung the hat of the specialist upon my wall.

The reason that Claire and Samantha have a babysitter is that
their father met a woman in the woods. He is going to see her
tonight, and they are going to have a picnic supper and look at the
stars. This is the time of year when the Perseids can be seen,
falling across the sky on clear nights. Their father said that he
has been walking with the woman every afternoon. She is a distant
relation of Rash and besides, he said, he needs a night off and
some grownup conversation.

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.