Dreams from the Witch House: Female Voices of Lovecraftian Horror (2 page)

Lynne Jamneck

October 5, 2015

1.

In the late winter of 1928, when she was sixteen years old, my mother's mother Magdalena Schön journeyed alone by train from the Black Rock district of Buffalo, New York, five hundred miles eastward to the seaport of Edmundston, Massachusetts. Never before had the shy, inexperienced girl traveled anywhere by herself; rarely had she ventured out of the German-Hungarian neighborhood in which she'd been born, to immigrant parents from southern Germany; she spoke accented English which felt to her, in the presence of strangers, like a speech impediment or a physical deformity. She was terrified of leaving home but had no choice: there were seven children in the family, too many to feed and clothe and care for, and an eighth soon to be born, so her parents had decided to send her to live with an elderly aunt of her father's, a widow with no children who was bedridden after a stroke and terribly homesick for someone from the family, who lived by herself in Massachusetts.
But why must I go, why must I be the one?
Magdalena protested, and her mother said, smiling, as if this were an answer,
Your aunt Kistenmacher married a rich man, she will leave us money.

In a state of shock mistaken for acquiescence Magdalena was put on a crowded New York Central coach car with a single battered suitcase and a satchel containing sandwiches and drinking water and a prayer book and a rosary; she'd been cautioned
Don't speak to anybody, not even the train men. Just give your tickets.
Stiff and upright in her seat beside a sooty window Magdalena gritted her teeth against the train's lumbering and lurching and ceaseless vibrating; she dared not look at anyone, least of all the brusque, uniformed conductor who took her ticket; for most of the first day she stared sightlessly out the window or shut her eyes, her lips moving in silent prayers to the Virgin Mary she came to know, less than one hundred miles into her journey, were useless. She did not cry though from time to time bright tears glistened on her cheeks like raindrops. For crying, too, was useless.

She was thinking
My mother doesn't want me! My mother sent me away.

For of the myriad facts that might be said of Magdalena Schön, this was the cruel, inescapable fact, the fact she would recall for the remainder of her life which would be a long life
My mother didn't love me but sent me away.

The coach car was uncomfortable, overheated, jammed with travelers, most of them men who gazed upon Magdalena with interest. Some stared at her without knowing what they did, like men dreaming with their eyes open; others were more deliberate. Magdalena gave no sign, of course. She had long learned, since the age of twelve, never to meet the eyes of strangers even by chance. She was an attractive girl of moderate height who looked as if she'd grown swiftly in the past year. Her skin was fair, healthy, lightly freckled; her eyes were wide-set and thickly lashed, a deep, placid blue; her wavy wheat-colored hair was dense as a horse's mane and had been neatly plaited and wound in two coils around the sides of her head, like a telephone operator's earphones. On her lap was the satchel into which she looked repeatedly, as if checking to see what might be lost. She hadn't any appetite for the food her mother had packed for her, which had begun to smell rancid, but could only sip from a jar of lukewarm water, to ease her parched mouth, and then she burst into a spasm of coughing, with a sound like hoarse weeping. She wore rust-colored clothes that might have been handed down from an adult woman, and old-fashioned leather shoes, or boots, with complicated laces. She looked, not like 1928, but like 1918. In school she'd been one of those children of immigrant parents so shy and uncertain of themselves they were considered "slow"; at home, she'd been made to feel there was something wrong with her that justly provoked impatience in others. She wore a perpetual expression of chagrin and vague embarrassment. When someone, usually a sister, came to her defense saying
Leave Magdalena alone, she can't help it
, Magdalena was stricken with emotions of gratitude and shame as if she'd swallowed something delicious the wrong way.

A man seated across from Magdalena did speak to her, as the train came clattering and shrieking into the Albany station that evening, asking if she'd like to join him for dinner in the dining car; but Magdalena, staring out the window with dolorous eyes, her rosary twined through her fingers and her lips silently moving, seemed not to hear. The clumsy satchel was on her lap. She had ceased thinking and in a haze of oblivion sat prepared to be hurtled eastward into the deepening night to a fate so vast and incomprehensible she had ceased trying to consider it as she'd given up considering the geometry problems certain of her boy classmates at school solved so readily. Thinking, as the train wheels rolled,
She sent me away. Sent me away. My mother didn't love me but sent me away.

And then at dawn to her surprise Magdalena woke stiff-necked and dry-mouthed from a night of patchy, disturbing dreams to see a slow explosion of light at the horizon; an unknown river creased and sparkling in the darkness and broad as the Niagara. The train was rushing over this river on an elevated bridge Magdalena could see curving dizzily ahead, a skeleton bridge on stilts. In the distance was a city built on a peninsula that must have been Edmundston, her destination. Overhead the sky was still partly darkened, rippled and ridged with cloud. Wind made the train rock. Magdalena bit her lower lip in panic, or was it excitement?—never had she been so far from home, never could she have found her way back. Far to her right the hilly, rocky land fell away and there emerged a vast body of water, choppy and glittering with light. Magdalena rubbed her eyes, she'd never seen anything so beautiful. It seemed to her suddenly that the world was luminous before her; the future lay ahead, welcoming; the world behind, of dismal Black Rock, the airless crowded tenement flats, the endless winter of icy, snow-locked streets, the stink of factories and the soot-blackened walls and air singed with smoke that caused people to cough and choke until tears ran down their cheeks—all that was behind her, diminished and narrowed and rapidly retreating like a tunnel that has the power to terrify while you are in it but is forgotten as soon as you merge into daylight.

The sun lifted from the horizon and broke through a dense bank of cloud. Shafts of light fell obliquely earthward. To Magdalena's right, the vast stretch of water shifted suddenly to dark greeny-blue, near its surface transparent as cut glass. Magdalena exclaimed in childlike wonder, "Oh, what is that” and a man seated across from her said, proud as if it were his own possession, "That, miss, is the Atlantic Ocean."

The Atlantic Ocean! Magdalena's parents hadn't told her that Edmundston was on the ocean. All Magdalena knew of the Atlantic Ocean were horror tales of her parents' terrible stormy crossing years before her birth, a crossing her pregnant mother had barely survived. Magdalena's brothers and sisters had been imbued all their lives with a sense of the ocean's terror, not its beauty. But the Atlantic Ocean at which Magdalena stared was beautiful—and immense!—like nothing she had ever seen before. She hoped that 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 its peak. Several of the black-lacquered shutters needed repair, repainting. Winter-damaged ivy clung to the brick like scraggly claws, and lichen grew in the cracked bricks of the elegant front stoop with its tall columns and graceful, if partly rotted portico. But Magdalena felt tears sting her eyes, for she'd never seen, up close, any house so beautiful.

Will I be living here?

I, Magdalena Schön?

The girl whose mother had not loved her; had sent her away.

Magdalena's next surprise was Erica Kistenmacher.

Within minutes of being shown to her room on the third floor, by a woman in a dark dress and a stiff-starched white apron, Magdalena was taken to see her great-aunt. "Mrs. Kistenmacher has been waiting for you since dawn, Miss Schön," the woman said quietly. There was an air in this remark of the most subtle reproach but when Magdalena murmured anxiously that she was sorry, the woman seemed not to hear, nor did she even look at Magdalena. She was of no age that Magdalena could have guessed, older than her own mother; with thin gray hair neatly contained by a hairnet, and a solid, stocky though not plump body, deftly defined motions as she led Magdalena along a corridor without a backward glance. Magdalena had been told that her great-aunt was lonely and required a "companion" and so she had come to imagine the Kistenmacher house as empty except for her great-aunt and now she saw how erroneous such a notion was. Rich people require servants, she was to be a servant here as well. The woman rapped lightly on a door, and after some delay the door was opened not by Magdalena's great-aunt as she'd naively expected, but by another somber, unsmiling middle-aged woman; a nurse; stockily built too, with a flushed face, in a white uniform and starched white cap over leaden-gray hair. Not greeting the anxious girl but rather scolding Magdalena at once, she said, "Miss Schön, at last, come in, hurry!—so we don't get a draft. And don't tire Mrs. Kistenmacher, she's in a state of nerves as it is." Magdalena stepped into a room so airless and overheated it took her breath away, and the nurse quickly shut the door behind her. It was a spacious, high-ceilinged bedroom so crowded with furniture and fabrics, vases and glassware, glittering figurines, candlestick holders, scattered books, mirrors with old glass that subtly distorted the reflections they framed, that Magdalena had difficulty seeing her great-aunt until the woman whispered, "My dear! Come!" On a divan in a patch of wan sunlight, covered by a satin quilt, there lay a white-skinned, doll-like old woman with one of her arms tremulously lifted, her fingers stretched in Magdalena's direction and her face creased in joyous expectation.