The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 6

MR. SPLITFOOT Dale Bailey

1893

They have taken me to Emily Ruggles’s house to die.

I had hoped to die in my little apartment in the city, but Emily’s house is very pleasant, and will serve as well, I suppose. The March sunlight illuminates my room in the morning, and Emily is kind enough to sit up with me at night. The nights are hardest. The follies and illusions of childhood re-assert themselves at night, and it is reassuring to see a human face when you open your eyes in the gloom, in an unfamiliar house, thinking that perhaps you are already dead. Last night — was it last night? — I woke from a dream of Hydesville and Emily looked like Kate, bending to her needlework by the light of a guttering taper. For a moment, we were girls, all undone between us. Kate, I cried, Kate — then Emily took my hand and became just plain Emily once more. So I remembered that Kate was dead and had to mourn her all over again. The mind is a funny thing, playing tricks like that.

You were always playing tricks on me, too, weren’t you, Kate? Full of tricks from the day you were born. Remember how we held the stage when Leah paraded us from city to city like a pair of trained lovebirds, tapping and preening? Every girl’s dream to be a bird, feted on every side, and oh, we were feted Kate, how our names did ring upon every tongue! And even then you were a tapping, preening little thing, all dressed up in your skirts of robin’s-egg-blue. Do you remember how the people used to gather before a sitting, how they would come from near and far, crying your name aloud and reaching out to touch you? Do you remember how easy it all was, how eager they were to believe? What a glorious trick that was, Kate! That was the best trick of all! Who could have seen that it would all turn out as it has? We were children, Maggs. I can hear you say it. We didn’t know. Surely that’s something. Surely that’s enough—

You were at them again, your tricks, last night, weren’t you? Emily dozed — even the most faithful watchers doze — and as she nodded over her needlework, you were up to your old tricks, rapping and tapping and knocking oh so quietly, so only I could hear. It got cold in the room then, just like it used to when we were girls, all those years ago. Do you remember the cold, Kate? The cold of the grave, so black and deep it prickled up the hairs along the back of your neck and turned your breath to vapor?

The Summerland indeed.

And here you are with another blanket to comfort me. Look at me, Kate! Look how frail I’ve become. I’ve become old, I say, and a young girl’s melancholy creeps into my breast. How funny it is, the way we never age inside our hearts, whilst outwardly this catastrophe every day renews itself. Tutting—

— you must calm yourself, Mrs. Maggie—

— Emily — it is Emily, isn’t it? In the gloom it’s hard to see — tucks the blanket in tight around me. She means kindness, I know, dear Emily. Why, I remember when she came to us, how dumbfounded she was to be among us at last: the mothers of Spiritualism! I remember her first sitting and afterward teaching her the secrets of material manifestations. How shocked she was at this cheerful fraud! Yet I’ll admit, and I admitted then, that there is something of the illusionist’s craft in our art; it helps the sitters to suspend their disbelief, to quote Mr. Coleridge.

But there is truth, as well.

There is the matter of the cold. And of Hydesville.

That was March, too, wasn’t it? More than forty years have passed since then — I was sixteen that year, and you still a slip of a girl — yet I still remember the winter of 1848, spilling right over into spring, such a fierce year it was. At first, I thought that no one noticed the cold because it was already so cold in that house, with the wind tearing down off Lake Ontario and rattling the timbers like bones. Pop, pop, pop, went that house, like an old man cracking his joints, and it wasn’t much warmer in the house than it was standing in the street. What was a little tapping to me?

That’s what I said in New York, Katie, remember that? The biggest stage of all, right there in New York City, and you stuck in the audience whilst I held the spotlight. How that must have chafed, you always so loved the stage. But there you sat with your face of stone. I saw you! I saw you when I peeked between the curtains before the show. You and the whole house, and what a house it was! A hundred people, all of them in their Sunday best, and the house all shining and gilt by the gaslight chandeliers, and me there to say our whole lives had been a lie.

Leah — the third Fox sister, she styled herself, as if she ever had any traffic with the dead — the way she made us back in Rochester. That’s what she always said. I made you! I was the one who booked the Corinthian Hall in Rochester, I was the one who made you! The Fox Sisters of the Famous Events in Hydesville, that Occurred in the Spring of 1848, tapping and preening like little birds, always her little birds, and we hardly knowing her before Hydesville, her seventeen years our senior, a grown woman and a family of her own. The Queen of Lies! Our sittings with the great and small alike. Oh, Katie, how grand they all were! Mr. Cooper and Mrs. Stowe, the great Sojourner Truth and Mr. Horace Greeley himself, our patron and protector, to them all delivering, each and every one — Lies! And most of all the hundreds, the thousands! that followed, innumerable to count, with their sittings and their gauzy apparitions, their spirit lights, their automatic writing: Lies, all lies. And we the Sisters of the Lie, who birthed a monstrous truth.

“Our whole lives,” you said backstage, your voice quavering with resentment.

“Our whole goddamn lives, Maggs,” you said. “You with your toes popping and your knuckles cracking, all the tricks of the trade. The spirit hands and the voices and the Summerland itself.” All a lie — though it didn’t keep you from taking your half of the money, did it? Seven hundred and fifty dollars each, a small fortune in 1888, like sand through our fingers, it went. You folded it away in your purse with an edge of fierce defiance in your voice. I can hear it now, your fury at all my lies, saying, “But it wasn’t all a lie. Not all of it, Maggs.”

Even lies have some truth inside them, and truth some lies. The Summerland is a cold, hard place. It’s a cold, hard place we go when we die. And there are voices, there is a voice to make you shudder and run all cold inside. Nobody’s going to pay their good, hard-earned money to hear such a monstrous truth — or believe it when they do. Some things cannot be countenanced or believed, not if you want to go on living or crawl inside a bottle where the voice goes silent for a while. Not unless. So we lied. Our whole career a lie built upon a truth, and our renunciation of it a truth built upon a lie.

I sleep a little then, a little slice of death somebody once told me, but I know that it’s not true. Not the sleep of oblivion, but the sleep of nightmare, breeding monsters—

Then Emily is bending over me. It’s morning, a bright shining March morning to make you forget all these truths—

— that awful voice—

— for a while. The confusion has lifted. I’m clearest in the mornings.

“Here, Mrs. Maggie, take some broth,” she says. “I made it special.”

So I take a sip to please her. You have to please people, that’s what we do, you know. But the truth is I don’t want it, I haven’t any appetite any more. Then it’s dark, and here you come bending over me again, saying Mrs. Maggie, Mrs. Maggie, are you there. Your voice is coming from far away, like a voice from the bottom of a well. Why you should call me Mrs. Maggie I don’t know. Plain old Maggs has always been good enough for all these years. I can hear you say it now—Maggs, Maggs, Maggs, your voice dripping with scorn.

You always scorned me so, saying I couldn’t summon the spirits, not the way you could. Yet I never denied it. I never denied the ascendancy of your gift. Why, I remember a time when you said as much, as though I had denied it. We were mere girls then. I wasn’t yet twenty and you just then fifteen-years-old, in your dress of robin’s-egg blue and your hair done up so pretty, with some stray wisps falling down around your eyes, as if they’d just worked loose and you hadn’t planned it that way from the first, so artful, to frame your face just so. In a fine hotel room in New York City, that was. How rich it had seemed, the fine velvet upholstery and the gilt moldings and the golden and red brocade on the curtains, that new smell on everything, as if it was fresh made. Leah said we could afford such fine things by then, the very best, I remember the way she said it: We can afford the very best now, girls, as though she had anything to do with it. That was Leah for you. She was out at the shops, I remember. We had just arrived in the city — where was it we had been before that? I wonder — and she was always out at the shops. We have to look the part, girls, she always said so cheery, but why she should have to look it, I never did understand. I sometimes think that it was just to spite Leah that we renounced it all, and condemned it as a sin and blasphemy.

But that day, that day the sky was clear and blue as the blue in your dress, as though they’d been special made to match. You had tied back the heavy curtains and posed yourself in the most flattering fall of light, as though there were anyone there to see it but me. You were always on stage. Every time in my life I ever saw you, you were on stage.

You said, “Come to the window, Sister. It’s so pretty out.”

So I did. For a time we were quiet, just looking out the window. Fine carriages rolled by three stories below, full of the richest sort — who could say, some of them might have paid for private sittings, we were that well loved in that day. And cabs too, and dray carts rattling over cobbles and flinging up horse apples, which was what our father always called them, remember that? People pushing and shoving on the sidewalks, and newspaper boys, and ballad-sellers singing out the titles of the latest songs, a penny each for the sheet music so that pretty girls in pretty parlors could play them for their pretty boys. We never learned to play, of course, that was not our station in the world, but our station had changed, hadn’t it? And I could almost smell the street below — the hay scattered out across the cobbles, and the horse apples, too, and the smell of perfumes and the like in the press — I could smell it in my mind, the way you can, you know.

And you, whispering right in my ear, “I can do it better, Maggs.”

For some reason that made me feel so ashamed. “Do what?” I said, all innocent, though of course I knew.

I always knew. Both of us knew.

“Why I can call the spirits better,” you said, all innocent, flouncing across the room to pose yourself on a little loveseat they had sitting there, arranging your dress just so.

“You can’t,” I said. I said, “I can do it twice as good as you. I’m older,” the only card I had to play.

“Then do it,” you said.

But I didn’t want to, that’s what I said. I couldn’t, of course, not then and only sometimes later. The spirits came to me of their own accord, I couldn’t summon them. I just wanted to sit at the window and watch the street, I always liked the city so. It reminded me of how far we’d come from Hydesville, where it had always seemed dark to me, and cold. And how we didn’t have to be there anymore, not ever again. That’s what I thought in that day — that we’d never be poor again — not knowing the miseries to come. I was just a girl, so young.

Even then I liked the lie better than the truth. I liked the toe cracking and the finger popping and all the other tricks Leah had taught us, she was as tricksy as you were, almost.

The truth scared me.

“Because you can’t,” you said, and I feigned not to care.

I remember your face then, the way you’d posed so that the shadow cut your face right in half. I remember the look in your eyes in that moment, the way they got hard and like a set of mirrors, like you weren’t there anymore or you’d gone way down deep inside yourself.

“Katie, don’t—” I cried, but it was too late.

Already the light seemed to have gone all watery and pale, like it was shining down from a faraway star. And a minute after that came the cold, a black hateful kind of cold that made your breath frost the air, and that on a summer day.

That’s how you know. The cold. Like vapors from the grave. The rest is just tricks without the cold.

And you were always a tricky one, weren’t you, Kate?

Tricksy, tricksy, tricksy. But not everything was tricks. Not Hydesville. And not that day in the hotel, either. Not when all that light went out of the room, and the cold started up and the tap, tap, tapping began, like a man with claw hammer deep buried in a mine.

Oh, I remember. It was a terrible thing, Katie, a terrible thing, your eyes rolling up to whites like that and you sitting straight like a rod had been driven down your spine, your hands upturned upon your crossed knees, giggling as the room grew darker and darker still, until I could not see to see. The tapping got louder and this time there was no playacting. This time there were no tricks, were there, Katie?

How used to them I had become by then, all the posing and the playacting, all the tricks! I could summon up the taps myself, Katie — sometimes anyway. I won’t deny that, no matter how much it would please you. I had a touch of the gift myself—

But you—

I remember. I remember it all so clearly. The way the room seemed to fall away into a black void. The way that blackness seized us up so careless, like a pair of rag dolls, boneless and limp, and carried us off. Like being caught in an undertow and swept out to sea, it was, the black stuff pouring in at your mouth and your nostrils, shoving aside everything that was you, until you drowned in it and there was nothing left but void and darkness. Yes, and I remember the way the tapping became a knocking, the knocking a thunderous boom boom boom boom, so that I cried aloud for the terror of it and clapped my hands over my ears. And between the booms, the voice. That cold and creeping voice, whispering at me, coaxing and wheedling, saying—

— wake up Mrs. Maggie wake up—

— and Emily Ruggles bends over me in the gloom.

“You were dreaming,” she says, and here it is March and I can see her breath in the air.

My mouth is parched. All I can manage to croak is a single word. “Water.” She cradles my head and lifts a cup to my lips, ice crackling against my tongue.

“What were you dreaming of?” Her mouth twitchy and eager, hungry like the crowds who turned out to see us all those years ago, when I was a girl. That was the one part I had never expected, that hunger, the way they looked at you just like they could eat you up.

Just you remember, Leah used to say. It’s not you they want. It’s what you do. And so she held her power over us, with the clever tricks she taught us and the thought of those hungry crowds, and how she alone stood between us.

“What were you dreaming of?” Emily prompts me again, and maybe she senses it, too, that hunger and how unseemly it is, here in my final hours, for she goes on to add, “I only want to help you, Mrs. Maggie.”

It’s hard to be sure. But I know that hunger when I see it — I’ve seen it so many times — and what I feel is a rush of pity for the girl. I’ve done her a great disservice, showing her all our tricks like that, and letting her catch a glimpse of the bigger truth inside the lie at the same time. It’s the truth she’s so hungry to possess, and never will; Emily doesn’t possess so much as a jot of the gift. Or it doesn’t possess her. Because that’s what it is — possession. We’ve been possessed since we were girls, Katie and I, and now it draws to a close at last. Now I stand for the last time on the threshold where I’ve spent a lifetime lingering, and on the other side there are worse things waiting. That voice, whispering, always whispering.

A lie’s the thing, it always has been. I try to work up the moisture to spit it out. Once again the ritual with the cup. The rime of ice is gone. The water is cool, salving to the lips. The room has warmed. I kick at the covers. Emily folds back the counterpane, neat as a pin. She’s a kind girl, Emily. She deserves the lie.

And how easy it comes to the lips, the habit of a lifetime. “Tis only the Summerland,” I whisper, gasping for a breath of the March air that billows out the sheers. “I see it now, all stretched out before me, green and lovely as a day in June. The passage draws near, Emily, dear.” For a lie goes down easier with a taste of the truth inside it.

And then here you are again, Katie, leaning over me, your face so white in the moonlight, saying, “Mrs. Maggie, Mrs. Maggie, Mrs.—”

— Maggs—

“It’s always half measures with you, isn’t it, Maggs? Not the lie and not the truth either, but some misbegotten thing in between, monstrous and malformed.”

Such nerve, you have, calling me the monster, you so handy with the lie from the start. From the start, Katie, from Hydesville. Remember Hydesville, Katie, that ramshackle old house popping its joints in the wind screaming down off the lake? March it was, and no man had ever seen such a winter: snow piled as high as a tall man’s shoulder on the north face of the house, the cramped rooms inside stinking of ash and rancid fatback, and in the bedroom we all shared the reek of tapers dipped in animal fat. It had been a long time since Daddy could afford candles, and if it hadn’t been for Leah sweeping us off like a couple of performing birds, it might have been longer still.

Eighteen-forty-eight, that was, you just a girl with your first blood upon you and right away the tapping commences, just a faraway sound at first, like the door rattling its hinges in the wind. Like the time my blood had come in three years before that — a whisper in my ears upon the edge of sleep, a tap, tap, tapping, quiet as my heart against my ribs. Then nothing, and when I think about that time now, a lifetime gone, I wonder if I might have escaped the whole thing, if my piddling gift might have slept forever. Such a happy life that would have been, I sometimes think, a husband and a houseful of little ones, neither the riches of a king nor the crumbs off a poor man’s table — and I’ve had both, haven’t I? — but something steady and standing in between.

Then your blood came in, and me trying to sleep, huddled close against you as the room grew colder and then colder still, no natural cold, but something deeper and blacker, with iron in its bones and hatred in its heart. The darkness deepened so that I could hardly see my hand before my face, and the real knocking commenced — not from one of your childish tricks either, was it, Katie? Not from an apple bobbing on a string to bang against the floor, or your toes and fingers cracking, but a spirit knocking and more, scurrying like footsteps across the ceiling and banging the furniture around the room like a housewife banging on her pans.

A light guttered to life. A wavering taper pushed back the dark, and in that flickering glow I saw my father’s face. If I live a thousand years, I hope never to see another man’s face like that one. All drawn and pale, it was. Why, it was as white as a freshly laundered sheet, and his eyes the size of saucers, shot through with blood and the pupils so round and black that you could hardly see the color at all, and such a pretty blue they were. My mother clutched at him, crying aloud, “What is it, John? What is it?”

But he doesn’t answer, just stumbles out of bed in his nightshirt, him so prayerful and wary of his modesty.

“Girls?” he cries. “Girls?”

And, oh, how you shrieked with laughter, a high-pitched screech so unlike you that it’s a marvel your mouth could produce such an awful sound. All erect you sat, with your nightdress draped across your crossed knees and your hands turned up atop your thighs. I could feel that piercing shriek run all through me like the horrors.

Great fists hammered the walls, shivering the boards. In the kitchen, the table danced like a drunken man on a Saturday night — you could hear it — and the chairs dashed themselves to kindling against the walls. But that wasn’t the worst of it. The worst of it was that I heard all this as through a veil. Someone had flung a veil over me, and everything came through to me all blurry, only it was a veil of whispers, it was a veil of words.

As the knocking grew more violent, that voice grew louder, until it was screaming inside my head, guttural and hateful. It scoured out the inside of my skull, it erased everything I ever thought I was, and it knew me. It knew me, Katie. Knew every lie I’d ever told, every grudge and secret thought I’d nursed inside my crooked heart, no matter how base and hateful. It knew me. What do you think Emily Ruggles would think of that, Katie? What would she think of the blood-red hatred that seized me then, and of the awful things it asked me to do. To my father, as he stumbled from the room in search of that awful knocking’s source. To my mother, huddled under the bedclothes against that hateful cold, her breath a flag of vapor in the dark. And to you, Katie. To you most of all. Oh such horrible red thoughts that I weep to recall them. Such red, red thoughts.

How long it lasted, how long I wrestled with that awful spirit like Jesus in the desert, I cannot say. Only that a time came when it was over — when a bright sun dawned glittering off the snow outside the window. The stink of sweat and terror faded. Even our father slept then, giving up at last, unable to locate the origin of all that terrible racket.

Three nights.

On the second night our neighbors crowded into the room, disbelievers every one — Mary and Charles Redfield and the Dueslers and the Hydes and others too, that old house rocking around them. Every one they came in doubt and every one they left believers, that unearthly cold shivering their bones, their faces scrubbed clean with terror, pale and blank as eggs.

The next night, hundreds. It was them that brought Leah, those hundreds, and the chance they represented. Hundreds crowding into the bedroom shoulder to shoulder, rank with the stench of unwashed bodies, hundreds spilling out into the kitchen and beyond, into the street itself, where a raw wind came tearing off the lake, chilling everyone to the bone. How I envied them that warmth. For inside the bedroom, it was colder still. How can I convey it, that cold? Like being buried to your shoulders in ice, it was, or worse, the cold of all dead things and dead places on this earth, the cold of the grave yawning open to receive you.

And you, Katie, with your hands upturned upon your knees and your hair hanging over your eyes, in a night dress thin as gossamer, all untouched. Your crowning moment that was, your best trick of all, breathing in the stillness, “Do as I do, Mr. Splitfoot,” and the spirit did. One two three you snapped your fingers and one two three the spirit rapped in answer.

Gasps of disbelief and wonder. Do you remember that, Katie? Gasps of wonder and disbelief — proof incontestable of this raging spirit that hurled furniture around like kindling and responded to the quiet admonition of a little girl. Do you remember that?

And all this time in my head, that rageful voice, entreating, wheedling, screaming in frustration, for I would not do as it demanded. I would not take up the knife in the kitchen or lift a leg from a dismembered chair. I would not turn my home into an abattoir. But oh such effort did I have to exert to resist. Sweat sprang out on my forehead despite that glacial cold, and by the guttering flame of the taper I could see that my hands, all of their own accord, had clenched themselves into white-knuckled fists and so it would be ever after. That hateful voice whispering and cajoling in my head, my constant attendant, and when Katie called the spirits, a spiteful and powerful spirit it became. In those moments it took every ounce of strength I possessed to resist it. A life embattled we have shared, Katie and I, a life that enriched us beyond measure one moment and plunged us into poverty the next, always the voice beyond the rappings, urging us to horrors that we must struggle to resist. Two husbands we have known between us, but Mr. Splitfoot was our one and only true betrothed. Many nights I stood over my own dear husband’s bed, clutching a knife in my hand, my whole body wracked with the effort of turning Mr. Splitfoot away.

We were children, Maggs, I can hear you say it now. We didn’t know. Isn’t that enough?

But it is not. For a time came, and early, when we did know, and even then we did not, could not, stop. There was too much of fortune in it, and too much of pleasure as well, in giving yourself over to something larger than you had ever known, something sinewy and vast. Even from the start, Mr. Splitfoot ruled our hearts.

Mr. Splitfoot, Mr. Splitfoot—

— and here is a figure leaning over me, its face cast in shadow by the candle it holds aloft.

“Katie,” I cry, “Katie—”

But it’s only Emily, leaning over to smooth the hair from my brow.

“You were talking in your sleep, Mrs. Maggie.” So gentle-like. “What was it you were dreaming?” That hunger in her eyes.

But what shall I say? Some truths are better left unsaid. Sometimes the lie is kinder. “I miss Katie, dear”—taking her hand—“I miss her so much.”

And here is the truth inside the lie. I miss you, Kate. Every morning I wake afresh to find you gone away from me. Every morning I grieve you like the first. Gone, gone, gone — and who else to confide in here at the end of all days, about matters so fraught and fearsome?

“We all miss her, dear,” Emily says, withdrawing to her needlework, and after a time I’m not sure who it is I’m looking at anymore, time seems so slippy and uncertain. Only there is a chill in the room, a faraway rapping, and you’re sitting here beside me once again, your strong hand in my own, bony as a bird’s and heavy-veined. You were always so strong, and I the weak one. Why, see how old I’ve become, and still a sixteen-year-old in Hydesville in my heart, before it all began. Or so I could believe but for the whisper in my ears, but for my one true love and paramour, goading me, always goading me to blood and madness.

Blood and madness. For once it came to me, it never fully departed, that voice. It lingered, whispering, insinuating, urging me on to bloodshed and hatred. But only once did I succumb.

I begged you not to do it. How I begged you.

Nineteen, I was, and you just fifteen — mere girls with the petty jealousies of sisters, the thoughtless malice and spite. There in that lush hotel room, with the sounds of the street rising to us in a hushed murmur, muffled by the heavy velvet curtains that draped the windows. And the taps at first, the raps and knocks, the boom boom boom, so loud that floor itself seemed to rock, and I marveled that no one else could hear it. Those heavy curtains billowed out like the thinnest sheers. A great wind filled the room, like the rank breath of the dead, and in it the voice, such a voice it was, guttural and full of hate, and then worse — wheedling, insinuating, flattering. And promising. Yes, promising.

What was yours mine, your vast gift in exchange for my paltry one. You with your eyes rolled back, your legs crossed, your palms face up on your thighs, beneath your dress of robin’s-egg blue.

And that voice, whispering now, conniving and entreating. It drew me across the room to the loveseat, my arms outstretched, and how it thrilled me to take your neck between my hands, to feel my fingers dig into the soft, pale flesh beneath your high-necked dress, and squeeze. Squeeze and squeeze, nails biting, fingers gouging. Who knew then how thin and high it was, that neck, as delicately boned as a bird’s. Bones creaked beneath the pressure.

And then you were there again. Your eyes snapped open with dread of the terrible thing that was death, the cold of the grave and the voice that lived on the other side and the hatred everlasting. Your hands flew up to pry my hands away, weak, too weak. I had gifts of my own, you see: the strength of my hands and purpose, and that voice capering inside my head in joy.

You gasped.

“Maggie,” you croaked. “Maggs, Maggie, please—”

And then there were no words, just struggle. Your legs kicking. Your hands tearing at my own, your body heaving. Second by second, your strength left you. Your body fell still. Your hands fell away. Your body went limp. And gradually, gradually, your face took on a deepening blue cast.

You might have died then — the one true person I ever loved, and I would have exulted in it.

But the door flew open, and here was Leah, laden with packages, saying, “Oh, girls, you won’t believe such finery I got, and at a poor man’s cost—” Her voice breaking off like that. Hatboxes and shoeboxes and dresses on their woolen-cloaked hangers, fumbled from her hands.

She found her voice then, a rising note of panic, edged in hysteria.

“Maggs, Maggie! You let your sister go!”

And just that easily the spell was broken. I sagged, my hands as of their own accord unfolding from your neck, that terrible, alluring voice dwindling — but never fading — from my mind. I stumbled away in tears, retching as your own hands came up to your neck in wonder and dismay.

Silence reigned. Even Leah, gathering her packages, could find no words to speak. And as for Katie and me, we knew. No words were necessary. We knew what had happened — we had heard that hating voice — and though it remained with us for the rest of our days, never again would we speak of what had happened that afternoon, never again would we risk so deep a trance, never again surrender ourselves so wholly to the thing that lay in wait for us upon the other side.

Until now.

Emily sleeps over her needlework, the darkness deepens, the room grows cold. I hear a knocking in the distance, growing louder. And worse yet, a voice, guttural and full of hate, and growing louder.

Katie, I want to say, Katie, is that you.

But I know it is not. Mr. Splitfoot slouches toward us, battening upon half a century of belief and blood, waiting to be born.

My lifetime draws to a close. The year is 1893. A new era draws nigh.

We were girls. How could we know? Surely that is enough.

God forgive us both. God help us all.

What manner of doorway have we opened? What awful beast have we unleashed upon the world?

I foresee a century of blood.