“That the two of us are not in danger of being surprised by the storm . . .”
My little sister likes enigmas. And she likes songs even more. When she began to hum one of her favorite nursery rhymes, I must have fallen asleep, lulled by her voice . . .
What’s your name, Mary Jane
What’s your number, Cucumber
My dream continued the adventure from earlier in the night. Except that Katie was in my place and I was in hers. In my case I had kept my reserve as opposed to her playful pixie behavior and I was quite surprised to see myself suddenly intrepid, there, across from the body I was occupying, that big carcass of an adolescent who no longer belonged to me. Anyhow, we descended the staircase, one of us bizarrely in the other, me in her and her in me, and I couldn’t tell anymore which of us was trembling so much that the entire house felt the tremors. “Let’s not be afraid,” I said to Katie in my body, “there is always a step after the last step.” Through the open door of the woodstove, tongues of fire shot up while it roared all the way up its thick iron stovepipe. Leaning over to shut it, despite the intense heat, I saw in this aquarium of embers the skeletons of children the color of molten iron. They were moving slowly like long delicate fish, sea needles, or seahorses. My mirror-faced sister tugged at my sleeve.
“Come on, come,” she said in unknown words, “the fire will go out all by itself.” We let ourselves flow immediately into the swirl of a staircase of whitewater that seemed familiar to me, even if I had not forgotten that a sort of riveted wooden ladder was what led down to the basement. We slipped at full speed down those step-shaped wavelets until soon underground, in the middle of the roots of cedars and tall pines. Green glowworms were performing the service of streetlamps in these depths.
At another moment, I had the sensation of myself being buried in an old rock salt mine or in one of those caves all vaulted with the ribs of branches in full sun. Katie, my little Katie transformed into Maggie (what an unpleasant impression of stiffening!), already below me exclaimed, “It’s Mister Splitfoot! Here he is in his manor house! Mister Splitfoot in person . . .” And singing out loud at the top of her voice without my being able to see who it was, aside from a wicked will-o’-the-wisp climbing up from the entrails of the earth:
Where do you live?
In the grave!
What is your favorite song?
Hello maggot!
Waking with a start, I realized that my bedfellow had hardly finished her nursery rhyme, also perceived with strange deformities, and that my dream had lasted the length of a yawn. But either from precaution or superstition, I felt first for my breasts, rather developed for my age, then for my sister’s almost nonexistent ones.
“What’s gotten into you?” Katie was irritated.
“Oh nothing, really!” I said without laughing. “I just wanted to assure myself that you weren’t me . . .”
Timidly, with one arm numb, I asked if she would repeat the end of her little song.
“What song?” she asked with surprise.
“You know, ‘Where do you live . . .?’”
“Oh, Mister Splitfoot’s nursery rhyme! I don’t remember it very well anymore. Wait, it’s coming back to me:
What is your name? Horn of the chin
What is your number? Zero plus zero
What is your country? Far from paradise
What is your address? Street of Two She-devils
Where do you live? In the black house that kills
First Conversation with Mister Splitfoot
Over the course of March nights, these phenomena took on an unprecedented magnitude. The floor shaking in the rooms made the beds tremble and one couldn’t remain standing without feeling, at each blow, a long vibration straight up the spinal column. At the approach of midnight, the sounds—by turns muffled or clashing, far away or close, like an axe chopping into a log or a load of cast iron crashing against some cleanly broken board—grew more frequent and continuous, so that the sleep of the entire family was interrupted by the mysterious tantrums of their home. Only John D. Fox, a man of certainty who would swear only by the beliefs and theories of the Methodist Episcopal Church, quite disinclined to superstition and always skillful at attributing commonplace causes to the unusual, wanted under no circumstances to renounce his stertorous sleep. Faced with the increasing worrying of his wife, he displayed the stubborn countenance of a headstrong convict stupefied by alcohol. According to him the house suffered from age, the wood was tired and worn, the ground had shifted. Those ghost stories were just nonsense. The only thing to fear was being swept away to the bottom of the pond by a landslide. But by the grace of the Lord and several shots of an honest whiskey, his dignified repose was not seen as that of a disturbed person’s.
One night, the last in the month of March, 1848, with Mr. Fox still being away on business in Rochester, the three inhabitants of the farm on Long Road, absolutely exhausted by the previous night’s disorder, all went to bed in the parents’ bedroom in the hope of escaping insomnia’s throes. Margaret and her mother had long been dozing when, just before midnight, the knocks started up again.
Kate always slept with one eye open. Like the night before, she watched for the first signs of the phenomenon, impassive to her core, penetrated by the great miracle of being alive in the heart of these shadows. She could very well have disappeared unexpectedly or metamorphosed into a cat, or a pitcher, which wouldn’t have changed by a hair or a world this strangeness that ticked along with the clock on the very end of each second. To be herself, an insignificant little girl, and to feel with a mad keenness the interlacing of the night’s mysteries was an experience she wanted to relish so as not to die of terror. Mister Splitfoot, once and for all, brought her fantasy together with the enigmas of closed and dusty places, whereas the Redskin with green glasses had accompanied her in open spaces, forests, and high plains, as a messenger of the People of Wind and Light.
Even so, the knocks grew more violent, enough to wake up Maggie lying on the right side of the bed, in the same spot where their father usually snored, whereas their mother softly sighed on the left. Maggie saw her sister busy snapping her fingers, thumbs against middle fingers. To her amazement, the sounds answered back in echo, just after the finger snapping. A knock for a snap, two knocks for two, and so on. Mister Splitfoot was playing the game of give-and-take.
Kate took on the mischievous tone that worked so well with grown-ups, who were simultaneously won over and perplexed by it.
“If you know how to count to seven, prove it!” Seven knocks followed, perfectly spaced one after the other from an alarming proximity.
“Now count to ten.”
While the knocking continued, their mother, awakened by the racket, exchanged a long look of astonishment mingled with circumspection with Margaret, sitting up now on her side of the bed. The whole thing was so outlandish, in this solitude without recourse out in the countryside, that the emotional rush of assailing thoughts must have suddenly opened in both of them, a simple woman given to superstition and a young girl hurt by friendship, the subtle and radiating channels of the psyche. Without any warning, because of the imagination of an insomniac girl, another world was knocking on the walls and floorboards. This sort of spontaneous communication took on such an uncontrollable vehemence that their mother lost all her reserve and ventured to ask the entity a personal question.
“Hey there, how many children have I had?” Seven knocks thundered in response.
“That’s false!” she cried, suspecting with a secret desolation