Captivity. Deborah Noyes

Marie, David. Her mind wanders through the storm of noise, a steady thumping as of some giant come to tread their roof, but Ma is breathless, vigilant, counting along. Fifteen raps for Maggie. Eleven for Kate.

      “My youngest now,” Ma demands mysteriously, and Maggie thinks, It’s one patient ghost to weather such a taskmaster. Besides which Kate is their youngest. But the visitor raps thrice, faintly, and Ma swoons. So there was another child once. Did Kate know? Why not Maggie? Father’s lips flap in prayer, and Maggie wonders at the secret, mortifying world of adults. What more unspoken? What else?

      “Will you continue to rap if I call my neighbors in?” Ma trembles. It’s a terror to see her this way. And a thrill beyond reckoning. Pity and fear catch like a bone in Maggie’s throat, but she has no shame, evidently. It’s too late for that.

      “That they might hear it also?” Ma pleads.

      Maggie imagines the men and boys out night fishing by Mud Creek. They’ll mill and murmur with eyes full of moonshine. They’ll listen intently, blow into strong hands with icy breath. She will have them in thrall.

       Rap rap rap.

      Ma stamps out into the darkness of the hall, clutching her shift close round a spacious bosom, Pa stumbling at her heels.

      Kate leads their visitor up and back in a hypnotic square, the walls resounding. Doesn’t she see there’s no one left to impress now? Where has she gone to in mind? Her eyes shine like ice.

       Rap. Rap. Rap.

      Had the river burst its banks and come swirling in under their roof this night, Maggie understands, the Fox sisters could not have seen their way clear.

      We were born for this, she thinks.

      

The first to arrive is candid Mrs. Redfield, meaning to have a laugh at their expense. Indulged city children (the Fox family has only just relocated from Rochester) scared silly in their beds.

      But when Ma enlists the clever spirit to rap out her neighbor’s age, Mrs. Redfield promptly fetches Mr. Redfield. His ripe old age is likewise disclosed. He, in turn, sends for Mr. and Mrs. Duesler, who summon the Hydes. Before the girls know it (always “the girls,” as if deprived at birth of Christian names), the house swarms with eager Methodists in various degrees of undress demanding audience with the spirit. For shame! Ankles on view everywhere, even the ladies’, and this is something. This is grandeur.

      “Is it a human being that answers us?” prompts Duesler in his righteous baritone. His morning beard shadows a doughy jaw. His bare feet with their revolting horny nails—he alone politely removed snow-crusted boots at the door, woolens or no—rivet Maggie. The only sound in the now overheated room is squeaking-wet soles. The occasional dry cough. “Is it a spirit? If it is, make three raps please.”

       Rap rap rap.

      “Are you an injured spirit, then? Make three raps if you are.”

      It does, and it’s deafening.

      “Were you injured in this house?”

       Yes.

      “Were you murdered?”

       Yes.

      “Can your murderer be brought to justice?”

      No comment.

      “Is the person living that harmed you?

       Yes.

      Everyone in the room seems to shrink, for the only expedient way to finger the assailant is list each luckless person they can think of and hope for a match, which is cause for murmuring and downcast eyes. Who will be named? On what grounds? Who will do the naming—offending whom? With a lofty sigh, their leader, Mr. Duesler, proposes, “There are twenty-six letters in the alphabet. Will you rap out the number that corresponds with each letter? One for ‘A,’ two for ‘B,’ and so on?”

       Yes.

      With this tedious method, their ghost, identified as a Mr. Charles B. Rosna, formerly an itinerant peddler, narrates its violent demise. Five years earlier, for his worldly wealth of five hundred dollars, his throat was cut with a butcher knife in the east bedroom, his body dragged down through the buttery to the cellar and left lying the night long. In due course, he was buried ten feet below the earthen floor.

      

The population within the little house, meanwhile, has surged. Men up from the creek move with fishing poles slung over shoulders, a threat to life and limb, though a thoughtful few have lined them up outdoors. Too exhausted to navigate the forest of ripe bodies, excited to the point of collapse by clamor, Maggie prays for sleep under the stairwell crawlspace. She wishes Mr. Hyde would take out his fiddle, that for a change they might roll up the ratty rug and dance as they did in Rochester, instead of milling about rooms where a dead man got dragged, his blood streaking the boards.

      When Charles B. Rosna intrudes on her thoughts, her rest under the stair is broken. Maggie crawls out, slapping spiderwebs off her dress, to search for Kate, who’s retreated to the empty room upstairs, their room before the rappings began. Kate is wound tight in a blanket, a dead weight that Maggie can’t unravel; nor can she pry her way in, so she lies alongside her sister’s mummified shape, Kate’s breath soft on her cheek and faintly stale in the sweet way of childhood. Maggie watches her sister’s chest rise and fall and the flicker of her pulse at the hollow of her freckled neck. She buries her head in that warm space under Kate’s chin a moment, marveling at their sway over and invisibility among so vast an assemblage of neighbors.

      A low roar of voices fills the house as even the spectral rappings did not.

      But the thing in the cellar commands her. Even if she and Kate and their joint imagination have planted it there—and she can’t say for certain anymore—the peddler’s ruined body has swelled, spread like a foul demon vegetable in the nether regions of their farmhouse. Maggie can’t long keep it from her thoughts.

      When the rappings began, Marta Weekman, who’s nine but seems younger, told Maggie and Kate matter-of-factly that she once lived in their house and suffered there. It knocked, Marta said, and when her father answered, there was no one. Her pa raced round in bare feet to see was the knocker here concealed or there, and this—her befuddled father’s evident lunacy—terrified her worst of all. One night she felt a hand trail over her sheets as fingers play on water or a harp, and when the hand reached her face, it was cold. She lay rigid till dawn, too stricken to speak or cry out, and refused to enter her room again after dark. Not long after, her family moved out.

      Maggie hopes it won’t touch her.

      On the other hand, what might it feel like, being touched by a hand from Beyond? Wondering—like when she wonders about God or the devil—makes her feel light and unpinned from her body, wide-awake and willing to a fault.

      She curls tight, listening to the swell of voices. Safe among her family and neighbors, Maggie wonders, is Marta Weekman downstairs with her parents? Or have they had their fill of the spook house? She wonders about the rappings, about herself and Kate, whose breath now warms her wrist. All these people milling about in the strangeness of night, including the peddler with limp head dangling over a great gash. Who are we? How have we come to be here? Now. Together.

      

Maggie lurks outside the parlor next morning, holding her shadow back from the threshold.

      Inside, in full morning sun, Mrs. Redfield kneels, surrounded by a hushed assemblage—more arrive every hour—of villagers. She asks in a voice unfamiliar and soft, urgent enough to make a blacksmith blush, “Is there a heaven to attain?”

      In broad daylight, the question floats down among the farmhouse congregation like a feather. It rocks on the