I returned only once, in 1958. On a whim, I left my home in Connecticut early one Saturday morning and drove west along Interstate 90. Many hours later I turned south, following the Genesee River for forty miles before crossing through Millworth and over Firethorn on Gulf Road. I arrived at the Manikin shortly before dusk.
At the time, Hal Craxton was still alive, and the Manikin had been left unattended for three decades. The surge of development in the Northeast hadn’t hit the region yet—Millworth was destined to remain a poor village, the railway no longer ran through Kettling, and no major highways had been built to connect the region to the upstate cities. A few small industries had sprung up, though, and Gulf Road was home to an occasional four-room ranch house. But traffic remained light, and on Hadley Road, between the old Gill farm and the Manikin, I didn’t pass a single car.
The huge pocket of Craxton land, crowned by its Greek Revival mansion, appeared at the end of my journey like a hidden world behind a mirror. A soft breeze blew cottonwood puffs through the air while swallows swooped through clouds of midges. I sat on the hood of my car and contemplated the Manikin’s north facade with the attention I would have given a letter I’d written as a child, not quite believing that I’d been the author, or that I’d been a resident of this Golgotha. How strange to think that I’d spent much of my childhood here, while my mother exhausted herself trying to keep the house in order and her employer distracted. I wouldn’t wish such work on anyone. Yet my mother had proved herself a capable rebel. “The Craxton Uprising,” we called it in the family stories retold every holiday. And the part I’d played, the lie I’d told my mother to keep her from marrying Hal Craxton—the thought of it made me laugh aloud as I sat there.
Although age had eroded my youthful audacity, my memories began to come back to me with such force that I grew curious about the Manikin, and curiosity made me bold. I’d come here to see how the house had fared through the years. I decided I couldn’t leave until I’d explored the interior.
The first-floor windows had been boarded shut, but after circling the house I found an open basement window. A path indented in the weeds suggested that I was not the first trespasser to use this entrance. And evidence of others made me wary. But I persisted in my adventure, and with some difficulty I managed to squeeze through the basement window and lower myself onto a trestle that had been moved against the wall. A splinter on the window frame snagged my trousers and ripped the denim open, luckily without catching my skin. Once level on the dirt floor, I moved toward the ladder that led up to the first floor. I had to keep hunched over, since the basement was only four feet in height. The old furnace stood in the same place, the ash door open to reveal the pit where the grates had been. The boiler lay on its side. The wooden boxes used by Sylva to store apples and potatoes remained exactly where she’d left them. They were empty, of course, along with the coal bin, the furnace, the house itself. I stood still for a moment, trying to gauge the extent of the emptiness. The pulse of this great, vague place had stopped. And here I was sneaking across the basement like some wayfarer intent on plundering a tomb.
As I looked up the ladder to the open hatchway, I couldn’t help but think that something awful awaited me there—a dead body, a skeleton, pieces of matted hair torn from a skull, a ghost. I am not the sort of woman who normally indulges in superstition, but the threat was both so real and abstract that I couldn’t stop my imagination from drifting.
Lore had cut that hatchway into the kitchen floor back when I was seven or eight, and in the years that followed I used to marvel at my mother’s fortitude as she descended the ladder into this well of darkness. Now my own courage fed upon itself as I ascended until my fears faded to nothing. I climbed to my feet in the kitchen and brushed myself off with composure that was almost contemptuous in its indifference.
Here I am! I announced silently, and sensing no objection from the Manikin I began to look around.
The kitchen—along with the other first-floor rooms—had been stripped of furniture and appliances. Even the immense cast-iron stove had been carted away, and the emptiness contrasted sharply with the recollected images that cluttered my mind. At first the memories were those improved by time. What a simple country childhood I had enjoyed—fresh-baked cobbler cooling on the table, Sylva shucking corn, little Junket poking me in the ribs. And what a simple, easily dismantled lie that was! I had spent my early years trying to understand the complicated rules of servitude that my mother knew by rote. And now my freedom to wander the house at my own discretion only intensified my memories of the endless restrictions. Except for the kitchen and one corner of the attic—and the library eventually, at Hal Craxton’s dispensation—the territory had been forbidden.
Irresistible, forbidden rooms. For years I had risked my life—or so it had seemed then—in an attempt to penetrate the mysteries of this oversized house. My mother still attributes my early restlessness to her easy hand. She let me grow wild, she insists, and blames herself for the consequences of that. I have given up trying to persuade her otherwise. But I don’t blame my mother—I blame her occupation. I never could figure out why the freedom my mother allowed me was compromised by an invalid woman named Mrs. Craxton. A person I wasn’t allowed to speak to governed my life, determining where I could and couldn’t go, what I would eat for supper, even which school I would attend, since the salary she paid my mother was just enough to send me to the Millworth Academy. Given the inscrutable logic behind the household law, of course I entertained myself with an endless variety of transgressions.
Mrs. Craxton was an oddball not only in her habits but in her choice of servants. Most employers of the day refused to hire live-in help with children, for obvious reasons. But Mrs. Craxton preferred servants who came with a young child or two—a shrewd preference, I see in hindsight, since it made employees like my mother and Lore more obliged to their employers and therefore more dependable workers. If she could have surrounded herself with slaves, she would have done so. Short of that, she made it nearly impossible for her servants to quit.
Or that’s my explanation for my mother’s excessive loyalty, though here again we disagree, my mother insisting that she was truly fond of Mary Craxton and didn’t mind her petulance. Of Hal Craxton we speak only vaguely. And the Manikin itself has come to seem an independent entity, a long-lost wonder that never belonged to anyone.
As a child, I hadn’t quite understood what it meant to say that the Manikin was Craxton property, but as I wandered through the dark, vacant rooms I felt the presence of the mother and son, their habits, their privileges, just as I felt the coolness of the winter months stored in corners and crevices.
Eventually I wandered upstairs. The hall carpet had been pulled up, and chunks of plaster had fallen from the walls. In the master bedroom I discovered the animals—dozens of forgotten old impostors abandoned to this dusty purgatory. It had never occurred to me that Hal Craxton would have sold all the furniture and still kept the animals. I had come upon a buried treasure. During my childhood, these crones and graybeards had turned the Manikin into a playhouse for me, a prohibited playhouse, to be sure, but all the more tantalizing because of the censure. Dressed in their own skins, with glass marbles for eyes, they had appeared unreal and yet unbearably lifelike to me—terrifying doll-animals that came to life as soon as I closed my eyes in sleep.
I’d moved to the Manikin with my mother when I was five, and for many years the Craxtons’ Cabinet of Curiosities haunted my dreams. Inevitably, though, I began to take the animals for granted. Children are inclined to think that all people live identical lives—I figured that every house in America was full of mounted animals, that antlers grew from all the walls, that people flicked ashes into severed hooves and housekeepers brushed the fur of dead cougars. The only thing that continued to confuse me about the animals was the prohibition against playing with them. Outside, Lore gave us permission to kill, but inside we weren’t supposed to touch a finger to the giant turtle’s hard-baked shell.
After the servants chased Hal Craxton out of the house, it was old Boggio who marked the new order. He turned the Manikin into a diverse habitat, made it a true home for a wide variety of species. The fun hadn’t lasted long, of course—Craxton came back and evicted us in short order. Yet, inexplicably, he kept these poor veterans locked in the Manikin, where they had been languishing for thirty years.
The turtle was gone—stolen by thieves or sold by Hal Craxton—along with some of the more colorful birds and exotic mammals. The remaining trophies eyed me not with the sparkling outrage of their early years but with tired, sour expressions: Why did you abandon us? They were rather disgusting, I admit, especially the furry ones—mangy, with little trees of fungus growing up legs and along leathery noses and horns. The smell in the bedroom was of fruit covered with mold. But I found myself pitying them. Beasts of the fields, fowls of the air, vertebrates, marsupials—their confinement seemed unjust, and I considered releasing them from their captivity and taking them home with me.
Then I noticed how daylight had faded to dusk, and I decided that I’d better vacate the house before night trapped me there. I resolved to take a single trophy, the only one I’d ever seen alive, if only for a moment. The snowy owl had been mounted above the threshold, its plaque nailed to the door frame so the bird loomed overhead, ready to bury its talons in the skull of an intruder. With its dusty, gold-flecked armor, it was still a lovely warrior. Without question, this was the trophy I wanted to take away. But I couldn’t reach it from the floor, and there was no movable piece of furniture to stand on, nor a quadruped sturdy enough to support me. So I picked up a gnarled walking stick that had been propped in the corner and began striking at the plaque in an effort to break it apart.
Shame on me! Peg Griswood, a no-nonsense, middle-aged working woman going at that mess of feathers and clay as though my life depended upon it! With just one strike I knew I was doing something horrible, unforgivable, but I couldn’t restrain myself. I was determined to get that bird, to take a piece of the past with me when I left. Another strike split the panel above the door—the crack ran up from behind the bird and disappeared into the molding. I searched the ceiling for a new crack, found none, and was preparing to strike at the bird again when I experienced a sudden and indescribable fear. Did I shiver? Isn’t this what a person does in response to fear? No, nothing moved, not my body and certainly not the house. The fear had sprung out of the air, and it was my mind, my consciousness, shivering inside me.
The fear had a definite form, though I can’t define it with words. It was a material thing, as real as the vast, grim hush of the Manikin. I felt myself in the presence of something unnatural and dreadful, spectral yet physical. The intensity of my cowardice could only be justified by a precise description of the fear, which I can’t give. The best I can offer is the metaphor of a ghost. For though there was nothing to be seen, the fear was as momentous as the appearance of a ghost, as astonishing as a dead thing come to life.
So I ran. I ducked my head beneath the surface of the liquid air and dove through that hellish house, the density increasing with every step, the pursuit involving a steady constriction around me, a suffocation. I think I held my breath for the entire descent. When I reached the basement I threw my body upward toward the open window, drew in a cleansing gulp of air, and pulled myself free.
I know I didn’t imagine this monstrous, predatory fear, though I have nothing but my own memory to prove that the experience actually occurred. I drove away from the house, heading west toward the last red streaks of sunset above Firethorn. As I drove I felt myself succumbing to an actual, physical trembling, a belated response to my temporary madness. I had trouble negotiating the road, so I slowed and pulled over to the shoulder.
The place I’d chosen to stop turned out to be directly in front of the old Gill farmhouse. A light on the second floor, along with an old Ford sedan in the drive, suggested that someone was home. I felt a sudden desire to knock on the door and tell the occupants, whomever they were, about my encounter at the Manikin. But I wasn’t sure what, exactly, I’d encountered, and I knew I’d succeed only in looking foolish, so I drove on to Millworth.
I restored myself with a quiet dinner at the Millworth Inn. The owner was out of town for the weekend, and the manager, a sullen young man, obviously preferred to be left alone in his corner of the otherwise empty dining room. I slept fitfully that night—the squeaky springs of my mattress must have echoed through the empty hallways of the inn, though as far as I knew there were no other guests to be disturbed by the noise. Early the next morning, after settling the bill, I started out on my trip home.
I had no desire to repeat my visit to the Manikin—by then I was rather embarrassed by the experience. But Gulf Road kept pulling me eastward, so instead of heading up to the interstate, I continued on over Fireworth for the second time in twenty-four hours. I turned down Hadley Road, and as soon as I was in sight of the Gill farm I decided to stop again.
I’d had little contact with the Gill family as a child. All I could remember was that the older boy had pushed his brother down the stairs. I’d heard that Nancy Gill had worked as the Manikin’s cook for a few months, and Win Gill served as a driver from time to time. Mostly, they’d kept to themselves. I assumed that such a family would have held on to their farm through the years, and when a plump, gray-whiskered woman answered my knock, opening the door only a few inches, I addressed her as Mrs. Gill. She wiped her hands on her apron and said sharply, “What is it you want?”
I explained that I used to live at the Manikin, thinking that this was reason enough for my appearance at her door.
“Well I ain’t Nancy Gill,” the woman said, pausing to consider whether or not to divulge more information. Finally she flung open the door and motioned me inside. She stood so close to me when she spoke again that I could feel her breath on my face.
“You want to see Derrick?” she asked, throwing out the question to taunt me, apparently. But I stood up to her and said, “Yes, if you don’t mind.”
She lifted her chin and broke into a throaty yell, booming Derrick’s name through the house. “Derrick, oh Derrick, darling! You got a visitor!” Just as abruptly she fell silent again and without expression led me up the stairs. I had the distinct feeling that I was the first visitor to the house in twenty years, and that my presence alternately impressed and annoyed her. I was about to apologize for the intrusion when she opened a bedroom door.
And so I encountered Derrick Gill. We’d hardly spoken as children, and though back then I’d known him by sight, I wouldn’t have recognized this shriveled, forty-three-year-old version. The only part of his body visible above the covers was his head, shaped like an apple, hairless except for the faint lines of his eyebrows, with buffed, shiny skin and perfect teeth. His two weaselish eyes narrowed even further when he burst out laughing.
I looked behind me, but the old woman had disappeared, so I just stood there, arms folded impatiently across my chest, and waited. He groaned with laughter, he roared, he flung his head back and forth, crowed and coughed, then smacked his lips together and said, “Little Peg Griswood!”
I was surprised that he knew me, of course, but more than that I was intrigued by his ability to recall a familiar face. If he’d kept a place for me in his memory, then surely he could tell me something about the house, something that would help explain yesterday’s experience.
“Well, well, well,” he said, sucking in his cheeks. I saw his eyes glance at the chair against the wall, so I pulled it over to the bedside and sat down.
“Little Peg Griswood. What have you been up to these last thirty years?”
I laughed then, amused by the interest of this person I hadn’t thought of since I’d moved away. “I’m all grown up,” I teased.
“I can see, chippy!” he replied with a lewd snort.
“I live in Connecticut now.”
“Children?”
“No.”
“Married?”
“No.”
“Waste of womanflesh,” he clucked. I knew I could do no better than ignore the comment, so that’s what I did. I wanted information. But first I made the necessary inquiries about his own condition. He told me that he was happy as a lark, and though both his parents were deceased, he was attended to by benevolent Mrs. Muldoon, his nurse, who sat her pussy on his face for a dollar a taste whenever he so desired.
I waited for the fit of laughter to die down, then said quietly, “I visited the Craxton place yesterday.”
“Did you go inside?” he asked, those narrow eyes growing round, the lids controlled by unusually elastic muscles. I suspected that he already knew what had happened to me in the house.
“I did go inside,” I echoed.
“Through the basement window.”
“Yes.”
“And did you go up to the second floor?”
“Yes.”
“You found the collection?”
“Yes.”
“And you tried to steal the angel?” He cackled this last question, the interrogative rise nearly lost in his laughter. Obviously, there was no need to answer him.
To my surprise, he became abruptly serious, throwing out the next observation in a whisper. “You survived.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
“You’re lucky, you know. The first looter who succeeds in dislodging the angel won’t live to tell it. If you’d put a bit more muscle into it, deary, the house would have collapsed, and you’d be buried beneath the rubble right now instead of chatting on a Sunday morning with Mr. Derrick Gill.”
“The house is haunted. Isn’t that what they say?”
“I say the house is haunted. How could I know what others say?” He chewed lightly on his tongue for a moment, then continued. “That old taxidermist Boggio. He cast a spell upon the house before he died.”
“A spell?”
I should have scoffed at such fanciful talk. Instead, I lost the inclination to disbelieve anything that Derrick told me.
“While he wasted away right in that same room where you found yourself yesterday, he cast a spell upon the house. No one lasts long inside. Sometimes on a summer night I hear the screams. I heard you last night, little Peg. Ellen’s Peg.”
I imagined the sound of my voice traveling on the back of the evening breeze, over the land, and through his window. I hadn’t realized I’d screamed, but I didn’t doubt the truth of Derrick’s words.
“Why did Boggio do that—cast a spell, as you say?”
“Why does the bastard kill his legitimate brother?”
“I don’t understand.”
“Boggio was a Craxton!”
“What?”
We were both speaking in whispers now, and I had the sense that behind me a jealous Mrs. Muldoon had returned and was eavesdropping at the door. But I couldn’t bring myself to turn around.
“Boggio was the son of the Founder.”
Henry Senior had been tagged the Founder by the employees of Craxton’s Scientific Establishment—it took me a minute to remember that, and while I struggled through the confusion, Derrick rattled on. “Son of the Founder. Now there’s a savory. A little mistake of youthful derring-do. The mother was a simpleton, they say. The Founder was a mere mite of fifteen when he planted his member in that most sacred place, heh heh heh…”
“Henry Senior?”
“The girl killed herself. The son was sent to an orphanage. But the Founder gave the boy a job in the company as soon as he came of age. He never told Boggio about the Craxton connection, though. Never told anyone.”
“So how did Boggio learn the truth?”
“How should I know? Maybe the good Lord sent him a telegram. Maybe the Founder’s ghost paid a timely visit. It doesn’t matter how Boggio came to know it. What matters is that when he finally learned the truth, the power of his rage turned him into a wizard.” He squeezed the last word out with a creaking breath. Wizard. His flawless teeth were a solid white shape, a glowworm between his parched, smiling lips. I looked away then. I closed my eyes, surrounding myself in darkness so I could take in his strange story.
Somehow it made sense, and though there might have been a thousand other explanations for what had happened to me in the Manikin, a thousand more probable causes that could have brought me to that crisis, Derrick’s version was the one that I preferred.
When I opened my eyes, he was asleep, or perhaps feigning sleep. That he was a trickster and a lech, I had no doubt. But I needed to believe what he told me, so I ignored the evidence that pointed to a half-truth and took away a new and accurate history. Old Boggio was a Craxton. This would explain why Henry Senior made a place for the taxidermist on his country estate. Perhaps Henry Craxton had bought and renovated the Manikin more for Boggio’s sake than for his own, as a secret sanctuary for the son he’d neglected. And Boggio had achieved a magical vengeance at the end and put the house under a dreadful curse—Ye who enter here beware.… This was the unnatural explanation I’d come looking for. This was all I needed to know.
I didn’t see Mrs. Muldoon anywhere as I walked downstairs—she must have concluded I would not permanently intrude upon their special intimacy. I let myself out as quietly as possible. The bright sunlight shocked me. It should have been midnight, dead leaves swirling in the wind, creatures with neon eyes watching from the edge of darkness, bones rattling inside hollow trees. Something in the landscape should have reflected the submission of the living to the authority of the dead. But the world wouldn’t cooperate. Instead, the reality of daylight and summer along with the smell of gasoline as I started my car and the oom-pah of “Seventy-Six Trombones” on the radio helped to dissipate my mood, until I felt fairly steady again, even purposeful. I had to be back at work at 8:00 A.M. the following morning, and I had a four-hundred-mile drive ahead of me.
I continued east toward Kettling. This route gave me one final opportunity to see the Manikin. I tried—and failed—to convince myself not to stop. I needed to see the house now that I knew its story, though I shouldn’t have spared the time. As the car rolled and bumped along the grassy drive, I vowed to linger no more than a few minutes.
My impatience to get back on the road brought to mind the beginning of another journey. I remembered how Sylva had sat in the passenger seat of the truck, baby June in her arms, Nora had balanced Gracie on her knees in the truckbed, the boys had straddled the side, and Peter, Red Vic, and Sid had caught and stacked suitcases that Lore lifted up to them. Then Junket leapt onto a wheel rim and from there into the truck while Machine barked frantically from the ground. Lore appeased the animal by hauling her up to Junket, then he climbed in and took a seat on a tower of boxes, which seemed to be the signal for Win Gill—our driver—to start the motor. The chassis shook, the air filled with exhaust, and above the coughing of the engine I heard a voice—old Boggio was leaning out the bedroom window, waving and yelling good-bye to us while the master and mistress hid their faces inside the curtained library and pretended that we had never existed.
And there was my mother standing near the passenger door, urging me on, a gray silhouette behind the cloud of exhaust extending her hand to me. “Come on, poppet, hurry up, poppet,” she was saying, rolling her tongue in the playful brogue I hadn’t heard her use for years. “Hurry up, poppet, let’s go and find the sea.”
What became of us from then on—the effort to find and keep jobs, the illnesses and injuries, the love affairs, the education erratically gained—all of it begins beyond the Manikin, beyond that moment when I climbed into the front seat beside Sylva, and my mother squeezed in next to me. Win Gill looped the truck around to head down the drive, and over the backfires I heard Boggio calling out, “Good-bye! Remember me!” and again, “Remember me,” and still again, the sound of his voice muted by distance, transforming into a more languorous command as we chugged toward Hadley Road, and though I twisted in my seat and leaned across my mother’s lap so I could see the old man waving from the upstairs window, the voice I heard only faintly now belonged not to him anymore but to the Manikin itself, the house shaping the words with its wood-and-plaster tongue, begging us, the lucky ones, to remember.