The Weight of October

The air in the master bedroom has a taste, though I have not breathed it in a hundred and thirty years. It tastes of dried lavender, copper, and cold, stagnant tallow.

​When the light dies behind the oak trees outside, I take my place at the foot of the brass bed. It is not the same bed where I spilled my life onto the feather mattress, but the room remembers where mine stood. The floorboards beneath the modern rug still carry the quiet groan of the doctor’s heavy boots and the hysterical rustle of my mother’s black silk skirts.

​Below, the new people are finishing their dinner.

​I hear the sharp clatter of a fork against porcelain. A radio hums—a thin, reedy voice crooning something soft and shapeless. They call themselves the Millers. I know this because I read their mail when the morning sun strikes the hall table, casting the letters in bright, impossible white. Clara and Thomas.

​Clara is young. She wears trousers made of rough indigo cloth and leaves her dark hair loose around her shoulders, unbound by pins or net. She moves through my corridors with a careless, heavy-footed confidence that offends the quiet dust.

​She is also seven months pregnant.

​I follow her when she ascends the stairs. My motion does not displace the air—I do not breathe, I do not push—yet the temperature drops precipitously in my wake. The air hardens, clinging to the skin like wet muslin.

​Clara reaches the landing and pauses. Her hand flies to the small of her back, her fingers pressing into her ribs. She shivers, pulling her knitted sweater tight around her swelling belly.

​"Tom?" she calls down the dark stairwell. "Did you leave the cellar door open again?"

​Tom’s voice echoes back, muffled by the distance of the kitchen. "No, honey! Why?"

​"It’s freezing up here."

​She turns toward the master bedroom. My bedroom.

​I step backward before her, keeping my face to hers. If she had the eyes to see me, she would see a woman of twenty-two in a high-collared nightdress of yellowed lawn lace. She would see the dark, wet matted ringlets clinging to my temples, sticky with cold sweat. She would see the pale blue skin around my lips, and the dark, glistening stain that starts at my hips and stretches down the white linen of my skirts, stiff and rust-colored at the hem.

​She sees none of this. She only feels a sudden, sharp prickle at the nape of her neck.

​Clara enters the room and reaches for the small plastic switch on the wall. The overhead bulb flickers, hums, and dies. She sighs with irritation, flicking the switch up and down.

​Click. Click. Click.

​I lean closer to her ear. I open my mouth—a mouth filled with the bitter, metallic tang of blood—and exhale.

​A breath of deep, subterranean ice sweeps across her cheek. The fine hairs on her arm stand up. Clara freezes, her hand lingering on the wall.

​"Tom?" her voice is smaller now, thin as spun glass.

​She feels me now. Not as a sight, but as a weight. It is the weight of October 14th, 1898. The weight of sixteen hours of tearing, agonizing labor in the stifling heat of a gas-lit room. The weight of the heavy velvet curtains drawn tight against the light, the smell of carbolic acid mixing with the stench of my own torn flesh, and the cold, terrible realization that the child inside me was no longer moving.

​I sink down, kneeling beside her on the floor. I press my forehead against her hip, right where her warm, beating child rests.

​Clara gasps, stumbling back as if struck. She clutches her abdomen, her face turning gray in the moonlight filtering through the windowpane.

​"Oh God," she whispers. "A cramp."

​Not a cramp, my dear, I think, tilting my head up to look at her trembling chin. A introduction.

​In 1898, they called it childbed fever, or exhaustion, or the dark will of Providence. My husband, Arthur, sat in the corner chair—that corner right there, where they have placed an ugly floor lamp—and wept into his linen handkerchief. He wept because the doctor had pulled out his shiny nickel tools, and because the sheets were ruined, and because the nursery down the hall would remain empty.

​I bled until the room went dark from the edges inward. I remember the sensation of sinking through the mattress, through the floorboards, into a cold, wet silence. But I did not sink all the way. Something caught me. The agony was so sharp, so bright, that it burned a hole straight through the fabric of my dying, pinning my spirit to this square of earth forever.

​My child died inside me. It never drew air. It never cried. It remains wrapped in the damp, dark red folds of my memory, and I have spent a century looking for it.

​Now, Clara has brought one into my room.

​I hear it. I can hear the fast, fluttering beat of the tiny heart inside her, sounding like the wings of a trapped moth against a windowpane. Thump-thump-thump-thump. It is the sweetest music I have ever heard. It belongs here. It belongs to the house.

​By midnight, the house is silent. Thomas is asleep, his breathing heavy and rhythmic on his side of the bed. Clara lies awake, staring at the ceiling. She has pulled the duvet up to her chin, though the room is not physically cold enough to warrant it.

​I sit on the edge of her side of the mattress. The springs do not yield under my weight, but the air grows thick, heavy enough to make her chest rise and fall with effort.

​Slowly, gently, I stretch out my hands. My fingers are long, blue-white, and tipped with bruised, translucent nails. I hover them an inch above her stomach.

​I begin to hum.

​It is the lullaby my mother sang to me, a quiet, melancholy Victorian tune about sweet babes and silver moons. I cannot make a sound that human ears can process as music, but the vibrations pass directly into the room's plaster and wood.

​The lamp on the nightstand gives a low, glass-tinkling vibration.

​Clara sat up with a violent jerk. "Who’s there?"

​Thomas grunts, rolling over. "Clara... go to sleep..."

​"Tom, wake up. Listen." Clara’s eyes are wide, white-rimmed with terror in the dark. She slides her legs out from under the covers. "Someone is singing."

​"It’s the wind, babe..."

​"It’s not the wind!" she snaps, her voice trembling. "It’s inside the room."

​She stands, her bare feet touching the hardwood floor. I am right beside her. I match my stride to hers as she walks toward the nursery—the room down the hall that they spent the last weekend painting a soft, pale yellow.

​They placed a crib there. A white wooden crib with tiny painted birds on the side.

​When Clara reaches the doorway of the nursery, I slide past her and stand beside the crib. I rest my hands on the smooth rail.

​"Look," I whisper into the stillness.

​Clara stops dead in the hallway. The hallway light flickers once, twice, and then casts a sickly yellow glow over the scene.

​In the dim light, she sees the mobile hanging above the crib—a ring of wooden swallows—begin to spin. It does not spin gently, as if caught in a draft. It spins with a frantic, jerky speed, the strings twisting tighter and tighter until they snap with sharp cracks. One by one, the wooden birds rain down into the empty crib.

​Plip. Plip. Plip.

​Clara screams—a ragged, choked sound. She backs away, clutching her belly with both hands, shielding her child from the air of the hallway.

​"Tom! Tom!"

​I follow her as she flees back to the bedroom. I am no longer floating quietly; I am surging behind her, bringing with me the thick, copper scent of fresh blood and the bitter chill of the grave.

​Thomas bursts out of the bedroom, bleary-eyed and alarmed. "Clara! What’s wrong? What happened?"

​"Something is in the house!" she sobbed, pressing her face into his chest. "I felt it—it’s right next to me! It wants the baby, Tom! It’s cold, it’s so cold—"

​Thomas wraps his arms around her, looking frantically up and down the empty hall. He looks straight through me. His eyes pass over my pale, weeping face, over the dark red ruins of my gown, over my hands stretched toward his wife.

​"There’s nothing here, Clara," he says softly, trying to soothe her, though I can see the gooseflesh breaking out along his bare arms. He feels the cold. He smells the iron in the air. "You’re having a nightmare. It’s just stress."

​"No!" she shrieks, pulling away from him. She looks down at her hands.

​Where I touched her sweater as she ran, wet, dark stains have bloomed across the wool. Not blood—she is not bleeding. It is cold, foul-smelling condensation, iron-rich water drawn out of the very air by my presence, leaving black spots like wet rot on her clothes.

​She looks up, her eyes darting around the landing. And for a fraction of a second—just a heartbeat, just as the hallway bulb gives a final, dying flare—our eyes meet.

​She sees me.

​She sees my hollow, dark-ringed eyes. She sees my mouth open in an eternal, silent scream of agony. She sees the ghost of the child I never held, lingering like a shadow beneath the folds of my blood-soaked skirt.

​Clara drops to her knees, hyperventilating, her eyes locked on mine.

​"Leave us," she chokes out, her voice barely a whisper, raw with terror. "Please. Please leave us alone."

​I bend down until my nose almost touches hers. I can smell her terror—sweet, sharp, and hot. I can hear the baby’s heart inside her, frantic now, beating like a frightened bird against its cage.

​I cannot leave, I think, reaching out to lay a freezing hand against her damp cheek. I live here. I died here. And when your time comes—when the pain tears through you and the sheets grow cold—I will be the one who delivers your sweet child into the dark.

​Thomas grabs her under the arms, lifting her up, shouting her name in panic as she faints into his arms. He carries her down the stairs, scrambling, terrified, cursing as he stumbles toward the front door to take her to the hospital.

​The front door slams shut. The house goes dead quiet.

​I stand at the top of the stairs, watching the light of their car red-shift into the fog as they speed down the driveway.

​They will come back. They always come back for their things. And even if they don't... the baby has heard my song now. It knows the way home.

​I turn around and walk slowly back into the nursery, settling myself on the floor beside the crib to wait.