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It Will Just Be Us
Author: Jo Kaplan

PART ONE


THE PARABLE OF THE KNOCKER

 

 

1


In Wakefield Manor, a decaying ancestral mansion brooding on the edge of the Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, there is a locked room. For years it has been inaccessible, closing out from the world all the aborted secrets stilled in its dormant womb. After climbing the main staircase that curves up through the house like a twisted spine, you’ll find a hallway with striped and long-faded viridian wallpaper that evokes algae-choked seafoam. On the third floor you’ll pass a linen closet, a disused nursery, a bathroom with a cracked clawfoot tub, and a wood-beamed room inhabited by broken furniture draped in white sheets. Then the hall narrows and turns a corner, its high ceiling webbed in shadow, and you are faced with a windowless passage, at the end of which lies the heavy door of distressed mahogany—and whatever lies beyond it.

What I have imagined must live in this locked room, if anything can indeed be said to live there at all, are the agonies of ghostly lives playing out on a dusty stage, the callous whispers of betrayal and the succor of revenge; creatures ineffable and unfamiliar as a lamprey must be to an amoeba, not merely vast but vastly alien, having come from either the distant past or the impenetrable future; or otherwise a black hole that invites the earth to leap inside to its death. These wonders have occupied me with indelible curiosity and, I will admit, a long-standing dread of the end of the third-floor hallway.

Imagine a younger me: a deliberate child, inward-drawn, with those two serpentine braids my mother used to weave into my unruly hair. Imagine that child creeping purposely down the hall while her mother downstairs scolds the older sister for breaking a glass.

Left to her own devices, this young Samantha wonders what lies beyond the door. What delicious secrets does it hide? What immortal trappings might she witness were she to peer through the keyhole, just waiting for a skeleton key to twist it into submission? She dares herself to look. Go on, she thinks to herself. Just a peek.

Where’s your sister? a voice from downstairs asks, accusing, then calls for Samantha!

Kneeling on the groaning hardwood, she is just leaning forward to press her eye to the keyhole when footsteps thunder up behind her, followed by her mother’s voice: “Samantha! Get away from there. I’ve told you how many times? You want to pretend you’re deaf, I’ll tell you in sign language.”

A sharp yank on a delicate arm drags her away from the door.

The look on little Sam’s face implies disappointment that her mother has found her so quickly in this dim, remote passage, swollen and close as an asthmatic throat, and perhaps she thinks of all her hiding places and wonders how many of them, truly, her mother has found out.

We may never know, because the hollow gong of a doorbell interrupts us.

Younger me vanishes into the twists and folds of time, and I consider that hallway and the locked door where the ghostly apparition of little Sam knelt. The doorbell rings again, impatiently and heedless of the late hour, unbefitting behavior for visitors. Outside the night yawns breathlessly, cold and still.

The hallway recedes from me as I back away and turn the corner.

“I wonder who that could be?” remarks my mother to no one, rubbing her hands over her chilled arms as she makes her way to the front door.

I descend the staircase that unfurls to the foyer as she unlocks the door, and an uncanny presentiment ensnares me. I call down for her to wait, and she pauses with her hand on the brass knob.

“Whatever for?” she asks in surprise.

I can feel something lurking on the other side of the closed door.

I’d like to explain to her so that she will not think me silly. I’d like to explain to her that closed doors inherently provide us with the potential for threat while offering a simulacrum of cold comfort. Imagine: something is waiting for you on the other side of this door. Perhaps there is a knock, or the ring of a doorbell; you know something is out there, but you don’t know what. Or even worse, there is only silence; you think there might be something out there, but you cannot know for sure. And while the closed door might offer the guise of security from that indefinite world, it simultaneously creates a deeper dread as it conceals whatever stands just beyond. Something in the wind that scratches its way inside, something that slips between the patter of raindrops, something without form until you open the door and look, until you have to open the door, until you cannot stand anymore not to open the door.

“Perhaps it’s Charles Severance,” I suggest lightly.

“Friend of yours?”

“No, Mother.”

She looks at me blankly.

“Don’t you remember The Parable of the Knocker? That serial killer in Alexandria who knocked on people’s front doors and then killed them? He wrote that biblical manifesto about himself. You must remember.”

The doorbell shrieks again with an irascible appeal. We are angering whatever begs to be admitted from the night.

“So you reckon there’s a serial killer out there ringing our bell?” says my mother in her gently chiding drawl.

“I’m all ears, then. Who do you suppose it is?”

“A little swamp creature that’s lost its way, ringing to see if we can spare a cup of sugar. Or perhaps arsenic.”

When she opens the door, the person beyond remains obscured, and I wonder with a thrill who it could be at this time of night. At this time of night? Have I become my mother? It seems so very like a thing she would say. In fact, I’m sure she’s said it just now, if I could only remember exactly when. But then, she is the one who’s opened the door.

“Oh, this is a surprise,” she says, before her tone drops with concern. “What’s happened?”

A little swamp creature, indeed—my enormously pregnant sister, not deliberate in the least, barges through the door. Her heavy breathing floods the foyer, which seems too bright against her red-veined eyes. At either side of her extraordinarily round belly she carries two small valises. It has been raining, and the sodden fraying rope of her hair glistens like the night sky.

“Elizabeth?” says my mother. “What on earth is it?”

The raindrops on her cheeks are tears. “Everything,” she spits out, dropping her bags. “Everything’s gone wrong. Can I stay here for a while?”

“Well, sure you can. But what about Donovan?”

Elizabeth’s words are brittle. “That’s what’s gone wrong.”

“Oh, honey,” my mother says, and wraps her arms around Elizabeth, who crumples into them like a child. From above my sister’s shoulder my mother’s eyes find me. “Well, don’t just stand there. Go put on the kettle.”

My banishment to the kitchen offers something of a reprieve from Elizabeth’s dramatics. Nothing my sister has ever done could be considered deliberate; she is more likely to react from pure animal instinct than from any sense of calculation, from any sense of decency. When we were children, every splinter and stubbed toe against a fallen log provoked wails of distress. Mountains and molehills are all one and the same, equally devastating to the one who pulls the universe in revolutions around herself.

I sometimes think to myself, proudly, that I am not like her. I will never be like her. I will melt into the walls; I will be careful and deliberate in all that I do.

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