Gordon Grice
Laughter from the Next Room
“What are you thinking of when you stare out the window?” Jane said.
There was no answer, of course. Samantha’s eyes seemed layered—thin slices of ice stacked miles deep, with fissures jigging through them all and contradicting each other. Jane could look straight into those eyes when Samantha was like this, could even wave a hand, and get no reaction. When she blinked the lids were slow, indecisive.
Jane sat back in her chair. “I wonder if you think at all,” she said. “Maybe your brain shuts down.” Samantha’s eyes reflected the snow outside, even the individual flakes as they fell.
Half an hour later, when Jane returned with hazelnut cookies and cups of coffee on a tray, Samantha was still staring, but there was nothing to reflect. The window had gone dark. Jane tucked her legs beneath her in an easy chair and opened a novel. One hand free for coffee meant no hands free for cookies, but she’d rather read than eat.
“What did you say?” Samantha said dreamily. She blinked slowly, then faster; she wiggled in her chair as if to ease her spine.
“Nothing, Sam,” Jane said. “I haven’t spoken in a long time.”
* * *
“Samantha’s brighter than you think,” said Frederick, the girls’ tutor. He could hardly keep still; Roger found it distracting, the way he bounced from foot to foot. “In fact, she’s brilliant. Take a peek.”
Roger peeked into the school room. He saw Samantha at her desk, writing rapidly. She paused to dip her pen in the inkwell without lifting her gaze from the page. Jane sat next to her, reading a novel propped on her text book.
“Jane’s not even working on her math,” Roger said.
“I’ll speak to her later,” Frederick said. “But look what Samantha’s doing.”
Roger looked. Samantha pushed a page aside to start a new one; the old one fluttered to the floor. Roger could see that it was covered with characters in her large, elegant hand.
“What am I supposed to see?” he said.
“Look what I’ve put on the chalkboard. Differential equations.”
“It’s been a good while since my own school days,” Roger said.
“You wouldn’t have studied differential equations anyway,” the tutor said. “Not unless you took calculus at university.”
“So she’s advanced for her age?”
“She’s advanced for any age. I only started her on algebra two months ago.”
“Maybe that explains something,” Roger mulled.
“Here,” Frederick said, opening a portfolio. “A sample of her algebra.” Her pen had rendered the radicals elegant and the numerals austere. Every equation lay balanced at the center of a page. “All of these are correct, of course, but that’s hardly the point.” He teased another page from the portfolio. “Here’s what she was able to do with geometry.” This page showed an angle elaborately decorated with arcs, each arc the basis of some further elaboration, the whole construction like spider’s lace on a forking branch. A galaxy of tiny punctures showed where she’d anchored her compass.
“It’s pretty, I suppose,” Roger said.
“It’s absolutely beautiful,” Frederick beamed. “It’s also an accurate trisection of an angle.”
Roger had had reservations about hiring such a young man to tutor the girls, though he had feared more for Jane’s romantic heart than Samantha’s. Frederick’s humble origins were a matter for concern.
“Are you familiar with the problem of trisecting angles with only a compass and straight-edge?” Frederick said impatiently.
“I’m not,” Roger admitted with equal impatience.
“She seemed to be thinking about something else when she did it. She kept looking away, craning her neck to see out the window.”
“I had hoped studying with you would break her of that habit. She’s far too dreamy.”
“I don’t think I’m being clear,” Frederick said. “Euclid himself never managed to trisect an angle. It’s thought to be impossible. She solved it in a few minutes while thinking about something else.”
Samantha slid another page aside. This one fell headlong and landed with a clack before sprawling on its face. Jane looked up from her novel, saw the mess of loose pages on the floor, and rose to tidy them. She noticed her father looking in and smiled at him. He smiled back. He thought her smile carried a hint of worry. He was sure his did.
* * *
“Did you play in these woods when you were little?” Frederick asked as he ducked beneath a pine bow. He didn’t quite clear it; it tipped its load of snow onto his cap and coat.
“I wasn’t one for games,” Samantha said, placing her feet carefully in his footsteps. He hadn’t meant to lead them into such deep patches, but he was glad he had; he’d never seen her so attentive to her surroundings. Perhaps her attention might, in time, turn to him.
“No games? Even as a child?”
“It was because I slipped into some other place one night and played with the children there, and afterwards none of our games at home seemed nearly as much fun.”
“Some other place? Who were these children?”
“I don’t know for sure. I was scared of them, because they seemed too big and strange, but their house was filled with windows of gold, and all the light dazzled me with happiness, and the games they played were like the most beautiful songs, but at the same time like the most difficult problems in geometry—I didn’t know the word geometry then—and the pieces in the games were lozenges of gold and little spires of ice.”
Frederick offered his hand to help her through a ditch of snow. He felt glad she was looking down to choose her path, for his face must have betrayed his shock. Was she insane?
“That was a dream, surely?” he finally managed to say.
“Perhaps. I suppose it must have been,” she said.
The conversation lagged, the silence marred by the squelching of their steps in the snow. At last, hungry to hear her speak again, he said, “And you had no idea who these people were?”
“Not in those days,” she said, with the air of having been battered into an admission. “Lately, though, I seem to hear their voices now and then, as if their loudest laughs were seeping through the wall from the next room. Sometimes I even go into the next room to check, but of course no one’s there.”
“But then where do you think these strange children are?”
“In Heaven, perhaps. I suppose they’re angels.”
* * *
Whatever she was looking at needn’t be outside, Jane noticed. Just now, for instance, Samantha was looking into the fire. The resin on a sawn face of firewood sizzled, as if offended by the intrusive flames. Samantha sat in an easy chair with her hands holding her sewing, her head tilted down and slightly to the left, her eyes glinting from shadows.
“I suppose you sat here staring until it got too dark to sew,” Jane said. She was surprised to hear a tinge of resentment in her own voice. As if her sister could help it. “I suppose you’d sit there and burn if the house caught fire,” she added.
Samantha blinked, breathed deep, did not otherwise move.
Jane went to the pitcher on the sideboard and dipped her handkerchief in it. She strode deliberately to Samantha, lifted the coil of hair at her nape, and swathed her neck.
Samantha turned to stare at her. Now the firelight winked along her profile. “What do you want?” she finally said.
“I was worried about you,” Jane said.
Samantha rose, took a step, stumbled against the chair.
“I’m all right,” she said. She took two steps away from the chair and stood indecisive.
“Have a seat, dear,” Jane said. “I’m sorry I disturbed you.”
“I was just thinking,” Samantha said awkwardly. She seemed to lapse immediately into her trance. After a moment, she said “What is it?” Jane sat down to face her, trying to find words for what worried her. It was no use, she saw; Samantha was gone again now, fully submerged in her reverie.
* * *
“Hopeless,” said the dance teacher when she tendered her resignation. “Grace she has, but she hardly even tries, and when she does, she’s too deep in thought to remember the steps.”
“But Jane--” Roger interposed.
“Jane is a conscientious girl, Mr. Carstairs, but perhaps not formed for the dance.”
Roger had hoped more tutors, more subjects, would help Samantha overcome her moods, would teach her the social graces. It was true that the young math teacher had worked no great improvement, had in fact begun to seem more interested in luring her out for walks than helping with her deportment. At first Roger had discouraged the boy, but then, in a moment of fear, he had suddenly felt even an ill-advised romance might have some value, might make Samantha think of how she looked to others.
“A waste of time,” the French tutor had said. “She doesn’t care about French, and when she does put any effort into it, she says the words in reverse.”
The music tutor, however, was more encouraging.
“Already she plays piano better than I do,” said the untidy little man with the wild curls. “She’s been composing, too, and there she’s left me behind. No doubt you’ve heard pieces designed for choirs that manage, through the composer’s precise harmonies, to fill the church with extra voices. It’s as if a few ghosts have joined the choir to swell its ranks—”
“I’m afraid I lack an ear for music,” Roger said.
“It’s an ordinary phenomenon I speak of, a trick known from the days of Pythagoras. Some sounds we make with voice or string; others result from the meeting and mating of those sounds in the air. No one person has made them, but they are real, can be heard with the ear and felt in the belly.” His pitch dropped illustratively on the final words; he dug his fingers into his own abdomen.
“I see,” Roger said inaccurately, because it seemed as if he were supposed to.
“Yet Samantha’s harmonies are richer still, more complex, suggesting, with mere manipulation of the keys, human voices in the corners of the room. A chord precisely rendered, then mingled with another, sets the very wood of the room ringing with a sound like cicadas. Listen outside the music room, sir, and feel your breastbone vibrate with her discoveries.”
So Roger found himself letting Samantha continue with mathematics and music. Every week she pleased her tutors more, but he feared these pursuits were having the opposite of the intended effect. She seemed ever more remote.
* * *
Jane came home from her errands to find Samantha at the drawing room window. A snowy pine bow beckoned beyond the window. Jane was tired from the walk to town and back, but the sun shone and it suddenly seemed to her that getting out of doors might keep Samantha out of her trance.
“Come, Sister, it’s warmer today,” she said, and took hold of her arm. And Samantha seemed for a moment ready to come out. She turned toward Jane, but then, without quite meeting eyes, whirled back to the window.
“What are you looking at?” said Jane. But Samantha didn’t answer, and Jane realized she had lost her, after all, to a trance. Nonetheless, she stood beside Samantha and followed her gaze. She was astounded to see who stood in the yard—their father, holding forth to the girl beside him—and the girl was Samantha! Jane looked at her sister, standing beside her; she looked out the window again, but that outdoor Samantha had vanished, and Roger was looking around, obviously puzzled. She saw him stride angrily to the hedgerow and look over it. His gloved hands clutched the branches, toppling clumps of snow.
The Samantha beside her whimpered, rolled her head to the side, and finally jerked into waking. “Hello, Jane,” she said confusedly. “Where did you come from?”
Jane couldn’t answer. She fixed her eyes on her father. He stood in profile, his head down, his lips moving. She saw tears glisten, though that might only be the doing of a cold gust—for indeed, snow was lifting into a powder all along the hedge.
* * *
Samantha’s fingers teased the keys, not so much playing as coaxing them. Some of her strokes made tones; others didn’t, not so far as Frederick could hear.
“I could take you away from here,” he said.
She regarded him from the sides of her icy eyes. Her tones grew fuller, almost imperceptibly, though Frederick knew such fine gradations were meaningful to her.
“It’s already warm where my family lives,” he went on, desperate to hold her attention while he had it. “Not a hint of snow. In a month or two we can swim in the ocean. You’ve never seen the ocean, I take it?”
“No,” she murmured.
“My mother keeps our piano tuned. It’s in the great room, which opens onto the veranda. She’s not well enough to play much anymore, but I know she’d love to hear you play to your heart’s content.”
“They won’t let me go,” Samantha said. Her music grew complicated in ways Frederick couldn’t understand. It made the hair on his arms stand up.
“But they will!” he said. “I’ve spoken to your father about us, darling. He understands everything. And Jane practically pushed me into this room to speak with you!”
“I wasn’t referring to Father and Jane,” Samantha said. Her fingers pulsed, like cobras rising from a charmer’s basket, caressing the same keys over and over. The motion made no sound. Frederick could see her listening to it nonetheless.
“You mustn’t listen to those children anymore,” Frederick said. “Each time you do, you wake up pale and ill. Why do you think your father is so eager to let me take you back East?”
“I thought you didn’t believe in them,” Samantha said—sang, rather, to the rhythm of her silent fingers.
“I believe they’re killing you, whether they’re real or not.” He turned his back then. For the first time, having her look him in the eye seemed impossible to bear.
“When they sing, one listens.”
* * *
“Where did you go this time, Samantha?” Jane asked that night as they prepared for bed.
“I don’t want to tell,” Samantha said. And she unwound the string she’d been wearing. Each pearl of it seemed to emerge from her own skin, so closely did their color match.
“Do you think Frederick is really going away?”
“It doesn’t matter. I’ve learned all he has to teach.” They looked at each other. There was no need for Jane to say that really wasn’t what she had meant.
But that night, as they lay awake in their beds, watching the snow pile into the pines outside their window, Samantha said, “I tried to find them, the strange children, and I did. They’re still like babies, with huge round heads and pale eyes, yet they’re bigger than I am. We played a game, solving riddles on the piano, and then we danced in a perfect circle, holding hands, and we sang a sort of song in integrals. Their skin is soft as water.”
“Was it beautiful, Samantha?”
“It was, but scary too. I heard people crying in the distance, and the children told me those were the voices of people lost in the night. Jane, I think I was in Hell.”
* * *
“Stay with me,” Samantha said the next day. “Or take me with you.”
They dressed for snow. Jane had to remind Samantha to wear gloves. Snow sifted down on them, but their skirts dragged in mud.
“Father worries about you,” Jane said.
“I’m already lost,” Samantha said. “The only question is whether the rest of you are too.”
Jane pulled up short. A single rabbit crept from beneath the hedge and stood twitching, apparently failing to notice them. “Why should Father and I be in danger?”
“Not you and Father, particularly,” Samantha said. “If the children come in from the next room, all are lost.”
“He’s spoken of sending you away.”
“To stay with Frederick’s family, I suppose?”
“To a place with doctors.”
“I imagine I can watch the door from anywhere,” Samantha said. “It devours my substance, of course. It wastes me, this watching.”
Indeed, her face looked thin, the hollows beneath her eyes more deeply shadowed. Jane stood studying her. What she said seemed to make a kind of sense. She felt the dreamy world Samantha spoke of looming into view, like the second sheet of a letter glimpsed through the first. But then the rabbit seemed to notice them and went creeping back beneath the hedge. That was enough to break the spell, to make Jane skeptical again.
* * *
At midnight Jane woke to see Samantha sitting at the window, gazing out at the snow. She slipped into her robe and sat beside Samantha and looked out also, and there, gazing back at them from between two snowy pines, was Samantha herself, her skin paler than the snow, her eyes black and empty. Jane touched the indoor Samantha on the shoulder. She shivered and whimpered. The other Samantha in the yard looked angry and bared her teeth before she vanished.
The Samantha in the chair moaned and woke. “My God, Jane, bring me a light,” she said in a hollow voice. Jane lit a candle. It revealed Samantha pale, almost as pale as the one that had stood in the yard, and she seemed to have wasted away; she must have weighed twenty pounds less than when she went to bed.
“I’ll bring Father,” Jane said.
“There’s no point,” Samantha said.
In a few moments Roger was at work, building up the fire on the hearth. “More light,” Samantha moaned, and Jane went from sconce to sconce around the room, lighting one candle from another.
“Your hand is cold, child,” Roger said. He rubbed it between his own.
“Will you drink warm milk, dear?” Jane said. That, too, was the work of a few minutes, and when Jane put a spoonful of it to Samantha’s lips, it spilled without making her chin any whiter. The tears ran down Roger’s face, making rills of reflected candlelight.
“This is the way your mother went,” he said.
Jane dropped the cup of milk and the spoon. He had never spoken of their mother’s death—had pointedly refused to do so, in fact.
“Father, I mean to send a servant for the doctor,” she said.
“Perhaps you can do more good here, Jane,” said Roger. “If she has any firm link to this earth, it’s you. I’ll send for the doctor.”
Once he was out of the room, Samantha said, “The doctor can do me no good. I’ll be joining those swollen children soon.”
“You’re just sick,” said Jane. “You’ll get better.”
“I left the game tonight to find the crying in the distance. I found the poor lost people. You can’t imagine what those big-headed children were doing to them, Jane. I saw it all. I saw the glee in their baby eyes; I saw it by a golden light.” She stared at the candle beside her bed. It made no reflection in her eyes.
Jane felt that other world, a palpable presence now, like the breath of a stranger behind her. “Will they come for us, too?” she said.
“I’ll hold the door,” Samantha said. “I’ll keep them out as long as I can.” Even as she spoke she seemed to shrink beneath her skin. Her head rolled to the side and rested against the chair.
Jane shook her once, then again. Her eyes were wide and black. Her arms felt like nothing but bones within her robe. Outside, the wind drew a soft song from the pines.
Gordon Grice’s short stories have lately appeared in Zone 3, Concho River Review, and Metaphorosis. He has written essays about the dark corners of biology for The New Yorker (where he tackled the history of post-mortem dissections), Harper’s (black widow spiders), and Discover (leprosy). His nonfiction books include The Red Hourglass: Lives of the Predators and Deadly Kingdom. He occasionally remembers to post things at GordonGrice.com.