The Accursed - Joyce Carol Oates

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or its one-sided vehemence.) Adding, with girlish wistfulness: “Only think, we three might all live together, in such a household, if we’d lived in a happier time—for instance, at Fruitlands, or Oneida, or in the Shaker community. Why can’t ‘sister and brother’ be expanded to include ‘sisters and brothers’ in the plural?—there being no harm, surely, in that.”

      So, Willy had spoken: brashly, recklessly, and irrevocably!

      Feeling the need now to press her hands against her warm cheeks, to cool and soothe; for she had grown unpleasantly warm, in the sun-splotched shade of the forest, with its damp, springy forest-bed; her hair felt disagreeably damp, coarse as a horse’s hair, at the nape of her neck. And why had she thought her “Turkish trousers” so chic, that were now stippled with burdocks, and muddied at the hem?

      The young women paused, and Annabel plucked at the burdocks on her friend’s clothing, as on her own. Gnats, mosquitoes, and tiny stinging blackflies had begun to swarm, in the forest interior. Fretfully Annabel said: “Yes, Willy—you are right. Yet, it is too late—for me. I have fallen in love and am damned—I belong now to another, in body as well as spirit—and neither Josiah, nor the dashing Lieutenant, can save me: not even you, dear Wilhelmina.”

      IT WAS AT this moment that the young women made their discovery, that Todd and Thor were nowhere in sight; though the boy’s shouts and laughter, and the dog’s wild barking, seemed to be echoing from all directions of the forest.

      Annabel led the way deeper into the forest, calling her cousin’s name; then, faltering, she surrendered the lead to Willy, who led them in another direction, calling out: “Todd! You are very bad! Why are you hiding from us? Come out at once!”

      After some stressful minutes, as the young women made their way ever more deeply into a soft, sinking, bog-like part of the forest, into which Stony Brook Creek evidently emptied, at last they sighted Todd at the same moment, in a sort of clearing, in which gigantic logs lay in a jumbled profusion; the logs being ossified, it seemed, and formidable as fallen monuments. The sunshine that fell slantwise into this open space, having taken on the peculiar quality of the great forest, did not seem, somehow, a natural sunshine, or the light of the sun itself, but rather a queer, silvery, lunar effulgence, unsettling yet not entirely disagreeable.

      There Todd stood, his head lowered, and his wild dark hair rising in tufts above his pallid face; but though both Annabel and Willy called to him, he seemed not to hear; nor did Thor leap up from the lichen-bed in which he lay, to approach them with his tail wagging, in his usual manner.

      The young women then noticed that Todd was not alone in this strange space: but there stood before him, engaging him in earnest conversation, a young girl unknown to either Annabel or Willy, of slender proportions, indeed wraith-like, with long and unruly dark hair, and a round, dusky-skinned, sharp-boned face; and dark eyes that seemed to blaze with passion. The girl was very coarsely dressed in what appeared to be work-clothes, that had been badly soiled, torn, or even burnt. The fingers of her right hand appeared to be misshapen, or mangled. Most remarkably, small flames lightly pulsed about the girl: now lifting from her untidy hair, now from her tensed shoulders, now from her outstretched hand!—for the girl was reaching out to Todd, as if to grasp his hand.

      More remarkably still, around the girl’s neck was a coarse rope, fashioned into a noose; the length of the rope about twelve feet, and its end blackened as from a fire.

      And ah!—how the girl’s topaz eyes blazed, with vehemence!

      Was the hellish vision a trick of the sunlight? Did Annabel’s and Wilhelmina’s widened eyes deceive them? The flames pulsed about the girl, and rippled, and subsided; and flared up again, lewdly vibrating, tinged with blue like a gas-jet, at their core; so subtle, in hellish beauty, they might have been optical illusions, or mirages, caused by some fluke of the fading light.

      “Todd! Come here . . .”

      In a faltering voice Annabel called to him, but Todd gave no sign of hearing.

      For it seemed that Todd had fallen under the spell of the demon girl, and could not rouse himself to flee from her, as if not comprehending what the pulsing blue flames might mean, or the coarse rope around her neck; or the danger to him, as she came very close to touching him, caressing him, with her burning fingers, and he did not shrink away.

      “Todd! It’s Annabel—Annabel and Wilhelmina—come to take you home. Todd!”

      Yet, was the burning girl not most mesmerizing?—though dusky-skinned, with a flat, slightly thick nose, and thick lips, and unruly and unwashed-looking hair tumbling down her back; and those uncanny luminous eyes; and the noose around her neck, that must have been uncomfortable, for it seemed tight enough to constrict breathing . . . It might have been that Todd believed the girl to be his own age, yet a closer look suggested that she was considerably older, at least the age of Annabel or Wilhelmina, a young woman and not a girl.

      And there was the German shepherd Thor so strangely stretched on the lichen-bed a few yards from the feet of the burning girl, muzzle extended, ears pricked into little triangles, eyes adoringly fixed upon the girl—why was Thor not barking but only just panting, audibly, as if he had run a great distance to throw himself down, as if in worship?

      When Annabel and Willy, clutching hands, ran forward, with little shrieks of concern, the burning girl turned to them, with an expression of rage, dismay, and anguish; now, a paroxysm of flames whipped over her figure, to obliterate her entirely; and, in the blink of an eye, as if she had never been, the burning girl vanished.

      “Todd! Thank God, you are unharmed!”—so Annabel cried, rushing to Todd, to embrace him; and quite shocked, when Todd wrenched himself from her, and fixed upon her a look of angry contempt.

      “Here is Cousin Annabel,” Todd began to chant, in the singsong that so maddened his father, “who has come too soon; here is Miss Willy, who has come unbidden; here is Todd, who had at last found a friend in the forest, but who has lost his friend—poor silly Todd, left all alone.”

      Most alarmingly, the German shepherd, who had known Annabel since he was a puppy, and had known Wilhelmina Burr nearly that long, had leapt to his feet and was growling deep in his throat, ears laid back and hackles raised, and formidable teeth exposed as if—(could this be possible?)—he failed to recognize the distraught young fair-haired woman and her dark-haired friend.

      Though it is the rare historian who will speak candidly of such matters, all of us who are engaged in the rendering of the past—by way of the amassing, selection, and distillation of a multitude of pertinent facts—are commonly beset by two dilemmas: the phenomenon of simultaneity of event, and the phenomenon of the authenticity of evidence.

      In assembling my materials for The Accursed: A History of the Tragic Events of 1905–1906, Princeton, New Jersey, which has been an effort of decades, if not my entire life, I have been forced to eliminate a great deal, that the reader will not be distracted by an excess of information; yet it would be disingenuous of me to pretend that, as my narrative moves forward in the mimesis of a “fable,” with its focus upon certain key individuals, the others are arrested in a kind of frieze, and refrain from thinking, feeling, speaking, and acting—indeed, in participating in History. While I write about Annabel Slade, Wilhelmina Burr, and Todd, in Crosswicks Forest, it is certainly the case that Woodrow Wilson, Winslow Slade, Adelaide Burr, Josiah Slade, the Clevelands, Lieutenant Bayard, and all the rest continue their lives uninterrupted, with no awareness that the “focus” has shifted elsewhere; as they have not the slightest awareness that they are participants in a chronicle of a time long past as an historian labors to illuminate the pathos of their situation. But, as I am confined to a linear chronology, and to the exigencies of print, how otherwise can I proceed? And even should I wish to include in this chronicle everything that transpired in Princeton, at this time, how could such a Herculean undertaking be accomplished?

      So, though I am tempted to examine certain scenes of unusual interest, which would surely

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