Free The Dark by Claire Mulligan

watching the house, she said, and were plotting, as if mayhap the cold had honed up their wits. Breath took on shapes, dragons and the like. Metals snapped like twigs. Then one forenoon your mother shrieked and pointed at the kitchen window. Sure enough, written out in hoarfrost were the words
Get gone
.
    Get gone
was surely what your sisters wanted for themselves. They were stir-crazed bored that winter and griped no end about having to go to bed so soon after supper as if they reckoned lantern oil and pine logs were God’s free bounty. And how they did gab on about Rochester, the lit-up byways, the canals with their carnival show of boats, the ice-cream parlours, and all those stores crammed with whatnots we had no money to buy anywise. They surely gabbed about you and Lizzie both, my girl, and how they missed your singing and piano playing, and how you didn’t come to visit near often enough, and that, ’course, was true as preaching. They teased your mother, too, and worked up some garbled language to confuse her thoughts.
    Now, don’t hold for an instance by the way I write of her that I don’t love your mother. I surely do, but it’s alike an old cat, one that keeps slinking off and then coming back, just when you thought it flat-dead. I know we make an odd pair to most eyes, her a vasty woman, all afret and ajostle and talking constant, me rake-thin and a good head shorter than my chosen wife, and skint with words besides. But Solomon’s Song keeps a lively tune with us, as it should in any marriage. And don’t hold that I don’t love your sisters, for I surely do, but I had little time to attend their growing. I had peace to make with Our Lord, as I do even yet, and such peacemaking is a time-stealing occupation. I surely regret my neglect of those two now. They needed attending. Your mother reckoned herself old as the blessed Sarah when she bore them, and this has surely added to her superstitious bent regarding those two. But then they were queer babes, watchful as owls, even in their swaddling, and easy to mistake for those creatures of the old stories, those what choosea family for convenience but are only biding their time to wreak havoc. No, I scratch that. It’s a blaspheming thought and uncharitable besides. I allowed your mother to be their only guiding rod. Their waywardness is my fault
in toto
, to use another Latinate phrase.
    Leah-Lou, I was the one who heard those footsteps first. Not your sisters. First the footsteps, then a swish-drag. The night was dark as Egypt with not a fillet of moon, and the sounds were hard to situate. The keeping room? The hall? Outside our bedroom door? Anywise, those sounds surely made sleep a difficulty, and then they got loud enough to wake your mother, and so began it all. She shook me though I was already wide awake and silently cursing, too, the taste of whiskey in my mouth, the empty flask propped under our marriage bed.
    “You hear that John?” your mother gasped. “Laws, where’s the tinder? Where’s the candle?” she said, and so on. I grumbled about it all, but I lit the candle stump obligingly enough and went to investigate. I found nothing, of course. The damp-reek had gotten worse over that long winter and it pervaded the house. I pushed aside a clump of dirt near the threshold and then stoked up the kitchen embers.
    Your sisters were huddled up in bed with your mother when I got back. They’d lit all the candles and night shadows paraded on the walls.
    “Rats,” I said.
    “Rats? Rats?” your mother near shouted. “Do rats wear boots? Do they?” She clutched your sisters into her well-endowments, one to either side.
    “Boards,” I tried. “In the wind.”
    “Is there a wind without? Is there? I hear none. John?”
    I suggested next the neighbours were having a revel—a foolish grasp, I concede now.
    “Are our neighbours giants? Are they?”
    Those thump-knocks came again, and they were surely in the room with us. I noted the smell of