A Special Kind of Creepy

Kelly Link's story The Specialist's Hat is a fantastic ghost story that made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I love Kelly Link. Her style is so straightforward and Anglo-Saxon with few fancy Lantinate words. Her style is the kind I always imagine I would use if I were ever to write short stories (please, no one get your hopes up on that or you can breath a sigh of relief--your choice).

The story is about ten-year-old twins Claire and Samantha who lost their mother exactly 282 days ago. They and their father are now living at Eight Chimneys, a huge mansion, while the father researches and writes about the former occupant, Charles Cheatham Rash, a very bad poet. The poet and his fourteen-year-old daughter disappeared in 1907 and no one knows what happened to them.

The father spends his days writing and drinking too much and then going out into the woods for a walk after dark. The girls spend their day following the caretaker around as he gives tours of the mansion to tourists and generally trying to amuse themselves.

The caretaker, Mr. Coeslak, seems to be a nice old man with a certain grandfatherly affection for the twins. He warns them to not go into the woods, but if they do stay on the marked paths otherwise they might get bit by a copperhead snake. He also tells them the house is haunted and they should never go into the attic. Of course the girls try to get in the attic but the door is locked.

One day their father, who has met a woman in the woods, goes to meet her there for an evenng picnic and star-gazing. The girls are left with a babysitter arranged by the caretaker.

After exhausting all the card games, the twins decide they want to play at being dead, their favorite game:

The Dead game is a let's pretend that they have been playing every day for 274 days now, but never in front of their father or any other adult. When they are Dead, they are allowed to do anything they want to. They can even fly, by jumping off the nursery beds, and just waving their arms. Someday this will work, if they practice hard enough.
The Dead game has three rules.

One. Numbers are significant...

Two. The twins don't play the Dead game in front of grownups...

Three is the best and most important rule. When you are Dead, you don't have to be afraid of anything.

And at this point in the story you know, in the pit of your stomach things aren't going to turn out well.

Up to this point the story has been told in a non-linear progression. The story opens with the twins and the babysitter playing the Dead game, then goes back to how the twins came to live at Eight Chimneys, returns to the near present, then to a history of the house and the poet, then to a different point of time, until finally the tension is ratcheted up high and we are at the present moment and continue on in the present to the end of the story. All of this is interspersed with pieces of poetry by Rash the poet. We also get a this blurb of house history from one of the books in the giftshop that the twins have looked at:

And so he had a wife, and they say she was real pretty. There was another man who wanted to go with her, and first she wouldn't, because she was afraid of her husband, and then she did. Her husband found out, and they say he killed a snake and got some of this snake's blood and put it in some whiskey and gave it to her. He had learned this from an island man who had been on a ship with him. And in about six months snakes created in her and they got between her meat and the skin. And they say you could just see them running up and down her legs. They say she was just hollow to the top of her body, and it kept on like that till she died. Now my daddy said he saw it.
-- An Oral History of Eight Chimneys

This bit comes fairly early in the story and afterwards snakes seem to pop up everywhere from warnings about the snakes in the woods to the fireplace snake-pokers the girls pretend duel with.

As if all that weren't enough, the babysitter adds the figure of the Specialist, some sort of magician from Mulatuppu (on the east coast of Panama). The Specialist has a hat that makes noises. One of the noises the hat makes is like a snake.

I can't really say more without giving away too much. I will say the girls get into the attic, the hat makes an appearance, and perhaps the Specialist shows up. The Dead games also turns serious and there is more snakiness. I think I gasped out loud at least once or twice while reading. It was a fun story. Just creepy enough to make me shiver but not so creepy that it gave me nightmares.

Cross-posted at So Many Books