Mommy's Story

Once upon a time, in a town called Sleepy Hollow -- the same town where Ichabod Crane encountered the headless horseman -- there was a big, old house at the top of a hill. The house had been abandoned for years and years and was dark and empty until an English family bought it. The family was named Deerfield, and the parents were Robert and Samantha. The kids were Peggy and Bobby. The father, Robert, worked in finance on Wall Street and was very busy during the day.

One night, soon after they moved in, the kids awoke to hear an eerie howling outside: "Whoo...whoo!" They ran into their parents' room and told them about the noise. But their parents couldn't hear it and became very cross that their children had woken them up. A couple of weeks later the kids heard the same noise..."whoo! Whoo!" and ran into their parents' room again and told them about the noise. The parents again couldn't hear it and were even angrier that their kids had woken them up.

A couple of weeks passed and the kids awoke one night, but they heard something different: the faint voices of children saying, "come play with us! Come play with us!" and Peggy and Bobby were frightened. But they got up and went in search of the voices -- and didn't find anything. The next day at breakfast they told their parents what they had heard, and their parents again said they hadn't heard anything -- but the mother, Samantha, started getting worried that the kids were hearing things.

The next night, Peggy and Bobby were determined to find out what was really going on. They grabbed their flashlights and went to the third floor of the house, the one that had three empty bedrooms. When they opened the door to the middle room, they found a room filled with cobwebs and furniture covered with white sheets and dust. And then they noticed two ghost children in old-timey clothes, dancing with each other. Then all of a sudden a stern woman's voice clapped her hands and called out: "Stop dancing! Time to wash the floors and scrub the walls and line up for porridge! Then you'll have to march outside for five hours to get your exercise! The kids started crying and ran out of the room. Peggy and Bobby ran downstairs to their bedrooms. The next day they told their mother what had happened. Their mother threatened to send them away to boarding school if they talked any more about hearing voices.

A few days later, Peggy and Bobby decided they wanted to do some research on the house. They went to the local library and asked the librarian to look up the address of their house -- 250 Caldecott Lane. The librarian looked it up but couldn't find any record of the house being there, either in the past or the present. Really puzzled by now, Peggy and Bobby wondered what was going on. They pressed the librarian for more information, and she told them that a hundred years ago, there was a tuberculosis sanatorium in Sleepy Hollow where parents sent their kids who were sick, so the kids could get better. But the people who ran the sanatorium were so mean than they really didn't take care of the kids; they made them work and march around outside. And one day there was a terrible fire that burned down the sanatorium and all the kids in it, but some of the workers survived. And a house was built for the workers near where the sanatorium had been, and they lived there until they died off, one by one, and the house was abandoned...until the day the Deerfields bought it and Peggy and Bobby and their parents moved in.  

The night after that, Peggy and Bobby again returned to the third floor of the house and this time, they heard the sounds of music. The music was being made by a whole group of kids who were singing and playing on homemade instruments, and there a whole bunch of kids who were all dancing together. As Peggy and Bobby looked on, the kids held out their hands to Peggy and Bobby, and they got caught up in the whirl of dancers that went faster and faster until they all spun themselves into a big cloud of white dust....and disappeared.

***

That is the story I told Rachel on the MetroNorth train into the city this morning. As I was getting to the part about the librarian, a lady with short curly gray hair stood up to get off at her stop and said, "I want to hear the ending! I hope you're writing this down!" and then left. I thanked her profusely, completely stunned by the great, great compliment she had paid me. This was a story I completely made up, helped by visual clues along the way -- an apartment building with small windows and strips of wood that gave me the inspiration for the house; the woman with curly gray hair who have me the idea for the stern woman who ran the sanatorium, etc. It was the eeriest feeling, like the story just pulled me along. I had no idea how I'd end it until just a few graphs before the ending.

Oh, and Rachel's eyes were as big as saucers the whole time, and her lower lip was hanging down, and she was looking at me like...like...I was a story goddess, or something. I'll never forget the expression on her face.

"It was all derivative!" I protested to Drew when we reached Grand Central Station.

"Unless your name is Homer or Gilgamesh, all fiction is derivative," he replied.

I guess this old girl still has some stories left in her -- even though she's no longer a journalist.