The Sundial by Shirley Jackson Read Free Book Online Page B

are not to leave the house.”
    â€œCan you get a message back to him?” Mrs. Halloran inquired. “Because
I
would like you to tell him that, danger or no danger—”
    Miss Ogilvie screamed and scrambled up onto a chair. Maryjane clutched at Essex, and even Mrs. Halloran rose. A small brightly-banded snake was watching them from the fireplace, seemingly frozen with attention, and then, turning at once into liquid movement, slipped from the fireplace across the heavy carpet, within a foot of Mrs. Halloran’s shoe, and, without hesitation, angled behind a bookcase and disappeared.
    â€œGood God,” Mrs. Halloran said. “Merciful God. Essex!”
    Essex disengaged himself from Maryjane with some difficulty and said, “Mrs. Halloran?”
    â€œWhat was that?”
    â€œA snake. It came out of the fireplace and went across the room and behind the bookcase.”
    â€œI
know
it was a snake, but—in
my
house?”
    â€œA snake, a snake,” cried Miss Ogilvie, clinging precariously to the back of the chair and seemingly determined to climb right on up the wall, “it will bite us; it was a snake, a snake!”
    â€œBlasphemy,” Essex said politely to Mrs. Halloran. “Sent, no doubt, by the noble ghost you were mocking. You should pay more attention to what you are saying.”
    â€œ
You
did it,” Maryjane said violently to Mrs. Halloran, “
you
were making fun of Aunt Fanny’s father, but
I
think we’ve had a warning and believe you me I’m not going to need a second one, believe you
me
. I say I am going to stay right here in this house where it’s safe and no one, not even you, is going to kick me out of it to face the danger he said was coming, not out into any fire.” She clasped Fancy to her and her hands were shaking. “Fancy stays and I stay,” she said.
    â€œI will have this room fumigated,” Mrs. Halloran said.
    â€œYou won’t find that snake,” Aunt Fanny said dreamily. “It was shining, full of light. You won’t ever find it.”
    â€œEssex,” Mrs. Halloran said.
    â€œMrs. Halloran?”
    â€œI am bewildered. Come into the library and explain all this to me.”
    _____
    The question of belief is a curious one, partaking of the wonders of childhood and the blind hopefulness of the very old; in all the world there is not someone who does not believe something. It might be suggested, and not easily disproven that anything, no matter how exotic, can be believed by someone. On the other hand, abstract belief is largely impossible; it is the concrete, the actuality of the cup, the candle, the sacrificial stone, which hardens belief; the statue is nothing until it cries, the philosophy is nothing until the philosopher is martyred.
    Not one of the people in Mrs. Halloran’s house could have answered honestly and without embarrassment the question: “In what is it you believe?” Faith they had in plenty; just as they had food and beds and shelter, they had faith, but it was faith in agreeably concrete things like good food and the best beds and the most weathertight shelter and in themselves as suitable recipients of the world’s best. Old Mr. Halloran, for one, would have been considerably more lighthearted in a faith which promised him everlasting life, but in the concept of everlasting life Mr. Halloran could not believe, since he was dying. His own life showed no signs of continuing beyond a hideously limited interval, and the only evidence he ever saw of everlasting life was in those luckier ones around him who continued young and would stay so after he was dead. Not-dying from day to day was as much as Mr. Halloran could be fairly expected to believe in; the rest of them believed in what they could—power, perhaps, or the comforting effects of gin, or money.
    _____
    Fancy was a liar. She had been with Aunt Fanny and dared not admit to running away. She had not