My Darling Dreadful Thing: A Novel

by Johanna van Veen

Genres: Occult & Supernatural; Gothic

Synopsis

Goodreads Most Anticipated Horror of 2024 | Goodreads Most Anticipated books in May | She Reads Most Anticipated Horror | Polygon Must-Read books of 2024 | Novel Suspects Most anticipated novels 2024

"Dark and decadent, with the haunting allure of a true gothic tale, My Darling Dreadful Thing is a sensation that horrifies as acutely as it delights. Johanna Van Veen is a force to be reckoned with and will stain your thoughts a brilliant shade of crimson." 

― Rachel Gillig, New York Times bestselling author of One Dark Window 

Spirits are drawn to salt, be it blood or tears.

Roos Beckman has a spirit companion only she can see. Ruth―strange, corpse-like, and dead for centuries―is the light of Roos' life. That is, until the wealthy young widow Agnes Knoop visits one of Roos' backroom seances, and the two strike up a connection. 

Soon, Roos is whisked away to the crumbling estate Agnes inherited upon the death of her husband, where an ill woman haunts the halls, strange smells drift through the air at night, and mysterious stone statues reside in the family chapel. Something dreadful festers in the manor, but still, the attraction between Roos and Agnes is undeniable. 

Then, someone is murdered.

Poor, alone, and with a history of 'hysterics', Roos is the obvious culprit. With her sanity and innocence in question, she'll have to prove who―or what―is at fault or lose everything she holds dear.

"A Sapphic séance of preternatural proportions, My Darling Dreadful Thing summons a stunning new literary voice to be reckoned with. Johanna van Veen reaches beyond the veil to conjure up a gothic shocker like no other." ― Clay McLeod Chapman, author of What Kind of Mother and Ghost Eaters

 

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Release date: May 14, 2024

Publisher: Poisoned Pen Press

Print pages: 384

Sample

Part I

“No, no—there are depths, depths! The more I go over it, the more I see in it, and the more I see in it, the more I fear. I don’t know what I don’t see—what I don’t fear!”

—Henry James, The Turn of the Screw

 

Prologue

Every séance I conducted with Mama followed a pattern.

In the small room at the front of the house, we—the clients, Mama, and I—would sit with linked hands around a table covered in dark velvet. The only light would come from the cheap candles she had lit before. They were crumbly, and the wicks often spluttered, throwing fantastic shadows on the wallpaper. As the candles burned, the wax tended to run dreadfully, staining the sideboards as it congealed. It was for this reason that she kept buying them. She said it created the right sort of ambience.

Poor Mama truly went to a great deal of trouble to spin her illusions. Not only did she invest in that black velvet tablecloth and the candles that would gutter out unexpectedly, she had also bought a crystal ball and large age-speckled mirrors that she would drape with gauze, giving the impression of a house in mourning. The way I addressed her, too, was part of the elaborate fantasy she spun. I called her Mama because she demanded it be so; it made us sound genteel, which gave her an air of respectability and made it seem as if she organized these séances not from a need for money but to help the bereaved.

“These communications are a terrible strain on my darling daughter,” she’d tell new clients, though she preferred to call them our guests because, although she desired money, she thought it vulgar to speak of it. “Frankly, there are times when her little talent seems more like a curse than a blessing. The war left so many dead, didn’t it? And in such gruesome ways, too. Starvation and bombs and gas chambers… But she’s so eager to help, the dear girl. ‘I must help these poor souls, Mama, and it doesn’t matter how much it hurts.’ She’s such a selfless thing, you see.”

Then she’d take a handkerchief hemmed with frothy lace from her pocket and dab at her dry eyes, her silver bangles clinking around her wrists. The shivering sound they produced when they clanked together could hide a multitude of sins. She wore black dresses of thick stiff materials that rustled as she moved. Her hair, she piled on top of her head in complicated heaps.

I, on the other hand, wore my hair loose. Mama brushed it before every session so it looked neat and shiny. I wore white summer dresses that were invariably too thin for the weather. Those dresses hung around my frame, making me look small and thin, a proper waif dressed in a child’s nightgown. This, too, was intentional: she wanted me to look like a little girl, innocent and defenseless. When I got into one of my trances and thrashed and moved about, the dress would slip down my shoulders and reveal the satin slip I wore underneath, and some of our male guests would suppress a moan.

Mama presented me as a child, yes, but one ripe and ready.

“Nothing,” she told me, “appeals more to a man than a young girl who’s not been had yet, apart from a girl who’s not been had yet and gives the impression she’ll be had by him.” She made me think of myself as a piece of fruit and the act of sex like plucking a plum with a rough hand, bruising the flesh.

Once we were all seated and holding hands, we called on the spirits to join us. It was all pretense, of course. The only spirit ever present was Ruth, my protector and only friend. After Mama gave me my cue, I’d invite Ruth into me to tether herself to my flesh and the white meat of my spine, and once she went down my throat, I’d be possessed. After Ruth had introduced herself to our guests, we would pretend to let other spirits inside me. We would speak in voices, would move around the table with a sailor’s swagger or an old woman’s shuffling gait. We’d chew my hair like a shy girl or laugh raucously and wink and snap my fingers. We’d bedevil and confound, beguile and seduce.

Mama had strict rules about touch. She always told our guests they were not allowed to break the circle of linked hands—this so they would not take hold of me. It proved a difficult rule. Who does not wish to embrace a departed loved one made flesh for a few brief minutes? And so Ruth and I would have to do the touching. We’d sit on men’s knees and stroke their bearded faces as we pretended to be a deceased daughter, or we’d manfully embrace a bereft widow and fold her against me.

Of course, there were always clients who did not care for Mama’s rules. They had come not to speak to someone they had lost, but to be entertained or to expose me. They liked to pinch me or suddenly grab me around the waist and kiss me to see if we would lose composure and show ourselves to be a fraud. We had been fondled more times than I cared to remember—spanked, even. Once, a man had smuggled in a birch rod and struck at us with the glee of the truly sadistic. He managed to get a few good strokes in before the other guests came to my defense, leaving me bruised and bleeding and afraid, with Ruth hissing from the rafters. Still, as Mama liked to say, that happened only once, and it could have been much worse; at least he had not damaged my face.

When Ruth and I had conjured up enough dead husbands, aunts, and sons, Mama would banish the spirits who had come to live inside me, and we’d sink in my chair like a wilting flower with a bruised stem, breathing in shallow little pants and moaning softly, my fingers atremble. Ruth would slip out of me then, leaving me cold and bereft. When I’d come to, I’d do my best to look sleepy and shy, asking softly, “Did I fall asleep? I’m ever so sorry. I don’t know what came over me, but I felt so very tired all of a sudden. Shall we begin?"

And I’d try and get to my feet, only to stumble and falter, proving to everyone how much the séance had taken out of me. Sometimes, if Mama felt it would result in a handsome tip, I’d bite the inside of my cheek and in that way cough blood into a handkerchief of virginal white.

This was how things had been for a long time, although not for as long as I could remember, and how things might have gone on for a while longer, had Agnes not decided to attend one of our séances.

I sometimes think it would have been better if she never had, for her and me both.

 

FIRST CASE EPISODE

PATIENT R—, A CASE STORY: INHABITED BY ANOTHER

(D = DOCTOR, P = PATIENT R—)

FIRST EPISODE, CONDUCTED ON 1 OCTOBER 1954:

Notes to self: First impressions of the patient: different from what I expected. Thought she’d be large, coarse, sullen. Didn’t expect her to be so wan and thin. Must talk to her physician, see if she eats properly.

During the talk: She seemed nervous. Kept tilting her head. Hard time keeping eye contact (possible sign of madness?). Speaks with a slight stammer, but generally responds quickly to my questions. Large vocabulary speaks to a high level of intelligence; must keep careful watch for inconsistencies (Police officer S— thought her an excellent liar).

D: “Do you know why I have come?”

P: “To examine me. To see if I’m crazy, or whether I’m just pretending.”

D: “And are you pretending?”

P: “Of course not.”

D: “Then are you, to use your word, crazy?”

P: “Perhaps. Some things are so horrible that the only sane response is a bit of madness. A— [Mrs. K—] often told me that she had to laugh or else go mad.”

D: “The police have asked me to talk to you because they have a hard time believing what you told them is true. Why do you think that is?”

P: “Because the truth scares people. They’re always afraid of what they can’t explain, and my Ruth can’t be so easily explained.”

D: “Why not? Because Ruth is a ghost?”

P: “I hate that word, always have.” [grows animated] “It reminds me of children dressed in white sheets trying to scare each other, or of those fake apparitions made of cheesecloth and cardboard that Victorian frauds conjured up when they said they talked to the dead. Ruth is nothing like that.”

D: “Then what is Ruth like?”

P: “It depends. Sometimes she is barely visible, no more than a quicksilver haze. It’s like the shapes you see when your eye waters and you rub at it a little too hard. At other times, I can touch her, and she feels much the same as you and I do, only quite cold, as if she’s been outside in winter without a coat.”

D: “And when you can touch her, does she look like you and I do?”

P: [laughs] “Of course not. You look like you, and I look like me, and Ruth looks like Ruth.”

D: “Let me rephrase that. Does Ruth look human?”

P: “A little. It depends.”

D: “In what way?”

P: “Sometimes, she looks almost alive, and at other times, she’s unmistakably dead. There’s something off about her features. I can’t explain. I think she’s been dead for so long that she doesn’t quite understand anymore what a human being should look like, although the longer she was with me, the better she got at it. Before that, I think she rested under the floorboards for a long time.” [nervously drums fingers on the tabletop]

D: “You said Ruth doesn’t really look human. Did that not scare you when you were little?”

P: “At first, but children accept so much as normal, don’t they? And for a long time, she was my only friend and companion. Then, when Mama realized she wasn’t an imaginary friend, she made me the medium of her séances. Ruth was my spirit control then.”

D: “Your spirit control?”

P: “Yes. A spirit control is a powerful spirit who draws other spirits, like moths are drawn to a candle. They’re supposed to soothe and help those spirits so the medium can talk to them. The Victorians invented them. Their spirits weren’t real, you see, just people dressed up and pretending. By using the concept of a spirit control, mediums could conjure up the same spirit time and time again without their guests becoming suspicious. Mama read about it and thought that perhaps Ruth could be a proper spirit control. We’d become famous and very rich then, because our possessions would be utterly real.”

D: “But?”

P: “But Ruth was never any good at being a spirit control. Other spirits never came when she was with me. I’ve started to think that perhaps most of us don’t become a spirit when we die, and there was never anything for her to lure. Or perhaps other spirits do exist, but Ruth scared them away. She was fiercely protective of me. In fact, I don’t think she’d like me to talk to you. She might think you mean me harm.” [becomes agitated and incoherent]

D: “Let us go back a little bit. When is the first time you saw Ruth?”

 

Chapter 1

I was never a happy child. I think that, if I had been, things would have gone very differently with me. For one, I don’t think Ruth would have become my constant companion. Spirits like her are not drawn to the happy and carefree; they want salt, be it blood or be it tears.

The question everyone wants answered is this: Was I or was I not actually possessed? But it is not so simple as that.

The policemen who questioned me all believed I wasn’t. In this, they agreed with one another, if not in much else. You see, some believed I was a little fraud feigning a disorder of the mind so I could plead insanity and escape being sent to jail. One even clapped his hands and called me a marvelous actress halfway through hearing my story.

They weren’t all so cruel, though; some pitied me because they argued that I was, in fact, insane. Because they couldn’t agree whether I was mad, they brought in a doctor to see if I was fit to stand trial. His name was Doctor Montague. He was young, eager to help, eager to prove himself. I found him easy to talk to, which I suppose is why he was of such value to the police. He made the words tumble out of my mouth one after the other, all these things I felt and thought and remembered, like how I felt about Mama or what my earliest memory was.

The latter is thus: I am crouching underneath the floorboards of the sitting room in which Mama conducts her séances. It’s a small space with strings bound to hooks protruding from the earthen walls. These strings all do something different when I pull them. One makes a lamp levitate; another causes a shelf to tilt, making books tumble down. I must know what each one does and when to pull it. For this, I listen to Mama as she pretends to be visited by spirits; certain phrases are my cues.

I am perhaps five years old, and I am scared senseless. The space is cold and damp and smells of mold and earth. Though my eyes get used to the dark, I can’t help but be terrified. Sometimes I weep from fright. Mama explains away these sounds as the spirit of a little child who is lost, and though her clients believe her, she still thrashes me after such a session.

“Do you want our guests to think the afterlife is a horrible place?” she hisses at me.

“But Ruth is down there, Mama, and she wants to bite me and drink my blood!” I howl as I clutch Mama’s skirts, trying to stay out of reach of the birch rod she holds in her hands. I have not yet learned to take what is coming to me without a fight.

“There’s nothing down there, you horrible little lunatic! You’re letting your imagination get the better of you. Now stand still!”

But despite everything Mama says, Ruth is in that little room underneath the floorboards with me. In the dark, her eyes sometimes flash green like that of a cat or fox. At other times, she doesn’t have eyes at all, just skin growing over the place where her empty sockets should be. Her skin changes all the time, too. Sometimes it’s the warm brown of an acorn; occasionally, it’s black—not in the way that some people are, but black like certain types of wood, with a grayish tint to it. The one time I manage to smuggle a flashlight down with me and shine it in her face, I see that her jaw is horribly dislocated. It hangs open and crooked. No wonder she can’t speak, only moan!

I know what she wants: to curl herself around me like a comma and press her gaping mouth to my throat so she can drink my blood. I fear she’ll drain me. To stop myself from crying out, I bite the soft flesh between my index finger and thumb. I worry at it with my teeth until I taste blood, rich and salty

and sickening. So often do I chew at that little bit of skin that the cuts I make won’t heal. Mama has to bandage my hand to stave off infection.

Mama has tried to feed me mixtures of pills and alcohol to take away my fear, but those just make me sick and sleepy. I’ve got a doll with me, a rag doll I’ve named Trudy. My father brought her home with him from America. She is stiff and stained with the blood from my bitten hand. One day, Mama will throw her away. “She was a filthy little thing,” she’ll say, “and you’re much too old to play with dolls.” I’ll weep for my Trudy for days.

But that is later. I am in the hole now, chewing on my hand, trying to listen to Mama pretend she can talk to the dead. I ignore Ruth as well as I’m able. There’s not a lot of room under the floorboards, so a part of me is always touching a part of her. She’s cold as stone. Sometimes she groans softly at me, but most of the time, she’s a quiet creature. She smells like autumn—that is to say, like wet earth and leaves sweet with the first touch of rot.

Aboveground, Mama booms, “Spirits, give us a sign!”

I unfasten a piece of twine from its hook and pull at it, making an empty biscuit tin fall down on the piano. It crashes on the keys. The piano releases a shuddering twang. I knot the cord back around its hook, my eyes watering against the pain of the fibers rubbing against my torn skin. Many of the strings have brown streaks of my clotted blood on them. When I’m done, I shake my hand to get rid of the pain. Drops of blood fly from the wound. Some hit the earthen walls, but one or two splash against Ruth’s face.

She shudders. She wipes them away, then licks her fingers with hoarse little moans.

“Ruth, hush,” I hiss.

She pushes a palm against her jaw. With a horrifying jolt, it slips back into its socket. She opens and closes her mouth, and though each movement is accompanied by a soft grinding sound, her jaw doesn’t fall back down. She sucks her fingers for remnants of my blood. She doesn’t look so bad anymore.

And now something extraordinary happens. For the first time—and though this is my earliest memory, I know this has never happened before—Ruth speaks. Her voice is like the wind among the branches, high and keening and strangely beautiful.

“Roos,” she whispers. Her breath smells like pennies. “You need never be alone again now, Roos. You have named me and let me drink from you. We are wedded to each other now, you and I. You’re my helpmeet and yokemate, and I am yours. I shall keep you safe.”

Later, when it all went to hell and I was smeared from cheek to chest with blood so dark and thick, it seemed like sealing wax, I thought about that moment a lot. If I had not so carelessly spilled my blood, would Ruth have found another little girl to love and hold and feed from?

 

Chapter 2

The day I met Agnes, I had gotten my monthlies for the first time in almost half a year. Mama looked at the blood staining my knickers. It was so dark, it looked black. “How relieved you must be,” she said coldly. “Now go wash yourself.”

In the bathroom, Ruth put a cool hand against my feverish forehead. “All shall be well now,” she said. I leaned against her. She put her cool dark arms around me and held me tight, the smell of peat rising from the folds of her dress.

I washed myself carefully, the water in the bowl turning pink. Ruth flitted around the bowl. When I was finished, she lapped from it, pleased as a cat with a saucer of cream.

Sometime in the future, Agnes would read a part of the Odyssey to me, the bit in which Odysseus wants to enter the underworld and has to sacrifice a black ram and a black sheep over a mixture of flour, honey, milk, sweet wine, and water. The spirits flock to his sacrifice, wishing to drink from it so they may regain the ability to speak. “They were on to something, those Greeks,” she said as she took a drag from her cigarette. “All spirits have a thirst for blood.”

But all that happened later, and I must not rush and leave parts of my tale untold.

When I came downstairs for breakfast, there was nothing on my plate. “Mama, please, I’m very hungry,” I said, hoping against hope.

“You’ve eaten enough lately. You wouldn’t be bleeding if you hadn’t,” she snapped. She buttered my slices of bread for herself and covered them with cheese. The smell made me sick with longing. From the quick pecking movements with which she ate her own breakfast, I could see something important had happened, something that excited and agitated her. I did not have to wait long.

“You must be at your best today,” she said. “We’ve got an important guest coming: Agnes Knoop.”

The name meant nothing to me. Miserable and faint, I removed the wad of cotton wool from a glass bottle of aspirin and shook out two tablets in the palm of my hand. They lay against the scar caused by that client with the birch rod; he had struck so hard, he had exposed the bone. That night, Ruth had unspooled the bandages and nibbled at the dried crust of blood, nearly purring with the pleasure of it.

“Is Mrs. Knoop an acquaintance of yours?” I asked as I poured myself a cup of tea.

Mama stared at me, then gave a humiliating little chuckle. “My dear child, don’t tell me you don’t know who Agnes Knoop is. It was in all the papers.”

“I haven’t read the papers in a while.” When I finished the housework, I was often too drained to do anything but watch Ruth grind up a piece of glass with a nail file. She kept the grit in a little bottle. I liked to hold it up to the light and see all the powdered glass inside glitter like snow.

Mama leaned close to me, her face flushed with excitement. “You’ve heard of Lockhart stockings, haven’t you?”

I nodded. Who hadn’t? Those stockings were of the highest quality, soft and lovely and durable. I had seen advertisements for them in magazines but had never held a pair, much less owned one; they were far too expensive. Mama did allow me to wear stockings, but the ones we bought were cheap and scratchy, liable to get ladders and never fitting quite right. They had a seam at the toe that often drove me to distraction. When I removed them at the end of the day, they left a red, raw-looking line on my toes.

“Well, the company is owned by some Americans nowadays, but it was founded by this Scotsman named Boswell who made his fortune with it. Nouveau riche

and all that. Well, to get to the point, he kept a mistress in London. She was Asian, God knows from which country; they all look the same, don’t they, whether they’re from China or the Dutch Indies?”

“It’s called Indonesia now, Mama. Remember? It’s no longer a Dutch colony.”

She made a quick impatient movement with her hand, as if batting at a fly. “Remember? Of course I do. What I don’t understand is why you care so much what it’s called. Ungrateful bunch, the lot of them. Before we came, they were no better than a bunch of godless children, playing with sticks in the mud. I say, if they don’t want our help, let them rot in their jungles. And don’t interrupt me and don’t try to act like you’re so much more clever than me. It’s very unbecoming.”

I took a sip of tea to keep from responding. Even if I had been able to muster the energy to argue with her, it would have been of no use. ...