Read Online Raising Demons by Shirley Jackson - Free Book Online

saying, “Simple is not a polite name for—” and my husband was saying, “Any young man as fresh as—” and Jannie was saying, “Horses don’t have sisters, they have—” “Amy?” Sally said. “May I please have two cookies, two, one for Amy and one for me, cookies?”
    â€œYou may, you may,” I said hastily. “Provided you eat them outdoors.” If Sally’s refrain conversation is difficult to bear, Amy’s repetitive conversation is worse; where Sally repeats the vital word, Amy repeats the whole sentence; Sally is the only one in our family who can talk to Amy at all. “May I please play with Sally?” Amy was saying through the back door screen, “is Sally here so she can play with me?”
    Sally slid off her chair and made for the cookie jar. “Amy,” she shouted, “Daddy is going to take us swimming, swimming, and ask your mommy if you can come, your mommy.”
    â€œMy mommy,” said Amy solemnly, opening the screen door and joining Sally at the cookie jar, “doesn’t let me go swimming right now, because I have a cold. I have a cold, so my mommy doesn’t want me to go swimming, because I have a cold. I have a cold,” she told me, “so my mommy won’t let me go swimming.”
    â€œBecause she has a cold,” Laurie said helpfully. “See, she has a cold and so—”
    â€œLaurie,” I said feverishly. “Sally and Amy, please take those cookies out
doors.
”
    â€œAnyway,” Jannie said with finality, “then that makes Sally a horse, too, because if Laurie is the brother of a horse, then Sally—”
    â€œIf you ask your mommy can we each have two cookies,” Amy began, preceding Sally out the screen door, “then maybe if your mommy says we can have two cookies—”
    Delicately Laurie shut the door behind them, and remarked consideringly to his father, “You know, you take that Riff. Now there’s a nag can jump and run and about everything, and then there’s Raff, and he’s Riff’s own twin brother and you think that horse can jump?” The phone rang.
    â€œIt’s probably a horse for Laurie,” Jannie said, inspired.
    â€œI’ll get it,” my husband said, abandoning Laurie in mid-sentence.
    â€œI’ll just change into my bathing suit right now,” Jannie said, taking advantage of my preoccupation with the ringing of the phone to leave two slices of bread and mayonnaise behind the toaster. “See you later, kid,” Laurie said, patting me on the head.
    â€œWell, well, well,” my husband was saying over the phone. “Isn’t this a
surprise.
” He turned and grinned evilly at me. “But you’ve
got
to come on over,” he said, “we’d never forgive you if you didn’t stop in. And plan to stay on for dinner,” he said, looking away from my dropped jaw. “Pot luck, of course.”
    Â â€¢Â â€¢Â â€¢Â 
    Two days before we were to leave, we got a letter from the real estate agent at home, saying that all four apartments in our new house were empty, the downstairs back having loaded their clothes and their television set in a pickup truck in the middle of the night and made off without further reference to the back rent. The agent said that a checkup on the downstairs back apartment indicated that they had been systematically removing furniture and household goods for some time; perhaps ever since they were first informed of the sale of the house. Nothing was left in the downstairs back apartment, not even the lightbulbs or the curtain rods, and the agent was of the opinion that they would have taken the glass out of the windows if it had not been broken already. My husband thought that we should keep the downstairs back apartment intact, repair the windows, and rent it out again. I thought that if we rented the apartment again, we