Inside the hole, there is a tiny cold key, its teeth facing outward. She pulls it out, and ducks back into the room. “She wasn’t lying,” she tells Claire.
“Of course I wasn’t lying,” the baby-sitter says. “When you’re Dead, you’re not allowed to tell lies.”
“Unless you want to,” Claire says.
Samantha and Claire have gone to camp for three weeks every summer since they were seven. This year their father didn’t ask them if they wanted to go back and after discussing it, they decided that it was just as well. They didn’t want to have to explain to all their friends how they were half-orphans now. They are used to being envied, because they are identical twins. They don’t want to be pitiful.
It has not even been a year, but Samantha realizes that she is forgetting what her mother looked like. Not her mother’s face so much as the way she smelled, which was something like dry hay and something like Chanel No. 5, and like something else too. She can’t remember whether her mother had gray eyes, like her, or grey eyes, like Claire. She doesn’t dream about her mother anymore, but she does dream about Prince Charming, a bay whom she once rode in the horse show at her camp. In the dream, Prince Charming did not smell like a horse at all. He smelled like Chanel No. 5. When she is Dead, she can have all the horses she wants, and they all smell like Chanel No. 5.
“Where does the key go to?” Samantha says.
The baby-sitter holds out her hand. “To the attic. You don’t really need it, but taking the stairs is easier than the chimney. At least the first time.”
“Aren’t you going to make us go to bed?” Claire says.
The baby-sitter ignores Claire. “My father used to lock me in the attic when I was little, but I didn’t mind. There was a bicycle up there and I used to ride it around and around the chimneys until my mother let me out again. Do you know how to ride a bicycle?”
“Of course,” Claire says.
“If you ride fast enough, the Specialist can’t catch you.”
“What’s the Specialist?” Samantha says. Bicycles are okay, but horses can go faster. “The Specialist wears a hat,” say the babysitter. “The hat makes noises.” She doesn’t say anything else.
The attic is somehow bigger and lonelier than Samantha and Claire thought it would be. The baby-sitter’s key opens the locked door at the end of the hallway, revealing a narrow set of stairs. She waves them ahead and upwards.
It isn’t as dark in the attic as they had imagined. The oaks that block the light and make the first three stories so dim and green and mysterious during the day, don’t reach all the way up. Extravagant moonlight, dusty and pale, streams in the angled dormer windows. It lights the length of the attic, which is wide enough to hold a softball game in, and lined with trunks where Samantha imagines people could sit, could be hiding and watching. The ceiling slopes down, impaled upon the eight thickwaisted chimney stacks. The chimneys seem too alive, somehow, to be contained in this empty, neglected place; they thrust almost angrily through the roof and attic floor. In the moonlight, they look like they are breathing. “They’re so beautiful,” she says.
“Which chimney is the nursery chimney?” Claire says.
The baby-sitter points to the nearest right-hand stack. “That one,” she says. “It runs up through the ballroom on the first floor, the library, the nursery.”
Hanging from a nail on the nursery chimney is a long, black object. It looks lumpy and heavy, as if it were full of things. The baby-sitter takes it down, twirls it on her finger. There are holes in the black thing, and it whistles mournfully as she spins it. “The Specialist’s hat,” she says.
“That doesn’t look like a hat,” says Claire. “It doesn’t look like anything at all.” She goes to look through the boxes and trunks that are stacked against the far wall.
“It’s a special hat,” the baby-sitter says. “It’s not supposed to look like anything. But it can sound like anything you can imagine. My father made it.”
“Our father writes books,” Samantha says.
“My father did too.” The baby-sitter hangs the hat back on the nail. It curls blackly against the chimney. Samantha stares at it. It nickers at her. “He was a bad poet, but he was worse at magic.”
Last summer, Samantha wished more than anything that she could have a horse. She thought she would have given up anything for one — even being a twin was not as good as having a horse. She still doesn’t have a horse, but she doesn’t have a mother either, and she can’t help wondering if it’s her fault. The hat nickers again, or maybe it is the wind in the chimney.
“What happened to him?” Claire asks.
“After he made the hat, the Specialist came and took him away. I hid in the nursery chimney while it was looking for him, and it didn’t find me.”
“Weren’t you scared?”
There is a clattering, shivering clicking noise. Claire has found the baby-sitter’s bike and is dragging it towards them by the handlebars. The babysitter shrugs. “Rule number three,” she says.
Claire snatches the hat off the nail. “I’m the Specialist!” she says, putting the hat on her head. It falls over her eyes, the floppy shapeless brim sewn with little asymmetrical buttons that flash and catch at the moonlight like teeth. Samantha looks again, and sees that they are teeth. Without counting, she suddenly knows that there are exactly fifty-two teeth on the hat, and that they are the teeth of agoutis, of curassows, of white-lipped peccaries, and of the wife of Charles Cheatham Rash. The chimneys are moaning, and Claire’s voice booms hollowly beneath the hat. “Run away, or I’ll catch you and eat you!”
Samantha and the baby-sitter run away, laughing, as Claire mounts the rusty, noisy bicycle and pedals madly after them. She rings the bicycle bell as she rides, and the Specialist’s hat bobs up and down on her head. It spits like a cat. The bell is shrill and thin, and the bike wails and shrieks. It leans first towards the right and then to the left. Claire’s knobby knees stick out on either side like makeshift counterweights.
Claire weaves in and out between the chimneys, chasing Samantha and the baby-sitter. Samantha is slow, turning to look behind. As Claire approaches, she keeps one hand on the handlebars and stretches the other hand out towards Samantha. Just as she is about to grab Samantha, the baby-sitter turns back and plucks the hat off Claire’s head.
“Shit!” the baby-sitter says, and drops it. There is a drop of blood forming on the fleshy part of the baby-sitter’s hand, black in the moonlight, where the Specialist’s hat has bitten her.
Claire dismounts, giggling. Samantha watches as the Specialist’s hat rolls away. It gathers speed, veering across the attic floor, and disappears, thumping down the stairs. “Go get it,” Claire says. “You can be the Specialist this time.”
“No,” the baby-sitter says, sucking at her palm. “It’s time for bed.”
When they go down the stairs, there is no sign of the Specialist’s hat. They brush their teeth, climb into the ship-bed, and pull the covers up to their necks. The baby-sitter sits between their feet. “When you’re Dead,” Samantha says, “do you still get tired and have to go to sleep? Do you have dreams?”