Argosy: The Short Story Magazine — page 20: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

’, <5 7 \ ial : tet, Prag F, " > | hie Pi d 20 MARY LEE SETTLE and her. My mother would tell me to come into her room and I would sleep the rest of the night in there. But that was out of the frying-pan into the fire, not that it wasn’t lovely having company after a nightmare, but she always thought that bad dreams were caused by something you ate, and that might mean castor oil in the morning, if she remembered. There were usually three or four aunts in the big kitchen when I took castor oil and they would all watch me, twisted around from whatever they were doing, and say, ‘‘Come on. Get it over with.” I had it in my orange juice. I know now that my great-grandmother stared at me because she was looking straight into the camera when the picture was taken, but it still doesn’t help. Ill bet the photographer repented of his sins after he took that picture. But when I turned again, out of her sight, on the way to the attic stairs, It took over and then I was sorry she couldn’t look all the way around the last corner before the attic. She could have handled It. I couldn’t. It used to watch me as I came up the last flight, and as my head got level with the floor of the attic, It used to recede back behind—behind the trunks or one of the pictures or somewhere so I couldn’t see It, and watch from there. The attic had long dangerous windows, almost to the floor, and the aunts would say sometimes, or my grandmother would say, “‘I’ll declare, we ought to do something about the attic windows; one of the children is going to fall out one of these days.” But they never did do anything about them. They didn’t know that we would never have gone near the windows for fear It would slip up behind us and push us out. Sometimes, on dares, the older ones would lure us up to the attic and we would sit along the beds; there were six beds in rows along opposite walls; we would sit and be told terrible stories about ghosts or sex. It was during one of those, one evening—I forget now whether it was ghosts or sex, both were horrible—that I got so frightened that I made a bee-line for the steps and fell down them, right to my grandmother’s feet. She liked me best and sat and patted me until I felt better, -then she ramped up to the attic, and cleared out all the cousins. They all accused me of telling her something, but I didn’t tell her anything. Of course, once I had reached the attic after climbing all the comiclbooks.comn