Excerpt: Despite These Dark Portents

In her latest, The Vanishers, author and The Believer editor Heidi Julavits looks at female relationships through the story of an elite school for psychics, centering around young woman just beginning to learn the power and pitfalls of her psychic gift, as well as the hard lessons of growing up. Here, the Tip Sheet presents the opening passage of The Vanishers, out March 13 from Doubleday. (The audiobook version is also out March 13, from Dreamscape.)

The attack, we later agreed, occurred at Madame Ackermann’s 43rd birthday party.

The evening was typical for late October—icebox air, onyx sky, White Mountains humped darkly in the distance, and visible only peripherally as a more opaque variety of night coagulating along the horizon. Because I knew that Madame Ackermann’s A-Frame would be under-heated, I wore a wool jumper and wool tights and a pair of silver riding boots bought at the nearby Nepalese import store, run by an aging Wasp hippie. Hers was one of seven businesses in the town of East Warwick, New Hampshire (there was also a Vegan bakery, a hardware store, a purveyor of Fair Isle knitwear, a bank, a pub, and a real estate agent), a town that existed solely in the minds of some to provide basic material support to the faculty and students at the Institute of Integrated Parapsychology—referred to locally, and by those in the field, as The Workshop.

That I—Julia Severn, a second-year initiate and Madame Ackermann’s stenographer—had been invited to her 43rd birthday party was an anomaly that I failed to probe past establishing the fact, with certain key people, of its unusualness. When I let slip to my stenographic predecessor, Miranda, that I had been invited to Madame Ackermann’s for a social occasion, Miranda tried to hide her wounded incredulity by playing with the pearl choker she habitually wore and, in apprehensive moments such as these, rolled into her mouth, allowing the pearls to yank on the corners of her lips like a horse’s bit.

Madame Ackermann observed a firm boundary between her academic and personal lives, Miranda said, removing her pearls halfway, wedging them now into the recession just above her chin.

She was not the kind of professor, Miranda cautioned, straining her necklace’s string with her lower jaw until it threatened to snap, to invite an initiate to her house for a social occasion, not even as a volunteer passer of hors d’oeuvres.

Miranda’s jealousy was to be expected; her jealousy was, in fact, the desired result of my “slipping” to her the fact of my invitation. Madame Ackermann’s attentions, after all, were the prize over which we initiates unofficially competed, the reason we’d come to the Workshop—to study with her, hopefully, yes, but in less ambitious terms to occupy, in a harmless fauna way, her territory, to partake of her forbidding, imperial aura simply by walking behind her on the many footpaths that scalpeled the campus quad into slivers of snow or mud or grass.

Thus, I reassured Miranda (who, despite the year she’d spent as her stenographer, clearly did not know Madame Ackermann)—one of the many admirable qualities Madame Ackermann possessed was that, even as a relentless investigator of past lives, she could allow bygones to be bygones. Yes, she’d chosen me, from a pool of thirty-five initiates, to be her stenographer, and yes we’d both, nearly immediately, come to regret this choice of hers. But after weeks of misunderstandings, deceptions and hostilities between us, she was not above extending an olive branch to me.

So on the night of October 25th I donned my silver boots and drove to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame awash in optimism and specialness. As I passed the custodian-lit Workshop buildings, their windows flickering behind the spruces, I allowed myself to view the scene from the future perspective of an older self, wrought by nostalgia for this place I’d yet to leave. In order to prolong my anticipation of what was sure to be a momentous evening, I took the scenic way along the Connecticut River; in the moonlight, the water, whisked to a sharp chop by the wind, appeared prematurely seized into a treacherous hoar of ice. I spied a hunter emerging from the burnt carcass of an old barn who appeared, for the shadowy half-second before my car beams illuminated him, to be wearing the decapitated head of a deer. A bat died against my windshield. And yet despite these dark portents I somehow failed to divine, as I turned off the river road and began the slow ascent to Madame Ackermann’s A-frame, that I would never drive along this river again. Or that I would drive along this river again, yes, but I would no longer be the sort of person who wore silver boots to parties and believed that bygones could be bygones.