In the hamlet, where Clara was a girl, the sun was spare and splintered by the rooftop. There was a lamp, a hearth, and a clock hung on the wall. It struck a stroke so hard every sixth hour the women flinched and turned their eyes to the window. Her father would go then and kneel alone on the stone floor.
     In Pittstown voices hovered over gnarled trees, the orchards, the barns and splintered roof beams. If you hear them, you must not look up. If you hear one in dusk, in a clearing—let's say you're splitting wood or gathering something maybe mushrooms—you must bend your eyes and your being to the axe, you must exert yourself and keep it out. 
     At the distance of three hundred yards from the house, atop a rock whose sides were steep and covered with dwarf cedars, Clara's father built a temple. It was nothing but a dome and a stone floor. It was without seat or table. Below the temple was a rocky channel, bounded by cornfields and an orchard.
     In Pittstown, Mary walked the gloomy streets. She wore fur and a strange gown. Clara darned socks inside the splintered light. I am drowning. Clara said to herself and the voice was not inside her head, but an echo deep inside a well. I am drowning. Mostly, Clara felt like this, save when she saw Mary in such strange and stunning gowns.
     At midnight, when her father prayed, Clara would walk to the cold rock, toward the dead orchard and the cornfield, where the stalks poked through snow and swayed against a sky unbearable and grey. Clara would wait for Mary in the orchard, and Mary would appear in something silk and soft or fur. "Do you like it?" Mary said. She stroked the gown with Clara's hand, and like a deer Clara grew very still. Everything, her skin, the sky, the splintering wind became an instrument through which to perceive her friend. "Yes," she said, "I like it."
     In Pittstown, aggression was a landscape. It was in the angle of a doorframe, the way a root broke through the cold dirt. It was too much, at times, to simply turn your eyes to something else. No one spoke of it. Clara's uncle, Thomas Wieland looked nothing like Thomas Wieland. Mary said, "That's not Thomas Wieland," but, of course, no one believed her because what did she know? He looked twenty years too young to be him. He'd recently arrived, or so he said, from Austria. He was a surgeon. He was an artist. She became his apprentice. "Put on this," he said and flung a gown at Mary's head. His room was spare and untidy. It was without comfort. There were reams of ink-stained paper, a surgeon's kit, and a trunk stuffed with silk dresses. "Don't touch that!" He shouted and hurled his commonplace book at Mary's head. The first page said "The World as My Will and My Idea." Mary stole it. Thomas was drawing her. He called these portraits the "Progress of a Woman of Pleasure." But there was no pleasure in Pittstown. There was only Clara kneeling in the orchard. There was only Mary in her dresses. Sometimes there was laughter in the orchard, and the birds scattered, and Clara's father looked at the sky and said, "What is that sound?"
     Thomas Wieland was a man of science. His brother, Clara's father, had let the voices in. Thomas came from Austria to get the voices out again. But when Clara's father said, "That is not Thomas" no one believed him. Clara's father had disobeyed God, and his singular act of defiance had disturbed him.
     "God wants him to murder us," said Clara, "but he's too nervous." In the orchard the bird's pecked at the dirt. "Someday my brother, Theodore, will have to do it."
      "Let's run away," said Mary. "Let's go to Bath!"
     Meanwhile, in the temple on the rock, Clara's father and uncle had an argument. Who was this man who called himself Thomas Wieland? Mary took out his commonplace book. There is something odd about Pittstown. It is not like Woodston. People walk with their eyes cast down, as if the tree tops and the sky have designs on them. They are possessed of a sixth sense but seem to lack something else. For instance, they are superstitious and don't like visitors. Luckily, they've mistaken me for someone else. A man named Thomas, which is very well because he has a practice, which I have not, and an apprentice, named, Mary, who is rather—
      A shot rang out, and the two girls turned their eyes to the rock, where they saw the figure of a man fling some great, unwieldy thing over the precipice and into the raging river below. That man was Thomas Wieland. That thing was Clara's father. No, not really. Not exactly. The first man was only pretending to be Thomas Wieland. And the second man was, of course, only pretending to be Clara's father, so that he might more lawfully murder her.
     Clara screamed and Thomas turned his awful head to the orchard, where the girls crouched and then they ran. 

*

Thomas Wieland pursued them.
     They were girls—Mary and Clara—cruel and brutish. Girls, climbing in a rowboat, with a rustle of their ugly dresses, a back against a bow, an elbow resting on the gunwhale, waiting. Stupid, exquisite, excitable. The rustle of their gowns. Endowed like swans with nature's cruel weapons.
     Thomas Wieland pursued them.
     Why?
     Because, he was telling them, of the precarity of being anything. Take a pile of bruised nectarines, carrion, floating fish and their bloated bellies. The sadness of impermanence is also arousing. He killed things and wondered what got into him. A family curse? He came to Pittstown to find out. And the girls? He was busy. Down in the orchard, they were laughing. Their ugly dresses rustling. What was he looking for? A footprint in the mud. A letter his father wrote to Thomas. A letter Thomas sent from Austria? A medical journal. Maybe in a trunk or chest or under the bed? In Pittstown he discovered things: Thomas was his father's friend, their laughter cut him; he winced.   
     They stood at the water's edge. "Come," he said and urged their steps forward. He nudged them into the skiff, and with a rustle of their ugly dresses, they climbed in. "Come," he said. They masked their unease in a practiced listlessness. Yawning. Their elbows resting, waiting. "Dull. Boring," they feigned thinking. They were, in fact, in great danger. They knew this. Of course, they knew this. Like rabbits before leaping. Behind their hooded eyes was a watchful stillness, a silence, a pulse throbbing in their temples. He did not want to hurt them. Their elbows resting, waiting. What did he want from them? They were frightened. He thrust his oar down. Their shoulders clutched. The boat rocked.  
      "What did you see," he said slowly, "on the rock, from the orchard?" He turned to Mary.
     Then Clara swiftly pitched herself over the port. He was dazzled. She could not swim. This much was evident. Should he jump in after her? Should they die, in this water, with their arms entwined? 
     He didn't and she did not drown. Not that time.
     Mary struck him from behind. The world went dark and when he woke hours later, a powerful effulgence covered him like a mantle. He opened his eyes and found all about him luminous and glowing. The larch trees swayed, the sky was throbbing. Find them. Find them. He was on land. The temple on the rock loomed. No, it was not the temple, but a castle propped atop the neck of a dead volcano.
     Hours—or was it days?—earlier, the girls, Mary and Clara, had climbed from a moat, and vanished in the brush. They took his commonplace book and left their footprints in the mud.

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This piece is excerpted from a parodic gothic novel, Agnes, We're Not Murderers!, which will come out with Clash Books in 2026. I spliced together some impressions from Sheridan Le Fan's Carmilla (the one about that irresistible lesbian vampire who goes around Austria seducing all the eligible bachelorettes). I was also thinking about Wieland, an early American gothic novel, about a guy who—among other things—is ordered by God to murder his family.