“The Specialist’s Hat” (1998)

Kelly Link won a World Fantasy Award for this story. It’s a little too whimsical for me but not bad. The main characters are Claire and Samantha, 10-year-old identical twins who play a verbal game called Dead. “When you’re Dead ... you don’t have to brush your teeth.” “When you’re Dead ... you live in a box, and it’s always dark, but you’re not ever afraid.” So on and so forth. They’re staying in a haunted house once occupied by a minor poet who their father is studying, even though he doesn’t like the poet’s work. Their mother died almost a year earlier. They compulsively measure and count things. It seems fanciful, but it paints the strange scene and setting quickly, a little bit comical and perhaps even a little bit something to envy. Staying in a ginormous haunted house to study the papers of a minor poet you don’t like has its appeals as a lifestyle. There’s also an unnamed babysitter on hand who is somehow unsettling. Specifics of the very large house follow, called Eight Chimneys because that’s what it has, with fireplaces big enough to stand in. They keep things intriguingly odd. Ten-year-old identical twins playing a game called Dead are, of course, unsettling too. The babysitter distracts with what she says and what she knows. Along the way the language can sparkle. Snatches of strange poetry, perhaps the minor poet’s work, interrupt the narrative. The story dances around the points of any haunting, teasing us with evocative details. Ominous notes attend the babysitter, “whose name neither twin quite caught.... The reason that Claire and Samantha have a babysitter is that their father met a woman in the woods.” I love how loaded and deceptively simple it all is. No one can reach the babysitter but she always shows up on time, enters the house, and goes to the room the twins are in. The babysitter tells them about “the Specialist” as if he or it is both real and unreal. The Specialist’s hat itself is a strange and unnerving object: “There are holes in the black thing and it whistles mournfully as she spins it.... ‘That doesn’t look like a hat,’ says Claire.” As it turns out, it bites. A lot going on underneath the surface of this one.

Kelly Link, Stranger Things Happen
The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror: Twelfth Annual Collection, ed. Ellen Datlow & Terri Windling
The Weird, ed. Ann & Jeff VanderMeer
Read story online.
Listen to story online.