The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Well, that’s not what Father says.”

  “Read your book, Merry. One day you’ll understand. One day soon, when you’re not a child anymore, and he loses his hold on you.”

  And she’d frowned, sighed, and opened her book again, opening it at random to one of the strangely melancholy lithographs—The Period of the Muschelkalk [Middle Trias]. A violent seascape, and in the foreground a reef jutted above the waves, crowded with algae-draped driftwood branches and the shells of stranded mollusca and crinoidea. There was something like a crocodile, a beast the author called Nothosaurus giganteus, clinging to the reef so it wouldn’t be swept back into the storm-tossed depths. Overhead, the night sky was a turbulent mass of clouds with the small, white moon, full or near enough to full, peeking through to illuminate the ancient scene.

  “You mean planets?” she’d asked Avery. “You mean moons and stars?”

  “No, I mean worlds. Now, read your book, and don’t ask so many questions.”

  Meredith thought she heard creaking wood, her father’s heavy footsteps, the dry ruffling of cloth rubbing against cloth, and she stood quickly, not wanting to be caught listening at the door again, was still busy straightening her rumpled dress when she realized that he was standing there in the hall behind her, instead. Her mistake, thinking he’d gone to the deep place, when he was somewhere else all along, in his library or the attic room with Avery or outside braving the cold to visit her mother’s grave on the hill.

  “What are you doing, child?” he asked her gruffly and tugged at his beard. There were streaks of silver-grey that weren’t there only a couple of months before, scars from the night they lost her mother, his wife, the night the demons tried to squeeze in through the tear, and Ellen Dandridge had tried to block their way. His face grown years older in the space of weeks, dark crescents beneath his eyes like bruises and deep creases in his forehead. He brushed his daughter’s blonde hair from her eyes.

  “Would it have been different, if you’d believed Avery from the start?”

  For a moment he didn’t reply, and his silence, his face set as hard and perfectly unreadable as stone, made her want to strike him, made her wish she could kick open the rotting, sea-damp door and hurl him screaming down the stairs to whatever was waiting for them both in the deep place.

  “I don’t know, Meredith. But I had to trust the book, and I had to believe the signs in the heavens.”

  “You were too arrogant, old man. You almost gave away the whole wide world because you couldn’t admit you might be wrong.”

  “You should be thankful that your mother can’t hear you, young lady, using that tone of voice with your own father.”

  Meredith turned and looked at the tall, rotten door again, the symbols drawn on the wood in whitewash and blood.

  “She can hear me,” Meredith told him. “She talks to me almost every night. She hasn’t gone as far away as you think.”

  “I’m still your father, and you’re still a child who can’t even begin to understand what’s at stake, what’s always pushing at the other side of—”

  “—the gate?” she asked, interrupting and finishing for him, and she put one hand flat against the door, the upper of its two big panels, and leaned all her weight against it. “What happens next time? Do you know, Father? How much longer do we have left, or haven’t the constellations gotten around to telling you that yet?”

  “Don’t mock me, Meredith.”

  “Why not?” and she stared back at him over her shoulder, without taking her hand off the door. “Will it damn me faster? Will it cause more men to die in the trenches? Will it cause Avery more pain than he’s in now?”

  “I was given the book,” he growled at her, his stony face flashing to bitter anger, and at least that gave Meredith some mean scrap of satisfaction.“I was shown the way to this place. They entrusted the gate to me, child. The gods—”

  “—must be even bigger fools than you, old man. Now shut up, and leave me alone.”

  Machen Dandridge raised his right hand to strike her, his big-knuckled hand like a hammer of flesh and bone, iron-meat hammer and anvil to beat her as thin and friable as the veil between Siamese universes.

  “You’ll need me,” she said, not recoiling from the fire in his dark eyes, standing her ground. “You can’t take my place. Even if you weren’t a coward, you couldn’t take my place.”

  “You’ve become a willful, wicked child,” he said, slowly lowering his hand until it hung useless at his side.

  “Yes, Father, I have. I’ve become a very wicked child. You’d best pray that I’ve become wicked enough.”

  And he didn’t reply, no words left in him, but walked quickly away down the long hall towards the foyer and his library, his footsteps loud as distant gunshots, loud as the beating of her heart, and Meredith removed her hand from the door. It burned very slightly, pain like a healing bee sting, and when she looked at her palm there was something new there, a fat and shiny swelling as black and round and smooth as the soulless eye of a shark.

  February 1915

  In his dreams, Machen Dandridge stands at the edge of the sea and watches the firelight reflected in the roiling grey clouds above Russia and Austria and East Prussia, smells the coppery stink of Turkish and German blood, the life leaking from the bullet holes left in the Serbian Archduke and his wife. Machen would look away if he knew how, wouldn’t see what he can only see too late to make any difference. One small man set adrift and then cast up on the shingle of the cosmos, filled to bursting with knowledge and knowing nothing at all. Cannon fire and thunder, the breakers against the cliff side and the death rattle of soldiers beyond counting.

  This is where I stand, at the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss. . .

  “A world war, Father,” Avery says. “Something without precedent. I can’t even find words to describe the things I’ve seen.”

  “A world war, without precedent?” Machen replies skeptically and raises one eyebrow, then goes back to reading his star charts. “Napoleon just might disagree with you there, young man, and Alexander, as well.”

  “No, you don’t understand what I’m saying—”

  And the fire in the sky grows brighter, coalescing into a whip of red-gold scales and ebony spines, the dragon’s tail to lash the damned. Every one of us is damned, Machen thinks. Every one of us, from the bloody start of time.

  “I have the texts, Avery, and the aegis of the seven, and all the old ways. I cannot very well set that all aside because you’ve been having nightmares, now can I?”

  “I know these things, Father. I know them like I know my own heart, like I know the number of steps down to the deep place.”

  “There is trouble brewing in Coma Berenices,” his wife whispers, her eye pressed to the eyepiece of the big telescope in his library. “Something like a shadow.”

  “She says that later,” Avery tells him. “That hasn’t happened yet, but it will. But you won’t listen to her, either.”

  And Machen Dandridge turns his back on the sea and the dragon, on the battlefields and the burning cities, looking back towards the house he built twenty-five years ago. The air in the library seems suddenly very close, too warm, too thick. He loosens his paper collar and stares at his son sitting across the wide mahogany desk from him.

  “I’m not sure I know what you mean, boy,” he says, and Avery sighs loudly and runs his fingers through his brown hair.

  “Mother isn’t even at the window now. That’s still two weeks from now,” and it’s true that no one’s standing at the telescope. Machen rubs his eyes and reaches for his spectacles. “By then, it’ll be too late. It may be too late already,” Avery says.

  “Listen to him, Father,” Meredith begs with her mother’s voice, and then she lays a small, wilted bouquet of autumn wildflowers on Ellen Dandridge’s grave. The smell of the broken earth at the top of the hill is not so different from the smell of the French trenches.

  “I did listen to him, Merry.”<
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  “You let him talk. You know the difference.”

  “Did I ever tell you about the lights in the sky the night that you were born?”

  “Yes, Father. A hundred times.”

  “There were no lights at your brother’s birth.”

  Behind him, the sea makes a sound like a giant rolling over in its sleep, and Machen looks away from the house again, stares out across the surging black Pacific. There are the carcasses of whales and sea lions and a billion fish and the bloated carcasses of things even he doesn’t know the names for, floating in the surf. Scarlet-eyed night birds swoop down to eat their fill of carrion. The water is so thick with dead things and maggots and blood that soon there will be no water left at all.

  “The gate chooses the key,” his wife says sternly, sadly, standing at the open door leading down to the deep place beneath the house, the bottomless, phosphorescent pool at the foot of the winding, rickety steps. The short pier and the rock rising up from those depths, the little island with its cave and shackles. “You can’t change that part, no matter what the seven have given you.”

  “It wasn’t me sent Avery down there, Ellen.”

  “It wasn’t either one of us. But neither of us listened to him, so maybe it’s the same as if we both did.”

  The sea as thick as buttermilk, buttermilk and blood beneath a rotten moon, and the dragon’s tail flicks through the stars.

  “Writing the history of the end of the world,” Meredith says, standing at the telescope, peering into the eyepiece, turning first this knob, then that one, trying to bring something in the night sky into sharper focus. “That’s what he kept saying, anyway. ‘I am writing the history of the end of the world. I’m writing the history of the future.’ Father, did you know that there’s trouble in Coma Berenices?”

  “Was that you?” he asks her. “Was that you said that or was that your mother?”

  “Is there any difference? And if so, do you know the difference?”

  “Are these visions, Merry? Are these terrible visions that I may yet hope to affect?”

  “Will you keep him locked in that room forever?” she asks, not answering his questions, not even taking her eye from the telescope.

  Before his wife leaves the hallway, before she steps onto the unsteady landing at the top of the stairs, she kisses Meredith on the top of her head and then glares at her husband, her eyes like judgment on the last day of all, the eyes of seraphim and burning swords. The diseased sea slams against the cliffs, dislodging chunks of shale, silt gone to stone when the great reptiles roamed the planet and the gods still had countless revolutions and upheavals to attend to before the beginning of the tragedy of mankind.

  “Machen,” his wife says. “If you had listened, had you allowed me to listen, everything might have been different. The war, what’s been done to Avery, all of it. If you’d but listened.”

  And the dream rolls on and on and on behind his eyes, down the stairs and to the glowing water, his wife alone in the tiny boat, rowing across the pool to the rocky island far beneath the house. The hemorrhaging, pus-colored sea throwing itself furiously against the walls of the cavern, wanting in, and it’s always only a matter of time. Meredith standing on the pier behind him, chanting the prayers he’s taught her, the prayers to keep the gate from opening before Ellen reaches that other shore.

  The yellow-green light beneath the pool below the house wavers, then grows brighter by degrees.

  The dragon’s tail flicks at the suicidal world.

  In his attic, Avery screams with the new mouth the gate gave him before it spit the boy, twisted and insane, back into this place, this time.

  The oars dipping again and again into the brilliant, glowing water, the creak of the rusted oarlocks, old nails grown loose in decaying wood; shafts of light from the pool playing across the uneven walls of the cavern.

  The dragon opens one blistered eye.

  And Ellen Dandridge steps out of the boat onto the island. She doesn’t look back at her husband and daughter.

  “Something like a shadow,” Meredith says, taking her right eye from the telescope and looking across the room at her brother, who isn’t sitting in the chair across from Machen.

  “It’s not a shadow,” Avery doesn’t tell her, and goes back to the things he has to write down in his journals before there’s no time left.

  On the island, the gate tears itself open, the dragon’s eye, angel eye, and the unspeakable face of the titan sleeper in an unnamed, sunken city, tearing itself wide to see if she’s the one it’s called down or if it’s some other. The summoned or the trespasser. The invited or the interloper. And Machen knows from the way the air has begun to shimmer and sing that the sleeper doesn’t like what it sees.

  “I stand at the gate and hold the key,” she says. “You know my name, and I have come to hold the line. I have come only that you might not pass.”

  “Don’t look, Merry. Close your eyes,” and Machen holds his daughter close to him as the air stops singing, as it begins to sizzle and pop and burn.

  The waves against the shore.

  The dragon’s tail across the sky.

  The empty boat pulled down into the shimmering pool.

  Something glimpsed through a telescope.

  The ribsy, omnivorous dogs of war.

  And then Machen woke in his bed, a storm lashing fiercely at the windows, the lightning exploding out there like mortar shells, and the distant thump thump thump of his lost son from the attic. He didn’t close his eyes again, but lay very still, sweating and listening to the rain and the thumping, until the sun rose somewhere behind the clouds to turn the black to cheerless, leaden grey.

  August 1889

  After his travels, after Baghdad and the ruins of Nineveh and Babylon, after the hidden mosque in Reza’lyah and the peculiar artefacts he’d collected on the southernmost shore of Lake Urmia, Machen Dandridge went west to California. In the summer of 1889, he married Ellen Douglas-Winslow, black-sheep daughter of a fine old Boston family, and together they traveled by train, the smoking iron horses and steel rails that his own father had made his fortune from, riding all the way to the bustling squalor and Nob Hill sanctuaries of San Francisco. For a time they took up residence in a modest house on Russian Hill, while Machen taught his wife the things that he’d learned in the East—archaeology and astrology, Hebrew and Islamic mysticism, the Talmud and Qur’an, the secrets of the terrible black book that had been given to him by a blind and leprous mullah. Ellen had disgraced her family at an early age by claiming the abilities of a medium and then backing up her claims with extravagant séances and spectacular ectoplasmic displays. Machen found in her an eager pupil.

  “Why would he have given the book to you?” Ellen asked skeptically, the first time Machen had shown it to her, the first time he’d taken it from its iron and leather case in her presence. “If it’s what you say it is, why would he have given it to anyone?”

  “Because, my dear, I had a pistol pressed against his rotten skull,” Machen had replied, unwrapping the book, slowly peeling back the layers of lambskin it was wrapped in. “That and knowledge he’d been searching for his entire life. Trust me. It was a fair trade.”

  And just as the book had led him back from Asia to America and on to California, the brittle, parchment compass of its pages had shown him the way north along the coast to the high cliffs north of Anchor Bay. That first trip, he left Ellen behind, traveling with only the company of a Miwok Indian guide who claimed knowledge of “a hole in the world.” But when they finally left the shelter of the redwood forest and stood at the edge of a vast and undulating sea of grass stretching away towards the Pacific, the Miwok had refused to go any farther. No amount of money or talk could persuade him to approach the cliffs waiting beyond the grass, and so Machen continued on alone.

  Beneath the hot summer sun, the low, rolling hills seemed to go on forever. The gulls and a pair of red-tailed hawks screamed like harpies warning him away, screeching th
reats or alarum from the endless cornflower sky. But he found it, finally, the “hole in the world,” right where the Miwok guide had said that he would, maybe fifty yards from the cliffs.

  From what he’d taught himself of geology, Machen guessed it to be the collapsed roof of a cavern, an opening no more than five or six feet across, granting access to an almost vertical chimney eroded through tilted beds of limestone and shale and probably connecting to the sea somewhere in the darkness below. He dropped a large pebble into the hole and listened and counted as it fell, ticking off the seconds until it splashed faintly, confirming his belief that the cavern must be connected to the sea. A musty, briny smell wafted up from the hole, uninviting, sickly, and though there was climbing equipment in his pack, and he was competent with ropes and knots and had, more than once, descended treacherous, crumbling shafts into ancient tombs and wells, Machen Dandridge only stood there at the entrance, dropping stones and listening to the eventual splashes. He stared into the hole and, after a while, could discern a faint but unmistakable light, not the fading sunlight getting in from some cleft in the cliff face, but light like a glass of absinthe, the sort of light he’d imagined abyssal creatures that never saw the sun might make to shine their way through the murk.

  It wasn’t what he’d expected, from what was written in the black book, no towering gate of horn and ivory, no arch of gold and silver guarded by angels or demons or beings men had never fashioned names for, just this unassuming hole in the ground. He sat in the grass, watching the sunset burning day to night, wondering if the Miwok had deserted him. Wondering if the quest had been a fool’s errand from the very start, and he’d wasted so many years of his life, and so much of his inheritance, chasing connections and truths that only existed because he wished to see them. By dark, the light shone up through the hole like some unearthly torch, taunting or reassuring but beckoning him forward. Promising there was more to come.

  “What is it you think you will find?” the old priest had asked after he’d handed over the book. “More to the point, what is it you think will find you?”