The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “He’s trying to bring us down, down to the very core of those old stories,” a woman named Rose tells Peter. She owns a gallery somewhere uptown, the sort of place where Hannah’s paintings will never hang. “‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ ‘Snow White,’ ‘Hansel and Gretel,’ all those old fairy tales,” Rose says. “It’s a very post-Freudian approach.”

  “Indeed,” Peter says. As if he agrees, Hannah thinks, as if he even cares, when she knows damn well he doesn’t.

  “How’s the new novel coming along?” Rose asks him.

  “Like a mouthful of salted thumbtacks,” he replies, and she laughs.

  Hannah turns and looks at the nearest painting, because it’s easier than listening to the woman and Peter pretend to enjoy one another’s company. A somber storm of blacks and reds and greys, dappled chaos struggling to resolve itself into images, images stalled at the very edge of perception. She thinks she remembers having seen a photo of this canvas in Artforum.

  A small beige card on the wall to the right of the painting identifies it as Night in the Forest. There isn’t a price, because none of Perrault’s paintings are ever for sale. She’s heard rumors that he’s turned down millions, tens of millions, but suspects that’s all exaggeration and PR. Urban legends for modern artists, and from the other things that she’s heard he doesn’t need the money, anyway.

  Rose says something about the exploration of possibility and fairy tales and children using them to avoid any real danger, something that Hannah’s pretty sure she’s lifted directly from Bruno Bettelheim.

  “Me, I was always rooting for the wolf,” Peter says, “or the wicked witch or the three bears or whatever. I never much saw the point in rooting for silly girls too thick not to go wandering about alone in the woods.”

  Hannah laughs softly, laughing to herself, and takes a step back from the painting, squinting at it. A moonless sky pressing cruelly down upon a tangled, writhing forest, a path and something waiting in the shadows, stooped shoulders, ribsy, a calculated smudge of scarlet that could be its eyes. There’s no one on the path, but the implication is clear—there will be, soon enough, and the thing crouched beneath the trees is patient.

  “Have you seen the stones yet?” Rose asks and no, Peter replies, no we haven’t.

  “They’re a new direction for him,” she says. “This is only the second time they’ve been exhibited.”

  If I could paint like that, Hannah thinks, I could tell Dr. Valloton to kiss my ass. If I could paint like that, it would be an exorcism.

  And then Rose leads them both to a poorly lit corner of the gallery, to a series of rusted wire cages, and inside each one is a single stone. Large pebbles or small cobbles, stream-worn slate and granite, and each stone has been crudely engraved with a single word.

  The first one reads “follow.”

  “Peter, I need to go now,” Hannah says, unable to look away from the yellow-brown stone, the word tattooed on it, and she doesn’t dare let her eyes wander ahead to the next one.

  “Are you sick?”

  “I need to go, that’s all. I need to go now.”

  “If you’re not feeling well,” the woman named Rose says, trying too hard to be helpful, “there’s a restroom in the back.”

  “No, I’m fine. Really. I just need some air.”

  And Peter puts an arm protectively around her, reciting his hurried, polite goodbyes to Rose. But Hannah still can’t look away from the stone, sitting there behind the wire like a small and vicious animal at the zoo.

  “Good luck with the book,” Rose says, and smiles, and Hannah’s beginning to think she is going to be sick, that she will have to make a dash for the toilet, after all. There’s a taste like foil in her mouth, and her heart like a mallet on dead and frozen beef, adrenaline, the first eager tug of vertigo.

  “It was good to meet you, Hannah,” the woman says. Hannah manages to smile, manages to nod her head.

  And then Peter leads her quickly back through the crowded gallery, out onto the sidewalk and the warm night spread out along Mercer Street.

  8.

  “Would you like to talk about that day at the well?” Dr. Valloton asks, and Hannah bites at her chapped lower lip.

  “No. Not now,” she says. “Not again.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’ve already told you everything I can remember.”

  “If they’d found her body,” the psychologist says, “perhaps you and your mother and father would have been able to move on. There could have at least been some sort of closure. There wouldn’t have been that lingering hope that maybe someone would find her, that maybe she was alive.”

  Hannah sighs loudly, looking at the clock for release, but there’s still almost half an hour to go.

  “Judith fell down the well and drowned,” she says.

  “But they never found the body.”

  “No, but they found enough, enough to be sure. She fell down the well. She drowned. It was very deep.”

  “You said you heard her calling you.”

  “I’m not sure,” Hannah says, interrupting the psychologist before she can say the things she was going to say next, before she can use Hannah’s own words against her. “I’ve never been absolutely sure. I told you that.”

  “I’m sorry if it seems like I’m pushing,” Dr. Valloton says.

  “I just don’t see any reason to talk about it again.”

  “Then let’s talk about the dreams, Hannah. Let’s talk about the day you saw the fairies.”

  9.

  The dreams, or the day from which the dreams would arise and, half-forgotten, seek always to return. The dreams or the day itself, the one or the other, it makes very little difference. The mind exists only in a moment, always, a single flickering moment, remembered or actual, dreaming or awake or something liminal between the two, the precious, treacherous illusion of Present floundering in the crack between Past and Future.

  The dream of the day—or the day itself—and the sun is high and small and white, a dazzling July sun coming down in shafts through the tall trees in the woods behind Hannah’s house. She’s running to catch up with Judith, her sister two years older and her legs grown longer, always leaving Hannah behind. You can’t catch me, slowpoke. You can’t even keep up. Hannah almost trips in a tangle of creeper vines and has to stop long enough to free her left foot.

  “Wait up!” she shouts, and Judith doesn’t answer. “I want to see. Wait for me!”

  The vines try to pull one of Hannah’s tennis shoes off and leave bright beads of blood on her ankle. But she’s loose again in only a moment, running down the narrow path to catch up, running through the summer sun and the oak-leaf shadows.

  “I found something,” Judith said to her that morning after breakfast. The two of them sitting on the back porch steps. “Down in the clearing by the old well,” she said.

  “What? What did you find?”

  “Oh, I don’t think I should tell you. No, I definitely shouldn’t tell you. You might go and tell Mom and Dad. You might spoil everything.”

  “No, I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t tell them anything. I wouldn’t tell anyone.”

  “Yes, you would, big mouth.”

  And, finally, she gave Judith half her allowance to tell, half to be shown whatever there was to see. Her sister dug deep down into the pockets of her jeans, and her hand came back up with a shiny black pebble.

  “I just gave you a whole dollar to show me a rock?”

  “No, stupid. Look at it,” and Judith held out her hand.

  The letters scratched deep into the stone—JVDTH—five crooked letters that almost spelled her sister’s name, and Hannah didn’t have to pretend not to be impressed.

  “Wait for me!” she shouts again, angry now, her voice echoing around the trunks of the old trees and dead leaves crunching beneath her shoes. Starting to guess that the whole thing is a trick after all, just one of Judith’s stunts, and her sister’s probably watching her from a hiding place right thi
s very second, snickering quietly to herself. Hannah stops running and stands in the center of the path, listening to the murmuring forest sounds around her.

  And something faint and lilting that might be music.

  “That’s not all,” Judith said. “But you have to swear you won’t tell Mom and Dad.”

  “I swear.”

  “If you do tell, well, I promise I’ll make you wish you hadn’t.”

  “I won’t tell anyone anything.”

  “Give it back,” Judith said, and Hannah immediately handed the black stone back to her. “If you do tell—”

  “I already said I won’t. How many times do I have to say I won’t tell?”

  “Well then,” Judith said and led her around to the back of the little tool shed where their father kept his hedge clippers and bags of fertilizer and the old lawnmowers he liked to take apart and try to put back together again.

  “This better be worth a dollar,” Hannah said.

  She stands very, very still and listens to the music, growing louder. She thinks it’s coming from the clearing up ahead.

  “I’m going back home, Judith!” she shouts, not a bluff because suddenly she doesn’t care whether or not the thing in the jar was real, and the sun doesn’t seem as warm as it did only a moment ago.

  And the music keeps getting louder.

  And louder.

  And Judith took an empty mayonnaise jar out of the empty rabbit hutch behind the tool shed. She held it up to the sun, smiling at whatever was inside.

  “Let me see,” Hannah said.

  “Maybe I should make you give me another dollar first,” her sister replied, smirking, not looking away from the jar.

  “No way,” Hannah said indignantly. “Not a snowball’s chance in Hell,” and she grabbed for the jar, then, but Judith was faster, and her hand closed around nothing at all.

  In the woods, Hannah turns and looks back towards home, then turns back towards the clearing again, waiting for her just beyond the trees.

  “Judith! This isn’t funny! I’m going home right this second!”

  Her heart is almost as loud as the music now. Almost. Not quite, but close enough. Pipes and fiddles, drums and a jingle like tambourines.

  Hannah takes another step towards the clearing, because it’s nothing at all but her sister trying to scare her. Which is stupid, because it’s broad daylight, and Hannah knows these woods like the back of her hand.

  Judith unscrewed the lid of the mayonnaise jar and held it out so Hannah could see the small, dry thing curled in a lump at the bottom. Tiny mummy husk of a thing, grey and crumbling in the morning light.

  “It’s just a damn dead mouse,” Hannah said disgustedly. “I gave you a whole dollar to see a rock and a dead mouse in a jar?”

  “It’s not a mouse, stupid. Look closer.”

  And so she did, bending close enough that she could see the perfect dragonfly wings on its back, transparent, iridescent wings that glimmer faintly in the sun. Hannah squinted and realized that she could see its face, realized that it had a face.

  “Oh,” she said, looking quickly up at her sister, who was grinning triumphantly. “Oh, Judith. Oh my god. What is it?”

  “Don’t you know?” Judith asked her. “Do I have to tell you everything?”

  Hannah picks her way over the deadfall just before the clearing, the place where the path through the woods disappears beneath a jumble of fallen, rotting logs. There was a house back here, her father said, a long, long time ago. Nothing left but a big pile of rocks where the chimney once stood, and also the well covered over with sheets of rusted corrugated tin. There was a fire, her father said, and everyone in the house died.

  On the other side of the deadfall, Hannah takes a deep breath and steps out into the daylight, leaving the tree shadows behind, forfeiting her last chance not to see.

  “Isn’t it cool?” Judith said. “Isn’t it the coolest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  Someone’s pushed aside the sheets of tin, and the well is so dark that even the sun won’t go there. And then Hannah sees the wide ring of mushrooms, the perfect circle of toadstools and red caps and spongy brown morels growing round the well. The heat shimmers off the tin, dancing mirage shimmer as though the air here is turning to water, and the music is very loud now.

  “I found it,” Judith whispered, screwing the top back onto the jar as tightly as she could. “I found it, and I’m going to keep it. And you’ll keep your mouth shut about it, or I’ll never, ever show you anything else again.”

  Hannah looks up from the mushrooms, from the open well, and there are a thousand eyes watching her from the edges of the clearing. Eyes like indigo berries and rubies and drops of honey, like gold and silver coins, eyes like fire and ice, eyes like seething dabs of midnight. Eyes filled with hunger beyond imagining, neither good nor evil, neither real nor impossible.

  Something the size of a bear, squatting in the shade of a poplar tree, raises its shaggy charcoal head and smiles.

  “That’s another pretty one,” it growls.

  And Hannah turns and runs.

  10.

  “But you know, in your soul, what you must have really seen that day,” Dr. Valloton says and taps the eraser end of her pencil lightly against her front teeth. There’s something almost obscenely earnest in her expression, Hannah thinks, in the steady tap, tap, tap of the pencil against her perfectly spaced, perfectly white incisors. “You saw your sister fall into the well, or you realized that she just had. You may have heard her calling out for help.”

  “Maybe I pushed her in,” Hannah whispers.

  “Is that what you think happened?”

  “No,” Hannah says and rubs at her temples, trying to massage away the first dim throb of an approaching headache. “But, most of the time, I’d rather believe that’s what happened.”

  “Because you think it would be easier than what you remember.”

  “Isn’t it? Isn’t easier to believe she pissed me off that day, and so I shoved her in? That I made up these crazy stories so I’d never have to feel guilty for what I’d done? Maybe that’s what the nightmares are, my conscience trying to fucking force me to come clean.”

  “And what are the stones, then?”

  “Maybe I put them all there myself. Maybe I scratched those words on them myself and hid them there for me to find, because I knew that would make it easier for me to believe. If there was something that real, that tangible, something solid to remind me of the story, that the story is supposed to be the truth.”

  A long moment that’s almost silence, just the clock on the desk ticking and the pencil tapping against the psychologist’s teeth. Hannah rubs harder at her temples, the real pain almost within sight now, waiting for her just a little ways past this moment or the next, vast and absolute, deep purple shot through with veins of red and black. Finally, Dr. Valloton lays her pencil down and takes a deep breath.

  “Is this a confession, Hannah?” she asks, and the obscene earnestness is dissolving into something that may be eager anticipation, or simple clinical curiosity, or only dread. “Did you kill your sister?”

  And Hannah shakes her head and shuts her eyes tight.

  “Judith fell into the well,” she says calmly. “She moved the tin, and got too close to the edge. The sheriff showed my parents where a little bit of the ground had collapsed under her weight. She fell into the well, and she drowned.”

  “Who are you trying so hard to convince? Me or yourself?”

  “Do you really think it matters?” Hannah replies, matching a question with a question, tit for tat.

  “Yes,” Dr. Valloton says. “Yes, I do. You need to know the truth.”

  “Which one?” Hannah asks, smiling against the pain swelling behind her eyes, and this time the psychologist doesn’t bother answering, lets her sit silently with her eyes shut until the clock decides her hour’s up . . .

  11.

  Peter Mulligan picks up a black pawn and moves it ahead two squares
; Hannah removes it from the board with a white knight. He isn’t even trying today, and that always annoys her. Peter pretends to be surprised that’s he’s lost another piece, then pretends to frown and think about his next move while he talks.

  “In Russian,” he says, “chernobyl is the word for wormwood. Did Kellerman give you a hard time?”

  “No,” Hannah says. “No, he didn’t. In fact, he said he’d actually rather do the shoot in the afternoon. So everything’s jake, I guess.”

  “Small miracles,” Peter sighs, picking up a rook and setting it back down again. “So you’re doing the anthropologist’s party?”

  “Yeah,” she replies. “I’m doing the anthropologist’s party.”

  “Monsieur Ordinaire. You think he was born with that name?”

  “I think I couldn’t give a damn, as long as his check doesn’t bounce. A thousand dollars to play dress-up for a few hours. I’d be a fool not to do the damned party.”

  Peter picks the rook up again and dangles it in the air above the board, teasing her. “Oh, his book,” he says. “I remembered the title the other day. But then I forgot it all over again. Anyway, it was something on shamanism and shapeshifters, werewolves and masks, that sort of thing. It sold a lot of copies in ’68, then vanished from the face of the earth. You could probably find out something about it online.” Peter sets the rook down and starts to take his hand away.

  “Don’t,” she says. “That’ll be check mate.”

  “You could at least let me lose on my own, dear,” he scowls, pretending to be insulted.

  “Yeah, well, I’m not ready to go home yet,” Hannah replies, and Peter Mulligan goes back to dithering over the chessboard and talking about Monsieur Ordinaire’s forgotten book. In a little while, she gets up to refill both their coffee cups, and there’s a single black and grey pigeon perched on the kitchen windowsill, staring in at her with its beady piss-yellow eyes. It almost reminds her of something she doesn’t want to be reminded of, and so she raps on the glass with her knuckles and frightens it away.