The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Twenty-three seconds to go.

  Almost two miles down, Tiburón II is listing badly to starboard, and then the ROV bumps against one of the boulders, and the lights stop flickering and seem to grow a little brighter. The vehicle appears to pause, as though considering its next move. The day he sold me the tape, the MBARI tech said that a part of the toolsled had wedged itself into the rubble. He told me it took the crew of the R/V Western Flyer more than two hours to maneuver the sub free. Two hours of total darkness at the bottom of the canyon, after the lights and the cameras died.

  Eighteen seconds.

  Sixteen.

  This time it’ll be different, I think, like a child trying to wish away a beating. This time, I’ll see the trick of it, the secret interplay of light and shadow, the hows and whys of a simple optical illusion—

  Twelve.

  Ten.

  The first time, I thought that I was only seeing something carved into the stone or part of a broken sculpture. The gentle curve of a hip, the tapering line of a leg, the twin swellings of small breasts. A nipple the color of granite.

  Eight.

  But there’s her face—and there’s no denying that it’s her face—Jacova Angevine, her face at the bottom the sea, turned up towards the surface, towards the sky and Heaven beyond the weight of all that black, black water.

  Four.

  I bite my lip so hard that I taste blood. It doesn’t taste so different from the ocean.

  Two.

  She opens her eyes, and they are not her eyes, but the eyes of some marine creature adapted to that perpetual night. The soulless eyes of an anglerfish or gulper eel, eyes like matching pools of ink, and something darts from her parted lips—

  And then there’s only static, and I sit staring into the salt-and-pepper roar.

  All the answers were here. Everything that you’re asking yourself . . . I offered all of it to you.

  Later—an hour or only five minutes—I pressed eject, and the cassette slid obediently from the VCR. I read the label, aloud, in case I’d read it wrong every single time before, in case the timestamp on the video might have been mistaken. But it was the same as always, the day before Jacova waited on the beach at Moss Landing for the supplicants of the Open Door of Night. The day before she led them into the sea. The day before she drowned.

  8.

  I close my eyes.

  And she’s here again, as though she never left.

  She whispers something dirty in my ear, something profane, and her breath smells like sage and toothpaste.

  The protestors are demanding that the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute (MBARI) end its ongoing exploration of the submarine canyon immediately. The twenty-five-mile-long canyon, they claim, is a sacred site that is being desecrated by scientists. Jacova Angevine, former Berkeley professor and leader of the controversial Open Door of Night cult, compares the launching of the new submersible Tiburón II to the ransacking of the Egyptian pyramids by grave robbers. (San Francisco Chronicle)

  I tell her that I have to go to New York, that I have to take this assignment, and she replies that maybe it’s for the best. I don’t ask her what she means; I can’t imagine that it’s important.

  And she kisses me.

  Later, when we’re done, and I’m too exhausted to sleep, I lie awake, listening to the sea and the small, anxious sounds she makes in her dreams.

  The bodies of fifty-three men and women, all of whom may have been part of a religious group known as the Open Door of Night, have been recovered following Wednesday’s drownings near Moss Landing, CA. Deputies have described the deaths as a mass suicide. The victims were all reported to be between 22 and 36 years old. Authorities fear that at least two dozen more may have died in the bizarre episode and recovery efforts continue along the coast of Monterey County. (CNN.com)

  I close my eyes, and I’m in the old warehouse on Pierce Street again; Jacova’s voice thunders from the PA speakers mounted high on the walls around the cavernous room. I’m standing in the shadows all the way at the back, apart from the true believers, apart from the other reporters and photographers and cameramen who have been invited here. Jacova leans into the microphone, angry and ecstatic and beautiful—terrible, I think—and that hideous carving is squatting there on its altar beside her. There are candles and smoldering incense and bouquets of dried seaweed, conch shells and dead fish, carefully arranged about the base of the statue.

  “We can’t remember where it began,” she says, “where we began,” and they all seem to lean into her words like small boats pushing against a violent wind. “We can’t remember, of course we can’t remember, and they don’t want us to even try. They’re afraid, and in their fear they cling desperately to the darkness of their ignorance. They would have us do the same, and then we would never recall the garden nor the gate, would never look upon the faces of the great fathers and mothers who have returned to the deep.”

  None of it seems the least bit real, not the ridiculous things that she’s saying, or all the people dressed in white, or the television crews. This scene is not even as substantial as a nightmare. It’s very hot in the warehouse, and I feel dizzy and sick and wonder if I can reach an exit before I vomit.

  I close my eyes, and I’m sitting in a bar in Brooklyn, watching them wade into the sea, and I’m thinking, Some son of a bitch is standing right there taping this and no one’s trying to stop them, no one’s lifting a goddamn finger.

  I blink, and I’m sitting in an office in Manhattan, and the people who write my checks are asking me questions I can’t answer.

  “Good god, you were fucking the woman, for Christ’s sake, and you’re telling me you had no idea whatsoever that she was planning this?”

  “Come on. You had to have known something.”

  “They all worshipped some sort of prehistoric fish god, that’s what I heard. No one’s going to buy that you didn’t see this coming—”

  “People have a right to know. You still believe that, don’t you?”

  Answers are scarce in the mass suicide of a California cult, but investigators are finding clues to the deaths by logging onto the Internet and Web sites run by the cult’s members. What they’re finding is a dark and confusing side of the Internet, a place where bizarre ideas and beliefs are exchanged and gain currency. Police said they have gathered a considerable amount of information on the background of the group, known as the Open Door of Night, but that it may be many weeks before the true nature of the group is finally understood. (CNN.com)

  And my clumsy hands move uncertainly across her bare shoulders, my fingertips brushing the puckered chaos of scar tissue there, and she smiles for me.

  On my knees in an alley, my head spinning, and the night air stinks of puke and saltwater.

  “Okay, so I first heard about this from a woman I interviewed who knew the family,” the man in the Radiohead T-shirt says. We’re sitting on the patio of a bar in Pacific Grove, and the sun is hot and glimmers white off the bay. His name isn’t important, and neither is the name of the bar. He’s a student from L.A., writing a book about the Open Door of Night, and he got my e-mail address from someone in New York. He has bad teeth and smiles too much.

  “This happened back in ’76, the year before Jacova’s mother died. Her father, he’d take them down to the beach at Moss Landing two or three times every summer. He got a lot of his writing done out there. Anyway, apparently the kid was a great swimmer, like a duck to water, but her mother never let her go very far out at that beach because there are these bad rip currents. Lots of people drown out there, surfers and shit.”

  He pauses and takes a couple of swallows of beer, then wipes the sweat from his forehead.

  “One day, her mother’s not watching, and Jacova swims too far out and gets pulled down. By the time the lifeguards get her back to shore, she’s stopped breathing. The kid’s turning blue, but they keep up the mouthto-mouth and CPR, and she finally comes around. They get Jacova to the hospital up in Wa
tsonville, and the doctors say she’s fine, but they keep her for a few days anyhow, just for observation.”

  “She drowned,” I say, staring at my own beer. I haven’t taken a single sip. Beads of condensation cling to the bottle and sparkle like diamonds.

  “Technically, yeah. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart had stopped. But that’s not the fucked-up part. While she’s in Watsonville, she keeps telling her mother some crazy story about mermaids and sea monsters and demons, about these things trying to drag her down to the bottom of the sea and drown her, and how it wasn’t an undertow at all. She’s terrified, convinced that they’re still after her, these monsters. Her mother wants to call in a shrink, but her father says no, fuck that, the kid’s just had a bad shock, she’ll be fine. Then, the second night she’s in the hospital, these two nurses turn up dead. A janitor found them in a closet just down the hall from Jacova’s room. And here’s the thing you’re not gonna believe, but I’ve seen the death certificates and the autopsy reports, and I swear to you this is the God’s honest truth.”

  Whatever’s coming next, I don’t want to hear it. I know that I don’t need to hear it. I turn my head and watch a sailboat out on the bay, bobbing about like a toy.

  “They’d drowned, both of them. Their lungs were full of saltwater. Five miles from the goddamn ocean, but these two women drowned right there in a broom closet.”

  “And you’re going to put this in your book?” I ask him, not taking my eyes off the bay and the little boat.

  “Yeah,” he replies. “I am. It fucking happened, man, just like I said, and I can prove it.”

  I close my eyes, shutting out the dazzling, bright day, and wish I’d never agreed to meet with him.

  I close my eyes.

  “Down there,” Jacova whispers, “you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”

  We would be warm below the storm

  In our little hideaway beneath the waves.

  I close my eyes. Oh god, I’ve closed my eyes.

  She wraps her strong, suntanned arms tightly around me and takes me down, down, down, like the lifeless body of a child caught in an undertow. And I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean. I would go with her, because, like a stone that has become an incarnation of mystery, she has drawn a circle around me.

  BRADBURY WEATHER

  1.

  I STILL HAVE all the old books that Sailor left behind when she finally packed up and went looking for the Fenrir temples. I keep them in a big cargo crate with most of her other things, all that shit I haven’t been able to part with. One of the books, a collection of proverbs, was written more than two hundred years ago by a Gyuto monk. It was published after his death in a Chinese prison, the manuscript smuggled out by someone or another, translated into Spanish and English, and then published in America. The monk, who did not wish to be remembered by name, wrote: “No story has a beginning, and no story has an end. Beginnings and endings may be conceived to serve a purpose, to serve a momentary and transient intent, but they are, in their truer nature, arbitrary and exist solely as a construct of the mind of man.”

  Sometimes, very late at night, or very early in the morning, when I should be sleeping or meditating, I read from Sailor’s discarded books, and I’ve underlined that passage in red. If what I’m about to write down here needs an epigraph, that’s probably as good as any I’ll ever find, just as this beginning is as arbitrary and suitable as any I could ever choose. She left me. I couldn’t have stopped her, not that I ever would have tried. I’m not that sort of woman. It was her decision, and I believed then it would have been wrong for me to interfere. But six months later, after the nightmares began, and I failed a routine mental-health evaluation, I resigned my teaching post and council seat and left to chase rumors and the ghost of her across the Xanthe Terra and Lunae Planum.

  In Bhopai, a pornography dealer sold me a peep stick of Sailor dancing in a brothel. And I was told that maybe the stick had been made at Hope VII, a slatternly, backdust agradome that had seen better days and then some. I’d been up there once, on Council business, more than twenty years before; Hope’s Heaven, as the locals like to call the place, sits like a boil in the steep basalt hills northwest of Tharsis Tholus. The dome has been breached and patched so many times it looks more like a quilt than a habitat.

  I know a woman there. We worked together a few times, but that’s ancient fucking history. These days, she runs a whorehouse, though everyone in Hope’s Heaven calls her a mechanic, and who the hell am I to argue? Her bulls let me in the front door, despite my bureaucratic pedigree and the Council brands on the backs of my hands. I played the stick for her, played it straight through twice, and Jun’ko Valenzuela shrugged her narrow, tattooed shoulders, shook her head once, and then went back to stuffing the bowl of her pipe with the skunky britch weed she used to buy cheap off the shiks down in New Riyadh.

  I waited for her to finish, because I’d spent enough time in the mechanic’s company to know that she talked when she was ready and fuck all if that wasn’t good enough. If I got impatient, if I got pushy, she’d have one of her girls handing me my hat and hustling me straight back across town to the air station, no ifs, ands, buts, or maybes. So, I sat quietly in my chair and watched while she used an antique ivory tamper to get the weed just the way she wanted it, before lighting the pipe with a match. Jun’ko exhaled, and the smoke was the color of steel, almost the same color as her long dreadlocks.

  “I don’t do business with the law,” she said. “Least ways, not if I have a choice. But you already knew that, didn’t you, Dorry? You knew that before you came in here.”

  “I’m not police,” I said, starting to feel like I was reading my lines from a script I’d rehearsed until the words had lost their meaning, going through motions designed to waste my time and amuse Jun’ko. “This isn’t a criminal investigation,” I assured her.

  “It’s bloody well close enough, perra. You’re nothing but a bunch of goddamn witches, I say, badges or no badges, the whole lot of you Council rats.”

  “I don’t work for any corporate agency or government corpus, nor do I—”

  “Maybe not,” she interrupted, “but you do work with them,” and she squinted at me across the small table, her face wreathed in smoke. “Don’t deny it. They say fuck, you ask who. You tell them whatever they need to know, whenever they come around asking questions, especially if there’s a percentage for your troubles.”

  “I already told you, this is a personal matter. I told you that before I ran the stick.”

  “People tell me lots of things. Most times, turns out they’re lying.”

  “Has it ever occurred to you that just might mean you’re running in the wrong circles?” I asked, the question slipping out before I let myself think better of it. There she was trying to pick a fight, looking for any excuse to have me thrown out of her place, and there I was playing along, like I thought I’d ever get a second chance.

  “Oh, the thought has crossed my mind,” she said calmly around a mouthful of britch smoke, smiled, and the sinuous gold and crimson Chinese dragon tattooed on her left shoulder uncoiled and flashed its gilded eyes. “Why are you asking me if I’ve seen this little share crop of yours?” Jun’ko said, and she motioned at the peep stick with her pipe. “It’s obvious that was scratched here, and nothing happens in my place I don’t know about.”

  “Was she working for you?”

  The dragon on Jun’ko’s shoulder showed me teeth like daggers.

  “Yeah, Dorry. She worked for me.”

  “When’d she leave?”

  “I didn’t say she had.”

  “But she’s not here now—”

  “No, she’s not,” Jun’ko Valenzuela said and stared into the softly glowing bowl of her pipe. “That one, conchita ca
shed out and bought herself a nook on a freighter that came through Heaven a couple months back. One of those big transpolar wagons, hauling ore down from the Acidalia.”

  “Did this freighter happen to have a name?”

  “Oh, no damn doubt about it,” she smiled and emptied the bowl of her pipe into an ashtray cut from cobalt-blue glass. “I just don’t happen to remember what it was.”

  “Or where it was headed.”

  “Lots of places, most likely.”

  “She’s looking for the Fenrir,” I said, saying too much, and Jun’ko laughed and tapped her pipe against the edge of the ashtray.

  “Jesus, Joseph, and Buddha, you know how to pick ’em, Dorry.”

  “She never told you that, that she was looking for the temples?”

  “Hell, no. She kept to herself, mostly. And if I’d known she was hodging for the wolf, I’d never have put her skinny ass on the menu. Mierda. You listen to me. Sácate el dedo del culo, and you get yourself right the fuck back to Herschel City. Count yourself slick all this Jane cadged was your heart.”

  “Is that what you’d do, Jun’ko?”

  She looked up at me, her hard brown eyes almost black in the dim light, and the dragon on her shoulder closed its mouth. “I got better sense than to crawl in bed with grey pilgrims,” she said. “And you’re officially out of time, Dorry. I trust you know the way back down to the street?”

  “I think I can figure it out.”

  “That’s ’cause you’re such a goddamn smart lady. Of course, maybe you’d like to have a drink and sample the product first,” and she nodded towards a couple of girls standing at the bar. “I’ll even see you get a little discount, just to show there’s no hard feelings.”