The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I am,” the girl replies, kneeling to gently kiss the Countess’ right cheek. “I have many mothers, as I have many daughters of my own. I watch over them all. I hold them to me and keep them safe.”

  “I’ve lost my mind,” the Countess whispers. “Long, long ago, I lost my mind.” She hesitantly raises her left hand, brushing back the girl’s filthy, matted hair, dislodging another feather. The Countess looks like an old woman. All traces of the youth she clung to with such ferocity have left her face, and her eyes have grown cloudy. “I am a madwoman.”

  “It makes no difference,” the gypsy girl replies.

  “Anna lied to me.”

  “Let that go, Mother. Let it all go. There are things I would show you. Wondrous things.”

  “I thought she loved me.”

  “She is a sorceress, Mother, and an inconstant lover. But I am true. And you’ll need no other’s love but mine.”

  The movie’s score has dwindled to a slow smattering of piano notes, a bow drawn slowly, nimbly across the strings of a cello. A hint of flute.

  The Countess whispers, “I called to the King of Cats.”

  The girl answers, “Cats rarely ever come when called. And certainly not ninety all at once.”

  And the brown girl leans forward, her lips pressed to the pale Countess’ right ear. Whatever she says, it’s nothing you can make out from your seat, from your side of the silver mirror. The gypsy girl kisses the Countess on the forehead.

  “I’m so very tired.”

  “Shhhhh, Mother. I know. It’s okay. You can rest now.”

  The Countess asks, “Who are you?”

  “I am the peace at the end of all things.”

  EXT. COURTYARD BELOW COUNTESS’ BALCONY.

  MORNING.

  The body of Elizabeth Báthory lies shattered on the flagstones, her face and clothes a mask of frozen blood. Fresh snow is falling on her corpse. A number of noisy crows surround the body. No music now, only the wind and the birds.

  FADE TO BLACK:

  ROLL CREDITS.

  THE END.

  As always, you don’t leave your seat until the credits are finished and the curtain has swept shut again, hiding the screen from view. As always, you’ve made no notes, preferring to rely on your memories.

  You follow the aisle to the auditorium doors and step out into the almost deserted lobby. The lights seem painfully bright. You hurry to the restroom. When you’re finished, you wash your hands, dry them, then spend almost an entire minute staring at your face in the mirror above the sink.

  Outside, it’s started to rain, and you wish you’d brought an umbrella.

  ONE TREE HILL (THE WORLD AS CATACLYSM)

  1.

  I AM DREAMING. Or I am awake.

  I’ve long since ceased to care, as I’ve long since ceased to believe it matters which. Dreaming or awake, my perceptions of the hill and the tree and what little remains of the house on the hill are the same. More importantly, more perspicuously, my perceptions of the hill and the house and the tree are the same. Or, as this admittedly is belief, and so open to debate, I cannot imagine it would matter whether I am dreaming or awake. And this observation is as good a place to begin as any.

  I am told in the village that the hill, the tree on the hill, was struck by lightning at, or just after, sunset on St. Crispin’s Day, eleven years ago. I am told in the village that no thunderstorm accompanied the lightning strike, that the October sky was clear and dappled with stars. The Village. It has a name, though I prefer to think of, and refer to, it simply as The Village. Nestled snugly—some would say claustrophobically—between the steep foothills of New Hampshire’s White Mountains, within what geographers name the Sandwich Range, and a deep lake the villagers call Witalema. On my maps, the lake has no name at all. A librarian in The Village told me that Witalema was derived from the language of the Abenakis, from the word gwitaalema, which, she said, may be roughly translated as “to fear someone.” I’ve found nothing in any book or anywhere online that refutes her claim, though I have also found nothing to confirm it. So, I will always think of that lake and its black, still waters as Lake Witalema and choose not to speculate on why its name means “to fear someone.” I found more than enough to fear on the aforementioned lightning-struck hill.

  There is a single, nameless cemetery in The Village, located within a stone’s throw of the lake. The oldest headstone I have found there dates back to 1674. That is, the man buried in the plot died in 1674. He was a born in 1645. The headstone reads: Ye blooming Youth who ƒee this Stone/Learn early Death may be your own. It seems oddly random to me that only the word see makes use of the Latin s. In stray moments I have wondered what the dead man might have ƒeen to warrant this peculiarity of the inscription, or if it is merely an engraver’s mistake that was not corrected and so has survived these past three hundred and thirty-eight years. I dislike the cemetery, perhaps because of its nearness to the lake, and so I have only visited it once. Usually, I find comfort in graveyards, and I have a large collection of rubbings taken from gravestones in New England.

  But why, I ask myself, do I shy from this one cemetery, and possibly only because of its closeness to Lake Witalema, when I returned repeatedly to the hill and the tree and what little remains of the house on the hill? It isn’t a question I can answer; I doubt I will ever be able to answer it. I only know that what I have seen on that hilltop is far more dreadful than anything the lake could ever have to show me.

  I am climbing the hill, and I am awake, or I am asleep.

  I’m thinking about the lightning strike on St. Crispin’s Day, lightning from a clear night sky, and I’m thinking of the fire that consumed the house and left the tree a gnarled charcoal crook. Also, my mind wanders—probably defensively—to the Vatican’s decision that too little evidence can be found to prove the existence of either St. Crispin or his twin brother, St. Crispinian, and how they survived their first close call with martyrdom, after being tossed into a river with millstones tied about their necks, only to be beheaded, finally, by decree of Rictus Varus. Climbing up that hill, pondering obscure Catholic saints who may not ever have lived, it occurs to me I may read too much. Or only read too much into what I read. I pause to catch my breath, and I glance up at the sky. Today there are clouds, unlike the night the lightning came. If the villagers are to be believed, of course. And given the nature of what sits atop the hill, the freak strike that night seems not so miraculous. The clouds seem to promise rain, and I’ll probably be soaking wet by the time I get back to my room in the rundown motel on the outskirts of The Village. Far off, towards what my tattered topographic map calls Mount Passaconaway, there is the low rumble of thunder (Passaconaway is another Indian name, from the Pennacook, a tribe closely related to the Abenakis, but I have no idea whatsoever what the word might mean). The trail is steep here, winding between spruce and pine, oaks, poplars, and red maples. I imagine the maple leaves must appear to catch fire in the autumn. Catch fire or bleed. The hill always turns my thoughts morbid, a mood that is not typical of my nature. Reading this, one might think otherwise, but that doesn’t change the truth of it. Having caught my breath, I continue up the narrow, winding path, hoping to reach the summit before the storm catches up with me. Weathered granite crunches beneath my boots.

  “Were I you,” said the old man who runs The Village’s only pharmacy, “I’d stay clear of that hill. No fit place to go wandering about. Not after . . .” And then he trailed off and went back to ringing up my purchase on the antique cash register.

  “. . . the lightning came,” I said, finishing his statement. “After the fire.”

  He glared at me and made an exasperated, disapproving sound.

  “You ain’t from around here, I know, and whatever you’ve heard, I’m guessing you’ve written it off as Swamp Yankee superstition.”

  “I have a more open mind than you think,” I told him.

  “Maybe that’s so. Maybe it ain’t,” he groused and looked for the
price on a can of pears in heavy syrup. “Either way, I guess I’ve said my piece. No fit place, that hill, and you’d do well to listen.”

  But I might have only dreamt that conversation, as I might have dreamt the graveyard on the banks of Lake Witalema, and the headstone of a man who died in 1674, and the twisted, charred tree, and . . .

  It doesn’t matter.

  2.

  I live in The City, a safe century of miles south and east of The Village. When I have work, I am a science journalist. When I do not, I am an unemployed science journalist who tries to stay busy by blogging what I would normally sell for whatever pittance is being offered. Would that I had become a political pundit or a war correspondent. But I didn’t. I have no interest or acumen for politics or bullets. I wait on phone calls, on jobs from a vanishing stable of newspapers and magazines, on work from this or that website. I wait. My apartment is very small, even by the standards of The City, and only just affordable on my budget. Or lack thereof. Four cramped rooms in the attic of a brownstone that was built when the neighborhood was much younger, overlooking narrow streets crowded with upscale boutiques and restaurants that charge an arm and a leg for a sparkling green bottle of S. Pellegrino. I can watch wealthy men and women walk their shitty little dogs.

  I have a few bookshelves, crammed with reference material on subjects ranging from cosmology to quantum physics, virology to paleontology. My coffee table, floor, desk, and almost every other conceivable surface are piled high with back issues of Science and Physical Review Letters and Nature and . . . you get the picture. That hypothetical you, who may or may not be reading this. I’m making no assumptions. I have my framed diplomas from MIT and Yale on the wall above my desk, though they only serve to remind me that whatever promise I might once have possessed has gone unrealized. And that I’ll never pay off the student loans that supplemented my meager scholarships. I try, on occasion, to be proud of those pieces of paper and their calligraphy and gold seals, but I rarely turn that trick.

  I sit, and I read. I blog, and I wait, watching as the balance in my bank account dwindles.

  One week ago tomorrow my needlessly fancy iPhone rang, and on the other end was an editor from Discover who’d heard from a field geologist about the lightning-struck hill near The Village, and who thought it was worth checking out. That it might make an interesting sidebar, at the very least. A bit of a meteorological mystery, unless it proved to be nothing but local tall tales. I had to pay for my own gas, but I’d have a stingy expense account for a night at a motel and a few meals. I was given a week to get the story in. I should say, obviously, I have long since exceeded my expense account and missed the deadline. I keep my phone switched off.

  It doesn’t matter anymore. In my ever decreasing moments of clarity, I find myself wishing that it did. I need the money. I need the byline. I absolutely do not need an editor pissed at me and word getting around that I’m unreliable.

  But it doesn’t matter anymore.

  Wednesday, one week ago, I got my ever-ailing, tangerine-and-rust Nissan out of the garage where I can’t afford to keep it. I left The City, and I left Massachusetts via I-493, which I soon traded for I-93, and then I-293 at Manchester. Then, it will suffice to say that I left the interstates and headed east until I reached The Village nestled here between the kneeling mountains. I didn’t make any wrong turns. It was easy to find. The directions the editor at Discover had emailed were correct in every way, right down to the shabby motel on the edge of The Village.

  Right down to the lat-long GPS coordinates of the hill and the tree and what little remains of the house on the hill. N 43.81591/W -71.37035.

  I think I have offered all these details only as an argument, to myself, that I am—or at least was once—a rational human being. Whatever I have become, or am becoming, I did start out believing the truths of the universe were knowable.

  But now I am sliding down a slippery slope towards the irrational.

  Now, I doubt everything I took for granted when I came here.

  Before I first climbed the hill.

  If the preceding is an argument, or a ward, or whatever I might have intended it as, it is a poor attempt, indeed.

  But it doesn’t matter, and I know that.

  3.

  I imagine that the crest of the hill was once quite picturesque. As I’ve mentioned, there’s an unobstructed view of the heavily wooded slopes and peaks of Mount Passaconaway and of the valleys and hills in between. This vista must be glorious under a heavy snowfall. I have supposed that is why the house was built here. Likely, it was someone’s summer home, possibly someone not so unlike myself, someone foreign to The Village.

  The librarian I spoke of earlier, I asked her if the hill has a name, and all she said was “One Tree.”

  “One Tree Hill?” I asked.

  “One Tree,” she replied curtly. “Nobody goes up there anymore.”

  I am quite entirely aware I am trapped inside, and that I am writing down, anything but an original tale of uncanny New England. But if I do not know, I will at least be honest about what I do not know. I have that responsibility, that fraying shred of naturalism remaining in me. Whether or not it is cliché is another thing which simply doesn’t matter.

  I reach the crest of the hill, and just like every time before, the first thing that strikes my eyes is the skeleton of that tree. I’m not certain, but I believe it was an oak. It must have been ancient, judging by the circumference and diameter of its base. It might have stood here when that man I have yet to (and will not) name was buried in 1674 near the banks of Lake Witalema. But I don’t know how long oak trees live, and I haven’t bothered to find out. It is a dead tree, and all the “facts” that render it more than a dead tree exist entirely independently of its taxonomy.

  Aside from the remains of the one tree, the hilltop is “bald.” The woods have not reclaimed it. If I stand at the lightning-struck tree, the nearest living tree, in any direction, is at least twenty-five yards away. There is only stone and bracken, weeds, vines, and fallen, rotten limbs. So, it is always hotter at the top of the hill, and the ground seems drier and rockier. There is a sense of flesh rubbed raw and unable to heal.

  Like all the times I have come here before, there is, immediately, the inescapable sense that I have entered a place so entirely and irrevocably defiled as to have passed beyond any conventional understanding of corruption. I cannot ever escape the impression that, somehow, the event that damned this spot (for it is damned) struck so very deeply at the fabric of this patch of the world as to render it beyond that which is either unholy or holy. Neither good nor evil have a place here. Neither are welcome, so profound was the damage done that one St. Crispin’s Night. And if the hill seems blasphemous, it is only because it has come to exist somewhere genuinely Outside . I won’t try to elaborate just yet. It is enough to say Outside . Even so, I’ll concede that the dead tree stands before me like an altar. It strikes me that way every time, in direct contradiction to what I’ve said about it. Or, I could say, instead, it stands like a sentry, but then one must answer the question about what it might be standing guard over. Bricks from a crumbling foundation? The maze of poison ivy and green briars? A court of skunks, rattlesnakes, and crows?

  The sky presses down on the hill, heavy as the sea.

  From the top of the hill, the wide blue sky looks very hungry.

  What is it that skies eat? That thin rind of atmosphere between a planet and the hard vacuum of outer space? I’m asking questions that lead nowhere. I’m asking questions only because it occurs to me that I have never written them down, or that they have never before occurred to me so I ought to write them down.

  A cloudless night sky struck at the hill, drawing something out, even if I am unable to describe what that something is, and so I will say this event is the author of my questions on the possible diet of the sky.

  Even after eleven years, the top of the hill smells of smoke, ash, charcoal, and cinders—all those odors we mea
n when we say, “I can smell fire.” We cannot smell fire, but we smell the byproducts of combustion, and that smell lingers here. I wonder if it always will. I am standing at the top of the hill, thinking all these thoughts, when I hear something coming up quickly behind me. It’s not the noise a woman’s or a man’s feet would make. A deer, possibly. An animal with long and delicate limbs, small hooves to pick its way through the forest and along stony trails. This is what I think I hear, but, then, most people think they can smell fire.

  I take one step forward, and a charred section of root crunches beneath the soles of my hiking boots. The crunching seems very loud, though I suspect that’s only another illusion.

  “Why is it you keep coming back here?” she asks. The way she phrases the question, I could pretend I’ve never heard her ask it before. My mouth is dry. I want to remove my pack and take out the lukewarm bottle of water inside, but I don’t.

  “It could open wide and eat me,” I say to her. “A wide carnivorous sky like that.”

  There’s a pause, nothing but a stale bit of breeze through the leaves of the trees surrounding the lightning-struck ring. Then she laughs, that peculiar laugh of hers, which is neither unnerving nor a sound that in any way puts one at ease.

  “Now you’re being ridiculous,” she says.

  “I know,” I admit. “But that’s the way it makes me feel, hanging up there.”

  “What you describe is a feeling of dread.”

  “Isn’t that what happened here, that St. Crispin’s Day? Didn’t the sky open its mouth and gnaw this hill and everything on it—the tree, the house?”

  “You listen too much to those people in the village.”

  That’s the way she says it, the village. Never does she say The Village. It is an important nuance. What seems, as she has pointed out, dreadful to me is innately mundane to her.

  “They don’t have much to say about the hill,” I tell her.

  “No, they don’t. But what they do say, it’s hardly worth your time.”