The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  The camera wanders through the forest, and there are close-ups of a sleeping doe and her fawn and of a watchful owl and of a hungry, hunting fox. It springs, and the scream of a rabbit briefly shatters the tranquil night. My mouth has gone very dry, and I lick my lips, wishing I had a swallow of something, anything at all. Hana’s Dr Pepper would do just fine.

  A woman’s voice says, “It must be lonely work,” and it takes me a second or two to realize that the voice is part of the movie and not someone standing there beside me.

  The film jump-cuts then to a wide clearing and a small camp somewhere deep in the forest, and I think that this must be the source of the distant flickering I saw earlier on. At the center of the camp, surrounded by ragged tree stumps, there’s a high conical billet formed from dozens of immense logs standing on their ends and leaning in one against all the others, covered over in places with a layer of soil and chunks of turf, forming a sort of smoldering bonfire or oven. There seems only to be a single man watching the fire, and he’s standing with his back to the billet, gazing towards the camera, into the ancient forest ringing the clearing. The man is holding some manner of old-fashioned rifle, a flintlock maybe. I don’t know shit about guns.

  He says, “Who was that? Who goes there?”

  And the woman replies, “No one who means you harm. Only someone passing by who thought you might be happy for the company.”

  “I’m not alone,” says the man.

  “I know,” answers the woman. “But all your companions are sleeping.”

  “I could wake them quickly enough,” he tells her, “if the need arises.”

  “Of course,” she says. “And you have your rifle. And there must be hounds nearby to keep away the wolves.”

  “Yes,” says the man. “There are hounds, three of them, and I’m a very good shot. You’d do well to keep that in mind.”

  “Naturally,” says the woman, and the camera pans around as she emerges from between the boles of two especially enormous pines. The woman is smiling for the man, and she’s dressed in a traditional Bavarian dirndl that reaches down almost to the ground. Standing there in the Avon theater, I have no idea that’s what her dress is called, a dirndl. I’ll only find that out later on, by checking with Wikipedia, which describes it as “a light circular cut dress, gathered at the waist, that falls below the knee.” She’s also wearing a bonnet. The woman is tall to the point that she could fairly be called lanky, and her face is plain and angular, and her ears are a little too big. But despite all of this, I think she may be one of the most singularly beautiful women I have ever seen. I stop hugging myself and, instead, rest my hands on the back of the theater seat in front of me. The worn velveteen feels like moss.

  “It must be lonely work,” the woman says again. “The life of a charcoal burner, all these long, cold nights spent so far from your home and your wife and your children.”

  “How do you know I have a wife and children?” he asks.

  “Well, don’t you?” she replies. “What an awful waste it would be if you didn’t. So, I prefer to assume that you do.”

  The man has dark eyes, a nose that looks as if it has been broken at least once, and there is a ragged scar that bisects his lower lip and runs the length of his chin down onto his throat. He has the face of someone who is still young, but also the face of someone who has been made prematurely old by the circumstances of his life, by the many hardships and losses endured and written in the lines and creases and angles of skin and bones. It’s a curiously effective paradox, not so different from the woman who is beautiful despite her awkwardness (or, perhaps, because of it).

  “I know who you are,” says the man warily. “My grandmother taught me about you when I was still a boy. I know what you are.”

  “Then you also know I mean you no harm.”

  “I know the stories I was taught,” he replies, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.

  “Then you know that this forest is my forest,” she tells him, and now the woman takes another step nearer to the man. I realize for the first time that she’s barefoot. “You know that these trees are my trees. If your grandmother was a wise woman, she taught you that much, surely.”

  The man, the charcoal burner, crosses himself, and the woman frowns the sort of frown that, more than anything else, is an expression of disappointment, as if she’d hoped for more from this man. As if she’d had cause to expect more.

  “After a hard winter,” she says, “I may bring prosperity, and for so little a price as a loaf of fresh bread or a hen’s egg left at the edge of your fields.”

  The man nods, and he says, “That is true, so far as it goes. But you also bring hardship when the mood suits you. You cause hunters to lose their way on clearly marked trails and to miss shots that ought to have found their marks. You lead children from their homes and into the dens of hungry animals, and you drown swimmers whom you fancy have slighted you in some small way or another.”

  “These are the sorts of tales you were taught?” asks the woman, who I realize now, and must have known all along, is not simply a human woman.

  “They are. And there are others.”

  “Tell me,” she says, and so the charcoal burner tells a story about a young man who was walking in the forest late one summer afternoon and happened to catch the briefest glimpse of the woman bathing in a spring. At once, he became so infatuated with her that he withdrew into himself and would speak to no one and would not eat or drink or care for himself in any way.

  “He only lived a few weeks,” says the man. “He was a man my grandmother knew when she was a girl, the son of the cooper in the village where she grew up.”

  “I don’t mean to call her a liar,” says the beautiful, awkward woman in the dirndl, “but I would have you know your grandmother’s tale was only half the truth of the matter. Yes, a cooper’s son from her village saw me bathing, and yes, he wasted away because I wished it so. But she did not tell you all the tale. She did not say that after he had discovered the spring where I bathe, he returned with iron horseshoes and used them to lay a trap, for his grandmother had taught him how cold iron undoes me. She did not tell you how, when I was defenseless, the cooper’s son raped me and cut off a lock of my hair to keep as a souvenir. I do not mean to call your grandmother a liar, but a story told the wrong way round is not the truth.”

  The woman takes another step nearer the charcoal burner, and this time he takes a step backwards towards the smoldering billet, yielding a foot of earth. And I want now to look away from the screen, though I would not yet be entirely able to explain just exactly why. But this pretend movie forest is too familiar, and I can’t shake the feeling that I’ve heard this woman’s voice before. But I do not look away. I want to search for the spot where Hana is sitting, but I don’t. I stand there, and I watch. I stand there, and I listen.

  “There is another story I know,” the charcoal burner says, and I can tell he’s trying hard to sound brave, and I can also hear the fear in his voice. Whatever confidence he might have had in his ability to hold this strange woman at bay is withering. Whatever faith he had is leaving him. “A story,” he says, “in which you came down out of your wood on a night when the moon was new and the sky was dark save starlight, and you sat beneath the window of a mother nursing her newborn daughter, her firstborn. She sang lullabies to the baby, but you sang, too, and your song was so much fairer than the mother’s that it was as if you alone were singing. Your melody took root in the mind of the infant, and, as she grew, it twisted her, shaping her to your own purposes. The girl became wicked, and where she walked wheat would not grow, and if she looked upon cows and goats their milk would turn sour and curdle in their udders. She was always singing in a tongue that no one knew, and they say that her songs drove dogs mad and could summon flies and toads.”

  “And what became of this poor unfortunate?” asks the woman.

  “What finally became of her,” replies the man, “is that she was driven away from her home for
being a witch, turned out into the forest where she might do less harm to people who’d never done any harm to her. She was sent back to the huldra who had sung to her as a baby and so stolen her mind and soul. Not even a fortnight passed before her own brothers found her hanging from a tree, strangled by a noose woven from hair the color of water at the bottom of a well. They left her there for the crows and the maggots, fearing your wrath if they dared even to cut her down and bury her.”

  “And you believe this story?” the woman asks the charcoal burner.

  And he answers her, “I’ve known stranger things to be true.”

  And I think, Like a raven that is only a reflection in a mirror. Like seeing for the first time that the woman you love has a tail.

  Onscreen, the woman nods, and she says, “I was passing by, is all, and it occurred to me what lonely work your work must be and how perhaps you would be grateful for my company and for conversation. I meant no offense. I did not mean to cause you such alarm. I’ll be on my way. But you’ll remember this is my forest, and those are my trees.”

  And then the woman turns and walks away, disappearing back into the blackness between the trunks of the two especially enormous pines, and the charcoal burner is left standing alone in the clearing by his billet. The camera leaves him there, moving slowly around the circumference of the burning woodpile, coming at last to the corpses of three dogs, their necks broken and their throats torn open, as if by teeth and claws. Behind the murdered dogs is a lean-to where the bodies of the charcoal burner’s companions lie slumped and mangled. It is a massacre.

  And then Hana is standing beside me, and she’s holding my hand, and she says, “I think we should go home now. I think it was a mistake, bringing you here.”

  “I’m sorry I took so long,” I say.

  “Don’t worry about it this time. It’s a silly sort of film, anyway.”

  Onscreen, black and white has given way to color, and the forest has been replaced by a modern city, the streets of Berlin crowded with automobiles and pedestrians all staring at their devices, instead of looking where it is they’re going. A woman steps in front of a bus, and someone screams. Finally, I look away. Instead of the old theater smell, I can smell pine straw and wood smoke.

  “I don’t feel well,” I say.

  “You’ll feel better soon,” Hana tells me, and then she leads me out of the auditorium and back to the brightly lit lobby. Out on the street, it’s stopped raining.

  5.

  All the way back home to Wood Street, neither of us talks. The radio is on, and there’s music, but it seems to come from somewhere very far off. The roads are still wet and shiny, the pavement glimmering dully beneath the garish new LED streetlights the city has recently installed. Hana drives, and I think about the movie and the raven and how I miss the soft yellow luminescence of the old sodium-vapor bulbs. From Thayer to Wickenden, then Point Street and over the bridge that crosses the filthy slate-colored river, then across the interstate to Westminster to Parade Street to home. I sit quietly and gaze out the passenger-side window, and I think how it is like finding your way back along a forest path. The street signs are breadcrumbs. The traffic lights are notches carved in the bark of living trees, electric talismans against losing one’s way.

  I have a beer, and then I have a second beer. I watch a few minutes of something on television, a news story on an outbreak of cholera in Yemen. Hana asks if I’m coming to bed, so I do. She’s sitting up naked, with her back against the oak headboard, her knees pulled up close to her chest, her arms wrapped around them. Her tail hangs limply over the side of the bed. She watches me while I undress, and she waits there while I go to the bathroom and brush and floss my teeth.

  When I come back into the bedroom, she says, “You haven’t lost your mind. You’re not insane.”

  I sit down on my side of the bed, and it creaks and pops. “We’re going to have to bite the bullet and get a new box spring soon,” I say. “This thing’s over a decade old. One night, it’s just going to collapse beneath us.” I sit there staring at the open window, smelling all the fresh, clean smells that come after a summer rain, even in so dirty a city as Providence. I think there might yet be more rain to come before sunrise and we shouldn’t fall sleep with the window open, so I should get up and close it. But I don’t. I just sit there, my feet on the floor, my back to Hana.

  “I know it must seem that way,” she says, “like you’re losing your mind, and I apologize for that. I genuinely do.”

  I think about all the things I could say in response, and then I think about just lying down and trying to sleep, and then I think about getting up, putting my clothes back on, and going for a long walk.

  “I can be an awful coward,” she says. “Using the theater that way, because I was afraid of telling you myself.”

  And I say, “When I was a little girl, maybe ten, maybe eleven years old, I got lost in the woods once. I’m not sure how it happened, but it did. I grew up in the country, and getting lost in the woods wasn’t something I worried about. It wasn’t something that my parents or my grandparents worried would ever happen to me, because they’d taught me how not to lose my way. But it did happen that once. I got turned around somehow, and I walked for hours and hours, and finally it started getting dark, and that’s when I really got scared. As well as I knew those woods by day, I didn’t know them at all by twilight. The shadows changed them, changed the trees and the rocks, changed the way sound moved along the valley between the mountains.”

  “What did you do?” Hana asks.

  “What do frightened children lost in the forest pretty much always do?” I reply, trading her a question for a question.

  “I’ve never been lost in a forest,” she says.

  “Well,” I tell her, “they cry and they start calling out for help. Which is what I did. I shouted for my mother and my father and my grandparents. I even called out the names of our three dogs, hoping anyone at all would hear me and come find me and lead me safely back home.”

  “But they didn’t,” she says.

  “No, they didn’t. But someone else did.” And I want to ask her, Was that you or maybe a sister of yours? Was that you or some aunt or distant cousin? But I don’t. I stop staring at the window and stare at my feet, instead. “And I followed her back to the pasture at the edge of the road that led to our house, and I never saw her again. At some point, growing up, I decided I’d made her up. I decided that I’d been so afraid I’d invented her as some sort of coping mechanism that had allowed me to push back the panic and calm down and remember my own way out of the woods. And I believed that, until this morning, until I dreamed about being lost and found and about a woman with a cow’s tail and a raven on her shoulder who sang to me until I stopped crying.”

  “Would you like me to sing to you tonight?” she asks.

  “Why? Am I lost again tonight?”

  “No,” she says, “not lost. Just a little turned about.”

  “Sometimes,” I tell her, “I’d leave her little gifts. Offerings, I guess, to show my gratitude. A hardboiled egg, half a baloney sandwich, a Twinkie, and once I even left her one of my dolls.”

  “A doll with yellow hair,” says Hana, “yellow like freshly ground cornmeal, and a blue and white checked gingham dress, like Dorothy wore in The Wizard of Oz.”

  “Yes,” I say. “Like that. I left them in a hollow tree, like Boo Radley leaving gifts for Scout and Jem in To Kill a Mockingbird. I think I got the idea from the book, the idea to leave her gifts.”

  “And then you stopped,” Hana says.

  “We moved here. Dad got a different job, and we moved away.”

  For a moment or two, neither of us says anything more, and then Hana says that it’s late and that we should probably get some sleep, that I have work tomorrow and she has errands to run. When I don’t reply, when I neither agree nor disagree, she asks me if I’d prefer that she leaves and never comes back.

  “If that’s what you’d like, I’l
l go.”

  “No,” I say, without having to consider my answer. “I wouldn’t rather you leave.”

  “Then I’m glad,” she says.

  “It must be lonely work,” I say, remembering the barefoot woman in the dirndl and the charcoal burner.

  “Sometimes,” Hana tells me, and then she tells me that we probably shouldn’t fall asleep with the window open, that she’s pretty sure there will be more rain tonight.

  “What finally made you decide to show me?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” she replies. “I think I just got tired of keeping secrets.”

  I nod, because that seems like a fair enough answer. I have other questions, but they’re nothing that can’t wait for some other time. I get up and cross the room and close the window. I check to be sure that it’s locked, even though we’re on the second floor of the old house on Wood Street. Down on the sidewalk, there’s a black bird big as a tomcat, and when I tap on the glass, it spreads its wings and flies away.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN was born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in the southeastern U.S. Before turning to fiction writing full-time, she worked as a vertebrate paleontologist in both Alabama and Colorado. She cofounded the Birmingham Paleontological Society and, in 1988, described a new genus and species of ancient marine lizard, the mosasaur Selmasaurus russelli.

  In 1992, Kiernan wrote her first novel, The Five of Cups, and has since authored thirteen more novels, including The Drowning Girl, winner of the Bram Stoker and the James Tiptree, Jr. awards. She is the author of more than two hundred and fifty short stories, which have been collected in fifteen volumes, including Tales of Pain and Wonder, A is for Alien, The Ammonite Violin & Others, Dear Sweet Filthy World, The Dinosaur Tourist, and the World Fantasy Award winner The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories. She also received the World Fantasy Award for her short story “The Prayer of Ninety Cats.” Kiernan has written graphic novels for both DC/Vertigo (The Dreaming, The Girl Who Would Be Death, Bast: Eternity Game) and Dark Horse Comics (the three-volume Alabaster series, winner of the Bram Stoker Award). In 1996 and 1997, she fronted a short-lived goth-rock band, Death’s Little Sister.