The Big Book of Modern Fantasy

by The Big Book of Modern Fantasy (retail) (epub)

  No, not quiet. Crying? A soft sound, like a child awakened from sleep. He shook his head in pity. He didn’t know what other secrets the folk expected to drag out of their prisoner. She was just an old woman, no matter her skin, and anyway, what could they prove against the street peddler, guilty of nothing but being where being was no longer a sin.

  When the guard’s last echo disappeared into the night, Mema crept back to the well and picked up the stone harp’s broken pieces. She held the instrument in her free hand and released the grasshopper on the well’s edge. She half-expected it to fly away, but he sat there, flexing his legs in a slow rhythmic motion, preening. She clasped the harp together again, sat down on her haunches, and began to blow softly. As the child curled up in the warmth of her own roundness, she set off to sleep, drifting in a strange lullaby. She could vaguely hear the grasshopper accompanying her, a mournful ticking, and the grasswoman softly crying below, the sound like grieving. Maybe, she thought as her lids slowly closed, maybe the grasswoman could hear it, too, and would be comforted.

  * * *

  —

  She awoke in a kingdom of drumming, the ground thumping beneath her head and her feet. The hoppers! A thousand of them covered the bare ground all around her and filled the whole street. Squatting and jumping, the air was jubilant, but the child could not imagine the cause of celebration. The grasswoman is free! she thought and tried to rise, but the grasshoppers covered every inch of her, as if she too were part of the glass city’s stone streets. All around they stared at her, slantfaced and bandwinged, spurthroated and bowlegged. It was still night—the twin Sun had long receded from the sky, and even the lamps of the city were fast asleep. Nothing could explain the hoppers’ arousal, their joy, or their number, or why they had not retreated in the canopy of night. Not even the world, in all its universal dimensions, seemed a big enough field for them to wing through.

  Mema carefully rose, brushing off handfuls of the hoppers, careful not to crush their wings. The air hummed with the sound of a thousand drums, each hopper signaling its own rapid-fire rhythm. They seemed to preen and stir, turn around, as if letting the stars warm their wings and their belly. The child tried to mind each step, but it was difficult in the dark, and finally she gave up and leaned into the well’s gaping mouth. Grasswoman? she called, and stepped back in surprise. The drumming sound was coming from deep within the well. She placed her hands above the well’s lip and felt a fresh wave of wings and legs pouring from it, the iridescent wings sparkling and flowing like water. The grasswoman had vanished; the place had lost all memory of her, it seemed. Mema called the old woman, but received no answer, only the drumming and the flash of wings.

  She decided to return to the okro, the stone tree where for a time, the grasswoman had lived. There was no longer any other place she might go. Some pitied the grasswoman, but none enough to take her in—no street, nor house; only the stone tree’s belly. As Mema walked along, the hoppers seemed to follow her, and after a time, her movements stopped being steps and felt like wind. It was as if the hoppers carried her along with them, and not the other way around. They were leading the child to the okro, to the stone forest, back to the place where the story begin.

  Mema arrived at the grasswoman’s door and looked at the stone floor covered with blood-red shards, the heartstone ground into powder. The okro was no longer dull stone, but was covered in a curious pattern, black with finely carved red lines, pulsing like veins. She stood at the door of the great trunk and entered, head bowed, putting distance between herself and time. Was there any use in waiting for the old woman? Mema blinked back tears, listened for the hoppers’ drum. Surely by now, the grasswoman had vanished, taking her stories and her strange ways with her, a fugitive of the blackfolk’s world again. The child took the stone harp and placed it to her mouth. She lulled herself in its shattered rhythm, listening with an ear outside the world, a place that confused her, listening as the hoppers kept time with their hindlegs and tapping feet. She played and dreamed, dreamed and played, but if she had listened harder, she would have heard the arrival of a different beat.

  There she is! That old white heffa inside the tree!

  Spiteful steps surrounded the okro, crushing the hoppers underfoot.

  It’s the woman with her mouth harp. Go on play, then. We’ll see how well you dance!

  They tossed their night torches aside, raised their mallets, and flung their pickaxes through the air. The hammers crushed the ancient stone, metal teeth bit at stone bark. Inside, the girl child had unleashed a dream: her hair was turning into tiny leaves, her legs into lean timber. Her fingers dug rootlike into the stone soil. The child was in another realm, she was flesh turning into wood, wood into stone, girl child as tree, stone tree of life. Red hot blades of grass burst in tight bubbles at her feet, pulsing from the okro’s stone floor, a crimson wave of lava roots erupting into mythic drumbeats and bursting wingsongs. Somewhere she heard a ring shout chorus, hot cry of the settlers’ voices made night, the ground fluttering all around them, the hoppers surrounding the bubbling tree, ticking, wing-striking, leg-raising, romp-shaking vibrations splitting the stone floor, warming in the groundswell of heat. And from the grassdreaming tree, blood-red veins writhing, there rose the grasswoman’s hands. They stroked crimson flowers that blossomed into rubies and fell on the great stone floor. Corollas curled, monstrous branches born and released, petal-like on the crest of black flames. The child’s drumskull throbbed as she concentrated, straining to hear the grasswoman’s call, to remember her lessons, how to make music without words, without air and drum, and her thoughts floated in the air, red hot embers of brimstone blues drifting toward the glass-walled city.

  And as the ground erupted beneath them, the settlers stood in horror, began to run and flee, but the children, the children rose from tucked-in beds, the tiny backs of their hands erasing sleep, their soft feet ignoring slippers and socks, toes running barefoot over the stone streets and the rocks, they came dancing, skip hop jump, through the glass door into the stone wood, waves of hoppers at their heels, their blue-green backs arched close to the ground as they hopped from stone to hot stone, drumming as they went, bending like strong reeds, like green grass lifting toward the night. And that was when Mema felt the sting of blaze, when the voices joined her in the song of ash, and the stone’s new heart beat an ancient rhythm, the children singing, the hoppers drumming, the settlers crying.

  And when the Sun rose, the land one great shadow of fire and ash, the hoppers lay in piles at their feet. They had shed their skins that now looked like fingerprints, the dust of the children blowing in the wind all around them. And that night, when the twin Sun set, the settlers would think of their lost children and remember the old woman who ate stones and cried grasshoppers for tears.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan (1964– ) was born in Dublin, Ireland, and raised in the southeastern United States. She studied vertebrate paleontology, geology, and biology before becoming a full-time writer. She worked as a teacher and in museums; her scientific publications include a coauthored article for the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology that described a new genus and species of ancient marine lizard, the mosasaur Selmasaurus russelli. She began writing fiction in the early 1990s, and her first story, “Persephone,” appeared in 1995. She has since published numerous novels, graphic novels, collections, and more than two hundred short stories. She has won four International Horror Guild Awards, two Bram Stoker Awards and World Fantasy Awards, and the James Tiptree, Jr. Memorial Award. Her collections include Tales of Pain and Wonder (2000), To Charles Fort, with Love (2005), and The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (2019). “La Peau Verte” was first published in To Charles Fort, with Love and won an International Horror Guild Award.

  LA PEAU VERTE

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  1

  IN A DUSTY, antique-littered back room of the loft on St. Mark’s Place, a room with walls the color of
ripe cranberries, Hannah stands naked in front of the towering mahogany-framed mirror and stares at herself. No—not her self any longer, but the new thing that the man and woman have made of her. Three long hours busy with their airbrushes and latex prosthetics, grease paints and powders and spirit gum, their four hands moving as one, roaming excitedly and certainly across her body, hands sure of their purpose. She doesn’t remember their names, if, in fact, they ever told their names to her. Maybe they did, but the two glasses of brandy she’s had have set the names somewhere just beyond recall. Him tall and thin, her thin but not so very tall, and now they’ve both gone, leaving Hannah alone. Perhaps their part in this finished; perhaps the man and woman are being paid, and she’ll never see either of them again, and she feels a sudden, unexpected pang at the thought, never one for casual intimacies, and they have been both casual and intimate with her body.

  The door opens, and the music from the party grows suddenly louder. Nothing she would ever recognize, probably nothing that has a name, even; wild impromptu of drumming hands and flutes, violins and cellos, an incongruent music that is both primitive and drawing-room practiced. The old woman with the mask of peacock feathers and gown of iridescent satin stands in the doorway, watching Hannah. After a moment, she smiles and nods her head slowly, appreciatively.

  “Very pretty,” she says. “How does it feel?”

  “A little strange,” Hannah replies and looks at the mirror again. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Haven’t you?” the old woman asks her, and Hannah remembers her name, then—Jackie, Jackie something that sounds like Shady or Sadie, but isn’t either. A sculptor from England, someone said. When she was very young, she knew Picasso, and someone said that, too.

  “No,” Hannah replies. “I haven’t. Are they ready for me now?”

  “Fifteen more minutes, give or take. I’ll be back to bring you in. Relax. Would you like another brandy?”

  Would I? Hannah thinks and glances down at the crystal snifter sitting atop an old secretary next to the mirror. It’s almost empty now, maybe one last warm amber sip standing between it and empty. She wants another drink, something to burn away the last, lingering dregs of her inhibition and self-doubt, but “No,” she tells the woman. “I’m fine.”

  “Then chill, and I’ll see you in fifteen,” Jackie Whomever says, smiles again, her disarming, inviting smile of perfect white teeth, and she closes the door, leaving Hannah alone with the green thing watching her from the mirror.

  The old Tiffany lamps scattered around the room shed candy puddles of stained-glass light, light as warm as the brandy, warm as the dark-chocolate tones of the intricately carved frame holding the tall mirror. She takes one tentative step nearer the glass, and the green thing takes an equally tentative step nearer her. I’m in there somewhere, she thinks. Aren’t I?

  Her skin painted too many competing, complementary shades of green to possibly count, one shade bleeding into the next, an infinity of greens that seem to roil and flow around her bare legs, her flat, hard stomach, her breasts. No patch of skin left uncovered, her flesh become a rain-forest canopy, autumn waves in rough, shallow coves, the shells of beetles and leaves from a thousand gardens, moss and emeralds, jade statues and the brilliant scales of poisonous tropical serpents. Her nails polished a green so deep it might almost be black, instead. The uncomfortable scleral contacts to turn her eyes into the blaze of twin chartreuse stars, and Hannah leans a little closer to the mirror, blinking at those eyes, with those eyes, the windows to a soul she doesn’t have. A soul of everything vegetable and living, everything growing or not, soul of sage and pond scum, malachite and verdigris. The fragile translucent wings sprouting from her shoulder blades—at least another thousand greens to consider in those wings alone—and all the many places where they’ve been painstakingly attached to her skin are hidden so expertly she’s no longer sure where the wings end and she begins.

  The one, and the other.

  “I definitely should have asked for another brandy,” Hannah says out loud, spilling the words nervously from her ocher, olive, turquoise lips.

  Her hair—not her hair, but the wig hiding her hair—like something parasitic, something growing from the bark of a rotting tree, epiphyte curls across her painted shoulders, spilling down her back between and around the base of the wings. The long tips the man and woman added to her ears so dark that they almost match her nails, and her nipples airbrushed the same lightless, bottomless green, as well. She smiles, and even her teeth have been tinted a matte pea green.

  There is a single teardrop of green glass glued firmly between her lichen eyebrows.

  I could get lost in here, she thinks, and immediately wishes she’d thought something else instead.

  Perhaps I am already.

  And then Hannah forces herself to look away from the mirror, reaches for the brandy snifter and the last swallow of her drink. Too much of the night still lies ahead of her to get freaked out over a costume, too much left to do and way too much money for her to risk getting cold feet now. She finishes the brandy, and the new warmth spreading through her belly is reassuring.

  Hannah sets the empty glass back down on the secretary and then looks at herself again. And this time it is her self, after all, the familiar lines of her face still visible just beneath the makeup. But it’s a damn good illusion. Whoever the hell’s paying for this is certainly getting his money’s worth, she thinks.

  Beyond the back room, the music seems to be rising, swelling quickly towards crescendo, the strings racing the flutes, the drums hammering along underneath. The old woman named Jackie will be back for her soon. Hannah takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with air that smells and tastes like dust and old furniture, like the paint on her skin, more faintly of the summer rain falling on the roof of the building. She exhales slowly and stares longingly at the empty snifter.

  “Better to keep a clear head,” she reminds herself.

  Is that what I have here? And she laughs, but something about the room or her reflection in the tall mirror turns the sound into little more than a cheerless cough.

  And then Hannah stares at the beautiful, impossible green woman staring back at her, and waits.

  2

  “Anything forbidden becomes mysterious,” Peter says and picks up his remaining bishop, then sets it back down on the board without making a move. “And mysterious things always become attractive to us, sooner or later. Usually sooner.”

  “What is that? Some sort of unwritten social law?” Hannah asks him, distracted by the Beethoven that he always insists on whenever they play chess. Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus at the moment, and she’s pretty sure he only does it to break her concentration.

  “No, dear. Just a statement of the fucking obvious.”

  Peter picks up the black bishop again, and this time he almost uses it to capture one of her rooks, then thinks better of it. More than thirty years her senior and the first friend she made after coming to Manhattan, his salt-and-pepper beard and mustache that’s mostly salt, his eyes as grey as a winter sky.

  “Oh,” she says, wishing he’d just take the damn rook and be done with it. Two moves from checkmate, barring an act of divine intervention. But that’s another of his games, Delaying the Inevitable. She thinks he probably has a couple of trophies for it stashed away somewhere in his cluttered apartment, chintzy faux golden loving cups for his Skill and Excellence in Procrastination.

  “Taboo breeds desire. Gluttony breeds disinterest.”

  “Jesus, I ought to write these things down,” she says, and he smirks at her, dangling the bishop teasingly only an inch or so above the chessboard.

  “Yes, you really should. My agent could probably sell them to someone or another. Peter Mulligan’s Big Book of Tiresome Truths. I’m sure it would be more popular than my last novel. It certainly couldn’t b
e less—”

  “Will you stop it and move already? Take the damned rook, and get it over with.”

  “But it might be a mistake,” he says and leans back in his chair, mock suspicion on his face, one eyebrow cocked, and he points towards her queen. “It could be a trap. You might be one of those predators that fakes out its quarry by playing dead.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes I do. You know what I mean. Those animals, the ones that only pretend to be dead. You might be one of those.”

  “I might just get tired of this and go the hell home,” she sighs, because he knows that she won’t, so she can say whatever she wants.

  “Anyway,” he says, “it’s work, if you want it. It’s just a party. Sounds like an easy gig to me.”

  “I have that thing on Tuesday morning though, and I don’t want to be up all night.”

  “Another shoot with Kellerman?” asks Peter and frowns at her, taking his eyes off the board, tapping at his chin with the bishop’s mitre.

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “You hear things, that’s all. Well, I hear things. I don’t think you ever hear anything at all.”