by S T Joshi
Twenty-six years old, shaved head glinting blue. Luminous shining eyes women in the street call beautiful. In the neighborhood he’s known by his first name. Sweet guy but strange, excitable. A habit of twitching his shoulders like he’s shrugging free of somebody’s grip.
Fast as you run somebody runs faster!
In the house that’s a semi-detached rowhouse on Mill Street he’s not listening to his angry mother asking why is he home so early, has a job in a building supply yard so why isn’t he there? Pushes past the old woman and into the bathroom, shuts the door and there in the mirror oh God it’s there: the five-sided star, pentagram. Sign of Satan. Embedded deep in his right eyeball, just below the dilated iris.
No! no! God help!
Goes wild rubs with both fists, pokes with fingers. He’s weeping, shouting. Beats at himself, fists and nails. His sister now pounding on the door what is it? what’s wrong? and Mama’s voice loud and frightened. It’s happened, he thinks. His first clear thought. Happened. Like a stone sinking so calm. Because hasn’t he always known the prayers did no good, on your knees bowing your head inviting Jesus into your heart does no good. The sign of the demon would return, absorbed into his blood but must one day re-emerge.
Pushes past the women and in the kitchen paws through the drawer scattering cutlery that falls to the floor, bounces and clatters and there’s the big carving knife in his hand, his hand shuts about it like fate. Pushes past the women now in reverse where they’ve followed him into the kitchen knocks his one-hundred-eighty-pound older sister aside with his elbow as lightly as he lifts bags of gravel, armloads of bricks. Hasn’t he prayed Our Father to be a machine many times. A machine does not feel, a machine does not think. A machine does not hurt. A machine does not starve for love. A machine does not starve for what it does not know to name: salvation.
Back then inside the bathroom, slamming the door against the screaming women, and locking it. Gibbering to himself, Away Satan! Away Satan! God help! With a hand strangely steely as if practiced wielding the point of the knife, boldly inserting and twisting into the accursed eyeball. And no pain—only a burning cleansing roaring sensation as of a blast of fire. Out pops the eyeball, and out the sign of Satan. But connected by tissue, nerves. It’s elastic so he’s pulling, fingers now slippery-excited with blood. He’s sawing with the sharp blade of the steak knife. Cuts the eyeball free, like Mama squeezing baby out of her belly into this pig trough of sin and filth, and no turning back till Jesus calls you home.
He drops the eyeball into the toilet, flushes the toilet fast.
Before Satan can intervene.
One of those antiquated toilets where water swirls about the stained bowl, wheezes and yammers to itself, sighs, grumbles, finally swallows like it’s doing you a favor. And the sign of the demon is gone.
One eyesocket empty and fresh-bleeding he’s on his knees praying Thank you God! thank you God! weeping as angels in radiant garments with faces of blinding brightness reach down to embrace him not minding his red-slippery mask of a face. Now he’s one of them himself, now he will float into the sky where, some wind-blustery January morning, you’ll see him, or a face like his, in a furious cloud.
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
Caitlín Rebekah Kiernan was born in 1964 in Skerries, Ireland, but came to the United States as a child, shortly after the death of her father. Her family lived in several locales in the South before settling in Birmingham, Alabama; in spite of her birth in Ireland, Kiernan now identifies herself as a Southern author and draws upon the heritage of Southern culture in much of her work. After receiving a degree in vertebrate paleontology from the University of Colorado, Kiernan returned to Birmingham to work at the Red Mountain Museum. She has published several scientific papers in such journals as the Journal of Paleontology and the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, and her scientific background is an essential component in several of her novels and tales.
Kiernan began publishing short stories in the 1990s, and they have now been gathered into five volumes: Candles for Elizabeth (1998), Tales of Pain and Wonder (2000), Wrong Things (2001; with Poppy Z. Brite), From Weird and Distant Shores (2002), and To Charles Fort, with Love (2005). Her work came to the attention of Neil Gaiman, who commissioned her to do much of the writing for The Dreaming, a successor to Gaiman’s successful graphic novel The Sandman; Kiernan scripted The Dreaming from 1997 to 2001. Her first novel, Silk (1998), fuses supernatural and psychological horror in its account of the demons that emerge from a young woman’s memories of her father’s abusive treatment of her; it won the International Horror Guild award for best first novel. Threshold (2001), a cosmic novel that draws upon Beowulf, Algernon Blackwood, and others, won the IHG award for best novel. Low Red Moon (2003) is another cosmic novel; The Five of Cups (2003) is a vampire novel; Murder of Angels (2004) is a sequel to Silk, while The Dry Salvages (2004) is a dark science fiction novel. Alabaster (2006) is her latest story collection.
“In the Water Works (Birmingham, Alabama 1888),” first published in Tales of Pain and Wonder, effectively utilizes both Kiernan’s knowledge of science and her sense of place in its evocative account of an ambiguous monster lurking in a tunnel in Birmingham.
IN THE WATER WORKS
(BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA 1888)
ed Mountain, weathered tip end of Appalachia’s long and scabby spine, this last ambitious foothill before the land slumps finally down to black-belt prairies so flat they’ve never imagined even these humble altitudes. And as if Nature hasn’t done her best already, as if wind and rain and frost haven’t whittled aeons away to expose the limestone and iron-ore bones, Modern Industry has joined in the effort, scraping away the stingy soil and so whenever it rains, the falling sky turns the ground to sea slime again, primordial mire the color of a butchery to give this place its name, rustdark mud that sticks stubborn to Henry Matthews’ hobnailed boots as he wanders over and between the spoil piles heaped outside the opening to the Water Works tunnel.
Scarecrow tall and thin, young Mr. Henry S. Matthews, lately of some place far enough north to do nothing to better the reputation of a man who is neither married nor church-going, who teaches geography and math at the new Powell School on Sixth Avenue North and spends the remainder of his time with an assortment of books and rocks and pickled bugs. The sudden rumble of thunder somewhere down in the valley, then, and he moves too fast, careless as he turns to see, almost losing his footing as the wet stones slip and tilt beneath his feet.
“You best watch yourself up there, Professor,” one of the workmen shouts, and there’s laughter from the black hole in the mountain’s side. Henry offers a perfunctory nod in the general direction of the tunnel, squints through the haze of light October rain and dust and coal smoke at the rough grid of the little city laid out north of the mountain; barely seventeen years since John Morris and the Elyton Land Company put pen to ink, ink to paper, and incorporated Birmingham, drawing a city from a hasty scatter of ironworks and mining camps. Seventeen years, and he wonders for a moment what this place was like before white men and their machines, before axes and the dividing paths of railroad tracks.
The thunder rolls and echoes no answer he can understand, and Henry looks back to the jumbled ground, the split and broken slabs of shale at his feet. The rain has washed away the thick dust of the excavations, making it easier for him to spot the shells and tracks of sea creatures preserved in the stone. Only a few weeks since he sent a large crate of fossils south to the State Geological Survey in Tuscaloosa, and already a small museum’s worth of new specimens line the walls of his cramped room, sit beneath his bed and compete with his clothing for closet space, with his books for the shelves. An antediluvian seashore in hardened bits and pieces, and just last week he found the perfectly preserved carapace of a trilobite almost the length of his hand.
A whistle blows, shrill steam blat, and a few more men file out of the tunnel to eat their lunches in the listless rain. Henry reaches into a pocket of his waistcoat for th
e silver watch his mother gave him the year he left for college, wondering how a Saturday morning could slip by so fast; the clockblack hands at one and twelve, and he’s suddenly aware of the tugging weight of his knapsack, the emptiness in his belly, hours now since breakfast but there’s a boiled egg wrapped in waxed paper and a tin of sardines in his overcoat. The autumn sky growls again, and he snaps his watch closed and begins to pick his way cautiously down the spoil towards the other men.
* * *
Henry Matthews taps the brown shell of his hard-boiled egg against a piece of limestone, crack, crack, crack, soft white insides exposed, and he glances up at the steelgray sky overhead; the rain has stopped, stopped again, stopped for now, and crystalwet drops cling to the browngoldred leaves of the few hickory and hackberry trees still standing near the entrance of the tunnel. He sits with the miners, the foreman, the hard men who spend dawn to dusk in the shaft, shadowy days breaking stone and hauling it back into the sunlight. Henry suspects that the men tolerate his presence as a sort of diversion, a curiosity to interrupt the monotony of their days. This thin Yankee dude, this odd bird who picks about the spoil like there might be gold or silver when everyone knows there isn’t anything worth beans going to come out of the mountain except the purplered ore, and that’s more like something you have to be careful not to trip over than try to find.
Sometimes they joke, and sometimes they ask questions, their interest or suspicion piqued by his diligence, perhaps. “What you lookin’ for anyways, Mister?” and he’ll open his knapsack and show them a particularly clear imprint of a snail’s whorled shell or the mineralized honeycomb of a coral head. Raised eyebrows and heads nodding, and maybe then someone will ask, “So, them’s things what got buried in Noah’s flood?” and Henry doubts any of these men have even heard of Lyell or Darwin or Cuvier, have any grasp of the marvelous advancement that science has made the last hundred years concerning the meaning of fossils and the progression of geological epochs. So he’s always politic, aware that the wrong answer might get him exiled from the diggings. And, genuinely wishing that he had time to explain the wonders of his artefacts to these men, Henry only shrugs and smiles for them. “Well, actually, some of them are even a bit older than that,” or a simple and noncommittal “Mmmmm,” and usually that’s enough to satisfy.
But today is different and the men are quiet, each one eating his cold potatoes or dried meat, staring silent at muddy boots and lunch pails, the mining-car track leading back inside the tunnel, and no one asks him anything. Henry looks up once from his sardines and catches one of the men watching him. He smiles, and the man frowns and looks quickly away. When the whistle blows again, the men rise slowly, moving with a reluctance that’s plain enough to see, back towards the waiting tunnel. Henry wipes his fingers on his handkerchief, fish oil stains on white linen, is shouldering his knapsack, retrieving his geologist’s hammer, when someone says his name, “Mr. Matthews?” voice low, almost whispered, and he looks up into the foreman’s hazelbrown eyes.
“Yes, Mr. Wallace? Is there something I can do for you today?” and Warren Wallace looks away, nervous glance to his men for a moment that seems a lot longer to Henry who’s anxious to get back to his collecting.
“You know all this geology business pretty good, don’t you, Mr. Matthews? All about these rocks and such?” and Henry shrugs, nods his head, “Yes sir, I suppose that I do. I had a course or two—”
“Then maybe you could take a look at somethin’ for me sometime,” the foreman says, interrupting, looking back at Henry, and there are deep lines around his eyes, worry or lack of sleep, both maybe. The foreman spits a shitbrown streak of tobacco at the ground and shakes his head. “It probably ain’t nothing, but I might want you to take a look at it sometime.”
“Yes. Certainly,” Henry says, “Anytime you’d like,” but Warren Wallace is already walking away from him, following his men towards the entrance of the tunnel, shouting orders, and “Be careful up there, Mr. Matthews,” he says, spoken without turning around, and Henry replies that he always is, but thanks for the concern anyway, and he goes back to the spoil piles.
Fifteen minutes later it’s raining again, harder now, a cold and stinging rain from the north and wind that gusts and swirls dead leaves like drifting ash.
* * *
May 1887 when the Birmingham Water Works Company entered into a contract with Judge A. O. Lane, Mayor and Alderman, and plans were drawn to bring water from the distant Cahaba River north across Shades Valley to the thirsty citizens of the city. But Red Mountain standing there in the way, standing guard or simply unable to move, and its slopes too steep for gravity to carry the water over the top, so the long tunnel dreamed up by engineers, the particular brainchild of one Mr. W. A. Merkel, first chief engineer of the Cahaba Station. A two thousand, two hundred foot bore straight through the sedimentary heart of the obstacle, tons of stone blasted free with gelignite and nitro, pickaxes and sledge hammers and the sweat of men and mules. The promise of not less than five million gallons of fresh water a day, and in this bright age of invention and innovation it’s a small job for determined men, moving mountains, coring them like ripe and crimson apples.
A week later, and Henry Matthews is again picking over the spoil heaps, a cool and sunny October day crisp as cider, an autumnsoft breeze that smells of dry and burning leaves, and his spirits are high, three or four exceptional trilobites from the hard limestone already and a single, disc-shaped test of some specie of echinodermia he’s never encountered before, almost as big as a silver dollar. He stoops to get a better look at a promising slab when someone calls his name, and he looks up, mildly annoyed at the intrusion. Foreman Wallace is standing nearby, scratching at his thick black beard, and he points at Henry with one finger.
“How’s the fishin’, Professor?” he asks, and it takes Henry a moment to get the joke; he doesn’t laugh, but a belated smile, finally, and then the foreman is crossing the uneven stones towards him.
“No complaints,” Henry says and produces the largest of the trilobites for the foreman’s inspection. Warren Wallace holds the oystergray chunk of limestone close and squints at the small dark Cryptolithus outstretched on the rock.
“Well,” the foreman says and rubs at his beard again, wrinkles his thick eyebrows and stares back at Henry Matthews. “Ain’t that some pumpkins. And this little bug used to be alive? Crawlin’ around in the ocean?”
“Yes,” Henry replies, and he points to the trilobite’s bulbous glabellum and the pair of large compound eyes to either side. “This end was its head,” he says. “And this was the tail,” as his fingertip moves to the fan-shaped lobe at the other end of the creature. Warren Wallace glances back at the fossil once more before he returns it to Henry.
“Now, Professor, you tell me if you ever seen anything like this here,” and the foreman produces a small bottle from his shirt pocket, apothecary bottle Henry thinks at first, and then no, not medicine, nitroglycerine. Warren Wallace passes the stoppered bottle to the schoolteacher, and, for a moment, Henry Matthews stares silently at the black thing trapped inside.
“Where did this come from?” he asks, trying not to show his surprise but wide eyes still on the bottle, unable to look away from the thing coiling and uncoiling in its eight-ounce glass prison.
“From the tunnel,” the foreman replies, spits tobacco juice and glances over his shoulder at the gaping hole in the mountain. “About five hundred feet in, just a little ways past where the limerock goes to sandstone. That’s where we hit the fissure.”
Henry Matthews turns the bottle in his hand, and the thing inside uncoils, stretches chitinous segments, an inch, two inches, almost three, before it snaps back into a legless ball that glimmers iridescent in the afternoon sun.
“Ugly little bastard, ain’t it?” the foreman says and spits again. “But you ain’t never seen nothin’ like it before, have you?” And Henry shakes his head, no, never, and now he wants to look away, doesn’t like the way the thing i
n the bottle is making him feel. But it’s stretched itself out again, and he can see tiny fibers like hairs or minute spines protruding between the segments.
“Can you show me?” he asks, realizes that he’s almost whispering now, library or classroom whisper like maybe he’s afraid someone will overhear, like this should be secret.
“Where it came from, will you take me there?”
“Yeah. I was hopin’ you’d ask,” the foreman says and rubs his beard. “But let me tell you, Professor, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” And after Warren Wallace has taken the bottle back, returned it to his shirt pocket so that Henry doesn’t have to look at the black thing anymore, the two men begin the climb down the spoil piles to the entrance of the tunnel.
* * *
A few feet past the entrance, fifteen, twenty, and the foreman stops, stands talking to a fat man with a pry bar while Henry looks back at the bright day framed in raw limestone and bracing timbers, blinking as his eyes slowly adjust to the gloom. “Yeah,” the fat man says, “Yeah,” and Warren Wallace asks him another question. It’s cooler in the tunnel, in the dark, and the air smells like rock dust and burning carbide and another smell tucked somewhere underneath, unhealthy smell like a wet cellar or rotting vegetables that makes Henry wrinkle his nose. “Yeah, I seen him before,” the fat man with the pry bar says, wary reply to the foreman’s question and a distrustful glance towards Henry Matthews.
“I want him to have a look at your arm, Jake, that’s all,” and Henry turns his back on the light, turns to face the foreman and the fat man. “He ain’t no doctor,” the fat man says. “And I already seen Doc Joe, anyways.”
“He’s right,” Henry says, confused now, no idea what this man’s arm and the thing in the jar might have to do with one another, blinking at Wallace through the dancing whiteyellow afterimages of the sunlight outside. “I haven’t had any medical training to speak of, certainly nothing formal.”
