Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “It’s not that simple, Missouri,” she says aloud, and she thinks that those could have been her father’s words, if the theosophists are right and the dead might ever speak through the mouths of the living.

  “Leave me alone, old man” she says and sits up. “Go back to the grave you yearned for, and leave me be.”

  Her arm is waiting for her at the foot of the bed, right where she left it the night before, reclining in its cradle, next to the empty space her leg ought to occupy. And the hot breeze through the window, the street- and coal smoke-scented breeze, causes the scrap of paper tacked up by her vanity mirror to flutter against the wall. Her proverb, her precious stolen scrap of Shakespeare: What’s past is prologue.

  Missouri Banks considers how she can keep herself busy until the mechanic comes back to her. There’s a torn shirt sleeve that needs mending, and she’s no slouch with a needle and thread. Her good stockings could use a rinsing. The dressing on her leg should be changed; Madam Ling saw to it she had a small tin of the pungent salve to reapply when Missouri changed the bandages. Easily half a dozen such mundane tasks, any woman’s work, any woman who is not a dancer, and nothing that won’t wait until the bells of St. Margaret’s ring ten or eleven. And so she watches the window, the sunlight and flapping gingham, and it isn’t difficult to call up with almost perfect clarity the piano and the guzheng and the Irishman thumping his bodhrán, the exotic, festive trill of the xiao. And with the music swelling loudly inside her skull, she can then recall the dance. And she is not a cripple in need of patron saints or a guttersnipe praying to black wolf gods, but Madam Ling’s specialty, the steam- and blood-powered gem of the Nine Dragons. She moves across the boards, and men watch her with dark and drowsy eyes as she pirouettes and prances through grey opium clouds.

  THE STEAM DANCER (1896)

  I’m fairly sure this has become the most reprinted steampunk story ever. It’s also a story that seems especially prone to misreading, especially by people with political agendas that are not necessarily my own. For me, it’s a joyful, triumphant story, and I don’t write many of those. This was the first of my Cherry Creek stories, though the city is never named.

  In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection

  How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin Shelley

  (October 15th, 1831)

  “Wake up,” she whispers, as ever she is always whispering with those demanding, ashen lips, but I do not open my eyes. I do not wake up, as she has bidden me to do, but, instead, lie drifting in this amniotic moment, unwilling to move one instant forward and incapable of retreating by even the scant breadth of a single second. For now, there is only now; yet, even so, an infinity stretches all around, haunted by dim shapes and half-glimpsed phantasmagoria, and if I named this time and place, I might name it Pluto or Orcus or Dis Pater. But never would I name it purgatorial, for here there are no purging flames, nor trials of final purification from venial transgressions. I have not arrived here by any shade of damnation and await no deliverance, but scud gently through Pre-Adamite seas, and so might I name this wide pacific realm Womb, the uterus common to all that which has ever risen squirming from mere insensate earth. I might name it Mother. I might best call it nothing at all, for a name may only lessen and constrain this inconceivable vastness.

  “Wake up now,” she whispers, but I shall rather seek these deeper currents.

  No longer can I distinguish that which is without from that which is within. In ocher and loden green and malachite dusks do I dissolve and somehow still retain this flesh and this unbeating heart and this blood grown cold and stagnant in my veins. Even as I slip free, I am constrained, and in the eel-grass shadows do I descry her desperate, damned form bending low above this warm and salty sea where she has lain me down. She is Heaven, her milky skin is star-pierced through a thousand, thousand times to spill forth droplets of the dazzling light which is but one half of her unspeakable art. She would have me think it the totality, as though a dead woman is blind merely because her eyes remain shut. Long did I suspect the whole of her. When I breathed and had occasion to walk beneath the sun and moon, even then did I harbour my suspicions and guess at the blackness fastidiously concealed within that blinding glare. And here, at this moment, she is to me as naked as in the hour of her birth, and no guise nor glamour would ever hide from me that perpetual evening of her soul. At this moment, all and everything is laid bare. I am gutted like a gasping fish, and she is flayed by revelation.

  She whispers to me, and I float across endless plains of primordial silt and gaping hadopelagic chasms where sometimes I sense the awful minds of other sleepers, ancient before the coming of time, waiting alone in sunken temples and drowned sepulchers. Below me lies the grey and glairy mass of Professor Huxley’s Bathybius haeckelii, the boundless, wriggling sheet of Urschleim that encircles all the globe. Here and there do I catch sight of the bleached skeletons of mighty whales and ichthyosauria, their bones gnawed raw by centuries and millennia and aeons, by the busy proboscides of nameless invertebrata. The struts of a Leviathan’s ribcage rise from the gloom like a cathedral’s vaulted roof, and a startled retinue of spiny crabs wave threatful pincers that I might not forget I am the intruder. For this I would forget, and forswear that tattered life she stole and now so labours to restore, were that choice only mine to make.

  I know this is no ocean, and I know there is no firmament set out over me. But I am sinking, all the same, spiraling down with infinite slowness towards some unimaginable beginning or conclusion (as though there is a difference between the two). And you watch on worriedly, and yet always that devouring curiosity to defuse any fear or regret. Your hands wander impatiently across copper coils and spark tungsten filaments, tap upon sluggish dials and tug so slightly at the rubber tubes that enter and exit me as though I have sprouted a bouquet of umbilici. You mind the gate and the road back, and so I turn away and would not see your pale, exhausted face.

  With a glass dropper, you taint my pool with poisonous tinctures of quicksilver and iodine, meaning to shock me back into a discarded shell.

  And I misstep, then, some fraction of a footfall this way or that, and now somehow I have not yet felt the snip that divided me from me. I sit naked on a wooden stool near Der Ocean auf dem Tische, the great vivarium tank you have fashioned from iron and plate glass and marble.

  You will be my goldfish, you laugh. You will be my newt. What better part could you ever play, my dear?

  You kiss my bare shoulders and my lips, and I taste brandy on your tongue. You hold my breasts cupped in your hands and tease my nipples with your teeth. And I know none of this is misdirection to put my mind at ease, but rather your delight in changes to come. The experiment is your bacchanal, and the mad glint in your eyes would shame any maenad or rutting satyr. I have no delusions regarding what is soon to come. I am the sacrifice, and it matters little or none at all whether the altar you have raised is to Science or Dionysus.

  “Oh, if I could stand in your place,” you sigh, and again your lips brush mine. “If I could see what you will see and feel what you will feel!”

  “I will be your eyes,” I say, echoing myself. “I will be your curious, probing hands.” These might be wedding vows that we exchange. These might be the last words of the condemned on the morning of her execution.

  “Yes, you shall, but I would make this journey myself and have need of no surrogate.” Then and now, I wonder in secret if you mean everything you say. It is easy to declare envy when there is no likelihood of exchanging places. “Where you go, my love, all go in due time, but you may be the first ever to return and report to the living what she has witnessed there.”

  You kneel before me, as if in awe or gratitude, and your head settles upon my lap. I touch your golden hair with fingers that have scarcely begun to feel the tingling and chill, the numbness that will consume me soon enough. You kindly offered to place the lethal preparati
on in a cup of something sweet that I would not taste its bitterness, but I told you how I preferred to know my executioner and would not have his grim face so pleasantly hooded. I took it in a single acrid spoonful, and now we wait, and I touch your golden hair.

  “When I was a girl,” I begin, then must pause to lick my dry lips.

  “You have told me this story already.”

  “I would have you hear it once more. Am I not accorded some last indulgence before the stroll to the gallows?”

  “It will not be a gallows,” you reply, but there is a sharp edge around your words, a brittle frame and all the gilt flaking free. “Indeed, it will be little more than a quick glance stolen through a window before the drapes are drawn shut against you. So, dear, you do not stand to earn some final coddling, not this day, and so I would not hear that tale repeated, when I know it as well as I know the four syllables of my own beloved’s name.”

  “You will hear me,” I say, and my fingers twine and knot themselves tightly in your hair. A few flaxen strands pull free, and I hope I can carry them down into the dark with me. You tense, but do not pull away, or make any further protest. “When I was a girl, my own brother died beneath the wheels of an ox cart. It was an accident, of course. But still his skull was broken and his chest all staved in. Though, in the end, no one was judged at fault.”

  I sit on my stool, and you kneel there on the stone floor, waiting for me to be done, restlessly awaiting my passage and the moment when I have been rendered incapable of repeating familiar tales you do not wish to hear retold.

  “I held him, what remained of him. I felt the shudder when his child’s soul pulled loose from its prison. His blue eyes were as bright in that instant as the glare of sunlight off freshly fallen snow. As for the man who drove the cart, he committed suicide some weeks later, though I did not learn this until I was almost grown.”

  “There is no ox cart here,” you whisper. “There are no careless hooves and no innocent drover.”

  “I did not say he was a drover. I have never said that. He was merely a farmer, I think, on his way to market with a load of potatoes and cabbages. My brother’s entire unlived life traded for a only few bushels of potatoes and cabbages. That must be esteemed a bargain, by any measure.”

  “We should begin now,” you say, and I don’t disagree, for my legs are growing stiff and an indefinable weight has begun to press in upon me. I was warned of these symptoms, and so there is not surprise, only the fear that I have prayed I would be strong enough to bear. You stand and help me to my feet, then lead me the short distance to the vivarium tank. Suddenly, I cannot escape the fanciful and disagreeable impression that your mechanical apparatuses and contraptions are watching on. Maybe, I think, they have been watching all along. Perhaps, they were my jurors, an impassionate, unbiased tribunal of brass and steel and porcelain, and now they gaze out with automaton eyes and exhale steam and oily vapours to see their sentence served. You told me there would be madness, that the toxin would act upon my mind as well as my body, but in my madness I have forgotten the warning.

  “Please, I would not have them see me, not like this,” I tell you, but already we have reached the great tank that will only serve as my carriage for these brief and extraordinary travels – if your calculations and theories are proved correct – or that will become my deathbed, if, perchance, you have made some critical error. There is a stepladder, and you guide me, and so I endeavor not to feel their enthusiastic, damp-palmed scrutiny. I sit down on the platform at the top of the ladder and let my feet dangle into the warm liquid, both my feet and then my legs up to the knees. It is not an objectionable sensation and promises that I will not be cold for much longer. Streams of bubbles rise slowly from vents set into the rear wall of the tank, stirring and oxygenating this translucent primal soup of viscous humours, your painstaking brew of protéine and hæmatoglobin, carbamide resin and cellulose, water and phlegm and bile. All those substances believed fundamental to life, a recipe gleaned from out dusty volumes of Medieval alchemy and metaphysics, but also from your own researches and the work of more modern scientific practitioners and professors of chemistry and anatomy. Previously, I have found the odor all but unbearable, though now there seems to be no detectable scent at all.

  “Believe me,” you say, “I will have you back with me in less than an hour.” And I try hard then to remember how long an hour is, but the poison leeches away even the memory of time. With hands as gentle as a midwife’s, you help me from the platform and into my strange bath, and you keep my head above the surface until the last convulsions have come and gone, and I am made no more than any cadaver.

  “Wake up,” she says – you say – but the shock of the mercury and iodine you administered to the vivarium have rapidly faded, and once more there is but the absolute and inviolable present moment, so impervious and sacrosanct that I can not even imagine conscious action, which would require the concept of an apprehension of some future, that time is somehow more than this static aqueous matrix surrounding and defining me.

  “Do you hear me? Can you not even hear me?”

  All at once, and with a certitude almost agonizing in its omneity, I am aware that I am being watched. No, that is not right. That is not precisely the way of it. All at once, I know that I am being watched by eyes which have not heretofore beheld me; all along there have been her eyes, as well as the stalked eyes of the scuttling crabs I mentioned and other such creeping, slithering inhabitants of my mind’s ocean as have glommed the dim pageant of my voyage. But these eyes, and this spectator – my love, nothing has ever seen me with such complete and merciless understanding. And now the act of seeing has ceased to be a passive action, as the act of being seen has stopped being an activity that neither diminishes nor alters the observed. I would scream, but dead women do not seem to be permitted that luxury, and the scream of my soul is as silent as the moon. And in another place and in another time where past and future still hold meaning, you plunge your arms into the tank, hauling me up from the shallow deep and moving me not one whit. I am fixed by these eyes, like a butterfly pinned after the killing jar.

  It does not speak to me, for there can be no need of speech when vision is so thorough and so incapable of misreckoning. Plagues need not speak, nor floods, nor the voracious winds of tropical hurricanes. A thing with eyes for teeth, eyes for its tongue and gullet. A thing which has been waiting for me in this moment that has no antecedents and which can spawn no successors. Maybe it waits here for every dying man and woman, for every insect and beast and falling leaf, or maybe some specific quality of my obliteration has brought me to its attention. Possibly, it only catches sight of suicides, and surely I have become that, though your Circean hands poured the poison draught and then held the spoon. There is such terrible force in this gaze that it seems not implausible that I am the first it has ever beheld, and now it will know all, and it shall have more than knowledge for this opportunity might never come again.

  “Only tell me what happened,” you will say, in some time that cannot ever be, not from when I lie here in the vivarium you have built for me, not from this occasion when I lie exposed to a Cosmos hardly half considered by the mortal minds contained therein. “Only put down what seems most significant, in retrospect. Do not dwell upon everything you might recall, every perception. You may make a full accounting later.”

  “Later, I might forget something,” I will reply. “It’s not so unlike a dream.” And you will frown and slide the inkwell a little ways across the writing desk towards me. On your face I will see the stain of an anxiety that has been mounting down all the days since my return.

  That will be a lie, of course, for nothing of this will I ever forget. Never shall it fade. I will be taunting you, or through me it will be taunting your heedless curiosity, which even then will remain undaunted. This hour, though, is far, far away. From when I lie, it is a fancy that can never come to pass – a unicorn, the roaring cataract at the edge of a flat world, a Hell whic
h punishes only those who deserve eternal torment. Around me flows the sea of all beginnings and of all conclusion, and through the weeds and murk, from the peaks of submarine mountains to the lowest vales of Neptune’s sovereignty, benighted in perpetuum – horizon to horizon – does its vision stretch unbroken. And as I have written already, observing me it takes away, and observing me it adds to my acumen and marrow. I am increased as much or more than I am consumed, so it must be a fair encounter, when all is said and done.

  Somewhen immeasurably inconceivable to my present-bound mind, a hollow needle pierces my flesh, there in some unforeseeable aftertime, and the hypodermic’s plunger forces into me your concoction of caffeine citrate, cocaine, belladonna, epinephrine, foxglove, etcetera & etcetera. And I think you will be screaming for me to come back, then, to open my eyes, to wake up as if you had only given me over to an afternoon catnap. I would not answer, even now, even with its smothering eyes upon me, in me, performing their metamorphosis. But you are calling (wake up, wake up, wake up), and your chemicals are working upon my traitorous physiology, and, worst of all, it wishes me to return whence and from when I have come. It has infected me, or placed within me some fraction of itself, or made from my sentience something suited to its own explorations. Did this never occur to you, my dear? That in those liminal spaces, across the thresholds that separate life from death, might lurk an inhabitant supremely adapted to those climes, and yet also possessed of its own questions, driven by its own peculiar acquisitiveness, seeking always some means to penetrate the veil. I cross one way for you, and I return as another’s experiment, the vessel of another’s inquisition.