Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Isn’t that the mountain where the Bible says Noah’s Ark landed after the flood?” I ask her.

  “No, dear. That’s Mount Ararat.”

  “Well, they sound very much alike, Ararat and Aramat,” I say, and Maddy stares at me. I can tell she’s thinking all sorts of things she’s not going to say aloud, things I’m not meant to ever hear.

  And then Maddy says, almost whispering, “Write her name backwards sometime. Very often, what seems unusual becomes perfectly ordinary, if we take care to look at it from another angle.” She peers over her shoulder and tells me that she has to go and that I should be on my way.

  I’m twenty-three, and this is the day I found the pendant in an antique shop on West Broughton Street. I ask the man behind the counter how much he wants for it, and after he tells me, I ask him if it’s jade or if it only looks like jade.

  “Seems like real jade to me,” he replies, and I know from his expression that the question has offended him. “It’s not glass or plastic, if that’s what you mean. I don’t sell costume jewelry, Miss. The chain, that’s sterling silver. You want it, I’ll take ten bucks off the price on the tag. Frankly, it gives me the creeps, and I’ll be happy to be shed of it.”

  I pay him in twenty-five dollars, cash, and he puts the pendant into a small brown paper bag, and I go back out into the blazing sun.

  I dream of a graveyard in Holland, and the October sky is filled with flittering bats. There is another sound, also of wings beating at the cold night air, but that sound is not being made by anything like a bat.

  “This card,” says Maddy, “is the High Priestess. She has many meanings, depending.”

  “Depending on what?” I want to know.

  “Depending on many things,” Maddy says and smiles. Her Tarot cards are spread out on the mossy paving stones on her side of the black iron gate. She taps at the High Priestess with an index finger. “In this instance, I’d suspect a future that has yet to be revealed, and duality, too, and also hidden influences at work in your life.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean by duality,” I tell her, so she explains.

  “The Empress, she sits there on her throne, with a pillar on either side. Some say, these are two pillars from the Temple of Solomon, king of the Israelites and a powerful mystic. And some say that the woman on the throne is Pope Joan.”

  “I never knew there was a woman pope,” I say.

  “There probably wasn’t. It’s just a legend from the Middle Ages.” And then Maddy brushes a stray wisp of hair from her eyes before she goes back to explaining duality and the card’s symbolism. “On the Empress’ right hand is a dark pillar, which is called Boaz. It represents the negative life principle. On her left is a white pillar, Jakin, which represents the positive life principle. Positive and negative, that’s duality, and because she sits here between them we know that the Empress represents balance.”

  Maddy turns over another card, the Wheel of Fortune, but it’s upside down, reversed.

  I am twenty-five years old, and Isobel Endecott is asleep in the bed we share in her loft on Atlantic Avenue. I lie awake, listening to her breathing and the myriad of noises from the street three stories below. It’s four minutes after three a.m., and I briefly consider taking an Ambien. But I don’t want to sleep. That’s the truth of it. There’s so little time left to me, and I’d rather not spend it in dreams. The night is fast approaching when the Starry Wisdom will meet on my behalf, because of what I’ve brought with me on that train from Savannah, and on that night I will slip this mortal coil (or be pushed, one or the other or both), and there’ll be time enough for dreaming when I’m dead and in my grave, or during whatever’s to come after my resurrection.

  I find a pencil and a notepad. The latter has the name of the law firm that Isobel works for printed across the top of each page: Jackson, Monk, & Rowe, with an ampersand instead of “and” being written out. I don’t bother to put on my robe. I go to the bathroom wearing only my panties and stand before the wide mirror above the sink and stare back at my reflection a few minutes. I’ve never thought of myself as pretty, and I still don’t. Tonight, I look like someone who hasn’t slept much in a while. My hazel eyes seem more green than brown, when it’s usually the other way around. The tattoo between my breasts is beginning to heal, the ink worked into my skin by the thin, nervous man designated the Ace of Pentacles by the High Priestess of the Church of Starry Wisdom.

  I write Aramat on the notepad, then hold it up to the mirror. I read it aloud, as it appears in the looking glass, and then I do the same with Isobel Endecott, speaking utter nonsense, my voice low so I won’t wake Isobel. In the mirror, my jade amulet does its impossible trick, which I first noticed a few nights after I bought it from a fastidious man in a shop on West Broughton Street. The reflection of the letters carved around the base, beneath the claws of the winged dog-like beast, are precisely the same as when I look directly at them. The mirror does not reverse the image of the pendant. I have never yet found a mirror that will. I turn away from the sink, gazing into the darkness framed by the bathroom door.

  I stand on a beach.

  I sit on a sidewalk, eleven years old, and a woman named Maddy passes me the Wheel of Fortune between the bars of an iron gate.

  3.

  Memory fails, and my thoughts become an apparently disordered torrent. I’m a dead woman recalling the events of a life I have relinquished, a life I have repudiated. I sit in this chair at this desk and hold this pen in my hand because Isobel has asked it of me, not because I have any motivation of my own to speak of all the moments that have led me here. I’m helpless to deny her, so I didn’t bother asking why she would have me write this. I did very nearly ask why she didn’t request it before, when I was living and still bound by the beeline perception of time that marshals human recollection into more conventional recitals. But then an epiphany, or something like an epiphany, and I understood, without having asked. No linear account would ever satisfy the congregation of the Church of Starry Wisdom, for they seek more occult patterns, less intuitive paths, some alternate perception of the relationships between past and present, between one moment and the next (or, for that matter, one moment and the last). Cause and effect have not exactly been rejected, but have been found severely wanting.

  “That is you,” says Madeleine, passing me the Tarot card. “You are the Wheel of Fortune, an avatar of Tyche, the goddess of fate.”

  “I don’t understand,” I tell her, reluctantly accepting the card, taking it from her because I enjoy her company and don’t wish to be rude.

  “In time,” she says, “it may make sense,” then gathers her deck and hurries back inside that dilapidated house on East Hall Street, kept safe from the world behind its moldering yellow brick walls.

  Burning, I lie down upon the cold granite altar. Soon, my lover, the Empress, climbs on top of me – straddling my hips – while the ragged High Priestess snarls her incantations, while the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana and all the members of the Four Suits (Pentacles, Cups, Swords, and Staves) chant mantras borrowed from the Al Azif.

  The train rattles and sways and dips as it hurries me through Connecticut and then Rhode Island on my way to South Station. Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me… The woman sitting next to me is reading a book by an author I’ve never heard of, and the man across the aisle is busy with his laptop.

  I come awake to the dank embrace of the clayey soil that fills in my grave. It presses down on me, that astounding, unexpected weight, wishing to pin me forever to this spot. I am, after all, an abomination and an outlaw in the eyes of biology. I’ve cheated. The ferryman waits for a passenger who will never cross his river, or whose crossing has been delayed indefinitely. I lie here, not yet moving, marveling at every discomfort and at my collapsed lungs and the dirt filling my mouth and throat. I was not even permitted the luxury of a coffin.

  “Caskets offend the Mother and the Father,” said the High Priestess. “W
hat use have they of an offering they cannot touch?”

  I drift in a fog of pain and impenetrable night. I cannot open my sunken eyes. And even now, through this agony and confusion, I’m aware of the jade pendant’s presence, icy against the tattoo on my chest.

  I awaken in my bed, in my mother’s house, a few nights after her funeral. I lie still, listening to my heartbeat and the settling noises that old houses make when they think no one will hear. I lie there, listening for the sound that reached into my dream of a Dutch churchyard and dragged me back to consciousness – the mournful baying of a monstrous hound.

  On the altar, beneath those smoking braziers, the Empress has begun to clean the mud and filth and maggots from my body. The Priestess mutters caustic sorceries, invoking those nameless gods burdened with innumerable names. The congregation chants. I am delirious, lost in some fever that afflicts the risen, and I wonder if Lazarus knew it, or Osiris, or if it is suffered by Persephone every spring. I’m not certain if this is the night of my rebirth or the night of my death. Possibly, they are not even two distinct events, but only a single one, a serpent looping forever back upon itself, tail clasped tightly between venomous jaws. I struggle to speak, but my vocal cords haven’t healed enough to permit more than the most incoherent, guttural croaking.

  …I am Lazarus, come from the dead,

  Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all…

  “Hush, hush,” says the Empress, wiping earth and hungry larvae from my face. “The words will come, my darling. Be patient, and the words will come back to you. You didn’t crawl into Hell and all the way up again to be struck mute. Hush.” I know that Isobel Endecott is trying to console me, but I can also hear the fear and doubt and misgiving in her voice. “Hush,” she says.

  All around me, on the sand, are dead fish and crabs and the carcasses of gulls and pelicans.

  It’s summer in Savannah, and from the wide verandah of the house on East Hall Street, an older woman calls to Maddy, ordering her back inside. She leaves me holding that single card, my card, and I sit there on the sidewalk for another half hour, staring at it intently, trying to make sense of the card and what Maddy has told me. A blue sphinx squats atop the Wheel of Fortune, and below it there is the nude figure of a man with red skin and the head of a dog.

  “You are taking too long,” snaps the High Priestess, and Isobel answers her in an angry burst of French. I cannot speak French, but I’m not so ignorant that I don’t know it when I hear it spoken. I wonder dimly what Isobel has said, and I adore her for the outburst, for her brashness, for talking back. I begin to suspect something has gone wrong with the ritual, but the thought doesn’t frighten me. Though I’m still more than half blind, my eyes still raw and rheumy, I strain desperately for a better view of Isobel. In all the wide world, at this instant, there is nothing I want but her and nothing else I can imagine needing.

  This is a Saturday morning, and I’m a few weeks from my tenth birthday. I’m sitting in the swing on the back porch. My mother is just inside the screen door, in the kitchen, talking to someone on the telephone. I can hear her voice quite plainly. It’s a warm day late in February, and the sky above our house is an immaculate and seemingly inviolable shade of blue. I’ve been daydreaming, woolgathering, staring up at that sky, past the sagging eaves of the porch, when I hear something and notice that there’s a very large black dog only a few yards away from me. It’s standing in the gravel alleyway that separates our tiny backyard from that of the next house over. I have no way of knowing how long the dog has been standing there. I watch it, and it watches me. The dog has bright amber eyes and isn’t wearing a collar or tags. I’ve never before seen a dog smile, but this dog is smiling. After five minutes or so, it growls softly, then turns and trots away down the alley. I decide not to tell my mother about the smiling dog. She probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.

  “What was that you said to her?” I ask Isobel, several nights after my resurrection. We’re sitting together on the floor of her loft on Atlantic, and there’s a Beatles album playing on the turntable.

  “What did I say to whom?” she wants to know.

  “The High Priestess. You said something to her in French, while I was still on the altar. I’d forgotten about it until this morning. You sounded angry. I don’t understand French, so I don’t know what you said.”

  “It doesn’t really matter what I said,” she replies, glancing over the liner notes for Hey Jude. “It only matters that I said it. The old woman is a coward.”

  Somewhere in North Carolina, the rhythm of the train’s wheels against the rails lulls me to sleep. I dream of a neglected Dutch graveyard and the amulet, of hurricanes and smiling black dogs. Maddy is also in my dreams, reading fortunes at a carnival. I can smell sawdust and cotton candy, horseshit and sweating bodies. Maddy sits on a milking stool inside a tent beneath a canvas banner emblazoned with the words Lo! Behold! The Strikefire & Z. B. Harbinger Wonder Show! in bold crimson letters fully five feet high.

  She turns another card, the Wheel of Fortune.

  I lie in my grave, fully cognizant but immobile, unable to summon the will or the physical strength to begin worming my way towards the surface, six feet overhead. I lie there, thinking of Maddy and the jade pendant. I lie there considering, in the mocking solitude of my burial place, what it does and does not mean that I’ve returned with absolutely no conscious knowledge of anything I may have experienced in death. Whatever secrets the Starry Wisdom sent me off to discover remain secrets. After all that has been risked and forfeited, I have no revelations to offer my fellow seekers. They’ll ask their questions, and I’ll have no answers. This should upset me, but it doesn’t.

  Now I can hear footsteps on the roof of my narrow house. Something is pacing heavily, back and forth, snuffling at the recently disturbed earth where I’ve been planted like a tulip bulb, like an acorn, like a seed that will unfold, but surely never sprout.

  It goes about on four feet, I think, not two.

  The hound bays.

  I wonder, will it kindly dig me up, this restless visitor? And I wonder, too, about the rumors of the others who’ve worn the jade pendant before me, and the stories of their fates. Those two ghoulish Englishmen in 1922, for instance; they cross my reanimated mind. As does a passage from Francois-Honore Balfour’s notorious grimoire, Cultes des Goules, and a few stray lines from the Al Azif. My bestial caller suddenly stops pacing and begins scratching at the soft dirt, urging me to move.

  In the temple, as my lover takes my hand and I’m led towards the altar stone, through the fire devouring me from the inside out, the High Priestess of the Starry Wisdom reminds us all that only once in every thousand years does the hound choose a wife. Only once each millennium is any living woman accorded that privilege.

  My train pulls into a depot somewhere in southern Rhode Island, grumbling to a slow stop, and my dreams are interrupted by other passengers bustling about around me, retrieving their bags and briefcases, talking too loudly. Or I’m jarred awake by the simple fact that the train is no longer moving.

  After sex, I lie in bed with Isobel, and the only light comes from the television set mounted on the wall across the room. The sound is turned down, so the black-and-white world trapped inside that box exists in perfect grainy silence. I’m trying to tell her about the pacing thing from the night I awoke. I’m trying to describe the snuffling noises and the way it worried at the ground with its sharp claws. But she only scowls and shakes her head dismissively.

  “No,” she insists. “The hound is nothing but a metaphor. We weren’t meant to take it literally. Whatever you heard that night, you imagined it, that’s all. You heard what some part of you expected, and maybe even needed, to hear. But the hound, it’s a superstition, and we’re not superstitious people.”

  “Isobel, I fucking died,” I say, trying not to laugh, gazing across her belly towards the television. “And I came back from the dead. I tunneled out of my grave with my bare hands and then, blind, f
ound my way to the temple alone. My flesh was already rotting, and now it’s good as new. Those things actually happened, to me, and you don’t doubt that they happened. You practice necromancy, but you want me to think I’m being superstitious if I believe that the hound is real?”

  She’s quiet for a long moment. Finally, she says, “I worry about you, that’s all. You’re so very precious to me, to all of us, and you’ve been through so much already.” And she closes her hand tightly around the amulet still draped about my neck.

  On a sweltering August day in Savannah, a fastidious man who sells antique jewelry and Chinese porcelain makes no attempt whatsoever to hide his relief when I tell him I’ve decided to buy the jade pendant. As he rings up the sale, he asks me if I’m a good Christian girl. He talks about Calvary and the Pentecost, then admits he’ll be glad to have the pendant out of his shop.

  I stand on a beach.

  I board a train.

  Maddy turns another card.

  And on the altar of the Church of Starry Wisdom, I draw a deep, hitching breath. I smell incense burning and hear the lilting voices of all those assembled for my homecoming. My heart is a sledgehammer battering at my chest, and I would scream, but I can’t even speak. Isobel Endecott is straddling me, and her right hand goes to my vagina. With her fingers, she scoops out the slimy plug of soil and minute branches of fungal hyphae that has filled my sex during the week and a half I’ve spent below. When the pad of her thumb brushes my clit every shadow and shape half glimpsed by my wounded eyes seems to glow, as if my lust is contagious, as though light and darkness have become sympathetic. I lunge for her, my jaws snapping like the jaws of any starving creature; there are tears in her eyes as I’m restrained by the Sun and the Moon. The Hanged Man dutifully places a leather strap between my teeth.