The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  Last spring, they found the boy’s body near the small stone bridge spanning one end of the pool, the end farthest from the brick apartment complex. Back that way, there are thick bunches of cattails and a few sickly water lilies and other aquatic plants I don’t know names for. I’ve seen the coroner’s report, and I know that the body was found floating face up, that the lungs were filled with water, that insects had done a lot of damage before someone spotted the corpse and called the police. No one questioned that the boy had drowned, and there was no particular suspicion of foul play. He had an arrest record—shoplifting, drugs and solicitation. To my knowledge, no one ever bothered to ask how he might have drowned in such shallow water. There are ways it could happen, certainly. He slipped and struck his head. It might have been as simple as that.

  No one mentioned the hoofprints, either, but I have photographs of them. The tracks of a large unshod horse pressed clearly into a patch of red mud near the bridge, sometime before the boy’s body was pulled from the pool. You don’t see a lot of horses in this part of town. In fact, you don’t see any. I’m writing this like it might be a mystery, like I don’t already know the answers, and that’s a lie. I’m not exactly a writer. I’m a photographer, and I don’t really know how one goes about this sort of thing. I’m afraid I’m not much better with confessions.

  I could have started by explaining that I happen to own one of those old houses along Euclid, passed down to me from my paternal grandparents. I could have begun with the antique bridle, which I found wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, hidden at the bottom of a steamer trunk in the attic, or... I could have started almost anywhere. With my bad dreams, for example, the things I only choose to call my bad dreams out of cowardice. The dreams—no, the dream, singular, which has recurred too many times to count, and which is possibly my shortest and most honest route to this confession.

  (No, I didn’t kill the boy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m no proper murderess. It’ll never be so simple as that. This is a different sort of confession.)

  In the dream, I’m standing alone on the little stone bridge, standing there stark naked, and the park is washed in the light of a moon that is either full or very near to full. I have no recollection of getting out of bed, or of having left the house, or of the short walk down to the bridge. I’m cold, and I wonder why I didn’t at least think to wear my robe and slippers. I’m holding the bridle from the trunk, which is always much heavier than I remember it being. Something’s moving in the water, and I want to turn away. Always, I want to turn away, and when I look down I see that the drowned boy floating in the water smiles up at me and laughs. Then he sinks below the surface, or something unseen pulls him down, and that’s when I see the girl, standing far out near the center of the pool, bathing in one of the fountains.

  A week ago, I laid the pen down after that last sentence, and I had no intention of ever picking it up again. At least, not to finish writing this. But there was a package in the mail this afternoon—a cardboard mailing tube addressed to me—and one thing leads to another, so to speak. The only return address on the tube was Chicago, IL 60625. No street address or post-office box, no sender’s name. And I noticed almost immediately that the postmark didn’t match the Chicago zip. The zip code on the postmark was 93650, which turns out to be Fresno, California. I opened the tube and found two things inside. The first was a print of a painting I’d never seen before, and the second was a note neatly typed out and paper-clipped to a corner of the print, which read as follows:

  A blacksmith from Raasay lost his daughter to the Each Uisge. In revenge, the blacksmith and his son made a set of large hooks, in a forge they set up by the lochside. They then roasted a sheep and heated the hooks until they were red hot. At last, a great mist appeared from the water and the Each Uisge rose from the depths and seized the sheep. The blacksmith and his son rammed the red-hot hooks into its flesh and, after a short struggle, dispatched it. In the morning there was nothing left of the creature apart from a foul jelly-like substance. (More West Highland Tales; J. F. Campbell, 1883)

  The print was labeled on the back, with a sticker affixed directly to the paper, as The Black Lake by Jan Preisler, 1904. It shows a nude young man standing beside a tall white horse at the edge of a lake that is, indeed, entirely black. The horse’s mane is black, as well, as is its tail and the lower portions of its legs. The young man is holding some black garment I can’t identify. The sticker informed me that the original hangs in the Nardoni Gallerie in Prague. I sat and stared at it for a long time, and then I came back upstairs and picked up this pen again.

  These are only words. Only ink on paper.

  I had the dream again tonight, and now it’s almost dawn, and I’m sitting in my study at my desk, trying to finish what I started.

  And I am standing on the stone bridge in the park, standing naked under the full moon, and I can hear the fountains, all that water forced up and then spattering down again across the pool, which, in my dream, is as black as the lake in Preisler’s painting. The girl’s wading towards me, parting the muddy, dark water with the prow of her thighs, and her skin is white and her long hair is black, black as ink, the ink in this pen, the lake in a picture painted one hundred and two years ago.

  Her eyes are black, too, and I can read no expression in them. She stops a few yards from the bridge and gazes up at me. She points to the heavy bridle in my hands, and I hold it out for her to see. She smiles, showing me a mouthful of teeth that would be at home in the jaws of some devouring ocean thing, and she holds both her arms out to me. And I understand what she’s asking me to do, that she wants me to drop the bridle into the pool. I step back from the edge of the bridge, moving so slowly now I might as well be mired to the ankles in molasses; she takes another quick step towards me, and her teeth glint in the moonlight. I clutch the bridle more tightly than before, and the bit and curb chains jingle softly.

  I found this online an hour or so after I opened the mailing tube and copied it down on a Post-It note, something from a website, “Folklore of the British Isles”—There was one way in which a Kelpie could be defeated and tamed; the Kelpie’s power of shape shifting was said to reside in its bridle, and my body who could claim possession of it could force the Kelpie to submit to their will.

  One thing leads to another.

  In my dream, I have lain the bridle in the fallen leaves gathered about the base of a drinking fountain that hasn’t worked in decades, setting it a safe distance from the water, and she’s standing at the edge of the pool, waiting for me. I go to her, because I can’t imagine what else I would ever do. She takes my hand and leads me down into the cold black water. She kisses me, presses her thin, pale lips to mine, and I taste what any drowning woman might taste—silt and algae, fish shit and all the fine particulate filth that drifts in icy currents and settles, at last, to the bottoms of lakes that have no bottoms. Her mouth is filled with water, and it flows into me like ice. Her piranha’s teeth scrape against my cheek, drawing blood. She laughs and whispers in a language I can’t understand, a language that I can somehow only vaguely even hear, and then she’s forcing me down into the muck and weeds beneath the bridge. She cups my left breast in one hand, and I can see the webbing between her fingers.

  And then...

  Then we are riding wild through the midnight streets of the city, her hooves pounding loud as thunder on the blacktop, and no one we pass turns to look. No one sees. No one would dare. I tangle my fingers in her black mane, and the wind is a hurricane whisper in my ears. We pass automobiles and their unseeing drivers. We pass shops and restaurants and service stations closed up for the night. We race along a railroad track past landscapes of kudzu and broken concrete, and the night air smells of creosote and rust. I think the ride will surely never end. I pray that it will never end, and I feel her body so strong between my legs.

  Beneath the stone bridge, she slides her fingers down and across my belly, between my legs. The mud squelches beneath us, and sh
e asks me for the bridle, stolen from her almost two hundred years ago, when she was tricked into leaving her lake. She promises no harm will ever come to me, at least no harm from her, if only I will return the bridle, a bewitched and fairie thing that is rightfully hers and which I have no conceivable use for.

  Her hooves against the streets seem to rattle the stars above us, seem to loosen them from their places in the firmament. I beg her to let the ride never end. I promise her everything, except the old bridle.

  In the fetid darkness beneath the bridge, away from the glare of the moon, her eyes blaze bright as burning forests, and she slips two fingers deep inside me. More words I can’t understand, and then more that I do, and I imagine myself crawling back to the spot where I left the bridle lying next to the broken drinking fountain. I imagine myself giving it to her.

  Her hooves are thunder and cyclones, cannon fire and the splintering of bedrock bones deep within the hearts of ancient mountains. I am deaf and blind and there is nothing remaining in the universe except her. In another instant, my soul will flicker out, and she will consume even the memory of me.

  And then I see the dead boy watching me, standing near the bridge and watching as she fucks me, or he’s watching from a street corner as we hurry past. Holes where his eyes once were, holes the hungry insects and birds have made, but I know that he can see us, nonetheless. One does not need eyes to see such things. Indeed, I think, eyes only blind a woman or a dead boy to the truth of things as terrible as the white woman leaning over me or the black horse bearing me along deserted avenues. And he is a warning, and I see him dragged down and down into depths only the kelpie can find in a knee-deep pool in a city park. The air rushes from his lungs, bleeds from his mouth and nostrils, and streams back towards the surface. I see him riding her all the way to the bottom, and I push her away from me.

  The night is filled with the screams of horses.

  And I come awake in my bed, gasping and sweat-drenched, sick to my stomach and fumbling for the light, almost knocking the lamp off the table beside my bed. My skin is smeared with stinking mud, and there’s mud on the white sheets and green-grey bits of weed caught in my wet hair. When I can walk, I go to the shower and stand beneath the hot water beating down on me, trying to forget again, and afterwards, I take the soiled sheets down to the washing machine in the basement. Again. And, the last part of this ritual, I find a flashlight and go to the trunk in the attic to be sure that the bridle is still there, wrapped safe inside its wool blanket.

  For One Who has Lost Herself

  1.

  The woman stands across the street from the little shop on Columbus Avenue, almost a whole week now and she still hasn’t found the nerve to simply walk across the street and go inside. She’s tall and thin, a bit too thin, some would say, and almost pale as the snow that fell two days before and hasn’t all melted away. Her eyes are a little too large for her face, and the irises are so big and black that the pupils are all but invisible and almost nothing of the white sclerae can be seen around their broad periphery. Her hands are long and slender, but her nails have been chewed down to stubs and her cuticles are red and raw. She’s wearing a tattered grey wool coat with fur stitched about the collar and lapels, and about the cuffs, as well. Catching a glimpse of her (because hardly anyone looks directly at this woman), someone might be struck by how poorly the coat seems to fit her, perhaps a size too large, or two sizes two small. She can’t recall where she got the coat, but thinks it might have been a gift. On her feet, she wears green galoshes, and she can’t quite recall where those came from, cither. Her ash blonde hair reaches down past her shoulders, a tangled, unkempt mane to frame her pale face.

  A city bus growls past, belching diesel fumes and trailing soot, and the woman steps nervously back from the curb. She dislikes the Manhattan traffic, but she dislikes the huge buses most of all. She’s thought of warning the people she sees climbing into them, and the people climbing out, but she knows enough of human beings to understand that none of them would listen.

  From the other side of Columbus Avenue, the little shop beckons, the sight of it calling her like a foghorn or a ship’s bell, or the lament of harpooned and dying whales. She knows that she only has to go to the corner and wait for the light to change, that she only has to walk across the street and place her hand upon the brass knob of the green door and go inside. She has only to step across the threshold, pass beneath the broad black-and-white placard hung above the entrance—GREYE’S ANATOMY (since 1962)—and her journey will be all but over. She’s come such a long way already, has crossed more than three thousand miles and almost a decade since she started out from the red sandstone beaches of Veantro Bay and Shapinsay Island. Leaving the Orkneys behind and wandering the Scottish Highlands, following rumours and hearsay west over the Atlantic to the shores of Iceland and Greenland, then on to America, to St. John’s and Halifax, Winter Harbor and Gloucester, a hundred other fishing villages and smoky industrial towns whose names she’s already forgotten. And finally, all the way down to this terrible city, this canyon of steel and glass and electricity which is always moving and crackling and muttering in its countless languages, always awake and watching her with its innumerable, unseeing human eyes.

  The light at the corner turns red again, and the traffic comes to a sudden, reluctant, grumbling halt. A moment or two more and there are people streaming hurriedly across the street, some of them moving towards her from the other side and many others moving away, walking towards that side and the little shop with its cluttered display windows and black-and-white sign and mocking green door.

  “Is there something over there you fancy, Miss?” someone asks, an old man’s voice, rough but patient, like sand polishing driftwood smooth. She turns quickly around, startled because the people in this city hardly ever speak to her. The old man is barely half her height, peering out at her from behind a pair of spectacles that sit crookedly on the bridge of his wide nose. His skin’s dark brown and wrinkled, almost the same color as his overcoat, and there’s not a hair left on his bald head. He grins up at her, flashing a mouthful of perfectly spaced false teeth, and she sees that he’s not really an old man at all. He’s really someone like her, one thing pretending to be another, hiding out in plain sight where this rush and press of mortal men and women will never pause to recognize him for what he is.

  “ Oh, I’m not gonna tell anybody, if that’s what you’re worrying about,” he says. “I got better things to do than waste my days telling these poor, dumb beasts secrets what they won’t believe,” and then he motions dismissively towards the cars and bright yellow taxis and all the people crossing Columbus Avenue.

  “I’ve come a great distance,” she says, though that doesn’t answer the question he’s asked her. And she thinks how it’s been days since she’s heard the sound of her own voice. No, not her own voice, but the voice she’s had so long now that it’s starting to seem like the only voice she’s ever had, the voice she was born with and the voice she’ll die with.

  “Me, I pass this way almost every day,” the old man says. “And I’ve seen you standing here, pretending you’re one of them and staring at that place. Greye’s Anatomy. I’ll wager my toenails someone thought himself a right witty bastard, coming up with that one. Anyhow, I’m not so far gone I can’t put one thing up against another, rub them together and see the sense of it.”

  She turns back towards the shop and chews at her lower lip a moment, then asks, “Did they steal something of yours, too?”

  “Well, maybe. In a manner of speaking,” he replies, “but then it’s nothing I couldn’t take right back, if ever the mood were to strike me I wanted it back. Is that how it is with you, Miss?”

  “I think so,” she says, not taking her eyes off the green door and the placard and all the dead things stuck up in the shop window. “It’s been so long now, I’m not quite certain anymore.”

  “Then, if you don’t mind my saying so, maybe it would be best if you didn’t
squander too many more days standing here in the cold, just watching.”

  “I don’t mind the cold,” she tells him.

  “That’s not what I was getting at, and you know it,” he says, and makes a dry, coughing sound.

  “It might not be there.”

  “You won’t be sure until you look.”

  “But I’m so tired of looking,” she says, and stuffs her hands into the deep pockets of the wool coat, which are bulging with an assortment of shells and pebbles she’s gathered over the years, a withered mermaid’s purse and a gold coin that’s a full century older than the oldest parts of this city. She moves her fingers anxiously among these souvenirs, searching for comfort that isn’t there to find. “It seems like I’ve been looking forever.”

  “Mind the difference between the way things seem and the way things are,” the old man says, and when she turns to reply, to ask him what he means, he’s gone, and she’s alone again with these people and their clattering automobiles and the roaring, smoldering buses.

  2.

  In the end, it was such a simple thing. As simple a thing as waiting for the light to change and crossing the busy street. As simple as following the sidewalk to the place where it ends beneath the black-and-white placard that reads GREYE’S ANATOMY. And as simple a thing as pausing only a moment or two to take in the morbid disarray of the window dressings before she opens the green door, trading the bitter, bright day for the musty warmth and shadows of the shop.