The Ammonite Violin & Others

by Kiernan, Caitlín R

  “Well,” the man says. “Then I guess the next question would be the price.”

  “The price?” she asks, and presses her hand deeper into the folds of the pelt. “You’d ask me to pay you for what’s already rightfully mine?”

  “What you say is already yours,” he replies. “I mean, nothing personal, right, but I’m running a business here, and this chest belonged to my cousin, who, I will remind you, is now deceased.”

  “I don’t want the chest,” she says, not taking her eyes off the sealskin. “Or the piccolo.”

  “Okay, then I’ll only charge you for the sealskin. And I’ll keep the rest. That works for me.”

  “It doesn’t work for me,” she tells him, and reluctantly withdraws her hand from inside the chest. “I don’t have any money. I have never had any money.”

  The man takes a deep breath and lets it out very slowly. He rubs at the scruff of his auburn beard and shakes his head. “Then we have a problem. I’m sorry, lady, but I can’t just give you this. I’ve got bills to pay.”

  The woman rakes a step back from the edge of the table, and she wonders if she’s still strong enough to murder a human being, if she’s ever been that strong, and if it would count as murder if she killed this man, who makes his living selling things which should have been decently returned to the earth or sea or sky, or simply left there in the first place, this man who will never know and can never understand the theft of one’s true shape. There’s a small hammer lying on the table, between the chest and the scattered pieces of the fossil tortoise’s carapace. She imagines how it would feel in her hand.

  “Nothing personal,” he says again.

  She puts both her hands into her deep coat pockets, because it would be so easy to reach for the little hammer, because she’s still fast, and he doesn’t expect she would do such a thing, that the sealskin could possibly mean so much to her that she’d kill him for it. She worries with the shells and pebbles filling her pockets, limpets and mussels and polished granite, all her souvenirs, and they make their familiar, soothing, clacking noises between her fingers.

  She can still hear the wind calling her home again, the voice of the sea speaking from the old chest.

  “I could hold it for you,” he says. “I could hold onto it for, say, six months. That’s the best I can promise.”

  And then her fingers brush something that isn’t shell or stone, something smooth and cold, and she remembers the old coin she’s carried all the way from Prince Edward Island. She found it one evening, half buried in the mud of a tidal flat, glinting faintly in the setting sun. She removes it from her coat pocket and lays it on the table in front of the man. “I have this,” she says. “It is money, isn’t it? It is gold.”

  “Yeah, that’s what it looks like,” he says, and gives her a quick sidewise glance; she can see surprise and suspicion in his easy blue eyes. “Can I hold it? Do you mind?”

  “I found it, along time ago. You can have it, for the chest,” “But you said you didn’t want—”

  “It is gold,” she says again, raising her voice slightly.

  He picks up the coin and rubs at it with his thumb, then holds it up to the light. “It’s Roman, I think,” he tells her. “But I don’t know much about coins, so I can’t say what it might be worth. I’d have to show it to someone. I know a numismatist over on—”

  “It’s worth an old wooden chest and a piccolo,” she interrupts and licks her dry lips. “It’s worth a nappy, moth-eaten sealskin that you’re ashamed to put in your shop window. It’s worth that much, at least,” and then she turns and looks directly at him for the first time since the man opened the chest. And there’s a flash of something like fear in his eyes, something like awe or horror, and she thinks perhaps he’s glimpsed some dim sliver of the truth. Maybe he’s beginning to understand what manner of being she is, and what he’s let follow him alone into the back room of his shop.

  “Yeah,” he says, his voice grown flat and cautious. “I expect it’s worth at least that much.”

  “Then we have a deal?” she asks, though the words come out sounding less like a question than she’d meant them to sound.

  “Jesus, you’re a weird one,” he says, and at first she thinks he means the old Roman coin, which he’s holding up the fluorescent light again. “Do you want a bill of sale for that? Should I sign somewhere in blood? At any rate, it’s yours now.”

  “It was always mine,” she replies, and she takes the sealskin out of the chest, leaving it empty except for the piccolo. “But I should thank you, for keeping it safe until I found it again.”

  “Well, then you’re very fucking welcome,” he says, squinting at the coin so he doesn’t have to look at her. “I’m thinking you can show yourself out. You’re a big girl.”

  “I’m sorry about your cousin,” she tells him, even though it isn’t true. She’d always meant to kill the piper who stole her skin, and some part of her feels cheated that a disease has beaten her to it. She’s dreamt his death many times, how she might separate him from out his skin before the end.

  “Don’t bother. He really was an asshole. It was always only a question of which would kill him first, his cock or his mouth or the liquor.”

  “You won’t see me again,” she says, and slips the bundle of sealskin beneath her grey coat, holding it there against bare flesh, and already it feels a part of her once more.

  “All I got to say is this better not fucking go up in a great puff of pink smoke when you’re gone,” he says, and mutters something else under his breath and squints more intently at the coin. So she leaves him there with the trunk and the piccolo and all his other hoarded treasures, retracing her steps to the green curtain and down the shop’s narrow, death-haunted aisle. The green door jingles loudly, and then she’s across the threshold and out in the sun again, and there’s only the indifferent noise of the taxis and buses, only the busy city streets, between her and the sea and home.

  Ode to Edvard Munch

  I find her, always, sitting on the same park bench. She’s there, no matter whether I’m coming through the park late on a Thursday evening or early on a Monday evening or in the first grey moments of a Friday morning. I play piano in a martini bar at Columbus and 89th, or I play at the piano, mostly for tips and free drinks. And when I feel like the long walk or can’t bear the thought of the subway or can’t afford cab fare, whenever I should happen to pass that way alone in the darkness and the interruptions in the darkness made by the lampposts, she’s there. Always on that same bench, not far from the Ramble and the Bow Bridge, just across the lake. They call that part of the park Cherry Hill. The truth is that I haven’t lived in Manhattan long enough to know these things, and, anyway, I’m not the sort of man who memorizes the cartography of Central Park, but she told me it’s called Cherry Hill, because of all the cherry trees growing there. And when I looked at a map in a guidebook, it said the same thing.

  You might mistake her for a runaway, sixteen or maybe seventeen; she dresses all in rags, or clothes so threadbare and dirty that they may as well be rags, and I’ve never seen her wearing shoes, no matter the season or the weather. I’ve seen her barefoot in snow.

  I asked her about that once, if she would wear shoes if I brought her a pair, and she said no, thank you, but no, because shoes make her claustrophobic.

  I find her sitting there alone on the park bench near the old fountain, and I always ask before I sit down next to her. And always she smiles and says of course, of course you can sit with me. You can always sit with me. Her shoulder-length hair has been dyed the color of pomegranates, and her skin is dark. I’ve never asked, but I think she may be Indian. India Indian, I mean. Not Native American. I once Awaited tables with a girl from Calcutta, and her skin was the same color, and she had the same dusky brown-black eyes. But if she is Indian, the girl on Cherry Hill, she has no trace of an accent when she talks to me about the fountain or her favorite paintings in the Met or the exhibits she likes best at the Museum of
Natural History.

  The first time she smiled...

  “You’re a vampire?” I asked, as though it were the sort of thing you might ask any’ girl sitting on a park bench in the middle of the night.

  “That’s an ugly word,” she said and scowled at me. “That’s a silly, ugly word.” And then she was silent a long moment, and I tried to think of anything but those long incisors, like the teeth of a rat filed dawn to points. It was a freezing night near the end of January, but I was sweating, nonetheless. And I had an erection. And I realized, then, that her breath didn’t fog in the cold air.

  “I’m a daughter of Lilith,” she said.

  Which is as close as she’s ever come to telling me her name, or where she’s from, or anything else of the sort. I’m a daughter of Lilith, and the way she said it, with not even a trace of affectation or humor or deceit, I knew that it was true. Even if I had no idea what she meant, I knew that she was telling me the truth.

  That was also the first night that I let her kiss me. I sat with her on the bench, and she licked eagerly at the back of my neck. Her tongue was rough, like a cat’s tongue.

  She smelled of fallen leaves, that dry and oddly spicy odor which I have always associated with late October and jack-o’-lanterns. Yes, she smelled of fallen leaves, and her own sweat and, more faintly, something which I took to be woodsmoke. Her breath was like frost against my skin, colder even than the long winter night. She licked at the nape of my neck until it was raw and bleeding, and she whispered soothing words in a language I could neither understand nor recognize.

  “It was designed in 1860,” she said, some other night, meaning the fountain with its bluestone basin and eight frosted globes. “They built this place as a turnaround for the carriages. It was originally meant to be a drinking fountain for horses. A place for thirsty things.”

  “Like an oasis,” I suggested, and she smiled and nodded her head and wiped my blood from her lips and chin.

  “Sometimes it seems all the wide world is a desert,” she said. “There are too few places left where one may freely drink. Even the horses are no longer allowed to drink here, though it was built for them.”

  “Times change,” I told her and gently touched the abraded place on my neck, trying not wince, not wanting to show any sign of pain in her presence. “Horses and carriages don’t much matter anymore.”

  “But horses still get thirsty. They still need a place to drink.”

  “Do you like horses?” I asked, and she blinked back at me and didn’t answer my question. It reminds me of an owl, sometimes, that slow, considering way she blinks her eyes.

  “It will feel better in the morning,” she said and pointed at my throat. “Wash it when you get home.” And then I sat with her a while longer, but neither of us said anything more.

  She takes my blood, but never more than a mouthful at a time, and she’s left me these strange dreams in return. I have begun to think of them as a sort of gift, though I know that others might think them more a curse. Because they are not entirely pleasant dreams. Some people would even call them nightmares, but things never seem so cut and dried to me. Yes, there is terror and horror in them, but there is beauty and wonder, too, in equal measure—a perfect balance that seems never to tip one way or the other. I believe the dreams have flowed into me on her rough cat’s tongue, that they’ve infected my blood and my mind like a bacillus carried on her saliva. I don’t know if the gift was intentional, and I admit that I’m afraid to ask. I’m too afraid that I might pass through the park late one night or early one morning and she might not be waiting for me there on her bench on Cherry Hill, that asking would break some brittle spell which I can only just begin to comprehend. She has made me superstitious and given to what psychiatrists call “magical thinking,” misapprehending cause and effect, when I was never that way before we met. I play piano in a martini bar, and, until now, there’s never been anything in my life which I might mistake for magic. But there are many things in her wide sienna eyes which I might mistake for many other things, and now that uncertainty seems to cloud my every waking thought. Yet I believe that it’s a small price to pay for her company, smaller even than the blood she takes.

  I thought that I should write down one of the dreams, that I should try to make mere words of it. From this window beside my bed, I can see Roosevelt Island beyond the rooftops, and the East River and Brooklyn and the hazy blue-white sky that can mean either summer or winter in this city. It makes me think of her, that sky, though I’m at a loss to explain why. At first, I thought that I would write it down and then read it to her the next time I see her. But then I started to worry that she might not take it the way I’d intended, simply as reciprocation, my gift to repay hers. She might be offended, instead, and I don’t think I could bear the world without her. Not after all these nights and mornings and all these dreams, I’m stalling.

  Yes, I am.

  There’s the silhouette of a city, far off, past the sand and smoke that seem to stretch away in all directions except that one which would lead to the city. I know I’ll never go that far, that going as far as that, I’d never again find my way home. The city is for other beings. I know that she’s seen the city, that she’s walked its streets and spoken all its dialects and visited its brothels and opium dens. She knows the stink of its sewers and the delicious aromas of its markets. She knows all the high places and all the low places. And I follow her across the sand, up one dune and down another, these great waves of wind-sculpted sand which tower above me, which I climb and then descend. In this place, the jackals and the vultures and the spiny black scorpions are her court, and there is no place here for thirsty horses.

  Sometimes I can see her, through stinging veils of sand. And other times it seems I am entirely alone with the wailing Sirocco gale, and the voice of that wind is a thousand women crying for their men cut down on some Arabian battlefield a thousand years before my birth. And it is also the slow creep of the dunes across the face of the wasteland, and it is my heart pounding loudly in my ears. I’m lost in the wild, and I think I’ll never see her again, but then I catch a glimpse of her through the storm, crouched in the lee of ruins etched and defaced by countless millennia of sand and wind and time. She might almost be any animal, anything out looking for its supper or some way to quench its thirst.

  She waits there for me in the entrance to that crumbling temple, and I can smell her impatience, like dashes of turmeric. I can smell her thirst and her appetite, and the wind drives me forward.

  She leads me down into the earth, her lips pressed to my ear, whispering so I can hear her over the storm. She tells me the name of the architect who built the fountain on Cherry Hill, that his name was Jacob Wrey Mould, and he came to New York in 1853 or 1854 or 1855 to design and build All Soul’s Church. He was a pious man, she tells me, and he illustrated Thomas Grey’s “Elegy in a Country Church-Yard” and “Book of Common Prayer.” She says he died in 1886, and that he too was in love with a daughter of Lilith, that he died with no other thought but her. I want to ask where she learned all these things, if, perhaps, she spends her days in libraries, and I also want to ask if she means that she believes that I’m in love with her. But then the narrow corridor we’ve been following turns left and opens abruptly on a vast torch-lit chamber.

  “ Listen,” she whispers. “This is one of my secrets. I’ve guarded this place for all my life.”

  The walls are built from great blocks of reddish limestone carved and set firmly in place without the aid of mortar, locking somehow perfectly together by a forgotten masonic art. The air reeks of frankincense, and there is thick cinnamon-colored dust covering everything; I follow her down a short flight of steps to the floor. It occurs to me that we’ve gone so deep underground that the roar of the wind should not still be so loud, but it is, and I wonder if maybe the wind has found its way inside me, if it’s entered through one of the wounds she leaves on my throat.

  “This was the hall of my mother,”
she says.

  And now I see the corpses, heaped high between the smoky braziers. They are nude, or they are half-dressed, or they’ve been torn apart so completely or are now so badly decomposed that it’s difficult to tell whether they’re clothed or not. Some are men and others are women and not a few are children. I can smell them even through the incense, and I might cover my nose and mouth. I might begin to gag. I might take a step back towards the stairs leading up to the long corridor and the bloodless desert night beyond. And she blinks at me like a hungry, watchful owl.

  “I cannot expect you to understand,” she says.

  And there are other rooms, other chambers, endless atrocities that I can now only half recall. There are other secrets which she keeps for her mother in the deep places beneath shifting sands. There are the ghosts of innumerable butcheries. There are demons held in prisons of crystal and iron, chained until some eventual apocalypse; their voices are almost indistinguishable from the voice of the wind.

  And then we have descended into some still greater abyss, a cavern of sparkling stalactite and stalagmite formations, travertine and calcite glinting in the soft glow of phosphorescent vegetation which has never seen and will never have need of sunlight. We’re standing together at the muddy edge of a subterranean pool, water so still and perfectly smooth, an ebony mirror, and she’s already undressed and is waiting impatiently for me to do the same.

  “I can’t swim,” I tell her and earn another owl blink.

  If I could swim, I cannot imagine setting foot in that water, that lake at the bottom of the world.

  “No one has asked you to swim,” she replies and smiles, showing me those long incisors. “At this well, men only have to drown. You can do that well enough, I suspect.” And then I’m falling, as the depths of that terrible lake rise up around me like the hood of some black desert cobra and rush over me, bearing me down and down and down into the chasm, driving the air from my lungs. Stones placed one by one upon my chest until my lungs collapse, constricting coils drawing tighter and tighter about me, and I try to scream. I open my mouth, and her sandpaper tongue slips past my lips and teeth. She tastes of silt and dying and loss. She tastes of cherry blossoms and summer nights in Central Park. She wraps herself about me, and the grey-white wings sprouting from her shoulders open wider than the wings of any earthly bird. Those wings have become the sky, and her feathers brush aside the fire of a hundred trillion stars.