Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  "It is a riddle," Dancy says. "One is the truth, and one isn't. Or they're both true, but only partly true. They're both lies, without the other."

  "Give me a bon-bon, and I'll tell you which," the stuffed bear growls.

  "You don't answer riddles. You said so."

  "I'll make an exception."

  "I don't think you even know."

  "I'm dead. Dead bears know lots of things," and Dancy's thinking about that, trying to decide whether or not she could even get a piece of the candy all the way up into the bear's mouth with her wrists tied together.

  "All right," she says, but then there's a rustling sound behind her, like dry October leaves in a cold breeze, and the air smells suddenly of cinnamon and ice.

  I never knew ice had a smell, she thinks, turning, and there's a very pretty boy standing on the other side of the room, watching her. The door's still closed, or he shut it again. He's tall and very slender, maybe a little older than she is, and wearing a black velvet dress with a dark green symbol like an hourglass embroidered over his flat chest. His long hair is the exact same green as the hourglass, and his eyes are the color of starlight.

  "Hello, Dancy," he says and takes a step towards her. He's barefoot and has a silver ring on each of his toes. "Who were you talking to?"

  "The bear," she says, and the boy smiles and reaches into a pocket of his dress; he takes out a small stoppered bottle and holds it up where she can see. The glass is the amber color of pine sap or deep swamp pools stained by rotting vegetation.

  "The Ladies have asked me to speak to you," he tells her. "I've brought them something quite precious, but they thought you should see it first. And, I admit, I've been wanting to see you for myself. You have a lot of people talking, Dancy Flammarion."

  "Did you know he was coming?" she asks the bear, or her angel, it doesn't really matter which, since neither of them answers her.

  "You're not exactly what any of us expected. Why did you come to Savannah? Who did you come here to kill?"

  "I'm not sure," she says, and that much is true, all her dreams after Waycross, all the things she sees in dark hours, only bits and tattered pieces, something broken, and there wasn't time to figure out how all the parts fit together.

  "You didn't come for the Ladies?"

  "They're not real monsters," she says. "They're nothing but witches and perverts and cannibals. They're all crazy, but they're not real monsters at all."

  "No," he says. "They're not. Did you come for me, then? Did you come for my master or one of the Parsifal?"

  "I don't know."

  "Did you come for this?" and the boy in the black dress holds the bottle out to her, and Dancy looks back at the bear again, imagines a story where he springs suddenly to life and leaps across the room to devour this strange boy in a single bite.

  "No. I don't even know what that is," she says.

  For a moment, the boy doesn't say anything else, watches her with his brilliant starshine eyes, eyes to read her mind, her soul, to ferret out lies and half truths. They're starting to make her feel light-headed, those eyes, and she glances down at the floor.

  "Do I frighten you, Dancy?"

  "No," she lies. "I'm not scared of you."

  "Look at me then," he says, and when she does, Dancy sees that she isn't standing by the bear and the dead-woman paintings anymore, but sitting on the red sofa again, and the duct tape binding her hands is gone. The pretty boy is sitting beside her, on her left, staring down at the amber bottle in his hand. The glass looks very old, oily, prismatic. He shakes it, and inside something buzzes and flickers to life, lightning-bug flicker, and soon the bottle has begun to glow as brightly as the fancy lamps set around the room, and she can't look directly at it anymore.

  "Some people still think that it's the Grail," he says. "It isn't, of course. The alchemist Petrus Bonus thought it might be a splinter of the lapis exilis, but it isn't that, either. For a long time, it was lost. It turned up a few years ago in a Portuguese fisherman's nets, trapped inside this bottle. The fisherman died trying to open it."

  "So what is it?" Dancy asks, trying not to hear the low, thrumming voices woven into the light from the bottle. A rumbling thunderstorm choir to rattle her teeth, to make ashes of her bones and soot of her white flesh.

  "Just a toy. An unfinished experiment. Some forgotten, second-rate wizard's silly trinket."

  "Then it isn't precious at all," Dancy says, and her eyes have started to hurt so badly that she looks away. Tears are streaming down her cheeks, and the thrumming sound is starting to make her head ache.

  "It's quite useless, but there are people who would die for it. There are people who would kill for it."

  "You're just another riddle, aren't you?" Dancy whispers. "I'm sick of riddles." She's holding her fingertips to her temples, eyes squeezed shut, the voices stuck inside her head now and trying to force their way out through her skull.

  "But that's all there is, I'm afraid. In the whole, wide, irredeemable world, that's all there is, finally."

  "No. That's not true," Dancy says. "There's pain-"

  "But why? Why is there pain, Dancy?"

  "So there can be an end to pain," and she wishes on the names of all the saints and angels she can remember that the boy will stop talking, stop asking her questions, kill her and get it over with. She doesn't want to be alive when the voices from the bottle find their way out of her head.

  "What do you hear, Dancy Flammarion? The voices, what do they sing for you? What songs do they sing for martyrs and monster slayers?"

  "They hate you," she says and then bites down hard on the end of her tongue so that she won't say anything else, nothing else she isn't supposed to say. Her mouth tastes like salt and wheat pennies and rain water.

  "That's nothing I didn't already know. What do they sing for my oblation, for your sacrifice?"

  The throb behind her eyes folding and unfolding, becoming something unbearable, unthinkable, that stretches itself across the sizzling sky, running on forever or so far it may as well be forever. A choir of agony, razorshard crescendo, and "Haven't you ever tried to open the bottle?" Dancy asks the boy, because she can't keep it all inside herself any longer.

  And for her answer, the rustling autumn sound again, though this time she thinks it's actually more like wings, leathery bat wings or the nervous wings of small birds, the flutter of ten thousand flapping wings, and Dancy knows that if she opens her eyes it won't be the boy sitting next to her. Something else entirely, something much closer to whatever he really is, and now the red room stinks of roadkill and shit and garbage left to slowly rot beneath the summer sun.

  "It's only a toy," she says.

  "That's what he's afraid of," the stuffed bear growls from across the room, and Dancy laughs, because she knows he's telling the truth. Dead bears don't like riddles, either, and when she tries to stand up she falls, tumbles like a dropped teapot that would never stop falling if she had a choice, would never have to shatter like the china-doll woman who shattered a long, long time ago and the Savannah River washed most of the pieces away to the sea.

  Dancy opens her eyes, and the bottle's lying on the floor in front of her. The roaring, hurtful voices inside drip from her nostrils and lips and ears, a sticky molasses-dark puddle on the rug, and "Pick it up," the thing that isn't a boy in a dress snarls, making words from the tumult of feathers and hurricane wind. "You're dying, anyway. There's nothing it can do to you. Show me the trick."

  "There isn't any trick," she says, reaching for the bottle. "It's only a toy."

  "No," the bear growls. "Don't you touch it. Make him do his own dirty work," but she's already holding the bottle, so light in her hand, so warm, a balm to soothe the pain eating her alive, and she looks up into the maelstrom spinning in the bruised place hung a few feet above the red sofa. The counterclockwise gyre of snapping, twigthin bones and mockingbird quills, the eyes like swollen, seeping wounds, and here, this part she remembers, this moment from a nightmare of hu
ngry, whirling fire and dying birds.

  "You should have tried the window," the bear says, and Dancy vomits, nothing much in her stomach but the tea that Dead Girl let her drink, but she vomits, anyway.

  "It knows you, Dancy Flammarion. Before you were born, it knew you. Before the sun sparked to life, it was already calling you here."

  "I don't want it," she coughs and wipes her mouth.

  "You know the trick. We know you know the trick," and the thing in the air above the sofa is screaming, screeching, turning faster and faster, and bits of itself are coming loose and drifting slowly down to the floor. Wherever they land, the rug scorches and smolders.

  "Open it!"

  Dancy sits up, and for a moment she stares deep into the wheel, the paradox still point at its absolute center-consuming and blossoming heart, nothing and everything there all at once. "Abracadabra," she whispers, her throat gone raw and her head coming apart at the seams, and she throws the bottle as hard as she can. It arcs end over end, and the pretty boy with starshine eyes (and she sees that he has become a boy again, that the boy was there somewhere, all along) is scrambling after it. When the bottle hits the wall, it bursts into a spray of powdered glass and blue-golden flame that rises quickly towards the ceiling. A sparkling ruin that twines itself into a hammer, a wave, a fist of the purest light, and as the pain leaves her head and the world slips kindly away to leave her alone in darkness, the hammer falls, and the only sounds left are the promises that monsters make before they die.

  * * *

  "Is it over?" Mary Rose asks, speaking very quietly, and Biancabella holds an index finger up to her lips, hush.

  The Ladies of the Stephens Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists wait together in the long hall outside the door to the Crimson Room. Miss Aramat is sitting on the stairs, alone with Porcelina's body in her arms, singing softly to herself or to Porcelina's ghost-Blacks and bays, dapples and greys, when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses. The bread knife she used to cut Porcelina's throat lies at her feet, sticky with drying blood. The house on East Hall Street is quiet now, breathless in the battered silence after the storm, and there's only Miss Aramat's voice and the obstinate ticking of the grandfather clock by the stairs, the distant ticking of other clocks in other rooms.

  All the things they've heard, or only think they've heard, since the Bailiff left and Samuel's boy went into the room with his bottle and the albino girl, the inescapable, inevitable moment of Porcelina's death, but all of it not half so terrible as this silence. This waiting, and once Candida put her hand on the doorknob and pulled it quickly back again, her palm scalded raw by the cold.

  "He used us," Isolde murmurs. "He lied to us."

  "They both used us," Emily replies, then the look from Miss Aramat enough that neither of them says anything more.

  Just the clocks and pretty little horses and the long, last hour before dawn.

  And then the knob turns, finally, the tumblers of the lock rolling themselves, the irrelevant key in Biancabella's pocket, and the door swings open. Dancy Flammarion stands silhouetted in lamplight and a weirder, flaxen glow, fairy fire, foxfire, that seems to shine from somewhere just behind her. A power in that light, and dignity, and darker things that will haunt the dreams of the Ladies for the rest of their lives. But the glow fades immediately away when she steps out into the shadow-strewn hallway, and she's only the Bailiff's hitchhiker again.

  Dancy holds one of the swords from over the fireplace gripped tightly in both hands. Her face is streaked with tears and blood and vomit, and Biancabella notices that one of her boots is untied.

  Miss Aramat stops singing. "What did you do to him?" she asks. "Is he dead? Did you kill him?"

  "He would have let you open the bottle for him," Dancy says. "He would have let you all die trying."

  Miss Aramat looks down at Porcelina's head in her lap, and she smiles sadly and strokes the dead girl's matted hair.

  "What was in it?" she whispers.

  "Nothing meant for you. Nothing meant for him, either."

  "I tried to tell her," Miss Aramat says, wiping a bloody smear from underneath Porcelina's left eye. "I tried to tell her we wanted nothing to do with the goddamned thing."

  "Is that why you killed her?" Dancy asks her.

  Miss Aramat wipes away another splotch of blood, and then she closes Porcelina's eyes. "I can't remember why I killed her," she says. "I knew for certain, only a moment ago, but now I can't remember. Do you know, Biancabella?"

  "You were angry," Biancabella replies, keeping her eyes on the sword in Dancy's hands. "You were afraid."

  "Was I? Well, there you go, then. Biancabella's hardly ever wrong."

  "Are you going to kill us all now?" Alma asks Dancy. "We wouldn't really have hurt you, you know, not really. We were only-"

  "Jesus Christ," Biancabella hisses. "You only wanted to cook her with plantains. Shut up, or I'll kill you myself."

  "I'm leaving now," Dancy says, and she takes another step away from the door to the Crimson Room, still holding the sword out in front of her like a shield. Alma and Candida step out of her way, and "Thank you, oh, thank you," Alma gushes. "We wouldn't have hurt you, not really. We would never, ever-"

  " Alma, I told you to shut the fuck up!"

  "I'm sorry," and then Alma 's backing away from Dancy and Biancabella both, presses herself insect flat against the wall. "I won't say anything else, I promise. I'm sorry I ever said anything at all."

  "Get the hell out of here, girl," Biancabella growls. "Now, before I change my mind. I don't give a shit what happened in there, you couldn't kill all of us."

  Dancy glances at the sword and then nods once, because she knows that Biancabella's probably right, and what she came to do is finished, so it doesn't matter anyway. She turns and hurries towards the front door. Outside, the first watery hints of dawn, grey-blue wash through the window set into the front door, and she never thought she'd see daylight again.

  "Stop!" Miss Aramat shouts, and when she stands up, Porcelina's body rolls forward and tumbles loudly to the bottom of the stairs.

  So close, Dancy thinks, so close, only two or three more steps and she would have been out the door and running down the street, and she wouldn't have looked back even once.

  "It doesn't end this way," Miss Aramat says, and when Dancy turns around, the china-doll woman's holding a revolver pointed at her. "Not in my house, missy. You don't come into my house and make threats and then walk out the front door like nothing's happened."

  "Let her go," Biancabella says. "It's not worth it."

  "We have to have a feast to remember Porcelina by, don't we? We'll have to have something special," and Miss Aramat pulls the trigger. There's a small, hard click as the hammer falls on an empty chamber.

  "I didn't come for you," Dancy says, and she tightens her grip on the sword because it's the only thing left to hold onto. "You're nothing but a wicked, crazy woman."

  "And you, you think you're any better? You're so goddamn high and mighty, standing there on the side of the goddamn angels, and we're nothing but shit, is that it?"

  "Please, Aramat," Biancabella begs. "We'll find something else for Porcelina's feast, something truly special. We'll take the car and drive down to St. Augustine -"

  "Look at her, Biancabella. She's the monster. She has the marks," and Miss Aramat pulls the revolver's trigger again, and again there's only the impotent taunt of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

  "Let her go, Aramat," and now Biancabella's moving towards the stairs. She shoves Isolde aside and almost trips over Porcelina's corpse. "She's nothing to us. She's just someone's fucking puppet."

  "I didn't come for you," Dancy says again.

  "'I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,'" Miss Aramat whispers, and the third time she squeezes the trigger the revolver explodes in a deafening flash of fire and thunder, tearing itself apart, and the shrapnel takes her hands and face with it, buries a chunk of steel the size of a grape
between her eyes. One of the fragments grazes Biancabella's left cheek, digging a bloody furrow from the corner of her mouth to her ear, and she stands, helpless, at the bottom of the stairs as Aramat crumples and falls.

  And Dancy Flammarion doesn't wait to see whatever does or doesn't come next. She drops the sword and runs, out the front door of the big house on East Hall Street, across the wide yard, and the new day wraps her safe in redeeming charcoal wings and hides her steps.

  * * *

  Not yet noon and already a hundred degrees in the shade, and the Bailiff is sitting alone on the rusted rear bumper of the Monte Carlo drinking a Coke. The sun a proper demon overhead, and he holds the cool bottle pressed to his forehead for a moment and squints into the mirage shimmer writhing off the blacktop. Dancy Flammarion is walking towards him up the entrance ramp to the interstate, a small girlshape beneath a huge black umbrella, coming slowly, stubbornly through the heatbent summer day. A semi rushes past, roars past, and there's wind for a moment, though it isn't a cool wind. The truck rattles away, and once again the only sound is the droning rise and fall of cicadas. The Bailiff finishes his Coke and tosses the empty bottle into the marsh at the side of the road; he takes a blue paisley bandanna from his back pocket and wipes the sweat from his face and bald head.

  "A man needs a hat in a place like this," he says, and Dancy stops a few feet from the car and watches him. She's wearing a pair of sunglasses that look like she must have found them lying by the side of the road, the left lens cracked and the bridge held together with a knotted bit of nylon fishing twine.

  "You set me up, old man," she says to him. "You set us all up, didn't you?"

  "Maybe a nice straw Panama hat, something to keep the sun from cooking his brains. Didn't Clark Gable wear one of those in Gone With The Wind?"