Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  "Maybe you got it turned 'round backwards," the Gynander says and sets the lamp down on the floor. "Maybe what you think you know, you don't know at all."

  "I knew right where to find you, didn't I?" Dancy asks it, speaking very quietly and not taking her eyes off the lamp.

  "Well, yeah, now that's a fact. But someone like me, you know how it is. Someone like me always has enemies. Besides the angels, I mean. And word gets around, no matter how careful-"

  "Are you afraid to kill me? Is that it?"

  And there's a loud and sudden flutter from the Gynander's chest, then, like a dozen mockingbirds sewn up in there and wanting out, frantic wings beating against that leather husk. It leans closer, scalding carrion breath and the fainter smell of alcohol, the eager snik snik snik of its sharp white teeth, but Dancy keeps staring into the flickering heart of the hurricane lamp.

  "Someone like you," she says, "needs to know who its enemies are. Besides the angels, I mean."

  The Gynander hisses through its teeth and slips a hand around her throat, its palm rough as sandpaper, its needle claws spilling more of her blood.

  "Patience, Snow White," it sneers. "You'll be dead a long, long time. I'll wear your pretty alabaster skin to a thousand slaughters, and your soul will watch from Hell."

  "Yeah," Dancy says. "I'm starting to think you're gonna talk me to death," and she smiles for the beast, shuts her eyes, and the afterimage of the lamp flame bobs and swirls orange in the dark behind her lids.

  "You're still alive 'cause I still got things to show you, girl," the Gynander growls. "Things those fuckers, those angels, ain't ever bothered with, 'cause they don't want you to know how it is. But if you're gonna fight with monsters, if you're gonna play saint and martyr for cowards that send children out to do their killing, you're gonna have to see it all."

  Its grip on her throat tightens, only a little more pressure to crush her windpipe, a careless flick of those claws to slice her throat, and for a moment Dancy thinks maybe she's won after all.

  "This whole goddamn world is my enemy," the thing says. "Mine and yours both, Dancy Flammarion."

  And then it releases her, takes the lamp and leaves her alive, alone, not even capable of taunting a king of butchers into taking her life. Dancy keeps her eyes closed until she hears the trapdoor slam shut and latch, until she's sure she's alone again, and then she rolls over onto her back and stares up at the blackness that may as well go on forever.

  * * *

  After the things that happened in Bainbridge, Dancy hitched the long asphalt ribbon of U.S. 84 to Thomasville and Valdosta, following the highway on to Waycross. Through the swampy, cypress-haunted south Georgia nights, hiding her skin and her pink eyes from the blazing June sun when she could, hiding herself from sunburn and melanoma and blindness. Catching rides with truckers and college students, farmers and salesmen, rides whenever she was lucky and found a driver who didn't think she looked too strange to pick up, maybe even strange enough to be dangerous or contagious. And when she was unlucky, Dancy walked.

  The last few miles, gravel and sandy red-dirt back roads between Waycross and the vast Okefenokee wilderness, all of those unlucky, all of those on foot. She left the concrete and steel shade of the viaduct almost two hours before sunset, because the angel said she should. This time it wouldn't be like Bainbridge or the Texaco Station. This time there would be sentries, and this time she was expected. Walking right down the middle of the road because the weedy ditches on either side made her nervous; anything could be hiding in those thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry briars, anything hungry, anything terrible, anything at all. Waiting patiently for her beneath the deepening pine and magnolia shadows, and Dancy carried the old carving knife she usually kept tucked way down at the bottom of her duffel bag, held it gripped in her right hand and watched the close and darkening woods.

  When the blackbird flapped noisily out of the twilight sky and landed on the dusty road in front of her, Dancy stopped and stared at it apprehensively. Scarlet splotches on its wings like fresh blood or poisonous berries, and the bird looked warily back at her.

  "Oh Jesus, you gotta be pullin' my leg," the blackbird said and frowned at her.

  "What's your problem, bird?" Dancy asked, gripping the knife a little tighter than before.

  "I mean, we wasn't expecting no goddamn St. George on his big white horse or nothin', but for crying out loud."

  "You knew I was coming here tonight?" she asked the bird and glanced anxiously at the trees, the sky, wondering who else might know.

  "Look, girly, do you have any idea what's waitin' for you at the end of this here road? Do you even have the foggiest?"

  "This is where he sent me. I go where my angel sends me."

  The blackbird cocked its head to one side and blinked at her.

  "Oh Lord and butter," the bird said.

  "I go where my angel tells me. He shows me what I need to know."

  The blackbird glanced back over the red patch on its shoulder at the place where the dirt road turned sharply, disappearing into a towering cathedral of kudzu vines. It ruffled its feathers and shook its head.

  "Yeah, well, this time I think somebody up there must'a goofed. So you just turn yourself right around and get a wiggle on before anyone notices."

  "Are you testing me? Is this a temptation? Did the monsters send you?"

  "What?" the bird squawked indignantly and hopped a few in-ches closer to Dancy; she raised her carving knife and took one step backwards.

  "Are you trying to stop me, bird? Is that what you're doing?"

  "No. I'm trying to save your dumb ass, you simple twit."

  "Nobody can save me," Dancy said and looked down at her knife. In the half-light, the rust on the blade looked like old dried blood. "Maybe once, a long, long time ago, but no one can save me now. That's not the way this story ends."

  "Go home, little girl," the bird said and hopped closer. "Run away home before it smells you and comes lookin' for its supper."

  "I don't have a home. I go where the angel tells me to go, and he told me to come here. He said there was something terrible hiding out here, something even the birds of the air and the beasts of the field are scared of, something I have to stop."

  "With what? That old knife there?"

  "Did you call me here, blackbird?"

  "Hell no," the bird cawed at her, angry, and glanced over its shoulder again. "Sure, we been prayin' for someone, but not a crazy albino kid with a butcher knife."

  "I have to hurry now," Dancy said. "I don't have time to talk anymore. It's getting dark."

  The bird stared up at her for a moment, and Dancy stared back at it, waiting for whatever was coming next, whatever she was meant to do or say, whatever the bird was there for.

  "Jesus, you're really goin' through with this," it said finally, and she nodded. The blackbird sighed a very small, exasperated sigh and pecked once at the thick dust between its feet.

  "Follow the road, past that kudzu patch there, and the old well, all the way to down to-"

  "I know where I'm going, bird," Dancy said and shifted the weight of her duffel bag on her shoulder.

  "Of course you do. Your angel told you."

  "The old blue trailer at the end of the road," Dancy whispered. "The blue house trailer with three old refrigerators in the front yard." In the trees, fireflies had begun to wink on and off, off and on, a thousand yellow-green beacons against the gathering night. "Three refrigerators and a broken-down truck."

  "Then you best shove in your clutch, girl. And don't think for a minute that they don't know you're comin'. They know everything. They know the number of stars in the heavens and how many days left till the end of time."

  "This is what I do," she told the bird and stepped past him, following the road that led to the blackness coiled like a jealous, ancient serpent beneath the summer sky.

  * * *

  Sometime later, when the Gynander finally comes back to her, it's carrying a small wooden
box that it holds out for Dancy to see. Wood like sweet, polished chocolate and an intricate design worked into the lid-a perfect circle filled in with a riot of intersecting lines to form a dozen or more triangles, and on either side of the circle a waning or waxing half-moon sickle. She blinks at the box in the unsteady lantern light, wondering if the design is supposed to mean something to her, if the monster thinks that it will.

  "Pretty," Dancy says without enthusiasm. "It's a pretty box."

  The Gynander makes a hollow, grumbling sound in its throat, and the dead skin hiding its true face twitches slightly.

  "You never saw that before?" it asks her and taps at the very center of the circular design with the tip of one claw. "You never saw that anywhere else?"

  "No. Can I please have a drink of water?"

  "Your angel never showed it to you?"

  "No," Dancy says again, giving up on the water, and she goes back to staring at the rootsy ceiling of the cellar. "I never saw anything like that before. Is it some sort of hex sign or something? My grandma knew a few of those. She's dead-"

  "But you've never seen it before?"

  "That's what I said."

  The Gynander sits down in the dirt beside her, sets the lamp nearby, and she can feel the black holes where its eyes should be watching her, wary nothingness peering suspiciously out from the slits in its mask.

  "This box belonged to Sinethella."

  "Who?"

  "The woman that you killed last night," the Gynander growls, beginning to sound angry again.

  "I didn't kill a woman," Dancy says confidently. "I don't kill people."

  "It's carved from a type of African cedar tree that's been extinct for two thousand years," the Gynander says, ignoring Dancy, and its crackling voice makes her think of dry autumn leaves and fire. "And she carried this box for eleven millennia. You got any idea what that means, child?"

  "That she was a lot older than she looked," Dancy replies, and the Gynander grunts and puts the box down roughly on her chest. Heavy for its size, and cold, like a small block of ice, and suddenly the musty cellar air smells like spices-cinnamon, basil, sage, a few others that Dancy doesn't immediately recognize or has never smelled before.

  "Get that thing off me," she tells the monster. "Whatever it is, I don't want it touching me. It isn't clean."

  "Next to Sinethella," the Gynander says, "I'm nothing, nothing at all. Next to her, I'm just a carny freak. So why did you come for me instead of her?"

  "I go where my angel leads me. He shows me-"

  "In a moment, Dancy Flammarion, I'm going to open up this box here and let you see what's inside."

  "Get it off me. It stinks."

  The Gynander grunts, then leans very close to Dancy and sniffs at her; something almost like a tongue, the dark, unhealthy color of indigo or polk-salad berries, darts out from between its shriveled lips and tastes the cellar air.

  "That's sort'a the pot callin' the kettle black, don't you think? When's the last time you had a bath, Snow White?"

  And Dancy shuts her eyes, praying that her angel will come, after all, that he'll appear in a whirling storm of white, white feathers and hurricane wind and take her away from this awful place. She imagines herself in his arms, flying high above the swamps and pine barrens, safe in the velvet and starlight spaces between the moon and earth. I've done my best, she thinks, trying not to imagine what's waiting for her inside the freezing wooden box pressing painfully down on her chest. I've done my best, and none of these things can ever touch my immortal soul.

  "When men still huddled in their own filth," the Gynander says, "and worshipped the sun because they were too afraid to face the night, she walked the wide world, and nobody and nothin' stood against her. She was a goddess, almost."

  "I saw her with my own eyes," Dancy whispers. "I saw exactly what she was."

  "You saw what you were told to see."

  Sailing with her angel high above the winding black waters of the Okefenokee, above the booming voices of bull alligators and the nervous ears of marsh rabbits, safe in his arms because she's done the best that she can do. And he would tell her that, and that she doesn't have to be strong anymore. Time now to lie down and die, finally, time to be with her grandmother and mother in Paradise, no more lonely roads, no more taunts for her pink eyes and alabaster skin, and no more monsters. The angel's wings would sound like redemption, and she might glance down between her feet to see the Gynander's blue house trailer blazing in the night. "It'll be nothing but ashes by morning," she'd say, and the angel would smile and nod his head.

  "The first time Sinethella brought this box to me, first time she opened it and let me have a peek inside, I thought that I would surely die. I thought my heart would burst."

  There are no more monsters left in the world, the angel would say to her as they flew across the land, east towards the sea. You don't have to be afraid anymore. You can rest now, Dancy.

  "She read me a poem, before she let me look inside," the Gynander says. "I never was much for poetry, but I still remember this one. Hell, I'll remember this one till the day I die."

  She would ask her angel about the box, and he would tell her not to worry. The box was destroyed. Or lost in the swamp in some pool so deep only the catfish will ever see it. Or locked away forever in the inviolable vaults of Heaven.

  "But from my grave across my brow," the Gynander whispers, "plays no wind of healing now, and fire and ice within me fight, beneath the suffocating night."

  Open your eyes, Dancy, the angel says, and she does, not afraid of falling anymore, and the Gynander opens the box sitting on her chest. Far, far away, there's a sound like women crying, and the ebony and scarlet light that spills from the cedar box wraps Dancy tight in its searing, squirming tendrils, and slowly, bit by bit, drags her away.

  * * *

  Dancy walked through the long dark tunnel formed by the strangling kudzu vines, the broad green leaves muffling her footsteps, the heavy lavender flowers turning the air to sugar. She moved as quickly as she dared, wishing now that the blackbird had come with her, wishing she'd gotten an earlier start, and then there would still be a few bright shafts of late afternoon sunlight to pierce the tunnel of vines. Surrounded by the droning scream of cicadas, the songs of crickets and small peeping frogs hidden in amongst the rotten branches and trunks of the oaks that the kudzu had taken long ago for its skeleton, she counted her paces, like rosary beads, something to mark distance and occupy her mind, something to keep her focused and moving. No more than a hundred feet from one end to the next, a hundred feet at the most, but it might as well have been a mile. And halfway through, she reached a spot where the air was as cold as a January morning, air so cold her breath fogged, and Dancy jumped backwards, hugging herself and shivering.

  Too late, she thought. It knows I'm coming now, realising that the forest around her had gone completely quiet, not one insect or amphibian voice, no twilight birdsongs left to break the sudden silence.

  Reluctantly, she held a hand out, penetrating the frigid curtain of air again, a cold that could burn, that could freeze living flesh to stone; she drew a deep breath and stepped quickly through it.

  Beyond the vines, the blue house trailer was sitting there alone in a small weedy clearing, just like she'd seen it in her dreams, just exactly the way the angel had shown it to her. Light spilled from the windows and the door standing wide open like a welcome sign-Come on in, I've been waiting for you, Dancy Flammarion.

  She set her duffel bag down on the ground and looked first at her knife and then back to the blue trailer. Even the shimmering, mewling things she'd faced back in Bainbridge, even they were afraid of this haunted place, something so terrible inside those aluminum walls that even boogeymen and goblins were afraid to whisper its name. Dancy glanced up at the summer sky, hoping the angel might be there, watching over her, but there were only a few dim and disinterested stars.

  Well, what are you waiting on? the trailer seemed to whisper.

&
nbsp; "Nothing," she said. "I'm not waiting on anything."

  She walked past the three refrigerators, the burned-out carcass of the old Ford pickup, and climbed the cinder-block steps to stand in the open doorway. For a moment, the light was so bright that she thought it might blind her, might shine straight into her head and burn her brain away, and Dancy squinted through the tears streaming from the corners of her eyes. Then the light seemed to ebb, dimming enough that she could make out the shoddy confusion of furniture crammed into the trailer: a sofa missing all its cushions, a recliner the color of Spanish moss, and a coffee table buried beneath dirty plates, magazines, chicken bones, beer cans, and overflowing ashtrays. A woman in a yellow raincoat was sitting in the recliner, watching Dancy and smiling. Her eyes were very green and pupilless, a statue's jade-carved eyes, and her shaggy black hair fell about her round face in tangled curls.

  "Hello there, Dancy," she said. "We were beginning to think that you wouldn't make it."

  "Who are you?" Dancy asked, confused, and raised her knife so she was sure the woman could see it. "You're not supposed to be here. No one's supposed to be here but-"

  "I'm not? Well, someone should have told me."

  The woman stood up, slipping gracefully, slowly, from the grey recliner, her bare feet on the linoleum floor, and Dancy could see she wasn't wearing anything under the coat.

  "Not exactly what you were expecting, am I?" she said, sounding pleased with herself, and took a single step towards Dancy. Beneath the bright trailer lights, her bare olive skin glinted wetly, skin as smooth and perfect as oil on deep, still water, and "Stop," Dancy warned her and jabbed the knife at the air between herself and the woman.

  "No one here wants to hurt you," she said and smiled wider so that Dancy could see her long sharp teeth.

  "I didn't come for you," Dancy said, trying hard to hide the tremble in her voice, because she knew the woman wanted her to be afraid. "I don't even know who you are."