Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  "But I know who you are, Dancy. News travels fast these days. I know all about what you did in Bainbridge, and I know what you came here to do tonight."

  "Don't make me hurt you, too."

  "No one has to get hurt. Put the knife down, and we can talk."

  "You're just here to distract me, so it can run, so it can escape, and then I'll have to find it all over again."

  The woman nodded and looked up at the low ceiling of the trailer, her green eyes staring directly into the flood of white light pouring down into the tiny room.

  "You have a hole inside you," she said, her smile beginning to fade. "Where your heart should be, there's a hole so awfully deep and wide, an abyss in your soul."

  "That's not true," Dancy whispered.

  "Yes, it is. You've lost everything, haven't you? There's nothing left in the world that you love and nothing that loves you."

  And Dancy almost turned and ran, then, back down the cinder-block steps into the arms of the night, not prepared for this strange woman and her strange, sad voice, the secret things she had no right to know or ever say out loud. Not fair, the angel leaving this part out, not fair, when she's always done everything he asked of her.

  "You think that he loves you?" the woman asked. "He doesn't. Angels love no one but themselves. They're bitter, selfish things, every one of them."

  "Shut up."

  "But it's the truth, dear. Cross my heart. Angels are nothing but spiteful-"

  "I said to shut up."

  The woman narrowed her eyes, still staring up at the ceiling, peering into the light reflecting off her glossy skin.

  "You've become their willing puppet, their doll," she sighed. "And, like the man said, they have made your life no more than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nothing whatsoever."

  Dancy gripped the carving knife and took a hesitant step towards the woman.

  "You're a liar," she said. "You don't have any idea what you're talking about."

  "Oh, but I do," the woman replied, lowering her head and turning to gaze at Dancy with those startling, unreal eyes. "I know so very many things. I can show you, if you want to see. I can show you the faces of God, the moment you will die, the dark places behind the stars," and she shrugged off the yellow raincoat, and it slipped to the linoleum floor.

  Where her breasts should have been there were wriggling, tentacled masses instead, like the fiery heads of sea anemones, surrounding hungry, toothless mouths.

  "There is almost no end to the things I can show you," the woman said. "Unless you're too afraid to see."

  Dancy screamed and lunged towards the naked woman, all of her confusion and anger and disgust, all of her fear, flashing like steam to blind, forward momentum, and she swung the rusty knife, slashing the woman's throat open a couple of inches above her collarbones. The sudden, bright spray of blood across Dancy's face was as cold as water drawn from a deep well, and she gasped and retreated to the door of the trailer. The knife slid from her hand and clattered against the aluminum threshold.

  "You cut me," the woman sputtered, dismayed, and now there was blood trickling from her lips, too, blood to stain those sharp teeth pink and scarlet. Her green eyes had gone wide, swollen with surprise and pain, and she put one hand over the gash in her throat, as if to try and hide the wound hemorrhaging in time to her heart.

  "You did it," she said. "You really fucking did it," and then the tentacles on her chest stopped wriggling, and she crumpled to the floor beside the recliner.

  "Why didn't you tell me?" Dancy asked the angel, even though she knew it probably wasn't listening. "Why didn't you tell me she would be here, too?"

  The woman's body shuddered violently and then grew still, lying on top of the discarded raincoat, her blood spreading out across the floor like a living stain. The white light from the ceiling began to dim and, a moment later, winked out altogether, so that Dancy was left standing in the dark, alone in the doorway of the trailer.

  "What have you done to her?" the Gynander growled from somewhere close, somewhere in the yard behind Dancy, its heavy, plodding footsteps coming closer, and she murmured a silent, doubtful prayer and turned to face it.

  * * *

  Unafraid of falling, but falling nonetheless, as the living light from the wooden box ebbs and flows beneath her skin, between the convolutions of her brain. Collapsing into herself, that hole where her heart should be, that abyss in her soul, and all the things she's clung to for so long, the handholds clawed into the dry walls of her mind, melt beneath the corrosive, soothing voices of the light.

  Where am I going? she asks, and the red and black tendrils squeezing her smaller and smaller, squeezing her away, reply in a hundred brilliant voices-Inside, they say, and Down, and Back, and finally, Where the monsters come from.

  I don't have my knife, she says.

  You won't need it, the light reassures her.

  And Dancy watches herself, a white streak across a star-dappled sky, watches her long fall from the rolling deck of a sailing ship that burned and sank and rotted five hundred years ago. A sailor standing beside her curses, crosses himself, and points at Heaven.

  "Did ye see it?" he asks in a terrified whisper, and Dancy can't tell him that she did and that it was only the husk of her body burning itself away, because now she's somewhere else, high above the masts and stays, and the boat is only a speck in the darkness below, stranded forever in a place where no wind blows and the sea is as still and flat as glass. As idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.

  Falling, not up or down, but falling farther in, and Is there a bottom, or a top? Is there ever an end?, she wonders, and Yes, the voices reply. Yes and no, maybe and that depends.

  Depends on what?

  On you, my dear. That depends on you.

  And she stands on a rocky, windswept ledge, grey stone ground smooth and sheer by eons of frost and rain, and the mountains rise up around her until their jagged peaks scrape at the low-slung belly of the clouds. Below her is a long, narrow lake, black as pitch, and in the center of the lake, the ruins of a vast, shattered temple rise from its depths. There are things stranded out there among the ruins, nervous orange eyes watching the waters from broken spires and the safety of crumbling archways. Dancy can hear their small and timorous thoughts, no one desire among them but to reach the shore, to escape this cold, forgotten place-and they would swim, the shore an easy swim for even the weakest among them, but, from time to time, the black waters of the lake ripple, or a stream of bubbles rises suddenly to the surface, and there's no knowing what might be waiting down there. What might be hungry. What might have lain starving since time began.

  "I want to go back now," Dancy says, shouting to be heard above the howling wind.

  There's only one way back, the wind moans, speaking now for the light from the Gynander's box. And that's straight on to the center.

  "The center of what?" Dancy shouts, and in a moment her voice has crossed the lake and echoed back to her, changed, mocking. The center of when? center of where? of who?

  On the island of ruins, the orange-eyed things mutter ancient, half-remembered supplications and scuttle away into deeper shadows, Dancy's voice become the confirmation of their every waking nightmare, reverberating God-voice to rain the incalculable weight of truth and sentence. And the wind sweeps her away like ash…

  "What about her bush?" the orderly asks the nurse as the needle slips into Dancy's arm, and then he laughs.

  "You're a sick fuck, Parker, you know that?" the nurse tells him, pulling the needle out again and quickly covering the tiny hole she's left with a cotton ball. "She's just a kid, for Christ's sake."

  "Hey, it seems like a perfectly natural question to me. You don't see something like her every day of the week. Guys are curious about shit like that."

  "Is that a fact?" the nurse asks the orderly, and she removes the cotton ball from Dancy's arm, stares for a moment at the single drop of crimson staining it.


  "Yeah. Something like that."

  "If you tell anyone, I swear to fucking-"

  "Babe, this shit's between me and you. Not a peep, I swear."

  "Jesus, I ought'a have my head examined," the nurse whispers and drops the cotton ball and the syringe into a red plastic container labeled infectious waste, then checks Dancy's restraints one by one until she's sure they're all secure.

  "Is that me?" Dancy asks the lights, but they seem to have deserted her, left her alone with the nurse and the orderly in this haze of antiseptic stink and Thorazine.

  "Is that me?"

  The nurse lifts the hem of Dancy's hospital gown and, "There," she says and licks her lips. "Are you satisfied? Does that answer your question?" She sounds nervous and excited at the same time, and Dancy can see that she's smiling.

  "Goddamn," the orderly mumbles, rubs at his chin and shakes his head. "Goddamn, that's a sight to see."

  "Poor kid," the nurse says and lowers Dancy's gown again.

  "Hey, wait a minute, I was gonna get some pictures," the orderly protests and laughs again.

  "Fuck you, Parker," the nurse says.

  "Anytime you're ready, baby."

  "Go to hell."

  And Dancy shuts her eyes, shuts out the white tile walls and fluorescent glare, pretends that she can't smell the nurse's flowery perfume or the orderly's sweat, that her arm doesn't ache from the needle and her head isn't swimming from the drugs.

  Closing her eyes. Shutting one door and opening another.

  The night air is very cold and smells like pine sap and dirt, night in the forest, and Dancy runs breathless and barefoot over sticks and stones and pine straw, has been running so long now that her feet are raw and bleeding. But she can hear the men on their horses getting closer, shouting to one another, the men and their hounds, and if she dares stop running they'll be on top of her in a heartbeat.

  She stumbles and almost falls, cracks her left shoulder hard against the trunk of a tree and the force of the blow spins her completely around so that she's facing her pursuers, the few dark boughs left between them and her, and one of the dogs howls. The eager sound of something that knows it's almost won, that can taste her even before its jaws close around her throat.

  The light from the box swirls about her like a nagging swarm of nocturnal insects, whirring black wings and shiny scarlet shells to get her moving again. Each step fresh agony now, but the pain in her feet and legs and chest is nothing next to her terror, the hammer of hooves and the baying hounds, the men with their guns and knives. Dancy cannot remember why they want her dead, what she might have done, if this is only some game or if it's justice; she can't remember when this night began or how long she's been running. But she knows that none of it will matter in the end, when they catch her, and then the earth drops suddenly away beneath her, and she's falling, really falling, the simple, helpless plummet of gravity. She crashes headlong through the branches of a deadfall and lands in a shallow, freezing stream.

  The electric shock of cold water to rip the world around her open once again, the slow burn before it numbs her senseless, the fire before sleep and death to part the seams; she looks back to see the indistinct, frantic tumble of dog bodies already coming down the steep bank after her. Above them, the traitorous pines seem to part for the beautiful man on his tall black horse, his antique clothes, the torch in his hand as bright as the sun rising at midnight. His pale face is bruised with the anger and horror of everything he's seen and done, and everything he will see and do before the dawn.

  "Je l'ai trouvèe!" he shouts to the others. "Dèpêchez-vous!"

  Words Dancy doesn't know, but she understands them perfectly well, just the same.

  "La bête! Je l'ai trouvèe!"

  And then she looks down at the reflection of the torchlight dancing in the icy, gurgling water, and her reflection there, as well, her albino's face melting in the flowing mirror, becoming the long snout and frightened, iridescent eyes of a wolf, melting again and now the dead woman from the Gynander's trailer stares back at her. Dancy tries to stand, but she can't feel her legs anymore, and the dogs are almost on top of her, anyway.

  "Is this me?" she asks the faces swirling in the stream. "Is this my face, too?" But this when and where slides smoothly out from beneath her before the light can reply, before snapping dog teeth tear her apart; caught up in the implosion again, swallowed whole by her own disintegration.

  "They're all dead," the nurse says, and her white shoes squeak loud against the white floor. "Cops up in Milligan think maybe she had something to do with it."

  "No shit?" the orderly says. He's standing by the window, looking out at the rain, drawing circles in the condensation with his index finger. Circles and circles inside circles. "Where the hell's Milligan?"

  "If you don't know already, trust me, you don't want to know."

  Far away, the beautiful man on his black horse fires a rifle into the night.

  "How old were you then?" the psychiatrist asks Dancy, and she doesn't answer him right away, stares instead at the clock on the wall, wishing she could wait him out. Wishing there was that much time in the universe, but he has more time than she does. He keeps it nailed like Jesus to his office wall and doles it out in tiny paper cups, a mouthful at a time.

  "Dancy, how old were you that night your mother took you to the fair?"

  "Does it matter?" she asks him, and the psychiatrist raises his eyebrows and shrugs his bony old-man shoulders.

  "It might," he says.

  And the fair unfurls around her, giddy violence of colored lights and calliope wails, cotton-candy taffy air, sawdust air, barkers howling like drunken wolves, and the mechanical thunk and clank and wheeze of the rides. Her mother has an arm around her, holding her close as the sea of human bodies ebbs and surges about them, and Dancy thinks this must be Hell. Or Heaven. Too much of everything good and everything bad all shoved together into this tiny field, a deafening, swirling storm of laughter and screams; she wants to go home, but this is a birthday present, so she smiles and pretends that she isn't afraid.

  "You didn't want to hurt your mother's feelings," the psychiatrist says and chews on the end of a yellow pencil. "You didn't want her to think you weren't having fun."

  "Look, Dancy," her mother says. "Have you ever seen anything like that in your whole life?"

  And the clown on stilts, tall as a tree, strides past them, wading stiffly through the crowd. He looks down as Dancy looks up, and the clown smiles at her, real smile behind his painted smile, but she doesn't smile back. She can see his shadow, the thing hiding in his shadow, its spidery-long legs and half-moon smile, its eyes like specks of molten lava burning their way out of its skull.

  Dancy looks quickly down at the ground, trampled sawdust and mud, cigarette butts and a half-eaten candy apple, and "Get a load of her, will you?" a man says and laughs.

  "Hey, girly. You part of the freak show or what?"

  "'Course she is. She's one of the albinos. I saw the poster. They got a whole albino family. They got a boy that's half-alligator and a stuffed cow with two heads. They got a Chinese 'maphrodite-"

  "They ain't got no cow with two heads. That's a damn fake."

  "Well, she ain't no fake, now is she?"

  And then her mother is shoving a path through the crowd, towing Dancy after her, trying to get away from the two men, but they follow close behind.

  "Slow up, lady," one of them shouts. "We just want to get a good look at her. We'll pay you."

  "Yeah, that's right," the other one shouts, and now everyone is staring and pointing. "We'll pay. How much just to look? We ain't gonna touch."

  The psychiatrist taps his pencil against his chin and helps Dancy watch the clock. "Were you mad at her afterwards, for taking you to the fair?" he asks.

  "That was a long time ago," Dancy replies. "It was my birthday present."

  He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, makes a whistling sound between his front teeth.

 
"We never went anywhere, so she took me to the fair for my birthday."

  "Did you know about freak shows, Dancy? Did your mother warn you about them before you went to the fair?"

  "What's the difference between freaks and monsters?" she asks the psychiatrist.

  "Monsters aren't real," he says. "That's the difference. Why? Do you think you're a monster? Has anyone ever told you that you're a monster?"

  She doesn't answer him. In only five more minutes she can go back to her room and think about anything she wants, anything but fairs and grinning clowns on stilts and the way the two men stalked them through the crowd, anything but freaks and monsters. In the forest, the man fires his rifle again, and this time the shot tears a hole in the psychiatrist's face, so Dancy can see shattered bone and torn muscle, his sparkling silver teeth and the little metal gears and springs that move his tongue up and down. He drops the pencil, and it rolls underneath his desk; she wants to ask him if it hurts, being shot, having half your face blown off like that, but he hasn't stopped talking, too busy asking her questions to care if he's hurt.

  "Have you ever been afraid that she took you there to get rid of you, to leave you with the freaks?"

  And all the world goes white, a suffocating white where there is no sky and no earth, nothing to divide the one from the other, and the Arctic wind shrieks in her ears, and snow stings her bare skin. Not the top of the world, but somewhere very near it, a rocky scrap of land spanning a freezing sea, connecting continents in a far-off time of glaciers. Dancy wants to shut her eyes; then, at least, it would only be black, not this appalling, endless white, and she thinks about going to sleep, drifting down to someplace farther inside herself, the final still point in this implosion, down beyond the cold. But she knows that would mean death, in this place, this when, some mute instinct to keep her moving, answering to her empty belly when she only wants to be still.

  "Ce n'est pas un loup!" the man on his horse shouts to the others in his company, and Dancy peers over her shoulder, but she can't see him anywhere. Nothing at all back there but the wind-blown snow, and she wonders how he could have possibly followed her to this time and place, when he won't even be born for another thirteen thousand years. The storm picks his voice apart and scatters it across the plains.