Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And then she must be more than half-asleep, because the sea has vanished, and Julia Flammarion is walking through the Wood on a sunny autumn day, late afternoon, only an hour or so left until dusk, and the fallen leaves crunch beneath her shoes as she follows Wampee Creek towards the small waterfall and the crystal-clear pool that fills a wide sinkhole. When she was younger, she swam there on very hot days, swimming naked beneath the pines and wax myrtles, the air all around filled with the joyous, raucous calls of birds and frogs and insects. She stops beside a familiar tree, wondering if it's all been nothing more than a daydream, her stealing the money and running off to Pensacola, the men and the movies and the drunk old woman whose husband left her because he was gay, nothing but something she wished that she had the courage to do. Julia laughs and leans against the tree, laughing that her imagination could ever get away from her like that, laughing because she's relieved and feels silly and because it's good to laugh here in the fading October sun and the long, familiar shadows. She sits down and wipes her eyes, and that's when Julia notices the albino girl walking towards her up the creek, the legs of her baggy overalls rolled past the knees.

  Somewhere nearby, a crow calls out hoarsely, and the girl looks up. Julia can see that her eyes are pink, and her hair as fine and pale as cornsilk. The girl, who can't be more than five or six years old, is holding a fat bullfrog in one hand. She sees Julia, too, and she smiles and begins splashing through the creek towards her.

  "Look, Momma," the girl says, holding up the bullfrog. "Have you ever in all your life seen one this big?"

  Look, Momma…

  And Julia knows perfectly damn well that the albino girl's only mistaken her for someone else, and in a few seconds more, when she comes closer, the child will realize her mistake. But then the girl stops, the creek flowing about her bare legs, and the bullfrog slips from her fingers and swims quickly away.

  "Momma?" the girl asks, looking down at her empty hand and then back up at Julia.

  I'm sorry child, Julia starts to tell her, but I ain't your momma. I ain't nobody's momma, but then the girl turns and begins splashing away down the creek towards the sinkhole. Julia stands up, ashamed that she's frightened the kid, even if she's not sure why. She starts to call out to the albino girl, wants to tell her to be careful because the rocks are slick and it's not far to the falls and-

  – there's only the caressing sea again, pressing in on every inch of her, the half-lit sea filling her, drowning her because she's asked it to, the agreeable, indifferent sea washing her away-a handful of mud, a pinch of salt, blood and a bit of sand, but there's nothing of her that won't dissolve or disperse. Only a passing moment's sadness that the autumn day by Wampee Creek was merely some smidgen of delirium coughed out by her dying mind, her life's last cruel trick, when it's only her and the sea and-

  No. Her and the sea and just one other thing, whatever it was came slithering up out of the wheel of light before her dream of Shrove Wood and the albino girl. The thing that isn't a shark or a barracuda, that it isn't anything that belongs here. Nothing she can see, but Julia feels it, like tendrils of scalding water twining themselves tightly about her legs, forcing her back up towards the surface. And then its inside her, burning, prying her body and soul apart to find some slender crevice in between.

  A pillar of fire dragging her to life again.

  A child with white rabbit eyes.

  And still and always, the world buzzes on like angry bees. Let it come and go, appear and vanish, for what have we to lose?

  Blood and thunder, fire and a mad woman with a knife.

  Have you ever in all your life seen one this big?

  The briefest flicker of blue-white light, a searchlight beacon hiding itself in her womb, where no one will ever think to look.

  The body of woman is like a flash of lightning…

  There are arms around Julia, then, the strong arms of a man hauling her up and out of the angry, cheated sea, the man's voice shouting for help, the voices of other men and the slosh of salt-water breaking against their bodies and the hull of a boat painted yellow as sunflowers and canary birds. And before Julia Flammarion blacks out, she sees the boat's name printed boldly across its bow-Gulf Angel.

  XIII. The Weaver's Retreat

  The Glaistig, Queen of Immolations, stands with Kypre Alundshaw on the barbican overlooking the gates of Kearvan Weal. She led the alchemist here from the outer courtyards, despite the protests of her architects and engineers, who argued that the earthquakes might have weakened the tower. But it looked sound enough to her, and from the barbican she can see between and beyond the steep walls of Wailer's Gash and out onto the plains beyond. She has borrowed one of the astronomer's telescopes, and with it the Glaistig can clearly make out a cloud of ash-grey dust heading into the rising sun. Both the Nesmians' horses, though only one of the red witches would be returning to their far-away protectorate on the river Yärin.

  "Have you found her, your Grace?" Alundshaw asks, and the Glaistig nods and passes the long brass telescope to him.

  And then Kypre Alundshaw can see her, too, the dust-haze trail marking Pikabo Kenzia's progress across the barren hublands. He wishes that he knew one of the heathen prayers, so that he might offer it up for her safe return home. She left the Weal without the body of her companion, which has now been bound in a gravling's winding-sheet and will be buried in the catacombs below the keep.

  "She kept her word, Alundshaw," the Glaistig says, the hot wind through the Gash rearranging her reddish-blonde hair and the folds of her long gown. "With luck, she'll reach the Dog's Bridge before nightfall."

  The alchemist lowers the telescope and rubs at his eye. "With luck," he says, "the Weaver's army will have all gone before her and the path will be clear."

  "Would that she might have at least accepted an escort," the Glaistig sighs, almost whispering now. "They've bought us precious time, Alundshaw."

  The alchemist places the looking-glass to his eye again, and it only takes him a moment to find her this time. He watches and contemplates sacrifice and the time that has or hasn't been bought by the death of the woman named Ezcha.

  And the wheels turn as the wheels have always turned, the alternating bands of granite and basalt and fire which are this flat, revolving world, and at its dim center the hublands lie, as still as still will ever be. The fixed point about which all creation revolves, the pivot and the axle, the rod and the shaft, and the Dragon lies coiled in its fiery abscess, long miles below Kearvan Weal. He's awake now, fully and truly awake for the first time in more than a hundred millennia, and he listens to the witch's horses, rough hoof beats against lava flats and the lonely roads of the blistered back country. He listens to the Weaver's forces somewhere out beyond the conflagration forever dividing the hublands from the rest of the world. Ten-thousand marching soldiers, twice that many cavalry, twenty-thousand horses, the wagons and battering rams and siege engines, and the Dragon is beginning to understand why, with victory within her grasp, the Weaver has chosen to flee.

  As her Seraphim were banished by the magic of the red witches, he easily snagged the soul of one exorcised angel, mere moments before it winked out of this existence and into another-hooked it snug and screaming on a mountainous thumb claw. Now the Dragon lies in its bed of fire, considering this frail creature of light and hate, this simple device which has brought so much pain and suffering and fear, this deadly toy the Weaver has stitched together from memory and nightmare and her own insanity. It would be such a simple undertaking, the fabrication of an angel, the Dragon thinks…

  The wheels turn.

  And far out on the Serpent's Road, atop a barren hill, the Weaver licks her wounds. She keenly felt the moment when her Seraphim were ripped from the disc of the world and strewn across the cosmos. She felt it like a knife driven through her skull and can only begin to guess at the power that might have ever accomplished such an exile. Beneath the rising sun, her white hair hangs about her face, tinged pink-orange, and th
e gem set deeply into the flesh between her pale eyes glows a bitter crimson. The sulfurous mists shrouding the stays and towers of the Dog's Bridge are underlit by the wide sea of fire between this innermost wheel and the hublands, and the Weaver begins to doubt she'll ever lead another charge across the bridge.

  And the Dragon picks her angel apart to see what makes it tick.

  The Glaistig's hooves stamp restlessly against the flagstones, and the alchemist lowers the telescope.

  "Now that they are no longer in the world, these angels," she asks him, "do you think she'll try again?"

  Kypre Alundshaw considers the question, then considers his reply twice as long. "The Weaver," he says, "like her Seraphim, is an alien to our lands. We have undone one weapon, but we must begin to consider what other infernal beings she might spin. We cannot know her mind, any more than we can know the mind of the Dragon, your Grace."

  For a moment they stand together atop the barbican, listening to the wind roaring through the Gash, through the mountains and around the jagged edges of the Weal, and then the Glaistig shivers, and the alchemist leads her back down to the courtyards.

  And, blind to wars and the sacrifices that may end them, if only for a time, the wheels turn as the wheels have always turned…

  XIV. The End of the Beginning

  Dancy sits on one of the old marble headstones in the overgrown cemetery and watches the church burn down. She didn't start the fire; she isn't exactly sure what started the fire, but she knows that it's probably for the best. Fire will make the earth here pure again, her mother's ghost whispers from beneath a tangle of blackberry briars. Fire will burn out all the evil, and good green things will live here again.

  Dancy keeps waiting for her mother's ghost to evaporate and the angel to show up and take her place. It usually happens that way, first her mother and then the angel. Sometimes, she actually prefers the angel. There's a loud crack, and Dancy looks up to see that the roof has collapsed completely. The sky is lit with a flurry of red-orange cinders as the last of the shadows, freed from the inferno, escape into the night. That's okay. She didn't come for them. Where they go and what they do, that's none of her concern. Someone might almost mistake them for smoke, streaming up and out of the flames. One passes directly over her head and vanishes into the thick wall of live oaks and magnolia behind the little cemetery. The shadow's screaming, so maybe it believes it could die in the fire. Maybe it's even afraid, Dancy thinks, and then she thinks about all the places a shadow can hide.

  Those are the souls of bad people, Julia Flammarion assures her daughter. They were never baptized or they died without making confession, so they can never go to Heaven. Some of them were pagan Indians, and some of them were murderers and thieves and drug addicts.

  Dancy glowers at the blackberry thicket where her mother's hiding, not so sure she believes that God would turn an Indian into one of those shadows just because it never got the chance to be baptized. That sounds even less fair than most things seem to her, but she knows there's no point arguing with her mother.

  Dancy glances up at the eastern sky above the tops of the trees, and there's the faintest pink and purple hint of dawn. The heat from the fire is keeping the air around her warm, so at least she doesn't have to worry about the dew or the morning chill. Then she remembers her knife, that she hasn't even cleaned the blade the way the angel has told her she should always do. She looks down at the monster's dark blood already gone to a crust on the steel and frowns. She'll have to find a stream or a pond somewhere to wash it clean, as clean as it's ever going to get. She wipes it once against the leg of her jeans, but hardly any of Elandrion's blood comes off the carving knife.

  "Is it over?" Dancy asks her mother. "Do you think that was the last one?"

  I ain't the one you ought to be asking that question, her mother replies, then rustles about in the briars like a raccoon or a possum or something.

  "Sometimes I think I'm crazy," Dancy says.

  You fight those thoughts, her mother says, sounding angry now. That ain't nothing but the demons trying to slow you down, trying to confuse you and slow you down.

  "Is that what she was?" Dancy asks her mother. "Elandrion. Was she a demon?"

  There's a long silence from the ghost of Julia Flammarion, then, and Dancy sits on the headstone listening to the roar and crackle of the burning church, to the screams of fleeing shadows and the uncomfortable, rustling sounds the trees are making, as if the fire frightens them.

  No, her mother says. You remember what I taught you about the Watchers, the Nephilim? And Dancy says that yes, she remembers, even though she really only half remembers.

  There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children unto them.

  "So Elandrion, she was one of the Watchers? She was half angel?" Dancy asks and wipes the knife against her pants leg again with no better results than the first time.

  They have many other names, her mother says, and then the blackberry thicket grows still and silent.

  But the monster told Dancy that she should know better than to believe it had any name at all. She considers telling her mother that it said that, then decides she doesn't need to hear anything more just now about all the ways the evils of the world will try and de-ceive her.

  She touches the tacky bloodstain on her jeans, the small smear the knife's left behind, and suddeny she's back inside the church and the fire hasn't started yet and the monster isn't dead. She's just buried her knife in its throat all the way up to the hilt, and it looks surprised, more surprised than hurt or scared or anything else. Blood that's black as molasses runs from between its sharp yellow teeth. She pulls the knife free, and the shadow things howl their disbelief as she raises her arm to plunge it in again, meaning to cut off the monster's head, just like her angel told her she ought to do.

  But it's speaking again, strangling on its own blood, but she can make out the words clearly enough. And Dancy's hand hesitates, halfway down to the monster's windpipe.

  "Now I see," it says. "Yeah, that's a damn good trick. That's an amazing fucking trick, hiding there in her skin, and I don't think she even knows-"

  But then the knife comes down again, comes down so hard it goes in all the way to the monster's spine, and Elandrion closes its empty, boiled-egg eyes and doesn't try to say anything else at all. It's body shudders, and Dancy smells smoke, and then the shadows begin to scream-

  She opens her eyes, disoriented and almost tumbling off the edge of the headstone, wondering how long it's been since she shut them, if its only been a moment or an hour. She glances back at the eastern sky, and it's not much brighter than the last time she looked, so it couldn't have been very long. There's an angry sound behind her, and she knows that it's the angel.

  "I don't want to do this anymore," she tell it, as though what she wants might actually matter to it. "I've killed three of them now. Find someone else to chase down all the rest. I'm done for."

  But she knows better, that there's a long road ahead of her, whether she's had enough or not, and she sits on the headstone and listens to the fire and the panicked cries of the shadow things. But mostly she's listening to what the angel's saying, how she's got to walk east, towards the scalding summer sun, and somewhere out there she'll find a gas station and a hand-painted sign that reads "Live Panther-Deadly Man Eater" in tall white letters. The angel tells her to kill everything and everyone she finds there, whether it looks like a monster or not.

  And she nods her head, because she knows she'll never say no, and it doesn't matter how many monsters she has to kill. Because her mother's told her time and time again about seeing the gates of Hell and all the demons swimming beneath the sea that tried to make sure that she drowned herself. So she knows there are worse things, no matter how tired she might get.

  She sits on the headstone for a few more minutes, until the angel is finished talking about the "live panther" sign and leaves he
r alone. Then Dancy stands up and slips the scabby knife into the waistband of her jeans. There will be somewhere nearby she can scrub it clean again. She picks up the heavy duffel bag and stares at the blazing ruins of Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church just a little longer before she leaves the cemetery, careful to shut the squeaky wrought-iron gate behind her, and Dancy Flammarion follows sunrise down Dry Creek Road, just the way her angel said she should.

  Afterword: On the Road to Jefferson

  Author's Note: This essay was originally released by Subterranean Press in 2002 as a chapbook to accompany In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers.

  1

  "Where do you get your ideas?"

  I've been asked that goddamned, annoying question so many times in the last few years that I've not only lost count, I've lost patience. So, in retaliation, I've about two dozen smart-ass replies to keep at the ready whenever it comes up (and it almost always comes up). They range from the Marxist (that's Groucho, not Karl)-"From a little feed shop in Boise. They deliver."-to the stupefyingly subtle-"Um…"-to turn-about-is-fair-play tactics-"Where do you get yours?" Sometimes body language is best, and the question can be dismissed with a simple shrug or an exasperated rolling of the eyes. Sometimes I pretend I didn't hear what was being asked and just say the first thing that comes to mind, instead. And, honestly, I usually have no clue where I "get an idea." I don't get them. They usually just come to me, like pimples and troublesome men, without my having invited them. They occur.