Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Mina refilled her cup from the mismatched teapot on the table, stirred at the peat-colored water, watching the bits of lemon pulp swirl in the little maelstrom she’d made.

  She’d go to the graveyard later, maybe tomorrow.

  And again the fact, the cold candor of her situation, washed over and through her; she had begun to feel like a lump of gravel polished smooth by a brook. That they were all dead now, the Company, and she’d not attended even a single funeral. Arthur first, almost four years back now, and then Jack Seward, lost at Suvla Bay. The news about Jonathan hadn’t reached her until two days after the drunken cacophony of victory had erupted in Trafalgar Square and had finally seemed to engulf the whole of London. He’d died in some unnamed village along the Belgian border, a little east of Valenciennes, a senseless German ambush only hours before the cease-fire.

  She laid her spoon aside, and watched the spreading stain it made on her napkin. The sky was ugly, bruised.

  A man named MacDonnell, a grey-bearded Scotsman, had come to her house, bearing Jonathan’s personal things – his pipe, the brass-framed daguerreotype of her, an unfinished letter. The silver crucifix he’d worn like a scar the last twenty years. The man had tried to comfort her, offering half-heard reassurances that her husband had been as fine a corporal as any on the Front. She thought, sometimes, that she might have been more grateful to him for his trouble.

  She still had the unfinished letter carried with her from London, and she might look at it again later, though she knew it almost by heart now. Scribblings she could hardly recognize as his, mad and rambling words about something bestial trailing his battalion through the fields and muddy trenches.

  Mina sipped her tea, barely noticing that it had gone cold, and watched the clouds outside as they swept in from the sea and rushed across the rocky headland.

  A soupy fog in the morning, misty ghosts of ships and men torn apart on the reef, and Mina Harker followed the curve of stairs up from the town, past the ruined Abbey, and into the old East Cliff churchyard. It seemed that even more of the tombstones had tumbled over, and she remembered the old sailors and fishermen and whalers that had come here before, Mr. Swales and the others, and wondered if anyone ever came here now. She found a bench and sat, looking back down to where Whitby lay hidden from view. The yellow lantern eyes of the lighthouses winked in the distance, bookending the invisible town below.

  She unfolded Jonathan’s letter and the chilling breeze fingered the edges of the paper.

  The foghorns sounded, that throaty bellow, perplexed and lonesome.

  Before leaving London, she’d taken all the papers, the typed pages and old notebooks, the impossible testament of the Company, from the wall safe where Jonathan had kept them. Now they were tucked carefully inside the brocade canvas satchel resting on the sandy cobbles at her feet.

  “…and burn them, Mina, burn every trace of what we have seen,” scrawled in that handwriting that was Jonathan’s, and no one’s she’d ever met.

  And so she had sat at the hearth, these records in her lap, watching the flames, feeling the heat on her face. Had lifted a letter to Lucy from the stack, held the envelope a moment, teasing the fire as a child might tease a cat with table scraps.

  “No,” whispered, closing her eyes against the hungry orange glow and putting the letter back with the rest. All I have left, and I’m not that strong.

  Far out at sea, she thought she heard bells, and down near Tate Hill Pier, a dog barking. But the fog made a game of sound, and she couldn’t be sure she’d heard anything but the surf and her own breathing. Mina lifted the satchel and set it on the bench beside her.

  Earlier that morning she’d stood before the looking glass in her room at the inn, staring into the soft eyes of a young woman, not someone who had seen almost forty-two years and the horrors of her twentieth. As she had so often done when standing before her own mirrors, she’d looked for the age that should have begun to crease and ruin her face and found only the faintest crow’s feet.

  “…every trace, Mina, if we are ever to be truly free of this terrible damnation.”

  She opened the satchel and laid Jonathan’s letter inside, pressed it between the pages of his old diary, then snapped the clasp shut again. Now, she thought, filled suddenly with the old anger, black and acid. I might fling it into the sea, lose these memories here, where it all started.

  Instead, she hugged the bag tightly to her and watched the lighthouses as the day began to burn the mist away.

  Before dusk, the high clouds had stacked themselves out beyond Kettleness, filling the eastern sky with thunderheads, bruise-black underbellies already dumping sheets of rain on a foamy white sea. Before midnight, the storm had reared above Whitby Harbor and made landfall. In her narrow room above the kitchen, framed in wood and plaster and faded gingham wallpaper haunted by a hundred thousand boiled cabbages, Mina dreamed.

  She was sitting at the small window, shutters thrown back, watching the storm walk the streets, feeling the icy salt spray and rain on her face. Jonathan’s gold pocket watch lay open on the writing desk, ticking loud above the crash and boom outside. MacDonnell had not brought the watch back from Belgium, and she’d not asked him about it.

  Regardless, there it lay, ticking. Quick and palsied fingers of lightning forked above the rooftops and washed the world in an instant of daylight.

  On the bed behind her, Lucy said something about Churchill and the cold wind, and she laughed. Chandelier diamond tinkling and asylum snigger between velvet and gossamer and rust-scabbed iron bars.

  And still laughing, she says, “Bitch…apostate, Wilhelmina coward.”

  Mina looked down, watching the hands, hour, minute, second, racing themselves around the dial. The fob was twisted and crusted with something unpleasantly dark.

  “Lucy, please…” and her voice came from very far away, and it sounded like a child asking to be allowed up past her bedtime.

  Groan and bedspring creak, linen rustle and a sound even wetter than the pounding rain. Lucy Westenra’s footsteps moved across the bare floor, heels clocking, ticking off the shortening distance.

  Mina looked back down, and Drawbridge Road was absurdly crowded with bleating sheep, soppy wool in the downpour. The gangling shepherd was a scarecrow blown from the wheat fields west of Whitby. Twiggy fingers emerged from beneath his burlap sleeves, as he drove his flock towards the Harbor.

  Lucy was standing very close now. Stronger than the rain and the old cabbage stink, anger that smelled like blood, and garlic bulbs, and dust. Mina watched the sheep and the storm.

  “Turn around, Mina. Turn around and look at me and tell me that you even loved Jonathan.”

  Turn around Mina and tell

  “Please, Lucy, don’t leave me here.”

  and tell me that you even loved

  The sheep were turning, their short necks craning upwards, and they all had red little rat eyes, and then the scarecrow howled.

  Lucy’s hands were cool silk on Mina’s fevered shoulders.

  “Don’t leave, not yet…”

  Lucy’s fingers, hairless spider legs, had crawled around her cheeks and seized her jaw. Something brittle dry, something crackling papery against her teeth, was forced past her lips.

  On the street, the sheep were coming apart in the storm, reduced to yellowed fleece and fat-marbled mutton; a river of crimson sluicing between paving stones. Grinning skulls and polished white ribs, and the scarecrow had turned away and broken up in the gale.

  Lucy’s fingers pushed the first clove of garlic over Mina’s tongue, then shoved another into her mouth.

  And she felt cold steel at her throat.

  we loved you, Mina, loved as much as the blood and the night and even as much as

  Mina Harker woke up in the hollow space between lightning and a thunderclap.

  Until dawn, when the storm tapered to gentle drizzle and distant echoes, she sat alone on the edge of the bed, shaking uncontrollably, and tasting bile and remem
bered garlic.

  January 1922

  Mina held the soup to the Professor’s lips, chicken steam curling in the cold air. Abraham Van Helsing, eighty-seven and so much more dead than alive, tried to accept a little of the thin broth. He took a clumsy sip, and the soup spilled from his mouth, dribbling down his chin into his beard. Mina wiped his lips with the stained napkin lying across her lap.

  He closed his grey-lashed eyes and she set the bowl aside. Outside, the snow was falling again, and the wind yowled wolf noises around the corners of his old house. She shivered, tried to listen instead to the warm crackle from the fireplace, the Professor’s labored breath. In a moment, he was coughing again, and she was helping him sit up, holding his handkerchief.

  “Tonight, Madam Mina, tonight…” and he smiled, wan smile, and trailed off, his words collapsing into another coughing fit, the wet consumptive rattle. When it passed, she eased him back into the pillows, and noticed a little more blood on the ruined handkerchief.

  Yes, she thought, perhaps.

  Once she would have tried to assure him that he would live to see spring and his damned tulips and another spring after that, but she only wiped the sweaty strands of hair from his forehead, and pulled the moth-gnawed quilt back around his bony shoulders.

  Because there was no one else and nothing to keep her in England, she’d made the crossing to Amsterdam the week before Christmas; Quincey had been taken away by the influenza epidemic after the war. So, just Mina now, and this daft old bastard. Soon enough, there would be only her.

  “Shall I read for a bit, Professor?” They were almost halfway through Mr. Conrad’s The Arrow of Gold. She was reaching for the book on the nightstand (and saw that she’d set the soup bowl on it) when his hand, dry and hot, closed softly around her wrist.

  “Madam Mina,” and already he was releasing her, his parchment touch withdrawn and there was something in his eyes now besides cataracts and the glassy fever flatness. His breath wheezed in, then forced itself harshly out.

  “I am afraid,” he said, his voice barely a rasping whisper, slipped into and between the weave of the night.

  “You should rest now, Professor,” she told him, wishing against anything he might say.

  “So much a fraud I was, Madam Mina.”

  did you ever even love

  “It was my hand that sent her, by my hand.”

  “Please, Professor, let me call for a priest. I cannot…”

  The glare that flashed behind his eyes – something wild and bitter, vicious humor – made her look away, scissoring her fraying resolve.

  “Ah,” and “Yes,” and something strangled that might have been laughter. “So, I confess my guilt? So, I scrub the blood from my hands with that other blood?”

  The wind banged and clattered at the shuttered windows, looking for a way inside. For a moment, an empty space filled with mantel-clock ticking and the wind and his ragged breathing, there was nothing more.

  Then he said, “Please, Madam Mina, I am thirsty.”

  She reached for the pitcher and the chipped drinking glass.

  “Forgive me, sweet Mina.”

  The glass was spotty, and she wiped roughly at its rim with her blue skirt.

  “…had it been hers to choose…” and he coughed again, once, a harsh and broken sound. Mina wiped at the glass harder.

  Abraham Van Helsing sighed gently, and she was alone.

  When she was done, Mina carefully returned the glass to the table with the crystal pitcher, the unfinished book, and the cold soup. When she turned to the bed, she caught her reflection in the tall dressing mirror across the room; the woman staring back could easily have passed for a young thirty. Only her eyes, hollow, hollow, bottomless things, betrayed her.

  May 1930

  As twilight faded from the narrow rue de l’Odéon, Mina Murray sipped her glass of chardonnay and roamed the busy shelves of Shakespeare and Company. The reading would begin soon, some passages from Colette’s new novel. Mina’s fingers absently traced the spines of the assembled works of Hemingway and Glenway Wescott and D. H. Lawrence, titles and authors gold or crimson or flat-black pressed into cloth. Someone she half-recognized from a café, or a party, or some other reading passed close, whispered a greeting, and she smiled in response, then went back to the books.

  And then Mlle. Beach was asking everyone to please take their seats, a few straight-backed chairs scattered among the shelves and bins. Mina found a place close to the door, and watched as the others took their time, quietly talking among themselves, laughing at unheard jokes. Most of them she knew by sight, a few by name and casual conversation, one or two by reputation only. Messieurs Pound and Joyce, and Radclyffe Hall in her tailored English suit and sapphire cufflinks. There was an unruly handful of minor Surrealists she recognized from the rue Jacob bistro where she often took her evening meals. And at first unnoticed, a tallish young woman, unaccompanied, choosing a chair off to one side.

  Mina’s hands trembled, and she spilled a few drops of the wine on her blouse.

  The woman sat down, turning her back to Mina. Beneath the yellowish glow of the bookstore’s lamps, the woman’s long hair blazed red-gold. The murmuring pack of Surrealists seated themselves in the crooked row directly in front of Mina, and she quickly looked away. Sudden sweat and her mouth dry, a dull undercurrent of nausea, and she hastily, clumsily, set her wine glass on the floor.

  That name, held so long at bay, spoken in a voice she thought she’d forgotten.

  Lucy.

  Mina’s heart, an arrhythmic drum, raced inside her chest like a frightened child’s.

  Sylvia Beach was speaking again, gently hushing the murmuring crowd, introducing Colette. There was measured applause as the authoress stepped forward, and something sarcastic mumbled by one of the Surrealists. Mina closed her eyes tightly, cold and breathing much too fast, sweaty fingers gripping the edges of her chair.

  Someone touched her arm, and she jumped, almost cried out, gasping loud enough to draw attention.

  “Mademoiselle Murray, êtes vous bien?”

  She blinked, dazed, recognizing the boy’s unshaven face as one of the shop’s clerks, but unable to negotiate his name.

  “Oui, je vais bien.” And she tried to smile, blinking back sucking vertigo and dismay. “Merci…je suis désolé.”

  He nodded, doubtful, reluctantly returning to his windowsill behind her.

  At the front of the gathering, Colette had begun to read, softly relinquishing her words. Mina glanced to where the red-haired woman had sat down, half expecting to find the chair empty, or occupied by someone else entirely. She whispered a faithless prayer that she’d merely hallucinated or suffered some trick of light and shadow. But the woman was still there, though turned slightly in her seat, so that Mina could now see her profile, her full lips and familiar cheekbones.

  The smallest sound, a bated moan, from Mina’s pale lips, and she saw an image of herself rising, pushing past bodies and through the bookstore’s doors, fleeing headlong through the dark Paris streets to her tiny flat on Saint-Germain.

  Instead, Mina Murray sat perfectly still, watching, in turn, the reader’s restless lips and the delicate features of the nameless red-haired woman wearing Lucy Westenra’s face.

  After the reading, as the others milled and mingled, spinning respectful pretensions about Sido (and Madame Collete in general), Mina inched towards the door. The crowd seemed to have doubled during the half-hour, and she squeezed, abruptly claustrophobic, between shoulders and cigarette smoke. But four or five of the rue Jacob Surrealists were planted solidly and typically confrontational, in the shop’s doorway, muttering loudly among themselves, the novelist already forgotten in their own banter.

  “Pardon,” she said, speaking just loudly enough to be heard above their conversation, “puis-je…” Mina pointed past the men to the door.

  The one closest, gaunt and unwashed, almost pale enough to pass for albino, turned towards her. Mina remembered his face,
its crooked nose. She’d once seen him spit at a nun outside the Deux Magots. He gave no sign that he intended to let her pass, and she thought that even his eyes looked unclean.

  Carrion eyes, she thought.

  “Mademoiselle Murray, please, one moment.”

  Mina matched the man’s glare a second longer, and then, slowly, turned, recognizing Adrienne Monnier; her own shop, the Maison des Amis des Livres, stood, dark-windowed tonight, across the street. It was generally acknowledged that Mlle. Monnier shared considerable responsibility for the success of Shakespeare and Company.

  “I have here someone who would very much like to meet you.” The red-haired woman was standing at her side, sipping dark wine. She smiled, and Mina saw that she had hazel-green eyes.

  “This is Mademoiselle Carmicheal from New York. She says that she is a great admirer of your work, Mina. I was just telling her that you’ve recently placed another story with the Little Review.”

  “Anna Carmicheal,” the woman said, eager and silken-voiced, offering Mina her hand. Detached, drifting, Mina watched herself accept it.

  Anna Carmicheal, from New York. Not Lucy.

  “Thank you,” Mina said, her voice the same dead calm as the sea before a squall.

  “Oh, Christ, no, thank you, Miss Murray.”

  And Mina noticed how much taller than Lucy Westenra this woman was, her hands more slender, and there was a small mole at the corner of her rouged lips.

  Then Adrienne Monnier was gone, pulled back into the crowd by a fat woman in an ugly ostrich-plumed hat, leaving Mina alone with Anna Carmichael. Behind her, the divided Surrealists argued, a threadbare quarrel and wearisome zeal.

  “I’ve been reading you since ‘The White Angel of Carfax,’ and last year, my God, last year I read ‘Canto Babel’ in Harper’s. In America, Miss Murray, they’re saying that you’re the new Poe, that you make Le Fanu and all those silly Victorians look –”