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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Yes, well,” she began, uncertain what she meant to say, only meaning to interrupt. The dizziness, sharpening unreality, was rushing back and she leaned against a shelf for support.

  “Miss Murray?” And a move, then, as if to catch someone who had stumbled, long fingers alert. Anna Carmichael took a cautious step forward, closing the space between them.

  “Mina, please, just call me Mina.”

  “Are you…”

  “Yes,” but she was sweating again. “Forgive me, Anna. Just a little too much wine on an empty stomach.”

  “Then please, let me take you to dinner.”

  Lips pursed, Mina bit the tip of her tongue, biting hard enough to bring a salted hint of blood, and the world began to tilt back into focus, the syrupy blackness at the edges of her vision withdrawing by degrees.

  “Oh, no. I couldn’t,” she managed. “Really, it’s not…”

  But the woman was already taking her by the arm, crescent moon smile baring teeth like perfectly spaced pearls, every bit the forceful American. She thought of Quincey Morris, and wondered if this woman had ever been to Texas.

  “But I insist, Mina. It’ll be an honor, and in return, well, I won’t feel so guilty if I talk too much.”

  Together, arm in arm, they elbowed their way through the Surrealist blockade, the men choosing to ignore them. Except the gaunt albino, and Mina imagined something passing between him and Anna Carmichael, unspoken, or simply unspeakable.

  “I hate those idiot bastards,” Anna whispered as the door jangled shut behind them. She held Mina’s hand tightly, squeezing warmth into her clammy palm, and surprising herself, Mina squeezed back.

  Out on the gas lit rue de l’Odéon, a warm spring breeze was blowing, and the night air smelled like coming rain.

  The meal had been good, though Mina had hardly tasted the little she’d eaten. Cold chicken and bread, salad with wild thyme and goat cheese, chewed and swallowed indifferently. And more than her share from a large carafe of some anonymous red Bordeaux. She’d listened to the woman who was not Lucy talk, endless talk of Anna Carmichael’s copious ideas on the macabre and of Mina’s writing.

  “I actually went to the Carfax estate,” she’d said, and then paused as if she had expected some particular reaction. “Just last summer. There’s some restoration underway there now, you know.”

  “No,” Mina answered, sipping her wine and picking apart a strip of white meat with her fork. “No, I wasn’t aware of that.”

  Finally, the waitress had brought their bill, and Anna had grudgingly allowed Mina to leave the tip. While they’d eaten, a shower had come and gone, leaving the night dank and chilly, unusually quiet. Their heels sounded like passing time on the wet cobblestones. Anna Carmichael had a room in one of the less expensive Left Bank hotels, but they walked together back to Mina’s flat.

  When Mina woke, it was raining again, and for a few uncounted minutes she lay still, listening, smelling the sweat and incense, a hint of rose and lilac in the sheets. Finally, there was only a steady drip, falling perhaps from the leaky gutters of the old building, and maybe from the eaves, striking the flagstones in the little garden. She could still smell Anna Carmichael on her skin. Mina closed her eyes and thought about going back to sleep, realizing only very slowly that she was now alone in the bed.

  The rain was over and the drip – the minute and measured splash of water on water, that clockwork cadence – wasn’t coming from outside. She opened her eyes and rolled over, into the cold and hollow place made by Anna’s absence. The lavatory light was burning; Mina blinked and called her name, calling

  Lucy

  “Anna?”

  drip and drip and drip and

  “Anna?” and her throat tightened, whatever peace she’d awakened with leached away by fear and adrenaline. “Anna, are you all right?”

  did you call for Lucy, at first, did I

  drip and drip and

  The floor was cold against her feet. Mina stepped past the chiffonier, bare floorboards giving way to a time- and mildew- and foot-dulled mosaic of ceramic polygons. Some of the tiles were missing, leaving dirty, liver-colored cavities in the design. The big tub, chipped alabaster enamel, the black iron showing through. Lion’s feet claws frozen in molded rictus, grappling for some hold on the slick tiles.

  Lucy Westenra lay, empty again, in the tub filled almost to overflowing. Each drop of water swelled like an abscess until its own weight tore it free of the brass faucet and so it fell, losing itself in the crimson water. The suicide’s wrists hung limply over the sides of the bath, hands open; her head tilted back at a broken angle. And there were three bright smiles carved into her flesh, all of them offered to Heaven, or only to Mina.

  The straight razor lay, its blade glinting sticky scarlet, on the floor where it had fallen from Lucy’s hand. And, like the dripping water, Mina stood until gravity pulled her free, and she fell.

  October 1946

  After the latest war and the ammonia antiseptic rooms where electrodes bridged the writhing space between her eyes with their deadening quick sizzle, after the long years that she was kept safe from herself and the suicidal world kept safe from her, Mina Murray came back to London.

  A new city to embrace the mopwater-grey Thames, changed utterly, scarred by the Luftwaffe’s firestorms and aged by the twenty-four years of her absence. She’d spent three days walking the streets, destruction like a maze for her to solve or discard in frustration. At Aldermanbury, she stood before the ruins of St. Mary’s and imagined – no, wished – her hands around Van Helsing’s neck. His brittle old bones to break apart like charred timbers and shattered pews. Is this it, you old bastard? Is this what we saved England for?

  And the question, recognizing its own intrinsic senselessness, its inherent futility, had hung nowhere, like all those blown-out windows framing the autumn-blue sky, the hallways ending only in rubble. Or her reflection, the woman a year from seventy looking back from a windowpane that seemed to have somehow escaped destruction especially for the purpose, this moment; a year from seventy, and she almost looked it. Time was catching up.

  The boy sitting on the wall watched the woman get out of the taxi, old woman in black stockings and a black dress with a high collar, her eyes hidden behind dark spectacles. He absently released the small brown lizard he’d been tormenting, and it skittered gratefully away into some crack or crevice in the tumbledown masonry. The boy thought the woman looked like a widow, but better to pretend she was a spy for the Gerrys on a clandestine rendezvous, secrets to be exchanged for better secrets. She walked in short steps that seemed like maybe she was counting off the distance between them. In the cool, bright morning, her shoes clicked, a coded signal click, possibly Morse-code click, and he thought perhaps he should quickly hide himself behind the crumbling wall, but then she saw him, and it was too late as the taxi pulled away. Too late, so he waved back, and there, she was just an old woman again.

  “Hello,” she said, fishing about, then, for something in her handbag. She took out a cigarette, and when he asked, the widow gave him one also. She lit it for him with a silver lighter and turned to stare at the gutted ruins of Carfax Abbey, at the broken, precarious walls braced against their inevitable collapse. Noisy larks and sparrows sang to themselves in the blasted trees, and farther on, the duck pond glinted in the sun.

  The woman leaned against the wall and sighed out smoke.

  “They didn’t leave much, did they?” she asked him.

  “No, Ma’am,” he said. “It was one of them doodlebugs last year that got it,” and he rocket-whistled for her, descending octaves and a big rumbling boom stuck on the end.

  The woman nodded and crushed her cigarette out against a raw edge of mortar, ground it back and forth, the ash smear black against oatmeal grey, and the butt dropped at her feet.

  “It’s haunted, you know,” the boy told her, “Mostly at night, though.” She smiled and he glimpsed her nicotine-stained teeth past the magenta bruise of
her lips. She nodded again.

  “Yes,” she said. “Yes, I guess that it is, isn’t it?”

  Mina killed the boy well back from the road, the straight razor she’d bought in Cheapside slipped out of her purse while he was digging about for bits of shrapnel to show her, jagged souvenirs of a pleasant autumn afternoon in Purfleet. One gloved hand fast over his mouth and only the smallest muffled sound of surprise before she drew the blade quick across his throat, and the boy’s life sprayed out dark and wet against the flagstones. He was the first murder she’d done since returning to England, and so she sat with him a while in the chilly shade of the tilted wall, his blood drying to a crust around her mouth. Once, she heard a dog barking excitedly off towards the wreck that had been Jack Seward’s asylum such a long time ago. There was a shiver of adrenaline and her heart skipped a beat, raced for a moment because she thought maybe someone was coming, that she’d been discovered. But no one came, and so she sat with the boy and wondered at the winding knot of emptiness still inside her, unchanged and, evidently, unchangeable.

  An hour later, she left the boy beneath a scraggly hedgerow and went to wash her hands and face in the sparkling pool. If there were ghosts at Carfax, they kept their distance.

  August 1955

  The cramped and cluttered office on West Houston even hotter than usual, the Venetian blinds drawn to keep the sun out, so only the soft glow from Audry Cavanaugh’s brass desk lamp, a gentle incandescence through the green glass shade. But no matter to the sticky, resolute Manhattan summer. The office was sweltering, and Mina had to piss again. Her bladder ached and she sweated and wrinkled her nose at the stale, heavy smell of the expensive English cigarettes the psychoanalyst chain-smoked. A framed and faded photograph of Carl Jung dangled on its hook behind the desk, and Mina felt his grey and knowing eyes, wanting inside her, wanting to see and know and draw reason from insanity.

  “You’re looking well today, Wilhelmina,” Dr. Cavanaugh said, then offered a terse smile. She lit another cigarette and exhaled a great cloud into the torpid air of the office. The smoke settled about her head like a shroud. “Sleeping any better?”

  “No,” Mina told her, which was true. “Not really.” Not with the nightmares and the traffic sounds all night outside her SoHo apartment, the restless voices from the street that she could never be sure weren’t meant for her. And not with the heat, either, like a living thing to smother her, to hold the world perpetually at the edge of conflagration.

  “I’m very sorry,” and Dr. Cavanaugh was squinting at her through the gauze of smoke, her stingy smile already traded for familiar concern. Audry Cavanaugh never seemed to sweat, always so cool in her mannish suits, her hair pulled back in its neat, tight bun.

  “Did you speak with your friend in London?” Mina asked. “You said you would.” And maybe the psychoanalyst heard the strain in Mina’s voice, because she sighed a loud, impatient sigh and tilted her head backwards, gazing up at the ceiling.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’ve talked with Dr. Beecher. Just yesterday, actually.”

  Mina licked her lips, her dry tongue drawn across drier lips, the parched skin of dead fruit. There was a moment of silence, a pause, and then Audry Cavanaugh said, “He was able to find a number of references to attacks on children by a ‘bloofer lady,’ some articles dating from late in September, 1897, in The Westminster Gazette and a few other papers. A couple of pieces on the wreck at Whitby, also. “But, Mina, I never said I doubted you. You didn’t have to prove anything.”

  “I had those clippings,” Mina mumbled around her dry tongue. “I used to have all the clippings.”

  “I always believed that you did.”

  There was more silence, then, and only street sounds ten stories down to fill the void. Dr. Cavanaugh put on her reading glasses and opened her yellow stenographer’s pad. Her pencil scritched across the paper to record the date. “The dreams, are they still about Lucy? Or is it the asylum again?”

  And a drop of sweat ran slowly down Mina’s rouged cheek, pooling at the corner of her mouth, abrupt tang of salt and cosmetics to tease her thirst. She looked away, at the worn and dusty rug under her shoes, at the barrister shelves stuffed with medical books and psychological journals. The framed diplomas and, almost whispering, she said, “I had a dream about the world.”

  “Yes?” and Audry Cavanaugh sounded a little eager, because here was something new, perhaps, something novel in old Mina Murray’s tiresome parade of delusions. “What did you dream about the world, Wilhelmina?”

  Another drop of sweat dissolved on the tip of Mina’s tongue, leaving behind the musky, fleeting taste of herself and fading too soon. “I dreamed that the world was dead,” she said. “That the world ended a long, long time ago. But it doesn’t know it’s dead, and all that’s left of the world is the dream of a ghost.”

  For a few minutes neither of them said anything more, and so there was only the sound of the psychoanalyst’s pencil, and then not even that. Mina listened to the street, the cars and trucks, the city. The sun made blazing slashes through the aluminum blinds, and Audry Cavanaugh struck a match, lighting another cigarette. The stink of sulfur made Mina’s nose wrinkle.

  “Do you think that’s true, Mina?”

  And Mina closed her eyes, wanting to be alone with the weary, constant rhythm of her heart, the afterimages like burn-scar slashes in the dark behind her vellum eyelids. She was too tired for confession or memory today, too uncertain to commit her scattered thoughts to words; she drifted, and there was no intrusion from patient Cavanaugh, and in a few minutes she was asleep.

  April 1969

  After she’s swallowed the capsules and a mouthful of plastic-flavored water from the blue pitcher on her night stand, after Brenda Neufield and her white shoes have left the hospital room, Mina sits up. She wrestles the safety bar down, and her legs swing slowly, painfully, over and off the edge of the bed. She watches her bare feet dangling above the linoleum floor, her ugly yellowed toenails, age spots and parchment skin stretched too tightly over kite-frame bones.

  A week ago, after her heart attack and the ambulance from her shitty little apartment, there was the emergency room and the doctor who smiled at her and said, “You’re a pip, Miss Murray. I have sixty-year old patients who should be glad to look half so good as you.”

  She waits, counting the nurse’s footsteps – twelve, thirteen, fourteen – and surely Neufield’s at the desk by now, going back to her magazines. And Mina sits, staring across the room, her back to the window, cowardice to pass for defiance.

  If she had a razor, or a kitchen knife, or a few more of Neufield’s tranquilizer pills.

  If she had the courage.

  Later, when the rain has stopped, and the crape myrtle has settled down for the night, the nurse comes back and finds her dozing, still perched upright on the edge of her bed like some silly parakeet or geriatric gargoyle. She eases Mina back and there’s a dull click as the safety bar locks again. The nurse mumbles something so low Mina can’t make out the words. So, she lies very still, instead, lies on starch-stiff sheets and her pillowcase and listens to the drip and patter from the street outside, velvet sounds after the storm enough to smooth the edges off Manhattan for a few hours. The blanket tucked roughly beneath her chin and taxi wheels on the street, the honk of a car horn, a police siren blocks away. And footsteps on the sidewalk below her window, and then the soft and unmistakable pad of wolf paws on asphalt.

  The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

  The ceremony of innocence is drowned…

  W. B. Yeats, “The Second Coming” (1919)

  * * *

  Emptiness Spoke Eloquent

  At twenty-nine, my ambition often got the better my abilities, and I frequently bit off more than my talent could chew. But, never believing the final paragraphs of Stoker’s novel, seeing an inherent insincerity meant to subvert everything good about Dracula, I had to try to find the truth of what became of Mina.

  Two Wo
rlds and In Between

  At the crumbling edge of the pit, and it seems like she’s been standing there forever, when the fever breaks and Twila opens her eyes. She has to blink three or four times before they even begin to focus, and they still burn and water from the greasy corpse smoke and the faintest sharpness of disappointment, dissolving with the dream. Across the little room, her Salvation Army dressing table and from the cracked mirror, Peter Murphy pouts and his lips are the bruised color of eggplant. On the floor, the candlelight is drowning itself in a cranberry pool of liquid wax.

  She lies very still, listening for the sound that woke her, remembering where she is and that apocalypse has come and gone and she’s still here. The bedroom stinks of old puke and shit and something gone over.

  Blondie is asleep in the ratty armchair pulled up beside their bed, head drooping down so his chin rests on his bare chest. He isn’t wearing a shirt, just a pair of black panties and a garter and black fishnets with the feet cut out. Snoring softly, his breath whistling in and out. And down on the street, dead guys growl and thump along the sidewalk.

  Nothing else, and nothing any different than before.

  She’s still alive or she’s dead.

  “Blondie?” she means to whisper, but her throat feels like she’s been knocking back Drano shooters and it comes out a strangled, zombiefied sound.

  “Blondie,” and this time his eyelashes flutter and his head snaps back, dark eyes clogged with interrupted sleep and confusion and fear.

  “Twila?” and he sounds lost and far away. “Jesus, Twila. Are you…” but there’s no sense in asking and instead he fumbles for her wrist, pressing his thumb to botched suicide scar tissue and the blue-green intersection of veins and arteries.