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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Twila’s stomach growls as she bends over the tub, and her newfound hunger is almost as monstrous as the sounds rattling up from the zombie’s ruined throat.

  In the final gunmetal velvet moments before dawn, she walks alone through the silent streets of the city, past smoking tenement embers and abandoned cars and a hundred other cliché spectacles of spent apocalypse. The dead know her, smell the discrepant blend of warm meat and the green-black decay that stains her face and hands and clothing. They are never more than hesitant shadows, cowering shamblers, fleeting butcheries. And the living are only a rumor on the drowsy lips of the night.

  Behind her eyes, the hornets have gone, and her mind is as still and silent as the morning. Her nose drips honey.

  She reaches the crest of a hill, dead-end street and a rust and Bondo Corvette shell is slewed crazily across the yellow dividing line. The driver’s side door is open and the threadbare upholstery is soaked maroon. Twila sits down on the hood, and already, where the trees and rooftops touch the eastern sky, the light is making promises she knows it can’t keep.

  * * *

  Two Worlds and In Between

  An editor (doesn’t matter who) said, “Write me a zombie story. You know, like George Romero.” He didn’t say that exactly. I’m paraphrasing. This was supposed to be my “big break”; it wasn’t even close. Anyway, I wrote a zombie story, but not much like George Romero. “When the twins gave a party, everybody came.” That’s the very best of it, I think.

  To This Water

  (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)

  1.

  Hardly dawn, and already Magda had made her way through the forest into the glittering frost at the foot of the Johnstown dam. When the sun climbed high enough, it would push aside the shadows and set the hollow on fire, sparkling crystal fire that would melt gently in the late spring sunrise and drip from hemlock and aspen branches, glaze the towering thickets of mountain laurel, later rise again as gauzy, soft steam. Everything, ice-crisped ferns and everything else, crunched beneath her shoes, loud in the cold, still air; no sound but morning birds and the steady gush from the spillway into South Fork Creek, noisy and secretive, like careless whispers behind her back.

  Winded, her breath puffing out white through chapped lips and a stitch nagging her side, she rested a moment against a potato-shaped boulder, and the moss there frost-stiffened, too, ice-matted green fur and grey lichens like scabs. Back down the valley towards South Fork, night held on, a lazy thing curled in the lee of the mountain. Magda shivered and pulled her shawl tighter about her shoulders.

  All the way from Johnstown since nightfall, fifteen miles or more since she’d slipped away from the darkened rows of company houses on Prospect Hill, following the railroad first and later, after the sleeping streets of South Fork, game trails and, finally, the winding creek, yellow-brown and swollen with the runoff of April thaw and heavy May rains. By now her family would be awake, her father already gone to the mill and twelve hours at the furnaces, her mother and sister neglecting chores, and soon they would be asking from house to house, porches and back doors.

  But no one had seen her go, and there would be nothing but concerned and shaking heads, shrugs and suspicion for their questions and broken English. And when they’d gone, there would be whispers, like the murmur and purl of mountain streams.

  As the sky faded from soft violet, unbruising, Magda turned and began to pick her way up the steep and rocky face of the dam.

  This is not memory, this is a pricking new thing, time knotted, cat’s cradled or snarled like her sister’s brown hair. Magda is always closing her eyes, always opening them again, and always the narrow slit of sky is red, a wound-red slash between the alley’s black walls and rooftops, pine and shingle jaws. And there is nothing left of the men but callused, groping fingers, the scalding whiskey sour-sweetness of their breath. Sounds like laughter from dog throats and the whiskery lips of pigs, dogs and pigs laughing if they could.

  And Magda does not scream, because they have said that if she screams, if she cries or even speaks they will cut her tongue out, will cut her bohunk throat from ear to ear, and she knows enough English to understand their threats. The big Irishman has shown her his knife; they will all show her their knives, and cut her, whether she screams or not.

  The hands pushing and she turns her face away, better the cool mud, the water puddled that flows into her mouth, fills her nostrils, that tastes like earth and rot and the alcohol from empty barrels and overflowing crates of bottles stacked high behind the Washington Street saloon. She grinds her teeth, crunching grit, sand sharp against her gums.

  And before she shuts her eyes, last thing before there is only raw pain and the sounds she won’t ever forget, Magda catches the dapper man watching from the far-away end of the alley, his surprised face peering down the well. Staring slack-jawed, and light from somewhere safe glints coldly off his spectacles, moonlight on thin ice.

  The demons growl, and he scuttles away, and they fold her open like a cockleshell.

  By the wavering orange oil light, her mother’s face had glowed warm, age and weariness softened almost away, and she had been speaking to them in Magyar, even though Papa said that they’d never learn English that way. She had leaned over them, brushing Magda’s sister’s hair back from her face. Her mother had set the lamp carefully down on the wobbly little table beside their bed, set herself in the wobbly chair. It had still been winter that night, still dirty snow on the ground out side, the wind around the pine-board corners of the house, howling for its own misfortunes. And two daughters, Magda and little Emilia, bundled safe beneath quilts and rag-swaddled bricks from the hearth at their feet.

  Magda had watched the shadows thrown across the walls, walls bare save knotholes stuffed with old newspapers and the crucifix her mother had brought across from Budapest, blood-dark wood and tortured pewter. And the lamp light had danced as her mother spoke, seeming to follow the rise and fall of her words, measured steps in a pattern too subtle for Magda to follow.

  So she had closed her eyes tightly, burying her face in pillows and Emilia’s back, and listened to her mother’s stories of childhood in the mountain village of Tátra Lomnitz and the wild Carpathians, listening more to her soothing voice than the words themselves. She knew all the old stories of the house elves, the hairy little domovoy that had lived in the dust and sooty corner behind her grandmother’s stove, and the river people, the vodyaniye and rusalka; the comfort her sister drew from the fairy tales, she took directly from the music of timbre and tender intonation.

  “And in the autumn,” her mother had said, “when a fat gander was offered to the people who lived under the lake, we would first cut off its head and nail it to the barn door so that our domovoy would not know that one of his geese had been given away to another.”

  And then, sometime later, the lamp was lifted from the wobbly table, and her mother had kissed them both, Magda pretending to sleep, and whispered, her voice softer than the bed, “Jó éjszakát kívánok,” her bare footsteps already moving away, sounding hollow on the floor, when Emilia had corrected her, “Good night, Mama.”

  “Good night, Emilia,” her mother had answered, and then they’d been alone with the night and the wind and the sky outside their window that was never quite black enough for stars, but always stained red from the belching foundry fires of Johnstown.

  It was full morning by the time Magda reached the top of the dam, and her eyes stung with her own sweat. When she licked her lips she tasted her own salt; not the taste of blood, but something close to blood. Her dress clung wetly to her back, to clammy, damp armpits, and she’d ripped her skirt and stockings on blackberry briars and creeper vines. Twice, she’d slipped on the loose stones, and there was a small gash on her left palm, purpling bruise below her thumb. Now she stood a moment on the narrow road that stretched across the breast of the dam, listening to her heart beat beneath cotton and skin, muscle and bone. Watching the mist, milky wisps curling up fro
m the green-grey water, burning away in the sun.

  Up here, the morning smelled clean, pine and the silent lake, no hint of the valley’s pall of coal dust or factory smoke. There were clouds drifting slowly in from the southwest, scowling, steel-bellied thunderheads, and so the breeze smelled faintly of rain and ozone as well.

  Magda stepped across the road, over deep buggy ruts, pressing her own shallow prints into the clay. The pockets of her skirt bulged with the rocks she’d gathered as she climbed, weather-smoothed shale and gritty sandstone cobbles the color of dried apricots. Four steps across, and on the other side, the bank dropped away sharply, steep, but only a few feet down to water, choked thick with cattails and weeds.

  Quickest glance, then, back over her shoulder, not bothering to turn full and play Lot’s wife proper. The fire burned inside her, a scorching, righteous flame shining through her eyes, inca pable of cleansing, only scarring and salting her brain. And, carefully, Magda went down to the cold water.

  When they have all finished with her, each in his turn, when they have carved away at her insides and forced their fat tongues past her teeth and so filled her with their hot seed that it leaks like sea-salt pus from between her bloodied thighs, they slosh away through the mud and leave her; not for dead, not for anything but discarded, done with. For a long time, she lies still and watches the sky roiling above the alley, and the pain seems very, very far away, and the red clouds seem so close that if she raises her hand she might touch them, might break their blister-thin skins and feel the oily black rain hiding inside. Gazing up from the pit into the firelight her own Papa stokes so that the demons can walk the streets of Johnstown.

  But the demons have kept their promises, and her throat is not sliced ear to ear, and she can still speak. She knows this because she hears the animal sounds coming from her mouth, distant as the pain between her legs. She is not dead, even if she is no longer alive.

  “Tell us about the rusalka, Mama,” her sister had said, and her mother had frowned, looking down at hands folded on her lap like broken wings.

  “Nem, Emilia,” her mother had answered firmly, gently, “Rusalka is not a good story for bedtime.”

  While her sister pleaded, Magda had sat straight-backed on the edge of the bed, silent, watching the window, watching the red and starless sky, and already that had been two weeks after the men with the buckboard and the white mare had brought her home, two weeks after her mother had cried and washed away the dirt and blood, the clinging semen. Two weeks since her father had stormed down from Prospect Hill with his deer rifle and had spent a night in jail, had been reminded by the grave-jowled constable that they were, after all, Hungarians, and what with all the talk of the Company taking on bohunk contract workers, cheap labor depriving honest men with families of decent wages, well, it wouldn’t do to look for more trouble, would it? In the end, he’d said, it would have been the girl’s word against anyone he might have brought in, anyway.

  In that space of time, days stacked like broken dishes, not a word from Magda and no tears from her dark and empty eyes. When food was pressed to her lips, a spoonful of soup or gulyás, she’d eaten, and when the sun went down and the lamps were put out, she’d lain with her eyes open, staring through the window at the seething sky.

  “Please, Mama, kérem,” her sister had whined, whined and Magda turned then, had turned on them so furiously that a slat cracked gunshot-loud beneath the feather mattress. Startled Emilia had cried out, reaching for their mother. And Magda had pulled herself towards them, hands gone to claws, tetanus snarl and teeth bared like a starving dog. And all that furnace glow gathered, hoarded from the red nights, and spilling from her eyes.

  “Magda, stop this,” her mother said, pulling Emilia to her. “You’re frightening your sister! You’re frightening me!”

  “No, Mama. She wants to hear a story about the rusalka, then I will tell her about the rusalka. I will show her about the rusalka.”

  But her mother had stumbled to her feet, too-big Emilia clutched awkwardly in her arms, and the wobbly chair tumbled over and kicked aside. Backing away from the sagging bed and Magda, burning Magda, Emilia’s face hidden against her chest. Backing into the shadows crouched in the doorway.

  “She wants to hear, Mama, she wants to hear my story.”

  Her mother had stepped backward into the hall gloom, had slammed the bedroom door shut behind her, and Magda had heard the key rattle in the lock, bone rattle, death rattle, and then she’d been alone. The oil lamp still bright on the wobbly table, and a train had wailed, passing down in the valley, and when the engineer’s whistle and the rattle and throb of boxcars had faded away, there had been only her mother’s sobs from the other side of the door and the distant clamor of the mills.

  Magda had let the lamp burn, staring a while into its tiny flame haloed safe behind blackened chimney glass, and then she’d turned back to the window, the world outside framed safe within. She’d held fingers to her mouth, and, between them, whispered her story to the sympathetic night.

  All the lost and pretty suicides, all the girls in deep lakes and swirling rivers, still ponds, drowned or murdered and their bodies secreted in fish-silvered palaces. Souls committed to water instead of consecrated earth, and see her on Holy Thursday, on the flat rocks combing out her long hair, grown green and tangled with algae and eels? See her sitting in the low branches of this willow, bare legs hanging like pale fruit, toes drawing ripples in the stream, and be kind enough this sixth week past Easter to leave a scrap of linen, a patch or rag. Come back, stepping quietly through the tall grass, to find it washed clean and laid to dry beneath the bright May sky.

  And there is more, after that, garlands for husbands and the sound of clapping hands from the fields, voices like ice melting, songs like the moment before a dropped stone strikes unseen well water.

  Carry wormwood in your pockets, young man, and bathe with a cross around your neck.

  Leave her wine and red eggs.

  And when she dances under the summer moon, when the hay is tall and her sisters join hands, pray you keep yourself behind locked doors, or walk quickly past the waving wheat; stay on the road, watch your feet.

  Or you’ll wind up like poor Józef, remember Józef, Old Viktor’s son? His lips were blue, grain woven into his hair, and how do you think his clothes got wet, so muddy, so far from the river?

  And see her there, on the bank beneath the trees, her comb of stickly fish bones? Watch her, as she pulls the sharp teeth through her green hair, and watch the water rise.

  Magda thought, So, this is what it’s like to drown, like stirring salt into water, thinking as she drifted, dissolving just below the surface of the lake, sinking slowly into twilight the color of dead moss, the stones in her pockets only a little help. Her hair floated, wreathing her face, and the last silver bubbles rose from her open mouth, hurrying away. Just the faintest dull pressure in her chest, behind her eyes, and a fleeting second’s panic, and then there was a quiet more perfect than anything she’d ever imagined. Peace folding itself thick around her, driving back the numbing cold and the useless, coruscating sun filtering down from above, smothering doubt and fear and the crushing regret that had almost made her turn around, scramble back up the slippery bank when the water had closed like molasses around her ankles.

  Magda flowed into the water, even as the water flowed into her, and by the time she reached the bottom, there was hardly any difference between them anymore.

  2.

  Thursday, the wet dregs of Memorial Day, and Mr. Tom Givens slipped quietly away from the talk and cigar smoke of the clubhouse front rooms. Talk of the parade down in Johnstown and the Grand Army Veterans and the Sons of Veterans, the amputees in their crutches and faded Union blues; twenty-four years past Appomattox, and Grant was dead, and Lee was dead, and those old men, marching clear from Main to Bedford Street despite the drizzling sky. He’d sat apart from the others, staring out across the darkening lake, the docks and the club fleet, the can
oes and sailboats and Mr. Clarke’s electric catamaran moored safe against the threat of a stormy night.

  And then someone, maybe Mr. D. W. C. Bidwell, had brought up the matter of the girl, and faces, smoke-shrouded, brandy-flushed, had turned towards him, curious, and

  Oh, yes, didn’t you know? Why, Tom here saw her, saw the whole damnable affair…

  and so he’d politely excused himself. Had left them mum bling before the crackle and glow of the big sandstone fireplace. By the time he’d reached the landing and the lush path of burgundy carpet that would carry him back to his room, the conversation had turned, inevitably, to iron and coke, the new Navy ironclads for which Carnegie, Phipps, and Co. had been contracted to produce the steel plating. Another triumph for Pittsburgh, another blow to the Chicago competition.

  Now, Tom shut the door behind him, and so the only light was dim grey through the windows; for a moment, he stood in the dark before reaching for the lamp chain. Above the lake, the clouds were breaking apart, hints of stars and moonshine in the rifts. The lake almost glimmered, seeming to ripple and swirl out towards in the middle.

  It’s only wind on the water, Tom Givens told himself as he pulled the lamp chain hard and warm yellow drenched the room, drove the blackness outside, and he could see nothing in the windows except the room mirrored and himself, tall and very much in need of a shave. By the clock on his dresser, it was just past nine. At least, he thought, maybe there’ll be no storms tonight. But the wind still battered itself against the clubhouse, and he sat down in a chair, back to the lake, and poured amber whiskey. He drank it quickly and quickly refilled the glass, trying not to hear the gusting wind, the shutter rattle, the brush of pine boughs like old women wringing their bony hands.