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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  By ten, the bottle was empty, and Tom Givens was asleep in the chair, his stocking feet propped on the bed.

  An hour later, the rain began.

  The storm was as alive as anything else, as alive as the ancient shale and sandstone mountains and alive as the wind; as alive as the scorch and burn of the huge Bessemer converters and the slag-scabbed molten iron that rolled like God’s own blood across the slippery steel floors of the Cambria mills. And also as perfectly mindless, as passion ately indifferent. It had been born somewhere over Nebraska two days before, had swept across the plains and in Kansas spawned twister children who danced along the winding Cottonwood River and wiped away roads and farms. It had seduced Arctic air spilling off the Great Lakes and sired blizzards across Michigan and Indiana, had spoken its throaty poetry of gale and thunder throughout the Ohio River Valley, and finally, with violent arms, would embrace the entire mid-Atlantic seaboard.

  As Tom Givens had listened distractedly to the pomp and chatter of the gentlemen of the club, the storm had already claimed western Pennsylvania, had snubbed the sprawling scar of Pittsburgh for greener lovers farther east. As he’d slept, it had stroked bare ridges and stream-threaded valleys, rain-shrouding Blairsville and Bolivar, New Florence and Ninevah, had followed the snaky railroad through Conemaugh Gap into the deep and weathered folds of Sang Hollow.

  And then, Johnstown, with its patchwork cluster of boroughs crowded into the dark hole carved in the confluence of two rivers. The seething Cambria yards and the office buildings, the fine and handsome homes along Main Street. The storm drummed tin- and slate-shingled roofs, played for the handful of mill workers and miners drinking late inside California Tom’s, for the whores in Lizzie Thompson’s sporting house on Frankstown Hill. George and Mathilde Heiser, closing up for the night, paused in the mercantile clutter of their store to watch the downpour, and inside St. Joseph’s parsonage, Reverend Chapman, who’d been having bad dreams lately, was awakened by his wife, Agnes, and they lay together and listened to the rain pounding Franklin Street.

  Unsatisfied, insatiable, the storm had continued east, engulfing the narrow valley, Mineral Point and the high arch of the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct, and, at last, sleeping South Fork.

  As alive as anything it touched.

  The girl on the dam doesn’t know that he’s watching, of that much he’s certain. He sits by open windows, and the early morning air smells like the lake, like fish and mud, and something sharper. He’s been drunk more than he’s been sober since the night down in Johnstown, the night he sat in the balcony of the Washington Street Opera House, Zozo the Magic Queen on stage, and some other fellows from the club talking amongst themselves more than watching the actors.

  The girl from the dam is walking on the water.

  He leans forward, head and shoulders out the window because he can’t hear, Irwin braying like a goddamned mule from the seat behind, and he can’t hear the words, the players’ lines, can only hear Irwin repeating the idiotic joke over and over again. Beneath the window of his room, the audience is seated, and he stares down at men’s heads and the ladies’ feathered hats, row after row on the front lawn of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club.

  The storm still somewhere far away, but rushing like locomotive wheels, like thunder, like applause and laughter, and the footlights are like light ning frozen on her face.

  “Ask Tom,” the usher says. “Tom saw the whole damnable affair,” and Irwin howls.

  And then the girl’s gone, if she were ever really there, and the crowd is on its feet, flesh smacking flesh in frenzied approval; if she were ever there. Lake Conemaugh is as smooth as varnished wood, and he knows it’s all done with trapdoors and mirrors, and that, in a moment, she’ll rise straight up from the stage planks to take her bows. But the roses fall on the flat water and lie undisturbed, and now the curtains are sweeping closed, velvet the color of rain rippling across the sky.

  “…saw the whole affair,” Irwin echoes, so funny he wants to say it over and over, and they’re all laughing, every one, when Tom gets up to go, when it’s obvious that the show’s over and everyone else is leaving their seats, the theater emptying onto the front porch of the clubhouse.

  Sidewalk boards creak loudly beneath his shoes, thunk and mold-rotten creak; after the evening rain showers, the air smells cleaner at least, coal dust and factory soot washed from the angry industrial sky into black gutters, but the low clouds hold in the blast-furnace glow from Cambria City and so the sky is bloodier than ever.

  Spring buggies and lacquered wagon wheels, satin skirts and petticoats held above the muddy street. The pungent musk of wet horse.

  And he knows that he’s only stepped out of his room, that he stands in the second floor hall, that if he walks straight on he’ll pass three rooms, three numbered doors, and come to the stairs, the oak banister, winding downward. But it’s dark, the sputtering white-arc streetlights not reaching this narrow slit of inverted alley spine between Washington and Union streets. The carpet feels more like muck and gravel, and he turns, starts to turn, when thunder rumbles like animal whispers and cloth tearing and

  Why, Tom here saw her. Saw the whole damnable affair.

  the shadow things are hunched here, claws and grunts and breath exhaled from snot-wet nostrils. She turns her head, hair mired in the filth and standing water, face minstrel-smudged, but eyes bright, and she sees him, and he knows she’s begging him to help, to stop this, to pull the shadows off her before there’s nothing left to save.

  But a shaggy head rises ox slow from the space between her breasts, and these eyes are nothing but the red sky, molten pools of stupid hunger, and Tom turns away, lost for a moment, feeling his way along the silken-papered walls, until his fumbling hands find the cool brass doorknob and the thunder splits apart that world. Splits the alley girl like an overripe peach, and he steps across the threshold, his bare feet sinking through the floor into the icy lake, and she’s waiting, dead hand shackle tight around his ankle to pull him down into the fish slime and silting night.

  Mr. Tom Givens woke up, sweat-soaked, eyes wide, still seeing white-knuckled hands clasped, sucking air in shuddering gulps, air that seemed as thick, as unbreatheable, as dark lake water. The crystal-cut whiskey glass tumbled from his hands and rolled away beneath the bed. Thunder rumbled across the Allegheny night like artillery fire and Old Testament judg ment.

  Both his legs were still propped up on the four poster and, as he shifted, the Charley horse began slowly, jealously, to relax its grip, and he realized there was no feeling at all in his left leg. Outside, furious rain pounded the windows and slammed the shutters against the clubhouse wall. Tom Givens cursed his stupidity, nodding off in the chair like a lousy drunkard, and he carefully lowered his tortured legs onto the floor. Fresh pain in bright and nauseating waves as the blood rushed back into droughty capillaries; the room swam, losing its precious substance for a moment, and the dream, still so close, lingered like crows around the grey borders.

  A flash of lightning then, blinding sizzle that eclipsed the electric lamp, and the thunder clamored eager on its heels.

  He sat in the chair, waiting for the last of the pin-and-needle stab to fade, and he listened to the storm. A wild night on the mountain, and that went a long way towards explaining the nightmare, that and the bourbon, that and the things he’d seen since he’d arrived at the lake two weeks before. He’d come out early, before the June crowds, hoping for rest and a little time to recover from the smoky bustle of Pittsburgh.

  The loose shutters banged and rattled like the wind knocking to come inside, and he got up, cautious, legs still uncertain, but only two steps, three, to the window. And even as he reached for the latch, then thumbed it back, even as he pushed against the driving rain – knowing full well that he’d be soaked before the task was done – he heard the roar. Not of thunder, not this time, but something else. Something new. There was immediate and stinging cold as the sashes were ripped from his hands, slamme
d back and glass panes shattered against the palsied shutters.

  And through the darkness and the downpour he saw the white and whirling thing, impossibly vast, moving past the docks, dragging itself across the lake. Silvered clockwise, and the deafening roar and boom, and Tom Givens forgot the broken windows, the frantic drapery flutter, the shutters, ignored the rain blowing in, soaking him through, drenching the room. He watched as the waterspout passed by, and the girl, the girl standing there, her long dark hair whipped in the gale, her body an alabaster slash in the black night. She raised her bare arms, worshipping, welcoming, granting the funnel passage. She turned, her white gown become a whirling echo of the thing, and her arms were opened to him now, and Tom recognized the face.

  The face that had turned to him, helpless, pleading, in the Johnstown alleyway, but changed, eyes swollen with bottomless fury and something that might be triumph, if triumph could be regret. And he knew as well that this was also the girl that he’d watched drown herself off South Fork Dam barely a week back.

  Her lips moved, but the wind snatched the words away.

  And then lightning splashed the docks with noonday bril liance, and she was gone, nothing remaining but bobbing canoes and the waves, and the trees bending down almost to the ground.

  He passed the night downstairs, hours sobering into headache and listening to the storm from the huge main living room. He sat on pebble-grained calfskin and paced the Arabian carpeted floors, thumbing nervously through the new Mark Twain novel someone had left, finished or merely forgotten, on an end table. Occasionally, he glanced at the windows, towards the docks and the lake. And already the sensible 19th-Century part of his mind had begun to convince itself that he’d only been dreaming, or near enough; drunk and dreaming.

  Finally, others were awake and moving, pot and pan noise and cooking smells from the kitchen, and the warm scents of coffee and bacon were enough to settle the argument; rational breakfast, a perfect syllogism against the fading night. He smoothed his hair, straightened his rumpled shirt and vest with hands that had almost stopped shaking and rose to take his morning meal with the others.

  Then young Mr. Parke, resident engineer, shaved and dressed as smartly as ever, came quickly down the stairs, walked quickly to the porch door and let in the dawn, light like bad milk and the sky out there hardly a shade lighter than the night had been. Something roared in the foggy distance.

  John Parke stepped outside, and Tom Givens followed, knowing that he was certainly better off heading straight for the dining room, but finding himself shivering on the long porch, instead. Before them, the lawn was littered with branches and broken limbs, with unrecognizable debris, and the lake was rough and brown.

  “It’s up a ways, isn’t it?” Tom asked and his voice seemed magnified in the soppy air.

  John Parke nodded slowly, contemplatively, then spoke without looking away from the water. “I’d say it’s up at least two feet since yesterday evening.”

  “And that awful noise, what is that?”

  Parke pointed southeast, towards the head of the lake, squinting as if by doing so he might actually see through the fog and drizzle.

  “That awful noise, Mr. Givens, is most likely Muddy Run coming down to the lake from the mountains.” He paused, then added, “It must be a torrent after so much rain.”

  “Doesn’t sound very good, does it? Do you think that the dam is, ah, I mean, do you…”

  “Let’s see to our breakfasts, Mr. Givens,” John Parke said, offering up a weak smile, a pale attempt at reassurance, “and then I’ll see to the lake.”

  The door clanged shut, and he was alone on the porch, rubbing his hands together against the gnawing damp and chill. After breakfast, he would go upstairs and pack his bags, find a carriage into South Fork; from there, he could take the 9:15 back to Pittsburgh. More likely than not, there would be others leaving, and it would be enough to say he was sick of the weather, sick of this dismal excuse for a holiday.

  Whatever else, that much certainly was true.

  Tom Givens turned his back on the lake, on the mess the night had made of the club grounds, and as he reached for the door, he heard what might have been laughter or glass breaking or just the wind whistling across the water. Behind him, one loud and sudden splash, something heavy off the docks, but he kept his eyes on the dark walnut wood grain, gripped the brass handle, and pulled himself inside once more.

  A week drowned, and what was left of her, of her body, bloated flesh sponge like strawberry bruise and the whitest cheese, pocked by nibbling, hungry black-bass mouths, this much lay knitted into the pine-log tangle and underbrush jamming the big iron fish screens. The screens that strained the water, that kept the lake’s expensive stock inside (one dollar apiece, the fathers and grandfathers of these fish, shipped all the way from Lake Erie by special railroad car). Screens that now sieved the cream-and-coffee brown soup of the lake before it surged, six feet deep, through the spillway. The caretaker and his Italians, the sewer diggers with their shovels and pickaxes, watched as the lake rose and ate away the mounds of dirt they’d spent all morning heaping along the breast of the dam.

  Blackened holes that were her eyes, grub-clogged sockets haloed in naked bone and meaty tatter, cribs for the blind and newborn maggots of water beetles and dragonflies.

  Some minutes past grey noon, the lake spread itself into a wide and glassy sheet and flowed over the top, beginning to slice and carve, bit by bit, sand and clay and stone washed free and tumbling down the other side. And now the morning’s load of cautious suggestions, desperate considerations and shaken heads, gambles passed on, the things that might have been done, none of it mattered. The workmen and the bystanders huddled, the dutiful and the merely curious, all rain-drenched, on either hillside, bookends for a deluge.

  Tom Givens sat alone, safe and almost drunk again within the shelter of the South Fork depot, sipping Scotch whiskey from his silver flask and trying not to watch the nervous faces, not to overhear the hushed exchanges between the ticket agent and the yardmaster. During the night, almost a quarter mile of track had washed out between South Fork and Johnstown, and so there had been no train to Pittsburgh or anywhere else that morning. By afternoon, the tracks were backed up; the Chicago Limited stretched across Lamb’s Bridge like a rusty, fat copperhead, and a big freight from Derry, too common for names, steamed and idled rain-slick and sullen just outside the station.

  Tom had come from the club in Bidwell’s springboard, but had lost track of Bidwell around noon, shortly after John Parke rode down from the dam. Soaked through to the skin, quite a sorry sight, really, drowned rat of a man galloping in on a borrowed chestnut filly. Parke had gathered a small crowd outside Stineman’s supply store, had warned that there was water flowing across the dam, that, in fact, there was real danger of the dam giving way at any time.

  Bidwell had snorted, the practiced porcine snort of authority and money, had immediately busied himself contradicting the dripping engineer, assuring everyone who’d listen (and everyone listens to the imperious cut of those clothes, the calm voice that holds itself in such high esteem) that there was nothing for them to get excited about. Mr. Parke had shrugged, his duty done, knowing better than to argue. He’d sent two men across the street to wire Johnstown from the depot’s telegraph tower, had climbed back onto the mud-spattered horse, and then he’d gone, clopping back up the slippery road towards the lake.

  Tom Givens’ ass ached from the bench, that torturous church-pew excuse for comfort, and the rain was coming down hard again, hammering at the tin roof. He closed his eyes and thought briefly about dozing off, opened them again and checked his watch, instead; twenty minutes past three, nearly three hours spent sitting here, waiting. He snapped the watch shut and slipped it back into his vest pocket. He knew that the sensible thing to do was return to the club, return to its amenities and cloister, and he also knew that he’d sooner spend the night sleeping on this bench.

  When he stood, his knees popped
almost loud as firecrackers. The yardmaster was yelling to someone out on the platform; the ticket agent looked up from his paper and offered a strained and weary smile. Tom Givens nodded and walked slowly across the room, pausing to warm his hands at the squat pot-bellied stove before turning to stare out rain-streaked windows. Across the tracks, Railroad Street, its tidy row of storefronts, the planing mill and the station’s coal tipple; farther along, the Little Conemaugh and South Fork Creek twined in a yellow-brown ribbon swallowing the flats below the depot, already claiming the ground floors of several houses out there. Along the banks, oyster-barked aspens writhed and whipped in the wind and current.

  There were people in the street, men and women standing about like simple idiots in the downpour, shouting, some running, but not back indoors.

  And then heard it, the rumbling thunder growl past thunder, past even the terrible whirl and roar from his waterspout nightmare. The earth trembled earth beneath his feet, the floorboards and walls and window panes of the depot resonating with sympathetic tremors.

  Run, Thomas, run away.

  One, two quickened heartbeats, and it rolled into view, very close, fifty feet high and filling in the valley from side to side, an advancing mountain of foam and churning rubbish. Every stump and living tree and fence post between the town and the dam, ripped free, oak and birch and pinewood teeth set in soil-frothy mad-dog gums, chewing up the world as it came.

  Run, Thomas, run fast. She’s coming.

  But there was no looking away, even as he heard footsteps and someone grabbed him and tugged roughly at his shoulder, even as he pissed himself and felt the warmth spreading at his crotch. He caught a fleeting glimpse of a barn roof thrown high on the crest before it toppled over and was crushed to splinters underneath.

  Too late. She’s here, Tom. She’s here.