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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

And then Lake Conemaugh and everything it had gathered in its rush down to South Fork slammed into the town, and in the last moment before the waters reached Railroad Street and the depot, Tom Givens shut his eyes.

  Beneath the red sky, he has no precise memory of the long walk down to this particular hell, slippery cantos blurred with shock and wet, does not even remember walking out onto the bridge. There’s only the dimmest recollection of lying on the depot floor, face down on window shards as the building pitched and yawed, moored by telegraph-cable stitches; window shards and the live coals spilling from the fallen stove – steaming, sizzling in the dirty water, a grey-black soot shower from the dangling pendulum stove pipe; dimmer memories of the pell-mell stumble through the pitchy dark, leaf-dripping, hemlock slap and claw of needled branches, and at some point his left arm has stopped hurting, and hangs useless and numb at his side; he recalls fall ing again and falling again, and unseen dogs howling like paid mourners. A nigger boy, sobbing and naked and painted with blood the sticky-slick color of melted tar, the two of them staring down together at the scrubbed raw gash where Mineral Point should have been,

  “Where is it?, asked Tom Givens. “Tell me where it’s gone.”

  “Mister,” the nigger boy replied, “the water just came and washed it right off to perdition.”

  and his eyes followed the boy’s finger and howling dogs like mourners and

  “Mister, your arm is broke, ain’t it? Sure looks broke to me.”

  There is nothing else, simply nothing more Tom Givens can remember. Above him the sky is furnace red, and he sits alone on the bridge. Sandstone and mortar arches clogged with the shattered bones of the newly dead, South Fork and Mineral Point, Woodvale and Franklin, Johnstown proper, the flood’s jumbled vomit piled higher than the bridge itself. Boxcars and trees, hundreds of houses swept neatly off foundations and jammed together here, telegraph poles and furniture. Impossible miles of glinting barbed wire from the demolished Gautier wireworks, vicious garland strung with the corpses of cows and horses and human beings.

  And the cries of the living trapped inside.

  And everything burns.

  Tar-black roil, oily exhalation from the flames, breathed crackling into the sky, choking breath that reeks of wood smoke and frying flesh. Embers spiral up into the night, scalding orange and yellow white, and vanish overhead, spreading the fire like sparkling demon seeds.

  Around him, men and women move, bodies bend and strain to wrestle the dead and dying and the barely bruised from the wreckage. And if anyone notices that he makes no move to help, no one stops to ask why.

  From somewhere deep inside the pyre, comes the hoarse groan of steel, lumber creak, wood and metal folded into a single shearing animal cry, a rising ululation, and the wreckage shudders, shivering in its fevered dreams; and for this they stop, for this they spare fearful seconds and stare into the fuming night, afraid of what they’ll see, that there might still be something worse left, held back for climax, for emphasis. But the stifling wind carries it away, muffles any chance of echo, and once again there are only the hurting sounds and the burning sounds.

  And he is the only one who sees her, the only one still watching, as she walks between the jutting timbers, steps across flaming pools of kerosene-scummed water. One moment, lost inside the smoke, and then she steps clear again. Her hair dances in the shimmering heat and her white gown is scorched and torn, hanging from her in linen tatters. And the stain blooming at her crotch, rust-brown carnation unfolding itself, blood-rich petals, blood shiny on the palms of the hands she holds out to him.

  Dead eyes flecked with fire and dead lips that move, shaping soundless words, and Oh, yes, didn’t you know? Why, Tom here saw her, and what isn’t there for him to hear is plain enough to see. She spreads her arms, and in another moment she’s gone, and there is only the blazing rubbish.

  …saw the whole damnable affair.

  He fights the clutching grip of their hands, hands pulling him roughly back from the edge, hands grown as hard as the iron and coke they’ve turned for five or ten or fifteen years, forcing him down onto the smooth and corpse-cold stones, pinning him, helpless, to the bridge.

  Above him, the sky is red and filled with cinders that sail and twinkle and finally fall like stars.

  If there were such a thing as ghosts, the night was full of them.

  David McCullough, The Johnstown Flood (1987)

  * * *

  To This Water

  This is the first of my stories to appear in a hardback book, so it meant a lot to me. Thank you, Steve and David. That said, like “Emptiness Spoke Eloquent,” it’s a good example of an immature author having more ambition than sense. Written in Athens, during a hurricane.

  Tears Seven Times Salt

  Jenny Haniver sits with herself on the always damp mattress in the center of her concrete floor, damp cotton ticking mildewed dark, and no light comes through the matte-black painted windows of the basement apartment. Her books are scattered around her like paper bricks, warped covers and swollen pages. And the candlelight flicker and fluorescence steady from the dozens of aquariums bubbling contentedly, rheumy, omnipresent whisper of air through charcoal and peat and lavalit. She knows the words by heart, sacred interplay of Latin and English, holy pictures of scales and skin flayed back, ink glistening muscles and organs open across her lap.

  If this knowledge were enough, she’d have gone down to them a long, long time ago.

  Jenny’s fingers follow the familiar, comforting lines, and her lips move, pronouncing soundlessly, bead counting each razor thin flare of cartilage and needle stab of bone, hyomandibular, interoperculum, supraoccipital crest.

  Necessary, but utterly insufficient; dead end to salvation or evolution, transcendence, and when she finishes, Jenny closes the big book and sets it aside.

  The apartment is too small, and her tanks line every inch of shelved wall; her long and cluttered tables, stolen doors laid across crumbling cinder blocks, taking up whatever space is left, uneven surfaces crowded with formalin-cloudy jars and wax-bottomed dissection trays, rusted pins and scalpels. The dumpster-scrounged mattress at the center and her at its soggy heart. She opens her eyes, irises the color of kelp, slick hazel brown and dead-star pupils eating the tiny pool of yellow candlelight and the green-white flood wrapped around. The air stinks like everything wet, fish and fish shit, mold and algae and the fleshy grey mushrooms that grow unmolested everywhere.

  When Jenny Haniver stands, rising up air-bubble slow from her careless lotus, some of the layered bandages on her long legs tear, gauze crust clinging to the jealous old mattress fabric, tearing at the useless scabs underneath. She ignores the pain, not even an inconvenience anymore, just a distant murmuring taunt of failure.

  Rumors of rumors reach even into her basement, and tonight Jenny Haniver has come out to see if there’s any truth between the lines. She comes here less and less often now, this cavern of steel and cement, a warehouse once, and the tainted Hudson sighing past outside so the air tastes safe enough. She wears a dingy black and silver body suit to hide the marks, the bandages, sips at salty tequila and watches the dancers, bodies writhing seagrass and eel tangled in the invisible current of sound, alternating mix of industrial clatter and goth’s sultry slur. Grease-paint vampires and boys with bee-stung lips the color of live gillflesh, ravestench reek of sweat and smoke and the fainter, briny tang of spilled beer and cum.

  “Jenny,” the girl says, shouts softly over the music and sits down in the booth across from her. Jenny looks up from her drink and waits until she remembers the face, puts a name with the hair bleached white and eyebrows shaved and penciled back in place.

  “Hello,” she says. “Hello, Maria.”

  “No one ever sees you anymore,” the girl says, leaning in closer to be heard, and the black-light strobes catch on the silver stud in her tongue, the single tiny ring in her lower lip. “Someone said they saw you up in Chelsea last month. Pedro, yeah, he said that.”


  Jenny nods, neither yes nor no, faintest smile showing her teeth, sharp and plaque-yellowed triangles, incisors and canines filed piranha perfect. She lets her eyes drift back down to her glass, and the girl keeps talking.

  “Jamie and Glitch got a new band together,” she says. “And Jamie’s singing, mostly, but Christ, Jenny, you know she can’t sing like you.”

  “I heard that Ariadne came back,” Jenny tells her, and the girl says nothing for a long time, a stretched, uneasy space filled up with the grind and wail from the speakers, calculated pandemonium and the background rumble of human voices.

  “Jesus, where the hell did you hear something like that? People don’t come back from the tunnels. You get that low, and you don’t come back.”

  Jenny Haniver doesn’t argue, finishes her tequila and watches the dancers. The girl leans close again, and her breath smells like cloves and alcohol.

  “I scored some X,” she says. “You want to do some X with me, Jenny?”

  “I have to go,” Jenny says and stands, notices a glistening, oily patch on the candy-apple naugahyde where she’s soaked through the bandages and the nylon body suit.

  “Everyone misses you, Jenny. I’ll tell Glitch you said hi, okay?”

  She doesn’t reply, turns quickly and leaves the girl without another word, pushes her way across the dance floor, moving between tattered lace and latex and hands that casually, desperately grope as she passes, that undertow of oblivion and need and at least a hundred different hungers.

  Jenny Haniver’s father never raped her, never laid her open like a live grey oyster and planted grains of sand for pearls and psychosis; none of that trendy talk-show trauma, nothing so horrible that it would have to be coaxed to the surface with hypnosis and regression therapy.

  He was a longshoreman, and her mother had left him when Jenny was still a baby, had left him alone with their child and his senile old mother with her Polish accent as thick as chowder. Sometimes, when he was drunk, he hit them, and when he was sober he sometimes said he was sorry.

  Once, after a layoff or a fight with his foreman, he backhanded Jenny so hard that he knocked out a front tooth, just a baby tooth and already loose anyhow, but afterwards he cried, and they rode the Q train together all the way out to Coney Island, to the New York Aquarium. He held her up high, and Jenny pressed her face flat against the thick glass, eyes wide and drowning in the mossy light filtering down from above, unbelieving, as weightless groupers and barracuda and sharks like the sleekest nightmares cruised silently past.

  After the club and the long February-cold walk back to her apartment, Jenny stands before the mirror in her tiny bathroom, unframed looking glass taller than her by a head, and the walls papered with bright prints torn from library books. Millias’ Ophelia and John Waterhouse’s Shalott, The Green Abyss and a dozen nameless Victorian sirens. She has stripped off the body-suit rag, has wound away most of the leaking bandages. They lie in a sticky, loose pile at her feet, stained unforgiving shades of infection and a few

  bloody smears.

  The air is so cold that it moves slow and heavy like arctic water around her naked body, gelid thick and redolent with the meaty, sweet perfume of rot that seeps from the incisions that don’t heal, from the dark, red-rimmed patches down her thighs and legs, her belly. The most recent splice, only two days old, has already faded, silverblue shimmer traded for a color like sandwich grease through a brown paper bag. She touches it, and the cycloid scales flake away like dandruff, drifting dead and useless to the floor.

  Jenny Haniver closes her eyes until the disappointment and nausea pass, and there’s nothing left but the drip of the faucets, the bubbling murmur of her fish tanks from the other room. This time she will not break the mirror, won’t give herself up to the despair. Instead, she opens her eyes and stares back at the gaunt thing watching her, metallic glint of desperation in that face, Auschwitz thin, the jut and hollow of bones just beneath death-pale skin.

  You can’t win, she thinks. I won’t die locked in here.

  Jenny Haniver turns her back on the mirror, turns to the shower stall, no bathtub here, and she pushes aside the mildew-blackened plastic curtain. She has to use the wrench lying on the little shelf intended for soap or shampoo to turn on the water, and it comes out numbing cold. She stands under the spray until she’s stopped shivering, until she can’t feel anything but the distant pressure of the water pounding itself futilely against her immutable flesh.

  When Jenny Haniver was a child, Old Mama talked to the pipes, leaned over sinks and tubs, the toilet and storm culverts, and spoke slowly and softly through the drains, microphones that would carry her raspy old woman’s voice down into the bowels of the city, the city beneath the city. Jenny would sit and watch, listening, anxiously straining to hear the responses that her grandmother clearly heard.

  “Why can’t I ever hear anything?” Jenny finally asked one winter afternoon. After school, and she had been watching for almost an hour from the kitchen table as her grandmother had leaned, head and bony shoulders into the white sink, alternately placing an ear and then her lips against the drain. When she spoke, it almost seemed that she kissed the rust-stained rim of the hole.

  Old Mama raised her head, impatient scowl, and Jenny knew she’d interrupted, was sorry, but afraid to say so. The late afternoon sunlight, dim through the dirty kitchen window, caught in the lines and creases of Old Mama’s face, shadowing each wrinkle deeper, making her look even older than she was. Eyes like gouges made by a pecking bird, dark and narrowed, regarding her impudent granddaughter.

  “Not until you begin to bleed for the moon,” Old Mama said, and she grabbed roughly at the crotch of her shapeless blue house dress. She grimaced and showed her gums. Jenny wasn’t stupid; she knew about menstruation, knew that someday she would get her period, and that then she wouldn’t be a child anymore.

  “But then you won’t have to wait for them talk to you, Jenny,” Old Mama went on, “because then they will smell you, will smell you ripe in the water from your bath or when you wash your hands or flush the toilet. Then they will come to take you back.”

  Jenny was afraid, even though she knew that Old Mama wasn’t well, wasn’t right in the head, as her father sometimes said, drawing circles in the air around his ear.

  “Back where?” she asked cautiously, not really wanting to know what Old Mama meant.

  “Back down to the sewers, down there in the shit and dark where Old Papa found you.”

  Jenny’s grandfather had worked under the streets, had told her stories about the alligators, and huge, blind sewer rats that never saw the sun, and the cats as big and strong as dogs that lived down there and fed on them. But he was dead, and he’d never said one word to her about having found her in the sewers.

  “You were such a very ugly baby that even the fish people that live down there didn’t want you. They left you under a big manhole, and Old Papa found you, naked and smeared in shit, and he had such a soft heart and brought you home.”

  Jenny opened her mouth, but she was suddenly too scared to say anything.

  “Your Mama, she knew, Jenny. Yes, your Mama knew that you weren’t really her baby, and that’s why she went away.”

  Old Mama laughed, then, dry cackle, and waggled one arthritis-crooked finger at Jenny.

  “And don’t ask your Papa. He is too stupid and doesn’t know that his little girl is not a real little girl. If he knew, he would be so angry he would stick you back down there now, or he would kill you.”

  And then she put her head into the sink again, and Jenny sat staring at Old Mama’s skinny rump, still unable to speak, pinned between the cold, solid knot settling in her stomach and the hot salt sting of the tears gathering in her eyes. After a while, Old Mama got bored, or the fish people quit talking to her, and she went off to watch television, and left Jenny alone in the kitchen.

  After the shower, after she dry-swallows two of the green cephalexin capsules – antibiotics she buys cheap on the street
– and puts clean bandages on her legs, Jenny falls asleep on her stinking mattress.

  And she dreams of Ariadne Moreau and the hanging room and taut wires that hold her, suspended high above the slippery floor. A hundred stainless-steel barbs pierce the blood-dabbed flesh of her outstretched arms, shoulders and breasts and upturned face. She has become a matchless crucifixion. Ariadne holds her steady and draws the scalpel blade along the inside of her thighs, first one and then the other, down the length of each dangling leg.

  “The old hag should have gone to jail for telling a kid crazy shit like that,” Ariadne says.

  Jenny doesn’t take her eyes off the point far above where all the wires converge, the mad gyre of foam and salt spray eating up the ceiling, counterclockwise seethe of lath and plaster and rafters that snap like the ribs of dying giants.

  “People like that,” Ariadne says, “make me sorry I don’t believe in Hell.”

  And then she binds Jenny’s ankles together with duct tape and begins to sew, sinks the needle in just above her right ankle, draws fine surgical silk through and across to the left. Closing the wounds, stitching away the scalpel’s track and the hateful cleft of her legs.

  Jenny Haniver follows Forty-Eighth Street westward, black wraparound shades against the late morning sun that shows itself for brief moments at a time, slipping in and out of the shale-grey clouds like a bashful, burning child. She walks with quick, determined steps, ignoring the sharp jolts of pain in her feet and legs that seem to rise from the sidewalk. She moves between and through the mindless jostle of shoulders and faces, avoids her reflection in the shop-front and office lobby panes of glass she passes. The chilling Hudson wind rips at her shabby peacoat, flutters her long, snarled hair.

  The way down to the tunnels, the gully between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues that Ariadne showed her months ago, has not moved and has not been sealed. From the edge of a garbage dumpster, Jenny climbs over the chain-link fence that the city has put up to keep the mole people out or in; she clings to the steel tapestry, the diamond-shaped spaces like gar scales in between, with bare, wind-gnawed fingers and the worn toes of her tennis shoes. There is a single strand of barbed wire along the top that gives her a moment’s trouble, but the solution costs only a few drops of her blood and a ragged new tear in one of her coat sleeves.