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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  A narwhal’s ivory tooth bought for half a fortune, and he once believed with the unflinching faith of martyrs that it was a unicorn’s horn. A precious bit of scaly hide from the Great Sea Serpent, harpooned off Malta in 1807, they said, and never mind that he knew it was never anything but the peeling belly of a crocodile.

  “There’s not much more time,” she says. “A day, perhaps,” and even her urgency, her fear, is patient, wet-nurse gentle, but Silas Desvernine closes his eyes again, prays he can slip back, fifty-two trips wrong way round the sun, and when he opens them he’ll be standing on the deck of the ferry, the damp and chill no match for his young wonder, his anticipation and a strong body and the river rolling slow and deep underneath his feet.

  “No,” she says. “I’m still here, Silas.”

  “I know that,” he says, and the December wind makes a hard sound around the edges of this rich man’s house.

  After the War, his father had run, running from defeat and reprisal and grief, from a wasted Confederacy. World broken and there would be no resurrection, no reconstruction. Captain Eustace Desvernine, who’d marched home in ’65 to the shallow graves of wife and child, graves scooped from the red Georgia clay with free black hands. And so he faded into the arms of the enemy, trailing behind him the shreds of a life gone to ash and smoke, gone to lead and worms, hiding himself in the gaslight squalor and cobbled industrial sprawl of Manhattan. The first skyscrapers rose around him as the Union licked its wounds and forgot its dead.

  Another marriage, strong Galway girl who gave him another son, Silas Josiah. The last dregs of his fortune sunk into a ferry, the Alexander Hamilton, sturdy name that meant nothing to him, but he’d seen it painted on the side of a tall building. So, the Captain (as Silas would always remember him, the Captain in shoddy cap and shoddier coat on wide shoulders) carried men and freight from Weehawken to the foot of West Forty-Second Street. Later, another boat, a whitewashed side-wheeler, double-ender he’d named the A. F. Beach, and the year that Robert E. Lee died, the Captain began running the long route between New York and Albany.

  One night, when Silas was almost twenty years old, almost a man himself and strong, he stood beside his father in the wheelhouse of the A. F. Beach. The Captain’s face older by the unsteady lamp as they slipped past the lights of West Point on their way downriver. The Captain taking out his old revolving pistol, Confederate-issue Colt, dullshine tarnish and his callused thumb cocking the hammer back while Silas watched, watching the big muzzle pressed against the Captain’s left temple. Woman’s name across his father’s lips then, unfamiliar “Carrie” burned forever into Silas’ brain like the flash, the echo of the gunshot trapped between the high cliffs, slipping away into the river night and pressed forever behind his eyes.

  “Are you sure that’s the way it happened?” she asked him once, when he told her the story. Years and years ago, not so long after he brought her to his castle on Pollepel Island, and she still wore the wings, then, and her eyes still shone new-dollar silver from between the narrow bars of her cage.

  “I was young,” he said. “Very young,” and she sighed, short and matter-of-fact sigh that said something, but he wasn’t certain what.

  Whole minutes later, “Who was she?” and him already turned away, unpacking a crate just arrived from Kathmandu.

  “What?” he asked, but already remembering, the meaning of her question and the answer, absently picking a stray bit of excelsior from his beard and watching those eyes watching him.

  “Carrie,” she said. “Who was Carrie?”

  “Oh,” and “I never found out,” he lied. “I never tried,” no reason for the lie, but already he felt the need to guard those odd details of his confessions, scraps of truth, trifling charms. Hoarding an empty purse, when all the coins have gone to beggars’ hands.

  “Ah,” she said, and Silas looked too quickly back to the things in the crate, pilfered treasures come halfway around the world to him, and it was a long time before he felt her eyes leave him.

  Pollepel Island: uneven jut of rock above water where the Hudson gets wide past the Northern Gate, Wey-Gat, the long stony throat of Martyr’s Reach, greenscab at the foot of Newburgh Bay; white oak and briar tangle, birch skin over bones of gneiss and granite. Bones of the world laid down a billion years ago and raised again in the splitting of continents, divorce of lands; birth of the Highlands in the time of terrible lizards, then scraped and sculpted raw, made this scape of bald rock and gorge during the chill and fever of ice ages. Pollepel Island like a footnote to so much time, little scar in this big wound of a place.

  Silas Desvernine already a rich man when he first came here. Already a man who had traded the Captain’s ragtag ferries for a clattering empire of steel and sweat, Desvernine Consolidated Shipyard, turning out ironclad steamers, modern ships to carry modern men across the ocean, to carry men to modern war. And Pollepel chosen for his retreat from industry, the sprawling, ordered chaos of the yard, the noise and careless humanity of Manhattan. First glimpse, an engraving, frontispiece by Mr. N. P. Willis for American Scenery: tall sails and rowboat serenity, Storm King rising in the misty distance. The island recalled from his trips up and down the river, and the Captain had shown him where George Washington’s soldiers sank their chevaux-de-frises, sixty-foot logs carved to spikes and tipped with iron, set into stone caissons and dropped into the river off Pollepel to pierce the hulls of British warships.

  This valley was already a valley of castles, self-conscious stately, Millionaire’s Row decades before Silas’ architects began, before his masons laid the first stones, since the coming of the men of new money, the men who nailed shining locomotive track across the nation or milled steel or dug ore and with their fortunes built fashionable hiding places in the wilderness; cultivated, delusory romance of gentleman farmers in brick and marble, iron spires and garden pools. But Silas Desvernine was never a man of society or fashion, and his reasons for coming to Pollepel Island were his own.

  Modest monstrosity, second-hand Gothic borrowed from his memory of something glimpsed on a business trip to Scotland, augmented with the architect’s taste for English Tudor. The pale woman he married, Angeline, his wife, never liked the great and empty halls, the cold and damp that never deserted the rooms. The constant sound of the river and the wind, restless in the too-close trees, the boats passing in the night.

  If he’d permitted it, Angeline Desvernine would have named the awful house, given a name to tame it, to bind it, make it her home, maybe, instead of whatever else it was. But, No, Silas said, stern and husbandly refusal, and so no poet ostentation, no Tioranda or Oulagisket or Glenclyffe on his island, just Silas’ castle, Silas’ Castle.

  His dream, and the long night on the Storm King is never precisely the same twice and never precisely the way things happened. And never anything but the truth. The dream and the truth worn thin, vellum-soft, streampebble-smooth, these moments pressed between the weight of now and then and everything before, and still as terrible.

  Younger but not young, reaching back and she takes his hand, or Angeline takes his hand, neither of them, but an encouraging squeeze for this precarious, slow climb up and up, above the river, while Prof. Henry Osborn talks, lecturing like the man never has to catch his breath.

  “Watch your step there. A lot of loose stone about,” he says, and Silas feels sixty instead of forty-five.

  Somewhere near the summit, he lingers, gasping, tearing eyes, and he looks down and back, towards his island. A storm coming, on its way up the valley and so twilight settling in early, the day driven like dirty sheep before the thunderheads, bruisebelly shepherds and the muddy stink of the river on the wind.

  “A shame about this weather, though, really,” Osborn sighs. “On a clear day, you can see the Catskills and the Shawangunks.”

  Of course, Osborn wasn’t actually with him that day, this day, and he knows that dimly, dim dream recollection of another history; another climb mixed in with this, the day that Osborn
showed him a place where there was broken Iroquois pottery and arrowheads. Osborn, man whose father made a fortune on the Illinois Central, and so he’s never known anything but privilege. The rain begins, then, wet and frying noise, and Henry Osborn squints at the sky, watches it fall as the drops melt his skin away, sugar from skeleton of wrought iron and seam welds. “On a clear day,” he whispers from dissolving lips, before his jaw falls, clank and coppertooth scatter, and Silas continues on up the mountain alone.

  No one ever asked him the why of the collecting, except her. Enough what’s and where’s and how’s, from the very few who came to the island. The short years when Angeline was alive and she held her big, noisy parties, her balls for the rich from other castles down the valley, for gaudy bits of society and celebrity from New York City or Philadelphia or Boston. Minor royalty once or twice. The curious who came for a peek inside the silent fortress on Pollepel. Long nights when she pretended this house wasn’t different, and he let her play the game, to dull the edge of an isolation already eating her alive.

  Later, new visitors, after the Great War that left him more than wealthy, no counting the fortune anymore, and Angeline in her lonely grave on the western edge of the island, their son gone to Manhattan, the yard run by so many others that Silas rarely left the island. Let whatever of the world he had need of come to him, and never more than one or two at a time, men and women who came to walk his still halls and wonder at this or that oddity. All of them filled with questions, each their own cyclopedia of esoteric interrogations, lean and shadowy catechists, a hundred investigators of the past and future, the hidden corners of this life and the next. Occultists, spiritualists, those whose askings and experiments left them on the bastard edges of science or religion. They came and he traded them glimpses of half-truths for the small and inconsequential things they’d learned elsewhere. All of them single-minded, and they knew, or mostly thought they knew, the why of his collecting, so no point to ever asking.

  That was for her, this one thing he’d brought back to Pollepel that he was afraid of and this one thing he loved beyond words or sanity. The conscious acquisition that could question the collection, the collector.

  “I have too much money,” he said once, after the purchase of a plaster replica of Carnegie’s Diplodocus skeleton to be mounted for the foyer, and she asked the sense of it “It’s a way of getting rid of some of the goddamned money,” he said.

  She blinked her owl-slow, owl-wise blink at him, her gold and crimson eyes scoffing sadly.

  “You know the emptiness inside you, Silas. These things are a poor substitute for the things you’re missing.” So he’d drawn the draperies on her cage and left them drawn for a week, which was as long as he could stand to be without the sight of her.

  Nineteen-eighteen, so almost three years after his son was pulled screaming from his wife’s swollen body, pulled wet and blind into the waiting, dog-jawed world; helpless thing the raw color of a burn. His heir, but Silas Desvernine could hardly bear the sight of it, the squalling sound of it. Angeline almost dying in the delivery nightmare of blood and sweat, immeasurable hours of breathless pain. There would be no others, the doctor said. Named for father and grandfather’s ghost, Eustace Silas, sickly infant that grew stronger slowly, even as its mother’s health began to falter, the raising of her child left to indifferent servants; Silas seeing her less and less often, until, finally, she rarely left her room in the east wing.

  One night, late October and the first winter storm rolling down on Pollepel from the mountains, arctic Catskill breath and Silas away in the city. Intending to be back before dark, but the weather so bad and him exhausted after hours with thick-headed engineers, no patience left for the train, so the night spent in the warmth and convenience of his apartment near Central Park.

  Some dream or night terror, and Angeline left her rooms, wandered half-awake, confused, through the sleeping house, no slippers or stockings, bare feet sneak-thief soft over Turkish carpets and cold stone, looking for something or someone real. Someone to touch or talk to, someone to bring her back to this world from her clinging nightmares. Something against the storm rubbing itself across the walls and windows, savage snow pelt, wild and wanting in and her alone on the second story: the servants down below, her child and his nurse far away in another part of the house that, at that derelict hour, seemed to weave endlessly back upon itself. Halls as unfamiliar as if she’d never walked them, doors that opened on rooms she couldn’t recall. Strange paintings to watch over her, stranger sights whenever she came to a window to stand staring into the swirling silver night, bare trees and unremembered statuary or hedges. Alien gardens, and all of it so much like the dream, as empty, as hungry.

  Lost in her husband’s house and inside herself, Angeline came at last to the mahogany doors to Silas’ gallery, wood like old blood and his cabinet beyond, and how many years since she’d come that way? But this she recognized, hinge creak and wood squeal as she stepped across the threshold, the crude design traced into the floor there, design within designs that made her dizzy to look directly at.

  “Silas?” No answer but the storm outside, smothering a dead world. Her so small, so alone at the mouth of this long and cluttered gallery of glass and dust and careful labels, his grotesquerie, cache of hideous treasures. Everything he loved instead of her; the grey years of hating herself flashing to anger like steam, flashing to scalding revelation. Something in her hands, an aboriginal weapon or talisman pulled from its bracket on the wall, and she swung it in long and ruthless arcs, smashing, breaking, shadow become destroyer. Glass like rain, shatter puddles that sliced at the soles of her feet, splinter and crash and the sick-sweet stench of formaldehyde. Angeline imagining gratitude in the blank green eyes of a two-headed bobcat that tumbled off its pedestal and lay fiercely still, stuffed, moth-gnawed, in her path.

  And the wail rising up from the depths of her, soul’s waters stagnant so long become all at once a tempest to rival the fury and thundervoice of the blizzard. Become a war cry, dragging her in its red undertow, and when she reached the far side, the high velvet drapes hiding some final rivalry: tearing at the cloth with her hands, pulling so hard the drapes ripped free of brass rings and slipped like shedding skin to the floor.

  Iron bars, a cage, and at first nothing else, gloom thick as the fog in her head, thick as jam, but nothing more. One step backwards, panting, feeling the damage to her feet, and the subtle shift of light or dark, then, all the nothing in the cage coalescing, made solid and beautiful and hateful, hurting eyes that she understood the way she understood her own captivity, her own loneliness.

  The woman with wings and shining bird eyes said her name, Angeline, said her name so it meant things she’d never suspected, some way the name held everything she was in just three syllables. One long arm out to her, arm too long and thin to believe, skin like moonlight or afterbirth, fingers longer still and pointing to the door of the cage. Padlocked steel and the interlace design from the threshold again, engraved there like a warning. “Please,” the woman in the cage said. “Please, Angeline.”

  Angeline Desvernine ran, ran from even the possibility of this pleading thing, gallery door slammed shut behind her, closing it away and closing away the fading illusion of her victory. Almost an hour before she found her way back to her own room, trailing pools and crusting smears of blood from her ruined feet; crawling, hands and knees, at the end. She locked her door. By then, the sound of servants awake, distant commotion, her name called again and again, but there was no comfort left after those eyes, the ragged holes they’d burned in her. No way not to see them or hear that silk and thorny voice.

  Most of the storm’s fury spent by dawn, by the time the maids and cooks and various man servants gave up and called for someone from the stables to take the door off its hinges. First sight, leadflat morning light filling up the empty room, the balcony doors standing open wide and tiny drifts of snow reaching almost to the bed. They found her hanging from the balustrade,
noose from curtain-cord tiebacks, snow in her tangled black hair, crimson icicles from the sliced flesh of her toes and heels. Her eyes open wide and staring sightlessly towards the Storm King.

  “They’re my dreams,” he says, whispers loud, and she says “They’re lies,” and he keeps his eyes on the last colorless smudges of afternoon and says low, mumbled so she won’t hear, “Then they’re my lies.”

  This time, this dog-eared incarnation of the climb up Storm King, he’s alone, except for the thunder and lightning and rain like wet needles against exposed skin, wind that would take him in its cold fist and fling him, broken, back down to the rocks below, to the impatient, waiting river. No sign anymore of the trail he’s followed from the road, faintest path for deer or whatever else might come this way and now even that’s gone. He can see in the white spaces after the thunder, flash-powder snapshots of the mountain, trees bending and the hulk of Breakneck across the river, Storm King’s twin. Jealous Siamese thing severed by the acid Hudson, and he thinks, No, somewhere deep they’re still connected, still bound safe by their granite vinculum below the water’s slash and silt.