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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Thunder that sounds like angels burning, and he slips, catches himself, numb hands into the roots of something small that writhes, woodsy revulsion at his touch. He’s shivering now, the mud and wet straight through his clothes. He lies so still, waiting to fall, to drown in the gurgling runoff, until the thunder says it’s time to get moving again and so he opens his eyes. And soon he’s standing at the summit, a little clearing and the tall stone at its heart like a stake to hold the world in place. Grey megalith-like things he’s seen in England or Denmark or France, and in the crackling brief electric flash he can discern the marks made in the stone, marks smoothed almost away by time and frost and a hundred thousand storms before. Forgotten characters traced in clean rivulets like emphasis. He would turn and run, from the place and the moment (if you had it to do over again, if you could take it back), but the roots have twisted about his wrists, becoming greenstick pythons, and for all his clever, distracting variations, there’s only this one way it can go.

  She steps out of the place where the stone is, brilliant moment, thinnest sliver of an instant caught and held in forked-lightning teeth; the rain that beads, rolls off her feathers, each exquisite, rough-gem drop and the strange angles of her arms and legs, too many joints. The head that turns on its elegant neck, and the eyes that find him, sharp face and molten eyes that will never let him go.

  “Nothing from the Pterodactyle, I shouldn’t think,” says Professor Osborn, standing somewhere behind him. “Though the cranium is oddly reminiscent of Dimorphodon, isn’t it?” and Silas Desvernine bows his head, staring down at the soggy darkness where his feet must be, and waits for the leather and satin rustle of her wings, gentle loversound through the storm. The rain catches his tears and washes them away with everything else.

  The funeral over and the servants busy downstairs when Silas opened the doors of his gallery; viewed the damage she’d done for the first time, knew it was mostly broken glass and little that couldn’t be put right again, but the sight hurt his chest, hurt his eyes. Heart already so broken and eyes already so raw, but new pain anyway. No bottom to this pain, and he bent over and picked up his dodo, retrieved it from a bed of diamond shards, and Silas brushed the glass from its dusty beak and rump feathers. Set it back on the high shelf between passenger pigeons and three Carolina parakeets. He took step closer to her cage, the drapes still pulled open, and his shoes crunched. Her, crouched in the shadows, wings wrapped tightly about her like a cocoon, living shield against him, and he said, “What did you do to her, Tisiphone?” And surprise at how calm his voice could be, how empty of everything locked inside him and clawing to get out.

  The wings shivered, cringed and folded back; “That’s not my name,” she said.

  “What did you do to her, Megaera?”

  “Shut up,” his words spat at the wall where her face was still hidden, spat at him. “You know that I’m not one of the three, you’ve known that much all along.”

  “She couldn’t have hurt you, even if she’d wanted to,” he said, hearing her words, but this is as close as he would ever come to being able to ignore them: her weak, and his grief too wide to cross even for her voice. “Did you think she could hurt you?” he asked.

  “No,” and she was shaking her head now, forehead bang and smack against brick, and he could see the sticky, black smear she left on the wall.

  “Then you did it to get back at me. Is that it? You thought to hurt me by hurting her.”

  “No,” she said, and that was the only time he ever saw her cry, if it was crying, the dim phosphorescence leaking from the corners of her eyes. “No, no.”

  “But you know she’s dead, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” she said, that small yes too quick, and it made him want to wring her white throat, lock his strong hands around her neck and twist until he was rewarded with the pop and cartilage grind of ruined vertebrae. Squeeze until her tongue hung useless from her lipless mouth.

  “She never hurt anyone, Alecto,” he hissed, and she turned around, snake-sudden movement, and he took a step away from the bars despite himself.

  “I asked her to help me,” and she was screaming now, perfect crystal teeth bared. “I asked her to free me,” and her hurt and fury swept over him, blast furnace heat rushing away from her, and the faint smell of nutmeg and decay left in the air around his head.

  “I asked her to unlock the fucking cage, Silas!” and abruptly the wings slipped from off her back and lay bloody and very still on the unclean metal and hay-strewn floor of the cage.

  In the simplest sense, these things, at least, are true: that during the last week of June 1916, Silas Desvernine hired workmen from Haverstraw to excavate a large stone from a spot near the summit of Storm King, and that during this excavation several men died or fell seriously ill, each under circumstances that only seemed unusual if considered in connection with one another. When the foreman resigned (a mink-eyed little Scotsman with a face like ripe cranberries), Silas hired a second crew, and in July the stone was carried down and away from the mountain, an ingenious block-and-tackle of his own design, then horse and wagon, and finally, barge, the short distance upriver to Pollepel Island. Moneys were paid to a Mr. Harriman of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, well enough known for his discretion in such matters, and no questions were ever asked.

  And also, that archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists and cryptographers were allowed brief viewings of the artifact over the next year, though only the sketchiest, conflicting conclusions regarding the glyphs on the stone were drawn: that they might have been made by Vikings, or Phoenicians, or Minoans, or Atlanteans; that they might be something like Sanskrit, or perhaps only the tracks of prehistoric sea worms, or have been etched by Silas Desvernine himself. The suggestion by a geologist of no particular note, that the stone, oily black shale with cream flecks of calcite, was not even native to the region, was summarily ignored by everyone but Silas, who ignored nothing.

  One passing footnote mention of “the Butterhill Stone” in a monograph on Mahican pottery, and by 1918 it was forgotten by the busy, forgetful world of men and words beyond the safeguarding walls of Silas’ Castle.

  “Wake up,” she says. “You must wake up,” and he does, gummy blink, unfocused, and the room’s dark except for the light of brass lamps with stained-glass shades like willows and dragonflies and drooping purple wisteria.

  “You’re dying, Silas.”

  He squints towards the great cage, cage that could hold lions or leopards, and she looks so terribly small in there. Deceptive contrast of iron and white, white skin, and she says, “Before the sun rises again…”

  Big sigh rattle from his bony chest, and “No,” looking about the desk for his spectacles. “No, not yet,” but she says, “You’re an old man, Silas, and old men die, eventually. All of them.”

  “Not yet,” and there they are, his bifocals perched on a thick book about African beetles. “There’s a new war, new ships that have to be built,” and he slips them on, frame wire bent and straightened and bent again so they won’t sit quite right on his face any longer. Walking cane within reach, but he doesn’t stand, waiting for the murky room to become solid again.

  “Let me go now,” she says, as if she hasn’t said it a thousand, thousand times before, as if it were a new idea, never occurred to her before, and he laughs. Froggy little strangled sound more like a burp.

  “You’re trying to trick me,” he says, grinning his false-toothed grin at her and one crooked finger pointed at the cage so there can be no doubt. “You’re not a sibyl,” and it takes him five minutes to remember where he’s put his pocket watch.

  “I can hear your tired old heart, and it’s winding down, like your watch,” and here it is, in his vest pocket; 4:19, but the hour hand and minute hand and splinter second hand still as ice. He forgets to wind it a lot these days, and how much time has he lost, dozing at his desk? Stiff-neck crane, and he can see stars through the high windows.

  “You can’t
leave me here, Silas.”

  “Haven’t I always told you that I won’t?” still watching the stars, dim glimpse of Canes Venatici or part of the Little Bear. The anger in his voice surprises him. “Haven’t I said that? That I’ll let you go before I die?”

  “You’re a liar, Silas Desvernine. You’ll leave me here with all these other things that you’ve stolen,” and he notices that her eyes have settled on the tall glass case near her cage, four tall panes and the supporting metal armature inside, the shriveled, leathery things wired there. The dead feathers that have come loose and lie scattered like October leaves at the bottom of the case.

  “You would have destroyed them if I hadn’t put them there,” he mumbles. “Don’t tell me that’s not the truth,” turning away, anything now to occupy his attention, and it was true, that part. That she’d tried to eat them after they’d fallen off, before he took them away from her, still warm and oozing blood from their ragged stumps.

  “Please,” she whispers, the softest snowflake excuse for sound, and “Please, Silas,” as he opens a book, yellow-brown paper to crackle loud between his fingers, and adjusts his bent spectacles.

  “I keep my promises,” he grumbles, and turns a dry page.

  * * *

  Estate

  First time I saw the Hudson River, this story began. Finally, I saw the castle, which still stands. Mostly. My first to make a “year’s best” anthology, and that meant all the world to me for a short while. So many of my obsessions are locked inside this story, that hummingbird in amber.

  Rats Live on No Evil Star

  “I think that we’re fished for,” Olan says, menthol cigarette smoked almost down to the filter, and he’s sitting at the unsteady little card table by the window, staring out at the high January sky, that disheartening sky like a flawed blue gemstone, and Jessie stops smearing peanut butter on slices of soft white bread and looks at him.

  “What?” she asks, and he only nods at the sky so that she has to ask again. “What did you say, Olan?”

  “I think we are fished for,” the words repeated loudly and more slowly, as if she’s only deaf and stupid, after all, and he’s making perfect sense.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” not meaning to sound annoyed, and she puts two pieces of thickly peanut-buttered bread together, another sandwich for this lean and crazy man who lives down the hall, this man to whom she is neither related nor can call her friend. But if no one looks in on him, he doesn’t eat. Jessie cuts the sandwich into neat triangles, trims away the crust because he only pulls it off anyhow. She places it on one of the pink saucers that she’s rescued from the kitchen’s clutter of filthy dishes, wasteland of cracked plates and coffee cups for the cockroaches to roam. She had to bring the soap from her own apartment down the hall, of course, that and a clean dishrag.

  “I don’t mind listening,” she says, setting his sandwich down in front of him. “If you want to try to explain.”

  Olan exhales, stubbing out his cigarette in a ceramic ashtray shaped like Florida, dozens of butts and cinder-grey ash spilling onto the top of the table. He looks at the sandwich instead of the sky, but his expression doesn’t change, the one as much a mystery to him as the other. He takes a hesitant, small sip from the beer that Jessie has brought him. She doesn’t often do that, but sometimes, just a bottle of the cheap stuff she drinks while she writes, Old Milwaukee or Sterling or PBR sacrificed to his reliable indifference.

  “Never mind,” he says and glances at her through his spectacles, wire and some Scotch tape wrapped around one corner, thick glass to frame his distant eyes. He takes a bite of the sandwich and looks at the sky while he chews.

  “What are you working on today, Jessie?” he asks around the mouthful of peanut butter as she sits down across the table from him. “Anne Sexton,” she says. Same answer as always, but that doesn’t matter, because she knows he only asks to be polite, to seem to care. Her eyes are drawn to the window, too, past the dead plant in its clay pot on the radiator, leaves gone to dry and wilt-brown tendrils. Out there, the railroad glints dull silver beneath the white, white sun, parallel lines of steel and creosote-stained cross ties, granite and slag ballast, the abandoned factories and empty warehouses on the other side, a few stunted trees to emphasize the desolation.

  She looks away, back down at her own lunch, bread with the crust still on, something mundane to break the spell. “I’m beginning a new chapter this afternoon,” she says, not feeling hungry anymore.

  “The Death Baby?” he asks, and she shakes her head no, “I’m done with the Death Baby for now.”

  “There,” Olan says and presses the tip of one finger against the flyblown glass, pointing at something he sees in the sky. “Right there. See it?” And Jessie looks. She always looks, and she’s never seen anything yet. But she doesn’t lie to him, either.

  “I don’t see it,” she says. “But my eyes are going to shit. I spend too much time staring at fucking computer screens.”

  “Well, it’s gone now,” he says very quietly, but only as if to let her off the hook, because his eyes don’t leave the window. Olan takes another bite of the sandwich, another sip of beer to wash it down, and his eyes don’t leave the window.

  The tiny apartment on the west side of a Southern city that once knew thriving industry and has seen long decades of decay, foundries and mills closed and the black smoking skies gone and the jobs gone with them. Not the Birmingham of his childhood, only the shell of the memory of that city, and farther east the hungry seeds of gentrification have been planted. In the newspapers, he has read about the “Historic Loft District,” a phrase they use like Hope or Expectancy. But this apartment existing on its own terms, or his terms, this space selected twenty years ago for its unobstructed view of the sky, and that hasn’t changed.

  Three very small rooms and each of them filled with his books and newspapers, his files and clippings and folders. The things he has written directly on the walls with Magic Marker because there wasn’t time to find a sheet of paper before he forgot. Mountains of magazines slumped like glossy landslides to bury silverfish and roaches, Fate and Fortean Times, journals for modern alchemists and cryptozoological societies and ufology cults. Exactly 1,348 index cards thumbtacked or stapled to plaster the fragile, drained color of dirty eggshells and coffee-ground stains. Testaments uncorrelated, data uncollated, and someday the concordance and cross-reference alone will be a hundred thousand pages long.

  After the girl has left (The Academic, as he thinks of her), Olan finds the fresh and stickybrown smear of peanut butter on the kitchen window, his shitcolored fingerprint still there to mark the exact spot, and he draws a black circle onto the glass around it. There are other circles there, twenty-three black and red circles on this window, and someday he will draw interconnecting lines to reveal another part of the whole, his map of the roof of the sky.

  “I don’t see it,” he whispers, remembering what she said, and something a doctor told him to say years ago, when he was still a boy and might have only have grown to be a man who could say “I don’t see it” when he does.

  Olan sits at the window, new ink drying as the sun sinks towards twilight. Black ink to indicate a Probable Inorganic, tentative classification of the shimmering orb he saw hanging in the empty sky above the city. A pencil sketch already in one of his notebooks, and best-guessed estimates of height and dimension underneath it, something like a bowling ball as perfectly motionless as the train tracks down below.

  “Visible for approx. 14 minutes, 1:56 until 2:10 P.M. CST,” he wrote, not sure of exactly how long because the girl kept talking and talking, and then he saw her to the door, and when he got back it wasn’t there anymore, had fallen or vanished or simply drifted away.

  “I don’t see it,” he says again, her borrowed words and inflection, and then he takes off his glasses and rubs at his tired and certain eyes.

  This is Page One. Which is to say – this is where the story begins when he is asked
to tell it as a story, when he used to tell it for the doctors who gave him pills and advice and diagnoses. The linear narrative that has as little and as much truth as any necessary fiction ever has, any attempt to relate, to make the subjective objective.

  “I was seven, and we lived on my granddaddy’s farm in Bibb County, after my father went away, and my mother and I lived there with my grandmother because my granddaddy was already dead by then. It wasn’t a real farm anymore, but we did have chickens and grew okra and tomatoes and collards. I had a dog named Biscuit.

  “One day – it was July – one July day in 1955, when I was seven, Biscuit chased a rabbit into the woods. And I was standing in the field beside the house calling him, and there were no clouds in the sky. No clouds at all. I’m sure there were no clouds. I was calling Biscuit, and it began to rain, even though there weren’t any clouds. But it wasn’t raining water, it was raining blood and little bits of meat like you put into a stew, shreds of red raw meat with white veins of fat. I stopped calling Biscuit and watched the blood and meat hitting the ground, turning it red and black. There was a crunchy sound, like digging in a box of Rice Crispies for the toy at the bottom, a very faint cereal-crunching sound that came from the sky, I think.

  “And then my mother was yelling and dragging me back towards the house. She dragged me onto the front porch, and we stood there watching the blood and meat fall from the clear sky, making puddles and streams on the ground.

  “No, Biscuit never came home. I couldn’t blame him. It smelled very bad, afterwards.”

  He has a big jar on the table beside the mattress where he sleeps, quart mayonnaise jar, and inside is the mummified corpse of something like a mouse. It fell out of the sky three years ago, dropped at his feet while he was walking the tracks near the apartment building, this mouse-thing husk from a clear sky, and he has labeled it in violet, for Definitive Organic.