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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I’m tired of this shit,” she says. Reese can tell that this time the petulance is there to hide something else, something she isn’t used to hearing in Emma’s voice. “Somebody turn on the lights.”

  Reese stands up and presses the switch on the dining room wall next to a gaudy, gold-framed reproduction of John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit – the pale, secretive faces of five girls and the solid darkness framed between two urns – and in the flood of electric light, the first thing that Reese notices is that the almond-skinned woman has gone, that she no longer stands there behind Emma’s chair. She doesn’t see the second thing until one of the women cries out and points frantically at the wall above the window, the white plaster above the drapes. Emma sees it, too, but neither of them says a word; both sit still and silent for a minute, two minutes, while the tall letters written in blood above the brocade valance begin to dry and turn from crimson to a dingy reddish brown.

  When everyone has left, and Emma has taken a couple of sleeping pills and gone upstairs, Reese sits at one end of the table and stares at the writing on the dining room wall. SPINDLESHANKS in sloppy letters that began to drip and run before they began to dry. She sips at her gin and wonders if they were already there before the reckless séance even started. Wonders, too, if Danielle Thibodaux has some hand in this, playing a clever, nasty trick on Emma’s urbane boozers, if maybe they offended her or someone else at the Friday night party, and this was their comeuppance, tit for tat, and next time perhaps they’ll stick to their own gaudy thrills and leave the natives alone.

  The writing is at least twelve feet off the floor, and Reese can’t imagine how the woman might have pulled it off, unless perhaps Emma was in on the prank as well. Maybe some collusion between the two of them to keep people talking about Emma Goldfarb’s parties long after the lease is up and they’ve gone back to Boston. “Remember the night Emma called up Spindleshanks?” they’ll say, or “Remember that dreadful stuff on the dining room wall? It was blood, wasn’t it?” And yes, Reese thinks, it’s a sensible explanation for Emma’s insistence that they use the downstairs for the party that night, and that there be no light burning but the candles.

  It almost makes Reese smile, the thought that Emma might be half so resourceful, and then she wonders how they’re ever going to get the wall clean again. She’s seen a ladder in the gardener’s shed behind the house and Carlton will probably know someone who’ll take care of it, paint over the mess if it can’t be washed away.

  In the morning, Emma will most likely admit her part in the ghostly deceit, and then she’ll lie in bed laughing at her gullible friends. She’ll probably even laugh at Reese. “I got you, too, didn’t I?” she’ll smirk. “Oh no, don’t you try to lie to me, Miss Callicott. I saw the look on your face.” In a minute more, Reese blows out the candles, turns off the lights, and follows Emma upstairs to bed.

  A few hours later, almost a quarter of four by the black hands of the alarm clock ticking loud on her bedside table, and Reese awakens from the nightmare of Harvard Square again. The snow storm become a blizzard, and this time she didn’t even make it past the church, no farther than the little graveyard huddled in the lee of the steeple, and the storm was like icicle daggers. She walked against the wind and kept her eyes directly in front of her, because there was something on the other side of the wrought-iron fence, something past the sharp pickets that wanted her to turn and see it. Something that mumbled. The sound of its feet in the snow was so soft, like footsteps in powdered sugar.

  And then Reese was awake and sweating, shivering because the verandah doors were standing open again. The heat and humidity so bad at night, worse at night than in the day, she suspects, and they can’t get to sleep without the cranky electric fan and the doors left standing open. But now even this stingy breeze is making her shiver, and she gets up, moving cat-slow and cat-silent so she doesn’t wake Emma, and walks across the room to close the doors and switch off the fan.

  She’s reaching for the brass door handles when Emma stirs behind her, her voice groggy from the Valium and alcohol, groggy and confused. “Reese? Is something wrong?” she asks. “Has something happened?”

  “No, dear,” Reese answers her. “I had a bad dream, that’s all. Go back to sleep,” and she’s already pulling the tall French doors shut when something down on the sidewalk catches her attention. Some quick movement there in the darkness gathered beneath the ancient magnolias and oaks along Sixth Street; hardly any moon for shadows tonight, but what shadows there are enough to cast a deeper gloom below those shaggy boughs. Reese stands very still and keeps her eyes on the street, waiting, though she couldn’t say for what.

  Emma shifts in bed, and the mattress creaks, and then there’s only the noise from the old fan and Reese’s heart, the night birds that she doesn’t know the names for calling to one another from the trees. Reese squints into the blacker shades of night along the leafy edge of Sixth, directly across from the place where the police found the body of the murdered cook, searching for any hint of the movement she might or might not have seen only a moment before. But there’s only the faint moonlight winking dull off the chrome fender of someone’s Chrysler, the whole thing nothing more than a trick of her sleep-clouded eyes, the lingering nightmare. Reese closes the verandah doors and goes back to bed and Emma.

  * * *

  Spindleshanks

  This started as an entirely different story, and then went somewhere I never guessed it would. Which happens a lot. Happened then; happens now. Here, I’m trying to learn to whisper. Sometimes, I have wanted to be Tennessee Williams so badly it’s shown.

  The Road of Pins

  1.

  May

  Without a doubt, Perrault’s paintings are some of the most hideous things that Alex has ever seen, and if her head didn’t hurt so much, if it hadn’t been hurting all day long, she might have kept her opinions to herself, might have made it all the way through the evening without pissing Margot off again. The first Thursday of the month so another opening night at Artifice, another long evening of forced smiles for the aesthete zombies, the shaking of hands and digging about for dusty scraps of congeniality, when all she wants is to be home soaking in a hot, soapy bath or lying facedown on the cool hardwood floor of their bedroom while Margot massages her neck. Maybe something quiet playing on the stereo, something soothing, and the volume so low there’s almost no sound at all, Nina Simone or Billie Holiday, and then her headache would slowly begin to pull its steelburr fingers out of the soft places behind her eyes, and she could breathe again.

  “You shouldn’t have even come tonight,” Margot whispers, sips cheap white wine from a plastic cup and stares glumly at the floor. “If you were going to be like this, I wish you’d gone home, instead.”

  “You and me both, baby,” and Alex frowns and looks past her lover at the smartly dressed crowd milling about the little gallery like a wary flock of pigeons.

  “So why don’t you leave? I can get a taxi home, or Paul will be happy to give me a ride,” and now Alex thinks that Margot’s starting to sound even more impatient with her than usual, probably afraid that someone might have overheard the things she said about the paintings.

  “I’m here now,” Alex says. “I suppose I might as well stick it out.” She rubs roughly at the aching space between her eyebrows, squints across the room at the high white walls decorated with Perrault’s canvases, the track lights to fix each murky scene in its own warm incandescent pool.

  “Then will you please try to stop sulking. Talk to someone. I have to get back to work.”

  Alex shrugs noncommittally, and Margot turns and walks away, threading herself effortlessly into the murmuring crowd. Almost at once, a man in a banana-yellow turtleneck sweater and tight black jeans stops her, and he points at one of the paintings. Margot nods her head and smiles for him, already wearing her pleasant face again, annoyance tucked safe behind the mask. The man smiles back at her and nods his head, too. />
  Five minutes later, and Alex has made her way across the gallery, another cup of the dry, slightly bitter Chardonnay in her hand, her fourth in half an hour, but it hasn’t helped her head at all, and she wishes she had a gin and tonic, instead. She’s been eavesdropping, listening in on an elderly German couple even though she doesn’t speak a word of German. The man and woman are standing close together before one of the larger paintings; the same sooty blur of oils as all the rest, at least a thousand shades of grey, faint rumors of green and alabaster, and a single crimson smudge floating near the center. The small printed card on the wall beside the canvas reads Fecunda ratis, no date, no price, and Alex wonders if the old man and woman understand Latin any better than she understands German.

  The man takes a sudden, deep breath then, hitching breath almost like the space between sobs, and holds one hand out, as if he intends to touch the canvas, to press his thick fingertips to the whirling chaos of charcoal brush strokes. But the woman stops him, her nervous hand at his elbow, hushed words passed between them, and in a moment they’ve wandered away, and Alex is left standing alone in front of the painting.

  She takes a swallow of wine, grimacing at the taste, and tries to concentrate on the painting, tries to see whatever all the others seem to see; the red smudge for a still point, nexus or fulcrum, and she thinks maybe it’s supposed to be a cap or a hat, crimson wool cap stuck on the head of the nude girl down on her hands and knees, head bowed so that her face is hidden, only a wild snarl of hair and the cruel, incongruent red cap. There are dark, hulking forms surrounding the girl, and at first glance Alex thought they were only stones, some crude, megalithic ring, standing stones, but now she sees that they’re meant to be beasts of some sort. Great, shaggy things squatting on their haunches, watching the girl, protective or imprisoning captors, and perhaps this is the final, lingering moment before the kill.

  “Amazing, isn’t it,” and Alex hadn’t realized that the girl was standing there beside her until she spoke. Pretty black girl with four silver rings in each earlobe. She has blue eyes.

  “No, actually,” Alex says. “I think it’s horrible,” never mind what Margot would want her to say; her head hurts too much to lie, and she doesn’t like the way the painting is making her feel. Her stomach is sour from the migraine and the bitter Chardonnay.

  “Yes, it is, isn’t it,” the black girl says, undaunted, then she leans closer to the canvas. “We saw this one in San Francisco last year. Sometimes I dream about it. I’ve written two poems about this piece.”

  “No kidding,” Alex replies, not trying very hard to hide her sarcasm. She scans the room, but there’s no sign of Margot anywhere. She catches a glimpse of the artist, though – tall, scarecrow-thin and rumpled man in a shiny black suit that looks too big for him. He’s talking with the German couple. Or he’s only listening to them talk to him, or pretending to, standing with his long arms crossed and no particular expression on his sallow face. Then the crowd shifts, and she can’t see him anymore.

  “You’re Alex Marlowe, aren’t you? Margot’s girlfriend,” the black girl asks.

  “Yeah,” Alex says. “That’s me.” And the girl smiles and laughs a musical, calculated sort of a laugh.

  “I liked your novel a lot,” she says. “Aren’t you ever going to write another one?”

  “Well, my agent doesn’t think so,” and maybe the girl can see how much Alex would rather talk about almost anything else in the world, and she laughs again.

  “I’m Jude Sinclair. I’m writing a review of the show for Artforum. You don’t care very much for Perrault’s work, I take it.”

  “I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to have opinions about painting, Jude. That’s strictly Margot’s department – ”

  “But you don’t like it, do you?” Jude says, pressing the point, her voice lower now, and there’s something almost conspiratorial in the tone. A wry edge to her smile, and she glances back at Fecunda ratis.

  “No,” Alex says. “I’m sorry. I don’t.”

  “I’m not sure I did either, not at first. But he gets in your head. The first time I saw a Perrault I thought it was contrived, too self-consciously retro. I thought, this guy wants to be Edvard Munch and Van Gogh and Albert Pinkham Ryder all rolled into one. I thought he was way too hung up on Romanticism.”

  “So are those things supposed to be bears?” Alex asks, pointing at one of the looming objects that isn’t a megalith.

  Jude Sinclair shakes her head. “No,” she says. “They’re wolves.”

  “Well, they don’t look like wolves to me,” and then Jude takes her hand and leads Alex to the next painting, this one barely half the size of the last. A sky the sickly color of sage and olives, ocher and cheese draped above a withered landscape, a few stunted trees in the foreground and their bare and crooked branches claw vainly at an irrevocable Heaven. Between their trunks the figure of a woman is visible in the middle distance, lean and twisted as the blighted limbs of the trees, and she’s looking apprehensively over her shoulder at something the artist has only hinted at, shadows of shadows crouched menacingly at the lower edges of the canvas. The card on the wall next to the painting is blank except for a date – 1893. Jude points out a yellowed strip of paper pasted an inch or so above the woman’s head, narrow strip not much larger than a fortune-cookie prognostication.

  “Read it,” she says. Alex has to bend close because the words are very small and she isn’t wearing her glasses.

  “No. Read it out loud.”

  Alex sighs, quickly growing very tired of this. “A woman in a field,” she reads. “Something grabbed her.” Then she reads it over again to herself, just in case she missed the sense of it the first time. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

  “It’s from a book by a man named Charles Hoy Fort. Have you ever heard of him?”

  “No,” Alex says, “I haven’t.” She looks back down at the woman standing in the wide, barren field beyond the trees, and the longer she stares the more frightened the woman seems to be. Not merely apprehensive, no, genuinely terrified. She would run, Alex thinks, she would run away as fast as she could, but she’s too afraid to even move. Too afraid of whatever she sees waiting there in the shadows beneath the trees, and the painter has trapped her in this moment forever.

  “I hadn’t either, before Perrault. There are passages from Fort in most of these paintings. Sometimes they’re hard to find.”

  Alex takes a step back from the wall, her mouth gone dry as dust and wishing she had more of the wine, wishing she had a cigarette, wondering if Judith Sinclair smokes.

  “His genius – Perrault’s, I mean – lies in what he suggests,” the black girl says, and her blue eyes sparkle like gems. “What he doesn’t have to show us. He understands that our worst fears come from the pictures that we make in our heads, not from anything he could ever paint.”

  “I’m sorry,” Alex says, not exactly sure what she’s apologizing for this time, but it’s the only thing she can think to say, her head suddenly too full of the frightened woman and the writhing, threatful trees, the pain behind her eyes swelling. She only knows for certain that she doesn’t want to look at any more of these ridiculous paintings. That they make her feel unclean, almost as if by simply seeing them she’s played some unwitting part in their creation.

  “There’s nothing to be sorry for,” Jude says. “It’s pretty heady stuff. My boyfriend can’t stand Perrault, won’t even let me talk about him.”

  Alex says something polite then, nice to meet you, good luck with the review, see you around, something she doesn’t mean and won’t remember later. She leaves the girl still gazing at the painting labeled 1893. On the far side of the gallery, Margot is busy smiling for the scarecrow in his baggy black suit, and Alex slips unnoticed through the crowd, past another dozen of Albert Perrault’s carefully hung grotesques, the ones she hasn’t examined and doesn’t ever want to. She keeps her eyes straight ahead until she’s made it through the front doo
r and is finally standing alone on the sidewalk outside Artifice, breathing in the safe and stagnant city smells of the warm Atlanta night.

  2.

  June

  The stuffy little screening room on Peachtree Street reeks of ancient cigarette smoke and the sticky, fermenting ghosts of candy and spilled sodas, stale popcorn and the fainter, musky scent of human sweat. Probably worse things, too, this place a porn theater for more than a decade before new management and the unprofitable transition from skin flicks to art-house cinema. Alex sits alone in the back row, and there are only eleven or twelve other people in the theater, pitiful Saturday night turnout for a Bergman double-feature. She’s stopped wondering if Margot’s ever going to show, stopped wondering that halfway through the third reel of Wild Strawberries, and she knows that if she goes to the pay phone outside the lobby, if she stands in the rain and calls their apartment, she’ll only get the answering machine.

  Later, of course, Margot will apologize for standing her up, will explain how she couldn’t get away from the gallery because the carpenters tore out a wall when they were only supposed to mark studs, or the security system is on the fritz again and she had to wait two hours for a service tech to show. Nothing that could possibly be helped, but she’s sorry anyway. These things wouldn’t happen, she’ll say, if Alex would carry a cell phone, or a least a pager.

  Wild Strawberries has ended, and after a ten- or fifteen-minute intermission, the house lights have gone down again, a long moment of darkness marred only by the bottle-green glow of an exit sign before the screen is washed in a flood of light so brilliant that it hurts Alex’s eyes. She blinks at the countdown leader, five, four, three, the staccato beep at two, one, and then the grainy black-and-white picture. No front titles – a man carrying a wooden staff walks slowly across a scrubby, rock-strewn pasture, and a dog trails close behind him. The man is dressed in peasant clothes, at least the way that European peasants dress in old Hollywood movies, and when he reaches the crest of a hill, he stops and looks down at something out of frame, something hidden from the audience. His lips part, and his eyes grow wide, an expression that is anger and surprise, disgust and horror all at the same time. There’s no sound but his dog barking and the wind.