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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I’m sorry,” she says, instead. “I’ve been in a funk all day long. I’m getting a headache. I just didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

  “For fuck’s sake.” Then Margot coughs, and Alex can tell that she’s trying to stop crying.

  “Margot, what’s wrong,” Alex asks again. “Has something happened?” She wants a cigarette, but she left them in the living room, left her lighter, too, and she settles for chewing on a ragged thumbnail.

  “I saw something today,” Margot says, speaking very quietly. Alex hears her draw a deep breath, the pause as she holds it in a moment, then the long uneven exhalation, before “I saw something terrible today,” she says.

  “So what was it? What did you see?”

  “A dog attack,” and she’s almost whispering now. “I saw a little girl attacked by a dog.”

  For a moment, neither of them says anything, and Alex stares out the window above the kitchen sink at the final indigo and violet dregs of sunset beyond the Atlanta skyline. The pain behind her left eye is back, more persistent than before, keeping time with her heartbeat. She has no idea what to say next, is about to tell Margot that she’s sorry, default sentiment better than nothing, better than standing here as the pain in her head gets bigger, listening to the faint electric buzz and crackle coming through the telephone line.

  “I was walking in the park,” Margot says. “Lafontaine, it’s not far from my hotel. This poor little girl, she couldn’t have been more than five. She must have wandered away from her mother – ”

  And now Alex realizes that she can hear the faint metallic notes of a music box playing from the next room, something on the video after all. She turns and looks through the doorway at the television screen.

  “ – she was dead before anyone could get it off her.”

  Grainy blacks and whites, light and shadow, and at first Alex isn’t sure what she’s seeing, unable to force all those shades of grey into a coherent whole. Movement, chiaroscuro, the swarm of pixels pulled from a magnetized strip of plastic, and then the picture resolves and a young woman’s face stares back at Alex from the screen. Pupilless eyes like the whites of hard-boiled eggs, a strand of hair across her cheek, and the music box stops playing. A dog barks.

  “Who are you? Your hand is cold – ”

  “I never saw anything so horrible in my life,” Margot says. “The damned thing was eating her, Alex.”

  “Which road will you take?” a guttural voice from the videotape asks the young woman. “That of the needles or that of the pins?”

  The pain in Alex’s head suddenly doubling, trebling, and she shuts her eyes tight, grips the edge of the counter and waits for the dizziness and nausea to pass, the disorientation that has nothing whatsoever to do with the migraine. The entire world is tilting drunkenly around her. “I have to go,” she says. “I’m sorry, Margot. I’ll call you back, but I have to go right now.”

  “Alex, no. Wait, please – ”

  “I promise. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” She opens her eyes, hanging up the phone quickly so that she doesn’t have to hear the confusion and anger in Margot’s voice. The young woman on the television gazes at her blind reflection in the window of her father’s house. Her reflection and the less certain reflection of the hunched, dark figure crouched close behind her.

  “The road of pins,” she says. “Isn’t it much easier to fasten things with pins, than to have to sew them together with needles?”

  Then the film cuts to a shot of the door of the house – unpainted, weathered boards, the bent and rusted heads of nails, a cross painted on the wood with something white; slow pan left, and now the window is in frame, the clean glint of morning sunlight off glass and the round face of the peasant’s daughter, the indistinct shape bending over her, and the camera zooms out until the house is very small, a lonely, run-down speck in a desolate, windswept valley.

  Alex hits the stop button, and the VCR whirs and thunks and is silent, the screen filled with nothing now but shoddy, Saturday-morning animation, four hippie teenagers and a Great Dane bouncing along a swampy back road in their psychedelic van, the cartoon sliver moon hung high in the painted sky, and she sits down on the floor in front of the television.

  When she presses eject, the tape slides smoothly, obediently out of the cassette compartment, and Alex reaches for it, holds it in trembling, sweat-slick hands while her heart races and the pain behind her eyes fades to a dull, bearable ache.

  In few minutes more, the phone begins to ring again, and this time she doesn’t wait for the answering machine.

  Incommensurable, impalpable,

  Yet latent in it are forms;

  Impalpable, incommensurable,

  Yet within it are entities.

  Shadowy it is and dim.

  Lao-tzu, Tao Te Ching

  * * *

  The Road of Pins

  Another story about my trouble with writer’s block. The first time I wrote about Albert Perrault, who’s still with me today (though I killed him off a while back). The beginning of my fascination with “lost” films (which came to me by way of Ramsey Campbell’s Ancient Images (1989) and Tim Lucas’ Throat Sprockets (1994). My unending fascination with La Bête du Gévaudan. Oh, wait. There’s a mysterious film in “Salmagundi (New York, 1981)”, isn’t there?

  Onion

  Frank was seven years old when he found the fields of red grass growing behind the basement wall. The building on St. Mark’s where his parents lived after his father took a job in Manhattan and moved them from the New Jersey suburbs across the wide grey Hudson. And of course he’d been told to stay out of the basement, no place for a child to play because there were rats down there, his mother said, and rats could give you tetanus and rabies. Rats might even be carrying plague, she said, but the sooty blackness at the foot of the stairs was too much temptation for any seven-year-old, the long, long hallway past the door to the super’s apartment, and sometimes a single naked bulb burned way down at the end of that hall. Dirty white-yellow stain that only seemed to emphasize the gloom, drawing attention to just how very dark dark could be, and after school Frank would stand at the bottom of the stairs for an hour at a time, peering into the hall that led down to the basement.

  “Does your mama know you’re always hanging around down here?” Mr. Sweeney would ask whenever he came out and found Frank lurking in the shadows. Frank would squint at the flood of light from Mr. Sweeney’s open door, then shrug or mumble the most noncommittal response he could come up with.

  “I bet you she don’t,” Mr. Sweeney would say. “I bet she don’t know.”

  “Are there really rats down there?” Frank might ask, and Mr. Sweeney would nod his head, point towards the long hall and say “You better believe there’s rats. Boy, there’s rats under this dump big as German shepherd puppies. They got eyes like acetylene blow torches and teeth like carving knives. Can chew straight through concrete, these rats we got.”

  “Then why don’t you get a cat?” Frank asked once, and Mr. Sweeney laughed, phlegmy old man laugh, and “Oh, we had some cats, boy,” he said. “We had whole goddamn cat armies, but when these rats get done, ain’t never anything left but some gnawed-up bones and whiskers.”

  “I don’t believe that,” Frank said. “Rats don’t get that big. Rats don’t eat cats.”

  “You better get your skinny rump back upstairs, or they’re gonna eat you, too,” and then Mr. Sweeney laughed again and slammed his door, leaving Frank alone in the dark, his heart thumping loud and his head filled with visions of the voracious, giant rats that tunneled through masonry and dined on any cat unlucky enough to get in their way.

  And that’s the way it went, week after week, month after month, until one snow-blind February afternoon, weather too cold and wet to go outside, and his mother didn’t notice when he slipped quietly downstairs with the flashlight she kept in a kitchen drawer. Mr. Sweeney was busy with a busted radiator on the third floor, so nobody around this time to tell him
scary stories and chase him home again. Frank walked right on past the super’s door, stood shivering in the chilly, mildew-stinking air of the hallway. The unsteady beam of his flashlight to reveal narrow walls that might have been blue or green a long time ago, little black-and-white, six-sided ceramic tiles on the floor, but half of them missing, and he could see the rotting boards underneath. There were doors along the length of the hall, some of them boarded up, nailed shut, one door frame without any door at all, and he stepped very fast past that one.

  Indiana Jones wouldn’t be afraid, he thought, counting his footsteps in case that might be important later on, listening to the winter wind yowling raw along the street as it swept past the building on its way to Tompkins Square Park and the East River.Twenty steps, twenty-five, thirty-three, and then he was standing below the dangling bulb, and for the first time Frank stopped and looked back the way he’d come. Maybe he’d counted wrong, because it seemed a lot farther than only thirty-three steps back to the dim and postage-stamp-sized splotch of day at the other end of the hall.

  Only ten steps more down to the basement door, heavy grey steel door with a rusted hasp and a Yale padlock, but standing wide open like it was waiting for him. Maybe Mr. Sweeney only forgot to lock it the last time he came down to check the furnace or wrap the pipes. Later, Frank wouldn’t remember much about crossing the threshold into the deeper night of the basement, the soup-thick stench and taste of dust and rot and mushrooms, picking his way through the maze of sagging shelves and wooden crates, decaying heaps of rags and newspapers, past the ancient furnace crouched in one corner like a cast-iron octopus. Angry, orange-red glow from the furnace grate like the eyes of the super’s cat-eating rats – he would remember that – and then Frank heard the dry, rustling sound coming from one corner of the basement.

  Years later, through high school and college and the slow purgatory of his twenties, this is where the bad dreams would always begin, the moment that he lifted the flashlight and saw the wide and jagged crack in the concrete wall. There was a faint draft from that corner that smelled of cinnamon and ammonia, and he knew better than to look, knew he should turn and run all the way back because it wasn’t ever really rats that he was supposed to be afraid of. The rats just a silly, grown-up lie to keep him safe, smaller, kinder nightmare for his own good. Run, boy, Mr. Sweeney whispered inside his head. Run fast while you still can, while you still don’t know.

  But Frank didn’t run away, and when he pressed his face to the crack in the wall, he could see that the fields stretched away for miles and miles, crimson meadows beneath a sky the yellow-green of an old bruise. The white trees that writhed and rustled in the choking, spicy breeze, and far, far away, the black enormous thing striding slowly through the grass on bandy, stilt-long legs.

  Frank and Willa share the tiny apartment on Mott Street, roachey Chinatown hovel one floor above an apothecary so the place always stinks of ginseng and jasmine and the powdered husks of dried sea creatures. Four walls, a gas range, an ancient Frigidaire that only works when it feels like it. But together they can afford the rent, most of the time, and the month or two they’ve come up short Mrs. Wu has let them slide. His job at a copy shop and hers waiting tables, and sometimes they talk about moving out of the city, packing up their raggedy-ass belongings and riding a Greyhound all the way to Florida, all the way to the Keys, and then it’ll be summer all year long. But not this sticky, sweltering New York summer, no, it would be clean ocean air and rum drinks with paper umbrellas, sun-warm sand and the lullaby roll and crash of waves at night.

  Frank is still in bed when Willa comes out of the closet that passes as their bathroom, naked and dripping from the shower, her hair wrapped up in a towel that used to be white, and he stops staring at the tattered Cézanne print thumbtacked over the television and stares at her instead. Willa is tall and her skin’s so pale he thought she might be sick the first time they met, so skinny that he can see intimations of her skeleton beneath that skin like milk and pearls. Can trace the blue-green network of veins and capillaries in her throat, between her small breasts, winding like hesitant watercolor brush strokes down her arms. He’s pretty sure that one day Willa will finally figure out she can do a hell of lot better than him and move on, but he tries not to let that ruin whatever it is they have now.

  “It’s all yours,” she says, his turn at the shower, even though the water won’t be hot again for at least half an hour, and Willa sits down in a chair near the foot of the bed. She leans forward and rubs vigorously at her hair trapped inside the dingy towel.

  “We could both play hooky,” Frank says hopefully, watching her, imagining how much better sex would be than the chugging, headache drone of Xerox machines, the endless dissatisfaction of clients. “You could come back to bed, and we could lie here all day. We could just lie here and sweat and watch television.”

  “Jesus, Frank, how am I supposed to resist an offer like that?”

  “Okay, so we could screw and sweat and watch television.”

  She stops drying her hair and glares at him, shakes her head and frowns, but it’s the sort of frown that says, I wish I could more than it says anything else.

  “That new girl isn’t working out,” she says.

  “The fat chick from Kazakhstan?” Frank asks, and he rolls over onto his back, easier to forget the fantasies of a lazy day alone with Willa if he isn’t looking at her sitting there naked.

  “Fucking Kazakhstan. I mean, what the hell were Ted and Daniel thinking? She can’t even speak enough English to tell someone where the toilet is, much less take an order.”

  “Maybe they felt sorry for her,” Frank says unhelpfully, and now he’s staring up at his favorite crack on the waterstained ceiling, the one that always makes him think of a Viking orbiter photo of the Valles Marineris from one of his old astronomy books. “I’ve heard that people do that sometimes, feel sorry for people.”

  “Well, they’d probably lose less money if they just sent the bitch to college, the way she’s been pissing off customers.”

  “Maybe you should suggest that today,” and a moment later Willa’s wet towel smacks him in the face, steamy-damp terrycloth that smells like her black hair dye and the cheap baby shampoo she uses. It covers his eyes, obscuring his view of the Martian rift valley overhead, but Frank doesn’t move the towel immediately, better to lie there a moment longer, breathing her in.

  “Is it still supposed to rain today?” Willa asks, and he mumbles through the wet towel that he doesn’t know.

  “They keep promising it’s going to rain,” she says. “And it keeps not raining.”

  Frank sits up, and the towel slides off his face and into his lap, lies there as the dampness begins to soak through his boxers.

  “I don’t know,” he says again. Willa has her back turned to him, and she doesn’t reply or make any sign to show that she’s heard. She’s pulling a bright yellow T-shirt on over her head, the Curious George shirt he gave her for Christmas, and has put on a pair of yellow panties, too.

  “I’m sorry,” she says. “It’s the heat. The heat’s driving me crazy.”

  Frank glances towards the window, the sash up but the chintzy curtains hanging limp and lifeless in the stagnant July air. He’d have to get out of bed, walk all the way across the room, lean over the sill and peer up past the walls and rooftops to see if there are any clouds. “It might rain today,” he says.

  “I don’t think it’s ever going to rain again as long as I live,” Willa says and steps into her jeans. “I think we’ve broken this goddamn planet, and it’s never going to rain anywhere, ever again.”

  Frank rubs his fingers through his stiff, dirty hair and looks back at the Cézanne still life above the television – a tabletop, the absinthe bottle and a carafe of water, an empty glass, the fruit that might be peaches.

  “You’ll be at the meeting tonight?” he asks, and Frank keeps his eyes on the print because he doesn’t like the sullen, secretive expression Willa gets whenev
er they have to talk about the meetings.

  “Yeah,” she says, sighs, and then there’s the cloth-and-metal sound of her zipper. “Of course I’ll be at the meeting. Where the hell else would I be?”

  And then she goes back into the bathroom and shuts the door behind her, leaves Frank alone with Cézanne and the exotic reek of the apothecary downstairs, Valles Marineris and the bright day spilling uninvited through the window above Mott Street.

  Half past two, and Frank sits on a plastic milk crate in the stockroom of Gotham Kwick Kopy, trying to decide whether or not to eat the peanut butter and honey sandwich he brought for lunch. The air conditioning’s on the blink again, and he thinks it might actually be hotter inside the shop than out on the street. A few merciful degrees cooler in the stockroom, though, a shadowy refuge stacked high with cardboard boxes of copy paper in a dozen shades of white and all the colors of a pastel rainbow. He peels back the top of his sandwich, the doughy Millbrook bread that Willa likes, and frowns at the mess underneath. So hot out front that the peanut butter has melted, an oily mess to leak straight through wax paper and the brown bag, and he’s trying to remember if peanut butter and honey can spoil.

  Both the stockroom doors swing open, and Frank looks up, blinks and squints at the sun-framed silhouette, Joe Manske letting in the heat.

  “Hey, don’t do that,” Frank says as Joe switches on the lights. The fluorescents buzz and flicker uncertainly, chasing away the shadows, drenching the stockroom in their bland, indifferent glare.

  “Dude, why are you sitting back here in the dark?” Joe asks, and for a moment Frank considers throwing the sandwich at him.

  “Why aren’t you working on that Mac?” Frank asks right back.

  “It’s fixed, good as new, “ Joe says, grins his big, stupid grin and sits down on a box of laser-print paper near the door.

  “That fucker won’t ever be good as new again.”