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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Biancabella finishes with the sutures, lays aside her scalpel and uses both hands to force open the dead woman’s belly. The sweet, caustic smells of embalming fluid and rot, already palpable in the stagnant basement air, seem to rise like steam from the interior of the corpse.

  “Of course, we don’t have the parsley seed,” she says and glances across the table at Porcelina, “because someone’s Greek isn’t exactly what it ought to be.”

  “It’s close enough,” Porcelina says defensively, and she points an index finger at the bowl of fresh, chopped parsley lined up with all the other ingredients for the ritual. “I can’t imagine that Miss Whomever She Might Be here’s going to give a damn one way or another.”

  Biancabella begins inserting her steel dissection hooks through the stiffened flesh at the edges of the incision, each hook attached to a slender chain fastened securely to the rafters overhead. “Will someone please remind me again why we took this little quim in?”

  “Well, she’s a damn good fuck,” Madeleine says. “At least when she’s sober.”

  “And she makes a mean corn pudding,” Alma adds.

  “Oh, yes. The corn pudding. How could I have possibly forgotten the corn pudding.”

  “Next time,” Porcelina growls, “you can fucking do it yourselves.”

  “No, dear,” Miss Aramat says, her voice smooth as the tabletop, cold as the heart of the dead woman. “Next time, you’ll do it right. Or there may not be another time after that.”

  Porcelina turns her back on them, then, turning because she’s afraid they might see straight through her eyes to the hurt and doubt coiled about her soul. She stares instead at the louvered window above Mary Rose’s skulls, the glass painted black, shiny, thick black latex to stop the day and snooping eyes.

  “Well, you have to admit, at least then we’d never have to hear about that fucking bottle again,” Candida laughs, and, as though her laughter were an incantation, skillful magic to shatter the moment, the back doorbell rings directly overhead. A buzz like angry, electric wasps filtered through the floorboards. Miss Aramat looks at Porcelina, who hasn’t taken her eyes off the window.

  “You told him three o’clock?” Miss Aramat asks.

  “I told him,” Porcelina replies, sounding scared, and Miss Aramat nods her head once, takes off her apron, and returns it to a bracket on the wall.

  “If I need you, I’ll call,” she says to Biancabella, and, taking what remains of the Burgundy, goes upstairs to answer the door.

  “Maybe Bobby and me should stay with the car,” Dead Girl says again, in case the Bailiff didn’t hear her the first time. Big, blustery man fiddling with his keys, searching for the one that fits the padlock on the iron gate. He stops long enough to glance back at her and shake his head no. The moonlight glints dull off his bald scalp, and he scratches at his beard and glares at the uncooperative keys.

  “But I saw a cop back there,” Dead Girl says. “What if he finds the car and runs the plates? What if – ”

  “We can always get another car,” the Bailiff grumbles. “Better he finds a stolen car than a stolen car with the two of you sitting inside.”

  “And I wanna see the ladies,” Bobby chirps, swinging the Bailiff’s leather satchel, and Dead Girl wishes she could smack him, would if the Bailiff weren’t standing right there to see her do it.

  Bobby leans close to the albino girl and stands on tiptoes, his lips pressed somewhere below her left ear. There’s a piece of duct tape across her mouth, silver duct tape wrapped tight around her wrists, and Dead Girl’s holding onto the collar of her Minnie Mouse T-shirt.

  “They’re like ghouls,” he whispers, “only nicer.”

  “No, they’re not,” Dead Girl snorts. “Not real ghouls. Real ghouls don’t live in great big fucking houses.”

  “You’ll see,” Bobby whispers to Dancy. “They dig up dead people and cut them into pieces. That’s what ghouls do.”

  And the Bailiff finds the right key, then – ”There you are, my rusty little sparrow” – and the hasp pops open and in a moment they’re through the gate and standing in the garden. Dead Girl looks longingly back at the alleyway and the Monte Carlo as the Bailiff pulls the gate shut behind him, clang, and snaps the padlock closed again.

  The garden is darker than the alley, the low, sprawling limbs of live oaks and magnolias to hide the moon, crooked limbs draped with Spanish moss and epiphytic ferns. Dancy has to squint to see. She draws a deep breath through her nostrils, taking in the sticky, flower-scented night, camellias and boxwood, the fleshy white magnolia blossoms. Behind her, the Bailiff’s keys jangle, and Dead Girl shoves Dancy roughly forward, towards the house.

  The Bailiff leads the way down the narrow cobblestone path that winds between the trees, past a brass sundial and marble statues set on marble pedestals, nude bodies wrapped in shadow garments, unseeing stone eyes staring after Heaven. Dancy counts her steps, listens to the Bailiff’s fat-man wheeze, the twin silences where Dead Girl and Bobby’s breath should be. Only the slightest warm breeze to disturb the leaves, the drone of crickets and katydids, and, somewhere nearby, a whippoorwill calling out to other whippoorwills.

  A thick hedge of oleander bushes, and then the path turns abruptly and they’re standing at the edge of a reflecting pool choked with hyacinth and water lilies; broad flagstones to ring its dark circumference, and the Bailiff pauses here, stares down at the water and rubs his beard. There’s an expression on his face like someone who’s lost something, someone who knows he’ll never find it again, or it’ll never find him.

  “What is it?” Dead Girl asks. “What’s wrong?” But the Bailiff only shrugs his broad shoulders, and takes another step nearer the pool, standing right at the very edge now.

  “One day,” he says. “One day, when you’re older, maybe, I’ll tell you about this place. One day, maybe, I’ll even tell you what she keeps trapped down there at the bottom with the goldfish and the tadpoles.”

  He laughs, an ugly, bitter sound, and Dancy makes herself turn away from the pool. She can hear the drowned things muttering to themselves below the surface, even if Dead Girl can’t, the rheumy voices twined with roots and slime. She looks up at the house, instead, and sees they’ve almost reached the steps leading to the high back porch. Some of the downstairs windows glow with soft yellow light, light that can’t help but seem inviting after so much darkness. But Dancy knows better, knows a lie when she sees one. There’s nothing to comfort or save her behind those walls. She takes another deep breath and starts walking towards the steps before Dead Girl decides to shove her again.

  “You still got that satchel?” the Bailiff asks, and “Yes sir,” the boy with silver eyes answers and holds it up so he can see. “It’s getting heavy.”

  “Well, you just hang in there, boy. It’s going to be getting a whole lot lighter any minute now.”

  They climb the stairs together, Dancy in the lead, still counting the paces, the Bailiff at the rear, and the wooden steps creak loudly beneath their feet. At the top, the Bailiff presses the doorbell, and Dead Girl pushes Dancy into an old wicker chair.

  “Where’s your angel now?” she sneers and digs her sharp nails into the back of Dancy’s neck and forces her head down between her knees.

  “Be careful, child,” the Bailiff says. “Don’t start asking questions you don’t really want answered.” He’s staring back towards the alley, across the wide, wide garden towards the car. “She might show you an angel or two, before this night’s done.”

  And Dead Girl opens her mouth to tell him to fuck off and never mind her “place” because babysitting deranged albino girls was never part of the deal. But the back door opens then, light spilling from the house, and Dead Girl and Bobby both cover their eyes and look away. Dancy raises her head, wishing they hadn’t taken her sunglasses, and she strains to see more than the silhouette of the woman standing in the doorway.

  “Well, isn’t this a surprise,” the woman says cheerily, and then she leads th
em all inside.

  Through the bright kitchen and down a long, dimly-lit hall, walls hung with gilt-framed paintings of scenes that might have found their way out of Dancy’s own nightmares: midnight cemetery pictures, opened graves and broken headstones, a riot of hunched and prancing figures, dog-jawed, fire-eyed creatures, dragging corpses from the desecrated earth.

  “We can have our tea in the Crimson Room,” the woman named Miss Aramat says to the Bailiff. Small woman barely as tall as Dancy, china-doll hands and face, china-doll clothes, and Dancy thinks she might shatter if she fell, if anyone ever struck her. The jewels about her throat sparkle like drops of blood and morning dew set in silver, and she’s wearing a big black hat, broad-brimmed and tied with bunches of lace and ribbon, two iridescent peacock feathers stuck in the band. Her waist cinched so small that Dancy imagines one hand would reach almost all the way around it, thumb to middle finger. She isn’t old, though Dancy wouldn’t exactly call her a young woman, either.

  Miss Aramat opens a door and ushers them into a room the color of a slaughterhouse: red walls, red floors, crossed swords above a red-tiled fireplace, a stuffed black bear wearing a red fez standing guard in one corner. She tugs on a braided bell pull and somewhere deep inside the house there’s the muffled sound of chimes.

  “I didn’t expect you until tomorrow night,” she says to the Bailiff and motions for him to take a seat in an armchair upholstered with cranberry brocade.

  “Jacksonville took less time than I’d expected,” he replies, shifting his weight about, trying to find a comfortable way to sit in an uncomfortable chair. “You seemed anxious to get this shipment. I trust we’re not intruding.”

  “Oh, no, no,” Miss Aramat assures him. “Of course not,” and she smiles a smile that makes Dancy think of an alligator.

  “Well, this time I have almost everything you asked for,” and then the armchair cracks loudly, and he stops fidgeting and sits still, glancing apologetically at Miss Aramat. “Except the book. I’m afraid my man on Magazine Street didn’t come through on that count.”

  “Ah. I’m sorry to hear that. Biancabella will be disappointed.”

  “However,” the Bailiff says quickly and jabs a pudgy thumb towards Dancy, who’s sitting now between Dead Girl and Bobby on a long red sofa. “I think perhaps I have something here that’s going to more than make up for it.”

  Miss Aramat pretends she hasn’t already noticed Dancy, that she hasn’t been staring at her for the last five minutes. “That’s marvelous,” she says, though Dancy catches the doubtful edge in her voice, the hesitation. “I don’t think we’ve ever had an albino before.”

  “Oh, she’s not just any albino,” the Bailiff says, then grins and scratches his beard. “You must have heard about the unpleasantness in Waycross last month. Well, this is the girl who did the killing.”

  Something passes swiftly across Miss Aramat’s face, then, a fleeting wash of fear or indignation, and she takes a step back towards the doorway.

  “My god, man. And you brought her here?”

  “Don’t worry. I think she’s actually quite harmless.”

  The Bailiff winks at Dead Girl, and she slams an elbow into Dancy’s ribs to prove his point. Her breath rushes out through her nostrils and she doubles over, gasping uselessly against the duct tape still covering her mouth. A sickening swirl of black and purple fireflies dances before her eyes.

  I’m going to throw up, she thinks. I’m going to throw up, and choke to death.

  “You ask me, someone must be getting sloppy down there in Waycross,” the Bailiff says, “if this skinny little bitch could do that much damage. Anyway, when we found her, I thought to myself, now who would appreciate such an extraordinary morsel as this, such a tender pink delicacy.”

  Miss Aramat is chewing indecisively at a thumbnail, and she tugs the bell pull again, harder this time, impatient, stomps the floor twice.

  “No extra charge?” she asks.

  “Not a penny. You’ll be doing us all a favor.”

  Dancy shuts her eyes tight, breathing through her nose, tasting blood and bile at the back of her mouth. The Bailiff and Miss Aramat are still talking, but their voices seem far away now, inconsequential. This is the house where she’s going to die, and she doesn’t understand why the angel never told her that. The night in Waycross when she drove her knife into the heart of a monster dressed in the skins of dead men and animals, or before that, the one she killed in Bainbridge. Each time the angel there to tell her it was right, the world a cleaner place for her work, but never a word about this house and the woman in the wide peacock hat. Slowly, the dizziness and nausea begin the pass even if the pain doesn’t, and she opens her eyes again and stares at the antique rug between her tennis shoes.

  “I said look at me,” and it takes Dancy a moment to realize that the woman’s talking to her. She turns her head, and now Miss Aramat’s standing much closer than before and there are two younger women standing on either side of her.

  “She killed the Gynander?” the very tall woman on Miss Aramat’s right asks skeptically. “Jesus,” and she wipes her hands on the black rubber apron she’s wearing, adjusts her spectacles for a better view.

  The auburn-haired woman on Miss Aramat’s left shakes her head, disbelieving or simply amazed. “What do you think she’d taste like, Biancabella? I have a Brazilian recipe for veal I’ve never tried.”

  “Oh, no. We’re not wasting this one in the stew pot.”

  “I’ll have to get plantains, of course. And lots of fresh lime.”

  “Aramat, tell her this one’s for the slab. Anyway, she looks awfully stringy.”

  “Yes, but I can marinate – ”

  “Just bring the tea, Alma,” Miss Aramat says, interrupting the auburn-haired woman. “And sweets for the boy. I think there are still some blueberry tarts left from breakfast. You may call Isolde up to help you.”

  “But you’re not really going to let Biancabella have all of her, are you?”

  “We’ll talk about it later. Get the tea. The jasmine, please.”

  And Alma sulks away towards the kitchen, mumbling to herself; Biancabella watches her go. “It’s a wonder that one’s not fat as a pig,” she says.

  Miss Aramat kneels in front of Dancy, brushes cornsilk bangs from her white-rabbit eyes, and when Dancy tries to pull back, Dead Girl grabs a handful of her hair and holds her still.

  “Does she bite?” Miss Aramat asks Dead Girl, pointing at the duct tape, and Dead Girl shrugs.

  “She hasn’t bitten me. I just got tired of listening to her talk about her goddamn angel.”

  “Angel?”

  “She has an angel,” Bobby says. “She says everyone has an angel, even me. Even Dead Girl.”

  “Does she really?” Miss Aramat asks the boy, most of her apprehension gone and something like delight creeping into her voice to fill the void.

  “Her angel tells her where to find monsters, and how to kill them.”

  “Angels and monsters,” Miss Aramat whispers, and she smiles, her fingertips gently stroking Dancy’s cheeks, skin so pale it’s almost translucent. “You must be a regular Joan of Arc, then, la pucelle de Dieu to send us all scuttling back to Hell.”

  “She’s a regular nut,” Dead Girl says and draws circles in the air around her right ear.

  The Bailiff laughs, and the armchair cracks again.

  “Is that true, child? Are you insane?” and Miss Aramat pulls the duct tape slowly off Dancy’s mouth, drops it to the carpet. It leaves behind an angry red swatch of flesh, perfect rectangle to frame her lips, and Miss Aramat leans forward and kisses her softly. Dancy stiffens, but Dead Girl’s hand is there to keep her from pulling away. Only a moment, and when their mouths part, there’s a faint smear of rouge left behind on Dancy’s lips.

  “Strange,” Miss Aramat says, touching the tip of her tongue to her front teeth. “She tastes like hemlock.”

  “She smells like shit,” Dead Girl sneers and yanks hard on Dancy’s
hair.

  Miss Aramat ignores Dead Girl, doesn’t take her eyes off Dan-

  cy’s face.

  “Do you know, child, what it meant a hundred years ago, when a man sent a woman a bouquet of hemlock? It meant, ‘You will be my death.’ But no, you didn’t know that, did you?”

  Dancy closes her eyes, remembering all the times that have been so much worse than this, all the horror and shame and sorrow to give her strength. The burning parts of her no one and nothing can ever touch, the fire where her soul used to be.

  “Look at me when I talk to you,” Miss Aramat says, and Dancy does, opening her eyes wide and spits in the woman’s china-doll face.

  “Whore,” Dancy screams, and, “Witch,” before Dead Girl clamps a hand over her mouth.

  “Guess you should’ve left the tape on after all,” she snickers. Miss Aramat takes a deep breath, fishes a lace handkerchief from the cuff of one sleeve and wipes away the spittle clinging to her face. She stares silently at the damp linen for a moment while Dead Girl laughs and the Bailiff mumbles half-hearted apologies behind her.

  “A needle and thread will do a better job, I think,” Miss Aramat says calmly and gets up off her knees. She passes the handkerchief to Biancabella and then makes a show of smoothing the wrinkles from her dress.

  Then Alma comes back with a silver serving tray, cups and saucers, cream and sugar, a teapot trimmed in gold and there are violets painted on the side. Porcelina’s a step behind her, carrying another, smaller silver tray piled with cakes and tarts and a bowl of chocolate bon-bons.

  “We were out of jasmine,” Alma says. “So I used the rose hip and chamomile, instead.”

  “What’s she doing up here?” Miss Aramat points at Porcelina. “I told you to call for Isolde.”

  Alma frowns, sets the tray down on a walnut table near the Bailiff. “I did,” she says. “But Porcelina came.”