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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Isolde was busy draining the corpse,” Porcelina explains, and she puts her tray down beside the other. “And I’ve never seen vampires before.”

  “Is it everything you always hoped it would be?” Dead Girl purls sarcastically.

  “Rose hip and chamomile sounds just wonderful,” the Bailiff says, taking a saucer and two sugar cubes. “And are those poppy-seed cakes?”

  Miss Aramat stares at Porcelina, who pretends not to notice, while Alma pours steaming tea into the cups.

  “Yes, they are,” Porcelina says. “Mary Rose baked them just this morning.”

  “Delightful. I haven’t had a good poppy-seed cake in ages.”

  “Can I please have two of these?” Bobby asks, poking the sticky indigo filling of a blueberry tart lightly dusted with confectioner’s sugar.

  “I don’t see why not, dear. They’ll only go to waste, otherwise.”

  And then the sudden, swelling howl from Miss Aramat, rabid sound much too big, too wild, to ever have fit inside her body, her narrow throat, but it spills out, anyway. She turns and rushes towards the red fireplace, stretching up on tiptoes to snatch one of the swords from its bracket above the mantel. Broadsword almost as long as she is tall, but such grace in her movement, the silver arc of tempered steel, that it might weigh no more than a broomstick.

  Alma shrieks and drops the violet-dappled teapot and the cup she was filling. They seem to fall forever as the sword swings round like the needle of some deadly compass, finally smashing wetly against the floor in the same instant that the blade comes to rest beneath Porcelina’s chin. The razor point pressed to the soft place beneath her jawbone, only a little more pressure and she’d bleed; a thrust and the blade would slide smoothly through windpipe cartilage and into her spine.

  The Bailiff stops chewing, his mouth stuffed with poppy-seed cake, the sword only inches from the end of his nose. He reaches slowly for the automatic pistol tucked into the waistband of his trousers, and Bobby turns and runs back to Dead Girl.

  There’s grin on Miss Aramat’s face like rictus, wide and toothy corpse grin. “Biancabella,” she says, but already the fury has drained out of her, leaving her voice barely a hoarse murmur. “Remember last winter, when you wanted to do Salomé? Maybe our guests would enjoy the entertainment.”

  “She’ll make a poor Jokanaan,” Biancabella says, her eyes on the Bailiff’s hand as he flips off the gun’s safety and aims the barrel at Miss Aramat’s head.

  “Oh, I think she’ll do just fine,” Aramat says, and now the point of the sword draws a single scarlet bead from Porcelina’s throat.

  “Please. I’m sorry. I only wanted to see – ”

  “‘She is monstrous, thy daughter, she is altogether monstrous. In truth, what she has done is a great crime.’”

  The Bailiff swallows and licks his lips, catching the last stray crumbs. “You’re very thoughtful, Aramat,” he says coolly, politely, as if declining another cake or another cup of jasmine tea. “Some other time, perhaps.”

  “‘I will not look at things, I will not suffer things to look at me.’”

  “For fuck’s sake,” Biancabella hisses. “You know that he means it.”

  Aramat glances sidewise at the Bailiff and his gun, and then quickly back to Porcelina. Her grin slackens to a wistful, sour sort of smile, and she lowers the blade until the point is resting on the tea-stained carpet.

  “I didn’t want you thinking I wasn’t a good host,” she says, her eyes still fixed on Porcelina. The girl hasn’t moved, stands trembling like a palsied statue, a thin trickle of blood winding its way towards the high collar of her dress.

  “You understand that, Bailiff. I couldn’t have you going back up to Providence and Boston, telling them all I wasn’t a good host.”

  The Bailiff breathes out stale air and relief, and slowly he lowers his gun, easing his thumb off the trigger.

  “Now, you know I’d never say a thing like that, Miss Aramat.” He puts the gun away and reaches for one of the cups of tea. “I always look forward to our visits.”

  “I really wasn’t expecting you until tomorrow night,” she says, and Biancabella takes the sword from her hands, returns it to its place above the mantel. Miss Aramat thanks her and sits down in a salon chair near the Bailiff, but she doesn’t take her eyes off Porcelina until Alma has led her from the room.

  On the red sofa, Dancy turns her head and looks at Dead Girl and the frightened boy in her arms. Empty silver eyes in ageless, unaging faces. Eyes that might have seen hundreds of years or only decades, and it really makes no difference, one way or the other, when a single moment can poison a soul forever.

  “Can I please have something to drink,” she asks, and Dead Girl whispers in Bobby’s ear. He nods his head, takes his arms from around her neck, and sits silently on the sofa next to Dancy while Dead Girl goes to get Dancy a cup of tea.

  Sometime later, though Dancy can’t be sure how much later, as there are no clocks in the red room, but a whole hour, surely, since they left her alone on the sofa. The contents of the leather satchel traded for a fat roll of bills, and the Bailiff turned and winked at her before he left. Miss Aramat and Biancabella followed him and Dead Girl and Bobby back out into the hall, shutting and locking the door behind them. There’s only one small window, set high up on the wall past the fireplace, but if her hands weren’t still strapped together with duct tape, maybe she could reach it, if she stood on one of the chairs or tables.

  “They’d only catch you,” the black bear in the corner says. “They’d catch you and bring you right back again.” She isn’t very surprised that the bear’s started talking to her in his gruff, sawdusty, stuffed-bear voice.

  “They might not,” she says. “I can run fast.”

  “They can run faster,” the bear says, unhelpfully.

  Dancy stares at the bear, at the ridiculous hat perched between his ears. She asks him if he can talk to anyone or just to her, because sometimes there are things that can only talk to her, things only she can hear because no one else will ever listen.

  “I talked to the man who shot me,” the bear growls. “And I spoke to Candida once, but she told me she’d throw me out with the trash if I ever did it again.”

  “What will they do to me?” Dancy asks, and when the bear doesn’t answer her, she asks again. “What are they going to do to me, bear?”

  “I’d rather not say.”

  “Stupid bear. You probably don’t have any idea what goes on in this house.”

  The bear grumbles to itself and stares straight ahead with its glass eyeballs. “I wish I didn’t,” he says. “I wish the taxidermist had forgotten to give me eyes to see or ears to hear. I wish the hunter had left me to rot in the woods.”

  “They’re very wicked women,” Dancy says, watching the door now, instead of the bear. He doesn’t reply, tired of listening to her or maybe he’s gone back to sleep, whatever it is dead bears do instead of sleep. She gets up and crosses the room, stands in front of two paintings hung side by side above a potted plant. Both are portraits of the bodies of dead women.

  “Is this a riddle?” she asks the bear.

  “I don’t answer riddles,” the bear replies.

  “That’s not what I asked you.”

  “If I still had a stomach,” the bear says, “I’d like one of those chocolate bon-bons there,” and then he doesn’t point at the silver serving platter because he can’t move, and Dancy decides she’s better off ignoring him and looks at the two paintings, instead.

  The one on the right shows a naked corpse so emaciated that Dancy can make out the sharp jut of its hip bones, the peaks and valleys of its ribs. Sunken, hollow eyes, gaping mouth, and the woman’s left breast has sagged so far that it’s settled in her armpit. She lies on a bare slab, and there’s only a hard wooden block to prop up her skull.

  “You could put one into my mouth,” the bear suggests. “I might remember how to taste it.”

  “Shut up, bear,” and now Danc
y examines the painting on her left. This dead woman might only be sleeping, if not for the grief on the face of the old man seated there at her side. Her hands folded neatly across her breasts, and she’s dressed in a satin gown and lies on a bed covered with white roses, two soft pillows tucked beneath her head.

  “It is a riddle,” Dancy says. “One is the truth, and one isn’t. Or they’re both true, but only partly true. They’re both lies, without the other.”

  “Give me a bon-bon, and I’ll tell you which,” the stuffed bear growls.

  “You don’t answer riddles. You said so.”

  “I’ll make an exception.”

  “I don’t think you even know.”

  “I’m dead. Dead bears know lots of things,” and Dancy’s thinking about that, trying to decide whether or not she could even get a piece of the candy all the way up into the bear’s mouth with her wrists tied together.

  “All right,” she says, but then there’s a rustling sound behind her, like dry October leaves in a cold breeze, and the air smells suddenly of cinnamon and ice.

  I never knew ice had a smell, she thinks, turning, and there’s a very pretty boy standing on the other side of the room, watching her. The door’s still closed, or he shut it again. He’s tall and very slender, maybe a little older than she is, and wearing a black velvet dress with a dark green symbol like an hourglass embroidered over his flat chest. His long hair is the exact same green as the hourglass, and his eyes are the color of starlight.

  “Hello, Dancy,” he says, and takes a step towards her. He’s barefoot and has a silver ring on each of his toes. “Who were you talking to?”

  “The bear,” she says, and the boy smiles and reaches into a pocket of his dress. He takes out a small stoppered bottle and holds it up where she can see. The glass is the amber color of pine sap or deep swamp pools stained by rotting vegetation.

  “The Ladies have asked me to speak to you,” he tells her. “I’ve brought them something quite precious, but they thought you should see it first. And, I admit, I’ve been wanting to see you for myself. You have a lot of people talking, Dancy Flammarion.”

  “Did you know he was coming?” she asks the bear, or her angel, it doesn’t really matter which, since neither of them answers her.

  “You’re not exactly what any of us expected. Why did you come to Savannah? Who did you come here to kill?”

  “I’m not sure,” she says, and that much is true, all her dreams after Waycross, all the things she sees in dark hours, only bits and tattered pieces, something broken and there wasn’t time to figure out how all the parts fit together.

  “You didn’t come for the Ladies?”

  “They’re not real monsters,” she says. “They’re nothing but witches and perverts and cannibals. Sure, they’re all crazy. But they’re not real monsters at all.”

  “No,” he says. “They’re not. Did you come for me, then? Did you come for my master, or one of the Parsifal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Did you come for this?” and the boy in the black dress holds the bottle out to her, and Dancy looks back at the bear again, imagines a story where he springs suddenly to life and leaps across the room to devour this strange boy in a single bite.

  “No. I don’t even know what that is,” she says.

  For a moment, the boy doesn’t say anything else, watches her with his brilliant starshine eyes, eyes to read her mind, her soul, to ferret out lies and half truths. They’re starting to make her feel light-headed, those eyes, and she glances down at the floor.

  “Do I frighten you, Dancy?”

  “No,” she lies. “I’m not scared of you.”

  “Look at me then,” he says, and when she does, Dancy sees that she isn’t standing by the bear and the dead-woman paintings anymore, but sitting on the red sofa again, and the duct tape binding her hands is gone. The pretty boy is sitting beside her, on her left, staring down at the amber bottle in his hand. The glass looks very old, oily, prismatic. He shakes it, and inside something buzzes and flickers to life, lightning-bug flicker. Soon the bottle has begun to glow as brightly as the fancy lamps set around the room, and she can’t look directly at it anymore.

  “Some people still think that it’s the Grail,” he says. “It isn’t, of course. The alchemist Petrus Bonus thought it might be a splinter of the lapis exilis, but it isn’t that, either. For a long time, it was lost. It turned up a few years ago in a Portuguese fisherman’s nets, trapped inside this bottle. The fisherman died trying to open it.”

  “So what is it?” Dancy asks, trying not to hear the low, thrumming voices woven into the light from the bottle. A rumbling thunderstorm choir to rattle her teeth, to make ashes of her bones and soot of her white flesh.

  “Just a toy. An unfinished experiment. Some forgotten, second-rate wizard’s silly trinket.”

  “Then it isn’t precious at all,” Dancy says, and her eyes have started to hurt so badly that she looks away. Tears are streaming down her cheeks, and the thrumming sound is starting to make her head ache.

  “It’s quite useless, but there are people who would die for it. There are people who would kill for it.”

  “You’re just another riddle, aren’t you?” Dancy whispers. “I’m sick of riddles.” She’s holding her fingertips to her temples, eyes squeezed shut, the bottle voices stuck inside her head now and trying to force their way out through her skull.

  “But that’s all there is, I’m afraid. In the whole, wide, irredeemable world, that’s all there is, finally.”

  “No. That’s not true,” Dancy says. “There’s pain.”

  “But why? Why is there pain, Dancy?”

  “So there can be an end to pain,” and she wishes on the names of all the saints and angels she can remember that the boy will stop talking, stop asking her questions, kill her and get it over with. She doesn’t want to be alive when the voices from the bottle find their way out of her head.

  “What do you hear, Dancy Flammarion? The voices, what does they sing for you? What songs do they sing for martyrs and monster slayers?”

  “The hate you,” she says and then bites down hard on the end of her tongue so that she won’t say anything else, nothing else she isn’t supposed to say. Her mouth tastes like salt and wheat pennies and rain water.

  “That’s nothing I didn’t already know. What do they sing for my oblation, for your sacrifice?”

  The throb behind her eyes folding and unfolding, becoming something unbearable, unthinkable, that stretches itself across the sizzling sky, running on forever or so far it may as well be forever. A choir of agony, razorshard crescendo.

  “Haven’t you ever tried to open the bottle?” Dancy asks the boy, because she can’t keep it all inside herself any longer.

  And for her answer, the rustling, autumn sound again, though this time she thinks it’s actually more like wings, leathery bat wings or the nervous wings of small birds, the flutter of ten thousand flapping wings. Dancy knows that if she opens her eyes it won’t be the boy sitting next to her. Something else entirely, something much closer to whatever he really is, and now the red room stinks of roadkill and shit and garbage left to slowly rot beneath the summer sun.

  “It’s only a toy,” she says.

  “That’s what he’s afraid of,” the stuffed bear growls from across the room, and Dancy laughs, because she knows he’s telling the truth. Dead bears don’t like riddles, either, and when she tries to stand up she falls, tumbles like a dropped teapot that would never stop falling if she had a choice, would never have to shatter like the china-doll woman who shattered a long, long time ago and the Savannah River washed most of the pieces away to the sea.

  Dancy opens her eyes, and the bottle’s lying on the floor in front of her. The roaring, hurtful voices inside drip from her nostrils and lips and ears, a sticky molasses-dark puddle on the rug.

  “Pick it up,” the thing that isn’t a boy in a dress snarls, making words from the tumult of feathers and hurricane
wind. “You’re dying, anyway. There’s nothing it can do to you. Show me the trick.”

  “There isn’t any trick,” she says, reaching for the bottle. “It’s only a toy.”

  “No,” the bear growls. “Don’t you touch it. Make him do his own dirty work.”

  But she’s already holding the bottle, so light in her hand, so warm, a balm to soothe the pain eating her alive, and she looks up into the maelstrom spinning in the bruised place hung a few feet above the red sofa. The counterclockwise gyre of snapping, twig-thin bones and mockingbird quills, the eyes like swollen, seeping wounds. And here, this part she remembers, this moment from a nightmare of hungry, whirling fire and dying birds.

  “You should have tried the window,” the bear says, and Dancy vomits, nothing much in her stomach but the tea that Dead Girl let her drink, but she vomits, anyway.

  “It knows you, Dancy Flammarion. Before you were born, it knew you. Before the sun sparked to life, it was already calling you here.”

  “I don’t want it,” she coughs and wipes her mouth.

  “You know the trick. We know you know the trick,” and the thing in the air above the sofa is screaming, screeching, turning faster and faster, and bits of itself are coming lose and drifting slowly down to the floor. Wherever they land, the rug scorches and smolders.

  “Open it!”

  Dancy sits up, and for a moment she stares deep into the wheel, the paradox still point at its absolute center – consuming and blossoming heart, nothing and everything there all at once. “Abracadabra,” she whispers, her throat gone raw and her head coming apart at the seams, and she throws the bottle as hard as she can. It arcs end over end, and the pretty boy with starshine eyes (and she sees that he has become a boy again, that the boy was there somewhere, all along) is scrambling after it. When the bottle hits the wall, it bursts into a spray of powdered glass and blue-golden flame that rises quickly towards the ceiling. A sparkling ruin that twines itself into a hammer, a wave, a fist of the purest light, and as the pain leaves her head and the world slips kindly away to leave her alone in darkness, the hammer falls, and the only sounds left are the promises that monsters make before they die.