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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Is it over?” Mary Rose asks, speaking very quietly, and Biancabella holds an index finger up to her lips, hush.

  The Ladies of the Stephens Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists wait together in the long hall outside the door to the Crimson Room. Miss Aramat is sitting on the stairs, alone with Porcelina’s body in her arms, singing softly to herself or to Porcelina’s ghost – Blacks and bays, dapples and greys, when you wake you shall have all the pretty little horses. The bread knife she used to cut Porcelina’s throat lies at her feet, sticky with drying blood. The house on East Hall Street is quiet now, breathless in the battered silence after the storm, and there’s only Miss Aramat’s voice and the obstinate ticking of the grandfather clock by the stairs, the distant ticking of other clocks in other rooms.

  All the things they’ve heard, or only think they’ve heard, since the Bailiff and his charges left and Samuel’s boy went into the room with his bottle and the albino girl, the inescapable, inevitable moment of Porcelina’s death, but all of it not half so terrible as this silence. This waiting, and once Candida put her hand on the doorknob and pulled it quickly back again, her palm scalded raw by the cold.

  “He used us,” Isolde murmurs. “He lied to us.”

  “They both used us,” Emily replies, then the look from Miss Aramat enough that neither of them says anything more.

  Just the clocks and pretty little horses and the long, last hour before dawn.

  Then the knob turns, finally, the tumblers of the lock rolling themselves, the irrelevant key in Biancabella’s pocket, and the door swings open. Dancy Flammarion stands silhouetted in lamplight and a weirder, flaxen glow, fairy fire, foxfire, that seems to shine from somewhere just behind her. There’s power in that light, and dignity, and darker things that will haunt the dreams of the Ladies for the rest of their lives. But the glow fades immediately away when she steps out into the shadow-strewn hallway, and she’s only the Bailiff’s hitchhiker again.

  Dancy holds one of the swords from over the fireplace gripped tightly in both hands. Her face is streaked with tears and blood and vomit, and Biancabella notices that one of her shoes is untied.

  Miss Aramat stops singing. “What did you do to him?” she asks. “Is he dead? Did you kill him?”

  “He would have let you open the bottle for him,” Dancy says. “He would have let you all die trying.”

  Miss Aramat looks down at Porcelina’s head in her lap, and she smiles sadly and strokes the murdered girl’s matted hair.

  “What was in it?” she whispers.

  “Nothing meant for you. Nothing meant for him, either.”

  “I tried to tell her,” Miss Aramat says, wiping a bloody smear from underneath Porcelina’s left eye. “I tried to tell her we wanted nothing to do with the goddamned thing.”

  “Is that why you killed her?” Dancy asks her.

  Miss Aramat wipes away another splotch of blood, and then she closes Porcelina’s eyes. “I can’t remember why I killed her,” she says. “I knew for certain, only a moment ago, but now I can’t remember. Do you know, Biancabella?”

  “You were angry,” Biancabella replies, alert and keeping her eyes on the sword in Dancy’s hands. “You were afraid.”

  “Was I? Well, there you go, then. Biancabella’s hardly ever wrong.”

  “Are you going to kill us all now?” Alma asks Dancy. “We wouldn’t really have hurt you, you know, not really. We were only – ”

  “Jesus Christ,” Biancabella hisses. “You only wanted to cook her with plantains. Shut up, or I’ll kill you myself.”

  “I’m leaving now,” Dancy says, and she takes another step away from the door to the Crimson Room, still holding the sword out in front of her like a shield. Alma and Candida step out of her way.

  “Thank you, oh, thank you,” Alma gushes. “We wouldn’t have hurt you, not really. We would never, ever – ”

  “Alma, I told you to shut the fuck up!”

  “I’m sorry,” and then Alma’s backing away from Dancy and Biancabella both, pressing herself insect-flat against the wall. “I won’t say anything else, I promise. I’m sorry I ever said anything at all.”

  “Get the hell out of here, girl,” Biancabella growls. “Now, before I change my mind. I don’t give a shit what happened in there, you couldn’t kill all of us.”

  Dancy glances at the sword, and then nods once, because she knows that Biancabella’s probably right. What she came to do is finished, so it doesn’t matter anyway. She turns and hurries towards the front door. Outside, the first watery grey-blue hints of dawn wash through the window set into the front door, and she never thought she’d see daylight again.

  “Stop!” Miss Aramat shouts, and when she stands up, Porcelina’s body rolls forward and tumbles loudly to the bottom of the stairs.

  So close, Dancy thinks, so close. Only two or three more steps and she would have been out the door and running down the street, and she wouldn’t have looked back at the house even once.

  “It doesn’t end this way,” Miss Aramat says, and when Dancy turns around, the china-doll woman’s holding a revolver pointed at her. “Not in my house, missy. You don’t come into my house and make threats and then walk out the front door like nothing’s happened.”

  “Let her go,” Biancabella says. “It’s not worth it.”

  “We have to have a feast to remember Porcelina by, don’t we? We’ll have to have something special,” and Miss Aramat pulls the trigger. There’s a small, hard click as the hammer falls on an empty chamber.

  “I didn’t come for you,” Dancy says, and she tightens her grip on the sword because it’s the only thing left to hold onto. “You’re nothing but a wicked, crazy woman.”

  “And you,” Aramat scowls, “you think you’re any better? You’re so goddamn high and mighty, standing there on the side of the goddamn angels, and we’re nothing but shit, is that it?”

  “Please, Aramat,” Biancabella begs. “We’ll find something else for Porcelina’s feast, something truly special. We’ll take the car and drive down to St. Augustine.”

  “Look at her, Biancabella. She’s the monster. She has the marks,” and Miss Aramat pulls the revolver’s trigger again, and again there’s only the impotent taunt of the hammer falling on an empty chamber.

  “Let her go, Aramat,” and now Biancabella’s moving towards the stairs. She shoves Isolde aside and almost trips over Porcelina’s corpse. “She’s nothing to us. She’s just someone’s fucking puppet.”

  “I didn’t come for you,” Dancy says again.

  “‘I will kiss thy mouth, Jokanaan,’” Miss Aramat whispers, and the third time she squeezes the trigger the revolver explodes in a deafening flash of fire and thunder, tearing itself apart, and the shrapnel takes her hands and face with it, buries a chunk of steel the size of a grape between her eyes. One of the fragments grazes Biancabella’s left cheek, digging a bloody furrow from the corner of her mouth to her ear. She stands, helpless, at the bottom of the stairs as Aramat crumples and falls.

  Dancy Flammarion doesn’t wait to see whatever does or doesn’t come next. She drops the sword and runs, out the front door of the big house on East Hall Street, across the wide yard, and the new day wraps her safe in redeeming charcoal wings and hides her steps.

  Not yet noon, and already it’s a hundred degrees in the shade, and the Bailiff is sitting alone on the rusted rear bumper of the Monte Carlo drinking an RC Cola. The sun a proper demon overhead, and he holds the cool bottle pressed to his forehead for a moment and squints into the mirage shimmer writhing off the blacktop. Dancy Flammarion is walking towards him up the entrance ramp to the interstate, a small girl-shape beneath a huge black umbrella, coming slowly, stubbornly through the heat-bent summer day. A semi rushes past, roars past, and there’s wind for a moment, though it isn’t a cool wind. The truck rattles away, and once again the only sound is the droning rise and fall of cicadas. The Bailiff finishes his drink and tosses the empty bottle into the marsh at the s
ide of the road; he takes a blue paisley bandanna from his back pocket and wipes the sweat from his face and bald head.

  “A man needs a hat in a place like this,” he says, and Dancy stops a few feet from the car and watches him. She’s wearing a pair of sunglasses that look like she must have found them lying by the side of the road, the left lens cracked and the bridge held together with a knotted bit of nylon fishing twine.

  “You set me up, old man,” she says to him. “You set us all up, didn’t you?”

  “Maybe a nice straw Panama hat, something to keep the sun from cooking my brains. Didn’t Clark Gable wear one of those in Gone with the Wind?”

  “Was it the bottle, or the boy?”

  The Bailiff stuffs the blue bandanna back into his trouser pocket and winks at Dancy. “It was the bottle,” he says. “And the boy, and some other people you best hope you never have to meet face to face.”

  “And the women?”

  “No. It didn’t really ever have anything much to do with the Ladies.”

  “Aramat’s dead,” she says, and then another truck roars by, whipping the trash and grit at the side of the interstate into a whirlwind. When it’s gone, Dancy wipes the dust off her clothes.

  “It was an accident,” she says.

  “Well now, that’s a shame, I guess. I’d honestly hoped it wouldn’t come to that,” and the Bailiff shades his eyes and glances up at the sun. “But it was always only a matter of time. Some people are just too damn mean and crazy for their own good. Anyway, I imagine Biancabella can take care of things now.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “What don’t you understand, Dancy Flammarion?”

  “The boy. I mean, whose side are you on?”

  The Bailiff laughs softly to himself, and reaches for the bandan-

  na again.

  “You’ve got a lot to learn, child. You’re a goddamn holy terror, all right, but you’ve got a lot to learn.”

  She stares at him silently, her eyes hidden behind the broken sunglasses, while the Bailiff blows his nose into the bandanna and the cicadas scream at each other.

  “Can I have my duffel bag back?” she says. “I left it in your car.”

  “Wouldn’t you rather have a ride? This sun isn’t good for regular folks. I hate to think what it’ll do to an albino. You’re starting to turn pink already.”

  Dancy looks at her forearm, frowns, and then looks back at the Bailiff.

  “What about the others?” she asks.

  The Bailiff raps his knuckles twice on the trunk. “Dead to the world,” he says. “At least until sunset. And I owe you one after – ”

  “You don’t owe me nothing,” Dancy says.

  “Then think of it as a temporary cease-fire. It’ll be a nice change, having someone to talk to who still breathes.”

  Dancy stares at the Monte Carlo, at the Bailiff, and then at the endless, broiling ribbon of I-16 stretching away north and west towards Atlanta and the mountains.

  “But I’m not even sure where I’m going.”

  “I thought that’s why you have an angel, to tell you these things?”

  “It will, eventually.”

  “Well, it’s only a couple of hours to Macon. How’s that for a start?”

  In the marsh, a bird calls out, long-legged swamp bird, and Dancy turns her head and watches as the egret spreads its wide alabaster wings and flaps away across the cordgrass, something black and squirming clutched in its long beak.

  “It’s a start,” she says, but waits until the egret is only a smudge against the blue-white sky before she closes the umbrella and follows the Bailiff into the shade of the car.

  For Dame Darcy. Shine on.

  * * *

  Les Fleurs Empoisonnées

  I saw this house in Savannah, but I owe the story to an illustration by Dame Darcy. An exquisitely ghoulish tableaux of a lesbian sisterhood engaged in every profane rite, that was the true inspiration. The talking taxidermied bear with his red fez, he’s my favorite bit.

  Night Story 1973

  with Poppy Z. Brite

  “‘It rained and it rained and it rained,’” the old woman said, reading aloud from Winnie-the-Pooh. She held the book up close to her face, squinting to see the words by the yellow-orange light of the kerosene lantern. “‘Piglet told himself that never in all his life and he was goodness knows how old – three, was it, or four? – never had he seen so much rain,’” and then she paused, lifting her head to stare at the front door of the two-room mountain cabin she shared with her grandson, whose name was Ghost.

  “‘Days and days and days,’” said Ghost with just a touch of impatience, prompting her. But then he, too, sat up straighter in bed and stared at the door, recognizing the alert uneasiness on his grandmother’s face.

  “Ghost child, if you already know this story by heart, why am I bothering to read it to you?” But she didn’t take her eyes off the door as she spoke, the door and the rainslick windows on either side of it. Those windows worried her most of all. Nothing to see out there but the stormy night, blacker than pitch in a bucket, black as a coal miner’s ass, except for the brief and thunderous flashes of lightning.

  “What did you see, Dee?” Her name was Deliverance, Miss Deliverance to most everybody, and Dee-for-short only to this boy. Deliverance frowned and nodded her head, nodded it very slowly, and then she looked back down at the familiar pages of the book.

  “I didn’t see nothing at all,” she said. “I expect it was just a dog.”

  “Which?”

  “Which what?”

  The boy sighed, leaned back into his big, goose-down pillow. A small, vertical line appeared between his eyebrows, more than a hint of impatience now, that suspicious expression far too mature for his six and a half years. “Which one was it?” he asked. “Was it nothing or was it a dog? It can’t be both.”

  “You know, boy, sometimes you sound just like your mama,” and sometimes he could look like her too, but Deliverance didn’t say that. Hard enough thinking it, seeing the careless bits and pieces of her only daughter in his fox-sharp face, her eyes become his eyes, irises the pale blue of a clear dawn. She reached out and brushed Ghost’s long hair from his face, that cornsilk hair so blonde it was white, or as good as white.

  “Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t see nothing. So don’t you worry.” But there were no secrets between these two, and she knew he didn’t believe her. Instead of pretending to, he pointed at Winnie-the-Pooh.

  “‘It rained and it rained and it rained,’” he said.

  “Ghost, honey, why don’t we read something else? Something where it ain’t raining so much. Maybe that one about old Eeyore losing his tail, or Kanga and Baby Roo coming to the Hundred-Acre Wood.”

  Ghost looked disappointed, then frowned and glanced up at the ceiling of the little house. The storm drummed at the tin roof with a thousand fingers, the icy late-October rain that had started a few hours before sunset and showed no signs of letting up anytime soon. The wind roared and rattled the roof, trying hard to find a way in, trying to help the rain, and he was pretty sure this storm wasn’t just any storm. This storm was mean. This storm, he thought, wouldn’t mind hurting them, picking them up like Dorothy Gale and blowing them all the way to Oz or someplace not so nice.

  “It’s after me, ain’t it, ’cause of what I done down at the creek yesterday, at the rocks?”

  The old woman closed the book and laid it down next to the lantern on the small, walnut-burl table beside the bed.

  “It’s only a thunderstorm,” she said stern, trying hard to sound convincing. “Storms don’t come looking for people. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I think this one is,” he replied. “This one’s come out looking for me,” and then lightning so bright that it might have been the Second Coming, cold wash of noonday brilliance to drown the inside of the little house. The old woman turned towards the window, turned fast but not nearly fast enough, too old to be racing lightning,
and the windows were already black again. Nothing there but thunder and the rain streaking window glass.

  “That was its eyes,” Ghost said. “It has big shining eyes so it can see where it’s going in the dark.”

  And Deliverance turned back to her strange, pale grandson snuggled into his nest of old quilts and a mint-green blanket she’d bought at Woolworth’s years ago. The big flannel shirt he always slept in, a work shirt that had been his grandfather’s once upon a time, to keep him warm and safe from his dreams. She took a deep breath and leaned closer to him.

  “Ghost, you listen to me now and pay attention,” she said, using the sober, old-womanly voice she always reserved for the things that she had to be certain he understood, copperheads and steel-jaw traps, poisonous mushrooms and the leaf-covered pits of abandoned wells.

  “I’m listening, Dee,” he said quietly.

  “Sometimes we gotta be brave, even when we’re scared. We gotta not let being scared keep us from thinking straight. That’s all brave is, boy, when you come right down to it, not letting the fear get you so turned around you start doing stupid things, instead of what you know you ought to do.”

  “I didn’t know about the rocks,” the boy whispered, and he looked away from her, watching the flame of the lantern instead.

  “Ain’t nobody blaming you. I should’a told you about that old pile of stones a long, long time ago. But sometimes a body forgets things, even important things like them stones. All that matters now, Ghost, is that we do the stuff we know we gotta do and don’t get so scared we forget anything else important.”

  “Like the salt?” he asked solemnly, and she nodded her head, even though she knew the storm had surely washed away the double ring of salt she’d carefully sprinkled around the house that afternoon. There were still neat white lines of it on the thresholds and window sills.