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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “I saw it out there, grinning in at me, daring me,” she said. “You stay behind me, boy.” But Ghost took a step closer to the door instead, put one hand on the barrel of the shotgun and gently pushed it aside and down towards the floor.

  “I called it out,” Ghost said, turning towards his grandmother and his pale eyes glinted like the thumbprints of God, two shining points of certainty in the fickle, faithless night. “I didn’t mean to, but that’s what I done. Now I gotta send it back.”

  And she watched, helpless, too exhausted or afraid to argue, as he stepped past her and stood in front of the door, her crude charms visible in the flickering, pale wash of orange light. Ghost touched one of the chalk signs she’d made and he whispered something, but nothing she could hear, nothing meant for her anyway, and then he sat on the floor. He put the oil lamp down nearby and leaned forward, pressing himself tight against the door, and then Ghost began to trace words or shapes on the wood with one finger.

  “There are still worse things in the world than you,” he said. “Still things to watch the ways in and out of darkness,” speaking louder than before, and his finger moved faster, faster, smearing the chalk and powdered herbs and dried blood, tattooing the door with his own secret ciphers. Lines of power woven from innocence and mystery and the clammy night air, and after a moment Deliverance realized that the doorknob had stopped turning.

  “Go home,” Ghost said, and the lightning flashed again, the thunder right behind it this time. “Go on home before they come looking for you.”

  And then the old woman heard the sudden, feather-rough flutter of a hundred small wings, a great flock of blackbirds all taking to the air at the same instant, or the defeated sound of running feet, or nothing but the wind, shrieking cheated through the trees. Ghost glanced back at her, bright beads of sweat standing out on his sharp ashen face. The finger he’d been using slid slowly down the wood until his hand lay limp on the floor at his side.

  “Is it gone?” he asked, and shut his eyes before she could reply.

  Deliverance looked at the windows, at the night that was no different from any other storm-weary North Carolina night, the storm that was only rain and lightning, wind and thunder.

  “Yes,” she said, “It’s over, Ghost. I think it’s all over now,” but she didn’t get up. She stayed there in her grandmother’s rocking chair, the practical, reassuring weight of the shotgun in her lap, until the rain had finally stopped and the sky turned the first purple-grey shades of dawn.

  * * *

  Night Story 1973

  Known fact: I don’t play well with others. This is one of only four collaborations I’ve done, outside comics, out of almost two hundred short stories, novellas, and vignettes. This is the best of the lot. Here are glimpses of my childhood in Alabama, in wooded Appalachian foothills. Lazarus Mountain is mine. Ghost and Deliverance are Poppy’s, of course.

  From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6

  5:46 P.M.

  The old theater on Asylum Street smells of stale popcorn and the spilled soft drinks that have soured on the sticky floors. The woman sitting in the very back row, the woman with the cardboard box open in her lap, shuts her eyes. A precious few seconds free of the ridiculous things on the screen, just the theater stink and the movie sounds – a scream and a splash, a gunshot – and then the man coughs again. Thin man in his navy-blue fedora and his threadbare gabardine jacket, the man with the name that sounds like an ice-cream flavor, and when she opens her eyes he’s still sitting there in the row in front of her, looking at her expectantly over the back of his seat. The screen become a vast rectangular halo about his head, a hundred thousand shades of grey.

  “Well,” he says, “there you have it.”

  “I don’t know what I’m seeing anymore,” she says. He nods his head very slowly, up and down, up and down, like a small, pale thing on the sea. She looks up at the screen again at the man in the rubber monster suit and the flickering light, listens to the soft insectile flutter from the projector in the booth above her head.

  “Just an old movie,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says, not bothering to whisper because there’s no one else is in the theater but the two of them, him and her, the skinny, antique man and the bookish woman with her cardboard box. “A silly old movie to scare children at Saturday afternoon matinees, to scare teenage girls.”

  “Is that what it is? Is that the truth?”

  “The truth,” he says, smiles a tired sort of a smile and coughs again. A handkerchief from his breast pocket to wipe his thin lips clean, and then the man with the ice-cream name stares for a moment into his own spit and phlegm caught in folds of linen as though they were tea leaves and he could read the future there.

  “Yes, I suppose that’s what you would call it,” he tells her, stuffing the soiled handkerchief back into his pocket. “You would call it that, until something better comes along.”

  On screen, a cavern beneath the black Amazonian lake, glycerine mist and rifle smoke, and the creature’s gills rise and fall, struggling for breath; its bulging eyes are as blank and empty as the glass eyes of a taxidermied fish.

  “It’s almost over,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says. “Are you staying for the end?”

  “I might talk,” the woman whispers, even though they are alone, and the creature roars as its plated, scaly flesh its torn by bullets, by knives and spears. Rivulets of dark blood leak from its latex hide as the old man nods his head again.

  “You might. You wouldn’t be the first.”

  “Would someone try to stop me?”

  “Someone already has, Miss Morrow.”

  And now it’s her turn to nod, and she looks away from the movie screen, the man in the latex suit’s big death scene up there, the creature drifting limp and lifeless to the bottom of its lonely, weedy lagoon. Lacey Morrow looks down at the box in her lap.

  If I’d never found the goddamned thing, she thinks. If someone else had found it instead of me. All the things she would give away for that to be true, years or memories, her life if she could die without knowing the things she knows now.

  “Well, there it is,” Dr. Solomon Monalisa says again, as the last frames flicker past before the screen goes white and the red velvet curtain comes down and the house lights come up. “Not quite as silly as I remember. Not a bad way to pass an afternoon.”

  “Will they mind if I sit here a little longer?” she asks, and he shrugs his thin shoulders, stands and straightens the lapels of his jacket, fusses with the collar of his shirt.

  “No,” he says. “I shouldn’t think they’d mind at all.”

  She doesn’t watch him leave, keeps her eyes fixed on the box, and his shoes make small, uneven sounds against the sticky floor.

  1:30 P.M.

  Waking from an uneasy dream of childhood, a seashore and her sisters and something hanging in the sky, something terrible that she wouldn’t look at no matter what they promised her. Lacey blinks and squints through the streaky train window at the Connecticut countryside rushing by, surely Connecticut by now, probably somewhere well past Springfield and headed for Hartford. Crazy quilt of fields and pastureland stitched together with October leaves, the fiery boughs of birch and beech and hickory to clothe red Jurassic sandstone. Then she catches sight of the winding, silver-grey ribbon of the river to the west, flashing bright beneath the morning sun. She rubs her eyes, blinks at all that sunlight and wishes that she hadn’t dozed off. But trains almost always lull her to sleep, sooner or later, the steady heartbeat rhythm of the wheels against the rails, steel-on-steel lullaby, and the more random rattle and clatter of the couplings for punctuation.

  She checks to see that the cardboard box is still resting on the empty aisle seat beside her, that her satchel is still stowed safely at her feet. They are. Reassured, Lacey glances quickly about the car, slightly embarrassed at having fallen asleep. That strangers have been watching her sleep, and she might have snored or drooled or mumbled foolish things in her dreams, but the car is mostly empty, any
way – a teenage girl reading a paperback, a priest reading a newspaper – and she looks back to the window, her nightmare already fading in the warmth of the day. The train is closer to the river now, and she can see a small boat – a fishing boat, perhaps – cutting a V-shaped wake on the water.

  “Have yourself a nice little nap, then?” and Lacey turns, startled, clipping the corner of the box with her elbow, and it almost tumbles to the floor before she can catch it. There’s a woman in the seat directly behind her, someone she hadn’t noticed only a moment before, painfully thin woman with tangled, oyster-white hair, neither very old nor very young, and she’s staring at Lacey with watery blue eyes that seem to bulge slightly, intently, from their sockets. Her skin is dry and sallow, and there’s a sickly, jaundiced tint to her cheeks. She’s wearing a dingy black raincoat and a heavy sweater underneath, wool the color of instant oatmeal, and her nubby fingernails are painted an incongruous flamingo pink.

  “I didn’t mean to frighten you,” the woman says in her deliberate, gravel voice, but Lacey shakes her head.

  “No, it’s okay. I guess I’m not quite awake, that’s all.”

  “I was starting to think I’d have to wake you up myself,” the woman says impatiently, still staring. “I’m only going as far as Hartford. I don’t have the time to go any farther than that.”

  As she talks, Lacey has begun to notice a very faint, fishy smell, fish or low-tide mud flats, brine and silt and stranded, suffocating sea creatures. The odor seems to be coming from the white-haired woman, her breath or her clothes, and Lacey pretends not to notice.

  “You’re sitting there thinking, ‘Who’s this lunatic?’ ain’t you? ‘Who’s this deranged woman, and how can I get her to shut the hell up and leave me alone?’”

  “No, I just don’t – ”

  “Oh, yes you are,” the woman says, and she jabs an index finger at Lacey, candy-pink polish and her knuckles like dirty, old tree roots. “But that’s okay. You don’t know me from Adam. You aren’t supposed to know me, Miss Morrow.”

  Lacey glances at the other passengers, the girl and the priest. Neither of them are looking her way, still busy with their reading, and if they’ve even noticed the white-haired woman they’re pretending that they haven’t. Not like she’s their problem. Lacey says a silent, agnostic’s prayer that it isn’t much farther to the Hartford station; she smiles, and the woman makes a face like she’s been insulted.

  “It ain’t me you got to be afraid of, Miss. Get that straight. I’m sticking my neck out, just talking to you.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Lacey says, trying hard to sound sorry instead of nervous, instead of annoyed. “But I really don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Me, I’m nothing but a messenger. A courier,” the woman replies, lowering her voice almost to a whisper and glaring suspiciously towards the other two passengers. “Of course, that wouldn’t make much difference, if you know what I mean.”

  “I don’t have any idea what you mean.”

  “Well, you got the package right there,” the woman says, and now she’s pointing over the back of Lacey’s seat at the cardboard box with the Innsmouth fossil packed inside. “That makes you a courier, too. Hell, that almost makes you a goddamn holy prophet on Judgment Day. But you probably haven’t thought of it that way, have you?”

  “Maybe it would be better if we talked later,” Lacey whispers, playing along. The woman’s probably perfectly harmless, but she puts one hand protectively on the box, anyway.

  “They might be listening,” the woman says and nods her head towards the teenager and the priest. “They might hear something we don’t want them to hear.”

  She makes an angry, hissing sound between her yellow teeth and runs the long fingers of her left hand quickly through her tangled white hair, slicking it back against her scalp, pulling a few strands loose, and they lie like pearly threads on the shoulder of her black raincoat.

  “You think you got it all figured out, don’t you?” she growls. “Put some fancy letters after your name, and you don’t need to listen to anybody or anything, ain’t that right? Can’t nobody tell you no different, ’cause you’ve seen it all, from top to bottom, pole to pole.”

  “Calm down, please,” Lacey says, glancing towards the other passengers again, wishing one of them would look up so she could get their attention. “If you don’t, I’m going to have to call the conductor. Don’t make me do that.”

  “Goddamn stuck-up dyke,” the woman snarls, and she spits on the floor, turns her head and stares furiously out the window with her bulging blue eyes. “You think I’m crazy. Jesus, you just wait till you come out the other side, and then let’s see what the hell you think sane looks like.”

  “I didn’t mean to upset you,” Lacey says, standing, reaching for the satchel with her laptop. “Maybe I should just move to another seat.”

  “You do that, Miss Morrow. Won’t be no skin off my nose. But you better take this with you,” and the woman’s left hand disappears inside her raincoat, reappears with a large, slightly crumpled manila envelope, and she holds it out to Lacey. “They told me you’d figure it out, so don’t ask me no more questions. I’ve already said too goddamn much as it is.”

  Lacey sets her satchel down beside the cardboard box and stares at the envelope for a moment, yellow-brown paper, and there’s what looks like a grease stain at one corner.

  “Well, go on ahead. It ain’t got teeth. It ain’t gonna bite you,” the white-haired woman sneers, not taking her eyes off the window, the farms and houses rushing past. “Maybe if you take it,” she says, “the scary woman will leave you alone.”

  Lacey snatches the envelope, hastily gathers her things, the satchel and the box, and moves quickly up the aisle towards the front of the car. The priest and the girl don’t even look up as she passes them. Maybe they don’t see me at all, she thinks. Maybe they haven’t heard a thing. The door to the next car is stuck, and she’s wrestling with the handle when the train lurches, sways suddenly to one side, and she almost drops the box, imagines the fossil inside shattering into a hundred pieces.

  Stupid girl. Stupid, silly girl.

  She forces herself to be still, then, presses her forehead against the cool aluminum door. She takes a deep breath of air that doesn’t smell like dead fish, that only smells like diesel fumes and disinfectant, perfectly ordinary train smells, comforting familiarity, and the cadence of the rails is the most reassuring sound in the world.

  Go on ahead. It ain’t got teeth. It ain’t gonna bite you, the white-haired woman said, nothing at all but a crazy lady that someone ought to be watching out for, not letting her ride about on trains harassing people. Lacey looks down at the grease-stained envelope in her hand, held tenuously between her right thumb and forefinger.

  “Do you need me to help you with that?” and it’s only the priest, scowling up at her from his newspaper; he sighs a loud, irritated sigh and points at the exit. “Would you like me to get the door for you?”

  “Yes,” she says. “Thank you, Father. I’d really appreciate it. My hands are full.”

  Lacey glances anxiously past him towards the back of the car, and there’s no sign of the white-haired woman now, but the door at the other end is standing wide open.

  “There,” the priest says, and she smiles and thanks him again.

  “No problem,” he says, and as she steps into the short connecting corridor, he continues speaking in low, conspiratorial tones, “But don’t wait too long to have a look at what’s in that envelope she gave you. There may not be much time left.” Then the door slides shut again, and Lacey turns and runs to the crowded refuge of the next car.

  Her twenty-fifth birthday, the stormy day in early July when Lacey Morrow found the Innsmouth fossil, working late and alone in the basement of the Pratt Museum. Almost everyone else gone home already, but there was nothing unusual about that. Lacey pouring over the contents of Cabinet 34, drawers of Devonian fishes collected from Blo
ssburg, Pennsylvania and Chaleur Bay, Quebec, slabs of shale and sandstone the dusky color of charcoal, the color of cinnamon; ancient lungfish and the last of the jawless ostracoderms, lobe-finned Eusthenopteron and the boxy armour plates of the antiarch Bothriolepis. Relics of an age come and gone hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs, a time when the earliest forests lined the shores of lakes and rivers teeming with strange and monstrous fish, and vertebrates had begun to take their first clumsy steps onto dry land. And that transition has been her sole, consuming obsession since Lacey was an undergraduate, that alchemy of flesh and bone – fins to feet, gills to lungs – the puzzles that filled her days and nights, that filled her dreams. Her last girlfriend walking out because she’d finally had enough of Lacey’s all-night kitchen dissections, the meticulously mutilated sea bass and cod, eels and small sharks sliced up and left lying about until she found time to finish her notes and sketches. Dead things in plastic bags crammed into the freezer, and the ice cubes starting to taste like bad sushi, their Hitchcock Road apartment stinking of formalin and fish markets.

  “If I grow fucking scales maybe I’ll give you a call sometime,” Julie said, hauling her boxes of clothes and CDs from their front porch to the back of her banged-up little car. “If I ever meet up with a goddamn mermaid, I’ll be sure to give her your number.”

  Lacey watched her drive away, feeling less than she knew she ought to feel, wishing she would cry because any normal person would cry, would at least be angry with herself or with Julie. But the tears never came, nor the anger, and after that she figured it was better to leave romantic entanglements for some later stage in her life, some faraway day when she could spare a spark of passion for anything except her studies. She kept a picture of Julie in a pewter frame beside her bed, though, so she could still pretend, from time to time, when she felt alone, when she awoke in the middle of the night and there was nothing but the sound of rain on the roof and the wind blowing cold through the streets of Amherst.