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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Ce n’est pas un loup!” the man on his horse shouts to the others in his company, and Dancy peers over her shoulder, but she can’t see him anywhere. Nothing at all back there but the wind-blown snow, and she wonders how he could have possibly followed her to this time and place, when he won’t even be born for another thirteen thousand years. The storm picks his voice apart and scatters it across the plains.

  With the impatient wind at her back, hurrying her along, Dancy stumbles on ahead, helpless to do otherwise.

  She finds the camp just past a line of high granite boulders, men and women huddled together in the lee of the stones, a ragged, starving bunch wrapped in bear hides. She smells them before she sees them – the soot of their small, smoky fires, the oily stink of their bodies, the faint death smell from the skins they wear. She slips between the boulders, sure-footed, moving as quietly as she can, though they could never hear her coming over the wind. The wind that blows her own scent away, and she crouches above them and listens. The men clutching their long spears, the women clutching their children, and all eyes nervously watching the white-out blur beyond the safety of the fires.

  Dancy doesn’t need to understand their language to read their minds, the red and ebony light coiled tight inside her head is there to translate their hushed words, their every fearful thought, to show her the hazy nightmares they’ve fashioned from the shadows and the wailing blizzard. They whisper about the strange creature that has been trailing them for days, tracking them across the ice, the red-eyed demon like a young girl carved from the snow itself. Their shaman mumbles warnings that they must have trespassed into some unholy place protected by this spirit of the storms, but most of the men ignore him. They’ve never come across any beast so dangerous it doesn’t bleed.

  Crouched there among the boulders, her teeth chattering, Dancy gazes up into the swirling snow. The light leaks out of her nostrils and twines itself in the air above her head like a dozen softly glowing serpents.

  They will come for you soon, it says. If you stay here, they’ll find you and kill you.

  “Will they?” Dancy asks, too cold and hungry and tired to really care, one way or the other, and Yes, the light replies.

  “Why? I can’t hurt them. I couldn’t hurt them if I wanted to.”

  The light breaks apart into a sudden shower of sparks, bright drops of brilliance that splash against each other and bounce off the edges of the boulders. In a moment, they come together again, and the woman from the Gynander’s trailer, the woman in the yellow raincoat that she knows isn’t a woman at all, steps out of the gloom and stands nearby, watching Dancy with her green eyes.

  “It only matters that they are afraid of you,” she says. “Maybe you could hurt them, and maybe you could not, but it only matters that they are afraid.”

  “I killed you,” Dancy says. “You’re dead. Go away.”

  “I only wanted you to see,” the woman says and glances down at the camp below the boulders. “Sometimes we forget what we are and why we do the things we do. Worse, sometimes we never learn.”

  “It won’t make any difference,” Dancy growls at her, and the woman smiles and nods her head. Her raincoat flutters and flaps loudly in the wind, and Dancy tries hard not to look at the things writhing on her bare chest.

  “It might,” the woman says. “Someday, when you can’t kill the thing that frightens you. When there’s nowhere left to run. Think of it as a gift.”

  “Why would you give me a gift?”

  “Because you gave me one, Dancy Flammarion,” and then the woman blows apart in the wind, and Dancy shivers and watches as the glittering pieces of her sail high into the winter sky and vanish.

  “Is it over now?” Dancy asks the light, and in a moment it an-

  swers her.

  That depends, it says. Is it ever over? it asks, but Dancy is already tumbling back the way she’s come. Head over heels, ass over tits, and when she opens her eyes, an instant later, an eternity later, she’s staring through the darkness at the ceiling of the Gynander’s cellar.

  Dancy coughs and rolls over onto her left side, breathing against the stabbing, sharp pain in her chest, and there’s the box sitting alone in the dust, its lid closed now. The dark varnished wood glints dull in the orange light from the hurricane lantern hanging nearby, and whatever might have come out of the box has been locked away again. She looks up from the floor, past the drooping, empty husks on their hooks and the Gynander’s workbenches. The creature is watching her from the other side of the cellar.

  “What did you see?” it asks her, and she catches a guarded hint of apprehension in its rough voice.

  “What was I supposed to see?” Dancy asks back, and she coughs again. “What did you think I’d see?”

  “That’s not how it works. It’s different for everyone.”

  “You wanted me to see things that would make me doubt what the angel tells me.”

  “It’s different for everyone,” the Gynander says again and draws the blade of a straight razor slowly across a long leather strap.

  “But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? That’s what you hoped I’d see, because that’s what you saw when she showed you the box.”

  “I never talked to no angels. I always made a point of that.”

  And Dancy realizes that the nylon ropes around her ankles and wrists are gone, and her knife is lying on the floor beside the box. She reaches for it, and the Gynander stops sharpening its razor and looks at her.

  “Sinethella wanted to die, you know,” it says. “She’d been wanting to die for ages. She’d heard what you did to them folks over in Bainbridge, and down there in Florida. I swear, child, you’re like something come riding out of a wild west movie, like goddamn Clint Eastwood, you are.”

  Dancy sits up, a little dizzy from lying down so long, and wipes the rusty blade of her carving knife on her jeans.

  “Like in that one picture, High Plains Drifter, where that nameless stranger fella shows up acting all holier than thou. The whole town thinks they’re using him, but turns out, see, it’s really the other way round. Turns out, maybe he’s the most terrible thing there is, and maybe good’s a whole lot worse to have after your ass than evil. ’Course, you have a name.”

  “I haven’t seen too many movies,” Dancy says, though, in truth, she’s never seen a single one. She glances from the Gynander to the wooden box to the lantern and back to the Gynander.

  “I just want you to understand that she wasn’t no two-bit, backwoods haint,” it says and starts sharpening the straight razor again. “Not like me. I just want you to know ain’t nothing happened here she didn’t want to happen.”

  “Why did you untie me?”

  “Why don’t you trying asking that angel of yours? I thought it had all the answers. Hell, I thought that angel of yours was all over the truth like flies on dog shit.”

  “She told you to let me go?”

  The Gynander makes a sound like sighing and lays the leather strap aside, then holds the silver razor up so it catches a little of the stray lantern light. Its stolen face sags and twitches slightly.

  “Not exactly,” it says. “Ain’t nothin’ that easy, Snow White.”

  Dancy stands up, her legs stiff and aching, and she lifts the hurricane lantern off its nail.

  “Then you want to die, too,” she says.

  “Not by a long sight, little girl. But I do like me some sport now and then. And Sinethella said you must be a goddamn force of nature, a regular shatterer of worlds, to do the things you been getting away with.”

  “What I saw in there,” Dancy says, and she cautiously prods at the box with the toe of one shoe. “It doesn’t make any difference. I know it was just a trick.”

  “Well, then what’re you waiting for,” the thing whispers from the lips of its shabby patchwork skin. “Show me what you got.”

  The fire crackles and roars at the night sky lightening slowly towards dawn. Dancy sits on a fallen log at the side of the red
dirt road leading back to Waycross and watches as the spreading flames begin to devour the leafy walls of the kudzu tunnel.

  “Well, I guess you showed me what for,” the blackbird says. It’s perched on the log next to her, the fire reflected in its beady eyes. “Maybe next time I’ll keep my big mouth shut.”

  “You think there’s ever gonna be a next time?” Dancy asks without looking away from the fire.

  “Lord, I hope not,” the birds squawks. “That was just, you know, a figure of speech.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Where you headed next?” the bird asks.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I thought maybe the angels – ”

  “They’ll show me,” Dancy says, and she slips the carving knife back into her duffel bag and pulls the drawstrings tight again. “When it’s time, they’ll show me.”

  And then neither of them says anything else for a while, just sit there together on the fallen pine log, as the fire she started in the cellar behind the trailer burns and bleeds black smoke into the hyacinth sky.

  * * *

  Waycross

  Oh, Dancy, my avenging la pucelle de Dieu, angel-touched waif. My deluded, pallid paladin. You are that angry sliver of my heart that only wants to cut away, but inevitably ends up slicing my own hands. My monstrous monster slayer. I hear those voices, too. Still, I feel a little bad about the Gynander and Sinethella.

  The Dead and the Moonstruck

  Beneath Providence, below the ancient yellow house on Benefit Street where silver-eyed vampires sleep away the days and pass their dusty waxwork evenings with Spanish absinthe and stale memories; this house that once belonged to witches, long ago, this house with as many ghosts and secrets and curses as it has spiders and silverfish – beneath the yellow house, at half past midnight on a bitter February night, Mesdames Terpsichore and Mnemosyne are finishing a lecture with corporeal demonstrations. Lessons for ghoul pups and for the children of the Cuckoo – the changeling brats stolen as babies and raised in the warrens – and for an hour the two old hounds have droned on and on and on about the most efficacious methods for purging a corpse of embalming fluid and other funereal preservatives before it can be safely prepared in the kitchens. The skinny, mouse-haired girl named Starling Jane nodded off twice during the lecture, earning a snarl from Madam Mnemosyne and a mean glare from Madam Terpsichore’s blazing yellow eyes.

  “That’s all for tonight,” Madam Terpsichore growls, folding shut the leather satchel that holds her scalpels and syringes, her needles and knives. “But every one of you’d best know all the purgatives and detoxicants by the morrow. And you, young lady,” and now the ghul points a long and crooked finger at Starling Jane, one ebony claw aimed straight at her heart. “You need to learn that the day, not the classroom, is the proper place for sleeping.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Starling Jane whispers and keeps her eyes on the dirt floor of the basement, on her bare feet and an ivory scrap of bone protruding from the earth. “It won’t happen again.”

  There’s a hushed titter of laughter and guttural yapping from the rest of the class, and Jane pretends that she’s only a beetle or a small red worm, something unimportant that can scurry or slither quickly away, something that can tuck itself out of sight in an unnoticed cranny or crevice, and she’ll never have to sit through another dissection lecture or be scolded for dozing off again. Madam Mnemosyne silences the muttering class with a glance, but Jane can still feel their eyes on her, and “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “I should think that you are,” Madam Terpsichore barks. “You’re plenty old enough to know better, child,” and then, to the other students sitting cross-legged on the basement floor, “Mistress Jane’s Third Confirmation is scheduled for the full Hunger Moon, four nights hence. But perhaps she isn’t ready, hmmmm? Perhaps she’ll be found wanting, and the razor jaws will close tight about her hands. Then maybe we’ll have her meat on the slab before much longer.”

  “And no nasty embalming fluid to contend with,” Madam Mnemosyne adds.

  “Ah, she would be sweet,” Madam Terpsichore agrees.

  “I’m sorry,” Jane says again. “But I’ll be ready on the moon.”

  Madam Terpsichore flares her wide black nostrils, sniffs at the musty cellar air, and her eyes glitter in the candlelight. “See that you are, child,” she says. “It would be a shame to lose another sprout so very soon after young Master Lockheart’s unfortunate rejection,” and then she dismisses the class, and Jane follows all the others from the basement into the old tunnels winding like empty veins beneath the city.

  Later, after Elementary Thaumaturgy and Intermediate Necromancy and a rambling, unscheduled address on the history of the upper nightlands by Master Tantalus, visiting Providence from the Boston warrens. After dinner and the predawn free hour, after all the time lying awake in her narrow bunk, wishing she were asleep but afraid to close her eyes, Starling Jane finally drifts out and down, slipping through the familiar dormitory smells of wet masonry and mildew and millipedes, past the snores and grunts and gentle breathing noises of those who aren’t afraid of their dreams. A hundred feet beneath the day-washed pavement of Angell Street, and she spirals easily through velvet folds of consciousness and unconsciousness. Countless bits of senseless, inconsequential remembrance and fancy – simple dreams – leading and misleading her step by step, moment by moment, to the nightmare place she’s visited almost every morning or afternoon for two months.

  That place where there is a wide blue sky, and the sun hanging inconceivably bright directly overhead. Where there is grass and the scent of flowers, and she stands at the top of a hill looking down on a sparkling sea.

  “You should have stayed with me,” her mother says from somewhere close behind her, and Jane doesn’t turn around, because she doesn’t want to see. “If you’d have stayed with me, I’d have loved you, and you’d have grown up to be a beautiful woman.”

  The salt-warm wind off the sea makes waves in the tall grass and whistles past Starling Jane’s ears.

  “I would have stayed,” she says, just like she always says. “If they’d have let me. I would have stayed, if I’d had a choice.”

  “I knew I’d lose you,” her mother replies. “Before you were even born, I knew the monsters would come and steal you away from me. I knew they’d hide you from me and make you forget my face.”

  “How could you have known all that?” Jane asks. Down on the beach, there are children playing with a big yellow-brown dog. They throw pieces of driftwood, and the dog runs after them, and sometimes it brings them back again.

  “Oh, I knew, all right,” her mother says. “Trust me, I knew what was coming. I heard them in the night, outside my bedroom window, scratching at the glass, wanting in.”

  “I have to pass one more test, Mother. I just have to pass one more test, and they’ll let me live.”

  “You would have been such a beautiful girl. Just look at what they’ve made of you instead.”

  On the beach, the children chase the yellow-brown dog through the surf, laughing and splashing so loudly that Starling Jane can hear them all the way up at the top of the hill.

  “They’ll make you a monster, too,” her mother says.

  “I wish they could,” Jane mutters to herself, because she knows it doesn’t matter whether or not her mother hears the things she’s saying. “I wish to all the dark gods that they could make me like them. But that’s not what happens. That’s not what happens at all.”

  “You could come home. Every night, I sit up, waiting for you to come back, for them to bring you back to me.”

  “You shouldn’t do that,” Jane whispers, and the hill rumbles softly beneath her. Down on the beach, the children stop playing and turn towards her. She waves to them, but they don’t seem to see her.

  Or they’re afraid of me, she thinks.

  “If you fail the test, they might bring you back to me,” her mother says hopefully.

  “If I fail, they�
��ll kill me,” Jane replies. “They’ll kill me and eat me. No one ever goes back, once they’re chosen by the Cuckoo. No one.”

  “But you would have been such a beautiful girl,” her mother says again. “I would have given you everything.”

  “It’s the last test,” Jane whispers.

  Beneath her, the hill rumbles again, and the sea has turned to blood, and there are wriggling white things falling from the sky. On the beach, the children and the yellow-brown dog have vanished.

  “I’ll be waiting,” her mother says.

  And Jane opens her eyes, tumbling breathlessly back into flesh and bone, and she lies awake until sunset, listening to her heart and the sounds the sleepers make and the faraway din of traffic up on Angell Street.

  “You’re scared,” the ghoul pup named Sorrow says, not asking her but telling her, and then he scratches determinedly at his left ear.

  “I’m not scared,” Starling Jane tells him, and shakes her head, but she knows it’s a lie and, worse still, knows, too, that he knows it’s a lie.

  “Sure, and neither was Lockheart.”

  “Lockheart wasn’t ready. Everyone knew he wasn’t ready.”

  They’re sitting on stools near one of the tall kitchen hearths, scrubbing tin plates clean with wire-bristle brushes, sudsy water up to their elbows and puddled on the cobbles at their feet. The washtub between them smells like soap and grease.

  “Would you eat me?” she asks Sorrow. And he grunts and drops the plate he was scrubbing back into the washtub, then tugs thoughtfully at the coarse, straw-colored tuft of hair sprouting from the underside of his muzzle.

  “That’s not a fair question. You know underlings never get delicacies like that. Not a scrap. You’d be served to Master Danaüs and the – ”

  “I was speaking hypothetically,” Jane says and adds another plate to the stack drying in front of the fire. “If they made an exception and you had the opportunity, would you eat me?”