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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Above her, the drum-wraiths fall silent.

  “It’s okay,” she whispers. “It’s all okay,” and death’s not such a terrible thing now that she’s seen that light, felt it burrowing its way into her, washing her clean. On the ground in front of her there are two holes, each no more than a few inches across and ringed with hammered gold and platinum.

  She remembers the Bailiff’s coin, gold for gold, and reaches into the deep pocket in the robe where she tucked it safely away before Madam Hippodamia led her down to wait in the tiny myrrh-scented alcove with Master Solace. Gold for gold, and the hole at the center of the coin is not so very different from the twin mouths of the dragon.

  “Just get it over with,” she says and leans forward, plunging both arms into the holes, the Bailiff’s coin clutched tightly in her right hand.

  Inside, the holes are warm, and the stone has become flesh, flesh and slime and dagger teeth that eagerly caress her fingers and prick her wrists. Nidhogg’s poisonous breath rises from the holes – sulfur and brimstone, ash and acid steam – and Jane opens her hand and presses the coin against the thorny tongue of the dragon. The earth rumbles violently again, and Starling Jane waits for the jaws to snap shut.

  But then the pit sighs, making a sound like the world rolling over in its sleep, and there’s only cold, hard stone encircling her arms. She gasps, pulls her hands quickly from the holes and stares at them in disbelief, all ten fingers right there in front of her, and only a few scratches, a few drops of dark blood, to prove that there was ever any danger at all.

  High above, the amphitheater erupts in a thunderous clamor, a joyful, relieved pandemonium of barks and shouts and clapping hands, howls and laughter and someone ringing the ship’s bell again and again.

  Jane sits back on her heels and stares up into the moonlight, letting it pour down into her, drinking its impossible radiance through her strangling pinpoint pupils and every pore of her body, letting it fill her against all the endless nights to come, all the uncountable darknesses that lie ahead. When she cannot hold another drop, Starling Jane stands up again, bows once, and only once, to Nidhogg Rootnibbler, exactly the way that Madam Terpsichore said she should, and then the changeling starts the long walk back up the catwalk to the alcove. With the applause raining down around her and the moonlight in her eyes, it doesn’t seem to take any time at all.

  * * *

  The Dead and the Moonstruck

  I’ve said, many times, that all beginnings and all endings are arbitrary inventions. The first appearance of a character is never his, her, or its beginning. They must have had lives before. After Low Red Moon, I had to go looking for an earlier Starling Jane. I found a lot more than I thought I would. But I’ve never yet eaten one of my friends.

  The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles

  The brown girl who has spent the last seventy-five years locked away in the attic of the big yellow house on Benefit Street takes a deep breath of the stale, musty air and holds it for several heartbeats. Then she sighs, breathing out stagnation and torpor, and checks her father’s pocket watch again. But the hands are still frozen at precisely seven thirty-three and fifteen seconds. She knows that they’ll begin to move again just as soon as there’s a knock at the underside of the attic’s trapdoor, and she shifts impatiently on the wooden milking stool. She wonders who will knock this time, if it will be a man or a woman, a boy or a girl, a vampire or only one of the changelings. Maybe it will be someone who remembers her name, someone who’s come before, perhaps even the same person as last time. That happens every now and then, that she gets the same person two or even three times in a row. If she’s very lucky, it will be someone who remembers the brown girl’s name and why she’s here, someone who wants to talk, who’ll listen, before the trapdoor is pulled shut again and the hands of her father’s pocket watch stop moving.

  “I’m ready now,” she says very quietly, pretending that there’s anyone down there who cares, pretending that she might possess some secret magic that could hurry them along.

  Around her the attic is as still as an oil painting. Spiders sit motionless in half-spun webs. A billion dust motes hang like the fixed globes of an astronomer’s model of the heavens, moving only when her passing briefly sets them to swirling and tumbling one against the other. If there’s time here, it’s a cowardly, toothless thing.

  “I’m ready now,” she says again, more forcefully than before, and there’s a sudden rap at the trapdoor. She jumps at the sound, almost losing her balance and falling off the stool, her heart pounding in its cage of flesh and bone. The brown girl holds her breath and grips the edges of her seat, her fingertips digging at the wood, and she listens eagerly as iron keys are turned in locks and rusty hasps are thrown back. She glances down at her father’s watch and sees that the hour and minute and second hands have all started moving, that forty-three seconds have already passed unnoticed.

  The hinges of the trapdoor squeak loud as a pillowcase stuffed with angry mice and a moment later there’s a pale, freckled boy with a flickering oil lamp, staring up at her, squinting into the gloom, even as she squints at so much light. She’s disappointed that this boy is no one she’s ever seen before, but it’s a very small disappointment, easily pushed aside and forgotten.

  “Hello,” the boy says, and she thinks he must be about her age, twelve, maybe thirteen at the most.

  “Hello,” she replies. “Be careful on that ladder. I think the next to the top rung might be loose.”

  The boy blinks at her and nods his head. His hair is the color of cinnamon and his eyes are green, not silver, so she knows he must be one of the changelings, because all the vampires have eyes like spilled mercury. He’s wearing overalls and a white undershirt.

  “I don’t think I’m coming all the way up,” he says, “so I don’t think it matters.”

  The brown girl’s heart sinks and she stands so quickly that she knocks the milking stool over. The sound of it hitting the floor is very loud, and the boy scowls at her and retreats down the ladder a rung or two.

  “No, no, don’t go yet,” she pleads, hastily setting the stool upright and then turning to face him again. “We can talk. We can tell each other stories. You haven’t even told me your name.”

  The boy stares at her, then looks back down the ladder, past his feet, at the landing lost somewhere in the shadows below.

  “My name is Airdrie,” he tells her.

  “I’ve never heard that name before,” she says and takes a cautious step nearer the trapdoor.

  “Well, you have now. It’s nothing special.”

  “My name’s – ” the girl begins, but he cuts her off.

  “I know your name. You think they’d send me up here without even telling me your name?”

  “They might have. They’ve done it before. The last one, she didn’t know my name. I had to tell it to her”

  The boy looks at his feet again, then climbs the ladder until he’s standing almost at the top. “The last one,” he says. “How long ago was that?”

  The brown girl looks at her father’s watch. “Two minutes and fifty-three seconds ago,” she replies. The boy seems confused by her answer, so she adds, “I don’t know how long it’s been out there. In here, it’s been two minutes and fifty-three seconds.”

  “Oh,” he says and then sets the lantern down on the attic floor near the edge of the trapdoor. “But it must seem like a lot longer than that to you, right?”

  She decides to ignore the question, because it’s really not the sort of thing she can afford to think about, all the days and months and years that have passed her by, the discrepancy between the attic and the world rushing past beyond the attic, what her father once called a “temporal contrariety.”

  “Your name is Hester,” the boy says, so maybe he didn’t expect her to answer the question anyway. “You’re the alchemist’s daughter. They’ve kept you in the attic since August 12, 1929, the day after – ”

  “My name is Pearl,” she
replies, correcting the boy before he can finish.

  He shakes his head and arches his eyebrows skeptically. “Your name’s not Pearl,” he says. “It’s Hester. Why did you tell me your name was Pearl?”

  “What did they send me this time?” she asks him, changing the subject. “I hope there’s an apple. Or a plum.”

  “Why did you say your name was Pearl?” the boy persists, and the brown girl shrugs and sits down on the floor between the milking stool and the lantern. The truth is that her father called her Pearl sometimes, but she doesn’t want to tell this scowling boy the truth.

  “It’s just a game,” she lies. “I know a lot of games.”

  “Yeah,” the boy says, carefully avoiding the next to last rung at the top of the ladder as be climbs the rest of the way into the attic. He sits on the other side of the trapdoor, opposite the brown girl, and wipes the dust from his hands onto the bib of his overalls. “I guess it helps you pass the time.”

  “There’s no time to pass,” she tells him, “but it helps whenever I get bored.”

  The boy nods, as though he understands what she means when she’s fairly certain that he doesn’t understand any of it, and then he stares past her into the half-light and murk crouched at her back.

  “It’s a whole lot bigger up here than I thought it would be,” he says and cranes his neck to stare up into the low rafters. The oil lantern’s glow reflects dully off the underside of the wide beams, the corpses of ancient white pines felled and hewn and hauled all the way to Providence from the forests of western Massachusetts. Her father used to tell her stories about how and why the house was built, how these very beams were set in place in 1764, how the complex geometry of rafters, ridge beams, struts, and king posts – triangles set within and against triangles – channeled and refined aetheric energy to create a sort of protective umbrella above the yellow house and the intersecting catacombs beneath its floors.

  “Did they send me fruit?” she asks, not wanting to seem impatient, but tired of waiting. “Did they send me sweets?”

  The boy reaches into a pocket of his overalls and produces a large paisley handkerchief bundled and tied with a short length of lace ribbon. He passes it to the girl, their fingers brushing above the trapdoor, and the boy quickly pulls his hand back as soon as she’s taken the parcel from him. She doesn’t ask him what he felt, because she doesn’t want to know. Usually, they’re careful not to touch her.

  The paisley handkerchief is mostly purple, the same purple as the undersides of storm clouds, and the bit of ribbon is white aging towards yellow. She quickly unties the lace and the handkerchief falls open to reveal a single red apple, two candy canes, a pack of Black Jack chewing gum, a tin of sardines, and a blue rubber ball. She picks up the apple and polishes it on the front of her dress, then sets it back down with the rest.

  “It’s not much, is it?” the boy asks, and when the brown girl looks up at him, he’s sitting there, staring intently at the fingers of his right hand, the fingers that brushed hers.

  “Oh, it’s enough,” she replies. “I don’t need much. I can make this last until next time. That’s another good game, making things last.”

  The boy named Airdrie looks doubtful, frowns and blows on the tips of his fingers. “Why is your hand so goddamned cold?” he asks. “I swear, I think I got frostbite.”

  “No, you haven’t,” she says. “Don’t be such a baby.” The brown girl examines the rubber ball, glad Miss Josephine remembered that she’d lost the orange one they gave her time before last. Now she can play jacks again, and she promises herself that she’ll be more careful about keeping up with this ball than she was about keeping up with the orange one. She bounces it once against the floor and catches it, then returns it to the outspread handkerchief.

  The boy stops blowing on his fingers and glares at her. “You don’t even seem to mind,” he says.

  “Mind what?” she asks him, sniffing the candy canes to be sure that they’re both clove and not peppermint. “What don’t I mind?”

  “Being stuck here all the time. Being kept up here like a prisoner.”

  “I’m not a prisoner,” she replies, setting the candy down. “I’m only collateral.”

  “You can’t leave,” the boy says. “You aren’t ever allowed to leave the attic. That sure sounds to me like you’re a prisoner.”

  “You don’t know the particulars. That’s all.”

  “I know your father left you here with Miss Josephine so the ghouls wouldn’t kill him for what he’d done. Everyone in the house knows that. Hell, they know that all the way over in Boston.”

  The brown girl wraps everything back up inside the storm-colored paisley handkerchief and then ties the ribbon very tightly so that nothing will spill out when she isn’t looking. She watches the boy for a moment without saying anything at all.

  “You’ve been up here more than seventy-five years and you’re telling me it doesn’t bother you?” the boy asks. “You ought to be an old woman and you’re still just a kid.”

  “My Poppa’s coming back for me,” the brown girl replies, trying hard to sound sure of herself. She’s starting to wish the boy would climb back down the ladder, pull the trapdoor closed after him, snap all the locks shut, and leave her alone. “He’ll be back, any day now.”

  “You still believe that?”

  “Is there any reason that I shouldn’t?”

  The boy looks up at the rafters again. “You ever climbed up there?” he asks her.

  “Sometimes,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. She has many secret places beneath the roof of the yellow house. Places where she hides the things that mean nothing to anyone but her. Cubby holes, nooks and crannies, fissures in the punky old wood of the beams. Bits of candy and unanswered riddles written on brittle scraps of paper torn from her father’s books. A piece of sage-green soapstone engraved with the names of four of the Nephilim. A cracked horizon mirror from a sextant, the dried petals of a rose from Miss Josephine’s garden.

  “It’s sure a lot bigger than I thought it would be,” the boy says again.

  The brown girl glances at her father’s pocket watch and sees that almost fifteen minutes have passed since the boy knocked at the trapdoor. She can feel the time flowing thick around her now, sticky as molasses, and she tries to imagine how things were before her father left and they shut her away up here in the clever, inviolable maze of their “temporal contrariety.” How things were when she was just like everyone else, drifting helpless in time, drowning in it like all the other children racing towards adulthood and their graves. How she ever endured the weight of it, pushing her along.

  “I want to see the snow globes,” the boy says, standing up and brushing dust from the seat of his overalls.

  “They’re not snow globes,” the brown girl replies, sure now that she wants him to leave, that she’d rather be alone again without the ticking watch and the suffocating rush of moments. “That’s not what they’re called.”

  “That’s what Miss Josephine calls them.”

  “Miss Josephine doesn’t know everything.”

  “Well, I don’t really care what they’re called or what they’re not called, Hester. I just want to see them.”

  This is something new. No one has ever asked her to see her father’s work before, the hundreds of crystal orbs that are the reason she’s been locked away here. She’d always assumed there must be a rule against it, and maybe there is and this cinnamon-haired boy just doesn’t care about the rules.

  “I don’t know if I should. Show them to you, I mean,” she says, though, truthfully, the thought of leading the boy past the tall shelves and cabinets where the orbs were carefully arranged and cataloged by her father gives her a sort of thrill deep inside. “It might not be a good idea.”

  “Then I guess I’ll just have a look for myself,” he says, but when he reaches for the lantern, she grabs it first. She knows that he won’t try to take it away from her, not after the cold he felt when their fi
ngers brushed above the trapdoor. And she also knows that he won’t enter the depths of the attic alone, without even the slim comfort of the oil lantern. She looks at the pocket watch again. Nineteen minutes, fourteen seconds since he knocked.

  “I’ll show you,” she says, “but you don’t touch anything, understand? And you don’t go wandering off alone. There are other things up here besides the orbs, and you wouldn’t want to see them. You wouldn’t want them to see you.”

  The boy glances at the trapdoor, like maybe he’s going to chicken out and head back down the ladder. Then he turns and looks into the wide darkness again, and slowly nods his head. “Okay,” he says. “But I get to carry the lantern.”

  “No, you don’t, either,” she tells him and then, before the cinnamon-haired boy named Airdrie can say anything else, the brown girl gathers up the purple handkerchief and, holding the lantern out like an archangel’s flaming sword, leads him past sagging bookshelves and a marble pedestal supporting a bust of Poseidon, and the attic of the yellow house on Benefit Street closes greedily around them.

  I

  Maryse opens her eyes and blinks up at the shifting fog and the dim, ruddy smudge trying to pass itself off as the sun. For a moment, she can’t recall where she is, and none of it – not the fog nor the canvas hanging limp from the mizzenmast nor the salty, fishy stink of the sea – means anything at all to her. For that moment, which might only be the end of a dream, there’s nothing more concrete than the pain nestled firmly behind her eyes, the pain that leads to nausea and dizziness as soon as she sits up. Then she remembers it all and would almost give her soul to forget again.