Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “You will wear that until I say otherwise,” Madam Terpsichore told her, and then Madam Mnemosyne carried her to the spot where she now sits with only the earthworms and tiny white mushrooms for company, listening to the man named Higginson scream.

  Sparrow Spooner opens her eyes, even though no one’s told her that she could, and she squints past the gloom and the ache in her hand that has begun to move slowly, steadily up her entire arm. Madam Terpsichore has spread wide her long, clawed fingers, jabbing them towards the night sky hidden by the ceiling of the chamber, above the fallen tree and the Old North Burial Ground, above Providence and the storm, and she’s calling out the names of gods and darker things. As for Mr. Higginson, Sparrow sees that he’s been given to the ghoul pups and changelings, all of whom have left the places where they were sitting and are clambering over his thrashing body. It isn’t often that they get fresh meat, fresh and living meat, and it doesn’t get any fresher than this; so this is one more part of her punishment, that she will not be permitted to take part in this rarest of feasts, even though it’s her doing that the man’s down here.

  Madam Terpsichore asks almighty Father Kraken to let this business end here, tonight, with no further repercussions. Sparrow knows that particular prayer, the snipping of a dangling thread, the tying off of a knot against any maleficent consequence. She begins to whisper it along with the ghul, then stops, too distracted by the man’s screams and the vicious feeding noises of her peers. Two of the pups are wrestling over a slippery, fat length of intestine; Sparrow Spooner’s empty stomach growls, and she licks her lips hungrily.

  Madam Mnemosyne and Master Danaüs bark and yap their encouragement to the frenzied, blood-spattered pack, and Master Shardlace laughs and mocks the screams of the dying man. Madam Terpsichore squats next to Mr. Higginson, brushing aside two or three of her students, and she snatches the man’s soul as it exits his right ear like a greasy puff of smoke. So, Sparrow thinks, he’ll be dead soon, and I won’t ever get a father. I won’t even get so much as a single mouthful of him.

  And then she feels something wash over her, something quick and dizzying and bittersweet that she’s never felt before, something that she might almost have mistaken for simple déjà vu (which, she has been taught, is only the memory of the world flowing backwards through her from the end of time), if not for the way Madam Terpsichore turns and looks at her—a questioning, startled look from her red eyes to ask, You felt that, too, didn’t you, child? The others seem oblivious, but last semester Sparrow Spooner ranked first in her Discord and Continuity class. She has often felt very faint things before, subtle or fleeting magicks and cosmic shudders that almost everyone else has missed. Things like the summoning that Mr. Higginson cast over the warren below the yellow house on Benefit Street, drawing her out into the day.

  Be still, Madam Terpsichore’s eyes say. Be still and be silent. We will speak of this later. And then she looks away again, squeezing the captured soul until there’s nothing left in her palm but a dull green, pea-soup-colored stone, which she swallows at once.

  One of the older changelings, a tall, blond-headed boy named Nehemiah Sweet, bites through the man’s carotid artery, and Mr. Higginson is finally gone, gone forever, body and soul and everything in between. And then Sparrow Spooner closes her eyes again, shuts them tight as she can, just like Madam Mnemosyne said she should; she tries hard not to hear the delicious sounds of bone snapping and blood spilling and teeth ripping through sinew and gristle, tries to hear the storm still raging overhead instead. She doesn’t let herself think about what she might or might not have felt, whatever it was or wasn’t that Madam Terpsichore might, or might not, have felt as well. The pain from her missing fingers helps to distract her, the pain and the falling rain Above and the thunder, and before the others have finished with Mr. Higginson’s carcass, she’s asleep.

  VI

  When Soldier is finally done with the twenty-three incantations that have forever sealed the doors and windows of Quaker Jameson’s roadhouse, the measured, angry stream of syllables to secure every loose board and ill-fitted sheet of corrugated aluminum—and maybe she’s not much of a magus, but, by the Mother and Father, she knows how to plug a hole—she begins emptying the five gasoline cans. The demon and the morning gaunt have already gone, of course. This was never their fight, just something they came to see, a little mortal entertainment to interrupt the monotony of their long, long lives. The demon went down, vanishing into some deep, secret cavern or melding seamlessly with the weathered metamorphic strata below the marsh. The gaunt went straight up, a glittering, firework ghost climbing into the low clouds and disappearing with a distinct crack. Soldier knew better than to try to stop either of them.

  By the time the last of the gallon cans is almost empty, Jameson and Joey Bittern have both given up trying to escape and have started making her promises, offers of power and money and sex and other things that she either doesn’t need or has all she wants. They press their lips to the windowpanes and shout for her to see reason and stop. They make threats and curse the hounds and every changeling ever stolen from its crib or stroller or the arms of its mother. She listens for a little while, standing there in the rain, and then she turns and walks back to the muddy edge of the road, trailing the last of the gasoline behind her.

  “I’m thinking this game’s a little steep for your tastes, sweetmeats,” she whispers and lights one of the highway flares from the Caddy’s glove compartment. It paints the night with a sizzling ruby glow, and for a moment Soldier holds it at arm’s length, staring into the heat and brightness, the dazzling inferno cocktail of potassium nitrate, magnesium, strontium, and sulfur.

  “I’m thinking you talk like a big dog,” she says, and imagines she hears the roar of Sheldon’s shotgun again, imagines the pain as it tears her apart and the smirk on Joey Bittern’s face. “But, when the chips are down, you got nothing to bring to the table but talk.” And then she tosses the flare away, towards the tall grass and the catwalk, and Soldier watches as the flames rush hungrily back towards the roadhouse.

  VII

  Upstairs in the big gray house on Angell Street, Emmie Silvey lies in her bed, listening to the rain drumming against the roof and the bedroom window. Her father is sitting on the edge of the bed. He’s been reading to her from one of her books, Moon Mouse, but he keeps pausing to listen to the storm. This last time there was a sudden cracking sound from the sky just as Arthur the mouse asked his mother how far away the moon is, a sound that might have been thunder, and he stopped reading and stared at the black, rain-slicked window.

  “Deacon, it’s only thunder,” Emmie says. “What does Arthur’s mother tell him?”

  “Baby, how many times in the last three years have I read you this book?” he asks her, but his voice sounds sleepy and far away. He’s been drinking tonight. She can smell it. She can always smell it.

  “I don’t know,” she replies, because she doesn’t. Sadie bought her the book before going away to New York, gave it to her for her fifth birthday. Inside the cover, Sadie wrote, Happy fifth birthday, my beloved moonchild. And she explained to Emmie that she’d been born on Halloween night, just as the full moon was rising in the sky.

  “Deacon,” Emmie says again. “What happens next?”

  “Oh,” her father says, turning away from the window and smiling sleepily down at her. “You know, I could read you another book tonight. How about some Dr. Seuss? Or Where the Wild Things Are?”

  “No, I want to hear how far away the moon is.”

  Her father sighs and looks at the book lying open in his lap. “Very far,” he tells her. “It was farther than the meadow. Farther even than the farmer’s cornfield. Farther than the wheatfields.”

  “Golden wheat,” Emmie says, correcting him. “Farther than the fields of golden wheat. I can tell you’re only pretending to read.”

  “Yeah,” he says and smiles at her. “Kiddo, you know this old book by heart. You don’t need me to read it to you
anymore.”

  “I need to hear the way you say it.”

  “Is that so? I think you’re just being ornery.”

  “What’s ornery?”

  “What you’re being,” he replies.

  “That’s another of your Alabama words, isn’t it?”

  “Not really,” Deacon says. “Lots of people who never lived in Alabama say ornery.” And then he continues reading, and Emmie goes back to listening to his voice. There’s a little bit of a slur from the beer, but it’s still something comforting against the rain and wind and lightning. Arthur the mouse crosses the meadow and the cornfield and the golden wheatfield and finally climbs an old fire escape up to the moon, which is made of yellow cheese, just like his mother said that it might be. He shows her the picture, the big wheel of Swiss on someone’s kitchen table, Arthur the mouse slipping in through an open window.

  “It should be white,” she says, as she almost always does, and her father nods and agrees with her, as he almost always does.

  “Yes, but this is poetic license,” he says.

  “What’s that?”

  “Permission to lie,” he tells her and goes back to reading. Arthur the mouse runs home to his mother, and he tells her how he nibbled at the moon.

  “He would have broken his teeth on the rocks,” Emmie says and rolls over on her left side to face the window.

  “Yes, I imagine he would’ve,” her father says.

  “When is Sadie coming home?” she asks, and he sighs again. Whenever he sighs, the beer smell grows stronger, and she wrinkles her nose.

  “Sadie lives in New York now, Emmie. You know that.”

  “We could go see her. We could ride the train.”

  “Maybe when the weather’s warmer,” her father says, and starts reading again. Arthur is alarmed at the half-moon, amazed that he managed to nibble so much of it away.

  “We could go see the dinosaurs,” she says, “when we go to see Sadie.”

  “We will. I promise. We’ll go to see the dinosaurs. Do you want me to finish this?”

  “I know how it ends,” she says, wishing the rain would stop so she could see the moon again, to be sure it was still up there, so she could fall asleep without the sound of the storm in her ears. “He didn’t eat it all. He only nibbled.”

  “I told you that you know this story by heart,” her father says. “I told you that you were being ornery.”

  “You know everything,” Emmie says and wiggles farther beneath the warm flannel sheets and blankets and the quilt that Sadie bought when she went to Tennessee. The quilt is white with autumn-colored maple leaves stitched one to the other.

  “I don’t know everything.”

  “You know magic,” Emmie says.

  “No, baby, I just know a few tricks. I’ve told you, it ain’t nothing but tricks.”

  Emmie nods her head, though she isn’t sure that she understands the difference. “I want to hear some music,” she says. “I want to hear Doris Day.”

  “It’s too late for music,” her father says. “You have to get up for school—”

  “It’s not too late for music. Music isn’t like stories. You don’t have to look at the pictures.”

  “If I play Doris Day, will you go to sleep?” he asks, and she nods again.

  “But you have to stay with me until I’m asleep,” she tells him.

  “It’s only rain,” her father assures her. “It can’t hurt you, you know?”

  She watches the rain streaking the glass a moment, pelting the windowpane like it wants inside, and she thinks maybe Deacon doesn’t know everything, after all.

  “‘You Are My Sunshine,’” she says.

  “Yes, well,” her father says, “it’s very sweet of you to say so.”

  “No, silly,” Emmie says and turns her head to frown at him. “That’s the song I want to hear. I want you to play ‘You Are My Sunshine.’”

  “And you promise you’ll go to sleep if I do?”

  “If you promise to stay with me until I do.”

  “Then it’s a deal,” Deacon Silvey says and stands up, wobbling a little, and crosses the room to the shelf where Emmie keeps all her CDs. It takes him only a moment to find the disc with “You Are My Sunshine” on it, and that’s something else that Sadie gave Emmie. She has three Doris Day CDs, and they were all gifts from Sadie. He hates Doris Day, and sometimes he thinks this whole thing, his daughter’s fascination with Doris Day, is a plot to drive him the rest of the way insane. He presses a button on Emmie’s pink and white Hello Kitty stereo, and the lid pops obediently open to accept the CD.

  “When’s it gonna stop?” Emmie asks.

  “What? You mean the rain?”

  And she doesn’t answer right away; while he waits, Deacon forwards the CD to track five, sets it on repeat, and presses the button marked PLAY. In a moment the room is filled with the shrill din of accordions and the steady thump thump thump of a double bass.

  The other night, dear, as I lay sleeping…

  “Yeah,” Emmie says. “When’s the rain gonna stop?”

  “Soon,” he replies. “It’ll stop tomorrow. By this time tomorrow, it’ll have blown all the way out to sea.”

  “That’s good,” she says, and Deacon goes back to sit on the bed with her.

  “It’s only rain,” she says.

  “Nothing but,” he assures her and leans over to kiss her forehead. In the lamplight, her yellow eyes seem almost golden. He brushes a few strands of ash blonde hair from her face.

  “It doesn’t scare me,” she tells him, sounding as though she really means it.

  “That’s ’cause you’re a big girl now, Emmie. Big girls don’t have to be afraid of storms anymore.”

  And he sits with her, listening to the rain and thunder, listening through the rain for anything else that might be out there in the night, the things he’s spent the past eight years listening and waiting for. The polka music fills the room, and he stays with Emmie until she’s asleep. Then he switches off the lamp. The night-light will be enough until morning; Emmie’s never been afraid of the dark.

  You are my sunshine, my only sunshine.

  You make me happy when skies are gray…

  Deacon Silvey switches the stereo off on his way out of the room, pausing a moment to be sure that Emmie doesn’t wake up. When she doesn’t, he leaves her and pulls the door shut behind him.

  I

  Parallel Lives

  One need not be a chamber to be haunted,

  One need not be a house….

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  ONE

  Emmie

  E mmie and Deacon sit together on one of the long antique benches lined up neatly inside the old Kingston Station, daughter and father waiting impatiently with all the other people headed south to New Haven or New York or wherever it is they’re all bound at half past eleven on a cold Saturday morning in February. Old Kingston Station instead of Providence Station because Deacon says he likes the long drive, and, besides, he has a friend in West Kingston he hasn’t seen for a while. He’s sipping at a can of Diet Pepsi from a vending machine near one of the windows, and Emmie is silently wishing that the train would hurry up. She loves taking the train to see Sadie, even when she has to ride alone, even when her father is too busy with his shop to go with her. She pretends she’s Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, or she pretends that all the sights rushing by outside the windows of the Amtrak are places that she’s never seen before, exotic, far-off places from the books she’s read, or she just sits listening to the reassuring drone of the wheels on the tracks and pretends nothing at all.

  “Did you pack your toothbrush?” her father asks, and Emmie nods her head, even though she didn’t pack her toothbrush because she has another one at Sadie’s. “Did you think to pack clean underwear?” he asks.

  “Yes,” she says, wishing he wouldn’t ask her questions about her underwear in public.

  “More than one pair?”

  “Yes, Dea
con. More than one pair.”

  There’s a round mirror mounted halfway up the wall directly in front of them, the sort of mirror she’s seen in convenience stores so the clerks will know if anyone’s shoplifting, stuck up there between a wide bay window and the door with a glowing red-orange exit sign mounted above it. Emmie watches herself and her father, the two of them caught in that distorted, fish-eyed reflection. She nods her head, and the girl in the mirror nods her head, too.

  “Why are you nodding your head?” Deacon asks, and Emmie shrugs. The girl in the mirror shrugs right back.

  “I just felt like it.”

  “Oh,” Deacon says and sips his Pepsi. “I thought I might have missed something.”

  “No, you didn’t miss anything,” she tells him.

  In the mirror, her father is wearing the gray wool sweater she gave him for his last birthday, the sweater and a pair of corduroys, and she can see the puffy reddish half circles beneath his green eyes, the half circles he gets when he’s been drinking too much and sleeping too little. The half circles that mean he’s spending too much time remembering things he shouldn’t. Her own eyes are almost the same color as sunflowers, and they glint faintly in the morning light. She’s the only kid in her school with yellow eyes, the only person she’s ever seen anywhere with yellow eyes. Sadie says it means that her soul is golden, and she’ll live to see more sunny days than rainy nights, but Deacon says that’s bullshit and nonsense, that it doesn’t mean anything at all that her eyes are yellow. He says lots of people have yellow eyes. The fat black tomcat that lives next door with a skinny old man named Mr. Bloom has eyes almost the same color as hers.

  “Don’t you talk to strange people,” her father says, staring down at his soda can.

  “How do I know if they’re strange people?” she asks, even though she understands what he means. “What if they’re just pretending to be normal and fool me?”