Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Is that what this is?”

  At that, the Bailiff laughed out loud and dabbed the handkerchief at the corners of his brilliant emerald eyes. “Well, that’s what they tell me,” he said. “But there’s never as much truth in the telling as in the tasting, I’ve always heard. Have yourself a sip, and tell me what you would have it called if not tea.”

  Soldier, who had once taken a dare to eat a large spider that one of the pups had found beneath her bunk and then been sick for a week, sniffed the tea again and wrinkled her nose. “It smells like alley apples,” she said.

  “Oh, it’s not quite as bad as that. I drink it almost every day.”

  “Is that why your hair fell out?” Soldier asked, sloshing the dark liquid about in the china cup. The cup had primroses painted on it, and there was a chip and a crack and the handle looked as though it had broken off and been glued back on again.

  “Well,” the Bailiff said, folding his handkerchief and returning it to the pocket of his seersucker suit. “They told me you had a mouth on you, child, and I daresay there’s a wit to match.”

  And then she tasted the tea, because it seemed inevitable that she would, because this man might be the Cuckoo, despite what he’d said, or he might be the god of man and churches or a secret that shouldn’t have been found out. Whichever, it was better not to make him angry, she thought, better if he didn’t go complaining to the pale, silver-eyed people who kept the house that she’d interrupted his reading and then refused his hospitality.

  It wasn’t tea, and it didn’t taste like turpentine. It tasted like something much, much worse.

  “Such a face,” the Bailiff said and shook his head. Soldier swallowed, gagged, coughed without covering her mouth, and then started to set the empty cup down on the edge of the writing desk, but, “No,” the Bailiff told her. “That’s not the last of it.”

  “Yes, it is,” she said and wiped the back of one hand across her lips, as though she might wipe the taste away. “I drank it all. I wish I hadn’t, but I did.”

  “Yes, you drank it,” the Bailiff agreed, “but that doesn’t mean the cup’s quite empty.”

  “Oh,” Soldier said and looked into the cup again. The Bailiff was right. The bottom was covered with a sort of sludge. It reminded her of the mud that got all over everything whenever it rained too much and the tunnels began to flood. It reminded her of the time she cut her thumb on a scalpel she hadn’t had permission to touch. It reminded her of the empty skins snakes leave behind.

  “They see something in you, dear girl,” the Bailiff said, and she was dimly aware of the old, dry wood of his chair creaking as he shifted his bulk from one side to another. “It frightens them. It makes them wonder if it means their doom, what you are, what you may yet become, or if perhaps you can become a more perfect servant of the Cuckoo.”

  “I don’t know,” Soldier whispered, and her voice seemed to have shrunk down to a sound no larger than the scritching of insect legs against bare dirt walls.

  “Nor do I,” replied the Bailiff. “But we must endeavor to find out, don’t you think?”

  “I’m going to be sick,” she told him and realized that the stuff in the bottom of the cup had become ashes or had been ashes all along.

  “It would be better if you didn’t. We’d only have to start this all over again some other time.”

  So she took a deep breath and struggled to think of anything at all but the wriggling sensation the dark liquid had left in her throat, the roiling, almost painful fullness much farther down inside. “I don’t want to look at this anymore,” she said and set the cup on the desk before he could protest, set it next to the book he’d been reading when she came in. The brittle paper was the color of ancient, rotting teeth, and she didn’t recognize any of the words because they were all in Latin, and the ghouls held back Latin until the seventh year.

  “Not to worry, child,” the Bailiff said and ran the tip of one finger around the rim of the cup. “You’ve seen the start of it. The rest can wait.” His skin against the porcelain made a high, clear ringing, and hearing it made Soldier’s stomach feel better.

  “They need their prophecies and portents,” he said. “It keeps them on an even keel, if you know what I mean.”

  “That’s pretty,” Soldier said, meaning the ringing his finger was drawing from the cup. “I didn’t see any bells in there,” and she thought perhaps he was hiding them in his hand somewhere. A hand that big might hide almost anything at all.

  “Do you recollect your mum?” the Bailiff asked. “Do you sometimes see her face?”

  Soldier frowned. It was a stupid question, and whoever he was, he ought to at least have the sense to know that. Anyone who could read Latin ought to know that much. “No,” she said. “The Cuckoo took me when I was a baby, just like all the others.”

  “Of course it did. But do you recall her face?”

  “Our mothers are gone, gone, gone,” she replied, repeating one of the first lessons the ghul had taught her. She didn’t want to be talking, and she silently asked Mother Hydra to tell the fat man to shut up so she could listen to the music from the teacup. “Our mothers are gone from us forever.”

  “That’s what they told you?” he asked.

  “Yes. When the Cuckoo took me from her, he took all my memories of her, too. It made me…” And she paused, looking for exactly the words that Madam Mnemosyne had used. “It made us hollow, so we could be filled with other things.”

  “Did it now? Sure, that’s what they say, all right, and you’re a smart girl what knows all her lessons.”

  Soldier realized that the music had stopped, but she felt much better, just the same.

  “You do what you’re told,” the Bailiff says, “and don’t think I’m telling you to do nothing otherwise. You answer to the hounds, and you always will. That’s the way of it, little Soldier, for better or ill. But you should know this, too,” and now he lowered his voice, and his eyes seemed to flicker and grow dim. That frightened Soldier, those glistening emeralds bruising until they were almost brown, though she wasn’t sure why it frightened her, and she took a step back from him, but then the Bailiff put a hand on her shoulder so she couldn’t run away.

  “They don’t know even half what they pretend to know,” he said, speaking in a hushed, conspiratorial tone. “And they’ve got no problem with making up the difference. They’re something terrible, something more than this old world, just the way they tell it, but they ain’t gods, no more than you or me. Don’t you ever forget that, girl, no matter what they might say to the contrary.”

  “I’m sleepy,” she said, because she was. Suddenly Soldier was very sleepy, and she wondered if she’d ever be able to find her way back downstairs before her dreams caught up with her.

  “That’s just the tea. The nap will do you good.”

  “Will I see you again?” she asked.

  “You will,” the Bailiff said, “and often. They want me to try to tell them if you’re what they’ve been waiting for all this time, what they’ve been praying would never track them down.”

  “Am I?” she asked groggily.

  “I guess we’ll have to see about that, won’t we?” he replied and laughed again. And then there was no use trying to stay awake even one minute longer, sleep grown so thick and warm and welcoming about her. He rose from his chair and took her in his strong arms, and the fat man who said he wasn’t the god of men or the Cuckoo carried Soldier back through the yellow house and down the stairs to the tunnels far Below.

  Near the dead end of Rocky Point Avenue, the ruins of the abandoned amusement park sprout like something cancerous, some gaudy, carnival-colored malignancy, grown wild and shattered from the banks of Narragansett Bay. There were rides and attractions and restaurants here as far back as the end of the nineteenth century, more than a hundred years of Rhode Islanders stuffing themselves with deep-fried clam cakes and doughboys, then getting sick on the carousels and Ferris wheels and roller coasters, until a bankrupt
cy finally shut the place down in ’ninety-six. Since then, the relentless vandalism of the seasons—snow and frost, rain and salt wind and summer heat—and the more random desecrations of teenagers have taken their toll. Now the park sits empty and forgotten by almost everyone but land developers and kids looking for someplace they shouldn’t be. A few deer and the occasional coyote stroll the Midway, and rats nest in the boarded-up ice-cream stands. Something else for Soldier to hate about Warwick, another place she’d never go if not going there were up to her.

  Saben White’s rusty old Chevy Impala is sitting directly in front of the park’s front gates—six vertical concrete columns painted hideous shades of blue and red and yellow, neons faded now almost to pastels, and there’s a sagging cross span with giant red-and-white plywood letters and the gaps where other letters are missing to gaily spell out ROCK PO NT. When they pull up, Saben’s standing near the rear of the car, smoking a cigarette.

  For the last half mile, Odd Willie’s been singing what he swears is an old radio and TV jingle for the park—Come with your family, come with your friends. Rocky Point is open, ’cuz it’s summertime again! When he sees Saben, his voice rises to a strained, ear-rending falsetto, Frankie Valli on crack, and Soldier tells him to shut the hell up.

  He giggles and lights another Winston. “Hey, I’m thinking maybe it’s not a real priest,” he says, talking through a cloud of smoke. “Maybe it was an impostor, and we’re in the clear, safe as houses, cool as Eskimo poop.”

  “Oh, it’ll be a real priest,” Soldier replies, because she’s been stuck with Saben just long enough to know that she never fucks anything up halfway, that with her it’s all or nothing. “You just stay sharp and don’t go freaking out on me again, you understand?”

  “Roger-dodger, Captain Kangaroo,” Odd Willie snorts and takes another long drag off his cigarette.

  “You are such a fucking asshole,” she says, pulling in close beside the Chevy, not certain if she means Willie Lothrop or Saben White but pretty damned sure it doesn’t make any difference. Soldier shifts into park and kills the engine, and Willie rolls down his window and waves at Saben. Soldier unfastens her seat belt and opens the driver-side door, climbing out into the cold, sunny afternoon, all that clean blue sky overhead like some void her headache is working overtime to fill. She slams her fist down hard against the roof of the Dodge, and Saben sighs and drops the butt of her cigarette to the pavement, grinds it out with the toe of her boot.

  “One good reason,” Soldier says, “you give me one good goddamn reason why I shouldn’t kill you right now and bury the both of you in the same hole.”

  “I didn’t have a choice,” Saben says, staring down at the ground instead of looking Soldier in the eye.

  “Bull shit,” Soldier growls and punches the roof again; this time Odd Willie yells at her to stop, and she yells back at him to get his lazy ass out of the damned car.

  “It’s fucking complicated,” Saben says, glancing right, towards the amusement park’s chain-link gates topped with glinting coils of razor wire. “I swear to you both, I did the only thing—”

  “You gonna swear it to the Bailiff?” Soldier asks, coming quickly around the front of the Dodge as Odd Willie gets out of the car. “Or maybe you better just swear to the hounds and get it over with? What the hell were you doing in Connecticut in the first damned place?”

  “Business,” Saben replies. “I had business. I was going to call—”

  “Saben, we are supposed to be in fucking Woonsocket right this very fucking second. Right now, all three of us, we’re MIA. The Bailiff doesn’t know where the hell we are. Those assholes up in Woonsocket don’t know where we are.”

  “Maybe you should let her talk,” Odd Willie says, and Soldier glares at him.

  “Maybe you should stay the hell out of this,” she barks back. “Maybe you should start worrying about your own problems, Mr. Goes-fucking-homicidal-psycho-in-a-goddamned-doughnut-shop-because-an-old-lady-looked-at-you-funny.”

  “I don’t think I need you standing up for me, Willie,” Saben says.

  “Oh, I think you are gonna find out you’re very wrong about that,” Willie tells her and laughs. “In fact, I think you have no idea just how—”

  “Shut up, Willie,” Soldier says, and this time he does. For a moment the only sound is the wind through the high, bare limbs of the trees growing on either side of the Rocky Point gate. Soldier flares her nostrils and takes a deep breath, smelling the nearby bay, pushing back at the headache and the anger crowding her mind, the anger that’s going to get her killed someday soon if she doesn’t learn to keep it on a shorter leash. She watches Saben and tries to imagine what the Bailiff would say, what he’d tell her to do if he were here. Something simple and obvious, like, You can fret about all the whys and hows and wherefores when you have the time for it, or The son of a bitch is dead, little Soldier. And that grave you’ve got to dig for him, it don’t much care how he got that way. Something like that. Something to get her moving and keep her from kicking Saben’s ass until after they’ve dealt with the mess she’s made.

  “He’s in the trunk?” Soldier asks, pointing at the Impala, and Saben White nods her head.

  “Yeah, Soldier, he’s in the trunk. I already told Willie he’s in the fucking trunk. I can explain this. I really can, if you’ll just stop and listen.”

  Soldier is standing very close to Saben now, close enough to hit her, close enough to knock out a few front teeth or maybe break her nose or both before Odd Willie would even have a chance to ask if that was really such a good idea. Her hands are clenched fists, and Soldier knows how good it would feel, Heaven in the force of the blow, release in the collision of her knuckles with that fragile construction of bone and cartilage and flesh. It would be almost as sweet as whiskey.

  “And what good’s that going to do us, exactly, me listening to more of your bullshit?” she asks Saben White and then takes a step closer, aware now that she’s near enough to make Saben uncomfortable, that she’s invaded the invisible, sacred bubble of personal space. To people like her and Saben, people who spend all their short lives waiting for the next confrontation, the next asshole who’s come around looking for a piece of you, sometimes that’s all it takes, and she silently prays to the nameless gods that Saben will swallow the bait and throw the first punch. “Explaining it to me, is that going to make this guy in your trunk any less dead? Will it get rid of the fucking body for us? Maybe it’ll square things with the Bailiff, is that it?”

  “Jesus,” Odd Willie mutters around his cigarette. “How about let’s just dispose of the motherfucker and get it over with. It’s freezing out here.”

  “No, I want her to know how it is,” Saben says, risking a glance at Soldier. “I want her to know this time it wasn’t my fault.”

  Soldier spits on the ground at Saben’s feet, and a white fleck of saliva spatters the shiny black leather toes of her boots. “Saben, I don’t believe you could tell the truth if someone wrote it down for you.”

  Odd Willie laughs, then shivers and stares up at two big gulls wheeling by overhead. “You guys keep this crap up long enough, we’re gonna end up having a chat with the fucking cops, okay?”

  “Yeah, so how you want to do this, Willie?” Soldier asks him, not taking her eyes off Saben, thinking she might still get lucky. Saben White’s good at not knowing when to shut the hell up, even better at not knowing when she’s in over her head.

  “Christ. Why are you asking me? I didn’t shoot the son of a bitch.”

  “You feel like digging a hole?” she asks Saben.

  “Hell,” Willie grumbles. “The ground’s probably half fucking frozen,” and he stops watching the gulls and kicks at the pavement. “It’d probably take the rest of the day to plant Holy Joe deep enough the dogs wouldn’t just come along tonight and dig him up again. Lots of wild dogs out here.”

  “What about you?” Soldier asks, and steals another inch or two of the space separating her and Saben. “Yo
u killed him. Maybe you know what we should do with him.”

  “Put him in the bay,” Saben replies, and Soldier can see how hard she’s straining to sound like she has her shit together. “Gut him, fill the bastard with stones, then dump the body off Rocky Point. That’s what I was thinking when I drove out here.”

  “I don’t know,” Willie says. “I never trust them not to float. Especially priests. Priests and faggots, they’ll float on you every goddamn time.”

  “There’ve been a lot of fires out here,” Saben says, and Odd Willie nods his head, then stares at the glowing tip end of his cigarette.

  “She’s got that part right,” Willie says. “What with all the kids and the bums, it’s a wonder there’s anything left standing out here. It’s a wonder it’s not just a heap of charcoal.”

  “Right, so who’s gonna care if there’s one more fire?” Saben asks hopefully, looking straight at Soldier now. “We take his teeth and hands—”

  “Yeah?” Soldier asks, speaking hardly above a whisper, and she leans close to Saben, sniffing at the air around her. “Is that what we do?” Soldier can smell stale tobacco smoke and expensive leather, cologne and the gun hidden beneath her blazer. The air about Saben stinks like fear and lies and desperation.

  “Man, these days burning ain’t much better than sinking,” Odd Willie says glumly, looking up at the gulls again, “not unless you’re dealing with some sort of serious expedient. What with the fucking DNA analysis and pathologists and all that shit, the goddamned cops might as well be magicians. Now, maybe if I had some time to lay my hands on a good accelerant, set up a delay—”

  “Could you do it alone?” Soldier asks, and he answers her with a shrug and a scowl.

  “Soldier, I heard you had pyromancy,” Saben White says, and Soldier moves closer and sniffs at her hair.

  “Did you? And where’d you hear a thing like that?”

  “After Ipswich—”

  “Ipswich was easy,” Soldier replies, and now she’s so close her lips brush against Saben’s right ear. “There weren’t any dead Roman fucking Catholic priests to worry about. All I used in Ipswich was a couple of cans of gasoline and a road flare. That’s all the pyromancy I know, bitch.”