Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Yeah, I’ve read that book, too.”

  “So,” Emmie continued, “Aslan made a wormhole for Lucy and Edmund and Eustace.”

  “I doubt that’s what C. S. Lewis meant, but I suppose you could think of it that way.”

  “Right. A bridge between worlds, a shortcut, and there must have been another one—”

  “Do you want me to read any more of this?” Sadie asks, and she glances at the alarm clock on the chest of drawers. “It’s getting late. We have a lot to do tomorrow.”

  “Read just a little more,” Emmie says and yawns without covering her mouth.

  “Okay, but only a little bit more,” Sadie says and turns the page. “‘Child,’ said Aslan, ‘do you really need to know that? Come, I am opening the door in the sky.’ Then all in one moment there was a rend—”

  “The wormhole,” Emmie says, and then she yawns again.

  “If that’s the way you want to think of it. Yeah, the wormhole.”

  “They’re very unstable things,” Emmie says and squints at the birthday star. “That’s what Stephen Hawking said. You couldn’t just travel through one like that. Even in a spaceship, the gravitational forces would tear you to spaghetti if you tried.”

  “Emmie, you know this is a fairy tale. Maybe you’re getting too old for fairy tales. Maybe science fiction would be better.”

  “I was just thinking about it, that’s all. Go ahead. Read me some more, please.”

  Sadie blinks and rubs her eyes, and suddenly Emmie misses her father, misses her own room in her own house, and she almost asks Sadie if they can call Deacon, because he’s always up late, but Sadie’s already started reading the book again.

  “Then all in one moment there was a rending of the blue wall (like a curtain being torn) and a terrible white light from beyond the sky, and the feel of Aslan’s mane and a Lion’s kiss on their foreheads and then—the back bedroom in Aunt Alberta’s home in Cambridge.”

  “That’s enough,” Emmie says, deciding it’s probably best not to call Deacon, even if he is still awake; the wave of homesickness has begun to pass, and she looks at the star again. Sadie closes the book and returns it to its place in the red milk crate.

  “Stephen Hawking might be wrong,” Emmie says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, some scientists think there might be ways to travel through wormholes without being torn apart. I think they might be right.”

  “Well, then, where do you think the wormholes would lead?” Sadie asks her. “Would they take us to Narnia?”

  “Narnia’s not a real place,” Emmie sighs and rolls over, turning her back on her stepmother and the golden star, turning to face the wall because she knows that if she doesn’t fall asleep soon she’ll start missing Deacon again. “But they might take us to other places.”

  “Good places or bad places?”

  “That remains to be seen,” Emmie says, though she’s thinking that her stepmother’s old enough to know that places are neither good nor bad. That places are only places, and it’s people that make them seem good or bad. “Leave the hall light on, okay?”

  “Sure,” says Sadie, tucking her in and kissing her on the top of her head. “Now, you’d better get some sleep, pumpkin. We’ll go see the dinosaurs tomorrow.”

  “Night-night,” Emmie whispers, and her stepmother switches off the reading lamp and leaves, shutting the bedroom door only halfway. Emmie stares at the wall, imagining a swirling, dinner plate–sized hole in it that might open out into their house on Angell Street. She imagines Deacon peering into the hole to be sure that she’s all right and falls asleep to the sound of Sadie’s footsteps.

  “No,” Emmie tells the rat in pirate boots. “I always know when I’m dreaming. It’s easy to tell the difference.” And when the rat glares skeptically back at her, she explains, “In my dreams, there are no limits.”

  “No limits to what?” the rat asks her, still glowering, and then it takes a sip of the peach-flavored soda it’s been nursing since Emmie sat down at the kitchen table. Deacon’s busy somewhere else in the house, and he doesn’t know that she’s having a conversation about dreams with a rat named Reepicheep. If he did know, he probably wouldn’t care, but he might tell her to stop giving away sodas to talking rats, that those things cost money, and money doesn’t grow on trees.

  “See, that’s what I mean,” she tells Reepicheep. “Money doesn’t grow on trees. So, whenever I see some money growing on a tree, I know that I’m dreaming, because in my dreams there are no limits to what’s real and what’s not.”

  The rat shakes its head and scratches at its chin, which is slightly damp and matted with the peach soda that keeps dribbling out of its mouth. “That seems awfully convenient, if you ask me,” Reepicheep says.

  “I didn’t ask you.”

  “This stuff tastes like cleaning fluid,” the rat shudders and stares into the bottle of soda. “Are you trying to poison me or something?”

  Emmie’s getting bored with the rat, who isn’t nearly as interesting to talk to as she thought he might be when she offered him something to drink. She turns and looks out the kitchen window at the house next door and discovers that there’s already someone at a window over there watching her. It might be the woman from the train, the woman who got off at the Old Saybrook Station. She waves, but whoever it is, they don’t wave back.

  “Have you ever been haunted by the ghost of a poisoned rat?” Reepicheep asks her. “Let me just tell you, it’s not a pleasant affair.”

  “Go away now,” Emmie says, and the kitchen gradually melts away like snow on a warm winter day, taking the talking rat with it.

  “Six of one, half dozen of the other,” she says, because it’s something that Deacon says whenever he doesn’t seem to care one way or another. He says it’s something that people from Alabama say all the time. And the graveyard where she’s standing now really isn’t that much of an improvement over the kitchen and the talking rat and being watched from the house next door, so she says it again—Six of one, half dozen of the other. It’s not Swan Point or the Old North Burial Ground or any of the other graveyards where she and Deacon sometimes go for long walks. All the headstones are jagged slabs of charcoal-or rust-colored slate, broken and covered with patches of lichen and moss. Hardly any of the names and dates carved into them are still legible, and that always makes Emmie sad, knowing that someone’s dead and buried and so completely forgotten that even their tombstone doesn’t know his or her name anymore.

  Here’s a whole cemetery of forgotten people, she thinks, and sits down in the grass beneath a maple tree, glad that at least it’s summer in the dream instead of February.

  “I was hoping you’d show up today,” her mother says—not Sadie but her real mother, the woman who died the day that she was born—and Emmie looks up to see the tall woman standing over her. There’s a rock hammer on her belt, just like the paleontologists Emmie’s seen on television. “It’s been a while,” the woman says.

  “I’ve been busy,” Emmie tells her, wishing that the sun weren’t so bright right there behind her mother’s head, so that she could actually see her face this time. She knows it from photographs, but it’s always hidden in the dreams, and sometimes that makes Emmie worry that maybe the woman in the dreams isn’t her mother after all.

  “You’re a busy girl,” her mother says.

  “I don’t believe in ghosts,” Emmie says. “I know you’re only a dream.”

  “It doesn’t make much difference either way,” the woman replies and turns away, the sunlight pouring fiery white about the eclipse of her head and shoulders. “A ghost or a dream, six of one, half dozen of the other.”

  “It matters,” Emmie insists. “It’s important to know the difference.”

  “There’s something coming,” the woman tells her. “You need to be ready when it gets here. You’re a smart girl, aren’t you, Emmie? You know the difference between dreams and what’s real?”

  “Yeah.
I was just telling the rat—”

  “Then I need you to try just a little bit harder. I need you to see who I am, not who you think I am.”

  “It’s a dream,” Emmie protests, and the woman turns back towards her. She doesn’t seem so tall now, and the tool belt with the rock hammer’s gone. There’s a six-pointed star tattooed on the woman’s left hand. “You’re not my mother,” Emmie says, a little disappointed, a little angry even though the dream woman never claimed to be her mother. She squints into the sun, trying harder to get a better look at the woman’s face. “You’re the woman from the train.”

  “You’re a damned smart girl. But sometimes you talk when you should be listening.”

  “It’s my dream,” Emmie says.

  “You also need to learn not to make quite so many assumptions.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” And Emmie stands up, dusting bits of grass off her jeans, but the woman who’s not her mother has already begun to fade away, just like the kitchen and the talking rat. Emmie tries to concentrate and make her stay, but the graveyard is slippery and has already become somewhere else entirely, the sun traded for shadows and mist in the blink of a dreaming eye. An attic, she thinks, because the ceiling’s so very low, the vaulted house ribs of huge and rough-hewn crossbeams, cobwebs draped all about like a cartoon haunted house, and the only light is coming from a candlestick that the girl holding her hand is carrying. The girl, who’s both older and taller than Emmie, is dragging her through the attic, leading her quickly from one somewhere to somewhere else, and Emmie stops and jerks her hand free.

  “Who are you?” she demands. “And where are we going?”

  “We can’t very well stay here,” the older girl says anxiously, impatiently. “They’ll hear and come up to check. The clocks are ticking, Emma Jean. They’ll find you out.”

  By the flickering candle, Emmie can see that the girl’s skin is brown, skin like almonds or milk stirred into coffee, and her hair’s black and cut into a bob. Emmie wonders if the girl’s Hispanic or maybe part Narragansett, maybe a little of both. “Who? Who will find me out?” she asks the girl, who’s beginning to look more than anxious and impatient—she’s beginning to look scared. She tries to take Emmie’s hand again, but Emmie snatches it away. “No, answer my question. Who’s gonna find out I’m here?”

  “It might be your dream, Emma Jean Silvey, but it might be someone else’s, too. Did you never stop to consider that?”

  “No,” Emmie tells her. “That’s stupid. This is my dream, and it isn’t anybody else’s.”

  The girl looks back the way they’ve come, and Emmie looks, too, but there’s nothing back there except darkness and shadows, spiderwebs and dust. “Who are you so afraid of?” Emmie asks the girl.

  “She told you that something’s coming, and you need to listen to her. She told you about the horses, too, didn’t she? You’ve already forgotten that, I’ll wager?”

  “She didn’t say anything about any—” Emmie begins, but then she remembers the woman on the train—Saben White, that was her name, at least the name she said was her name—remembers her saying that Emmie should stay away from horses. “I’m in New York City at my stepmom’s,” Emmie says. “So I really don’t think I have to worry too much about horses.”

  The candlelight glitters in the girl’s eyes, eyes that are almost black, eyes that get Emmie to thinking about holes in the sky, holes punched in worlds by lion gods to send children home. The girl looks more frightened than Emmie has ever seen anyone look before.

  “You need to calm down,” she tells the girl. “You’re gonna have a cardiac arrest or a stroke or a panic attack or something if you don’t. It’s just a dream. I promise. You don’t even exist.”

  “You can hear them, can’t you?” the girl asks. “You can hear the clocks ticking?”

  “I don’t hear anything,” Emmie says, but then she stops and listens, and she does hear clocks, dozens of clocks, maybe more, but she can’t tell where the sounds are coming from. “Yeah, so what? I can hear clocks ticking.”

  The girl groans, the same sort of noise that her father makes whenever he’s tired of arguing with Emmie about taking a bath or doing her homework or cleaning her room. The end-of-his-rope noise, Sadie calls it. Do it now, or you’ll wish you had. That sort of noise.

  “You can get lost in dreams,” the girl says and motions at the darkness with her candle. “If you’re not careful, you can spend forever wandering about in dreams, and it hardly matters if they’re yours or someone else’s. Maybe this is your dream, Emma Jean, but it’s mine, too, and maybe it’s the hounds’, and maybe it’s even old Mother Hydra’s, so you’d best hush up a minute and stop thinking things aren’t connected just because you can’t see the—”

  “—shortcuts,” Emmie says.

  “That’s not what I was going to say, but it’s near enough. Those clocks shouldn’t be ticking. You shouldn’t be here. You’re getting too far ahead—”

  And then the brown-skinned girl’s gone, and Emmie’s alone in the sun-drenched cemetery again, and there’s an empty soda bottle half-buried in the ground in front of every single one of the slate gravestones. There are black ants on the bottles—ants going in, ants coming out. Reepicheep’s leather pirate boots are draped across one of the markers, and when she looks again at the lush green grass sprouting from the earth, Emmie can see that the ground has begun to leak something oily and red, not blood, no, but that’s the first thing it makes her think of. The air crackles and smells like rain and a dead raccoon she once found out behind their house. There are rough voices drifting across the cemetery, guttural animal sounds that want to be words but haven’t quite figured out the trick of it, and she tries not to hear what they’re saying.

  “She had a plan, your mother did,” the leaves of the maple tree rustle in the voice of the girl from the attic. “And now I fear it isn’t going so well for her. She made mistakes, and now it isn’t going well at all.”

  “My mother’s dead,” Emmie tells the girl or the old tree or whomever she’s talking to; she’s angry now and getting scared, and when she gazes up into the limbs of the old maple, there are eyes there, gazing back down at her, eyes and grinning Cheshire cat jaws with sharp ivory teeth. “My mother’s dead,” Emmie says. “She’s dead and buried, and she isn’t planning anything.”

  “Six of one,” the tree whispers. “You said so yourself,” and then something slips suddenly down from the branches, slithering snakelike along the trunk of the tree, something almost the same color of red as the stuff oozing from the ground.

  “They must have heard the clocks,” the girl from the attic says. “I told you they might. They have keen ears, and they’re always listening. You know the way back. You’d best start running.”

  The red thing in the tree laughs and wriggles and vomits a slimy clump of fur and the half-digested bones of a very large rat onto the grass at her feet.

  “Now would be better than later,” the girl from the attic says.

  And there’s an ugly tearing sound—a rending, Emmie thinks—as she dreams a wormhole into the fabric of the stinking summer day, a shimmering hole filled with blinding white light. As the red thing from the tree coils about the roots and opens its mouth wide so she can see exactly what it’s using for teeth, Emmie tumbles through.

  By the time that Emmie’s seen all the dinosaurs, saurischian and ornithischian, and all of the fossil mammals, it’s almost noon. Sadie buys her a hot dog, a bag of potato chips, and a Snapple from a silver cart parked outside near the bronze statue of Theodore Roosevelt on horseback, flanked by an Indian on one side and a black man on the other. They sit on a granite bench beneath the tall Ionic columns framing the archway leading back into the museum; the sun’s warm today, and the wind’s not so bad that they can’t have lunch outdoors. Emmie tries to remember not to talk while she’s chewing, but it’s hard, because her head’s so full of all the things she’s seen in the last few hours.

  “Hu
nter’s meeting us in a bit,” Sadie says. “You won’t mind, will you?”

  “No,” Emmie manages around a mustardy bite of hog dog. She likes Hunter Fontana, likes her long salt-and-pepper dreadlocks, the spicy-sweet clove smell of the Indonesian cigarettes she sometimes smokes, and the fact that she knows lots of good stories that Emmie’s never heard before. Hunter’s a witch, too, and a writer, and Deacon says that she’s a lesbian. Emmie chews her hot dog, swallows, washes it all down with raspberry-flavored Snapple, then leans back against the bas-relief sculpture of a pair of bighorn sheep.

  “I didn’t think you would,” Sadie says and smiles. She points at what’s left of Emmie’s hot dog. “Good?” she asks.

  “Yep,” Emmie says. “I could eat another one.”

  “We’ll see,” Sadie tells her and checks her wristwatch.

  “I’m sure that I’ll still be hungry when I’m finished with this one.”

  “How about you finish it and find out.”

  “What do you think I’m doing?” and Emmie takes another big bite. Deacon fixes hot dogs whenever she wants them, because he likes them too, but they’re never as good as the ones Sadie buys her outside the Museum of Natural History. Someone at school told her that the Mafia owns all the hot-dog stands in Manhattan, but she doesn’t know if she believes that. It seems to her the Mafia would have better things to do than sell hot dogs.

  “You can tell Hunter what you were telling me about the prehistoric horses,” Sadie says, and Emmie shrugs and swallows.

  “I’m not sure she’d be interested.”

  “Of course she would. You should tell her.” Sadie didn’t get a hot dog, just a Snapple and a bag of chips. She sips at her bottle of tea and watches the traffic moving up and down Central Park West, or she’s watching the brown-and-gray edge of the park itself. Emmie can’t be sure which without asking. She likes the park best in summer, when it’s green and warm and there’s Shakespeare and picnics; in winter, there’s something hard and skeletal about it, just like the rest of the city. She finishes her hot dog and decides that she’s probably full, after all.