Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Tell her about the Protohippius.”

  “Protohippus,” Emmie says, correcting her. “Hippus means ‘horse’ in Latin. Latin or Greek, I can’t remember which.”

  “Well, so tell her about the Protohippus. Everything that you were telling me.”

  There’s a sudden gust of icy wind then, sweeping down the street to remind them of February, blowing between the high buildings and the park. Emmie turns her face away from it, but it tugs persistently at her clothes and bites the tips of her fingers, snatches away her empty hot-dog wrapper and sends it scuttling like a pale, relish-stained insect across the sidewalk.

  “Whoa,” Sadie says and laughs. “Maybe we’d better hold on, pumpkin. Another one of those might blow us all the way to New Jersey.”

  Emmie doesn’t laugh, because something about the wind has reminded her of the bad dream—the girl in the attic, the clocks, the old cemetery, and the red thing in the maple tree. She hasn’t told her stepmother about the dream, because she’d already forgotten it, mostly, by morning. And besides, Sadie always wants to make more out of dreams than she should. Emmie knows what dreams are, what she believes that they are, and they aren’t portents or visions or anything like that. “Brain garbage,” Deacon calls them, which seems about right to her.

  “I don’t want to litter,” she says, “even if it’s really the wind’s fault,” and Emmie chases down the hot-dog wrapper before it ends up in the street or across the street in the park. She catches it where it’s snagged against the base of a flagpole, then glances back at Sadie, who points at a nearby garbage can.

  She told you about the horses, too, didn’t she? the dark-skinned girl in the dream asked her. You’ve already forgotten that, I’ll wager? And she had, and she’d forgotten them again when she and Sadie were standing in front of all those fossil horse skeletons—Hyracotherium, Mesohippus, Merychippus, and the perfectly articulated skeleton of a Protohippus, not mounted on welded steel rods like the others but still encased in rock, half-exposed in right profile. Just behind the skeleton’s rib cage, underneath its pelvis, were the skull and tiny bones of an unborn foal. Twelve million years ago, the mother horse had died giving birth.

  She told you about the horses, too, didn’t she?

  I know this isn’t going to make much sense, said the woman on the train, but you need to stay away from horses.

  But Emmie hadn’t stayed away from them, had she? And nothing bad had happened. She imagined telling it all to Deacon, imagined him rubbing his stubbly cheeks and nodding his head like it wasn’t anything he hadn’t heard a thousand times before. “Of course nothing bad happened,” he would tell her, “because the woman on the train was crazy—and what have I told you about talking to strangers?—and the dream was just a dream. Brain garbage.” And then he’d tap on his forehead with one finger and tell her he was late for work but to try to stop worrying herself about horses and nightmares.

  “Hello there,” someone says, and when Emmie looks up, Hunter Fontana is standing over her, smiling. Hunter’s a lot older than Sadie, and sometimes Emmie pretends that Hunter is her grandmother.

  “What’s that?” Hunter asks, and she points at the wad of paper in Emmie’s hand.

  “The stupid wind,” Emmie replies. “I’m not a litterbug.”

  “Where’s your stepmom?”

  “She’s right over there,” Emmie tells her and jabs a thumb towards the spot where Sadie’s sitting with the bighorn sheep. “We were waiting on you.”

  “Well, now I’m here. Let’s put that in the trash and go see Sadie, shall we?”

  Emmie smiles, her uneasiness from the wind already beginning to fade away. “We shall,” she says. “She wants me to tell you about the museum, about the fossil horses.”

  “Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, or Pliocene?” Hunter asks, following Emmie to the trash. It never surprises Emmie what Hunter seems to know, since she seems to know something about almost everything.

  “Miocene,” Emmie tells her. “I told her you probably wouldn’t want to hear it. I’m sure you know about it already.”

  “Maybe,” Hunter says. “You never can tell.” And then Emmie drops the wrapper into the trash can.

  “What about the Seal of Solomon?” Emmie asks, the words thought up, strung together, and spilling out of her mouth before she’s even sure she wants to start talking about that again. Hunter seems only a little surprised.

  “I thought we were talking about fossil horses?”

  “Never mind,” Emmie says, peering past the rim of the can into the trash, all the bits and pieces that people have thrown away, the bottles and drink cans and paper bags, discarded plastic and glass, aluminum and cardboard. And her hot-dog wrapper, crumpled into a ball and lying on top of everything else. She wrinkles her nose; something in there smells dead, and she wonders if maybe there’s a dead pigeon wedged way down at the bottom, or a squirrel, or a rat.

  “If you say so,” Hunter tells her and takes Emmie’s right hand, then leads her back to where Sadie’s sitting, finishing her Snapple. “You know she’s a weird kid, right?” Hunter asks her stepmother, and Sadie smiles.

  “Takes after her dad,” she says.

  Emmie wishes that they wouldn’t talk about her like she wasn’t there, and that they wouldn’t call her weird, even though she knows it’s only a joke. Lesbian witches have no damn business calling anyone else weird, she thinks and turns loose of Hunter’s hand.

  “Is that a fact?” Hunter asks, sitting down on the bench next to Sadie. “When did Deacon Silvey take an interest in the Kabbalah?”

  “Oh, I see. So I guess she’s on about the Seal of Solomon again,” Sadie says. “I don’t know what’s up with that. She—”

  “You know, I’m standing right here,” Emmie says, interrupting her stepmother. “You could just ask me what’s up with that.”

  “Did she tell you about the horses?” Sadie asks Hunter.

  “She started to, I think. But then the other thing came up, and she didn’t finish.”

  “You’re still doing it,” Emmie says, reaching for her backpack lying there on the bench. “It’s rude, Sadie. How the heck am I ever going to learn how to act when all the adults I know are rude?”

  “How about we go for a walk,” Hunter suggests and points at the park. “It’s such a nice day, we should take a walk in the park. How’s that sound, Emmie?”

  “We haven’t seen the blue whale yet,” Emmie protests, “or the meteorites, either.”

  “We could go for a walk, then come back to the museum later this afternoon,” Sadie says. “Then we can still see the blue whale and the meteorites.”

  “And the Hall of Vertebrate Origins. And the planetarium,” Emmie says.

  “Right. And the planetarium.”

  “Sure,” Emmie nods without a drop of enthusiasm. “Whatever.”

  She’s thinking about the dream again, the girl with the candle, the maple tree, and the rat sipping peach soda, and she doesn’t want to walk in the park, just wants to go back inside the museum so maybe something interesting will distract her. They haven’t even seen the Hall of Minerals or the Hall of Gems. But now Hunter and Sadie are talking about something else, laughing about some secret grown-up thing, and Emmie looks over her shoulder at the busy street, past the people and taxis and a long yellow school bus, to the place where asphalt and concrete give way to a low stone wall that seems to be holding back the grass and trees at the western edge of the park. It’s not the same as in the summer, she thinks. There’s a whole hungry wilderness in there, hungry and waiting for me. And then she remembers a book she read once about the history of Manhattan, how the island was saltmarshes and forest hundreds of years ago, how the land was drained by Dutch settlers and the Indians driven away so a city could be built here. How Central Park isn’t really a wild place at all, but a garden designed by men who wanted to tame nature. Maybe, she thinks, it isn’t tame at all. Not really. All those thousands of crooked, bare limbs clawing at the brigh
t blue sky, the poplars and willows, oaks and maples, and suddenly Emmie Silvey is afraid of the park for the first time in her life.

  “What about a carriage ride?” Hunter asks, and Emmie glances over at the statue of Roosevelt on his great bronze horse. “I bet that’s something you’ve never done before. How about it, Sadie? My treat.”

  “What do you think, Emmie?” Sadie asks. “You want to ride in a carriage? Might be fun.”

  The statue is black and green with verdigris, and Theodore Roosevelt looks more like a Roman god of war riding off to battle than an American president. His head and shoulders are spattered with white smears of bird shit. I know this isn’t going to make much sense, but you need to stay away from horses. His bronze mount is an enormous metal beast; no horse was ever that large, not even in prehistoric times. Emmie looks back at her stepmother and Hunter Fontana, trying to think of some way to explain, some way to get them to take her back inside immediately.

  “Look, there’s one now,” Hunter says and points to a hansom cab making its way towards them, drawn by a muscular but weary-looking black mare, her iron hooves clip-clopping loudly on the pavement. The hack is wearing a gray top hat, and there are no riders in the carriage. “Just let me get his attention,” Hunter says.

  “We haven’t seen the blue whale,” Emmie says again, because she can think of nothing else to say.

  “We will,” Sadie assures her. “I promise. But Emmie, this is something you’ve never done before. You’ve seen that old whale lots of times.”

  “Three times,” Emmie tells her. “I’ve only seen it three times.” Her mouth has gone very dry, and the cold wind has started blowing again. An empty Coke can rattles past. The carriage has pulled over in front of the museum, parking in front of the statue of Theodore Roosevelt, and the driver pulls back on the mare’s leather reins. Wooden wheels lacquered white as snow, white wheels with crimson hubs, and Hunter’s already talking with the hack, taking money from her wallet.

  “I don’t want to go,” Emmie whispers. “Please, Sadie, I don’t want to do this.”

  Her stepmother looks confused, her smile fading slowly away to some indistinct concern. “Why not, Emmie?” she asks. “You’ll probably love it.”

  “I can’t tell you. I just don’t want to do it. Tell Hunter I don’t want to do it, please. Make her stop.”

  “Oh, baby,” Sadie says. “No, no, it’s okay,” and Emmie’s crying now, and that’s stupid and makes it all even worse. She’s too old to be acting this way. She imagines the wind will freeze her tears, and tiny beads of ice will shatter on the sidewalk at her feet, imagines that they will make sounds like wind chimes when they break.

  “He can’t wait forever,” Hunter shouts, and the mare snorts and shakes its head, pulling at the reins. “We’ll just make a loop, once around the park, that’s all.”

  “She doesn’t want to go,” Sadie calls out to Hunter.

  “Why not?” Hunter shouts back. “I’ve already paid the man. Come on, Sadie.”

  “I can’t,” Emmie whispers, leaning closer to her stepmother. “I can’t do it, Sadie. I can’t go. If I do it, something bad’s going to happen.”

  “That’s silly,” Sadie tells her. “Why would you think—”

  “Hurry up!” Hunter yells.

  “Just tell him we’ve changed our minds,” Sadie shouts back at her, and she puts her good arm around Emmie and hugs her tightly. “I think she’s tired. Thanks, but maybe some other time.”

  Emmie buries her face in her stepmother’s lap, hiding from the wind and the hungry trees and Theodore Roosevelt. “I’m sorry,” she sobs. “I’m sorry, Sadie. I’m sorry—”

  “Pumpkin, there’s nothing for you to be sorry about,” Sadie says and begins stroking her hair. “Hunter thought it might be fun, that’s all. No one’s upset with you.”

  But then Emmie hears the squeal of tires, rubber burning itself to smoke against the blacktop, and she looks up in time to see the taxi swerve across the yellow dividing line. The mare sees it, too, and tries to bolt, but there’s no time, too much weight hitched to her and nowhere to run, and a moment later the horse screams as the car collides with the hansom cab. The taxi’s horn, the snap of wood, the wetter snap of splintering bone, the abrupt thud of metal against meat, and the mare goes down in a heap of flesh and tack on the sidewalk, just missing Hunter. Emmie knows from the emptiness in its lolling, dark eyes and the pool of blood spreading thickly across the concrete that it’s dead. Sadie screams, her voice not so different from the dead horse’s, and Emmie looks away.

  Almost forty-five minutes later, and Emmie’s sitting on her bed in Sadie’s apartment, trying not to hear the things that her stepmother and Hunter Fontana are saying. They went into Sadie’s bedroom and shut the door, but Emmie can still hear them. The apartment’s too small for privacy.

  “—would have been dead.”

  “Hunter, you don’t know that.”

  “The hell I don’t. If the two of you had come when I called—”

  —we’d be dead.

  They weren’t, but the horse was, its ribs caved in and its neck broken, and the man who drove the hansom cab hauled off to the hospital in an ambulance.

  “It was a fucking coincidence,” Sadie hisses.

  “You don’t believe that,” Hunter says. “You don’t believe that for a moment, and we both know it.”

  “She’s just a child.”

  “I want to go home now,” Emmie says, speaking to no one in particular because there’s no one there to hear. She’s said it several times since they got back to the apartment, and that’s why Sadie’s packing. “I want to go home now.”

  “We would be dead,” Hunter says again.

  But Emmie’s pretty sure she’s missing the point. If Deacon were here, he’d say she couldn’t smell the turds for the sewage or something like that. He always knows what to say when people are missing the point.

  She told you that something’s coming, and you need to listen to her. She told you about the horses, too….

  Just while you’re in New York City this time, stay away from horses, okay? I think it’s very important.

  “She’s missing the point,” Emmie says, pretending that Sadie’s standing there and can hear her. “Hunter’s missing the point.” Emmie’s left shoe has come untied, and she starts to tie it, then stops and just stares at it instead.

  “If I’d listened…” Emmie begins, but maybe it’s not something she should say aloud, so she finishes the sentence in her head:…the horse would still be alive. If we hadn’t gone to the museum, where I knew there would be horses, Hunter never would have made the carriage stop.

  “Don’t waste your life on regret,” the dark-skinned girl from the attic says. Emmie looks up from her untied sneaker, and the girl is standing at the foot of the bed, watching her. “No good ever comes of that.”

  “If this is only a dream,” Emmie tells her, “and I wake up, then the horse will still be alive.”

  “Six of one,” the girl says.

  “And I can tell Sadie I don’t feel like going to the museum, that I’d rather go to Chinatown instead.”

  “Half dozen of the other.”

  “If I’m only dreaming, none of it has to happen.”

  “Unless it already has,” the girl suggests unhelpfully.

  “The hell with you,” Emmie says, and it feels so good that she says it a second time. “The hell with you.”

  “You have a very foul mouth on you, Emma Jean Silvey. And, just so you know, you won’t ever profit from thinking that second chances are that easy.”

  “You’re not real,” Emmie growls at the girl, “so just shut up and leave me alone. And nobody calls me Emma Jean. If you were real, you’d know that.”

  She can hear Sadie crying now.

  “Has anything like this ever happened before?” Hunter asks. “Sadie, the kid saved our goddamn lives today.”

  “You stop saying that,” Sadie snaps back at her. “I don’t
want to fucking hear it again.”

  “What the hell are you so afraid of?” Hunter demands.

  “You don’t fucking know. You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

  “If I’m dreaming, then I can change it all,” Emmie tells the girl standing at the foot of the bed. The girl’s wearing a black dress with a stiff white collar, like something a pilgrim girl might have worn to the first Thanksgiving dinner. She’s also wearing black-and-white-striped stockings and old-fashioned black patent leather boots. She frowns and takes a purple Magic Marker from a pocket in her dress and hands it to Emmie.

  “Show me,” the dark-skinned girl says.

  “What do you mean?” Emmie asks, staring at the marker. The label’s mostly scraped off and the cap’s missing.

  “Show me, changeling. You know how it goes. ‘I am the great Bridge Builder. And now come; I will open the door in the sky and send you to your own land.’”

  “You’re a loony bird,” Emmie says. She can smell the Magic Marker, and the purple ink smells like African violets and the ocean before a storm, which only goes to prove it’s all a dream.

  “Show me,” the girl says a third time. “Build me a bridge, Emmie. I have long desired one.”

  And because this is only a dream, and almost anything’s better than listening to Sadie and Hunter yelling at each other, yelling the way that Deacon and Sadie did before Sadie left Providence for good, Emmie turns and draws a circle on the wall with the purple marker. The felt tip squeaks loudly against the plaster. When she’s done, it’s not a bridge or a wormhole or anything else but a big purple circle drawn on Sadie’s wall.

  “See?” the girl from the attic says. “You’re not dreaming,” and when Emmie turns to tell her none of this proves a thing one way or the other, she discovers that the girl’s gone, and she’s alone again.

  FOUR