Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  If these mortals are suffer’d their scheme to pursue,

  There’s devil a goddess will stay above stairs.

  Hark! Already they cry,

  In transports of joy.

  A fig for Parnassus! To Rowley’s we’ll fly;

  And there, my good fellows, we’ll learn to entwine,

  The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus’ vine.

  He offered to teach her another one, something bawdy the Freemasons sometimes sang to the tune of “God Save the Queen,” but she was beginning to see where all this was headed, and she went back upstairs into the yellow house on Benefit Street. One of the silver-eyed women was waiting for her, and Soldier breathed into her palm, checking for the stink of whiskey. And of course she smelled like a fucking distillery, but the silver-eyed woman didn’t seem to notice. A clock on the mantel rang the hour, and Soldier wondered if Sheldon had gotten lost in Ipswich again, if maybe he’d spend the whole night wandering about, lost in the rain. The silver-eyed woman, Miss Josephine, who’d lived in the house for more than a hundred years, offered Soldier a glass of brandy, and she said she’d rather have bourbon.

  “Such a vulgar spirit,” the vampire said disapprovingly, but poured Soldier a tall glass of Wild Turkey and left the bottle on the table so she could help herself if she wanted another. Soldier thanked her, drained the glass, belched, and then sat trying to recall the words to the demon’s drinking song.

  “I hear it did not go well tonight,” the silver-eyed woman said, and when Soldier looked at her again, it was Sheldon Vale sitting on the other side of the wide mahogany dining table. There was a gaping red-black cavity between his eyes, the two overlapping bullet holes she could almost remember putting there. He wiped some of the gore from his face and then stared at the blood and brains and flecks of bone on his hands.

  “Shoot first, ask questions later,” he said and laughed. It made her think of drowning, that laugh, and she wondered where the silver-eyed woman had gone, and if she’d be coming back. “Of course,” Sheldon said, “maybe you think it’s better if you skip the questions entirely.”

  “You’d have done the same damned thing, and you know it,” Soldier told him, and the clock on the mantel chimed again, fifteen minutes come and gone like a handful of nothing. The clock was strung together with baling wire and smoke, splintered wood from old tomato crates, three prickly white fish spines where the hands should be. Wheels and spindles carved from human bone, the fat pendulum a dead rat dangling headfirst, its stiff tail and some kite string for the rod. The clock’s face had once belonged to a very pretty girl, and Soldier could see that the taxidermist had taken care to give her the finest glass eyes, irises the color of a broken china cup, before he’d tattooed a circle of blue-green Roman numerals onto her skin—XII perfectly centered on her forehead, VI on her chin. Or maybe she’d still been alive when that was done. Maybe they’d only killed her afterwards.

  “But you do have questions, don’t you?” Sheldon asked. “You’ve got questions gnawing you apart like maggots. You’ve got things in you worse than questions. I mean, at least a question is a place to start, right?”

  “You’re dead and full of shit,” she told him and turned away from the clock because she was starting to think that the glass eyes could see her.

  “That might be,” Sheldon said. “But it doesn’t change a word I’ve said. Do you even remember her?” and he pointed at the clock.

  “Do I remember who?”

  “The little girl in the attic, Soldier. The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles.”

  “Maybe I should be the one asking you the fucking questions—”

  “So maybe you are. Maybe that’s just exactly what you’re doing. Do you remember her? The wizard’s child?” And he rubbed at his eyes again, then wiped his sticky fingers on the table. The smear looked like chocolate and raspberry tapioca. He took something from the pocket of his jacket, a tarot card, and laid it faceup on the table between them.

  “The Four of Pentacles,” Sheldon said and tapped the card with an index finger like a magician getting ready for some sleight of hand. Soldier stared at the card a moment, a king seated upon a bench, a pentacle beneath each foot, one balanced atop his crown, and another wrapped up tight in his arms. Behind him there were low, tree-covered hills and the towers and parapets of a medieval city. The man’s face was greed, she thought, greed and desperation, and then Sheldon tapped the card again.

  “Yeah, so what?” Soldier asked him, losing patience, wondering how he’d made it back from Ipswich so goddamned fast. “It’s a tarot card. I fucking hate riddles. You know that. You got something to say, spit it out or go haunt someone else, you backstabbing son of a bitch.”

  But the dead man only smiled and produced a battered paperback—The Tarot Revealed, by Eden Gray—from the same pocket that had held the card; he read silently from it for a moment, then laid the book on the table beside the card. “Maybe it’s time you start asking a few of those questions,” he said. “Maybe it’s time for you to try and remember.”

  “Remember what?” she demanded, even though she’d been taught never to raise her voice in the yellow house on Benefit Street. “Just what the hell is it that you want me to try to remember?”

  “I’ve got such a goddamned headache,” he said, instead of answering her question. “I should probably take some aspirin and find someplace to lie down.”

  “They’ve got these things called graves,” Soldier said, glancing from the tarot card back to the clock on the mantel.

  “Don’t you even want to know why I did it?”

  “Not particularly,” Soldier told him and poured herself another glass of bourbon. The clock winked at her with one glass eye.

  “Well, if that’s the way you want it. You’ll find out sooner or later, anyway. Right now, though, you’d better wake up,” Sheldon said. “Looks like you’ve got company.” And then he was gone, and Soldier was alone in the big dining room. She reached for the glass of whiskey, meaning to toast the clock, but opened her eyes instead, opened her eyes in another place and another time because now she could hear footsteps heavy on the floorboards of her apartment, footsteps and her squeaky front door being eased shut again. Adrenaline like a punch in the heart, brass knuckles to shatter her sternum, and she was awake in an instant, the dream already gone to gray tatters, nothing she’d be able to make sense of later. Soldier slipped her right hand beneath one of the pillows and pulled out the .357 Magnum she kept there, flipped off the safety, and cocked the pistol. The room was dark, even though she’d left the bathroom light burning.

  “You would do me a great kindness,” the Bailiff said, “if you’d please see fit to point that thing elsewhere.”

  “Shit,” Soldier hissed, easing her finger off the trigger. She could smell her own sweat, the tinny stench of her fear, and she could also smell the Bailiff’s cheap cologne like flowers and rubbing alcohol. “You scared the piss out of me, old man,” she said, sitting up, returning the gun to its place beneath the pillow.

  “I hope you don’t mean that literally.”

  “I did what you said,” Soldier told him. “I took her to the doc, and then I took her home.”

  “Would you like to turn on a light?” the Bailiff asked. “I can’t see my hand four inches in front of my face.”

  Soldier reached for the floor lamp beside the bed, fumbling for the long cord with its frayed gold tassel, and a moment later she was squinting and cursing and shading her eyes against the dim glare of the twenty-five-watt bulb.

  “It’s right there on the television,” she said. “I haven’t had a sip. I haven’t even opened it. It’s all yours. Every goddamn drop, if you still want it.”

  The Bailiff turned to find the bottle of Dickel where Soldier had left it a few hours earlier. “Really? For me?” he asked, and smiled one of his great carnivorous smiles. “Why, little Soldier girl, how terribly, terribly thoughtful of you. I hope you won’t mind if I share this with my boys. They do so ap
preciate a stiff shot of something now and then.”

  “I’m sure they do,” Soldier yawned and picked up her lighter and a fresh pack of Marlboros from the cluttered nightstand. “Knock yourself out. Pour it down the fucking toilet, for all I care.”

  “You’re naked,” the Bailiff said.

  “Thank you for noticing.”

  “Would you like me to give you a moment to dress yourself? The matter that’s brought me here, it’s nothing so urgent—”

  “I’m fine,” Soldier said, though the air in the bedroom was much colder than when she’d fallen asleep, and she wished that she’d bothered to bring her ratty green terry-cloth bathrobe to bed with her instead of leaving it hanging on its nail beside the shower stall. “Unless titties offend you, Bailiff.”

  He sniffed, cocked a bushy eyebrow, and set the bottle of whiskey down again. “It might not be my personal preference, as you should well know, but I have seen more than my share of womanflesh, and I’m not the squeamish sort, besides. So if it suits you—”

  “I did what you said,” Soldier told him again and lit a cigarette.

  “Yes, I know. I just left Miss Saben White not half an hour ago. Somewhat worse for the wear, I might add. At the moment, I’m more concerned with the whereabouts of Mr. William Lothrop and the inconveniently deceased papist.”

  Soldier took a deep drag off her cigarette, exhaled, and stared through the smoke at the fat man standing near the foot of her bed. Beads of sweat stood out on his bald head, and his long beard was twisted into a short, stiff braid and tied with a rubber band. He was wearing a shiny blue suit of worsted wool.

  “I haven’t talked to Odd Willie yet,” she replied. “He was supposed to call. But you know how he is. He gets caught up in his work. He forgets shit.” And Soldier drew little circles in the air around her right ear.

  “Yes, he does,” the Bailiff said and nodded his head. “But he is a maestro when it comes to incineration, is he not? We can sometimes overlook eccentricities when matters of genius are involved, don’t you think?”

  “If it suits you,” Soldier said, wishing the Bailiff would stop hemming and hawing and get to whatever was on his mind so that maybe she could go back to sleep.

  “William is a troubled boy,” the Bailiff continued, “but insanity and antisocial behavior have never excluded the likelihood of precocity, little Soldier. You should remember that.”

  “Fine,” she said and took another drag off the Marlboro. “I’ll remember that. Have I done something wrong?”

  “No, no. Quite the contrary,” the Bailiff said. “Why do you ask?” and then he looked about in vain for a place to sit down. Soldier pointed at the foot of the bed, and he eased his bulk onto the mattress. The box springs shrieked like a sockful of stomped mice.

  “I asked because I’m not accustomed to waking up with you standing in my goddamn bedroom. That’s why I asked.”

  “Yes, I suppose it was rude of me not to call,” he said and tugged at his braided beard. “I’m sorry about that. But I believe, little Soldier, that I had cause not to trust certain information to the telephone.”

  “And it couldn’t have waited until tomorrow?”

  “No, as a matter of fact,” he said, and then he told her that there had been another call from George Ballou up in Woonsocket, that she’d have to make the trip on Sunday instead of Monday. And then he said other things, and Soldier sat naked on the bed and listened. By the time he was done, the last thing on Soldier’s mind was sleep. He took the bottle of Dickel, bade her a good morning and good luck, reminded her that if she fucked it up this time, she’d never have to worry about fucking it up again, kissed her on the left cheek, and then the Bailiff left. Soldier smoked another Marlboro, and when she was done, she picked up her cell and called Odd Willie Lothrop.

  In the wan, cloud-filtered light of the winter afternoon, the winding, rugged course of the Blackstone River reminds Soldier of a gigantic coal-colored snake, some vast and immeasurably prehistoric serpent or biblical monster sprawled lazily across the land, and there’s the city of Woonsocket held forever tight inside its iridescent coils. The water, which is really only its scales, glints darkly, and, here and there, she can see foam-white scars to mark the various waterfalls and cataracts. Soldier knows there’s too much truth in the things Odd Willie said, and maybe when the Algonquin named this place, they meant hell after all. Seeing it now, postcard perfect between the steep, wooded hills and yet surely gone as sick and mean and insane as any town ever will, Soldier could believe just about anything at all about Woonsocket. There have been white men here, of one sort and then another, for almost four hundred years, and they have dug themselves in deep, almost as deep as the hounds and the things that were here before the hounds. The Dodge follows the highway down into the valley, out of the old forest, the trees that she imagines lean in towards the river as if their bare branches might hide it from the terrible gray and purple sky.

  Odd Willie giggles anxiously and asks Soldier a question that she only half hears, something about swamp yankees and sundown, but she doesn’t answer him, doesn’t say a word. She follows the road past shoddy, weatherworn houses and boarded-up discount stores, fast-food joints and fading wooden billboards hawking “chowda” and clam cakes and lobster, out into the crooked streets of the city. The smokestacks and pitched rooftops of abandoned mills, towering church steeples and the brick-and-mortar corpses of long-dead factories rise up before her like some ingenious armor the serpent river has fashioned to keep itself safe, the symbiotic ruins of industry and avarice to guard a sleeping dragon.

  “When are you going to get around to telling us what this is all about?” Saben White asks from the backseat.

  “It’s just a courier job; that’s all,” Soldier replies and stops at a red light. “As long as no one gets stupid and nothing gets fucked-up, it won’t be anything but a simple drop and swap. We give them that leather bag in the trunk, and they give us a package for the Bailiff.”

  “What the Sam Hill could these yahoos have that the Bailiff wants?” Willie Lothrop asks her and shakes his head. She realizes that he hasn’t combed his hair once since they left Providence, hasn’t even taken out his pink plastic comb, and that’s got to be some sort of record.

  “That part’s none of our goddamn business. You ought to know that much by now, Willie. That part’s between Old Man Ballou and the Bailiff.”

  “Well, they should have sent two fucking cars,” he says.

  “Ballou said just one. One car, three occupants,” Soldier tells him. “So that’s the way we’re doing it.”

  “We’ve got less than ten minutes,” Saben White says, sounding more impatient than anything else, and Soldier nods, but doesn’t look at her.

  “Believe it or not, I can fucking tell time,” Soldier says, then finds a gravelly place at the side of the road and pulls over, the wheels of the Dodge sending up a dense cloud of dust and grit. She lets the motor idle for a moment, as the dust settles again, before she turns the key and switches it off. The car’s parked beside an old retaining wall, concrete covered with wild grapevines like a strangling network of dead, dry veins and capillaries.

  “I want to talk to Willie for a moment,” Soldier says. “Just Willie. You stay where you are, Saben. Unless I call for you, you stay right there where you are.”

  “Ten minutes,” Saben reminds her, and Soldier shows her the middle finger of her right hand.

  “Come on, Odd Willie. We need to talk.”

  “What the hell for?” he asks, reaching for the door handle, reaching so slowly that Soldier gets the impression that maybe he thinks she’s going to change her mind and let him stay in the car.

  “I need to stretch my legs. I need to clear my head before the drop, that’s all.”

  She opens her door, and the cold air tastes like the highway grime stirred up by the Dodge, like the exhaust from passing cars and trucks, and, beneath that, there’s the faintly rotten smell of the Blackstone River. Despite
all her years in the tunnels, her schooling by the hounds, Soldier has never really grown accustomed to the smell of rot. Most of the changelings hardly seem to notice, but the smell of rot makes Soldier uneasy, and the smell of wet rot is the worst of them all. Odd Willie follows her along the road’s shoulder for fifteen or twenty yards. He lights a cigarette and that helps mask the smell of the river a little, so she lights one of her own, then stops and stares back at the car and Saben sitting in the backseat.

  “You think she’s getting suspicious?” Odd Willie asks. “You think she knows something’s up?”

  “Well, you laid it on pretty thick,” Soldier says, then looks away from the Dodge, up at the sky; she wonders how the car handles on ice and snow.

  “Sometimes it’s hard to stop,” he says and puffs his cigarette. “Once I get started, it just keeps on coming.”

  “No, I think she’s pissed off, but that’s all. She thinks it’s just something personal between me and her. And I guess that makes her half right.” Soldier flicks ash at the gravel and takes a long drag off her Marlboro. She wants to walk back to the Dodge and put two or three in Saben’s skull, but this is the Bailiff’s show, and he’s the one calling all the shots.

  “I’m scared as shit,” Odd Willie whispers and giggles softly to himself. “I’m sorry, Soldier, but that’s the gods’ fucking truth. I never signed on for crap like this.”

  “You never signed on,” she reminds him, as if he might somehow have managed to forget.

  “It was just a figure of speech. You know what I fucking meant.”

  “Sure,” Soldier says, looking away from the sky, turning her attention once more to the walls and roofs and streets of Woonsocket laid out below them. “But I’ve never yet heard of one of us dying of old age. Makes it seem kind of silly to get too worked up over something like this.” That’s Sheldon talking, she thinks, his words from her mouth, something he said to her once or twice. You ever heard of one of us dying from old age?

  “There’s always a goddamned first time. I can’t see the harm in being ambitious.”