Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “But it’s only a dream,” Emmie reminds the girl, and then she reaches for the envelope marked WR and takes out the gold wedding ring and slips it on her thumb. But it’s too loose and falls off, so she puts it in one of the front pockets of her jeans instead. “I should clean all this up,” she says. “Deacon will be mad if he comes home and finds this mess.”

  “There isn’t time. He’ll understand.”

  “But these are his secrets,” Emmie says, and she knows that it’s not right for them to be spread out all over the bedroom floor for anyone to see.

  “Now,” the girl says, and Emmie does as she’s told, because it’s only a dream, after all, and when she’s awake again Deacon won’t know about the box if she doesn’t tell him. The brown girl disappears into the hallway, and Emmie goes to put on warmer clothes and find her coat.

  And half an hour later, Emmie is walking east along Waterman Street, trudging forward with the freezing north wind pressing brusquely at her back, driving her, hurrying her along, and the snow swirls about her like fat white fairies. Her breath puffs out in foggy clouds, and the fairies slowly melt whenever they collide with the warm patch of exposed skin around her eyes and the bridge of her nose. This is the way the brown girl said that she had to go, east down Angell and then one street over to Waterman, east on Waterman to Ivy, south on Ivy to East Manning, and then on to Gano Street and the woods at the edge of the river, and there the girl would show her the place where they’d hide until it was safe to come out again. The snow’s ankle deep, and she figures the monsters must have sent it to slow her down.

  It’s smothering everything just to get at me, Emmie thinks and stops walking, looking back to see if the brown girl’s still following her. She’s been harder to see since they left the house, but Emmie knows she’s back there somewhere, because she can still hear her footsteps. From time to time the girl says something, not speaking out loud, just a few words whispered directly into Emmie’s head.

  Don’t stop, Emma Jean. Keep moving.

  Or: You can’t stop here. It’s getting late.

  Emmie doesn’t know how late it is—eight thirty, almost nine, maybe, and Deacon will be home soon. The streetlights spaced out along Waterman make pools of Creamsicle brilliance in the slippery, uncertain darkness. Overhead the sky is lost in the storm, and the bellies of the low clouds are the same soft orange-white as the light from the street lamps. Emmie walks a few more steps, wipes the melted snow from her eyes, then stops again beneath one of the mercury-vapor lights.

  “Where are you?” she shouts back at the spot where she thinks the brown girl might be. “I can’t see you.”

  You don’t need to see me. I’ve told you the way to go.

  “I’m freezing my rear end off,” Emmie yells back, and she is, even though it’s only a dream (she reminds herself), even though she has her good coat—not the pink zebra stripes, but her blue down-filled parka—and her mittens, gloves under the mittens, warm wool socks and her new winter boots, the blue ones from L.L. Bean that Sadie gave her, rubber and nylon and a drawstring to keep the snow from getting inside. She’s wearing a sweater and a T-shirt under that, her toboggan cap and muffler, and she knows she ought to be warm. But the cold seems to come right through her clothes, right through her, as though she were no more substantial than the brown girl or the swirling snow.

  You can’t stop here, the brown girl says urgently. It doesn’t matter if you’re cold and tired; you can’t stop. You can rest when we’ve reached the tunnel.

  “What tunnel?” Emmie asks her. “You didn’t say anything about a tunnel.” It’s getting hard to talk because her teeth have started chattering again and tunnel comes out more like tuh-uh-uh-nel, like a kid Emmie knew in second grade who had to have speech therapy because he stuttered.

  You’ll see. But you can’t stop here.

  “I got out of the house. You told me I had to get out so Deacon would be safe, and I’m out, so why do we have to hide?”

  Because I also have to keep you safe, Emma Jean, because I also… And then the girl falls silent, and for the first time since they left the house, Emmie feels alone and scared and lost in the disorienting white blur of the storm.

  “And because what?” she asks, but the brown girl doesn’t answer her. Emmie looks up and down the length of Waterman Street, as far as she can see through the storm, but there’s no sign of her anywhere. The houses, the trees, the fire hydrants, the cars parked along the side of the road, everything is rapidly vanishing beneath the snow. Everything is becoming something new, something indistinct and menacing, and Emmie wonders if she could find her way back home or if maybe she really is lost.

  It doesn’t matter if you get lost in a dream, she reminds herself. You’re found again as soon as you wake up.

  And then there’s a flash of lightning and, only a few seconds later, a rolling, rumbling thunderclap that seems to begin at one end of the street and roll back and forth, back and forth, as if the simple sound of it means to crush everything flat and dead.

  “What’s happening?” she shouts back at the brown girl, at the murky place where she might have been. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do!” But the thunder steals her frightened voice and grinds it to silent pulp in the snow.

  You can’t be afraid of them, the brown girl says inside her head. No matter what, you can’t be afraid of them. And then she’s gone again, and there’s only the storm and the snow-covered world and the thunder rolling up and down Waterman Street.

  No, Emmie realizes, not thunder. It’s not thunder at all. Only something that wants me to think it’s thunder, or something that can’t help but sound like thunder when it moves. And she remembers a book she has about mastodons and woolly mammoths, towering, shaggy things wandering about in the shadows of ancient glaciers, and Emmie also remembers a scary story that Deacon read her once, a story about the Wendigo, an enormous monster or Indian god that lived on the wind and snatched away people foolish enough to go too deep into the wild places it haunted.

  “It’s only thunder,” she says. “It’s only the storm playing tricks with sound, playing tricks on my mind.” And then Emmie ducks quickly behind a sugary lump that was a holly bush before the storm began, and she crouches down and waits for the noise to stop. Help me, she thinks, hoping that the brown girl is listening and will hear her thoughts. Help me. Make it stop. Make it stop looking for me.

  The brown girl doesn’t answer her, and Emmie thinks that maybe it’s because she’s afraid to, that maybe the thunder monster can hear their thoughts, too, or maybe it’s because it’s found the girl already and has torn her apart or eaten her or whatever it does. Emmie peers out between the branches of the holly bush, at the abandoned white waste of Waterman Street, and she wonders why there aren’t any cars. If there were a car or a truck or just someone walking by on foot, maybe there would be someone who could help her. This time of night there should still be traffic; even with the snow, there should be people coming home from work.

  And then she sees it, the stilt-legged, tattletale gray thing that’s making the noises she only thought were thunder. It isn’t a mammoth or a mastodon—though it has long, shaggy hair—and she’s pretty sure it isn’t the Wendigo, either. It isn’t anything she knows a name for, and maybe it has no name. Maybe you would die, if you even tried to name it. The creature seems to glide effortlessly out of the shadows, drifting along light as a wisp of radiator steam, moving like a whirl of fallen snow stirred up by the wind. But its footsteps are still thunder and lightning, betraying the weight of all the evil trapped deep in its roiling black-hole belly, betraying the gravity of the thing. Its footsteps are the shattering of stone by vast iron hammers, the grinding of pack ice at the bottom of the world, the collision of continental plates, the impossible gait of a thing so heavy that Emmie wouldn’t have believed the universe could even contain it, that it doesn’t simply tear a hole in space and time and vanish forever.

  I’m dreaming, she reminds herself
, and when I’m awake, I’ll forget it. I’ll forget I ever saw it.

  It has no eyes that Emmie can see, and when the thing pauses near the holly bush and sniffs at the February night, its breath doesn’t steam in the cold air. She doesn’t dare move, doesn’t breathe, does her best not to even think. Something pink and wet darts from a ragged cleft up high that might be its mouth, and then it bends low and licks at the snow and slush in the middle of the road. It lingers there a moment longer, as if considering whatever it might or might not have just tasted, and then a sudden strong gust of wind seems to catch the creature off guard and blows it away down Waterman Street, back in the direction Emmie’s come, tossing it thundering along, weightless as a discarded candy wrapper and heavy as the heart of a collapsing star. Emmie doesn’t move, crouching there beneath the holly bush as the snow slowly covers her. The creature’s footsteps have become distant, faint fireworks heard from far, far away, and Emmie shuts her eyes tightly and shivers and wishes that this could be the end of the dream.

  “It’s not so cold anymore,” the brown girl says, standing there with Emmie now, and she brushes snow from Emmie’s lips and eyelids. “We’re lucky,” she says. “That was a very wicked place, indeed, but it didn’t find us, and it won’t come back. They never do.”

  “A place?” Emmie asks, and then she realizes that the brown girl’s right. It is warmer now, only the cold of any snowy winter night, nothing more and nothing less. “What do you mean? I saw it. It wasn’t a place. It was a monster.”

  “There’s that silly word again,” the brown girl says, and smiles at Emmie. “You use that word entirely too often, Emma Jean Silvey. You’re going to have to try harder. Now hurry. We still have a ways to go.”

  “Will he be safe?” Emmie asks, glancing past the streetlights, peering deep into the night, towards the place where she thinks her house must be. “Will Deacon be safe now that I’m gone?”

  “The Bailiff isn’t looking for Deacon,” the brown girl says. “He’s looking for you, dear. Now come on. I don’t like the snow. It was snowing when my mother died.”

  “What about my mother?” Emmie asks her. “Was it snowing when my mother died?”

  The brown girl from the attic stares at her a moment, lost in thought or looking at something only she can see, and then she smiles and takes Emmie’s hand. “I don’t know,” she says. “But I’m beginning to think it may turn out that way.”

  For twenty-eight years, the East Side railroad tunnel has sat half-forgotten beneath the streets of College Hill, a relic from a time when trains and trolleys were still used to carry people through the city. The two teams of workmen, one digging east from Benefit and the other west from Gano, met beneath Cooke Street on April 7, 1908, a full day ahead of schedule. Two hundred thousand cubic yards of hard Paleozoic bedrock were moved in the excavations, and when the workers were finally finished, the tunnel stretched more than five thousand feet from end to end. There were no casualties during the construction, which began in 1906, but there were persistent reports of peculiar noises, especially towards the western end of the dig, and a number of workers complained of foul odors, like rotting meat and ammonia, which seemed to leak in places from the freshly broken rocks. Others said that they often felt that they were being watched, and half a dozen men reported brief but unnerving encounters with doglike “goblins” or “devils” that never left tracks and always managed to lope away into the darkness and vanish before anyone was able to get a good look at them. There was a passing mention of the phantoms in an article published by the Providence Journal, mocking the Portuguese and Italian workers for not having left their superstitions in the old country.

  The East Side tunnel was officially opened during a ceremony on November 15, 1908. Dignitaries were in attendance, ribbons were cut, speeches were made, and the stories told by superstitious immigrant workmen were quickly lost from the memory of Providence. For seventy-three years, as the restless world of men changed from one thing to another, passing from gaslights to electric bulbs to the fire of splitting atoms, the tunnel served the purpose for which it had been built. The men and women who passed through it, safe inside their rattling steel carriages, never reported anything strange, and certainly not the watchful eyes of subterranean demons. And then, when the world had at last changed enough that men no longer had any need for the tunnel, it was sealed off at both ends—for the public good—and the earth beneath College Hill became a secret place once again. There were padlocks, and gates were welded shut, but students from RISD and Brown would always break them open again, and parties in the tunnel became a routine occurrence. Sometimes the homeless sought shelter there, but it was wet and inhospitable, and there were usually better places to sleep.

  Emmie Silvey crosses Gano Street, aiming for the scraggly patch of woods behind the baseball diamond and the soccer field, but the snow’s falling so fast and heavy now that she’s having trouble seeing more than a couple of feet in front of her. She follows the brown girl’s footprints so that she doesn’t end up somewhere she’s not supposed to be, only catching a glimpse of the girl now and then, but Emmie can hear her, the girl’s voice murmuring in her head, so she knows that she hasn’t been left alone in the stormy night.

  “It’s not much farther,” the girl tells her. “We’re almost there. I promise.”

  Emmie’s legs are beginning to ache and her lungs hurt, and she almost asks the girl why the woods aren’t good enough for hiding. I could sit down, she thinks. I could just walk over to the other side and sit down beneath a tree and wait to wake up.

  “It’s not fair,” Emmie mumbles, tasting the damp wool of her muffler. “Ghosts don’t get tired.”

  I told you that I’m not a ghost, the girl replies. And besides, you don’t know that.

  “I know Deacon’s not going to be happy when he finds out that I’ve run off in a damn snowstorm. I know that.”

  He’ll understand, the brown girl assures Emmie.

  “You think? You don’t know Deacon. He’s only gonna kill me, if I’m lucky.”

  It’s just a dream, the brown girl reminds her. Surely he won’t punish you for what you’ve done in a dream.

  Yeah, Emmie thinks, reaching the far side of Gano Street and pausing beneath the snow-laden limbs of a big maple to catch her breath. It’s only a dream, and Deacon is my father, and that woman with the tattoo on the train wasn’t my mother. It’s only a dream, and there’s no box of secrets beneath Deacon’s bed.

  “I should’ve stayed in New York,” Emmie says. “This is way worse than dead horses.”

  He would have come for you there, the girl from the attic tells her. The Bailiff goes wherever he needs to go, wherever they need him to be.

  “Who’s the Bailiff?”

  “It’s not much farther. We need to keep moving, Emma Jean. The tunnel isn’t far.” And Emmie realizes that the girl is actually speaking to her now. She looks up, and the brown girl is standing knee-deep in a drift.

  “Aren’t you even cold?” Emmie asks.

  “We have to be going,” the girl says. “We have to hurry.”

  So Emmie keeps quiet and follows her into the dark woods behind the park, too tired to argue anymore, and she’s gone this far, so she might as well see what’s waiting at the other end of it all. It certainly can’t be anything worse than what she saw on Waterman Street. The girl guides her down a trail between the trees and underbrush, a narrow footpath leading them back towards the Seekonk River. The wind rustles through the dry branches, and just as Emmie starts to miss the streetlights, the brown girl begins to sing as she walks. Her voice is making Emmie a little sleepy, but it also helps to take her mind off the cold.

  When the mistletoe was green,

  Midst the winter’s snows,

  Sunshine in thy face was seen,

  Kissing lips of rose.

  Aura Lea, Aura Lea,

  Take my golden ring;

  Love and light return with thee,

  And swallows wit
h the spring.

  “What was that?” Emmie asks her, when the girl stops singing. “I’ve never heard that song before.”

  “My father taught it to me. It was one of my mother’s favorite songs. He sang it almost every single day.”

  “Is he dead?” Emmie asks. “Is your father dead, too?”

  “No,” the girl says. “But he’s gone away. The hounds sent him away. He’s coming back for me soon, though.”

  They’re standing together at what first appears to be a fork in the trail, but then Emmie sees that it’s actually a place where the trail ends at an old abandoned railroad track, one side leading off towards the river and the other back west towards Gano Street.

  “We go that way,” the brown girl says, sounding very certain of herself, and she points left, towards the glow of College Hill.

  “But that’s where we just were,” Emmie protests and kicks at a stump buried in the snow.

  “Yes, but nevertheless,” the brown girl says, annoyed or insulted that Emmie’s questioning her judgement, “that’s the way to the tunnel. That way,” and she points right, “only leads to the bridge. We don’t need the bridge.”

  “I thought you wanted a bridge.”

  “Yes, but not that sort of bridge.”

  “I’m going home,” Emmie grumbles.

  “No. No, you’re not. You know that you’re not. Now stop dawdling,” and, without another word, the brown girl heads off down the tracks. Emmie waits a moment or two, wondering if the girl bleeds, wondering if she can fight, and then Emmie Silvey takes a deep breath and follows. The brown girl is singing again.

  Aura Lea, the bird may flee,

  The willow’s golden hair

  Swing through winter fitfully,

  On the stormy air.

  Yet if thy blue eyes I see,

  Gloom will soon depart;

  For to me, sweet Aura Lea

  Is sunshine through the heart.