Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Emmie concentrates on the girl’s voice and the sound of her own boots in the snow, the wind and the brittle noise the snowflakes make as they fall. And before long they’ve come to a place where the tracks end at a rust-red wall of corrugated tin built within a high concrete archway set into the side of the hill.

  “Here,” the brown girl says. “They tried to seal it shut a long time ago, but nothing ever stays shut. Nothing that should be open.”

  “The tunnel?” Emmie asks, and she realizes that there’s a light here, thin white light tinged faintly blue, light that doesn’t cast any shadows that she can see. Emmie can’t be sure where it’s coming from, but it seems to be shining down from somewhere above their heads, near the top of the concrete arch, but when she looks up, there’s only the black and snowy sky, the wall of metal and cement.

  “Yes,” the brown girl says. “You’ll be safe in here till morning. The hounds won’t look here. They won’t think you’d ever come so near.”

  In front of the tunnel is a small clearing strewn with junk—the rusted remains of an automobile and a box spring, piles of beer cans, and the rotted carcass of a sofa. The land here is marshy, and there’s dark and stagnant water on both sides of the tracks. The water looks almost like ink, ink with little blobs of snow floating about in it, and Emmie thinks of Frodo and Gandalf outside the mines of Moria, the black pool and the guardian of the West Gate.

  “You’re sure it’s safe?” Emmie asks.

  “I’m afraid nowhere’s safe,” the brown girl says. “But they won’t look here tonight.”

  “And tomorrow?”

  “We’ll deal with that when it comes.”

  Someone has laid down wooden pallets, end to end, between the steel rails, and they lead to a door set into the wall of rusted tin. The door is standing ajar, and the strange blue-white light doesn’t seem to reach inside. There’s a red plastic milk crate, half-submerged, floating in the water on the right side of the tracks, and it reminds Emmie of her little room in Sadie’s apartment in New York and makes her wish she were there. The brown girl steps gingerly across the pallets. She stops near the floating crate and looks back at Emmie.

  “You should hurry,” she says. “There are rules.”

  Emmie nods her head and takes one step forward. The lower part of the tin wall and the concrete of the tunnel are obscured by decades of graffiti, dull metal tagged and spray-painted with a drunken, looping neon tapestry of patterns and symbols and words that mean nothing to her, but it’s an unexpected, distracting splash of color among the sleeping brown and gray of the trees and the snow and the stones.

  “What kind of rules?” Emmie asks.

  “There are always rules, especially in very magickal places,” the brown girl tells her. “Don’t you read?” And the brown girl takes something from a pocket in her dress, something that glints in the blue light, and Emmie guesses it must be a coin, and the girl from the attic drops it into the milk crate with a faint splash. “Don’t worry,” she says. “That’s enough for both of us.”

  “Thank you,” Emmie says, though she isn’t at all sure she should be thankful, and the wooden pallets creak beneath the rubber soles of the boots that Sadie gave her as she walks towards the tunnel. She can see now that there’s a black-and-white circle painted on the door, a white circle ringed by interwoven lines of black, and a cracked black heart at the very bottom. Inside, the circle has been painted black, and at its center there’s a white horse that’s fallen or been knocked down, a horse on its back with its legs in the air. Above the horse, in white lettering, is written, The horse is dead, and below the horse is written, From here we walk.

  “What does that mean?” Emmie asks the brown girl, who makes a face like it’s the silliest question she’s ever heard.

  “You were there,” she says. “I don’t think you need me to explain, Emma Jean.” And then she steps through the doorway, and the darkness inside seems to swallow her.

  “The horse is dead,” Emmie whispers, glancing up at the snowy place where the blue-white light might be coming from, then down at the floating milk crate. “From here we walk.” And she thinks once more about turning back, about turning and running all the way home again, before she says Deacon’s name aloud, then crosses the threshold into the tunnel.

  II

  Lost Girls

  My cocoon tightens, colors tease,

  I’m feeling for the air;

  A dim capacity for wings

  Degrades the dress I wear.

  —EMILY DICKINSON

  SIX

  Shadow and Flame

  “F ucking dead,” Odd Willie moans, somewhere nearby, somewhere in the river-scented darkness and the acrid stench of the mill-befouled Blackstone, and Soldier grits her teeth and shuts her eyes again. No sense staring into that black void until her eyes burn and she begins to imagine taunting, swirling colors that aren’t there to see. No light left down here. No light at all. Only pain and the darkness and Odd Willie moaning about being dead. Both of them dangling headdown like fat hogs strung up for the slaughterhouse knife, her wrists tied behind her back, her ankles bound. Soldier’s head and spine and shoulders are white fire, but at least she can’t feel her hands or feet because she’s been hanging here so long, and, besides, the nylon cord and electrical tape have cut off the circulation.

  “Fuckers,” mumbles Odd Willie.

  They may have been hanging here only an hour, but it might have been much longer. She remembers the car and the cemetery, the glamour, the butt of Saben’s pistol against her skull, then an indefinite, numb nothingness before being kicked awake and finding herself lying naked on the floor of the ossuary—a floor tiled with polished teeth, walls lined with long bones and skulls, a vaulted ceiling of ribs and vertebrae. And then she and Odd Willie were beaten and tortured and raped by Ballou’s goons until the goons got bored and tied them up and left them alone together in the dark.

  And then, later, she was dreaming, until Odd Willie’s moaning woke her. She was dreaming about the musty library in the yellow house on Benefit Street, and the Bailiff was offering her a candy cane. She took it, translucent sugar the color of amethyst, and it was nothing she’d ever tasted before or since—not quite licorice and not quite peppermint, a bit like eating violets. She sat on a velvet cushion on the floor while he read to her from the big book lying open on his desk.

  “She killed us,” Odd Willie moans. “We’re dead, dead as dog shit, and she fucking killed us.”

  Soldier opens one eye and tries to guess where his voice is coming from. “We’re not dead,” she says, though they could be, for all she knows. “Now shut up. My head hurts.”

  “She killed us both. That crazy, fucking, backstabbing cunt killed us both.”

  Soldier closes her right eye again, pretty sure Odd Willie must be somewhere to the left of her, anyhow, and tries to recall exactly how the candy tasted.

  “Aren’t you listening? Aren’t you even paying attention?” the Bailiff asks and smiles at her. His green eyes are the kindest eyes that she’s ever seen, and Soldier wishes that she could leave the warrens and live up here with him in the house forever. He could be her father, and she could spend every day listening to him read from his books. They could take long walks in the sunlight together, and he could tell her stories whenever she was having trouble getting to sleep.

  “My fucking mouth tastes like puke and blood,” Odd Willie says and makes a painful spitting sound.

  “Someone keeps distracting me,” Soldier tells the Bailiff, and he sighs and scratches at his beard.

  “Well, you’d best try to ignore her, little soldier girl,” he says. “She’s trouble good and proper, that one. Lightning in a bottle. I don’t mind saying it out loud. They should’ve slit her throat a long damn time ago, if you were to ask me.”

  “I didn’t ask you anything.”

  “Too true.”

  In the darkness, the damp air is cold and smells like mud and mold and earthworms and the po
isoned river, and Soldier wishes Odd Willie would shut the hell up. She couldn’t hear him in the dream, in the library with the Bailiff, and she couldn’t feel all the places where they’ve hit her or kicked her or sliced her with their knives, their nails and their claws. And then there’s a new noise—dry twigs snapping, the living bones of a sparrow cracked open between a cat’s teeth, thin ice breaking apart underfoot—and Soldier stares out into the darkness.

  “Oh gods,” Odd Willie whimpers. “They’re coming back. Oh, fuck me, Soldier, fuck me—”

  “Shut the fuck up, you fucking pussy,” Soldier growls at him, and the effort makes her head pound and her stomach roll.

  “Is this shit leading anywhere?” she asks the Bailiff, and he grunts and turns a page.

  “Depends what you’re asking me,” he replies, then begins reading to her again, the poetry of demons transcribed by the hands of dead men, a meandering recollection from the last day of a battle in a city of ghosts that sleeps forever now beneath sand and blistering desert sky.

  “What’s the point?” she says, interrupting him. “That’s what I’m asking you, old man. I’m sick of riddles and dreams and fucking symbolism. If you’ve got something to say to me, say it or shut up.”

  The Bailiff snorts and marks the page with a long white feather before closing the book and pushing it away across the wide desk. “The universe,” he says, “and all those unfortunate beings locked up within it—cosmic inmates, if you will—have no purpose but the purpose which they imagine for themselves within the spiraling dream of time.”

  “That’s very fucking nice,” Soldier says, and she decides that the stick of candy isn’t the color of amethyst, after all. “That’s almost goddamn poetry. Did you find it scrawled in one of your books? Is it something else you learned from the hounds?”

  “It’s not a riddle,” the child from the attic says, the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles, the girl whose name is never spoken, and now Soldier remembers her standing in front of the Bailiff’s desk, running her fingers lovingly back and forth across the worn leather cover of the book. She’s smiling, and Soldier thinks that maybe the girl is remembering the time before they locked her away and stopped all the clocks her father built for the hounds.

  “You can’t be here,” Soldier says. The Bailiff doesn’t seem to have noticed the girl.

  “It wasn’t easy,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles replies, and suddenly she pulls her fingers back from the book, as if it’s burned her. “I broke three of his bindings, and now those moments are lost forever. I simply dropped them on the floor and they shattered. It’s the most wicked thing I’ve ever had to do.”

  “The universe,” the Bailiff continues, “and, indeed, all universes, are at war with the consequences of their consciousness. Sometimes they fashion the most ingenious weapons for their regiments. But occasionally the weapons are reluctant to fulfill their purpose. Guns jam. Arrows miss their mark. Shots go wild, as they say.”

  He doesn’t see her, Soldier thinks and opens her eyes again. He doesn’t see her, because she wasn’t there.

  There’s light now, warm light from a white candle held tight in the girl’s hand, the flame flickering uneasily in the dank air far beneath Woonsocket. “It’s simpler for me to move through dreams, usually,” she says. “There aren’t as many…” And the girl pauses a moment, furrowing her brow as though trying to recall a difficult or unfamiliar word. “…not as many watchers. At least, that’s what my father used to call them.”

  “In the eyes of the hounds,” the Bailiff says, “you have become just such a reluctant weapon. And I have failed to set you straight.”

  “You didn’t fail, old man. You never even tried.”

  “Too true,” he says again and smiles. “But that’s most likely beside the point.”

  “Somehow, I doubt the ghul will think so,” Soldier tells him, Soldier only five years old and seated on a velvet cushion on the floor, the tall bookshelves rising up all about her, so very tall that the tops are dappled with snow and lost in misty clouds. “You’re a traitor,” she says and licks the last of the candy off her fingers.

  “Now, now,” he frowns. “That’s an awfully weighty word for such a small girl to be tossing about. Perhaps you should endeavor to avoid it in the future.”

  “Soldier, that was a long time ago, that day with the Bailiff,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles says, and wax drips from her candle and puddles on the floor of molars and incisors and canines. “I need you here and now, with me. I need you awake. I have only a few moments left, and I can’t come back to you once I’ve gone.”

  “She fucking killed us,” Odd Willie says so softly that it’s almost a whisper, and he laughs and then begins to cough.

  “Do you want to die here?” the girl asks.

  “No,” Soldier says, and the Bailiff glares down at her from his seat at the desk, and she sees that what she mistook for kindness in his green eyes is something else altogether.

  “Don’t you start believing in fairy stories,” he warns her. “It’s a little late for that, child. They locked her away in that attic for a reason.”

  “Ask him why they put you there,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles says, so much anger and bitterness for the voice of a child, and Soldier realizes that she can’t see the girl anymore, only fluttering candlelight and her shadow stretched out across the floor of teeth.

  “Where did you go?” Soldier calls out, and her voice echoes dully off the moldering walls of the ossuary.

  “I’m here, behind you. Don’t make so much noise. These knots are going to take me a moment.”

  “Don’t you dare accept her help, Soldier,” the Bailiff commands, “not that one.” And he leans forward, towering above Soldier, who’s only a child sitting cross-legged on a ratty velvet cushion. Only five and lost in an endless canyon of books and shelves, the taste of something sweet fading on her tongue, and all of heaven become the voice of a madman.

  “Did you send me here to die?” Soldier asks him. The Bailiff licks at his lips, and her body sways a little as the wizard’s daughter struggles to free her hands. Like the pendulum of a clock, she thinks, like the clock on the mantel in the yellow house on Benefit Street, the clock with the face of a girl.

  “Oh, Soldier”—the Bailiff sighs—“don’t you know you have meant all the world to me? Should any harm befall you, I could never forgive myself.”

  “How old am I?” Soldier asks, and the girl stops working at the knots and tells her, No, no, Soldier, it’s not time for that question yet. That question will come later. The Bailiff narrows his glittering eyes and leans back in his squeaky chair.

  “How old was I when you took me up to the attic?” Soldier asks, feeling sick, and her mind wriggles cold and slippery, a great, squirming fish caught between her fingers. She’s blacking out again. “Answer me, you son of a bitch.”

  “You’ve had a very trying day,” the Bailiff replies, and behind Soldier the library door is opening, the silver-eyed woman come to claim her, to lead her back to the cellar steps and down to the Hounds of Cain. “We’ll talk about this another time, when you’re not so…excitable.”

  And then he’s gone, and that day is gone, gone and almost forgotten, and Soldier is only hanging in the abscess carved out beneath a hill in Woonsocket, hanging by her ankles while the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles tries to loosen the knots that George Ballou’s men have tied.

  “Who is she?” Odd Willie mumbles. “Soldier, who the hell is that girl? Where’d she come from?” but Soldier ignores him and shuts her eyes and lets the world fall away.

  “I hope you understand that this is an exceedingly special privilege,” the Bailiff said as he closed the library doors behind them. “Very few changelings have ever been allowed into the house, and far fewer have seen the second floor, and the number who’ve visited the attic…well, I can say with confidence that I could count those souls on the fingers of my left foot.” She smiled, imagining th
e mess that the Bailiff’s left foot must be; he locked the library with a silver key, then slipped the key into his pants pocket.

  “Is it true there’s a ghost up there?” she asked.

  “A ghost? Well, in a manner of speaking, I suppose. In a manner of speaking, there are many ghosts up there. More than you’d care to know. More than ever you could count.”

  “I wouldn’t care to know any at all,” Soldier said, and the Bailiff laughed and led her up a narrow staircase and down a long hallway hung with paintings and peeling Dresden-blue calico wallpaper. Soldier stopped to examine one of the strips of blue wallpaper, which she discovered was damp and sticky with something that smelled like soured milk; the Bailiff scolded her.

  “Don’t be greedy,” he scowled. “And don’t take liberties you haven’t been offered.”

  “I just wanted to see,” Soldier said, wiping her hand on the front of her dress. “I wanted to know why it was peeling off the wall, that’s all.”

  “But that’s a secret, Soldier girl, and this house and all those within its walls will reveal only the secrets they choose to reveal.”

  “It’s only wallpaper. That’s a pretty dumb secret.”

  “That’s not for you to say, most especially not when you’ve already been accorded such grand and all but unprecedented honors.” And the Bailiff took her hand firmly in his so that she’d have to walk beside him and couldn’t stop to look at any of the portraits or urns or cut-glass doorknobs they’d have to pass to reach the end of the hall. “You wouldn’t want to seem ungrateful,” the Bailiff said.

  “No,” she agreed. “I wouldn’t,” and in only a few more steps they’d reached the far end of the hallway. There was a small wrought-iron table with a green marble top and a peacock green vase of dead roses, and all the wallpaper had been stripped away here to reveal the plaster underneath. The wall was marked with a confusion of red and gold runes that Soldier couldn’t read. She was about to ask what they meant, when the Bailiff pointed at the ceiling; she looked up and saw the trapdoor. It had a length of rope for a handle, and there were more runes painted on it.