Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Well, we can’t stop here,” Odd Willie says and coughs. “We gotta keep moving, or I’m never going to make it. Left or right, kid. You pick.”

  Emmie picks left, for no particular reason, and leads Odd Willie Lothrop down the long tunnel, which seems to slope gradually upwards. The air is dank and smells like mud and mold, and there’s a chemical odor that burns Emmie’s nose and eyes, like the place beneath the sink where Deacon keeps the bottles of Clorox and detergent, Mr. Clean and Drano and Formula 409. When she asks Odd Willie about it, he says it’s from the river, that the old textile mills along the Blackstone dump all their toxic sludge right into the river, and that’s what she’s smelling.

  Once, they cross a narrow wooden bridge, pine boards gone slick and punky, and Emmie pauses to look over the edge. But there’s only blackness down there, as far as she can see, and the rushing of flowing water far below.

  “Shake a leg, kid. Ain’t nothing down there you want to see,” he says, then grunts as he shifts Soldier from one shoulder to the other. “And, more important, there’s nothing down there you want to be seen by.”

  The tunnel rises, turns left, then right, then left again, and when they come to an archway leading to another chamber or a side tunnel, Willie tells her to keep going straight. There’s a skull resting on a small ledge above the arch, and Emmie tells herself it’s only the skull of a coyote or a big dog, but she knows better. The next time the tunnel turns right, they’re greeted by a gust of cold, fresh air.

  “This must be the way,” she says. “I think I can even smell the outside. It smells like snow.”

  “What the hell does snow smell like?” Odd Willie asks, and stops again to get his breath.

  “Clean,” Emmie tells him. “Snow smells clean.”

  Odd Willie shuts his eyes and licks at his lips. “Christ, I wish I had a goddamn beer.”

  “I’d settle for a Cherry Coke,” Emmie says, “or some birch beer.”

  “I thought we were fucking dead back there,” and he tightens his hold on Soldier. “If you hadn’t come along, you and that goddamn crystal ball of yours—”

  “It wasn’t mine,” Emmie says, interrupting Odd Willie. “It was Pearl’s, and it wasn’t a crystal ball, either.”

  “You saved our sorry skins,” he says and opens his eyes again. “We owe you one, Emmie Silvey.”

  “I just want to go home, that’s all.”

  “Then that’s where you’re gonna go,” Odd Willie tells her. “Just as soon as we can get out of this shithole, I’ll drive you myself. Hell, I’ll even get you that bottle of birch beer. You like Polar?”

  “Yeah, Polar’s good. Are you ready now?” she asks.

  “As I’ll ever be, which isn’t saying very goddamn much.” And she starts walking again, heading in the direction the clean, wintry air is coming from, and he follows.

  Odd Willie left Soldier and Emmie in the woods not far from the north side of the cemetery. When she asked where he was going, he told her that he had to steal a car, unless she’d gotten it in her head to walk all the way back to Providence. The day was bright, but it was still snowing—a white sky and whiter ground—and Emmie wondered if it was only the next day, only Monday, or if maybe she’d been gone a long time and it’d been a whole week or more since she left Pearl in the railroad tunnel. Maybe it had been snowing for days. She sat with Soldier, the two of them beneath an old poplar tree that Odd Willie had picked because he said ghouls hated poplar trees. When she asked why, he wouldn’t tell her, so she had a feeling he was lying and had only said that so she wouldn’t be afraid. Soldier was still unconscious, and her fever was worse. Sweat trickled across her face, and she shivered so hard that her teeth chattered. Emmie wrapped her tighter in the robes that Odd Willie had taken off the ghoul he’d killed, and told her about Aslan defeating the armies of the White Witch. She felt silly doing it, but she was scared, and it was all she could think of to talk about, and it made the time go faster.

  And then Willie was back much sooner than she’d expected, back in the cemetery and blowing the horn so she’d know it was only him coming—two short honks, one long. She followed him through the snow as he carried Soldier up the hill again. He laid her in the backseat of the purple Chevrolet Malibu, spread a blanket over her (Emmie didn’t ask where the blanket or the car had come from), and then they drove away from Oak Hill and Woonsocket, and no one and nothing tried to stop them.

  It’s Wednesday, and they’ve been at the seedy little motel just outside Uxbridge, Massachusetts, for almost two days now. Willie drove north on icy back roads until he found the place, and he told Emmie they’d probably be okay there until Soldier felt better and he could figure out what to do next. The walls are the same shade of green as lime sherbet, and the carpet is orange. Emmie’s sitting on one of the queen-sized beds with Soldier, swabbing her bruised and blistered face with a damp washcloth, and Odd Willie’s on the other bed, talking on his cell phone, having another argument with the man he calls the Bailiff. The television is on a channel that’s been showing nothing but Tom and Jerry cartoons for two hours, but the volume’s turned all the way down.

  “What I want is some sort of fucking security,” he says again. “I’ve told you that, what, like a hundred goddamn times already? I keep fucking telling you that. I want a fucking guarantee that it’s safe to come in. That’s what I want.”

  There’s a long pause while Willie chews at a thumbnail and stares at the TV screen. Emmie lays the washcloth back across Soldier’s forehead; she’s sick of Tom and Jerry and wishes he would change the channel.

  “Damn straight, I’m paranoid. Right now, I’m the most paranoid motherfucker in New England. You weren’t there, and you have no goddamn idea what we walked into.”

  Another pause, shorter than the last, and then Odd Willie says he’ll call back later and hangs up. “Fucking mouse,” he says and points at the television with the antenna of his cell phone. “It’s just a game to him.”

  “He doesn’t want to be eaten,” Emmie says. “That’s all, he just doesn’t want to be eaten.”

  “Then maybe he ought to live somewhere there isn’t a damned cat. Lots of people don’t have cats. Christ, man, I hate that little brown fucker. He’s fucking sadistic; you know that, right? You know what ‘sadistic’ means? That is a sadistic fucking mouse.”

  “It’s almost suppertime,” Emmie says. “You should let me call my father now.”

  Odd Willie frowns and sits up, swinging his long legs over the edge of the bed. “I told you I can’t let you do that. We’ll get you home, I swear. There’s just some shit has to be cleared up first, so no one else gets hurt.”

  “Deacon’s gonna think I’m dead. He’s gonna think someone kidnapped me.”

  Odd Willie looks at the clock radio on the table between the beds. It’s almost seven o’clock. “Well, then, just think how much happier he’ll be when you show up safe and sound. Want a hamburger?”

  “No. I’m tired of hamburgers,” Emmie says and watches Soldier’s eyelids flutter. They’ve been fluttering all day, but she still hasn’t opened them.

  “Then how about some fucking McNuggets? Those are pretty good.”

  “They taste like shit,” Emmie tells him.

  “There’s some sort of pizza joint—”

  “I don’t want pizza. I want to call Deacon. I want you to take me home.”

  “Kid, you’re just gonna have to be cool, all right? When I get this crap straightened out—”

  “If you don’t get Soldier a doctor soon, she’s gonna die,” Emmie says. “She’s in a coma. Her fever’s up to a hundred and two again. The aspirin aren’t working.”

  “I need a fucking cigarette,” Willie says and reaches for his shoes, because Emmie won’t let him smoke in the room. He got some clothes and shoes that fit from a Salvation Army in Uxbridge; there’s also a pair of Levi’s, a black sweater, and some scuffed-up old cowboy boots for Soldier, if she ever wakes up. He tosses Emmie the remote and
tells her to find something else to watch.

  “Hey, you’re the one who wouldn’t change the channel,” she tells him. “I hate Tom and Jerry. I told you I hate Tom and Jerry.”

  “Well, I hate them worse than you do. You’re a kid. I thought kids liked fucking cartoons and shit. Just change the channel. I’ll be back in five.”

  “You know it’s almost suppertime,” she says again, and Odd Willie rolls his eyes.

  “Decide what you want, and I’ll go get it. I’ll be back in five minutes.” And he stands up, puts on the Red Sox jacket that he also found at the Salvation Army store, and leaves Emmie alone in the room with Soldier. Before he pulls the door shut, she sees that it’s snowing again. She turns the sound on the television up loud and flips channels until she finds a documentary about the planet Mars, then lies down beside Soldier and stares at the television a few minutes before glancing at the phone sitting useless on the bedside table. Odd Willie disconnected it and hid the cord somewhere. She’s tried to find it, whenever he leaves her alone, but she’s starting to think he must have hidden it out in the car.

  “What’s going to happen to me?” she asks Soldier, pretending that Soldier can answer her, pretending that Soldier might know the answer. Soldier’s eyelids flutter, her lower lip twitches, and then her face is still again.

  “You know I’d help you, if I knew how. Right now, there are lots of things I’d do, if I knew how.” Then Emmie stares at her a moment, her face like someone who’s only asleep and having a very bad dream.

  “You look like my mother,” Emmie says. “You look like her a lot.” She’s been thinking it since she first saw Soldier beneath Woonsocket, but she’s been too afraid to actually say it out loud, too afraid of what it may mean to allow herself to even think about it for more than a few seconds at a time. But it’s true. Soldier’s face isn’t exactly her mother’s face—the face of the woman in the old photographs that Deacon’s shown her and the ones that she found in the box under his bed—but it’s close enough. Too close. And Soldier doesn’t have yellow eyes. She has green eyes like Deacon. Green eyes like Chance Silvey.

  Emmie remembers the gold wedding ring she took from the box, and reaches into her jeans pocket, afraid suddenly that she might have lost it somewhere, in the black woman’s desert or one of the tunnels. But the ring’s still there, and she takes it out and stares at it for a moment.

  On the television, the narrator is talking about a time, billions of years ago, when Mars might have had an ocean.

  “Willie’s not so bad,” she says to Soldier. “He’s not nearly as big a creep as he wants everyone to think he is. If he was, he’d have left me down there to die, right? He wouldn’t have saved me. He’s mostly just scared all the time, and that’s why he acts the way he does.”

  Emmie doesn’t have to touch Soldier’s skin to feel the heat coming off her; it’s almost like lying next to an oven. Emmie thinks about taking her temperature again, slipping the digital thermometer beneath her tongue and watching the numbers go up, waiting to see just how bad it is. Willie bought the thermometer at a CVS the day before, when he bought aspirin and Tylenol, Neosporin and gauze bandages and a tube of something smelly he keeps combing through his hair. She hasn’t asked him where he’s getting the money. She hasn’t really cared.

  “You can’t die,” Emmie whispers. “You can’t. If you die—” and then she makes herself stop, because Sadie has told her that words are magick and she should be careful how she uses them. She slips the ring into her pocket again and goes back to watching television. And she holds Soldier’s hand, no matter how hot it is, and waits for Willie to come back.

  Dreaming, dreaming so long now that Soldier has forgotten that there was ever anything before the dream. There was fire somewhere back towards the beginning, an unimaginable, devouring fire that would have burned away the universe and still been hungry, and now some fraction of the fire is trapped inside her. Perhaps no single fire—Quaker Jameson’s roadhouse in flames, the fire Odd Willie set at Rocky Point and then the sizzling being he summoned, George Ballou’s bonfire and the beast rising from it, and, finally, a star inside a crystal ball. Fire to destroy and purify, fire to deliver and condemn, and she breathed it all in, and it might never find a way out again.

  Dreaming, she has drifted through years and months, days and hours, and sometimes it seems that she only drifts and there’s no time at all. She’s never entirely alone, because she has the fire that she swallowed for company, and she has the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles, too, who comes and goes, rattling on about things that Soldier only occasionally understands. She has memories and things that can’t be memories because they haven’t happened yet or will never happen.

  “I sent her to you,” the alchemist’s daughter says, but Soldier isn’t at all sure she believes her. “The poor child,” the girl continues, “she was lost and alone on the sea in a tiny yellow boat named the Fly-Away Horse, bobbing and lost in a hurricane tempest upon the wild, wild sea. There was a whale that wanted to swallow her alive, and there were monsters, and a phantom mariner who catches mermaids on fishhooks and cooks them in his skillet.”

  Soldier watches herself sitting on the floor in the Bailiff’s study, a child in a blue calico dress eating sugar cookies and drinking grape soda while an old man talks. But here he has silver eyes, like the vampires do, and his words are black and living, and there’s a nasty plopping sound as they drip from his lips to lie in a squirming heap on his desk.

  She walks the long, narrow path down to the dragon, old Root-nibbler waiting for her on the night of the Full Hunger Moon, the last confirmation before she passes from childhood into the service of the ghouls. At the bottom of the pit, she kneels and thrusts her arms into the twin holes in the earth, one ringed in gold, the other in platinum, and holds her breath, expecting the dragon to take her hands. Expecting to die there with all the ghouls and the other changelings looking on.

  “Strictly speaking, this has never happened either,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles says and shakes her head. “You’re the only adult changeling alive who hasn’t had to make the passage through the three trials, fire and blades and teeth. The ghul imagine you’re much too precious to risk on such dangerous formalities.”

  “They sent me to Woonsocket to fucking die,” she replies, and “No,” the girl says. “The Bailiff sent you to Woonsocket. Not the ghouls.”

  “The Bailiff serves the ghouls. Whatever he does, it’s nothing that isn’t their will.”

  “Oh, don’t be such a silly sap,” the girl says, and then she wanders off again, leaving Soldier alone on the Fly-Away Horse, and the fisherman who only catches mermaids scowls at her and goes back to wrestling with the tiller. The rain’s falling so hard now that she can barely see him, even though he’s only a few feet away from her, squatting in the stern of the dory. The boat rises and falls on waves so high that their white crests scrape at the low clouds; then it races back down the steep sides of watery canyons, plunging into troughs that carry them almost all the way to the seafloor. The tattered sail, shredded by the wind, flutters uselessly in the gale. She doesn’t know the fisherman’s name; she isn’t even sure that he has one. She paid him a dollar and a handful of dead spiders to get her from one side of Block Island Sound to the other, but now she thinks that they’ll both drown before they ever see land again.

  “I ought to have known better,” the fisherman growls and chews the stem of his soggy corncob pipe. “I ought to have my sorry skull stove in, takin’ on the likes of you.”

  “I was only looking for the way across,” she says, surprised that she doesn’t have to raise her voice to be heard above the storm.

  “Well, I hope you’re pleased with yourself,” he grunts, but Soldier doesn’t know what he means. The voice of the storm is the same as the voice of the fire, the fire from the beginning, and soon it will fall on them like a hammer. The water seethes with the restless coils of great eels and serpents and the eternally searchi
ng arms of Mother Hydra and Father Kraken.

  “My father caught this boat in 1922,” the girl from the attic says, and smiles. “It was one of his earliest experiments with translocation. He was only trying to catch a bit of the sea. He said the boat was pure luck.”

  Sand blows down from the dunes, which have never been waves, no matter how much they might emulate or envy them. The Fly-Away Horse lies on its starboard side, half-buried in the beach, its mast snapped in two and its rigging and canvas scattered all about, and Soldier is sitting cross-legged in the shade of the boat, hiding from the desert sun. There are dead mackerel and jellyfish and trilobites baking in the noon heat, stranded by the tide. The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles told her to wait here if she wanted to speak with the black woman, the woman who is ancient and unaging and who wanders the desert looking for lost dreamers.

  “I never said I was lost,” she tells the girl.

  “You certainly don’t look particularly found,” the girl replies and kneels in the sand in front of Soldier. The noonday sun gathers in her hair like honey and washes gently across her almond skin. She doesn’t make eye contact with Soldier, pokes at the corpse of a blue-gray starfish instead, flipping it over to expose all the hundreds and hundreds of wriggling tube feet to the sun.

  “I don’t need your help,” Soldier says.

  “What I did to you—”

  “Is ancient fucking history. Go away. Leave me alone.”

  “They said they would kill my father if I didn’t help them, if I didn’t work the contraption. No one else knew how. They said they would send assassins all the way to Weir to find him. They said—”

  “Leave me alone,” Soldier tells her, and the black-skinned woman kneeling in the sand picks up the dying starfish and sighs.

  “It used to make me very sad, finding all the helpless little things that the sea spits out, all the things cast up to die. I used to think, perhaps I could save them all. I’d walk this beach for days and days,” and she motions at the shoreline stretching away on either side. “I would find them and carry them back down to the water where they belonged. I would try to give them back to the sea.”