Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Care to be just a little more specific?” Odd Willie asks the rat, and it frowns and glances towards the shadows at the far end of the hallway.

  “Yeah, sure, whatever you say, Mr. Lothrop,” the rat sneers. “If you wanted a goddamn turncoat, you should have tried pumping the fucking bear before you came across.”

  “The bear doesn’t talk to changelings,” Soldier says. “You know that.”

  Emmie starts to ask her why the bear won’t talk to changelings, and how a stuffed bear can talk to anyone at all, but then she decides both questions are too ridiculous to bother with. She looks past the rat, at the hall, at the faraway place where it ends. The walls are made of doors set one against the other—black doors, crimson doors, weathered gray doors, and doors the color of butterscotch. None of them have knobs or handles, only empty black holes where doorknobs ought to be.

  “Anyhow,” the rat says and waves a paw in the air dismissively, “you’ll see it all for yourselves plenty soon enough now. The Bailiff ain’t shy with his little indiscretions, not down here. Follow me, and don’t any of you say peep until—”

  “We know the drill,” Soldier tells the rat. “Let’s just get this over with.”

  The rat shrugs and drops down onto all fours. It sniffs at Emmie’s boots and scowls. “Just trying to keep the peace,” it snorts. “What precious few crumbs are left of it.” And then it turns and walks slowly down the long hall of doors, slipping through the yellow-white pools of light from the bare bulbs overhead and the dark patches dividing them.

  “Fucking fleabag twat,” Odd Willie mutters and follows the talking rat.

  “I know,” Emmie says to Soldier. “Stay close to you. Don’t touch anything.”

  “If I hadn’t killed her, you’d both be dead by now,” Soldier replies, answering a question that Emmie hasn’t asked in hours. “No reason you should take my word for it, but it’s the truth. I’m not saying that’s why I did it. I did it because I didn’t have any choice.”

  “You said that already.”

  “Well, I thought maybe I should say it again.”

  “They’re getting way ahead of us,” Emmie says and points at Odd Willie and the rat. “We’re gonna have to hurry to catch up.”

  “Take my hand,” Soldier tells her, and Emmie does, squeezes it tight like she did before they walked through the bear into this place of doors and bare lightbulbs and missing doorknobs, and Soldier leads her down the hallway. Emmie tries to keep her mind off whatever’s at the other end by silently counting the doors on her right, and she makes it as far as fifty-eight before they get to the spot where Odd Willie is waiting with the rat. The hallway ends in something that Emmie at first mistakes for a mirror, because she can see herself and Soldier and Odd Willie reflected there in its smooth, glassy surface, but then the rat steps through it and vanishes.

  “You guys know what a cliché is?” Emmie asks.

  “Hey, I’m not the prick that built this funhouse shithole,” Odd Willie says, “so don’t go complaining to me.”

  Emmie stares back at herself a moment, then glances up at Soldier. “We go through a mirror?”

  “It’s not a mirror,” Soldier says. “And I don’t have time to explain, so don’t even ask.”

  Odd Willie coughs and smoothes his hair with both his hands. “Stand up straight,” he says, and for a second Emmie thinks he’s talking to her, so she stands up straight. “Chew with your fucking mouth shut,” he continues. “Mind your Ps and Qs, Master Lothrop.” And then he steps through the mirror that isn’t a mirror and is gone.

  “The Bailiff built this place?” Emmie asks.

  “No. He’s just renting it. A demon built it.”

  “There’s no such thing as demons. I mean, I don’t believe in them,” Emmie says, even though she’s starting to think that maybe she does, that perhaps she believes in lots of things that Deacon’s told her are only fairy tales and horseshit. But mostly, she says it just to have something to say, just to buy a few more seconds before Soldier leads her through the looking glass.

  “It really doesn’t matter what you do and don’t believe,” Soldier tells her and then chews at her lower lip a moment. “But you’ll figure that out, sooner or later.”

  “If I live that long.”

  “Yeah, Emmie. That’s the way it always works. If you live that long,” and then Soldier steps through her own reflection, and there’s nothing Emmie can do but follow her.

  The passage lasts only a glittering instant, but it fills Soldier’s head with the cavernous, shattering, hopeless noise of storms, of waves pounding the shingles of rocky shorelines, of the unanswered prayers of dying men. An instant of the raw chaos and pain woven together centuries ago to fashion this place from the nothingness between worlds, and then she’s standing with Odd Willie and Emmie, looking down at the great octagonal chamber, the Bailiff’s hiding place, standing on a dais carved from obsidian and petrified cypress logs. It might easily double as the set of some silent-era Rudolph Valentino romance of Arabian horsemen and harem girls, this room, half-lost beneath the clutter of draperies and carpets and silk pillows, Moroccan antiques and Syrian hookahs. The air is warm and smells like blood, like hot wax and frankincense, opium and shisha tobaccos. And there are bodies everywhere. Soldier gags and covers her mouth; astral travel has always made her a little queasy, and the stink of the room isn’t helping any.

  “Well, well,” the Bailiff says, and spreads his arms wide. He’s wearing a shabby lime-green bathrobe thrown open to reveal that he’s wearing nothing else. There’s a kukri in his left hand, its broad blade glinting wetly in the candlelight. “Have a look at what the cat’s dragged in.” His voice booms, amplified by the countless imperfections and peculiarities of the room’s geometry. “I was beginning to think you’d lost your way, Soldier girl. But here you are, safe and sound, almost pretty as a painted picture. Imagine my relief.”

  “I know you’re gonna tell me it’s none of my goddamn business,” Odd Willie says and points at the corpses of the Bailiff’s boy whores scattered about the chamber, and the room turns another trick, making his voice seem small and distant. “But why’d you do this? Why did you kill them?”

  “Shall we tell him, do you think?” the Bailiff asks Soldier, and then he laughs and tugs hard at his beard, which is tangled and matted with drying blood and claret wine and slobber. “Do we dare? Shall we be bold and let him in on our little secret?”

  “I’ve done what you asked, old man. I’ve brought you Saben’s daughter,” Soldier says, and then she pauses to cough and clear her throat; her mouth tastes like bile and incense. “Was it only so you could murder her, too?”

  Emmie tightens her grip on Soldier’s right hand, digging her nails into Soldier’s palm, and takes a small step backwards.

  The Bailiff stops tugging his beard and shakes his head in an unconvincing pantomime of disbelief. “Forgive me, dear, but that seems a most improbable and ironic word to hear from your lips.”

  “Second thought,” Odd Willie says and glances anxiously at Soldier, “maybe you should both keep your secrets. Just pretend like I never asked, and I’ll forget I ever saw any of this shit.”

  “I don’t want to be here anymore,” Emmie says, and tries to pull Soldier back towards the portal and the hallway of doors, back towards the stuffed black bear and the stolen Chevy waiting for them in the museum’s parking lot.

  “Be still,” Soldier tells her, almost growling the words, not taking her eyes off the Bailiff in his lime-green bathrobe, his fat, hairy belly smeared with the dead boys’ blood, the huge knife in his hand.

  “He killed them,” Emmie says. “Now he’s going to kill me, too.”

  “I’m gonna do it for him,” Soldier tells her, “if you don’t shut up and stand still.”

  The Bailiff grins and scratches at his crotch. “It’s quite all right, Master Lothrop,” he laughs. “Some secrets go sour if you let them sit too long. They go rancid and lose their potency, that drea
dful spark that made them secrets in the first place.”

  “Odd Willie did everything he was told,” Soldier says, walking to the edge of the dais. “Whatever quarrel you might have with me and the girl, it doesn’t have anything to do with him.”

  The Bailiff stops scratching at his balls and lets the kukri slip from his fingers and fall to the floor. Then he bows once and claps his pudgy hands together, applause made loud as thunder and sledgehammers on steel rails by the room’s deceiving acoustics.

  “Brava,” he says and bows his bald head again. “You’ve grown into a fine and gallant woman, Soldier girl, a veritable fucking Hot-spur. But Master Lothrop has his role to play, and we mustn’t deprive him of his rightful part in this exquisite comedy of ours. That would be exceedingly unfair. Never rob a man of his place in history.”

  “He’s going to kill us all,” Emmie says and tugs on Soldier’s arm again.

  The Bailiff comes nearer, steps over the body of one of the slaughtered boys, and slips in a pool of blood. For a moment, Soldier thinks he’s going to fall, that he’s about to land in a heap atop the gore and silk damask and spilled absinthe. But then he finds his balance again and steps gingerly over the remains of a broken sitar and another corpse, neatly decapitated, gutted, its intestines wound tightly about its pale legs.

  You’re afraid of him, Soldier thinks for the second time that morning, hating herself more than ever, hating her fear and all the years she’s allowed her fear of him to steer her life. He knows it. He fucking banks on it. She draws the pawnshop 9mm and aims it at the fat man.

  Odd Willie makes a sudden strangled noise, part confusion, part dumbfounded surprise, and turns from the Bailiff to Soldier. “What the hell are you doing?” he asks her. “Come on, now. You know the score. I’m the fucking lunatic with a thinly veiled death wish. You, you’re just the sullen drunk with a bad temper.”

  “Shut up, Odd Willie,” Soldier replies. “Take the kid and get the hell out of here. Go to Master Danaüs. Tell him everything.”

  The Bailiff stops stepping over cushions and dead boys and applauds again.

  “Sublime,” he says and tugs at his beard. “I did not even dare to hope that you’d ever find the courage to stand up to me, little Soldier girl. What a wondrous, sublime turn of events, here, before the end.”

  “Soldier,” Odd Willie says, and she wants to look him in the eye, wants to make him see that she means what she’s said, but she doesn’t dare take her eyes off the Bailiff.

  “Just fucking do it. Get her the hell out of here.”

  “You know I can’t do that. The Cuckoo—”

  “Oh, yes you can,” Soldier says and thumbs off the Smith & Wesson’s safety. “Yes, you fucking can, Willie, because this doesn’t have jack shit to do with the Cuckoo. This is old business between me and the Bailiff, and that’s all there is to this.”

  The Bailiff leans over and lifts a severed head from its place on a large plum-colored pillow, his fingers tangling in ash-blond hair, its blue eyes open and staring forward. He holds it up so the dead boy is facing him. His grin is so broad now that Soldier thinks it’s a wonder his skull doesn’t split open.

  “The question at hand,” the Bailiff says, speaking to the severed head, “is whether or not she has also found the courage to pull the trigger. It seems most unlikely, but I can’t entirely rule it out, of course, the weight of these particular secrets being what they are.”

  “Talk to me, old man,” Soldier says, tightening her grip on the trigger. “Stop playing games and fucking talk to me.”

  The Bailiff presses his lips to the left ear of the head and whispers something, then pretends that the dead boy whispers something back to him.

  “Only her bless’d girlhood,” the Bailiff says and licks blood from the dead boy’s chin. “All in all,” he says, “it actually wasn’t such a very terrible loss. She’s overreacting. Some vague hysteria arising from her uterus, most likely. A crying shame she wasn’t born with a dick. Then, my lad, perhaps she could have lived up to her name.”

  “I said talk to me, you fat son of a bitch!” Soldier shouts, and the Bailiff acts startled and drops the head. He puts one hand over his heart, and his mouth is hanging open wide in a perfect, astounded O. The dead boy’s blood stains his lips like a smudge of rouge, and Soldier notices that he has an erection.

  “She’s mad!” the Bailiff wails and rolls his eyes. “Master Lothrop, you are a Child of the Cuckoo, and, as such, you must do your sworn duty.”

  “Last chance,” Soldier says, almost whispering, speaking just loudly enough that she’s sure Odd Willie will hear. “Get out of here.”

  “Now, Master Lothrop!” the Bailiff screams, and the walls shudder and dust sifts down from between the struts of the domed ceiling. “You were delivered unto the Hounds of Cain and have passed through the trials of fire and swords and laid your hands upon the tongue of the dragon. You know your obligation.”

  Odd Willie draws his own pistol and cocks it, hesitates a moment, and then points it at Soldier’s head. “Don’t you make me fucking do this,” he says. “Not after all that shit in Woonsocket, don’t you make me fucking have to pull this trigger.”

  “He dies, either way,” Soldier tells him. “You’re not that fast, Odd Willie.”

  Emmie lets go of Soldier’s hand, and the Bailiff takes another step towards the dais. “Don’t worry about the girl,” he says to Odd Willie. “The girl’s a trifling thing. She can be dealt with anytime, at our convenience.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” Emmie says, close to tears. “Please, Soldier. Please tell me what I’m supposed to do now.”

  “Yes,” the Bailiff says, and then he sits down on the floor amid the pillows and hookahs and corpses. “Do please tell her. Tell her what you told me the day I took you to meet the alchemist’s daughter. Tell her—”

  “I’m not afraid of you anymore, old man.”

  “Don’t make me do this,” Odd Willie says again. “Just put the fucking gun down, and we’ll sort this shit out.”

  “No,” the Bailiff says, speaking to Odd Willie now. “She won’t do that. Not our Soldier girl.” Then he pauses and surveys the carnage strewn about the octagonal chamber, the naked bodies and broken glass, feathers and torn cloth, the blood splashed across walls and portieres. “My, but I have managed to make quite the mess, haven’t I? Have I killed them all?” he asks no one in particular.

  “We were both supposed to die in Woonsocket,” Soldier says. “Saben made a deal with Ballou, to get her daughter back, but she made a deal with you, too, didn’t she?”

  The Bailiff shrugs and then lies down beside one of the dead boys. “It hardly matters now, does it? We both know what happens next, dear. We both know…” He trails off and buries his face in the dead boy’s long black hair.

  Odd Willie presses the barrel of his gun to Soldier’s temple. “What do we both know?” he asks her. “What’s he talking about?”

  “I know a trick,” Soldier says. “I was born knowing a trick. When I was a child I had dreams that came true, and I know this fucking trick. And that’s what happens next. That’s what he thinks happens next.”

  The Bailiff rolls over on his back again, gazing up at the high ceiling. “She misleads you with eloquent understatement, Master Lothrop. This one here, our pretty little Soldier girl, she knows something more than any mere trick. She knows time, Master Lothrop, and she bends it to her will as easily as you might turn back the hands of a clock. She’s poor Professor Einstein’s darkest nightmare, a veritable imp of Kronos. Even so, she only half comprehends these things she does—that slick getaway out at Quaker Jameson’s, for example.”

  “You meant for us to die in Woonsocket,” Soldier says. “You and Saben White. Just let me hear you say it, old man. Say it so Odd Willie at least knows the truth before he puts a bullet in my brain.”

  “A man tries as best he can to elude his fate,” the Bailiff sighs, all the gleeful fury drained from him now, and he sit
s up and leans towards them, crouched there on the floor like some obscene Buddha. “Three and half years ago, Soldier, you showed me my fate. You told me about drops of blood sealed in a beautiful china-blue bottle. You told me about a lead box and my path down to the Mother and the Father.”

  Soldier shakes her head, denial the only thing like sanity she has left, and Odd Willie tells her not to move.

  “It was only a dream,” she says to the Bailiff. “It was only a dream, and I was only five years old.”

  “Where does the time go?” the Bailiff laughs and tugs his beard. “See, that’s what she’s been asking herself, Master Lothrop, even though she was never quite aware of the question.”

  “I think you’ve both lost your goddamn marbles,” Odd Willie says. “Soldier, put down the motherfucking gun. I’ve had enough, and I’m not going to tell you again,” and he jams the barrel of his pistol against her left cheekbone hard enough to tear the dental-floss stitches and reopen the wound there.

  The Bailiff makes a gun with his thumb and index finger and puts it to his own temple. “What was it that I’m supposed to say when the hounds have gone?” he asks Soldier. “Ah, yes. How could I ever forget those words—We have fallen on hard times. Our lords and ladies have all deserted us, and our purpose lies in ruin. A masque which has endured down untold ages is ended here this night, and now we are castaways in our own land. Did I get it right?”

  “I don’t know,” Soldier replies, her voice trembling almost as badly as her hands and the 9mm. “That was a long time ago. I was only a child.”

  “Oh, but it’s such an awful shame to forget such poetry. Even Shakespeare and Blake would have envied such perfect lines as those. Wouldn’t you agree, Master Lothrop?”

  “I’ve never cared much for poetry,” Odd Willie says.

  The Bailiff shrugs, and the green bathrobe slips off his right shoulder. “Soldier, surely you can’t blame a man for trying to outwit destiny. Do you honestly believe I could have acted otherwise?”