The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  My mother never read me fairy tales, and she never told them to me from memory. Rosemary Anne wasn’t a bad mother, she just didn’t do fairy tales.

  Imp typed: “I think this is what you call prolegomena, what I’ve written so far, which is a word I’ve never before had a reason to use.” And then she got up and went to the bathroom, because she’d needed to pee since that part about Daryl Hannah. She also got a handful of Lorna Doones and an apple, because she’d skipped dinner again. Then she sat back down at the typewriter and typed, “The importance of fairy tales, and her love for ‘The Little Mermaid,’ as well as her aversion to ‘Little Red Riding Hood,’ is very much at the heart of the ghost story she’s writing.”

  Which means that wasn’t a digression.

  A couple of months after Abalyn moved in with me, we went to an exhibit at the Bell Gallery at Brown. Going was her idea, not mine. The exhibit, which was called The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (in Hindsight), was a retrospective of the work of an artist who’d died in a motorcycle accident a few years before, a man who called himself Albert Perrault (though that wasn’t the name he was given at birth). I’d heard of him, but not much. Abalyn had read an article about Perrault somewhere online, and I went because she wanted to go. The exhibit consisted of an assortment of oil paintings, sculptures, and mixed-media pieces, almost all of it inspired, in part, by fairy tales, and mostly by “Little Red Riding Hood.” Had I known that beforehand, I might have let Abalyn go alone. I probably would have insisted. As it was, I held her hand almost the whole time we were in the gallery.

  We signed the guest book at a table near the door, and Abalyn took a copy of a glossy brochure about the exhibit. The first painting had a Latin name, Fecunda ratis. The canvas was executed mostly in shades of gray, though there were a few highlights of green and alabaster, and a single striking crimson smudge floating near the center. A card on the wall beside the painting explained that Perrault borrowed the title from a book by an eleventh-century pedagogue named Egbert of Liège, a book that had included “De puella a lupellis seruata,” an account of a lost girl found living with a pack of wolves. In the story, she’s wearing a red wool tunic, given to her by her grandfather on the day of her baptism. Someone spots the red tunic, and she’s rescued, which I suppose makes it a morality tale. Baptize your children, or they’ll go live with wolves.

  I didn’t like the painting. It made me uncomfortable. And not only because it went straight back to my old hang-up about “Little Red Riding Hood.” There was something awful about it, something that made it hard for me to look directly at for more than a few seconds at a time. I suppose this should have impressed me, that the artist had so effectively managed to imbue his work with such a sense of dread. My impression of it was formed piecemeal. I’d glance at the painting, then turn away again. I don’t think Abalyn noticed I was doing this; I’m not sure she had any idea how the exhibit was affecting me until I asked if we could please leave, which was about twenty minutes and several paintings and sculptures later.

  Before I sat down to write this, I googled Fecunda ratis and looked at some images on the web, because I didn’t want to rely on my unreliable memories. The painting doesn’t upset me the way it did that August day at the Bell Gallery. Too much has happened, and the sculptures and paintings of Albert Perrault, for all their dreadfulness, pale by comparison. But, like I’ve said, mostly all in gray, and then the red smudge near the center. The smudge forms a sort of still point, or a nexus, or a fulcrum. It’s the child’s wool baptismal tunic, and it’s the only thing she’s wearing. She’s on her hands and knees, her head bowed so that her face is hidden from view. There’s nothing but a wild snarl of matted hair and the red tunic, which, when the painting is considered as a whole, seems to me cruel and incongruent. The girl is surrounded by a circle of dark, hulking forms—the wolves—and the wolves, in turn, are sitting within an outer circle of standing stones, a looming megalithic ring.

  The wolves are rendered so indistinctly that I might have mistaken them for something else, if I hadn’t first read the card on the wall. I might have looked at those great, shaggy things squatting there on their haunches, lewdly, hungrily watching over the girl. And I might have mistaken them for bears. Bears or even, I don’t know, oxen. You can’t tell from the painting if the wolves are about to eat the girl, or if they’re keeping her safe. You can’t tell if they’re marveling at what a strange wolf she is, or thinking about how they’ve never made love to a human woman and maybe that would be an interesting change of pace.

  But the very worst part of the painting was a strip of rice paper worked into the lower left-hand corner of canvas. Printed on the paper were the words Nobody’s ever coming for you.

  I had it in my head, when I sat down with my apple and my Lorna Doones, that I would be able to write in detail about all the pieces that made up The Voyeur of Utter Destruction (in Hindsight), or at least those I saw before I started feeling sick and we had to leave the gallery. Night in the Forest, which was very much like Fecunda ratis, only more so. And 1893 and Sudden Fear in Crowded Spaces. A series of rusty metal cages collectively titled Breadcrumbs, each cage holding a single cobble inside, each stone engraved with a single word. And the grotesque pinwheel spread out at the center of it all, Phases 1–5, a series of sculptures portraying a woman’s transformation into a wolf. Not just any woman, but the murdered and dismembered corpse of Elizabeth Short, known to most of the world as “the Black Dahlia.” I had nightmares about those sculptures for weeks. Sometimes, I still do. I was going to describe all of this to the best of my abilities. But now I think it’s better if I don’t. Maybe later into the story I will, when doing so might become unavoidable, but not now.

  “So,” Imp typed, “I’ve made my beginning, however arbitrary and disjointed it may be. I’ve begun my ghost story, and I’m going to pretend there’s no turning back now.”

  It’s a lie, but I’m going to pretend, regardless.

  In the end, it may or may not all add up to something coherent. I won’t know until I’ve found the end.

  Me. Rosemary Anne. Caroline. Three crazy women, all in a row. My mother’s suicide and my grandmother’s suicide. Taking away words so that scary things are less scary, and leaving behind words that no longer mean what they once did. “The Little Mermaid.” The cloudy day I met Abalyn. Dead sparrows and mice trapped inside stoppered bottles. The Drowning Girl, painted by a man who fell off a horse and died. Fecunda ratis, painted by a man who fell off a motorcycle and died. A man who took the surname of the Frenchman who is often credited with having first written down the tale of “Little Red Riding Hood,” and then proceeded to create horrific works of art based on that same fairy tale. Which happens to be my least favorite fairy tale of all. Jacova Angevine and the Open Door of Night, which I’ll come to later. Contagious hauntings and pernicious memes. The harm we do without meaning to do any harm at all.

  A dark country road in eastern Connecticut. Another dark road beside a river in Massachusetts. A woman who called herself Eva Canning, who might have been a ghost, or a wolf, or maybe a mermaid, or possibly, most likely, nothing that will ever have a name.

  These are the sum of the notes my mother told me I should make, so I won’t forget that which has made a strong impression upon me. This is my apology to Abalyn, even though I know she’s never going to read it.

  This might be my pocket full of stones.

  “That’s enough for now,” Imp typed. “Get some rest. It’ll still be here when you come back.”

  2

  “And what about this business with chapters?” Imp typed. “If I’m not writing this to be read—which I’m most emphatically not—and if it’s not a book, as such, then why is it that I’m bothering with chapters? Why does anyone bother with chapters? Is it just so the reader knows where to stop and pee, or have a snack, or turn off the light and go to sleep? Aren’t chapters a bit like beginnings and endings? Arbitrary and convenient constructs?” Nonetheless, she type
d the Arabic numeral two precisely seventeen single-spaced lines down a fresh sheet of typing paper.

  October is slipping away around me. I’ve spent several days now, days filled with work and not much else, trying to decide when and how to continue the ghost story. Or whether I should continue the ghost story. Obviously, I decided that I would. That’s another sort of being haunted: starting something and never finishing it. I don’t leave paintings unfinished. If I start reading a book, I have to finish it, even if I hate it. I don’t waste food. When I decide to go for a walk, and I’ve planned the route I’m going to take, I insist upon taking the entire walk, even if it starts snowing or raining. Otherwise, I have to contend with that unfinished thing haunting me.

  Before I met Abalyn Armitage, I’d never played a video game. I didn’t even own a computer. I also didn’t know much about transsexuals. But I’ll get back to that later. I’ll write about the video games now, because it was one of the very first subjects that she and I talked about that night. We managed to get all her things from the place on Wood Street where she no longer lived, because her ex-girlfriend had evicted her when they broke up, to my place on Willow Street before it started raining. It did start raining, which proved I’d been sensible after all, if somewhat premature, bringing the umbrella along and wearing my galoshes. We got her stuff back to my place, and up the stairs to my apartment. Most of it we piled in my front parlor, which was pretty much empty anyway.

  “You’re the first person I’ve ever heard describe a room in their house as a parlor,” Abalyn said. She was sitting on the floor, sorting through her CDs, as if to be sure something hadn’t been left back at her old apartment.

  “Am I?”

  She watched me a moment, then said, “If you weren’t, I’d never have said you were.”

  “Fair enough,” I replied, and then asked if she’d like a cup of tea.

  “I’d really prefer coffee,” she said, and I told her that I didn’t drink coffee, so I couldn’t make her any. She sighed and shrugged. “Never mind,” she said, then added, “I’ll have to rectify that tout de suite. I can’t live without coffee. But thanks, anyway.”

  I was only in the kitchen maybe ten minutes, but by the time I got back she’d already plugged in her television and was busy hooking up one of the gaming consoles. I sat on the sofa and watched her and sipped my tea. It was sweet, but there was no lemon, because I hadn’t thought to buy one the last time I’d gone to the market.

  “Did you love her?” I asked, and Abalyn looked over her shoulder and frowned at me.

  “That’s a hell of a thing to ask,” she said.

  “Right. But…did you?”

  She turned back to the wires and black plastic boxes, and I thought for a moment she was going to ignore me, so that I’d have to think of another question.

  “I wanted to,” Abalyn said. “Maybe I thought I did, at first. I wanted to think I did.”

  “Did she love you?”

  “She loved the person she thought I was, or the person she’d thought I was when we met. But no, I don’t think she ever loved me. I’m not even sure she ever knew me. I don’t think I ever knew her.”

  “Do you miss her?”

  “It’s only been a couple of hours.” Abalyn was starting to sound annoyed, so I changed the subject. I asked instead about the black boxes and the television. She explained that one was an Xbox 360 and the other was a PS3, then had to explain that PS was an acronym for PlayStation. She also had a Nintendo Wii, which she pronounced “we.” I sat and listened, though I wasn’t particularly interested. I’d started to feel bad for having asked the question I’d asked, about her girlfriend, having belatedly realized how personal it was, so listening seemed like the least I could do. I figured talking would take her mind off her ex and suddenly not having a place to live and all.

  “I get paid to write game reviews,” she said, when I asked why she spent so much time playing video games. “I write for websites, mostly. A few print magazines, now and then, but mostly for websites.”

  “People read reviews of video games?”

  “Do you think I’d get paid to write them if they didn’t?”

  “Right. But…I never thought about it, I suppose.” And I told her I’d never played a video game. She wanted to know if I was joking, and I told her that I wasn’t.

  “I don’t especially like games,” I said. “I’ve never much seen the point. I’m pretty good at checkers, and gin, and backgammon isn’t so bad. But it’s been years…” I trailed off, and she looked over her shoulder at me again.

  “Have you always lived alone?”

  “Since I was nineteen,” I told her, and I suspected she was thinking something along the lines of, So that’s why you’re so strange. “But I do okay,” I said.

  “Doesn’t it get lonely?”

  “Not especially,” I replied, which was a lie, but I didn’t want to come across as pathetic or maudlin or something. “I have my painting, and I have work. I read a lot, and sometimes I write stories.”

  “You’re a painter and a writer?” By this time, she was untangling a snarl of black cables she’d pulled from one of the boxes.

  “No, just a painter. But I write stories sometimes.”

  “Does anyone ever publish them?”

  “I’ve sold a few, but that doesn’t make me a real writer. Not an author, I mean.”

  She glared at the snarl of black cables, and, for a moment, it seemed like she might put them back in the box or hurl them across the parlor.

  “Have you ever sold a painting?” she asked.

  “No,” I replied. “Not really. Not my real paintings. Only my summer-people paintings.”

  Abalyn didn’t ask what I meant. By “summer-people paintings,” I mean.

  “But you think of yourself as a painter, and not a writer. You know that doesn’t make a lot of sense, right?”

  “I also work at an art supply store, and I get paid for that. Still, I don’t ever think of myself as a clerk or a cashier. The point is, I think of myself as a painter, because painting is what I love to do, what I’m passionate about. So, I’m a painter.”

  “Imp, you don’t mind me setting all this stuff up, do you? I guess I should have asked before I started. I just want to be sure nothing’s broken.” She finally managed to untangle the cables, connected the consoles to the television, and then pulled a power strip from the cardboard box.

  “I don’t mind,” I said, and sipped at my tea. “It’s actually sort of interesting.”

  “Should have asked before I started, I know.”

  “I don’t mind,” I said again.

  I considered the big flat-screen television a moment. She’d propped it against the wall. I’d seen them in shop windows and at the mall, but I’d never owned any sort of TV. “I don’t have cable,” I said.

  “Oh, I’d already figured that part out.”

  So, it rained, and we talked, and Abalyn was relieved that nothing had been broken. She told me that her girlfriend—who was named Jodie, by the way (I suppose she still is)—had set most of it out in the hallway rather roughly while they were still arguing. Abalyn hadn’t tried to stop her. Anyway, she showed me how to play a couple of games. In one, you were an alien soldier fighting an alien invasion, and there was a blue holographic girl. In another, you played a soldier who was trying to stop terrorists from using nuclear weapons.

  “Are they all this violent?” I asked. “Are all the central characters male? Are they all about war?”

  “No…and no, and no. Maybe I’ll show you some Final Fantasy tomorrow, and maybe Kingdom Hearts. That stuff might be more your speed. Though, there’s still sorta combat. It’s just not as graphic, the violence, if you know what I mean. Cartoon violence.”

  I didn’t know what she meant, but I didn’t tell her that. Eventually it stopped raining. We ordered Chinese takeout, and my fortune cookie said, “Don’t stop now.” It really did. I’m not making that up.

  Abalyn said,
“That’s an odd thing to put in a fortune cookie.”

  “I like it,” I replied, and I still have that fortune, tacked to the wall with the Virginia Woolf and Ursula K. Le Guin quotes. I always save fortunes from fortune cookies, though usually I put them in an antique candy tin in the kitchen. I probably have at least a hundred.

  “Where is all this headed?” Imp typed, because it was beginning to seem a bit ramblesome. Then she answered herself by typing, “It really happened. It’s one of the things I’m sure really happened.”

  “How can you be so sure?”

  And Imp typed, “Because I still have the fortune from that cookie,” though that hardly seemed like a satisfactory answer. “Fine,” she said aloud. “Just so long as you don’t lose sight of why you’re doing this, don’t forget.”

  I haven’t forgotten at all.

  Isn’t that why I’m writing this down, because I haven’t forgotten, because I haven’t figured out how to forget? Abalyn is one of the ghosts, same as my mother and grandmother, and Phillip George Saltonstall and Albert Perrault, same as Eva Canning. No one ever said you have to be dead and buried to be a ghost. Or if they did, they were wrong. People who believe that have probably never been haunted. Or they’ve only had very limited experience with ghosts, so they simply don’t know any better.

  Abalyn slept on the sofa that night, and I slept in my bed. I lay awake a long time, thinking about her.

  If I let her read this, Dr. Ogilvy would probably tell me that I’m exhibiting “avoidant behavior,” the way I’m going about writing this ghost story.