The Drowning Girl

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  So it was named Wolf Den Road, but technically I was on Valentine Road when I found Eva the wolf and I’m embellishing. She would have wandered Wolf Den Road, though. I think she must have.

  He murdered the wolf at ten o’clock, and they say that was the last wolf in Connecticut. General Israel Putnam, to be a hero in wars to come—American Revolution and French and Indian. But I still will call him a murderer, and I will call him the murderer who set loose the ghost I found that freezing night, naked and lost and frightened on the icy dirt road. She must have come to him, like the Exeter vampire specter of Mercy Brown visiting her sisters and brothers. She must have haunted him, and in his guilt he fought in those latter wars hoping against hope to assuage his guilt in the affairs of the winter of 1742 and 1743.

  That’s a terrible burden to carry, and I don’t care even if you’re a pious Saint armed with lead buckshot, that’s a terrible burden, finding himself the hand of extinction of the race of wolves in all Connecticut. He might have worn it like a badge of honor, oh I’m sure but I’m supposing it was a put-on so others wouldn’t see his guilt.

  Eva spake, “You found me.” But it came out more like a growl than English. She didn’t, of course, right? She didn’t say anything that night, or lots of nights after I brought her home to my Willow Street den and Abalyn who was duly horrified and wanted to send her away but I didn’t. Abalyn called her something I’ll not here repeat broken lovelorn on your rocks.

  Eva Canning was the ghost of the last dead wolf, just as sure as she was surely also the ghost of Elizabeth Short, Black Dahlia, werewolf murder, all the way faraway where I have never been to Lost Angels and that was in the winter of 1947. That was in that other winter at the edge—the opposite edge—of a continent. I think she, she being Elizabeth Short, she being the inverted reincarnation of Eva Canning, she being the reincarnated ghost of the final wolf of the Great State of Connecticut…I think SHE in capitals SHE must have taken the Road of Pins. She must have worn a red cape, to have been sliced in half like that, drained her blood, face carved like a jack-o’-lantern, carved ear to ear with the Glasgow Smile, the werewolf smile I think some journalist started that, which is how it was the werewolf murder because wolves have such wide smiles, such big teeth. Sometimes, I think the journalists meant she was the murdered werewolf and other times they without any doubt meant, no, she was murdered by the wolf. They made her eat shit, feces, said the coroner. All her teeth were rotten like apples lying on the ground late in the summer. They, the police, thought it was a blow to the head that killed her, not the being cut in half, which I guess is merciful. Like stopping by the woods on a snowy evening because she would not could not would not stop for me.

  Once. Not twice. There was only one Eva.

  Imp, you see? You see what this is, paper in the carriage? Pumpkin. Twelve enchanted mice. You have eyes and see, right, what and how you need to please stop this nonsense before it gets any worse rotten cider and you have to start in again on the goddamn mustard seeds? The words you won’t be able to pick up like mustard seeds and put back from all the places they’ve come from. You see that, right? Oh, god. Oh my god.

  I am a dead woman. Dead and insane.

  7/7/7

  7/7

  7

  Isn’t the number seven a holy number? It is, isn’t it? God’s number. So, I’m laying down these sevens against the ghosts crowding my head, and against the imp who I am, against demons, werewolves, sirens, hunters with muskets, lovers lost, women who can’t really be named Margot and little girls not named Chloe, against the blowback, the consequences, the backdraft, the mustard seeds. Against the ire and absence of Messieurs Risperdal, Depakene, and Valium, all of whom I have neglected in the worst sort of fashion, leaving my gentlemen to languish, jilted, uselessly in Baltic amber specked with carbonized ants and gnats. I put them away in the bathroom medicine cabinet. I put them away. They obscure the true things. Dr. Ogilvy knows that, that need is not quiet relief, that rats live on no evil star. She’s told me as much, if I don’t want to wind up like Rosemary Anne. I don’t, but my sevens are just as fierce as my psychoactive paramours. I want to hear the real me, not the false, inconstant me whose truer thoughts are all boxed up and hidden in a suitcase beneath my bed where no one might get hurt by sentences honed sharp as razors. I’m only cutting myself off at the knees.

  I kindly stopped, though. The woman stood naked in the snow at the side of Wolf Den Road Valentine Road, Road of Needles, Bray Road of road of yellowcake and the Trail of the Coeur d’Alenes. I stopped, and oh what big eyes she had, eyes of deepest golden-brown honey butterscotch agate and what big teeth of ivory so she rends me apart and gaily strews the pieces to the winds, so now my foolish heart. What long-leggedy beast, she, sidhe, Eva the Second Coming after my failed Ophelia. What sharp claws. She creeps along country roads and railroad tracks, and I’m no more than meat. She no more than a wisp of smoke, if you do not look directly at the creeping taxidermy of her. But she rends me and scatters the fruits of her efforts—pomegranate seeds, peach pits, bitter almonds the taste of cyanide monsoons boat is leaning. Opening the door of my Honda, the night spills in because she owns the night, and it does her bidding. Israel Putnam pulled the trigger and set her free. Ghosts must be liberated from the prisons of flesh and bone, autocracy of sinew and gray matter. She crept between the trees to me and I asked her if I could help and to smother in those golden sunset eyes, pupils eating up the sky. Pay attention, Imp. Pay attention, or it will come to collect the debt. Eva collected me in sickle talons, and rolled the bones on a snowy evening.

  Yeah, this is the conclusion I am arriving at without the fog of my Messieurs. I died, and what came home was as much a phantom as the last wolf in Connecticut. Eva buried my festering, grateful corpse below frost, leafy detritus frozen hard until spring thaw but her claws made short work of the crust, and neatly carved the soil for my grave. She prayed a wolfish, blasphemous mass over my funerary sleep, and there would have been twine bundles of bergamot, black-eyed Susans, columbine and marsh marigolds, had it been that night another season (I would give you some violets, but they wither’d all when I planned my runaway father’s demise). Instead, just rotting leaves and shivering worms. The interment rudely woke sleeping earthworms and clicking black beetles. But they forgave me, and I was schooled in the tongues of annelids and insects. Beetles have a peculiar dialect. Grubs are fiends of glottal stops. I told them I was a painter who wrote stories about paintings of mermaids and dead motorcycle slain multimedia men obsessed with murdered women and fairy tales. Whether or not they believed me, I was duly humored. I think this is most certainly what happened on WolfsValentineDenRoad. Be mine. And I can still smell Eva crouched on the raw dirt above me, pissing, shitting wolf lady, and she raises her head, throws back her head, wishing there were a full moon that night, howling anyway. I think, howling because there wasn’t the moon, her faithful brutal sweet rapist. Her rapacious satellite. Her tidal puller. Pray you, love, remember, how could you use a poor maiden so? Where were you? Underground, on my bed of sticks, bed of Styx, I prayed for her full sail. Here in November is a good month for giving up the ghost, she whispered, and I wouldn’t have argued, even if she’d not stilled my lips.

  It’s all well and good, India, but you can’t tell stories for shit, can you? You make a muddle, and it’s gonna be no worth to anyone.

  You can’t draw a straight line.

  But I can walk a crooked mile.

  When the subterranean insect catechism had ended, with hours yet before dawn, she exhumed whatever was left. She licked clean my skull and breast, until the bones were bright alabaster as her wayward rakish moon. This was to make plain and without a doubt her gratitude that I’d died for her sins. I mean, of course, the sins of Putnam, which she accepted as her own while he scuttled away to fight the redcoats and Iroquois and Mississauga during la Guerre de la Conquête, so had no time to bear his cross. Dead wolves are sin-eaters. She was nailed with iron spikes to a smoke
house wall and gawkers game from all around to bear witness to laid low Christ Wolf in her mock Calvary tribulations. There was no Mary Magdalene or Queen of Heaven to cry for a wolf, only owls and the crows who came to peck at her flesh, making her alive again. Eva Canning was resurrected in the bodies of crows, black birds are a sure sign of a lie, all black birds, even corvids not black burnt, and all black birds took her into themselves so she soared high, victorious above fallow fields. Transubstantiation.

  She pawed open the ground again (prematurely) that I might gaze in wide-eyed wonder upon the splinters of the one true barn door cradled in her gory, reliquary palms.

  She whispered in my ear and I smelled her sickly sweet carrion breath. She whispered there would be lies farther down the road. Abalyn, she would betray me three times, and instill a doubt so profound it would leave me clutching at Judas straws and shutting my pills behind a mirrored door. I cried when Eva told me this, and she wiped my tears away with flickering hands unable to decide if it was best to be paws or hands. She was all of a splendid metamorphosis, like the grubs who’d spoken while I slept. She was first this one thing and then that other, right before my eyes. She was a kaleidoscope chrysalis of shifting skeletons and muscle and marrow, bile and the four richly appointed chambers of a mammalian heart. The heart, the chest’s pumping aqua vitae tetragrammaton, for the life of the flesh is in the blood, blood is the life. She was never for an instant only a single beast, as I will not accept the deceit that there was only ever one of her, that I must choose between July and November. Why can’t she, Abalyn, see this, when she, herself, like Tiresias, has turned her gender lycanthropy trick on her own? Isn’t that an hypocrisy? She is a paradox, and wants to take mine away, and wants me to believe it impossible? She slipped out of a skin she hated and into one she wished, and so a particle and a wave and so Eva and Eva, right?

  Abalyn would scowl her priestly scowl and say no.

  If I’d not divorced my Messieurs I would have remained dumb and deaf to all this, and might have lain down and died. Choose the bathtub again, or open my wrists? It wouldn’t matter, either way I’d be silenced. The inconvenience would be done away with. Neatly, neatly. Safe as houses. You love someone, you don’t leave her to drown, and you don’t tell her she’s crazier than she already knows that she is.

  There’s a crow on the windowsill. He thinks I’m not watching him watching me. He probably hasn’t been told that I saw four people strolling along together in the park. Back from the streetlamps and under the trees, where it was the darkest. Not nuns, in their heavy flowing cloaks, but either human crows or actually (and this I concede most probable) plague doctors, beak doctors, slipped from their right century with salves of balm-mint leaves, amber camphor, rose, laudanum, myrrh, storax, waxed leather hoods, their bills with antidotes all lined, that foulsome air may do no harm. Medico Della Peste, glass-eyed, not like the black-eyed crow on my windowsill. Like wicked Hieronymus Bosch’s earthly delights. Maybe Abalyn kept secrets and can become a crow, and there now she sits spying as I type. But I have my seven charm, and when I set down

  7/7/7/7

  7/7

  7

  seven

  7

  7/7

  7/7/7/7

  VII

  7

  she spreads her ebony wings and flies away home to the hell with not-Margot and not-Chloe paper dolls she’s wrought for herself. But I digress. The distraction of a blackbird attempting to bury me in a new tumult of self-doubt, recalling Caroline’s warning, black birds come to liars. So, where was I?

  Chasing Eva Canning beneath a moonless winter sky.

  Or late autumn sky, but cold as fucking winter. Hurry along now, child. This clarity may not last forever. They have ways of stealing it back.

  I didn’t need my Honda any longer, not with Eva the Wolf of Israel Putnam calling out for me to run along on my dead legs and keep up, keep up. Wild, wild night. She planted a corpse and sprouted a swift-footed dead woman zombie racer who, try as she might, would not ever keep up. This doesn’t matter, as that night it didn’t matter. Only the effort was of importance. She knew I was running as fast as I could, on those rattling bony legs of mine. She understood I couldn’t go down on all fours with her, though I longed for that earthly delight so badly it ached. She was the ghost of a wolf, and I wished to join her. The ghost of a wolf is freer than a madwoman with a belly full of drugs. It was the pills that made me too immutable to run on all fours, not morphology of sacrum, pelvis, femur. They were the poison even she was helpless against.

  On two feet, upright, I ran until the souls of my feet bled. The soles. She removed all my ragged clothes, torn by her hunger, before laying me to rest, so upon my restoration I was naked as was she. I was her crippled sister, alike in intent if not her fearful symmetry burning bright down Valentine Road of Needles while unsuspecting farmers and the wives of farms slept snug in their beds. The horses heard us, though, and the cows. Goats, they heard us, too. I had strayed from the path of my life and illusions of medicated surrogate sanity. I strayed, and Eva let me dance beneath the starry sky with the long-leggedy beast the naked woman at the side of the road had become. You really have no notion how delightful it will be, was, at the inevitable convergence of those two roads full sail. That’s what Abalyn would steal from me, the knowledge of the glory of that tarantella danse macabre dervish. I fell down among quiescent fields, pale as sugar-powdered confections, divided by fieldstone walls since the days of Israel Putnam. I lay down, and she climbed on top of me. She glared down at me, all iridescent crepe-paper crimson eyeshine appetite, insatiable and wanton, and I spread my legs for the wolf she’d always really been. Her wet black nose snuffled my welcoming sex, her lolling mottled ice-cream licking me apart before she roughly rolled me over onto my stomach and wounded breasts and mounted me in the fashion of a wolf.

  “You are in the House of the Wolf, casa del lobo, young lady, and so you’ll fly right and do as is our custom. You will fuck as wolves fuck.”

  A woman in a field—something grabbed her.

  Fecunda ratis.

  She plowed me, as the fields would be plowed come spring. She planted me, a second time, sowing later jealousy, as I am certain Abalyn would have smelled her musk on me when I came home that night. It’s a fairy tale, isn’t it? Yes, it’s all a fairy tale, even if there are no fairies, per se. Pixie-led, pixilated, the foolish disobedient child wanders into the heart of a haunted wood and meets a ravenous lupine devil who, in short order, promises I will race you to Caroline’s house, and what’s more, I’ll love you true, let me enfold you and I don’t care that you’re insane. I will love you forever and forever. Pull back the covers to find her waiting in the fallow fields, to plow.

  (Abalyn is at the window again, but this time I’m ignoring her.)

  The carmine girl who was me, is me, came up from the hollow hills, hand in hand with La Bête, thinking how lucky I was. Hoping I might bear her pups, and not be empty anymore. Empty cockleshell girl behind the register, and people whisper about her behind her back, and they don’t know she knows or they just don’t fucking care. I wager the latter. Empty oyster girl at last not empty anymore. I came back to my car, and the headlights were still blazing white shafts in the gloom, making the snow sparkle. Eva was with me, on my left, and she let me fasten the seat belt around her. The roads were slick and treacherous, and sometimes I drive over the speed limit. Pixie-led girls who stray from the path aren’t the sort to worry too much about breaking traffic laws. They have their own limits painted indelibly on their palimpsest skin for wolves to read.

  This is my ghost story of the wolf who cried girl. The murdered wolf ghost who roamed centuries after a musket blast, without other wolves, except other wolf ghosts, for company. And somehow she forgot she ever was a wolf, deprived of others of her kind to provide perspective. She forgot. But she saw so many human beings, men and women and children, and having forgotten herself she mistook herself for nothing more than a naked w
oman at the side of Valentine Road. Or it wasn’t entirely a matter of forgetting. What if she learned her lesson, that wolves are not safe from men, but women are just a little safer from men, so she sewed herself a woman’s skin and crawled inside? The fit was snug, and she had to take great care her claws didn’t rip the skin gloves, and that no one saw her fangs.

  The ghost of a wolf in disguise.

  Madwomen can see such apparitions, and our touch can render them corporeal. Which is how Abalyn saw her when we got back to Willow Street. If Abalyn had met what I came upon, it would have been invisible and she’d have kept right on driving drive, drive, drive, drive ignorant of what a miracle. Since 1742 or 1743 or 1947, that’s what everyone before mad India Morgan Phelps the Imp of Willow Street pulled over and asked if she was okay or if she needed help. I saw she had no voice, had not learned yet to use her pilfered woman’s tongue. She would, eventually, and that means she lost herself that much more in the cacophony clash of nouns, vowels, participles, adjectives, verbs, and all. I blame myself for that a little. I was an enabler to her psychotic amnesiac masquerade.

  While I wasn’t looking the Abalyn Crow flew away again. I think it won’t be back. Not tonight, at least. A black bird means a lie, unless a black bird is a lie. When moving through fairy tales, one must obey the laws of fairy. When moving through a ghost story, Gothic and Victorian law applies. Here I creep my footpath through both at once and the dictates are unclear, winding together in greenbrier snarls I’ll have to prick my fingers on spinning wheel spindleshanks to comprehend. It must have been worse on Eva. I was on the outside looking in and she was locked in the lie she’d told herself not to go mad as India Morgan Phelps or her mother.