Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
“It’s cold in Heaven,” she says. “Cold and dark, and the stars are farther away than God.”
Deacon spins around and blindly aims the gun at the nowhere place her voice might have come from. His finger on the trigger, but he can’t find the safety, can’t remember if it’s on or off.
“She’s here!” he shouts to Scarborough.
“I
know
she’s here,” Scarborough calls back from at least a mile away.
“No, she’s
here,
” and the sticky, wet thing brushes against Deacon’s face again, leaving behind the smell of decay and the sea, salt and putrescence, and he realizes the thunder isn’t thunder anymore, but waves pounding against a rocky shore, picking apart the world one ancient quartz grain at a time.
“Did you think you could come for me the way you came for poor Mary English? Did you really think it would be that easy?”
Deacon squeezes the trigger, and the gun clicks uselessly.
“Scarborough, where the fuck are you, man?” and now there’s no answer at all, or there’s so much distance between them it simply doesn’t matter anymore.
“The changelings can’t help you, Deacon Silvey,” the woman says, the mad woman from his dreams and visions, the woman with eyes of molten gold. “They never could.”
Deacon takes a step backwards, one step away from the taunting voice, and fumbles for the safety.
“Did they tell you that I was insane?” she asks, and the darkness around him flutters like hundreds of small and leathery wings. “Did they tell you I was only a half-breed mongrel whore?”
“They didn’t have to tell me jack shit. You tried to kill Sadie,” and then Deacon finds the safety and flips it off with his thumb. He squeezes the trigger three times and the gun roars, deafening demon voice to shatter the nothing packed in all around, to cut great, ragged slits and let the light come pouring through, and the unexpected recoil knocks the pistol out of his hand.
“When I was still a little girl, the moon bled for me,” the woman says. “One of these days, she’s going to bleed again.”
Deacon looks down, blinks at the daylight stinging his light-starved eyes, and the pistol’s lying in the brown- and white-sugar mix of sand and snow at his feet, and the crash of the breakers and the shrieking wind through the dunes are even louder than the gunshots were. Reverberating sound like deep-sea pressure, how many decibels per square inch before his skull finally collapses and the cacophony grinds his sorry soul to jelly?
“You really have no notion how delightful it will be,” Narcissa Snow begins to sing in a tittering voice stolen from a crazy child, a voice that rises somehow clearly above the seashore’s wail. “When they take us up and throw us, with the lobsters, out to sea!”
And Deacon finally sees her then, standing at the crest of a dune and looking down on him. The wind whips her blonde hair about her white face, blonde coils to hide and then reveal her blazing eyes, her naked body shimmering, skin like pearls, beneath the maritime sun. Slowly, he stoops down and reaches for the gun, never taking his eyes off her. Narcissa’s voice sails to him on wheeling gull wings, woven tightly into the gale.
“‘What matters it how far we go?’ his scaly friend replied. ‘There is another shore, you know, upon the other side.’”
His hand closes around the butt of the pistol, and he lifts it slowly from the sand.
“Yes. That’s right, isn’t it?” she asks and smiles, showing him her glistening dagger teeth. “You’ve read the stories, haven’t you? All the pretty fairy stories. You have to try to be the hero, don’t you, Deacon? Slay the ogre, save the princess—”
“You’re not an ogre,” he yells back at her, and the greedy wind snatches his voice from his lips and scatters it carelessly across the dunes. “You’re
nothing,
nothing but some twisted little girl who wanted to grow up to be a monster and didn’t get her wish!”
“Am I not monstrous?” she shouts at him, the smile fading, and she looks up at the low and steel-bellied sky. “What I am, the things I’ve done?” and Narcissa lowers her head, and her feral eyes flash scalding embers at Deacon. “The things I’ll
do
before I’m done?”
Deacon squints into the stinging wind, struggling to keep his hand steady as he aims the barrel of the gun at a spot just above her left breast. Narcissa takes a step towards him.
“They’ve been lying to you,
using
you, you sad, stupid man. The Children of the Cuckoo,” she sneers. “A couple of lapdog curs, that’s all they are, those two. That’s all they’ll ever be.”
He pulls the trigger, but the shot goes wide; Narcissa doesn’t even flinch. She takes another step forward, her bare feet in a drift of snow, her long legs and those eyes to burn his resolve to cinders.
“They need you, Deacon. They need your sight to find what I’ve taken from them.”
“Shut up,” he says and tries to steady the gun by propping it against his bandaged left wrist. She’s no more than ten feet away from him now, and Narcissa takes another step, closing the space for him that much more.
“Who’s watching Chance?” she asks. “Who’s minding the baby?”
Deacon pulls the trigger, and the slug tears a hole in the soft depression beneath her windpipe; blood sprays out across the sand, and she stops, staggers, and puts a hand over the wound, the smile returning to her lips.
“Your child will be such a prize,” she says hoarsely. “She has her father’s eyes.”
He fires again, and this time the shot catches Narcissa squarely between her breasts and knocks her to the sand. She sits there, smiling triumphantly up at him, a trickle of blood escaping from her open mouth, blood leaking thick and dark between the fingers still pressed futilely to her throat. But the hole in her chest isn’t bleeding at all.
“See me now, Mother Hydra,” she croaks. “Lady of the Abyss, Kraken Daughter,” and then she stops talking and shuts her eyes. Deacon takes a cautious step towards her, and the sea salt and rot smell grows suddenly stronger than before, the stench so thick it seems to cling to the insides of his nostrils. He gags helplessly, and Narcissa reaches out, taking his hand and the pistol and pressing it against her forehead. She opens her eyes again, but the fire is gone from them, leaving behind only sickly yellow irises and shrinking black-hole pupils.
“Finish it, Deacon,” she says. “Kill the monster,” and a fresh gout of blood spills from her lips and flows like syrup down her chin. “Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?”
Deacon pulls the trigger for the seventh time, lucky seven, and overhead the sky rumbles so loud he can’t even hear the shot. The sky pulling itself apart, ripping itself open at the seams with lightning hooks and needles, and Narcissa slumps back into the sand as her body comes apart in a feathery burst of raven wings. A dozen big black birds where her body lay an instant before and they rush past Deacon and are gone.
And he’s standing in the old house at the end of Cullom Street, storm-dim light through the windows so he can see Scarborough’s body lying lifeless at his feet. The body and the circle drawn on the floor in blood and shit and charcoal, the bleached bits of bone laid out inside that stinking wheel. Deacon lets the gun slip from his fingers, and it clatters loudly against the floor, and the sound echoes through the empty house.
By the time he gets back to Morris Avenue, the storm has passed, has dragged itself away north and east across the smarting, shell-shocked sky, leaving the city to glitter wet beneath the street lamps. Driving like a maniac, running stop signs and red lights, and it’s a miracle he doesn’t get pulled over or have a wreck; finally the wheels of Scarborough Pentecost’s long black Cadillac bouncing hard over the cobblestones, bouncing so hard that Deacon bites his tongue, and his mouth fills with the taste of saltwater and old pennies. He’s still a block away when he sees the strobing lights, an epileptic’s nightmare of swirling, flashing blues and whites and reds.
Too late,
he thinks.
Too late and she’s dead,
and then there’s a pissed-off-looking cop standing in the road with a whistle frantically waving him towards the curb.
Deacon cuts the wheel sharply to the right and stomps on the brake, but the Cadillac’s tires couldn’t care less what he wants and keep moving over the cobbles, too fast, too wet for traction, and the big car slams over the concrete curb and crashes into one of the cast-iron lampposts. It comes loose from the sidewalk and lands on the hood of the car in a sizzling spray of yellow-orange sparks, denting chrome and puncturing steel, shattering the windshield. Deacon wipes at his forehead, trying to figure out why he’s bleeding, why there’s blood on the steering wheel and his head hurts. When he looks up, the cop has started shouting at him, shouting words that Deacon can’t quite make out, and he pulls the handle to open the Cadillac’s door.
“You just stay right the hell where you are,” the cop yells, reaching for something at his waist, his gun, handcuffs or pepper spray, and Deacon doesn’t think it really makes much difference which. “Are you fucking high or something?”
“No,” Deacon says and starts to get out of the car, but that just makes the cop yell at him again.
“We’ve had enough crazy shit down here tonight without some drunk plowing into a lamppost.”
“I’m not drunk,” Deacon tells him.
“Well, how about you just stay put and let me figure that out for the both of us, okay?”
Deacon shakes his head and looks back up at the blizzard of swirling colored lights, all the cop cars and two ambulances crowded in at the back of their building, a fire truck parked right in the middle of Twenty-third Street. “My wife,” he says. “My wife is in there.”
“Mister, ain’t nobody left in there,” the cop replies and glances warily at the ruined streetlamp half buried in the hood of the black Cadillac, still spitting up a few lazy sparks. “You better just sit still until I can get someone from EMS over here to take a look at you.”
“Look, man, I fucking
live
there,” Deacon growls, losing patience as his head begins to clear, and he stabs an index finger in the general direction of the building. “My wife is pregnant. She was in 307. I’ve got to find her.”
“Oh, crap,” the cop says, and then starts speaking fast into his walkie-talkie, but there are already other people running across the wet cobblestones towards the Cadillac, their shoes loud in the night—four or five more cops and a fat paramedic, a tall fireman in green rubber boots and Detective Downs bringing up the rear.
Downs whispers something to the cop with the whistle and bends down beside the open car door. “Where the sam hell have you been?” he asks. Deacon doesn’t answer him or take his eyes off the building, off the windows of his and Chance’s apartment.
“Listen to me, Deke, I’m gonna need you to stay real fucking calm, you hear?”
“Where is she? Where’s Chance?”
“That’s what we’re trying to figure out. We just got the power back on a few minutes—”
“What the fuck do you mean?” and then Deacon’s up and out of the Cadillac, shoving his way through the bodies packed in around the car, already halfway across Morris before the fireman and one of the cops can stop him.
“She’s not
in
there,” Downs says. “Now don’t make me have to put the cuffs on you. You gotta believe me, there’s nothing in there you want to see right now.”
“Oh god,” Deacon whispers. “You were supposed to be here. You were supposed to protect her,” and he starts to take another step, but Downs is there to block him.
“Where were you tonight, Deke? What is it you’re not telling me about all this shit? You knew she needed protection, but you weren’t here to do it.”
Deacon looks away from the apartment windows and stares directly into the detective’s bloodshot eyes; whatever Downs sees there is enough to make him take a cautious step or two backwards.
“Arrest me or turn me the fuck loose,” Deacon says, his voice gone flat and mock calm, spending almost everything he has left just to keep from punching the detective in the face.
“You are bound and determined to make this as hard as possible for both of us, aren’t you?”
“Arrest me or get out of my way.”
“Deacon, your wife is
missing,
and we’ve got this other woman’s corpse splattered all over your parking garage like a piece of modern fucking art, all right? We got
another
girl they found out in the street there, and she’s gonna be real damn lucky if she makes it through the night. Right now, arresting you is just about the only thing that does make sense, but I don’t want to do it.”
“I know who did this,” Deacon says. “I know exactly who did this, and I know why, and you and all your little bad boys in blue here aren’t ever going to catch her,” and for a few seconds Downs stares silently back at him, then nods his head.
“Right now,” he says, his voice strained thin and brittle, “forensics is in your apartment. When they’re done, I’ll take you up. But, Deacon, in the meantime, you’re gonna sit your ass in the backseat of that cruiser over there, and you’re gonna keep your mouth shut, do you hear me?”
“You don’t know what’s—”
“I
asked
you if you fuckin’ heard me.”