Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
“What’s the story?” he asks, drying the lighter on the hem of his T-shirt.
“Not so loud,” she whispers. “I thought maybe we’d be able to hear the baby, if it’s crying.”
Deacon listens to the darkness crowded between the tunnel walls, and there’s hardly any sound at all, only the dripping ceiling and his own heart hammering inside his chest.
“I don’t hear anything,” he whispers.
“Do you still have the pistol?”
“Yeah, I still have the pistol.”
“Well, you just make sure it’s cocked and the safety’s off,” she whispers. “If we find them, we’ll have to be ready.”
“You fire that shotgun in here and you’ll probably bring this whole place down on our heads,” Deacon mumbles, glancing up at the tunnel ceiling hidden somewhere in the darkness overhead.
“It’s more stable than it looks.”
“Great. So what the hell are we waiting on?” and there’s a long moment of nothing but the measured
plop plop plop
from the dripping stone, and then Jane whispers, “You said you knew my name, Deacon. Were you lying?”
“My wife is dying out there,” he replies. “My child is lost in here somewhere. I don’t have time for this right now.”
“I might not have time for it later. Were you lying?”
“No,” Deacon says and flips the strike wheel again, white-hot sparks and then the little flame to show their faces, etched starkly in the gloom. “I wasn’t lying. Downs told me.”
“I never…I didn’t think anyone would ever know.”
“We have to go,” Deacon says. “We have to go now.”
“Tell me,” she whispers, leaning closer to him, her eyes gleaming faintly in the light from the Zippo. “Quick, and then we’ll go.”
And at first he thinks he might have actually forgotten the name the cop gave him, the infant vanished from its crib fifteen years ago. But there it is, waiting behind the fear and urgency. “Eliza,” he says. “Your real name’s Eliza Helen Morrow. You were born in 1986, I think.”
“Eliza,” Jane whispers, speaking so softly there’s hardly more than the movement of her lips, and she smiles a sad and secret smile. “My name is Eliza Morrow, and I might be fifteen years old.”
“We have to go
now,
” Deacon says, and “Yeah,” she replies. “Thank you, Deacon. Thank you for keeping that for me,” and without another word she turns and heads deeper into the tunnel.
He follows her, carrying his puny light, walking fast to keep up with her. The air is growing warmer by degrees, but has begun to stink of mold and dank, rotting things. Deacon keeps counting, picking up at sixty-eight, nothing else to mark the time or distance; when he reaches one hundred and thirty-five, Jane stops and looks back at him.
“I think this opens into a cavern,” she whispers. “I expect that’s where she’s waiting for them. Unless they’ve already come and gone.”
“I still don’t hear anything,” Deacon says doubtfully.
“You wouldn’t,” she replies, but then he
does
hear something, a sudden
shhsssh
through the still and stinking air, and then Jane drops the shotgun and clutches her chest with both hands. Four or five inches of rusty, bloodstained steel are jutting from her chest, the ugly, double-barbed point of some antique spear or harpoon, and she crumples silently to her knees in front of him. A dark gout of blood rushes from her open mouth, leaving maroon bubbles on her lips, and she grabs for Deacon. He sees the long shaft of the harpoon between her shoulder blades, sees that it really
is
a fucking harpoon and sees the rope tied to it; he reaches for her, their fingertips brushing as the rope goes taut and she’s dragged away into the greedy blackness beyond the Zippo’s reach. There and then gone so fast it can’t possibly be real, as impossible as the rest of this shit, and he raises the pistol and aims into the dark.
“Run, Deacon,” Jane calls out. “Run
fast,
” a gurgling, wrecked phantom of her voice, and then there’s a loud cracking noise, wet snap of living bone, dry snap of metal, and he fires the pistol. The roar of the gun is deafening, like thunder belched up from the gut of the bottom of the world.
“Jane!” he shouts, his voice muffled by the painful ringing in his ears; no answer, but a few handfuls of sand and tiny bits of stone sift from a crack in the ceiling of the tunnel. A second or two later, and there’s an awful tearing sound before the girl named Starling Jane screams and is silent.
In the inky darkness up ahead, something begins to laugh.
And Deacon raises the gun, taking aim at the face of the pale shape lurching towards him through the tunnel, its skin streaked with blood and gore, its seething eyes to scald and shrivel the souls of angels.
“You think I still have what you’re looking for, little man?” she asks. “You think you can take it away from me?”
Narcissa Snow, only a woman and nothing remotely human, and when she smiles, he pulls the trigger again.
Neither dreaming nor awake, living nor dead, Chance listens to the gunshots echoing from the mouth of the tunnel by the sea. She can’t remember how long she’s been lying there, wrapped tight in the strange girl’s raincoat and Deacon’s jacket, shivering and watching the stars moving overhead. All the constellations that her grandparents taught her to recognize—Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco, Cassiopeia—and other stars she doesn’t know, and the wind flutters the edges of the blue-white banner lying crumpled in a corner of the ruins, the one that reads at the ocean’s edge: fish with feet, when it ought to read
AT THE RIVER’S EDGE
, but Alice said it wasn’t worth getting into an argument over. The sky so vast and brilliant, nothing like the sky above Birmingham, dull city sky half hidden behind city lights, and she’s beginning to think a few of those stars might take pity on her, might streak, screaming across the velvet night, and show her how to die.
But then the gunshots, and the girl’s voice before that, words Chance couldn’t make out, but the fear plain enough to hear.
“He needs you now,” the child says. She’s been sitting at the edge of the pool where she was born, dipping her fingers into the freezing water, playing tag with the tiny silver fish and phosphorescent trilobites, the waving arms of crinoids, and now she turns and looks sadly at Chance.
“Just let me lie here a few more minutes, please,” Chance replies. “Just let me rest my eyes.”
“There isn’t time,” the child says, and then she smiles and dips her finger in the water again. “No, that’s not right, is it? There’s always time.”
“I’m so sorry,” Chance says, because she’s just remembered how she got here, and that the werewolf took her newborn daughter into the tunnel. “But I couldn’t stop her.”
For a moment or two, the child watches Chance, still smiling, and then leaves the pool and comes to stand beside her. All around the remains of the basement, warm night breezes rustle the branches of towering tree ferns and cycads, and a gangly young
Giganotosaurus
pauses to watch them, mother and daughter, with its flashing, nocturnal eyes, before vanishing into the foliage again.
“I made this place for you,” the girl says. “I sewed it from pieces of your soul. When we’re finished, you can stay here as long as you want. There’s always time.”
“You’re very clever,” Chance tells her, trying to sit up, and the girl bends down to help.
“But we have to hurry now,” she says. “He’s hurt.”
“Who? Deacon?”
“His gun ran out of bullets, and he didn’t have time to reach Starling’s shotgun before Narcissa got to him.”
Chance closes her eyes, hoping this is only a dream after all, her brain spitting up memories and wishful thoughts and white noise at death’s door. The tropical Mesozoic air is sweet, and it would be easy to sleep now, she thinks. Easy never to open her eyes again, and this is so much better than drowning in a muddy, freezing pool with a stone on her chest.
“Wake up, Mother,” the child insists and shakes her hard. “I’ll help you, but
you
have to do this. It won’t be finished until you do.”
“It’s finished now,” Chance says, opening her eyes, and the girl is frowning down at her. “What’s your name?” Chance asks.
“I’m not allowed to tell you that. You’ll find out later.”
“You can’t tell me, can you? Because you don’t know. Because I never made up my mind about a girl’s name, so you don’t have one.”
“Look, she’ll kill him if you don’t get up off your ass.”
“Will she?” Chance asks, and “Watch your step,” the nameless girl replies, leading her along the wall of the dark tunnel. “It’s slippery in here.”
“What if he’s dead already? What if we’re already too late?”
“Then you’ll know that you’ve done everything you could do,” the girl replies. “You’ll have done your best to help him.”
“That’s not enough.”
“Then you should talk less and walk faster,” but Chance can’t walk any faster, can hardly walk at all, the child all but holding her up as it is. The stones have bruised and sliced her bare feet, and the water covering most of the tunnel floor is cold and smells like shit. She braces herself against the granite wall, pulls the raincoat tighter about her shoulders and wishes she were back outside in the sultry, jungle-scented night.
“There’s light up ahead,” the girl says, and when Chance stares hard into the dark she can see it too, a sickly greenish glow, but it’s hard to tell how far away it might be. And then she trips over Deacon’s legs and almost falls. The child catches her, and Chance kneels down beside him, her hands for eyes, and she’s grateful for the blackness now, that she can’t see his battered body slumped against the tunnel wall.
“Chance,” he whispers. “How the fuck did you get in here?”
“You’re not dead,” she says and kisses him, tasting the blood drying to a sticky mess on his cheek. “I thought you were. I thought we were both dead.”
“I couldn’t stop her, baby. I emptied that goddamn gun into her, and I still couldn’t stop her.”
“Shhhh,” Chance whispers, crying again, but this time from relief and the tears are warm against her chilled skin. “That doesn’t matter anymore. We’re safe. We’re
all
safe now, Deke. I just have to get you out of here.”
“She didn’t take the shotgun with her,” Deacon says. “It’s still here somewhere.”
Look, Mother,
the child whispers.
Do you see? Do you see where she’s taken me?
Chance stares past Deacon at the green glow filling the tunnel only forty or fifty yards farther along, light that seems to pulse faintly, light so terrible she wants to hide herself in Deacon’s arms and never leave the dark again.
“I don’t understand,” she whispers. “I don’t understand any of this.”
“She would have killed me,” Deacon says, “but someone down there started calling her name.” He tries to stand up, grunts in pain and sits right back down again. “Just give me a few,” he says. “I’ll be okay. See if you can find that damn shotgun.”
“It’s right here,” she tells him and picks it up from the tunnel floor. “But we’re okay, Deacon. We’re alive.”
“She has the baby. She took it to them. Just let me get my breath.”
The chartreuse light seems a little brighter now, or her eyes are adjusting, bright enough that she can make out Deacon’s face, the wide and ragged cut above his eyes, the clean lines of the gun in her hands.
“I think I’m dying, Deacon,” she says. “If I don’t do this now, I’m not going to have the strength to do it at all.” He doesn’t reply, and she sees that he’s shut his eyes. Chance leans close enough that she can feel his sour, alcoholic’s breath on her face, can hear the regular rise and fall of his chest.
“You sleep,” she says and kisses him again. “This won’t take long, I promise.”
“I wish it didn’t have to end this way,” the child says. “I wish the story could have a better ending. I wish it could end, ‘And then they all left the tunnel, went home, and never met another monster, and lived happily ever after.’”
“That would be a fine story,” Chance tells her. “That would be a very fine story.”
And the child helps her to her feet again, holding her up when Chance thinks she can’t walk another step, tells her not to look when they pass the headless body with the harpoon rising from its chest, but it’s too late, and she’s already seen.
“She was trying to save us,” the child says. “Daddy told me her real name was Eliza.”
“Her real name,” Chance whispers, too weak to speak any louder, and now the yellow-green light is so bright she can clearly see the tunnel walls, the face of her daughter, her own tattered flesh beneath the folds of the raincoat.
“I can’t take you any farther,” the child says. “You’ll have to finish this alone, Mother,” and there’s a warm breeze, the ancient smell of the forest that isn’t growing outside the tunnel, and the girl is gone. Chance leans against the stone wall, staring first at the shotgun in her hands, and then up at the place just ahead where the tunnel widens suddenly, the space filled up with the pulsing green light. And there are voices now, gravel-throated voices that hardly sound human, more like dogs or bears that have been taught to talk, some ingenious circus sideshow trick; she rests against the wall and listens and squints into the light.