Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
He stood there for a while, silently watching the sea through her drapes, watching the summer night, and she didn’t ask him anything else. She slipped her hand beneath the pillow and gripped the wooden handle of the ice pick tightly, but he left a few minutes later, without saying another word, without even looking at her again, left the carving knife lying on the bureau and shut the door behind him. Aldous Snow would only enter her bedroom one more time in his life.
October 30—There are terrible noises from the cellar tonight, and I’m too afraid to go see. I’m afraid all the time. I don’t want to know any more. I don’t want to know any of it. This afternoon I watched my father standing at the edge of the sea, talking to the sky. I think he was arguing with the sky. I was all the way back at the old boathouse and couldn’t hear what he was saying, but he did it for over an hour. And I think he’s started keeping animals in the cellar. I can smell them if I stand at the cellar door. I can hear them moving around.
The day after Aldous held a knife to her throat, Narcissa walked and hitchhiked into Ipswich. She didn’t tell him that she was going, not because she thought he would try to stop her, but because she didn’t care whether he knew or not. She was starting to think that he
couldn’t
hurt her, that if he could, he would have done it already. She crossed the dunes behind the house, then followed the Argilla Road until a man in a green pickup truck stopped for her.
“Where you bound?” and she told him Ipswich.
“But you ain’t no runaway?” he asked suspiciously, and Narcissa shook her head no, told him the story she’d made up that morning about her sick grandfather and how their car had broken down a week ago, how she had to pick up his heart medicine from the drugstore in Ipswich. Narcissa had never ridden in a car and the thought of gliding along so effortlessly on those black rubber tires made her a little dizzy.
“Well, I guess you better get in, then.”
The man didn’t say much on the drive into town, glanced at her in his rearview mirror from time to time, hesitant, nervous glances, but just before he let her out on Market Street, “You ain’t by any chance any relation to Old Man Snow?” he asked.
“Yes sir,” Narcissa said politely. “He’s my grandfather. How’d you know that?”
“You just got that look about you,” the man said and shrugged, not looking at Narcissa, pretending to watch a woman pushing a baby carriage along the sidewalk. “You got the old man’s eyes.”
“Thank you for the ride,” she said and got out of the truck.
“Anytime,” the man said. “Hope your granddad’s feeling better soon,” and then he drove away. Narcissa walked past the drugstore to a smaller shop that sold books and magazines and bought a paperback French-English dictionary with five dollars she’d taken from one of the snuff tins Aldous kept his money in. On the way back, no one stopped to pick her up, and it was almost dark by the time she got home.
After she found the Colt where it had landed beneath a crape myrtle bush and unpacked the car—four trips from the porch to the Olds and back again, four trips across the dandelion- and pecan-cluttered yard, but all her boxes and bags finally safe inside the house—Narcissa fell asleep near the broken bedroom window. No sleep for almost forty-eight hours and the sunlight, the clean, afternoon-warmed air through the broken window, almost as good as the tiny violet Halcion tablets she takes when the voices won’t let her sleep. She promised herself that she was only going to close her eyes, only for a moment, a ten-minute nap at the most, and she lay down with a stolen motel pillow beneath her head and the gun within easy reach.
“Rise and shine, girl,” her grandfather growls at her from some fading dream place; in an instant Narcissa is wide awake, adrenaline sharp and her heart pounding loud as thunder. The long shadows and half-light filling the white room, so she knows she’s slept for hours, not minutes. The day is almost gone, and she closes her hand around the butt of the pistol, its comforting, undeniable weight, and listens for whatever it is that woke her—not her grandfather or his ghost, something flesh and blood, something that can hurt and die.
But there’s only the brittle rustle of the wind playing with leaves, two squirrels chattering angrily at each other somewhere nearby, the distant, steady sound of traffic. Down the street, a woman calls out.
“Taylor! It’s getting dark! Time to come in!”
Narcissa takes a very deep breath and holds it, waiting impatiently as her heart begins to return to normal, as her body quickly burns away the adrenaline clogging her bloodstream.
“Five more minutes. It’s not even dark yet.”
“
Now
, young man!”
Narcissa exhales and sits up, slides across the floor until her back is pressed firmly against the wall, and then she steals a glance out the window at the porch and the yard cut up into neat twilight slices by the blinds. Nothing that shouldn’t be there. The sleek black car almost lost in the gloom. The untrimmed shrubbery lining the driveway. One of the noisy squirrels races itself from the trunk of one tree to another.
“It was nothing,” she whispers. “It was nothing at all,” and she turns to face the almost-empty room again, three closed doors, the map thumbtacked to the wall, her papers scattered on the floor.
And from somewhere in the house, the creak of a floorboard to contradict her.
“Old houses make all sorts of sounds,” one of her voices whispers reassuringly from a corner. “You know that.”
Narcissa raises the Colt and rests the barrel flat against her left cheek, straining her ears to see if the voice is right or wrong. She flips the safety off with her thumb and takes another deep breath.
Old houses make all sorts of sounds.
From the north side of the house, the living room or perhaps the kitchen, somewhere off to her left, there’s another, louder creak and then a third immediately after that. She stands up very slowly, keeping the wall at her back, silently cursing herself for having fallen asleep.
“You can’t expect to stay awake forever,” the voice in the corner sighs.
“But she’s getting careless,” another voice whispers. “These fuckers, you screw up just once and you’re history. Just once, and you’re toast.”
Narcissa takes one cautious step towards the door leading to the foyer, and the floor squeaks softly beneath her bare feet.
“If you can hear them, you better bet they can hear you,” one of the voices chuckles, and Narcissa stops and aims the pistol at the corner the voice came from.
“Best ignore all that chatter in your head,” her grandfather grumbles from behind the closet door. “They’re just trying to distract you, Narcissa. They still think it’ll save them, if you get yourself killed.”
The sudden flutter of wings then, a hundred wings hammering the air somewhere above the house, ink-black feathers battering the dusk, and she fires two shots through the bedroom ceiling.
“You should have killed that damned bird when you had the chance,” her grandfather says.
Sheetrock dust like powdered sugar settles to the polished floor from the fist-sized hole in the ceiling, hangs suspended in the air, drifting lazily through the last rays of the setting sun. The birds are already far away, high above the city, crying her name to anyone who will listen. And now there’s a new sound coming from the other side of the door, something animal pacing back and forth out there, its steel claws
click-click-click
ing against the wood, its breath the endless rise and fall of ocean waves against granite boulders.
“You can run,” one of the corner voices sneers. “But you know they can run faster.”
“I’m tired of running,” she says, and never mind if the thing on the other side of the door can hear her; after the birds, she can’t imagine it matters much whether she’s quiet or not. “I’m sick to fucking death of running. I’m going to find what I fucking came here to find, and then I’ll never have to run again.”
“Open the door, half-breed,” the thing in the foyer snarls, and she can smell it now, decay and red, raw meat, ashes and gasoline.
“You’re such a disappointment,” Aldous Snow mumbles from his closet. “My only daughter died for you.”
“Not your only daughter, you twisted old fuck,” one of the corners reminds him. “Now shut up and go back to sleep.”
“Make it easy on yourself,” the thing behind the door says. “Save us the trouble. You might as well. This story ends exactly the same, either way.”
And Narcissa looks down and sees the thick red-black liquid leaking into the room from beneath the door, viscous soup of shit and blood and rot, bile and half-digested hair, and backs away as it spreads itself out across the bedroom floor. She raises the pistol and fires three times at the door, and the shots are as loud as the world cracking itself apart at the end of time.
“Wake up, girl,” her grandfather says.
—The vision ended. I awoke
As out of sleep, and no
Voice moved—
“There’s someone here to see you.”
Narcissa opens her eyes, the dream spitting her back into herself, back into the sunny-bright afternoon room, sweat-soaked and gasping for air like a drowning woman. She lies still for a moment, staring up at the bedroom ceiling, waiting for her heart to stop pounding. Waiting to be absolutely sure it isn’t all a trick, some magic far too subtle for her to have ever learned; but no monsters have followed her back here, no black-bird spies, and in a few more minutes she rolls over and hides her face in the stolen pillow, crying as quietly as she can so the voices won’t hear.
As her twelfth summer dissolved into a bleak and drizzly twelfth autumn, Narcissa sat alone in her room in the tall house by the sea. Day after night after day, alone with
Cultes des Goules
and her French-English dictionary, impatiently struggling to tease some sense from the book’s crumbling yellow-brown pages and archaic grammar, fragments of sentences adding up to no more than fragments of meaning. Slowly transcribing the text onto stationery that she’d stolen from a drawer in her grandfather’s study, writing paper that had once belonged to
MR. ISCARIOT HOWARD Q. SNOW, ESQ
., and she was pretty sure that must have been her great-grandfather’s name. The relic and her cipher and little time left over for anything else, pausing only for the bland meals Aldous left outside her door twice a day and as little sleep as she could get by on. This blind urgency something new to Narcissa, like
passé simple
and the baffling French conjugations, this small voice in her head that whispered incessantly,
Hurry, there’s not much time left, hurry
.
Dépêchez-vous.
The revelations given up to her in stingy, oblique bits and pieces, murky enlightenments, and by early October she was finally finished, or at least as finished as she ever thought she would be. Several pages of the book had been written in languages other than French, and those would remain closed to her for many more years. But she’d gleaned enough to begin to understand, at last, the things her mother’s diary had only hinted, her grandfather’s fear and anger, her own golden eyes—that there was a world behind and beneath the world she knew, as hidden from the minds of men as the bottomless black depths of Mother Hydra’s drowning oceans. Hidden, but there
were
intersections, thin places where the one sometimes met the other, and there were the children of these meetings, the forsaken creatures Comte d’Erlette had simply called
les métis
.
“Do you see now?” her grandfather asked, watching from the safety of the bedroom doorway, his face become a skeleton mask by the light of his kerosene lantern. When she didn’t answer him, he asked again, “Do you
see,
Narcissa?”
Narcissa didn’t bother to look up from the stationery pages crowded with her sloppy handwriting, pages of pencil and fountain pen scrawl, pretending to read the words she’d written there.
“Leave me alone. Close the door and leave me alone,” she said.
“I wouldn’t have given you that book, but I still thought they would take you away. I shouldn’t have—”
“Are you going deaf, Aldous?”
“It was old Iscariot.
He
started all of this. It wasn’t me—”
“Do you really think that matters, who started it?”
“It isn’t my fault,” he mumbled ruefully, staring down at the floor, at the threshold of his lost Caroline’s bedroom, his eyes grown wet and distant. “I’m the same as you, Narcissa.”
“No, old man,” she snarled, baring her sharp white teeth for him. “Whatever you are, you’re not the same as me. You’ll never be
anything
like me,” and she got up and crossed the room, slammed the door in his face and then stood there listening to the sound of his slippers shuffling slowly down the long corridor towards his own bedroom door.
“Nothing like me, you lying bastard,” she whispered, her lips pressed hard against the door, driving her voice through the wood like nails. “Nothing like me at all.”
November 18—They all left the cellar last night and danced around a big bonfire Father built in the dunes behind the house. He spent the whole day gathering enough driftwood. I sat on the porch, bundled up in my coat and gloves and read the newspaper while he walked up and down the beach talking to himself. The things I read in the paper seem less and less important. I thought they were the key, but maybe they’re something else altogether. Maybe they’re only a distraction. Small evils, small cataclysms. It’s all a game, and there’s no time left for me to learn the rules. They howl all night long from the dunes, and my baby kicks in my belly as if it wants to join them and run beneath the moon. Be patient, dear. Your damnation will find you soon enough.