Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (21 page)

“You be careful, boy,” the man says with a voice like water sloshing in a rocky place. “That’s
Carcharodon carcharias
herself hanging there, and her ghost is just as hungry as her living belly ever was. You’ve given her a taste of blood, and she’ll remember now.”

“Our car broke down,” Lark says to the man, looking up at his face for the first time since the door opened. “And we saw the signs.” She points back down the hill without looking away from the man, his cloudy eyes that seem too big for his skull, an odd, forward-sloping skull with more of an under bite than she ever thought possible and a worm-pink wrinkle where his lower lip should be, nothing at all to pass for the upper lip. Eyes set too far apart, wide nostrils too far apart and a scraggly bit of grey beard perched on the end of his sharp chin. Lank hair to his shoulders and almost as grey as the scrap of beard.

“You two want to see what’s inside, then?” he asks, that watery voice. Lark and Crispin both look back towards the signs, the little stream cutting the beach in half. There’s no evidence of Tam anywhere.

“Does it cost money?” Crispin asks, glances tentatively out at the man from underneath the white shock of hair hiding half his face.

“Not if you ain’t got any,” the man replies and blinks once, vellum lids winking fast across those bulging eyes.

“It’s getting late, and our car’s broken down,” Lark says, and the man makes a noise that might be a sigh or might be a cough.

“It don’t take long,” he tells her and smiles, showing crooked teeth the color of nicotine stains.

“And you’ve got all the things that those signs say, in there?” Crispin asks, one eyebrow cocked, eager, excited doubt. The man shrugs.

“If it’s free, I don’t expect you’ll be asking for your money back,” as if that’s an answer, but it’s enough for Crispin. He nods his head and steps towards the door, away from the shark jaws. But Lark grabs his hand, anxious grab that says, “Wait,” without using any words. When he looks at her, he sees eyes that say,
This isn’t like the dinosaurs, whatever it is, this isn’t plaster and plywood,
and so he smiles for her, flashing comfort and confidence.

“It’ll be something cool,” he says. “Better than listening to Tam bitch at us about the car, at least.”

So she smiles back at him, small and nervous smile, but she squeezes his hand a little harder.

“Come on, if you’re coming,” the man says. “I’m letting in the flies, standing here with the door wide open.”

“Hold on,” Crispin says. “We’re coming,” and the man holds the door for them, steps to one side, and the trailer swallows them like a hungry metal whale.

Inside, the air is chilly and smells like fish and stagnant saltwater, mildew, and there’s the faintest rotten odor somewhere underneath, like a dead thing washed up and swelling on the sand. Crispin and Lark pause while the man pulls the door shut behind them, shutting them in, shutting the world out. 

“Do you live in here?” Lark asks, still squeezing Crispin’s hand, and the old man turns around, the tall old man with his billy-goat beard. He gazes down at the twins as he scratches at the scaly, dry skin on his neck.

“I have myself a cot in the back, and a hot plate,” he replies. Lark nods. Her eyes are adjusting to the dim light leaking in through the dirty windowpanes, and she can see flakes of dead skin, dislodged by his fingers and floating slowly down to settle on the dirty linoleum floor of the trailer.

The length of the trailer has been lined with wooden shelves and huge glass tanks, and there are sounds to match the smells,
wet
sounds, the constant bubble of aquarium pumps, water filters, occasional, furtive splashes.

“Wonders from the blackest depths,” the old man sighs, wheezes, tired and sickly imitation of a carnie barker’s spiel. “Jewels and nightmares plucked from Davy Jones’ Locker, washed up on the shores of the Seven Seas – ”

The old man is interrupted by a violent fit of coughing, then, and Crispin steps up to the nearest shelf, a collection of jars, dozens and dozens of jars filled with murky ethanol or formalin, formaldehyde gone weak-tea brown and the things that float lifelessly inside: scales and spines, oyster-grey flesh and lidless, unseeing eyes like pickled grapes. Labels on the jars, identities in a fine, spidery handwriting, and the paper so old and yellow he knows that it would crumble at his most careful touch.

The old man clears his throat, loud, phlegmy rattle, and spits into a corner.

“Secrets from the world’s museums, from Mr. Charles Darwin’s own cabinets, scooped from the sea off Montevideo in eighteen hundred and thirty-two.”

“Is that an octopus?” Lark asks. The twins both stare into one of the larger jars, three or four gallons and a warty lump sealed inside, a bloom of tentacles squashed against the glass like something wanting out. Crispin presses the tip of one finger to the glass, tracing the outline of a single, dime-wide suction cup.

The old man coughs again, throaty raw hack, produces a wadded and wrinkled, snot-stained handkerchief from his shirt pocket, and wipes at his wide mouth with it.

“
That
, boy, is the larva of the Kraken, the greatest of the cephalopods, Viking-bane, ten strangling arms to hale dragon ships beneath the waves.” And then the old man clears his throat, and, in a different voice, barker turned poet, recites, “
Below the thunders of the upper deep, far, far beneath in the abysmal sea, his ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep the Kraken sleepeth.
”

“Tennyson,” Lark says, and the old man nods, pleased.

Crispin leans closer, squinting through the gloom and dusty glass, the clouded preserving fluids, and now he can see something dark and sharp like a parrot’s beak nested at the center of the rubbery mass of mollusk flesh. But then they’re being hurried along, past all the unexamined specimens, and here’s the next stop on the old man’s tour.

Beneath a bell jar, the taxidermied head and arms and torso of a monkey sewn onto the dried tail of a fish, the stitches plain to see, but he tells them it’s a baby mermaid, netted near the coast of Java, a hundred years ago.

“It’s just half a dead old monkey with a fishtail stuck on,” Crispin says, impertinent, already tiring of these moldy, fabricated wonders. “See?” and he points at the stitches in case Lark hasn’t noticed them for herself.

The old man makes an fractious sound, not quite anger, but impatience, certainly, and he moves them quickly along, this time to a huge fish tank, plate-glass sides so entirely overgrown with algae there’s no seeing what’s inside, just mossy green like siren hair that sways in whatever dull currents the aquarium’s pump is making.

“I can’t see anything at all in
there
,” Crispin says, as Lark looks nervously back past the fake mermaid towards the trailer door. But Crispin stands on his toes, peers over the edge of the tank. “You need to put some snails in there,” he says. “To eat some of that green shit so people can see.”

“
This
one has no name, no
proper
name,” the old man croaks through his snot-clogged throat. “No legend. This one was scraped off the hull of a Russian whaler with the shipworms and barnacles. On Midsummer’s Eve, put an ear to the glass and you’ll hear it
singing
in the language of riptides and typhoons.”

Something in the tank seems to move, then, maybe, beyond the emerald scum, feathery red gill-flutter or a thousand jointed legs the color of a burn, and Crispin jumps, steps away from the glass and lets go of Lark’s hand. Smug grin on the old man’s long face to show his yellowed teeth, and he makes a barking noise like seals or laughing, or seals laughing.

“You go back, if you’re getting scared,” the old man says, and Lark looks like that’s all she wants in the world right now, to be out of the trailer, back on the beach and headed up the cliff to the Impala. But Crispin seizes her hand again, this very same boy that’s afraid of banana slugs, but something here he has to see, and something he has to prove to himself or to the self-satisfied old man.

“What’s next, sea monkeys?” he asks, defiantly, mock-brave.

“Right here,” the old man says, pointing to something more like a cage than a tank. “The illegitimate spawn of the Great Sea Serpent and a Chinese water dragon.” There’s a sloppy construction of planks and chicken wire on the floor, almost as tall as the twins, and Crispin drags Lark along towards it.

“Tam will be looking for us, won’t she?” Lark asks, but he ignores her, stares instead into the enclosure. There’s muddy straw on the bottom and motionless coils of taut gold and chocolate-brown muscle.

“Jesus, it’s just a stupid python, Lark. See? It’s not even as big as the one that Miss Alexandra used to have. What a rip-off – ” and then he stops. Because the snake moves, shifting its chain-link bulk, and now he can see its head, the tiny horns above its pearlbead eyes, and farther back, a single, stubby flap of meat along one side of its body that beats nervously at the air a moment and then lies still against the filthy straw.

“There’s something wrong with it, Crispin, that’s all. It’s deformed,” Lark says, argument to convince herself, and the old man says, “She can crush a full-grown pig in those coils, or a man,” and he pauses for the drama, then adds, resuming his confident barker cadence, sly voice to draw midway crowds – “Kept inside a secret Buddhist monastery on the Yangtze and worshipped for a century, gettin’ all the sacrificial children she could eat,” he says.

The flipper thing on its side moves again, vestigial limb rustle against the straw, and the snake flicks a tongue the color of gangrene and draws its head slowly back into its coils, retreating, hiding from their sight or the dim trailer light, or both. “Wonders from the blackest depths,” the old man whispers. “Mysteries of the deep, spoils of the abyss.” 

And Lark is all but begging, now. “
Please
, Crispin. We should go.” But her voice almost lost in the burbling murmur of aquarium filters.

Crispin’s hand about her wrist like a steel police cuff, and she thinks,
How much more can there be, how much can this awful little trailer hold?
When she looks back the way they’ve come, past the snake thing’s cage and the green tank and the phony mermaid, past all the jars, it seems a long, long way; the dizzying impression that the trailer’s somehow bigger inside than out, and she shivers, realizes that she’s sweating, clammy coldsweat in tiny salt beads on her upper lip, across her forehead and leaking into her eyes.
How much more?
but there’s at least
one
more, and they step past a plastic shower curtain, slick blue plastic printed with cartoon sea horses and starfish and turtles, to stand before the final exhibit in the old man’s shabby menagerie.

“Dredged from the bottom of Eel Canyon off Humboldt Bay, hauled up five hundred fathoms through water so inky black and cold it might be the very moment before Creation itself.” Crispin is staring at something Lark can’t see, squinting into the last tank. Cold air pools about Lark’s ankles, one dry and one still wet from the stream, a sudden, tangible chill that gathers itself like the old man’s words, or like heavy air spilling from an open freezer door.

“And this was just a
scrap
, boy, a
shred
ripped from the haunches or seaweed-crusted skull of a behemoth.”

“I can’t see anything,” Crispin says, but then he gasps, “
Oh.
Oh shit. Oh, Jesus.”

Lark realizes where the cold is coming from, that it’s pouring out from under the shower curtain, and finally she slips her hand free of Crispin’s grasp. He doesn’t even seem to notice, can’t seem to stop staring into the murky, ill-lit tank that towers over them, filling the rear of the trailer from wall to wall.

“Just
maybe
,” the old man says, bending very close, and he’s almost whispering to Crispin now, secrets and suspicions for the boy twin and no one else. “Maybe it’s growing itself a whole new body in there, a whole new organism from that stolen bit of flesh, like the arm of a starfish that gets torn off and keeps on living.”

Lark touches the folds of the curtain, and the cold presses back from the other side. Cold that would burn her hand if she left it there, if she lingered long enough. She glances back at the old man and Crispin to be sure they’re not watching, because she knows this must be forbidden, something she’s not meant to see. Then she pulls one corner of the shower curtain aside, and that terrible cold flows out, washing over her like a wave of Arctic breath and a neglected cat-box smell and another, sharper odor like cabbage left too long at the bottom of a refrigerator.

“Fuck,” Crispin says behind her. “No fucking way.” The old man is reciting Tennyson again.

“
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie, battening upon huge sea worms in his sleep, until the latter fire shall heat the deep – ”

There is dark behind the shower curtain, dark like a wall, solid as the cold, and again, that vertigo sense of a vast space held somehow inside the little trailer, that this blackness might go on for miles. That she could step behind the curtain and spend her life wandering lost in the perpetual night collected here.

“
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
” the old man says, somewhere back there in the world, where there is simple light and warmth. “
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.
”

Far off, in the dark ahead of her, there are wet sounds, something breaking the surface of water that has lain so still so long, and she can feel its eyes on her then, eyes made to see where light is a fairy tale and the sun a murmured heresy. The sound of something vast and sinuous coming slowly through the water towards her, and Crispin says, “It
moved
, didn’t it? Jesus, it fucking moved in there.”

It’s so close now,
Lark thinks.
It’s so close and this is the worst place in the world and I
should
be scared, I should be scared shitless.

“It does that sometimes,” the old man says. “In its sleep, sometimes it moves.”