Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (28 page)

Alex lays the small bundle of paper down on the coffee table and picks up her drink. The glass has left a ring of condensation on the dark wood, the finish already beginning to turn pale and opaque underneath. An heirloom from Margot’s grandmother or a great aunt or some such, and she’ll have a cow when she sees it, so Alex wipes the water away with the hem of her T-shirt. But the ring stays put, a defiant, accusing, condemning tattoo. She sighs, sits back, and takes another swallow of the vodka and grapefruit juice.

“What are you supposed to be, anyway?” she asks the videotape. No label of any sort on it for an answer, but almost certainly more Perraultiana, an interview, possibly, or maybe something a bit more exotic, more morbid, a news report of his accident taped off TF1 or even footage shot during the funeral. Alex wouldn’t be surprised, has seen and heard of worse things being done by art groupies like Jude Sinclair. She decides to save the video for later, a few moments’ diversion before bed, leaves it on the couch, and she goes to fix herself a fresh drink.

Something from the freezer for dinner, prepackaged Chinese that came out of the microwave looking nothing at all like the photograph on the cardboard box, Kung Pao pencil erasers and a bottle of beer, and Alex sits on the living room floor, watching
Scooby Doo
on the Cartoon Network. The end of another day that might as well not have happened, more of yesterday and the day before that, the weeks and months since she’s finished anything at all piling up so fast that soon it’ll have been a year. Today, she stood in the doorway to her office for fifteen minutes and stared uselessly at her typewriter, the vintage Royal she inherited from her father. She’s never been able to write on anything else, the rough clack-clack-clack of steel keys, all the mechanical clicks and clatters and pings to mark her progress down a page, through a scene, the inharmonious chapter-to-chapter symphony towards conclusion and THE END.

When the beer’s gone and she’s swallowed enough of the stuff from the freezer to be convinced that she’s better off not finishing it, Alex slides her plate beneath the coffee table and retrieves Jude Sinclair’s videocassette from the couch. She puts it into the VCR, hits the play button, and in a moment Scooby and Shaggy are replaced by a loud flurry of static. Alex starts to turn down the volume, but the snow and white noise have already been replaced by a silent black screen. She sits watching it, half-curious, impatient, waiting for whatever it is to begin, whatever the blue-eyed girl from the gallery wants her to see.

In the kitchen, the phone rings, and Alex looks away from the television screen, not particularly interested in talking to anyone, and so she thinks she’ll let the machine pick up. On the third ring, she turns back to the TV, but it’s still just as dark as before, and she checks to be sure that she doesn’t have it on pause by mistake. The soft, green glow of digital letters, play and a flashing arrow to let her know that she doesn’t, that either the tape’s blank or the recording hasn’t begun yet. Or maybe Jude Sinclair’s filmed a perfectly dark room as a tribute or eulogy to Perrault.

“This is bullshit,” Alex mutters, and she presses fast forward. Now the blackness flickers past as the counter tallies all the minutes of nothing stored on the tape. In the kitchen, the telephone rings once more and then the answering machine switches on, Margot’s voice reciting their number, politely informing the caller that no one can come to the phone right now, but if you’ll please leave your name and number, the date and time, someone will get back to you as soon as possible.

And then Margot answers herself, her voice sounding small and distant, sounding upset, and “Alex?” she says. “Alex, if you’re there please pick up, okay? I need to talk to you.”

Alex sighs and rubs at her temples. A bright burst of pain behind her left eye, maybe the beginnings of a migraine, and she’s really not up to one of Margot’s long-distance crises, the two of them yelling at each other with half a continent in between. She glances back to the television screen, presses play, and the nothing stops flickering.

“Hello? Alex? Come
on
. I know you’re at home. Pick up the damned phone,
please
.”

It really is blank,
she thinks.
The crazy bitch sent me a fucking blank videotape.

“Alex! I’m not kidding, okay? Please answer the goddamn telephone!”

“Alright! Jesus, I’m
coming
!” she shouts at the kitchen, gets up too fast and one foot knocks over the empty beer bottle. It rolls noisily away towards a bookshelf, leaves behind a glistening, semi-circular trickle of liquid as it goes. By the time Alex lifts the receiver, Margot has started crying.

“
What
? What’s wrong?” 

“Christ, Alex. Why can’t you just answer the fucking phone? Why do I have to get fucking hysterical to get you to answer the
phone?”

For a second, Alex considers the simple efficacy of a lie, the harmless convenience of
I was on the toilet
, or
I just walked in the front door
. Any plausible excuse to cover her ass. 

“I’m sorry,” she says, instead. “I’ve been in a funk all day long. I’m getting a headache. I just didn’t want to talk to anyone.”

“For fuck’s sake.” Then Margot coughs, and Alex can tell that she’s trying to stop crying.

“Margot, what’s wrong,” Alex asks again. “Has something happened?” She wants a cigarette, but she left them in the living room, left her lighter, too, and she settles for chewing on a ragged thumbnail.

“I saw something today,” Margot says, speaking very quietly. Alex hears her draw a deep breath, the pause as she holds it in a moment, then the long uneven exhalation, before “I saw something terrible today,” she says.

“So what was it? What did you see?”

“A dog attack,” and she’s almost whispering now. “I saw a little girl attacked by a dog.”

For a moment, neither of them says anything, and Alex stares out the window above the kitchen sink at the final indigo and violet dregs of sunset beyond the Atlanta skyline. The pain behind her left eye is back, more persistent than before, keeping time with her heartbeat. She has no idea what to say next, is about to tell Margot that she’s sorry, default sentiment better than nothing, better than standing here as the pain in her head gets bigger, listening to the faint electric buzz and crackle coming through the telephone line.

“I was walking in the park,” Margot says. “Lafontaine, it’s not far from my hotel. This poor little girl, she couldn’t have been more than five. She must have wandered away from her mother – ”

And now Alex realizes that she can hear the faint metallic notes of a music box playing from the next room, something on the video after all. She turns and looks through the doorway at the television screen.

“ – she was dead before anyone could get it off her.”

Grainy blacks and whites, light and shadow, and at first Alex isn’t sure what she’s seeing, unable to force all those shades of grey into a coherent whole. Movement, chiaroscuro, the swarm of pixels pulled from a magnetized strip of plastic, and then the picture resolves and a young woman’s face stares back at Alex from the screen. Pupilless eyes like the whites of hard-boiled eggs, a strand of hair across her cheek, and the music box stops playing. A dog barks.

“Who are you? Your hand is cold – ”

“I never saw anything so horrible in my life,” Margot says. “The damned thing was
eating
her, Alex.”

“Which road will you take?” a guttural voice from the videotape asks the young woman. “That of the needles or that of the pins?”

The pain in Alex’s head suddenly doubling, trebling, and she shuts her eyes tight, grips the edge of the counter and waits for the dizziness and nausea to pass, the disorientation that has nothing whatsoever to do with the migraine. The entire world is tilting drunkenly around her. “I have to go,” she says. “I’m sorry, Margot. I’ll call you back, but I have to go right now.”

“Alex, no.
Wait
, please – ”

“I promise. I’ll call you back as soon as I can.” She opens her eyes, hanging up the phone quickly so that she doesn’t have to hear the confusion and anger in Margot’s voice. The young woman on the television gazes at her blind reflection in the window of her father’s house. Her reflection and the less certain reflection of the hunched, dark figure crouched close behind her.

“The road of pins,” she says. “Isn’t it much easier to fasten things with pins, than to have to sew them together with needles?”

Then the film cuts to a shot of the door of the house – unpainted, weathered boards, the bent and rusted heads of nails, a cross painted on the wood with something white; slow pan left, and now the window is in frame, the clean glint of morning sunlight off glass and the round face of the peasant’s daughter, the indistinct shape bending over her, and the camera zooms out until the house is very small, a lonely, run-down speck in a desolate, windswept valley.

Alex hits the stop button, and the VCR whirs and thunks and is silent, the screen filled with nothing now but shoddy, Saturday-morning animation, four hippie teenagers and a Great Dane bouncing along a swampy back road in their psychedelic van, the cartoon sliver moon hung high in the painted sky, and she sits down on the floor in front of the television.

When she presses eject, the tape slides smoothly, obediently out of the cassette compartment, and Alex reaches for it, holds it in trembling, sweat-slick hands while her heart races and the pain behind her eyes fades to a dull, bearable ache.

In few minutes more, the phone begins to ring again, and this time she doesn’t wait for the answering machine.

Incommensurable, impalpable,

Yet latent in it are forms;

Impalpable, incommensurable,

Yet within it are entities.

Shadowy it is and dim.

Lao-tzu,
Tao Te Ching

The Road of Pins

Another story about my trouble with writer’s block. The first time I wrote about Albert Perrault, who’s still with me today (though I killed him off a while back). The beginning of my fascination with “lost” films (which came to me by way of Ramsey Campbell’s
Ancient Images
(1989) and Tim Lucas’
Throat Sprockets
(1994). My unending fascination with
La Bête du Gévaudan
. Oh, wait. There’s a mysterious film in “Salmagundi (New York, 1981)”, isn’t there?

Onion

Frank was seven years old when he found the fields of red grass growing behind the basement wall. The building on St. Mark’s where his parents lived after his father took a job in Manhattan and moved them from the New Jersey suburbs across the wide grey Hudson. And of course he’d been told to stay out of the basement, no place for a child to play because there were rats down there, his mother said, and rats could give you tetanus and rabies. Rats might even be carrying plague, she said, but the sooty blackness at the foot of the stairs was too much temptation for any seven-year-old, the long, long hallway past the door to the super’s apartment, and sometimes a single naked bulb burned way down at the end of that hall. Dirty white-yellow stain that only seemed to emphasize the gloom, drawing attention to just how very dark dark could be, and after school Frank would stand at the bottom of the stairs for an hour at a time, peering into the hall that led down to the basement. 

“Does your mama know you’re always hanging around down here?” Mr. Sweeney would ask whenever he came out and found Frank lurking in the shadows. Frank would squint at the flood of light from Mr. Sweeney’s open door, then shrug or mumble the most noncommittal response he could come up with.

“I bet you she don’t,” Mr. Sweeney would say. “I bet she
don’t
know.”

“Are there really rats down there?” Frank might ask, and Mr. Sweeney would nod his head, point towards the long hall and say “You better
believe
there’s rats. Boy, there’s rats under this dump big as German shepherd puppies. They got eyes like acetylene blow torches and teeth like carving knives. Can chew straight through concrete, these rats we got.”

“Then why don’t you get a cat?” Frank asked once, and Mr. Sweeney laughed, phlegmy old man laugh, and “Oh, we had some cats, boy,” he said. “We had whole goddamn cat
armies
, but when these rats get done, ain’t never anything left but some gnawed-up bones and whiskers.”

“I don’t believe that,” Frank said. “Rats don’t get that big. Rats don’t eat cats.”

“You better get your skinny rump back upstairs, or they’re gonna eat you, too,” and then Mr. Sweeney laughed again and slammed his door, leaving Frank alone in the dark, his heart thumping loud and his head filled with visions of the voracious, giant rats that tunneled through masonry and dined on any cat unlucky enough to get in their way.

And that’s the way it went, week after week, month after month, until one snow-blind February afternoon, weather too cold and wet to go outside, and his mother didn’t notice when he slipped quietly downstairs with the flashlight she kept in a kitchen drawer. Mr. Sweeney was busy with a busted radiator on the third floor, so nobody around this time to tell him scary stories and chase him home again. Frank walked right on past the super’s door, stood shivering in the chilly, mildew-stinking air of the hallway. The unsteady beam of his flashlight to reveal narrow walls that might have been blue or green a long time ago, little black-and-white, six-sided ceramic tiles on the floor, but half of them missing, and he could see the rotting boards underneath. There were doors along the length of the hall, some of them boarded up, nailed shut, one door frame without any door at all, and he stepped very fast past that one.

Indiana Jones wouldn’t be afraid,
he thought, counting his footsteps in case that might be important later on, listening to the winter wind yowling raw along the street as it swept past the building on its way to Tompkins Square Park and the East River.Twenty steps, twenty-five, thirty-three, and then he was standing below the dangling bulb, and for the first time Frank stopped and looked back the way he’d come. Maybe he’d counted wrong, because it seemed a lot farther than only thirty-three steps back to the dim and postage-stamp-sized splotch of day at the other end of the hall.