Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (33 page)

“Well, we’re not going to spend the rest of our lives in that dump. Next time, we’ll get an apartment that allows cats.”

Frank takes the card out and lays his wallet on the grass, but Willa hasn’t even noticed, too busy watching the children clambering about on Alice, too busy dreaming about kittens. The card is creased and smudged from a week riding around in his back pocket and all the handling it’s suffered, the edges beginning to fray, and he gives it to her without any explanation.

“What’s this?” she asks, and he tells her to read it first, just read it, so she does. She reads it two or three times, and then Willa returns the card and goes back to watching the children. But her expression has changed, the labored, make-believe smile gone, and now she just looks like herself again, plain old Willa, the distance in her eyes, the hard angles at the corners of her mouth that aren’t quite a frown.

“Sidney says he’s for real,” which is half the truth, at best, and Frank glances down at the card, reading it again for the hundredth or two-hundredth time.

“Sidney McAvoy’s a fucking lunatic.”

“He says this guy has maps – ”

“Christ, Frank. What do you want me to say? You want me to give you
permission
to go talk to some crackpot? You don’t need my permission.”

“I was hoping you’d come with me,” he replies so softly that he’s almost whispering, but he puts the card back into his wallet where neither of them will have to look at it, stuffs the wallet back into his jeans pocket.

“Well, I won’t. I go to your goddamn meetings. I already have to listen to that asshole Zaroba. That’s enough for me, thank you very much. That’s more than enough.”

The little girl petting Dinah slips, loses her footing and almost slides backwards off the edge of the sculpture. But her mother catches her and sets her safely on the ground.

“I see what it’s doing to you,” Frank says. “I have to watch. How much longer do you think you can go on like this?”

She doesn’t answer him, opens her purse and takes out a pack of cigarettes. There’s only one left, and she crumbles the empty package and tosses it over her shoulder into the bushes.

“What if this guy really can help you? What if he can make it
stop
?”

Willa’s digging noisily around in her purse, trying to find her lighter or a book of matches, and she turns and stares at Frank, the cigarette hanging unlit from her lips. Her eyes shining bright as broken gemstones, fractured crystal eyes, furious, resentful, and he knows then that she could hate him, that she could leave him here and never look back. She takes the cigarette from her mouth, licks her upper lip, and for a long moment Willa holds the tip of her tongue trapped tightly between her teeth.

“What the hell makes you think I
want
it to stop?”

And only silence as what she’s said sinks in, and he begins to understand that he’s never understood her at all.

“It’s killing you,” he says, finally, the only thing he can think to say, and Willa’s eyes seem to flash and grow brighter, more broken, more eager to slice.

“No, Frank, it’s the only thing keeping me
alive
. Knowing that it’s out there, that I’ll see it again, and someday maybe it won’t make me come back
here
.”

Then she gets up and walks quickly away towards the pond, taking brisk, determined steps to put more distance between them. She stops long enough to bum a light from an old black man with a dachshund, then ducks around the corner of the boathouse, and he can’t see her anymore. Frank doesn’t follow, sits watching the tiny sailboats and yachts gliding gracefully across the moss-dark surface of the water, their silent choreography of wakes and ripples. He decides maybe it’s better not to worry about Willa for now, plenty enough time for that later, and he wonders what he’ll say to Monalisa when finds him.

We shall be less apt to admire what this World calls great, shall nobly despise those Trifles the generality of Men set their Affections on, when we know that there are a multitude of such Earths inhabited and adorn’d as well as our own.

 Christiaan Huygens (c. 1690)

Onion

It still frustrates me that
onion
looks so much like a palindrome, but isn’t. This story got far more attention than I ever thought it would. An award, “best of” reprints, and, in the Summer of 2007, a producer wanted me to make of it a screenplay. I tried, but when he told me it was only the first half of the story, I lost interest. It is as whole as I can make it, and one good mystery is worth a thousand solutions.

Les Fleurs Empoisonnées

~ or ~ 

Dans le Jardin des Fleurs Toxiques

Miles past a town named Vidalia, town named after an onion, onion named after a town, but Dead Girl has no idea how many miles; the vast, unremarkable Georgia night like a seamless quilt of stars and kudzu vines, and all these roads look the same to her. The Bailiff behind the wheel of the rusty black Monte Carlo they picked up in Jacksonville after the Oldsmobile broke down, Bobby in the front seat beside him, playing with the dials on the radio; the endless chain of honky-tonk and gospel stations is broken only by the spit and crackle of static squeezed in between. Dead Girl’s alone in the back seat, reading one of her books by moonlight. She asks Bobby to stop, please, because he’s getting on her nerves, probably getting on the Bailiff’s nerves, too. He pauses long enough to glance back at her, and his silver eyes flash like mercury and rainwater coins. He might be any six-year-old boy, except for those eyes.

“Let him be,” the Bailiff says. “He isn’t bothering me.” Bobby smirks at her, sticks out his tongue, and goes back to playing with the radio.

“Suit yourself,” Dead Girl says and turns a page, even though she hasn’t finished reading the last one.

“Well, well, now,” the Bailiff says, and he laughs his husky, drywheeze laugh. “
There’s
a sight.”

The Monte Carlo’s brakes squeal, metal grinding metal, and the car drifts off the road. Dead Girl sits up, and she can see the hitchhiker in the headlights, a teenage girl holding up one hand to shield her eyes from the glare.

“I’m not hungry,” Bobby says, as if someone had asked, and Dead Girl stares at the Bailiff’s reflection in the rearview mirror. But there’s no explanation waiting for her in his green eyes, his easy smile, the secretive parchment creases of his ancient face. She wishes for the hundredth time that she’d stayed in Providence with Gable, better things to do than riding around the sticks picking up runaways and bums. Having to sleep in the trunks of rattletrap automobiles while the Bailiff runs his errands beneath the blazing Southern sun, sun so bright and violent that even the night seems scorched.

“Maybe this one ain’t for eating, boy,” the Bailiff chuckles, and the Monte Carlo rolls to a stop in a cloud of dust and grit and carbon monoxide. “Maybe this one’s something you’ve never seen before.”

The girl’s wearing dark wrap-around sunglasses, and her hair is as white as milk, milk spun into the finest silken thread, talcum-powder skin. “It’s just an albino,” Dead Girl mutters, disappointed. “You think we’ve never seen an albino before?”

The Bailiff laughs again and honks the horn. The girl leans forward and squints at them through her sunglasses and the settling dust, takes a hesitant step towards the car. She’s wearing a faded yellow Minnie Mouse T-shirt and carrying a tattered duffel bag.

“Pure as the driven snow,” the Bailiff says, “this one here. Funeral lilies and barbed wire. Keep your eyes open, both of you, or she just might teach you something you don’t
want
to learn.”

“Christ,” Dead Girl hisses and slumps back in her seat. “I thought we were in such a big, damn hurry. I thought Miss Aramat was – ”

“Watch your tongue, child,” the Bailiff growls back, and now his eyes flash angry emerald fire at her from the rearview mirror. “Mind your
place
,” and then Bobby’s rolling down his window, and the albino girl peers doubtfully into the Monte Carlo.

“Where you bound, sister?” the Bailiff asks, but she doesn’t answer right away, looks warily at Bobby and Dead Girl and then back at the road stretching away into the summer night.

“Savannah,” the albino girl says, finally. “I’m on my way to Savannah,” and Dead Girl can hear the misgiving, the guarded apprehension, weighting the edges of her voice.

“Well, now, how about that. Would you believe we’re headed that way ourselves? Don’t just sit there, Bobby. Open the door for the girl and help her with that bag – ”

“Maybe I should wait on the next car,” she says and wrinkles her nose like a rabbit. “There’s already three of you. There might not be enough room.”

“Nonsense,” the Bailiff replies. “There’s plenty of room, isn’t there, children?” Bobby opens his door and takes her duffel bag, stuffs it into the floorboard behind his seat. The albino looks at the road one more time, and, for a moment, Dead Girl thinks maybe she’s going to run, wonders if the Bailiff will chase her if she does, if it’s
that
sort of lesson.

“Thanks,” she says, sounding anything but grateful, and climbs into the back and sits beside Dead Girl. Bobby slams his door shut, and the Monte Carlo’s smooth tires spin uselessly for a moment, flinging up sand and gravel, before they find traction and the car lurches forward onto the road.

“You from Vidalia?” the Bailiff asks, and the girl shakes her head, but doesn’t say anything. Dead Girl closes her book –
Charlotte’s Web i
n Latin,
Tela Charlottae
– and lays it on the seat between them. The albino smells like old sweat and dirty clothes, like fresh air and the warm blood in her veins. Bobby turns around in his seat and watches her with curious silver eyes.

“What’s her name?” he asks Dead Girl, and the Bailiff swerves to miss something lying in the road.

“Dancy,” the albino says. “Dancy Flammarion,” and she takes off her sunglasses, revealing eyes the deep red-pink of pyrope or the pulpy hearts of fresh strawberries. 

“Is she blind?” Bobby asks.

“How the hell would I know?” Dead Girl grumbles. “Ask her yourself.”

“Are you blind?”

“No,” Dancy tells him, the hard edge in her voice to say she knows this is a game, a taunting formality, and maybe she’s seen it all before. “But the light hurts my eyes.”

“Mine, too,” Bobby says.

“Oculocutaneous albinism,” the Bailiff chimes in. “A genetic defect in the body’s ability to convert the amino acid tyrosine into melanin. Ah, but we’re being rude, Bobby. She probably doesn’t like to talk about it.”

“No, that’s all right. It doesn’t bother me,” Dancy says and leans suddenly, boldly, forward, leaving only inches between herself and Bobby. The movement surprises him, and he jumps. “What about
you
, Bobby? What’s wrong with
your
eyes?” Dancy asks him.

“I – ” he begins and then pauses and looks uncertainly at Dead Girl and the Bailiff. Dead Girl shrugs, no idea what the rules in this charade might be, and the Bailiff keeps his eyes on the road.

“That’s okay,” Dancy says, and she winks at him. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to, if you’re not supposed to tell. The angel tells me what I need to know.”

“
You
have an angel?” and now Bobby sounds skeptical.

“Everyone has an angel. Well, everyone I ever met so far. Even you, Bobby. Didn’t they tell you that?”

Dead Girl sighs and picks her book up again, opens it to a page she’s read twice already. 

“Why don’t you see if you can find something on the radio,” she says to Bobby.

“But I’m still talking to Dancy.”

“You’ll have plenty of time to talk to Dancy, boy,” the Bailiff says. “She isn’t going anywhere.”

“She’s going to Savannah with us.”

“Except Savannah,” Dancy says very softly, faint smile at the corners of her mouth, and she turns away and looks out the window at the nightshrouded fields and farmhouses rushing silently past. Bobby stares at her for another minute or two, like he’s afraid she might disappear, then he goes back to playing with the radio knobs.

“You too, Mercy Brown,” the albino whispers, and Dead Girl stops reading. 

“
What
?” she asks. “What did you just say to me?”

“I dreamed about you once, Mercy. I dreamed about you sleeping at the bottom of a cold river, crayfish tangled in your hair and this boy in your arms.” Dancy keeps her eyes on the window as she talks, her voice so cool, so unafraid, like maybe she climbs into cars with demons every goddamn night of the week. 

“I dreamed about you and snow. You got an angel, too.”

“
You
shut the fuck up,” Dead Girl snarls. “That’s not my name, and I don’t care
who
you are, you shut up or – ”

“You’ll kill me anyway,” Dancy says calmly, “so what’s the difference?” Up front the Bailiff chuckles to himself. Bobby finds a station playing an old Johnny Cash song, “The Reverend Mr. Black,” and he sings along.

Southeast, and the land turns from open prairie and piney woods to salt marsh and estuaries, confluence of muddy, winding rivers, blackwater piss of the distant Appalachians, the Piedmont hills, and everything between. The Lowcountry,
no fayrer or fytter place,
all cordgrass and wax myrtle, herons and alligators, and the old city laid out wide and flat where the Savannah River runs finally into the patient, hungry sea. The end of Sherman’s March, and this swampy gem spared the Yankee torches, saved by gracious women and their soirée seductions, and in 1864 the whole city was made a grand Christmas gift to Abraham Lincoln.

The mansion on East Hall Street, Stephens Ward, built seventeen long years later, Reconstruction days, and Mr. Theodosius W. Ybanes hired a fashionable architect from Rhode Island to design his eclectic, mismatched palace of masonry and wrought iron, Gothic pilasters and high Italianate balconies. The mansard roof tacked on following a hurricane in 1888 and, after Theodosius’ death, the house handed down to his children and grandchildren, great-grandchildren, generations come and gone and, unlike most of Savannah’s stately, old homes, this house has never passed from the direct bloodline of its first master.