Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (59 page)

Too late,
she thought.
It knows I’m coming now,
realizing that the forest around her had gone completely quiet, not one insect or amphibian voice, no twilight birdsongs left to break the sudden silence. 

Reluctantly, she held a hand out, penetrating the frigid curtain of air again, a cold that could burn, that could freeze living flesh to stone. She drew a deep breath and stepped quickly through it.

Beyond the vines, the blue house trailer was sitting there alone in a small weedy clearing, just like she’d seen it in her dreams, just exactly the way the angel had shown it to her. Light spilled from the windows and the door standing wide open like a welcome sign –
Come on in, I’ve been waiting for you, Dancy Flammarion.

She set her duffel bag down on the ground and looked first at her knife and then back to the blue trailer. Even the shimmering, mewling things she’d faced back in Bainbridge, even they were afraid of
this
haunted place, something so terrible inside those aluminum walls that even boogeymen and goblins were afraid to whisper its name. Dancy glanced up at the summer sky, hoping the angel might be there, watching over her, but there were only a few dim and disinterested stars.

Well, what are you waiting on?
the trailer seemed to whisper.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m not waiting on anything.”

She walked past the three refrigerators, the burned-out carcass of the old Ford pickup, a propane tank, and climbed the cinder-block steps to stand in the open doorway. For a moment, there was light was so bright that she thought it might blind her, might shine straight into her head and burn her brain away, and Dancy squinted through the tears streaming from the corners of her eyes. Then the light seemed to ebb, dimming enough that she could make out the shoddy confusion of furniture crammed into the trailer: a sofa missing all its cushions, a recliner the color of Spanish moss, and a coffee table buried beneath dirty plates, magazines, chicken bones, beer cans, and overflowing ashtrays. A woman in a yellow raincoat was sitting in the recliner, watching Dancy and smiling. Her eyes were very green and pupilless, a statue’s carved jade eyes, and her shaggy black hair fell about her round face in tangled curls.

“Hello there, Dancy,” she said. “We were beginning to think that you wouldn’t make it.”

“Who are you?” Dancy asked, confused, and raised her knife so she was sure the woman could see it. “You’re not supposed to be here. No one’s supposed to be here but – ”

“I’m not? Well, someone should have told me.”

The woman stood up, slipping gracefully, slowly, from the grey recliner, her bare feet on the linoleum floor, and Dancy could see she wasn’t wearing anything under the coat.

“Not exactly what you were expecting, am I?” she said, sounding pleased with herself, and she took a single step towards Dancy. Beneath the bright trailer lights, her bare olive skin glinted wetly, skin as smooth and perfect as oil on deep, still water. 

“Stop,” Dancy warned her and jabbed the knife at the air between herself and the woman.

“No one here wants to hurt you,” she said and smiled wider so that Dancy could see her long sharp teeth.

“I didn’t come for you,” Dancy said, trying hard to hide the tremble in her voice, because she knew the woman wanted her to be afraid. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“But I know who
you
are, Dancy. News travels fast these days. I know all about what you did in Bainbridge, and I know what you came here to do tonight.”

“Don’t make me hurt you, too.”

“No one has to get hurt. Put the knife down, and we can talk.”

“You’re just here to distract me, so
it
can run, so it can escape, and then I’ll have to find it all over again.”

The woman nodded and looked up at the low ceiling of the trailer, her green eyes staring directly into that flood of white light filling the tiny room.

“You have a hole inside you,” she said, her smile beginning to fade. “Where your heart should be, there’s a hole so awfully deep and wide, an abyss in your soul.”

“That’s not true,” Dancy whispered.

“Yes, it is. You’ve lost everything, haven’t you? There’s nothing left in the world that you love and certainly nothing that loves you.”

And Dancy almost turned and ran, then, back down the cinder-block steps into the arms of the night, not prepared for this strange woman and her strange, sad voice, the secret things she had no right to know or ever say out loud. Not fair, the angel leaving this part out, not fair, when she’s always done everything he asked of her.

“You think that
he
loves you?” the woman asked. “He doesn’t. Angels love no one but themselves. They’re bitter, selfish things, every one of them. They resent all men and women.”

“Shut up.”

“But it’s the truth, dear. Cross my heart. Angels are nothing but spiteful – ”

“I said to
shut up.
” 

The woman narrowed her eyes, still staring up at the ceiling, peering into the light reflecting off her glossy skin.

“You’ve become their willing puppet, their doll,” she sighed. “And, like the man said, they have made your life no more than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nothing whatsoever.”

Dancy gripped the carving knife and took a hesitant step towards the woman.

“You’re a liar,” she said. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, but I
do,
” the woman replied, lowering her head and turning to gaze at Dancy with those startling, unreal eyes. “I know so very many things. I can show you, if you want to see. I can show you the faces of God, the moment you will die, the dark places behind the stars,” and she shrugged off the yellow raincoat, and it slipped to the linoleum floor.

Where her breasts should have been there were wriggling, tentacled masses instead, like the fiery heads of sea anemones, surrounding hungry, toothless mouths.

“There is almost no end to the things I can show you,” the woman said. “Unless you’re too afraid to see.”

Dancy screamed and lunged towards the naked woman, all of her confusion and anger and disgust, all of her fear, flashing like steam to blind, forward momentum, and she swung the rusty knife, slashing the woman’s throat open a couple of inches above her collarbones. The sudden, bright spray of blood across Dancy’s face was as cold as water drawn from a deep well, and she gasped and retreated to the door of the trailer. The knife slid from her hand and clattered against the aluminum threshold.

“You
cut
me,” the woman sputtered, dismayed, and now there was blood trickling from her lips, too, blood to stain those sharp teeth pink and scarlet. Her green eyes had gone wide, swollen with surprise and pain, and she put one hand over the gash in her throat, as if to try and hide the wound hemorrhaging in time to her heart. 

“You did it,” she said. “You really fucking did it,” and then the tentacles on her chest stopped wriggling, and she crumpled to the floor beside the recliner.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Dancy asked the angel, even though she knew it probably wasn’t listening. “Why didn’t you tell me she would be here, too?”

The woman’s body shuddered violently and then grew still, lying on top of the discarded raincoat, her blood spreading out across the floor like a living stain. The white light from the ceiling began to dim and, a moment later, winked out altogether, so that Dancy was left standing in the dark, alone in the doorway of the trailer. 

“What have you done to her?” the Gynander growled from somewhere close, somewhere in the yard behind Dancy, its heavy, plodding footsteps coming closer, and she murmured a silent, doubtful prayer and turned to face it.

Unafraid of falling, but falling nonetheless, as the living light from the wooden box ebbs and flows beneath her skin, between the convolutions of her brain. Collapsing into herself, that hole where her heart should be, that abyss in her soul, and all the things she’s clung to for so long, the handholds clawed into the dry walls of her mind, melt beneath the corrosive, soothing voices of the light.

Where is it I’m going?
she asks, and the red and black tendrils squeezing her smaller and smaller, squeezing her away, reply in a hundred brilliant voices –
Inside,
they say, and
Down,
and
Back,
and finally,
Where the monsters come from.

I don’t have my knife,
she says.

You won’t need it,
the light reassures her.

And Dancy watches herself, a white streak across a star-dappled sky, watches her long fall from the rolling deck of a sailing ship that burned and sank and rotted five hundred years ago. A sailor standing beside her curses, crosses himself, and points at Heaven.

“Did ye see it?” he asks in a terrified whisper, and Dancy can’t tell him that she did, and that it was only the husk of her body burning itself away, because now she’s somewhere else, high above the masts and stays, and the boat is only a speck in the darkness below, stranded forever in a place where no wind blows and the sea is as still and flat as glass.
As idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.

Falling, not up or down, but falling farther in, and
Is there a bottom, or a top? Is there ever an end?
she wonders.

Yes,
the voices reply.
Yes and no, maybe and that depends.

Depends on what?

On you, my dear. That depends on you.

And now she stands on a rocky, windswept ledge, grey stone ground smooth and sheer by eons of frost and rain, and the mountains rise up around her until their jagged peaks scrape at the low-slung belly of the clouds. Below her is a long, narrow lake, black as pitch, and in the center of the lake, the ruins of a vast, shattered temple rise from its depths. There are things stranded out there among the ruins, nervous orange eyes watching the waters from broken spires and the safety of crumbling archways. Dancy can hear their small and timorous thoughts, no one desire among them but to reach the shore, to escape this cold, forgotten place – and they
would
swim, the shore an easy swim for even the weakest among them. But from time to time, the black waters of the lake ripple, or a stream of bubbles rises suddenly to the surface, and there’s no knowing what might be waiting down there. What might be hungry. What might have lain starving since time began. 

“I want to go back now,” Dancy says, shouting to be heard above the howling wind.

There’s only one way back,
the wind moans, speaking now for the light from the Gynander’s box.
And that’s straight on to the center.

“The center of what?” Dancy shouts, and in a moment her voice has crossed the lake and echoed back to her, changed, mocking.
The center of when? Center of where? Of who?

On the island of ruins, the orange-eyed things mutter ancient, half-remembered supplications and scuttle away into deeper shadows, Dancy’s voice become the confirmation of their every waking nightmare, reverberating God-voice to rain the incalculable weight of truth and sentence. And the wind sweeps her away like ash.

“What about her bush?” the orderly asks the nurse as the needle slips into Dancy’s arm, and then he laughs.

“You’re a sick fuck, Parker, you know that?” the nurse tells him, pulling the needle out again and quickly covering the tiny hole she’s left with a cotton ball. “She’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake.”

“Hey, it seems like a perfectly natural question to me. You don’t see something like her every day of the week. Guys are curious about shit like that.”

“Is that a fact?” the nurse asks the orderly, and she removes the cotton ball from Dancy’s arm, staring for a moment at the single drop of crimson staining it.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Okay, but if you tell anyone, I swear to fucking – ”

“Babe, this shit’s between me and you. Not a peep, I swear.”

“Jesus, I ought’a have my head examined,” the nurse whispers and drops the cotton ball and the syringe into a red plastic container labeled infectious waste, then checks Dancy’s restraints one by one until she’s sure they’re all secure.

“Is that me?” Dancy asks the lights, but they seem to have deserted her, left her alone with the nurse and the orderly in this haze of antiseptic stink and Thorazine.

“Is that me?”

The nurse lifts the hem of Dancy’s hospital gown. 

“There,” she says and licks her lips. “Are you satisfied? Does that answer your question?” She sounds nervous and excited at the same time, and Dancy can see that she’s smiling.

“Goddamn,” the orderly mumbles, rubs at his chin and shakes his head. “Goddamn, that’s a sight to see.”

“Poor kid,” the nurse says and lowers Dancy’s gown again.

“Hey, wait a minute, I was gonna get some pictures,” the orderly protests and laughs again.

“Fuck you, Parker,” the nurse says.

“Anytime you’re ready, baby.”

“Go to hell.”

And Dancy shuts her eyes, shuts out the white tile walls and fluorescent glare, pretends that she can’t smell the nurse’s flowery perfume or the orderly’s sweat, that her arm doesn’t ache from the needle and her head isn’t swimming from the drugs.

Closing her eyes. Shutting one door and opening another.

The night air is very cold and smells like pine sap and dirt, night in the forest, and Dancy runs breathless and barefoot over sticks and stones and pine straw, has been running so long now that her feet are raw and bleeding. But she can hear the men on their horses getting closer, shouting to one another, the men and their hounds, and if she dares stop running they’ll be on top of her in a heartbeat. 

She stumbles and almost falls, cracks her left shoulder hard against the trunk of a tree. The force of the blow spins her completely around so that she’s facing her pursuers, the few dark boughs left between them and her. One of the dogs howls, the eager sound of something that knows it’s almost won, that can taste her even before its jaws close around her throat.