Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (60 page)

The light from the box swirls about her like a nagging swarm of nocturnal insects, whirring black wings and shiny scarlet bodies to get her moving again. Each step fresh agony now, but the pain in her feet and legs and chest is nothing next to her terror, the hammer of hooves and the baying hounds, the men with their guns and knives. Dancy cannot remember why they want her dead, what she might have done, if this is only some game or if it’s justice. She can’t remember when this night began or how long she’s been running. But she knows that none of it will matter in the end, when they catch her, and then the earth drops suddenly away beneath her, and she’s falling, really falling, the simple, helpless plummet of gravity. She crashes headlong through the branches of a deadfall and lands in a shallow, freezing stream.

The electric shock of cold water to rip the world around her open once again, the slow burn before it numbs her senseless, the fire before sleep and death to part the seams. She looks back to see the indistinct, frantic tumble of dog bodies already coming down the steep bank after her. Above them, the traitorous pines seem to part for the beautiful man on his tall black horse, his antique clothes, the torch in his hand as bright as the sun rising at midnight. His pale face is bruised with the anger and horror of everything he’s seen and done, and everything he will see and do before the dawn.

“
Je l’ai trouvée!
” he shouts to the others. “
Dépêchez-vous!
”

Words Dancy doesn’t know, but she
understands
them perfectly well, just the same.

“
La bête! Je l’ai trouvée!
”

And then she looks down at the reflection of the torchlight dancing in the icy, gurgling water, and her reflection there, as well, her albino’s face melting in the flowing mirror, becoming the long snout and the frightened, iridescent eyes of a wolf, melting again and now the dead woman from the Gynander’s trailer stares back at her. Dancy tries to stand, but she can’t feel her legs anymore, and the dogs are almost on top of her, anyway.

“Is this me?” she asks the faces swirling in the stream. “Is this my face, too?” But this
when
and
where
slides smoothly out from beneath her before the light can reply, before snapping dog teeth tear her apart. She’s caught up in the implosion again, swallowed whole by her own disintegration.

“They’re all dead,” the nurse says, and her white shoes squeak loud against the white floor. “Cops up in Milligan think maybe she had something to do with it.”

“No shit?” the orderly says. He’s standing by the window, looking out at the rain, drawing circles in the condensation with his index finger. Circles and circles inside circles. “Where the hell’s Milligan?”

“If you don’t know already, trust me, you don’t want to know.”

Far away, the beautiful man on his black horse fires a rifle into the night.

“How old were you then?” the psychiatrist asks Dancy. She doesn’t answer him right away, stares instead at the clock on the wall, wishing she could wait him out. Wishing there was that much time in the universe, but he has more time than she does. He keeps it nailed like Jesus to his office wall and doles it out in tiny paper cups, a mouthful at a time.

“Dancy, how old were you that night your mother took you to the fair?”

“Does it matter?” she asks him, and the psychiatrist raises his eyebrows and shrugs his bony old man’s shoulders.

“It might,” he says.

And the fair unfurls around her, giddy violence of colored lights and calliope wails, cotton-candy taffy air, sawdust air, barkers howling like drunken wolves, and the mechanical thunk and clank and wheeze of the rides. Her mother has an arm around her, holding her close as the sea of human bodies ebbs and surges about them. Dancy thinks this must be Hell. Or Heaven. Too much of everything good and everything bad all shoved together into this tiny field, a deafening, swirling storm of laughter and screams. She wants to go home, but this is a birthday present, so she smiles and pretends that she isn’t afraid.

“You didn’t want to hurt your mother’s feelings,” the psychiatrist says and chews on the end of a yellow pencil. “You didn’t want her to think you weren’t having fun.”

“Look, Dancy,” her mother says. “Have you ever seen anything like that in your whole life?”

A clown on stilts, tall as a tree, strides past them, wading stiffly through the crowd. He looks down as Dancy looks up, and the clown smiles at her, revealing the real smile behind his painted smile, but she doesn’t smile back. She can see his shadow, the thing hiding in his shadow, its spidery-long legs and half-moon smile, its eyes like specks of molten lava burning their way out of its skull.

Dancy looks quickly down at the ground, trampled sawdust and mud, cigarette butts and a half-eaten candy apple. 

“Get a load of her, will you?” a man says and laughs.

“Hey, girly. You part of the freak show or what?”

“‘Course she is. She’s one of the albinos. I saw the poster. They got a whole albino family. They got a boy that’s half-alligator and a stuffed cow with two heads. They got a Chinese ’maphrodite.”

“They ain’t got no cow with two heads. That’s a damn fake.”

“Well,
she
ain’t no fake, now is she?”

And then her mother is shoving a path through the crowd, towing Dancy after her, trying to get away from the two men, but they follow close behind. 

“Slow up, lady,” one of them shouts. “We just want to get a good look at her. We’ll even pay you.” 

“Yeah, that’s right,” the other one shouts, and now everyone is staring and pointing. “We’ll pay. How much just to look? We ain’t gonna touch.”

The psychiatrist taps his pencil against his chin and helps Dancy watch the clock. “Were you mad at her afterwards, for taking you to the fair?” he asks.

“That was a long time ago,” Dancy replies. “It was my birthday present.”

The psychiatrist takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, makes a whistling sound between his front teeth.

“We never went anywhere, so she took me to the fair for my birthday.”

“Did you know about freak shows, Dancy? Did your mother warn you about them before you went to the fair?”

“What’s the difference between freaks and monsters?” she asks the psychiatrist.

“Monsters aren’t real,” he says. “That’s the difference. Why? Do you think you’re a monster? Has anyone ever told you that you’re
a monster?”

She doesn’t answer him. In only five more minutes she can go back to her room and think about anything she wants, anything but carnivals and grinning not-clowns on stilts and the way the two men stalked them through the crowd, anything but freaks and monsters. In the forest, the man fires his rifle again, and this time the shot tears a hole in the psychiatrist’s face, so Dancy can see shattered bone and torn muscle, his sparkling silver teeth and the little metal gears and springs that move his tongue up and down. He drops the pencil, and it rolls underneath his desk. She wants to ask him if it hurts, being shot, having half your face blown off like that, but he hasn’t stopped talking, apparently too busy asking her questions to care if he’s hurt.

“Have you ever been afraid that she took you there to get rid of you, to leave you with the other freaks?”

And all the world goes white, a suffocating white where there is no sky and no earth, nothing to divide the one from the other, and the Arctic wind shrieks in her ears, and snow stings her bare skin. Not the top of the world, but somewhere very near it, a rocky scrap of land spanning a freezing sea, connecting continents in a far-off time of glaciers. Dancy wants to shut her eyes. Then, at least, there would only be black, not this appalling, endless white, and she thinks about going to sleep, drifting down to someplace farther inside herself, the final still point in this implosion, down beyond the cold. But she knows that would mean death, in this place, this
when
, some mute instinct to keep her moving, answering to her empty belly when she only wants to be still.

“
Ce n’est pas un loup!
”
the man on his horse shouts to the others in his company, and Dancy peers over her shoulder, but she can’t see him anywhere. Nothing at all back there but the wind-blown snow, and she wonders how he could have possibly followed her to this time and place, when he won’t even be born for another thirteen thousand years. The storm picks his voice apart and scatters it across the plains. 

With the impatient wind at her back, hurrying her along, Dancy stumbles on ahead, helpless to do otherwise.

She finds the camp just past a line of high granite boulders, men and women huddled together in the lee of the stones, a ragged, starving bunch wrapped in bear hides. She smells them before she sees them – the soot of their small, smoky fires, the oily stink of their bodies, the faint death smell from the skins they wear. She slips between the boulders, sure-footed, moving as quietly as she can, though they could never hear her coming over the wind. The wind that blows her own scent away, and she crouches above them and listens. The men clutching their long spears, the women clutching their children, and all eyes nervously watching the white-out blur beyond the safety of the fires. 

Dancy doesn’t need to understand their language to read their minds, the red and ebony light coiled tight inside her head is there to translate their hushed words, their every fearful thought, to show her the hazy nightmares they’ve fashioned from the shadows and the wailing blizzard. They whisper about the strange creature that has been trailing them for days, tracking them across the ice, the red-eyed demon like a young girl carved from the snow itself. Their shaman mumbles warnings that they must have trespassed into some unholy place protected by this spirit of the storms, but most of the men ignore him. They’ve never come across any beast so dangerous it doesn’t bleed.

Crouched there among the boulders, her teeth chattering, Dancy gazes up into the swirling snow. The light leaks out of her nostrils and twines itself in the air above her head like a dozen softly glowing serpents. 

They will come for you soon
, it says.
If you stay here, they’ll find you and kill you.

“Will they?” Dancy asks, too cold and hungry and tired to really care, one way or the other, and
Yes,
the light replies.

“Why? I can’t hurt them. I couldn’t hurt them if I wanted to.”

The light breaks apart into a sudden shower of sparks, bright drops of brilliance that splash against each other and bounce off the edges of the boulders. In a moment, they come together again, and the woman from the Gynander’s trailer, the woman in the yellow raincoat that she knows isn’t a woman at all, steps out of the gloom and stands nearby, watching Dancy with her green eyes.

“It only matters that they are
afraid
of you,” she says. “Maybe you could hurt them, and maybe you could not, but it only matters that they are afraid.”

“I killed you,” Dancy says. “You’re dead. Go away.”

“I only wanted you to see,” the woman says and glances down at the camp below the boulders. “Sometimes we forget what we are and why we do the things we do. Worse, sometimes we never learn.”

“It won’t make any difference,” Dancy growls at her, and the woman smiles and nods her head. Her raincoat flutters and flaps loudly in the wind, and Dancy tries hard not to look at the things writhing on her bare chest.

“It might,” the woman says. “Someday, when you can’t kill the thing that frightens you. When there’s nowhere left to run. Think of it as a gift.”

“Why would you give
me
a gift?”

“Because you gave me one, Dancy Flammarion,” and then the woman blows apart in the wind, and Dancy shivers and watches as the glittering pieces of her sail high into the winter sky and vanish.

“Is it over now?” Dancy asks the light, and in a moment it an-
swers her. 

That depends,
it says.
Is it ever over?
it asks, but Dancy is already tumbling back the way she’s come. Head over heels, ass over tits, and when she opens her eyes, an instant later, an eternity later, she’s staring through the darkness at the ceiling of the Gynander’s cellar.

Dancy coughs and rolls over onto her left side, breathing against the stabbing, sharp pain in her chest, and there’s the box sitting alone in the dust, its lid closed now. The dark varnished wood glints dull in the orange light from the hurricane lantern hanging nearby, and whatever might have come out of the box has been locked away again. She looks up from the floor, past the drooping, empty husks on their hooks and the Gynander’s workbenches. The creature is watching her from the other side of the cellar.

“What did you see?” it asks her, and she catches a guarded hint of apprehension in its rough voice.

“What was I supposed to see?” Dancy asks back, and she coughs again. “What did you think I’d see?”

“That’s not how it works. It’s different for everyone.”

“You wanted me to see things that would make me doubt what the angel tells me.”

“It’s different for everyone,” the Gynander says again and draws the blade of a straight razor slowly across a long leather strap.

“But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? That’s what you hoped I’d see, because that’s what you saw when she showed you the box.”

“I never talked to no angels. I always made a point of that.”

And Dancy realizes that the nylon ropes around her ankles and wrists are gone, and her knife is lying on the floor beside the box. She reaches for it, and the Gynander stops sharpening its razor and looks at her.

“Sinethella wanted to die, you know,” it says. “She’d been wanting to die for ages. She’d heard what you did to them folks over in Bainbridge, and down there in Florida. I swear, child, you’re like something come riding out of a wild west movie, like goddamn Clint Eastwood, you are.”

Dancy sits up, a little dizzy from lying down so long, and wipes the rusty blade of her carving knife on her jeans.

“Like in that one picture,
High Plains Drifter,
where that nameless stranger fella shows up acting all holier than thou. The whole town thinks they’re using him, but turns out, see, it’s really the other way round. Turns out, maybe he’s the most terrible thing there is, and maybe
good
’s a whole lot worse to have after your ass than evil. ’Course,
you
have a name.”