Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (61 page)

“I haven’t seen too many movies,” Dancy says, though, in truth, she’s never seen a single one. She glances from the Gynander to the wooden box to the lantern and back to the Gynander.

“I just want you to understand that she wasn’t no two-bit, backwoods haint,” it says and starts sharpening the straight razor again. “Not like me. I just want you to know ain’t nothing happened here she didn’t
want
to happen.”

“Why did you untie me?”

“Why don’t you trying asking that angel of yours? I thought it had all the answers. Hell, I thought that angel of yours was all over the truth like flies on dog shit.”

“She told you to let me go?”

The Gynander makes a sound like sighing and lays the leather strap aside, then holds the silver razor up so it catches a little of the stray lantern light. Its stolen face sags and twitches slightly.

“Not exactly,” it says. “Ain’t nothin’ that easy, Snow White.”

Dancy stands up, her legs stiff and aching, and she lifts the hurricane lantern off its nail.

“Then you want to die, too,” she says.

“Not by a long sight, little girl. But I do like me some sport now and then. And Sinethella said you must be a goddamn force of nature, a regular shatterer of worlds, to do the things you been getting away with.”

“What I saw in there,” Dancy says, and she cautiously prods at the box with the toe of one shoe. “It doesn’t make any difference. I know it was just a trick.”

“Well, then what’re you waiting for,” the thing whispers from the lips of its shabby patchwork skin. “Show me what you got.”

The fire crackles and roars at the night sky lightening slowly towards dawn. Dancy sits on a fallen log at the side of the red dirt road leading back to Waycross and watches as the spreading flames begin to devour the leafy walls of the kudzu tunnel.

“Well, I guess you showed me what for,” the blackbird says. It’s perched on the log next to her, the fire reflected in its beady eyes. “Maybe next time I’ll keep my big mouth shut.”

“You think there’s ever gonna be a next time?” Dancy asks without looking away from the fire.

“Lord, I hope not,” the birds squawks. “That was just, you know, a figure of speech.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Where you headed next?” the bird asks.

“I’m not sure.”

“I thought maybe the angels – ”

“They’ll show me,” Dancy says, and she slips the carving knife back into her duffel bag and pulls the drawstrings tight again. “When it’s time, they’ll show me.”

And then neither of them says anything else for a while, just sit there together on the fallen pine log, as the fire she started in the cellar behind the trailer burns and bleeds black smoke into the hyacinth sky. 

Waycross

Oh, Dancy, my avenging
la pucelle de Dieu
, angel-touched waif. My deluded, pallid paladin. You are that angry sliver of my heart that only wants to cut away, but inevitably ends up slicing my own hands. My monstrous monster slayer. I hear those voices, too. Still, I feel a little bad about the Gynander and Sinethella.

The Dead and the Moonstruck

Beneath Providence, below the ancient yellow house on Benefit Street where silver-eyed vampires sleep away the days and pass their dusty waxwork evenings with Spanish absinthe and stale memories; this house that once belonged to witches, long ago, this house with as many ghosts and secrets and curses as it has spiders and silverfish – beneath the yellow house, at half past midnight on a bitter February night, Mesdames Terpsichore and Mnemosyne are finishing a lecture with corporeal demonstrations. Lessons for ghoul pups and for the children of the Cuckoo – the changeling brats stolen as babies and raised in the warrens – and for an hour the two old hounds have droned on and on and on about the most efficacious methods for purging a corpse of embalming fluid and other funereal preservatives before it can be safely prepared in the kitchens. The skinny, mouse-haired girl named Starling Jane nodded off twice during the lecture, earning a snarl from Madam Mnemosyne and a mean glare from Madam Terpsichore’s blazing yellow eyes.

“That’s all for tonight,” Madam Terpsichore growls, folding shut the leather satchel that holds her scalpels and syringes, her needles and knives. “But every one of you’d best know
all
the purgatives and detoxicants by the morrow. And you, young lady,” and now the
ghul
points a long and crooked finger at Starling Jane, one ebony claw aimed straight at her heart. “
You
need to learn that the day, not the classroom, is the proper place for sleeping.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Starling Jane whispers and keeps her eyes on the dirt floor of the basement, on her bare feet and an ivory scrap of bone protruding from the earth. “It won’t happen again.”

There’s a hushed titter of laughter and guttural yapping from the rest of the class, and Jane pretends that she’s only a beetle or a small red worm, something unimportant that can scurry or slither quickly away, something that can tuck itself out of sight in an unnoticed cranny or crevice, and she’ll never have to sit through another dissection lecture or be scolded for dozing off again. Madam Mnemosyne silences the muttering class with a glance, but Jane can still feel their eyes on her, and “I’m sorry,” she says.

“I should think that you are,” Madam Terpsichore barks. “You’re plenty old enough to know better, child,” and then, to the other students sitting cross-legged on the basement floor, “Mistress Jane’s Third Confirmation is scheduled for the full Hunger Moon, four nights hence. But perhaps she isn’t ready, hmmmm? Perhaps she’ll be found wanting, and the razor jaws will close tight about her hands. Then maybe we’ll have
her
meat on the slab before much longer.”

“And no nasty embalming fluid to contend with,” Madam Mnemosyne adds.

“Ah, she would be sweet,” Madam Terpsichore agrees.

“I’m sorry,” Jane says again. “But I’ll be ready on the moon.”

Madam Terpsichore flares her wide black nostrils, sniffs at the musty cellar air, and her eyes glitter in the candlelight. “See that you are, child,” she says. “It would be a shame to lose another sprout so very soon after young Master Lockheart’s unfortunate rejection,” and then she dismisses the class, and Jane follows all the others from the basement into the old tunnels winding like empty veins beneath the city.

Later, after Elementary Thaumaturgy and Intermediate Necromancy and a rambling, unscheduled address on the history of the upper nightlands by Master Tantalus, visiting Providence from the Boston warrens. After dinner and the predawn free hour, after all the time lying awake in her narrow bunk, wishing she were asleep but afraid to close her eyes, Starling Jane finally drifts out and down, slipping through the familiar dormitory smells of wet masonry and mildew and millipedes, past the snores and grunts and gentle breathing noises of those who aren’t afraid of their dreams. A hundred feet beneath the day-washed pavement of Angell Street, and she spirals easily through velvet folds of consciousness and unconsciousness. Countless bits of senseless, inconsequential remembrance and fancy – simple dreams – leading and misleading her step by step, moment by moment, to the nightmare place she’s visited almost every morning or afternoon for two months.

That place where there is a wide blue sky, and the sun hanging inconceivably bright directly overhead. Where there is grass and the scent of flowers, and she stands at the top of a hill looking down on a sparkling sea.

“You should have stayed with me,” her mother says from somewhere close behind her, and Jane doesn’t turn around, because she doesn’t want to see. “If you’d have stayed with me, I’d have loved you, and you’d have grown up to be a beautiful woman.”

The salt-warm wind off the sea makes waves in the tall grass and whistles past Starling Jane’s ears.

“I would have stayed,” she says, just like she always says. “If they’d have let me. I would have stayed, if I’d had a choice.”

“I knew I’d lose you,” her mother replies. “Before you were even born, I knew the monsters would come and steal you away from me. I knew they’d hide you from me and make you forget my face.”

“How could you have known all that?” Jane asks. Down on the beach, there are children playing with a big yellow-brown dog. They throw pieces of driftwood, and the dog runs after them, and sometimes it brings them back again.

“Oh, I knew, all right,” her mother says. “Trust me, I
knew
what was coming. I heard them in the night, outside my bedroom window, scratching at the glass, wanting in.”

“I have to pass one more test, Mother. I just have to pass one more test, and they’ll let me live.”

“You would have been such a beautiful girl. Just look at what they’ve made of you instead.”

On the beach, the children chase the yellow-brown dog through the surf, laughing and splashing so loudly that Starling Jane can hear them all the way up at the top of the hill.

“They’ll make you a monster, too,” her mother says.

“I wish they could,” Jane mutters to herself, because she knows it doesn’t matter whether or not her mother hears the things she’s saying. “I wish to all the dark gods that they could make me like them. But that’s not what happens. That’s not what happens at all.”

“You could come home. Every night, I sit up, waiting for you to come back, for them to bring you back to me.”

“You shouldn’t do that,” Jane whispers, and the hill rumbles softly beneath her. Down on the beach, the children stop playing and turn towards her. She waves to them, but they don’t seem to see her.

Or they’re afraid of me,
she thinks. 

“If you fail the test, they might bring you back to me,” her mother says hopefully.

“If I fail, they’ll kill me,” Jane replies. “They’ll kill me and eat me. No one ever goes back, once they’re chosen by the Cuckoo. No one.”

“But you would have been such a beautiful girl,” her mother says again. “I would have given you everything.”

“It’s the last test,” Jane whispers.

Beneath her, the hill rumbles again, and the sea has turned to blood, and there are wriggling white things falling from the sky. On the beach, the children and the yellow-brown dog have vanished.

“I’ll be waiting,” her mother says.

And Jane opens her eyes, tumbling breathlessly back into flesh and bone, and she lies awake until sunset, listening to her heart and the sounds the sleepers make and the faraway din of traffic up on Angell Street.

“You’re scared,” the ghoul pup named Sorrow says, not asking her but telling her, and then he scratches determinedly at his left ear.

“I’m not scared,” Starling Jane tells him, and shakes her head, but she knows it’s a lie and, worse still, knows, too, that
he
knows it’s a lie.

“Sure, and neither was Lockheart.”

“Lockheart wasn’t ready. Everyone knew he wasn’t ready.”

They’re sitting on stools near one of the tall kitchen hearths, scrubbing tin plates clean with wire-bristle brushes, sudsy water up to their elbows and puddled on the cobbles at their feet. The washtub between them smells like soap and grease.

“Would
you
eat me?” she asks Sorrow. And he grunts and drops the plate he was scrubbing back into the washtub, then tugs thoughtfully at the coarse, straw-colored tuft of hair sprouting from the underside of his muzzle.

“That’s not a fair question. You know underlings never get delicacies like that. Not a scrap. You’d be served to Master Danaüs and the – ”

“I was speaking hypothetically,” Jane says and adds another plate to the stack drying in front of the fire. “If they made an exception and you had the opportunity, would you eat me?”

Sorrow stares at her for a long moment, furrows his brow uncertainly and blinks his yellow eyes, and “Wouldn’t you
want
me to?” he asks her, finally.

“It wouldn’t bother you, eating your best friend?”

Sorrow pulls another plate from the washtub and frowns, looking down at the dishwater now instead of Starling Jane. He scrubs halfheartedly at the bits of meat and gravy and potatoes clinging to the dented tin and then drops the plate back into the tub.

“That wasn’t clean, and you know it.”

“It’s just not a fair question, Jane. Of
course
, I’d eat you. I mean, speaking hypothetically and all. I’m not saying I wouldn’t
miss
you, but – ”

“You’d eat me anyway.”

“It’d be awful. I’d probably cry the whole time.”

“I’m sure you would,” Starling Jane says with a sigh, pulling the plate Sorrow didn’t wash out of the tub again. There’s a piece of burnt potato skin big as her thumb stuck to it. “I hope I’d give you indigestion. You’d have it coming.”

“You really are scared,” Sorrow scowls and spits into the washtub.

“You’re a disgusting pig, you know that?”

“Oink,” Sorrow oinks and wrinkles his nostrils.

“I’m
not
scared,” Jane says again, because she needs to hear the words. “There’s no reason for me to be scared. I’ve made it past the Harvest Moon and the full Frost Moon. I know my lessons – ”

“Book lessons don’t get you past the moons. You know that, Jane. Nobody’s ever been confirmed because they got good marks.”

“It doesn’t hurt.”

“It doesn’t help, either.”

“But it doesn’t
hurt
,” Jane snarls at him and flings her wire-bristle brush at his head. Sorrow ducks, and it hits the wall behind him and clatters to the floor.

“You’re crazy,” Sorrow says, and then he hops off his stool, knocking it over in the process. “I might be a pig, but you’re crazy.”

“You
want
me to fail. You want me to fail so you can go through all my things and take whatever you want.”

“You don’t
have
anything I want,” Sorrow barks defensively and takes a quick step backwards, putting more distance between himself and Starling Jane.

“Yes, I do. That owl skull the Bailiff brought me from Salem. You want that. You’ve
told
me more than once that you wish he’d given it to you instead of me.”