Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (64 page)

The brown girl wraps everything back up inside the storm-colored paisley handkerchief and then ties the ribbon very tightly so that nothing will spill out when she isn’t looking. She watches the boy for a moment without saying anything at all.

“You’ve been up here more than seventy-five years and you’re telling me it doesn’t bother you?” the boy asks. “You ought to be an old woman and you’re still just a kid.”

“My Poppa’s coming back for me,” the brown girl replies, trying hard to sound sure of herself. She’s starting to wish the boy would climb back down the ladder, pull the trapdoor closed after him, snap all the locks shut, and leave her alone. “He’ll be back, any day now.”

“You still believe that?”

“Is there any reason that I shouldn’t?”

The boy looks up at the rafters again. “You ever climbed up there?” he asks her.

“Sometimes,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. She has many secret places beneath the roof of the yellow house. Places where she hides the things that mean nothing to anyone but her. Cubby holes, nooks and crannies, fissures in the punky old wood of the beams. Bits of candy and unanswered riddles written on brittle scraps of paper torn from her father’s books. A piece of sage-green soapstone engraved with the names of four of the Nephilim. A cracked horizon mirror from a sextant, the dried petals of a rose from Miss Josephine’s garden.

“It’s sure a lot bigger than I thought it would be,” the boy says again.

The brown girl glances at her father’s pocket watch and sees that almost fifteen minutes have passed since the boy knocked at the trapdoor. She can feel the time flowing thick around her now, sticky as molasses, and she tries to imagine how things were before her father left and they shut her away up here in the clever, inviolable maze of their “temporal contrariety.” How things were when she was just like everyone else, drifting helpless in time, drowning in it like all the other children racing towards adulthood and their graves. How she ever endured the
weight
of it, pushing her along.

“I want to see the snow globes,” the boy says, standing up and brushing dust from the seat of his overalls.

“They’re
not
snow globes,” the brown girl replies, sure now that she wants him to leave, that she’d rather be alone again without the ticking watch and the suffocating rush of moments. “That’s not what they’re called.”

“That’s what Miss Josephine calls them.”

“Miss Josephine doesn’t know everything.”

“Well, I don’t really care what they’re called or what they’re not called,
Hester.
I just want to see them.”

This is something new. No one has ever asked her to see her father’s work before, the hundreds of crystal orbs that are the reason she’s been locked away here. She’d always assumed there must be a rule against it, and maybe there is and this cinnamon-haired boy just doesn’t care about the rules.

“I don’t know if I should. Show them to you, I mean,” she says, though, truthfully, the thought of leading the boy past the tall shelves and cabinets where the orbs were carefully arranged and cataloged by her father gives her a sort of thrill deep inside. “It might not be a good idea.”

“Then I guess I’ll just have a look for myself,” he says, but when he reaches for the lantern, she grabs it first. She knows that he won’t try to take it away from her, not after the cold he felt when their fingers brushed above the trapdoor. And she also knows that he won’t enter the depths of the attic alone, without even the slim comfort of the oil lantern. She looks at the pocket watch again. Nineteen minutes, fourteen seconds since he knocked.

“I’ll show you,” she says, “but you don’t touch anything, understand? And you don’t go wandering off alone. There are other things up here besides the orbs, and you wouldn’t want to see them. You wouldn’t want them to see you.”

The boy glances at the trapdoor, like maybe he’s going to chicken out and head back down the ladder. Then he turns and looks into the wide darkness again, and slowly nods his head. “Okay,” he says. “But I get to carry the lantern.”

“No, you don’t, either,” she tells him and then, before the cinnamon-haired boy named Airdrie can say anything else, the brown girl gathers up the purple handkerchief and, holding the lantern out like an archangel’s flaming sword, leads him past sagging bookshelves and a marble pedestal supporting a bust of Poseidon, and the attic of the yellow house on Benefit Street closes greedily around them.

I

Maryse opens her eyes and blinks up at the shifting fog and the dim, ruddy smudge trying to pass itself off as the sun. For a moment, she can’t recall where she is, and none of it – not the fog nor the canvas hanging limp from the mizzenmast nor the salty, fishy stink of the sea – means anything at all to her. For that moment, which might only be the end of a dream, there’s nothing more concrete than the pain nestled firmly behind her eyes, the pain that leads to nausea and dizziness as soon as she sits up. Then she remembers it all and would almost give her soul to forget again.

Gunfire, and the smell of blood and smoke and spent powder; the fear and anger glinting bright in the Captain’s eyes before the mutineers shot him in the head and dumped his corpse over the side of the ship; the pastor smearing his clothes with pitch, setting himself on fire after renouncing Christ and calling on Heaven to drag the bark all the way down to Hell; all the unspeakable things that were done by and to the other passengers; the thirst, and heat, and hunger, and the sudden blow to the back of Maryse’s head that should have killed her.

The Atlantic laps impotently at the thick hull of the
Cumbria,
water against wood to summon a listless, hungry sound like an old man without teeth, lips and gums and spittle smacking tirelessly to no effect. Maryse tries to recall how she got into the lifeboat, but that’s something the pain seems to be keeping back, something it doesn’t want her to know, at least not yet. There’s a gaping hole hacked through the bottom of the boat, and a small axe lying nearby.

“Did I do that?” she asks and reaches for the axe, but pulls her hand back when she sees the crust of dried blood on the handle. She thinks about trying to climb out of the lifeboat and onto the deck, searching the ship to see if anyone else is alive, but she might be better off not seeing whatever she would find, or whatever might find her, so she stares out at the sea instead.

It might almost be a silvered looking glass, a gently rippling mirror stretching away in every direction until it’s lost in the mist. There’s no way to be sure how long she lay unconscious in the little boat, but she does know that the
Cumbria
was becalmed fifteen days before the crew turned on Captain Malmstrom. So this might be the sixteenth day since the ship sailed into the mist, somewhere south and west of São Filipe and the Cape Verde archipelago. Or it might be the seventeenth. It hardly seems to matter now. This is as far as they’re going, Maryse and the
Cumbria.
Her family is dead – her two sisters, her father and mother – all of them bound for Cape Town and a new life on a South African tobacco plantation. She’s the very last. She’ll be dead soon, too, surely, if there’s any mercy.

But there is
no
mercy,
she thinks.
No mercy at all. God has forsaken me and there is no mercy left. We have sailed completely off the world and into some damned and infernal region.
She lies back down in the lifeboat and stares up into the roiling mist. Her head hurts just a little less when she’s lying down, and, besides, she doesn’t want to see the ocean anymore.

She imagines a huge black raven perched on the davit above her head, watching her with eyes the color of molten gold, and Maryse reminds herself its only the fever, only the thirst, only her mind slipping away from sanity as her body gives up the ghost. Sometime later, as the sun smudge drags itself towards mid-day, the raven squawks once and dissolves in a shimmer of ebony rose petals. Maryse closes her eyes and tries hard to picture herself home again, her father’s manor house in Kent, the copse where her mother once showed her a fairy ring, where she and her sisters played King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and she was always Guinevere. The raven petals, which smell like licorice and coal dust, settle lightly about her face, and Maryse realizes for the first time that someone’s removed her dress. There are stiff maroon spatters across the front of her muslin petticoat, but it’s best not to think about that, either.

The ghost of the pastor sits at her feet, and there’s another gold-eyed raven perched on his shoulder. The man’s face has been scorched almost beyond recognition, but there’s enough left of his face that he can smile for her. His broken teeth are shades of yellow and brown and ivory.

“What are you still hanging on for, missy?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer him. “You think there’s an angel coming to bear you up to Paradise? You think your strength will be rewarded?”

Maryse closes her eyes so that she won’t have to see him. “Isn’t this Hell?” she asks the ghost. “Didn’t you send us all to Hell?”

“No, I don’t know where this is,” he replies, and the raven laughs at him. There’s a crackling sound like paper burning, but Maryse keeps her eyes shut tight. “I can’t say for certain,” the parson mutters, “but I don’t believe it’s Hell. I think we’re lost, that’s all. I don’t think we’re even on the ocean anymore.”

“They’re all dead,” Maryse says, trying not to consider what he meant by
not on the ocean anymore,
and the crackling sound stops.

“Oh, don’t you worry your pretty little head over it, girl. You’re not far behind them.”

The raven flaps its wings and Maryse almost remembers what the sails sounded like, fluttering and swollen with wind, bearing them quickly across the sparkling sea.

If I had black wings,
she thinks,
I could fly away from here. If I had wings, I could fly away home.

“All in a hot and copper sky,” the raven squawks. “The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon.”

“Please tell it to shut up,” she says, but the pastor doesn’t respond.

“Day after day, day after day,” the bird continues undaunted, “We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship, Upon a painted ocean.”

“But there wasn’t any albatross,” Maryse whispers, her mouth so dry it’s getting hard to speak, her lips cracked open and she tastes blood.

“Then it was some other sin,” the pastor tells her. “Let’s not start thinking ourselves innocent, child. There’s always plenty of sin to go around, whether there’s an albatross or not.”

Maryse swallows, her throat gone raw as the floor of a slaughterhouse, and she lies very, very still, listening to the bird reciting Coleridge. She wonders how long it will take for all the others to find their way back onto the
Cumbria,
and how long it will be, this time, before the crew mutinies, how long before the pastor’s suicide, and if she’ll make it into the lifeboat again.

II

The old man sits in an unsteady chair near the single window of his small apartment. On the folding aluminum card table in front of him is a revolver, a box of .45-caliber shells, the pearl-handled straight razor he’s had since his days in Korea, a Bible that he stole from a motel room in Toledo years ago, and photographs stacked up like a deck of playing cards. Some of the photographs are black and white, creased and turning yellow at the edges, and some are faded Polaroids, and some are in color. The apartment smells like fried food and Raid bug spray and stale cigarettes. It’s very, very quiet in the room with the unsteady chair and the folding aluminum card table, and there are no sounds leaking in from the world outside, because, as far as the old man can tell, there is no longer a world outside.

He cannot remember the last time he ate, or took a piss, or heard another human voice. He sleeps, sometimes, on the narrow, swaybacked bed shoved into one corner of the room, but he doesn’t dream. He changes his clothes, trading one white T-shirt for another, one pair of boxers for the next.

The old man takes the topmost photograph from the stack, and glances at the window. There’s a curtain, a dingy piece of cloth with make-believe sunflowers printed on it. When he prays, which is less frequently than he changes his underwear, he thanks God for that piece of cloth, grateful that there’s something between him and the view, so he only has to look when he needs to be reminded.

The color photograph in his hand was taken on July 4, 1973. He knows this because the date is written on the back in his dead wife’s swooping, left-leaning cursive. There are three children in the photograph, and a plastic wading pool. He slips the picture to the bottom of the stack and takes the next photo off the top. This one’s in black and white, himself at age sixteen, smiling proudly and holding the rifle that his father gave him for his birthday, the first gun he ever used to kill anything. He glances at the curtain again, then places the photo at the bottom of the stack.

The third photograph shows him at forty-five, and his son at twenty-one, standing on a pier in Destin, Florida. His son is grinning and holding up the seven-pound Jack Crevalle he caught that day. There’s no date on the back of this photograph. The old man lays it down next to the pearl-handled razor and shuts his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, there’s a cockroach crawling across the picture and he flicks it away from his right index finger. It’s so quiet in the apartment that he can hear the bug hit the floor on the other side of the room and then scramble away.

The old man tries to remember how long it’s been since he baited the mousetraps beneath the sink. He thinks it was the same day that he last looked out the window. The traps never catch anything, but the bits of stale bread and breakfast cereal are always gone whenever he bothers to check them.

He pushes the unsteady chair away from the card table, its legs squeaking loudly as they slide across the linoleum floor, then stands up and looks again at the sunflower curtain hiding the window. Sometimes, he imagines that the curtain rustles slightly in a breeze that isn’t there; sometimes, he thinks that he hears birds and traffic and human voices. So he always carries the Bible with him, whenever he goes to the window, whenever he can’t stand not to look, the Bible and the revolver, because the sounds he imagines might be the demons that are waiting just beyond the limits of Purgatory. He knows that neither the Bible nor the Colt would stop them, if they ever found a way through, but the one makes him feel better and he could use the other to put a bullet in his brain before the demons reach him. He picks up the gun first, opens the cylinder to be sure that there are no empty chambers, then closes it again and reaches for the stolen King James Bible. He’s read it six hundred and forty times, cover to cover, since the world went away and left him here.