Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (2 page)

So, here are my windows, stained all with me. It’s impossible to say whether they truly are the best windows I’ve ever made, but I have loved creating each and every one, in turn. Have a look.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

February 4, 2011

Providence, Rhode Island

1
“Why I write,” George Orwell, June 1946, originally published in the final issue of Gangrel (Summer 1946). [
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]

PART ONE

1993 – 1999

Emptiness Spoke Eloquent

Lucy has been at the window again, her sharp nails tap-tapping on the glass, scratching out there in the rain like an animal begging to be let in. Poor Lucy, alone in the storm. Mina reaches to ring for the nurse, stops halfway, forcing herself to believe that all she’s hearing is the rasping limbs of the crape myrtle, whipped by the wind, winter-bare twigs scritching like fingernails on the rain-slick glass. She forces her hand back down onto the warm blanket. And she knows well enough that this simple action says so much. Retreat, pulling back from the cold risks; windows kept shut against night and chill and the thunder.

Back then, there was so much of windows.

On the color television bolted high to the wall, tanks and soldiers in the Asian jungle and that bastard Nixon, soundless.

Electric-white flash and almost at once, a thunderclap that rattles the sky and sends a shudder through the concrete and steel skeleton of the hospital and the windows and old Mina, in her safe and warm blanket.

Old
Mina.

She keeps her eyes open, avoiding sleep, and memories of other storms.

And Lucy at her window.

Again she considers the nurse, that pale angel to bring pills to grant her mercy, blackness and nothingness, the dreamless space between hurtful wakings. Oh, if dear Dr. Jack, with his pitiful morphine, his chloral and laudanums, could see the marvels that men have devised to unleash numbness, the flat calm of mind and body and soul. And she
is
reaching then, for the call button and for Jonathan’s hand, that he should call Seward, anything against the dreams and the scritching at the window.

This time she won’t look, eyes safe on the evening news, and the buzzer makes no sound in her room. This time she’ll wait for the soft and rubber-quiet footsteps, the door to open and Andrea or Neufield or whoever is on duty to bring oblivion in a tiny paper cup.

But after a minute, a minute and a half, and no response, Mina turns her head, giving in by turtle-slow degrees, and she watches the rain streaking the dark glass, the restless shadows of the crape myrtle.

June 1904

The survivors of the Company of Light stood in the rubble at the base of the castle on the Arges and looked past iron and vines, at the empty, soulless casements. It seemed very little changed, framed now in the green froth of the Carpathian summer instead of snow, ice, and bare grey stone.

The trip had been Jonathan’s idea, had become an obsession, despite Mina’s protests and Arthur’s, too, and in the end, seeing how much the journey would cost her, even Van Helsing’s. Jack Seward, whose moods had grown increasingly black since their steamer had docked in Varna, had refused to enter the castle grounds and stood alone outside the gates. Mina held little Quincey’s hand perhaps too tightly and stared silently up at the moss-chewed battlements. 

There was a storm building in the east, over the mountains. Thunder rumbled like far-off cannon, and the warm air smelled of rain and ozone and the heavy purplish blooms hanging from the creepers. Mina closed her eyes and listened, or
tried
to listen the way she had that November day years before. Quincey squirmed, restless six, by her side. The gurgle and splash of the swollen river, rushing unseen below them, and the raucous calls of birds, birds she didn’t recognize. But nothing else.

And Van Helsing arguing with Jonathan.

“…now, Jonathan, now you are satisfied?”

“Shut up. Just shut the bloody hell up.”

What are you listening for, Mina?

Lord Godalming lit his pipe, some Turkish blend, exotic spice and smoke, sulfur from his match. He broke into the argument, something about the approaching storm, about turning back.

What do you expect you’ll hear?

The thunder answered her, much closer this time, and a sudden, cold gust blown before the storm.

He’s not here, Mina. He’s not here.

Off in the mountains, drifting down through passes and trees, a wild animal cried out, just once, in pain or fear or maybe anger. And Mina opened her eyes, blinked, waiting for the cry to come again, but then the thunder cracked like green wood overhead and the first drops of rain, fat and cold, began to fall. The Professor took her arm, leading her away, mumbling Dutch under his breath, and they left Jonathan standing there, staring blankly up at the castle ruins. Lord Godalming waited, helpless, at his side.

And in the falling rain, her tears lost themselves, and no one saw them.

November 1919

Fleeing garish victory, Mina had come back to Whitby hardly two weeks after the armistice. Weary homecomings for the living and maimed and flag-draped caskets. She’d left Quincey behind to settle up his father’s affairs. 

From the train, the lorry from the station, her bags carried off to a room she hadn’t seen yet; she would not sleep at the Westenra house at the Crescent, although it was among the portion of the Godalming estate left to her after Arthur Holmwood’s death. She took her tea in the inn’s tiny dining room, sitting before the bay windows. From there she could see down the valley, past red roofs and whitewash to the harbor pilings and the sea. The water glittered, sullen under the low sky. She shivered and pulled her coat tighter, sipped at the Earl Grey and lemon in the cracked china, the cup glazed as dark as the brooding sky. And if she looked back the other way, towards East Cliff, she might glimpse the ruined abbey, the parish church, and the old graveyard.

Mina refilled her cup from the mismatched teapot on the table, stirred at the peat-colored water, watching the bits of lemon pulp swirl in the little maelstrom she’d made.

She’d go to the graveyard later, maybe tomorrow.

And again the fact, the cold candor of her situation, washed over and through her; she had begun to feel like a lump of gravel polished smooth by a brook. That they were all dead now, the Company, and she’d not attended even a single funeral. Arthur first, almost four years back now, and then Jack Seward, lost at Suvla Bay. The news about Jonathan hadn’t reached her until two days after the drunken cacophony of victory had erupted in Trafalgar Square and had finally seemed to engulf the whole of London. He’d died in some unnamed village along the Belgian border, a little east of Valenciennes, a senseless German ambush only hours before the cease-fire. 

She laid her spoon aside, and watched the spreading stain it made on her napkin. The sky was ugly, bruised.

A man named MacDonnell, a grey-bearded Scotsman, had come to her house, bearing Jonathan’s personal things – his pipe, the brass-framed daguerreotype of her, an unfinished letter. The silver crucifix he’d worn like a scar the last twenty years. The man had tried to comfort her, offering half-heard reassurances that her husband had been as fine a corporal as any on the Front. She thought, sometimes, that she might have been more grateful to him for his trouble.

She still had the unfinished letter carried with her from London, and she might look at it again later, though she knew it almost by heart now. Scribblings she could hardly recognize as his, mad and rambling words about something bestial trailing his battalion through the fields and muddy trenches. 

Mina sipped her tea, barely noticing that it had gone cold, and watched the clouds outside as they swept in from the sea and rushed across the rocky headland.

A soupy fog in the morning, misty ghosts of ships and men torn apart on the reef, and Mina Harker followed the curve of stairs up from the town, past the ruined Abbey, and into the old East Cliff churchyard. It seemed that even more of the tombstones had tumbled over, and she remembered the old sailors and fishermen and whalers that had come here before, Mr. Swales and the others, and wondered if anyone ever came here now. She found a bench and sat, looking back down to where Whitby lay hidden from view. The yellow lantern eyes of the lighthouses winked in the distance, bookending the invisible town below.

She unfolded Jonathan’s letter and the chilling breeze fingered the edges of the paper.

The foghorns sounded, that throaty bellow, perplexed and lonesome.

Before leaving London, she’d taken all the papers, the typed pages and old notebooks, the impossible testament of the Company, from the wall safe where Jonathan had kept them. Now they were tucked carefully inside the brocade canvas satchel resting on the sandy cobbles at her feet.

“
…and burn them, Mina, burn every trace of what we have seen,
” scrawled in that handwriting that was Jonathan’s, and no one’s she’d ever met.

And so she had sat at the hearth, these records in her lap, watching the flames, feeling the heat on her face. Had lifted a letter to Lucy from the stack, held the envelope a moment, teasing the fire as a child might tease a cat with table scraps.

“No,” whispered, closing her eyes against the hungry orange glow and putting the letter back with the rest.
All I have left, and I’m not that strong.

Far out at sea, she thought she heard bells, and down near Tate Hill Pier, a dog barking. But the fog made a game of sound, and she couldn’t be sure she’d heard anything but the surf and her own breathing. Mina lifted the satchel and set it on the bench beside her.

Earlier that morning she’d stood before the looking glass in her room at the inn, staring into the soft eyes of a young woman, not someone who had seen almost forty-two years and the horrors of her twentieth. As she had so often done when standing before her own mirrors, she’d looked for the age that should have begun to crease and ruin her face and found only the faintest crow’s feet.

“
…every trace, Mina, if we are ever to be truly free of this terrible damnation.
”

She opened the satchel and laid Jonathan’s letter inside, pressed it between the pages of his old diary, then snapped the clasp shut again.
Now,
she thought, filled suddenly with the old anger, black and acid.
I might fling it into the sea, lose these memories here, where it all started.

Instead, she hugged the bag tightly to her and watched the lighthouses as the day began to burn the mist away.

Before dusk, the high clouds had stacked themselves out beyond Kettleness, filling the eastern sky with thunderheads, bruise-black underbellies already dumping sheets of rain on a foamy white sea. Before midnight, the storm had reared above Whitby Harbor and made landfall. In her narrow room above the kitchen, framed in wood and plaster and faded gingham wallpaper haunted by a hundred thousand boiled cabbages, Mina dreamed.

She was sitting at the small window, shutters thrown back, watching the storm walk the streets, feeling the icy salt spray and rain on her face. Jonathan’s gold pocket watch lay open on the writing desk, ticking loud above the crash and boom outside. MacDonnell had not brought the watch back from Belgium, and she’d not asked him about it.

Regardless, there it lay, ticking. Quick and palsied fingers of lightning forked above the rooftops and washed the world in an instant of daylight.

On the bed behind her, Lucy said something about Churchill and the cold wind, and she laughed. Chandelier diamond tinkling and asylum snigger between velvet and gossamer and rust-scabbed iron bars.

And still laughing, she says, “Bitch…apostate, Wilhelmina coward.”

Mina looked down, watching the hands, hour, minute, second, racing themselves around the dial. The fob was twisted and crusted with something unpleasantly dark.

“Lucy, please…” and her voice came from very far away, and it sounded like a child asking to be allowed up past her bedtime.

Groan and bedspring creak, linen rustle and a sound even wetter than the pounding rain. Lucy Westenra’s footsteps moved across the bare floor, heels clocking, ticking off the shortening distance.

Mina looked back down, and Drawbridge Road was absurdly crowded with bleating sheep, soppy wool in the downpour. The gangling shepherd was a scarecrow blown from the wheat fields west of Whitby. Twiggy fingers emerged from beneath his burlap sleeves, as he drove his flock towards the Harbor.

Lucy was standing very close now. Stronger than the rain and the old cabbage stink, anger that smelled like blood, and garlic bulbs, and dust. Mina watched the sheep and the storm. 

“Turn
around
, Mina. Turn around and look at me and tell me that you even loved Jonathan.”

Turn around Mina and tell

“Please, Lucy, don’t leave me here.”

and tell me that you even loved 

The sheep were turning, their short necks craning upwards, and they all had red little rat eyes, and then the scarecrow howled.

Lucy’s hands were cool silk on Mina’s fevered shoulders.

“Don’t leave, not yet…”

Lucy’s fingers, hairless spider legs, had crawled around her cheeks and seized her jaw. Something brittle dry, something crackling papery against her teeth, was forced past her lips. 

On the street, the sheep were coming apart in the storm, reduced to yellowed fleece and fat-marbled mutton; a river of crimson sluicing between paving stones. Grinning skulls and polished white ribs, and the scarecrow had turned away and broken up in the gale.

Lucy’s fingers pushed the first clove of garlic over Mina’s tongue, then shoved another into her mouth.

And she felt cold steel at her throat.

we loved you, Mina, loved as much as the blood and the night and even as much as