Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (38 page)

“Aramat’s dead,” she says, and then another truck roars by, whipping the trash and grit at the side of the interstate into a whirlwind. When it’s gone, Dancy wipes the dust off her clothes.

“It was an accident,” she says.

“Well now, that’s a shame, I guess. I’d honestly hoped it wouldn’t come to that,” and the Bailiff shades his eyes and glances up at the sun. “But it was always only a matter of time. Some people are just too damn mean and crazy for their own good. Anyway, I imagine Biancabella can take care of things now.”

“I don’t understand.”

“What don’t you understand, Dancy Flammarion?”

“The boy. I mean, whose side are you on?”

The Bailiff laughs softly to himself, and reaches for the bandan-
na again.

“You’ve got a lot to learn, child. You’re a goddamn holy terror, all right, but you’ve got a
lot
to learn.”

She stares at him silently, her eyes hidden behind the broken sunglasses, while the Bailiff blows his nose into the bandanna and the cicadas scream at each other.

“Can I have my duffel bag back?” she says. “I left it in your car.”

“Wouldn’t you rather have a ride? This sun isn’t good for regular folks. I hate to think what it’ll do to an albino. You’re starting to turn pink already.”

Dancy looks at her forearm, frowns, and then looks back at the Bailiff.

“What about the others?” she asks.

The Bailiff raps his knuckles twice on the trunk. “Dead to the world,” he says. “At least until sunset. And I owe you one after – ”

“You don’t owe me nothing,” Dancy says.

“Then think of it as a temporary cease-fire. It’ll be a nice change, having someone to talk to who still breathes.”

Dancy stares at the Monte Carlo, at the Bailiff, and then at the endless, broiling ribbon of I-16 stretching away north and west towards Atlanta and the mountains.

“But I’m not even sure where I’m going.”

“I thought that’s why you have an angel, to tell you these things?”

“It will, eventually.”

“Well, it’s only a couple of hours to Macon. How’s that for a start?”

In the marsh, a bird calls out, long-legged swamp bird, and Dancy turns her head and watches as the egret spreads its wide alabaster wings and flaps away across the cordgrass, something black and squirming clutched in its long beak.

“It’s a start,” she says, but waits until the egret is only a smudge against the blue-white sky before she closes the umbrella and follows the Bailiff into the shade of the car.

For Dame Darcy. Shine on.

Les Fleurs Empoisonnées

I saw this house in Savannah, but I owe the story to an illustration by Dame Darcy. An exquisitely ghoulish tableaux of a lesbian sisterhood engaged in every profane rite, that was the true inspiration. The talking taxidermied bear with his red fez, he’s my favorite bit.

Night Story 1973

with Poppy Z. Brite

“‘It rained and it rained and it rained,’” the old woman said, reading aloud from
Winnie-the-Pooh
. She held the book up close to her face, squinting to see the words by the yellow-orange light of the kerosene lantern. “‘Piglet told himself that never in all his life and
he
was goodness knows
how
old – three, was it, or four? – never had he seen so much rain,’” and then she paused, lifting her head to stare at the front door of the two-room mountain cabin she shared with her grandson, whose name was Ghost.

“‘Days and days and days,’” said Ghost with just a touch of impatience, prompting her. But then he, too, sat up straighter in bed and stared at the door, recognizing the alert uneasiness on his grandmother’s face.

“Ghost child, if you already know this story by heart, why am I bothering to read it to you?” But she didn’t take her eyes off the door as she spoke, the door and the rainslick windows on either side of it. Those windows worried her most of all. Nothing to see out there but the stormy night, blacker than pitch in a bucket, black as a coal miner’s ass, except for the brief and thunderous flashes of lightning.

“What did you see, Dee?” Her name was Deliverance, Miss Deliverance to most everybody, and Dee-for-short only to this boy. Deliverance frowned and nodded her head, nodded it very slowly, and then she looked back down at the familiar pages of the book.

“I didn’t see nothing at all,” she said. “I expect it was just a dog.”

“Which?”

“Which what?”

The boy sighed, leaned back into his big, goose-down pillow. A small, vertical line appeared between his eyebrows, more than a hint of impatience now, that suspicious expression far too mature for his six and a half years. “Which one
was
it?” he asked. “Was it nothing or was it a dog? It can’t be both.”

“You know, boy, sometimes you sound just like your mama,” and sometimes he could look like her too, but Deliverance didn’t say that. Hard enough thinking it, seeing the careless bits and pieces of her only daughter in his fox-sharp face, her eyes become his eyes, irises the pale blue of a clear dawn. She reached out and brushed Ghost’s long hair from his face, that cornsilk hair so blonde it was white, or as good as white.

“Nothing,” she said. “I didn’t see nothing. So don’t you worry.” But there were no secrets between these two, and she knew he didn’t believe her. Instead of pretending to, he pointed at
Winnie-the-Pooh
. 

“‘It rained and it rained and it rained,’” he said.

“Ghost, honey, why don’t we read something else? Something where it
ain’t
raining so much. Maybe that one about old Eeyore losing his tail, or Kanga and Baby Roo coming to the Hundred-Acre Wood.”

Ghost looked disappointed, then frowned and glanced up at the ceiling of the little house. The storm drummed at the tin roof with a thousand fingers, the icy late-October rain that had started a few hours before sunset and showed no signs of letting up anytime soon. The wind roared and rattled the roof, trying hard to find a way in, trying to help the rain, and he was pretty sure this storm wasn’t just any storm. This storm was
mean
. This storm, he thought, wouldn’t mind hurting them, picking them up like Dorothy Gale and blowing them all the way to Oz or someplace not so nice.

“It’s after me, ain’t it, ’cause of what I done down at the creek yesterday, at the rocks?”

The old woman closed the book and laid it down next to the lantern on the small, walnut-burl table beside the bed.

“It’s only a thunderstorm,” she said stern, trying hard to sound convincing. “Storms don’t come looking for people. You know that, don’t you?”

“I think this one is,” he replied. “This one’s come out looking for me,” and then lightning so bright that it might have been the Second Coming, cold wash of noonday brilliance to drown the inside of the little house. The old woman turned towards the window, turned fast but not nearly fast enough, too old to be racing lightning, and the windows were already black again. Nothing there but thunder and the rain streaking window glass.

“That was its eyes,” Ghost said. “It has big shining eyes so it can see where it’s going in the dark.”

And Deliverance turned back to her strange, pale grandson snuggled into his nest of old quilts and a mint-green blanket she’d bought at Woolworth’s years ago. The big flannel shirt he always slept in, a work shirt that had been his grandfather’s once upon a time, to keep him warm and safe from his dreams. She took a deep breath and leaned closer to him.

“Ghost, you listen to me now and pay attention,” she said, using the sober, old-womanly voice she always reserved for the things that she had to be certain he understood, copperheads and steel-jaw traps, poisonous mushrooms and the leaf-covered pits of abandoned wells.

“I’m listening, Dee,” he said quietly.

“Sometimes we gotta be brave, even when we’re scared. We gotta not let being scared keep us from thinking straight. That’s all brave is, boy, when you come right down to it, not letting the fear get you so turned around you start doing stupid things, instead of what you know you
ought
to do.” 

“I didn’t know about the rocks,” the boy whispered, and he looked away from her, watching the flame of the lantern instead.

“Ain’t nobody blaming you. I should’a told you about that old pile of stones a long, long time ago. But sometimes a body forgets things, even important things like them stones. All that matters
now
, Ghost, is that we do the stuff we know we gotta do and don’t get so scared we forget anything else important.”

“Like the salt?” he asked solemnly, and she nodded her head, even though she knew the storm had surely washed away the double ring of salt she’d carefully sprinkled around the house that afternoon. There were still neat white lines of it on the thresholds and window sills.

“Yes. Like the salt,” she said. “And the chamomile and St. John’s wort.”

And then Ghost sat up again and pointed at
Winnie-the-Pooh
, where Deliverance had set the book down on the table beside the bed.

“How about we read ‘In Which Pooh Goes Visiting and Gets into a Tight Place’?” he asked. “There ain’t too much rain in that one, is there?”

“Maybe you best get some sleep. It’s almost midnight.” 

He shook his head no. “I ain’t sleepy.”

“I didn’t ask if you were, now did I? And don’t say ‘ain’t.’” She scowled at him, but picked the book back up off the table anyway. “It’s bad grammar. I ain’t having people thinking my grandbaby’s no better educated than some ignorant hillbilly.”

“But
you
say
ain’t
all the time, Dee. You just said it.” 

“When did I say it?”

“Just
now
.”

“Well, I’m old,” she said. “It’s too late for me,” and she opened the book to Chapter Two and began to read, but Deliverance listened, too, to the wind blowing wild through the trees, the rain on the roof, the thunder rolling like angel voices across the valley.

“‘Well, Edward Bear, known to all his friends as Winnie-the-Pooh, or Pooh for short, was walking through the forest one day,’” she read, and far away, off towards the creek and the place where the sandstone bluffs got steep on their way up to the bald crest of Lazarus Mountain, there was another sound. The one she’d been waiting for all night long, the reason she’d drawn hex signs on all the doors with a piece of chalk. She didn’t have to ask him to know Ghost had heard it, too, the wary flicker in his pale eyes all she needed to tell her that he had, and so she kept reading about Pooh gone to see Rabbit, and tried to remember if the shotgun on the big table across the room was loaded.

Sixty years since the first time Deliverance saw the pile of stones by Lame Rabbit Creek; 1913 and she was barely eight years old, the same year her mother married a tall, red-bearded blacksmith from Tennessee who made horseshoes and axe heads and lightning rods. Deliverance would go down to the gurgling, snake-winding creek with her mother and together they would pick watercress and dandelion greens and look for sassafras trees growing along the banks. Sometimes they would sit very still and quiet in the bright patches where the sun found its way through the sheltering oak and sycamore branches overhead, dangle their bare feet in the cold water, and wait for deer or raccoons to come down to the creek for a drink. Sometimes they saw otters or mink, and once, a bobcat that sat and stared back at them warily from a tangled hawthorn thicket.

Her mother showed her fossil sea shells embedded in the mossy rock walls of the creek, proof of Noah’s flood, taught her the difference between the harmless water snakes and cottonmouth moccasins. And “This here creek runs all the way down to the sea,” she would say, as if maybe Deliverance had forgotten since the last time. “All the way to the Pee Dee River and the South Carolina marshes and finally out to the wide Atlantic Ocean.”

But on the late September day they found the stones it wasn’t sunny, and her mother hadn’t said much of anything, one of her silent, melancholy moods, and Deliverance kept running on ahead alone, threading her way expertly through the ferns and pricking creeper vines. The two of them strayed farther up the creek than they’d ever gone before, wandering past a wide, beaver-dammed pool and then the creek bed made a sharp bend and disappeared into a dense wall of tall, dead trees. Twisted, rotting trunks stripped of bark, stark branches naked except for the clustered, infesting growths of mistletoe and green-brown fungi. The trees seemed to have grown too close together, to lean towards one another, intertwining and blotting out the cloudy sky. 

“Livvy, stop!” her mother shouted, but she’d already gone past the first of the dead trees, stood among them looking back out at her mother.

“Come on back now, baby,” her mother said, whispered urgently, and she motioned to the girl. “We shouldn’t be here. This is…” and she hesitated, looking up at the ugly, ancient trees, the birch and hickory corpses standing guard like a column of wooden soldiers. “This is a bad place,” she said, sounding frightened, and Deliverance couldn’t remember her mother ever having been afraid of the woods before. Cautious, because there were things that could hurt them if they weren’t careful where they put their feet or what they touched, but never frightened.

“No, I want to
see
,” she said, and turned and ran deeper into the stand of dead trees.

Later, Deliverance clearly remembered the sound of her mother calling after her, the crunchy rustle of her mother’s feet running through fallen leaves, but she could never recall exactly why she’d disobeyed, why she’d turned and run away laughing. Even then, some small part of her understood what her mother was saying, could feel the sick and spiteful energy rising from the trees like heat from a crackling fire. Sometimes, she would think there had been a voice, another child’s sweet, inviting voice, calling her to come and play. And other times, it would seem as though there might have been an unseen hand pushing or pulling at her, driving or dragging her on as the trunks of the trees closed in tight around her.