Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (6 page)

But she has the hornets’ rustling instruction, ten thousand small voices in hushed and honeyed chorus, to play over and over in her mind.

This finalmost catechism, these obvious do’s and don’t’s for a new order of one. Miss Manners for the shiny thing sprung from its chrysalis of fever and dreams.

So she doesn’t have to see anything until she’s ready. 

Arlene begins the gentlest assault on the bathroom door, irregular thuds and raw-knuckled raps.

Twila rolls over, and there’s no surprise in the dangling limpness of her brother’s body, nothing past mute fact. For a while, she sits on the floor and watches the short arc and sway of his bare feet, toes pointed gracelessly down, meat pendulum skimming inches above the fallen kitchen chair. The breeze smells like rain and ozone and the day’s heat bleeding off into space. The leather belt noose creaks and strains, tied snugly around exposed plumbing painted the same latex oyster white as the ceiling.

She finds a knife and cuts him down, standing on the same chair he stood on and sawing through black leather and between studs and spikes. Halfway through, his weight does the rest. She tries to catch him under the arms but it’s too much and Blondie drops loudly to the floor. His head smacks the wood, and she just stands there, holding the big knife, looking down on this pale, boy-shaped puddle. 

He’d had his razor blades out again and his belly and thighs and the palms of his hands are sliced like fish gills. When she squats down on the chair she sees the single word carved small into his hip. SORRY.

Twila sits in the chair, jumping off point, she thinks and raises the knife above her head, drives it to the hilt into the soft place below his breastbone. Through skin and muscle and soft, dead organs. She yanks it free, and now her hands are stained slippery black, and the blood makes the air stink like a jar of old pennies. 

The wailing starts way down inside her, core shatter, swelling and looping on itself, feedbacking into something that has sickle claws and shreds the still darkness as the blade plunges in again and again and again.

Afterwards, she watches to be sure. She crouches in the chair and rests her head on knees drawn close, hums Hendrix, hey joe, hey joe, and the knife hangs slack in her left hand. To be sure she understands the hornets, that she’s read between all the lines and has the whole skinny. That whatever brought her through the fever will keep her brother down. But Blondie’s a good dead boy; there’ll be no Lazarus games tonight.

buzzbuzzbuzZBUZZBUZZ, the hornets babble and an emptiness as wide as the gangrene sky above the dead pit opens up inside her; perfect pretty nothing ballooning from her guts like a suckling universe, devouring regret and fear and loss. Shitting out crystal certainty and black and keening appetite.

“Arlene?” she whispers. Twila has pushed away the sofa and the table and all the other shit blockading the bathroom, and she presses her face and palms to the tortured door. The silence on the other side is solid and cold. Palpable.

“Hey, Arlene. You pissed on my floor, you stupid zombie bitch.” And she thinks that that’s the first time since it began that she’s said the Z-word out loud.

The stench is dizzying, and she knows that when she turns the brass knob and pushes the door the trapped air will roll out like an invisible, septic fog. She opens her mouth to say something else and the words drown in the thick spill of saliva. Twila wipes her chin dry with the back of her hand, wipes her hand on her T-shirt. And the door scrapes softly across age-buckled linoleum and the hinges murmur. 

Nothing could have ever prepared her for this, this tangible thing that floods her head in waves of smothering acid sweetness, the air soupy fermentation of rancid pork and worm-ripe windfall peaches and cheesy musk. This is not simple scent or taste or anything else hemmed in by mere sensation. The hornets are a howling locust cacophony and Twila gasps, reaching through the blackness for support. She blinks back vertigo and squints. 

A single rectangle of weaker darkness, night filtered dim through filthy curtains high above the tub.

“Arlene?”

Somewhere ahead, a liquid whimper and weight hauled by broken hands; glistening fear stitched against the murk in shades of colors Twila’s never seen before. She takes another step and her foot brushes soft and leaking Arlene, and the dead girl moans and pulls herself
thunk
into the bathtub. A fading part of Twila’s mind, sealed deep inside the maze of waxy hexagons, bothers to wonder how much got left behind on the floor, because whatever she touched is still there.

Twila’s stomach growls as she bends over the tub, and her newfound hunger is almost as monstrous as the sounds rattling up from the zombie’s ruined throat.

In the final gunmetal velvet moments before dawn, she walks alone through the silent streets of the city, past smoking tenement embers and abandoned cars and a hundred other cliché spectacles of spent apocalypse. The dead know her, smell the discrepant blend of warm meat and the green-black decay that stains her face and hands and clothing. They are never more than hesitant shadows, cowering shamblers, fleeting butcheries. And the living are only a rumor on the drowsy lips of the night.

Behind her eyes, the hornets have gone, and her mind is as still and silent as the morning. Her nose drips honey. 

She reaches the crest of a hill, dead-end street and a rust and Bondo Corvette shell is slewed crazily across the yellow dividing line. The driver’s side door is open and the threadbare upholstery is soaked maroon. Twila sits down on the hood, and already, where the trees and rooftops touch the eastern sky, the light is making promises she knows it can’t keep.

Two Worlds and In Between

An editor (doesn’t matter who) said, “Write me a zombie story. You know, like George Romero.” He didn’t say that exactly. I’m paraphrasing. This was supposed to be my “big break”; it wasn’t even close. Anyway, I wrote a zombie story, but not much like George Romero. “When the twins gave a party, everybody came.” That’s the very best of it, I think.

To This Water 

(Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)

1.

Hardly dawn, and already Magda had made her way through the forest into the glittering frost at the foot of the Johnstown dam. When the sun climbed high enough, it would push aside the shadows and set the hollow on fire, sparkling crystal fire that would melt gently in the late spring sunrise and drip from hemlock and aspen branches, glaze the towering thickets of mountain laurel, later rise again as gauzy, soft steam. Everything, ice-crisped ferns and everything else, crunched beneath her shoes, loud in the cold, still air; no sound but morning birds and the steady gush from the spillway into South Fork Creek, noisy and secretive, like careless whispers behind her back.

Winded, her breath puffing out white through chapped lips and a stitch nagging her side, she rested a moment against a potato-shaped boulder, and the moss there frost-stiffened, too, ice-matted green fur and grey lichens like scabs. Back down the valley towards South Fork, night held on, a lazy thing curled in the lee of the mountain. Magda shivered and pulled her shawl tighter about her shoulders.

All the way from Johnstown since nightfall, fifteen miles or more since she’d slipped away from the darkened rows of company houses on Prospect Hill, following the railroad first and later, after the sleeping streets of South Fork, game trails and, finally, the winding creek, yellow-brown and swollen with the runoff of April thaw and heavy May rains. By now her family would be awake, her father already gone to the mill and twelve hours at the furnaces, her mother and sister neglecting chores, and soon they would be asking from house to house, porches and back doors. 

But no one had seen her go, and there would be nothing but concerned and shaking heads, shrugs and suspicion for their questions and broken English. And when they’d gone, there would be whispers, like the murmur and purl of mountain streams.

As the sky faded from soft violet, unbruising, Magda turned and began to pick her way up the steep and rocky face of the dam.

This is not memory, this is a pricking new thing, time knotted, cat’s cradled or snarled like her sister’s brown hair. Magda is always closing her eyes, always opening them again, and always the narrow slit of sky is red, a wound-red slash between the alley’s black walls and rooftops, pine and shingle jaws. And there is nothing left of the men but callused, groping fingers, the scalding whiskey sour-sweetness of their breath. Sounds like laughter from dog throats and the whiskery lips of pigs, dogs and pigs laughing if they could. 

And Magda does not scream, because they have said that if she screams, if she cries or even speaks they will cut her tongue out, will cut her bohunk throat from ear to ear, and she knows enough English to understand their threats. The big Irishman has shown her his knife; they will all show her their knives, and cut her, whether she screams or not. 

The hands pushing and she turns her face away, better the cool mud, the water puddled that flows into her mouth, fills her nostrils, that tastes like earth and rot and the alcohol from empty barrels and overflowing crates of bottles stacked high behind the Washington Street saloon. She grinds her teeth, crunching grit, sand sharp against her gums.

And before she shuts her eyes, last thing before there is only raw pain and the sounds she won’t ever forget, Magda catches the dapper man watching from the far-away end of the alley, his surprised face peering down the well. Staring slack-jawed, and light from somewhere safe glints coldly off his spectacles, moonlight on thin ice.

The demons growl, and he scuttles away, and they fold her open like a cockleshell. 

By the wavering orange oil light, her mother’s face had glowed warm, age and weariness softened almost away, and she had been speaking to them in Magyar, even though Papa said that they’d never learn English that way. She had leaned over them, brushing Magda’s sister’s hair back from her face. Her mother had set the lamp carefully down on the wobbly little table beside their bed, set herself in the wobbly chair. It had still been winter that night, still dirty snow on the ground out side, the wind around the pine-board corners of the house, howling for its own misfortunes. And two daughters, Magda and little Emilia, bundled safe beneath quilts and rag-swaddled bricks from the hearth at their feet.

Magda had watched the shadows thrown across the walls, walls bare save knotholes stuffed with old newspapers and the crucifix her mother had brought across from Budapest, blood-dark wood and tortured pewter. And the lamp light had danced as her mother spoke, seeming to follow the rise and fall of her words, measured steps in a pattern too subtle for Magda to follow.

So she had closed her eyes tightly, burying her face in pillows and Emilia’s back, and listened to her mother’s stories of childhood in the mountain village of Tátra Lomnitz and the wild Carpathians, listening more to her soothing voice than the words themselves. She knew all the old stories of the house elves, the hairy little domovoy that had lived in the dust and sooty corner behind her grandmother’s stove, and the river people, the vodyaniye and rusalka; the comfort her sister drew from the fairy tales, she took directly from the music of timbre and tender intonation. 

“And in the autumn,” her mother had said, “when a fat gander was offered to the people who lived under the lake, we would first cut off its head and nail it to the barn door so that our domovoy would not know that one of his geese had been given away to another.” 

And then, sometime later, the lamp was lifted from the wobbly table, and her mother had kissed them both, Magda pretending to sleep, and whispered, her voice softer than the bed, “
Jó éjszakát kívánok,
” her bare footsteps already moving away, sounding hollow on the floor, when Emilia had corrected her, “Good night, Mama.”

“Good night, Emilia,” her mother had answered, and then they’d been alone with the night and the wind and the sky outside their window that was never quite black enough for stars, but always stained red from the belching foundry fires of Johnstown.

It was full morning by the time Magda reached the top of the dam, and her eyes stung with her own sweat. When she licked her lips she tasted her own salt; not the taste of blood, but something close to blood. Her dress clung wetly to her back, to clammy, damp armpits, and she’d ripped her skirt and stockings on blackberry briars and creeper vines. Twice, she’d slipped on the loose stones, and there was a small gash on her left palm, purpling bruise below her thumb. Now she stood a moment on the narrow road that stretched across the breast of the dam, listening to her heart beat beneath cotton and skin, muscle and bone. Watching the mist, milky wisps curling up from the green-grey water, burning away in the sun. 

Up here, the morning smelled clean, pine and the silent lake, no hint of the valley’s pall of coal dust or factory smoke. There were clouds drifting slowly in from the southwest, scowling, steel-bellied thunderheads, and so the breeze smelled faintly of rain and ozone as well.

Magda stepped across the road, over deep buggy ruts, pressing her own shallow prints into the clay. The pockets of her skirt bulged with the rocks she’d gathered as she climbed, weather-smoothed shale and gritty sandstone cobbles the color of dried apricots. Four steps across, and on the other side, the bank dropped away sharply, steep, but only a few feet down to water, choked thick with cattails and weeds.

Quickest glance, then, back over her shoulder, not bothering to turn full and play Lot’s wife proper. The fire burned
inside
her, a scorching, righteous flame shining through her eyes, inca pable of cleansing, only scarring and salting her brain. And, carefully, Magda went down to the cold water.

When they have all finished with her, each in his turn, when they have carved away at her insides and forced their fat tongues past her teeth and so filled her with their hot seed that it leaks like sea-salt pus from between her bloodied thighs, they slosh away through the mud and leave her; not for dead, not for anything but discarded, done with. For a long time, she lies still and watches the sky roiling above the alley, and the pain seems very, very far away, and the red clouds seem so close that if she raises her hand she might touch them, might break their blister-thin skins and feel the oily black rain hiding inside. Gazing up from the pit into the firelight her own Papa stokes so that the demons can walk the streets of Johnstown.