Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (7 page)

But the demons have kept their promises, and her throat is not sliced ear to ear, and she can still speak. She knows this because she hears the animal sounds coming from her mouth, distant as the pain between her legs. She is not dead, even if she is no longer alive.

“Tell us about the rusalka, Mama,” her sister had said, and her mother had frowned, looking down at hands folded on her lap like broken wings.

“
Nem
, Emilia,” her mother had answered firmly, gently, “Rusalka is not a good story for bedtime.”

While her sister pleaded, Magda had sat straight-backed on the edge of the bed, silent, watching the window, watching the red and starless sky, and already that had been two weeks after the men with the buckboard and the white mare had brought her home, two weeks after her mother had cried and washed away the dirt and blood, the clinging semen. Two weeks since her father had stormed down from Prospect Hill with his deer rifle and had spent a night in jail, had been reminded by the grave-jowled constable that they were, after all, Hungarians, and what with all the talk of the Company taking on bohunk contract workers, cheap labor depriving honest men with families of decent wages, well, it wouldn’t do to look for more trouble, would it? In the end, he’d said, it would have been the girl’s word against anyone he might have brought in, anyway.

In that space of time, days stacked like broken dishes, not a word from Magda and no tears from her dark and empty eyes. When food was pressed to her lips, a spoonful of soup or gulyás, she’d eaten, and when the sun went down and the lamps were put out, she’d lain with her eyes open, staring through the window at the seething sky.

“Please, Mama,
kérem,
” her sister had whined, whined and Magda turned then, had turned on them so furiously that a slat cracked gunshot-loud beneath the feather mattress. Startled Emilia had cried out, reaching for their mother. And Magda had pulled herself towards them, hands gone to claws, tetanus snarl and teeth bared like a starving dog. And all that furnace glow gathered, hoarded from the red nights, and spilling from her eyes. 

“Magda,
stop this,
” her mother said, pulling Emilia to her. “You’re frightening your sister! You’re frightening me!”

“No, Mama. She wants to hear a story about the rusalka, then I will
tell
her about the rusalka. I will
show
her about the rusalka.”

But her mother had stumbled to her feet, too-big Emilia clutched awkwardly in her arms, and the wobbly chair tumbled over and kicked aside. Backing away from the sagging bed and Magda, burning Magda, Emilia’s face hidden against her chest. Backing into the shadows crouched in the doorway.

“She wants to hear, Mama, she
wants
to hear my story.”

Her mother had stepped backward into the hall gloom, had slammed the bedroom door shut behind her, and Magda had heard the key rattle in the lock, bone rattle, death rattle, and then she’d been alone. The oil lamp still bright on the wobbly table, and a train had wailed, passing down in the valley, and when the engineer’s whistle and the rattle and throb of boxcars had faded away, there had been only her mother’s sobs from the other side of the door and the distant clamor of the mills.

Magda had let the lamp burn, staring a while into its tiny flame haloed safe behind blackened chimney glass, and then she’d turned back to the window, the world outside framed safe within. She’d held fingers to her mouth, and, between them, whispered her story to the sympathetic night.

All the lost and pretty suicides, all the girls in deep lakes and swirling rivers, still ponds, drowned or murdered and their bodies secreted in fish-silvered palaces. Souls committed to water instead of consecrated earth, and see her on Holy Thursday, on the flat rocks combing out her long hair, grown green and tangled with algae and eels? See her sitting in the low branches of this willow, bare legs hanging like pale fruit, toes drawing ripples in the stream, and be kind enough this sixth week past Easter to leave a scrap of linen, a patch or rag. Come back, stepping quietly through the tall grass, to find it washed clean and laid to dry beneath the bright May sky.

And there is more, after that, garlands for husbands and the sound of clapping hands from the fields, voices like ice melting, songs like the moment before a dropped stone strikes unseen well water.

Carry wormwood in your pockets, young man, and bathe with a cross around your neck.

Leave her wine and red eggs.

And when she dances under the summer moon, when the hay is tall and her sisters join hands, pray you keep yourself behind locked doors, or walk quickly past the waving wheat; stay on the road, watch your feet.

Or you’ll wind up like poor Józef, remember Józef, Old Viktor’s son? His lips were blue, grain woven into his hair, and how do you think his clothes got wet, so muddy, so far from the river?

And see her there, on the bank beneath the trees, her comb of stickly fish bones? Watch her, as she pulls the sharp teeth through her green hair, and watch the water rise.

Magda thought,
So, this is what it’s like to drown, like stirring salt into water,
thinking as she drifted, dissolving just below the surface of the lake, sinking slowly into twilight the color of dead moss, the stones in her pockets only a little help. Her hair floated, wreathing her face, and the last silver bubbles rose from her open mouth, hurrying away. Just the faintest dull pressure in her chest, behind her eyes, and a fleeting second’s panic, and then there was a quiet more perfect than anything she’d ever imagined. Peace folding itself thick around her, driving back the numbing cold and the useless, coruscating sun filtering down from above, smothering doubt and fear and the crushing regret that had almost made her turn around, scramble back up the slippery bank when the water had closed like molasses around her ankles.

Magda flowed into the water, even as the water flowed into her, and by the time she reached the bottom, there was hardly any difference between them anymore.

2.

Thursday, the wet dregs of Memorial Day, and Mr. Tom Givens slipped quietly away from the talk and cigar smoke of the clubhouse front rooms. Talk of the parade down in Johnstown and the Grand Army Veterans and the Sons of Veterans, the amputees in their crutches and faded Union blues; twenty-four years past Appomattox, and Grant was dead, and Lee was dead, and those old men, marching clear from Main to Bedford Street despite the drizzling sky. He’d sat apart from the others, staring out across the darkening lake, the docks and the club fleet, the canoes and sailboats and Mr. Clarke’s electric catamaran moored safe against the threat of a stormy night. 

And then someone, maybe Mr. D. W. C. Bidwell, had brought up the matter of the girl, and faces, smoke-shrouded, brandy-flushed, had turned towards him, curious, and 

Oh, yes, didn’t you know? Why, Tom here saw her, saw the whole damnable affair…

and so he’d politely excused himself. Had left them mum bling before the crackle and glow of the big sandstone fireplace. By the time he’d reached the landing and the lush path of burgundy carpet that would carry him back to his room, the conversation had turned, inevitably, to iron and coke, the new Navy ironclads for which Carnegie, Phipps, and Co. had been contracted to produce the steel plating. Another triumph for Pittsburgh, another blow to the Chicago competition.

Now, Tom shut the door behind him, and so the only light was dim grey through the windows; for a moment, he stood in the dark before reaching for the lamp chain. Above the lake, the clouds were breaking apart, hints of stars and moonshine in the rifts. The lake almost glimmered, seeming to ripple and swirl out towards in the middle. 

It’s only wind on the water,
Tom Givens told himself as he pulled the lamp chain hard and warm yellow drenched the room, drove the blackness outside, and he could see nothing in the windows except the room mirrored and himself, tall and very much in need of a shave. By the clock on his dresser, it was just past nine.
At least,
he thought,
maybe there’ll be no storms tonight.
But the wind still battered itself against the clubhouse, and he sat down in a chair, back to the lake, and poured amber whiskey. He drank it quickly and quickly refilled the glass, trying not to hear the gusting wind, the shutter rattle, the brush of pine boughs like old women wringing their bony hands. 

By ten, the bottle was empty, and Tom Givens was asleep in the chair, his stocking feet propped on the bed.

An hour later, the rain began.

The storm was as alive as anything else, as alive as the ancient shale and sandstone mountains and alive as the wind; as alive as the scorch and burn of the huge Bessemer converters and the slag-scabbed molten iron that rolled like God’s own blood across the slippery steel floors of the Cambria mills. And also as perfectly mindless, as passion ately indifferent. It had been born somewhere over Nebraska two days before, had swept across the plains and in Kansas spawned twister children who danced along the winding Cottonwood River and wiped away roads and farms. It had seduced Arctic air spilling off the Great Lakes and sired blizzards across Michigan and Indiana, had spoken its throaty poetry of gale and thunder throughout the Ohio River Valley, and finally, with violent arms, would embrace the entire mid-Atlantic seaboard.

As Tom Givens had listened distractedly to the pomp and chatter of the gentlemen of the club, the storm had already claimed western Pennsylvania, had snubbed the sprawling scar of Pittsburgh for greener lovers farther east. As he’d slept, it had stroked bare ridges and stream-threaded valleys, rain-shrouding Blairsville and Bolivar, New Florence and Ninevah, had followed the snaky railroad through Conemaugh Gap into the deep and weathered folds of Sang Hollow. 

And then, Johnstown, with its patchwork cluster of boroughs crowded into the dark hole carved in the confluence of two rivers. The seething Cambria yards and the office buildings, the fine and handsome homes along Main Street. The storm drummed tin- and slate-shingled roofs, played for the handful of mill workers and miners drinking late inside California Tom’s, for the whores in Lizzie Thompson’s sporting house on Frankstown Hill. George and Mathilde Heiser, closing up for the night, paused in the mercantile clutter of their store to watch the downpour, and inside St. Joseph’s parsonage, Reverend Chapman, who’d been having bad dreams lately, was awakened by his wife, Agnes, and they lay together and listened to the rain pounding Franklin Street.

Unsatisfied, insatiable, the storm had continued east, engulfing the narrow valley, Mineral Point and the high arch of the Pennsylvania Railroad viaduct, and, at last, sleeping South Fork.

As alive as anything it touched.

The girl on the dam doesn’t know that he’s watching, of that much he’s certain. He sits by open windows, and the early morning air smells like the lake, like fish and mud, and something sharper. He’s been drunk more than he’s been sober since the night down in Johnstown, the night he sat in the balcony of the Washington Street Opera House,
Zozo the Magic Queen
on stage, and some other fellows from the club talking amongst themselves more than watching the actors.

The girl from the dam is walking on the water.

He leans forward, head and shoulders out the window because he can’t hear, Irwin braying like a goddamned mule from the seat behind, and he can’t hear the words, the players’ lines, can only hear Irwin repeating the idiotic joke over and over again. Beneath the window of his room, the audience is seated, and he stares down at men’s heads and the ladies’ feathered hats, row after row on the front lawn of the South Fork Hunting and Fishing Club.

The storm still somewhere far away, but rushing like locomotive wheels, like thunder, like applause and laughter, and the footlights are like light ning frozen on her face.

“Ask Tom,” the usher says. “Tom saw the whole damnable affair,” and Irwin howls.

And then the girl’s gone, if she were ever really there, and the crowd is on its feet, flesh smacking flesh in frenzied approval; if she were ever there. Lake Conemaugh is as smooth as varnished wood, and he knows it’s all done with trapdoors and mirrors, and that, in a moment, she’ll rise straight up from the stage planks to take her bows. But the roses fall on the flat water and lie undisturbed, and now the curtains are sweeping closed, velvet the color of rain rippling across the sky.

“…saw the
whole
affair,” Irwin echoes, so funny he wants to say it over and over, and they’re all laughing, every one, when Tom gets up to go, when it’s obvious that the show’s over and everyone else is leaving their seats, the theater emptying onto the front porch of the clubhouse.

Sidewalk boards creak loudly beneath his shoes, thunk and mold-rotten creak; after the evening rain showers, the air smells cleaner at least, coal dust and factory soot washed from the angry industrial sky into black gutters, but the low clouds hold in the blast-furnace glow from Cambria City and so the sky is bloodier than ever.

Spring buggies and lacquered wagon wheels, satin skirts and petticoats held above the muddy street. The pungent musk of wet horse.

And he knows that he’s only stepped out of his room, that he stands in the second floor hall, that if he walks straight on he’ll pass three rooms, three numbered doors, and come to the stairs, the oak banister, winding downward. But it’s dark, the sputtering white-arc streetlights not reaching this narrow slit of inverted alley spine between Washington and Union streets. The carpet feels more like muck and gravel, and he turns,
starts
to turn, when thunder rumbles like animal whispers and cloth tearing and

Why, Tom here saw her. Saw the whole damnable affair.

the shadow things are hunched here, claws and grunts and breath exhaled from snot-wet nostrils. She turns her head, hair mired in the filth and standing water, face minstrel-smudged, but eyes bright, and she
sees
him, and he knows she’s begging him to help, to stop this, to pull the shadows off her before there’s nothing left to save.