Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (84 page)

And my clumsy hands move uncertainly across her bare shoulders, my fingertips brushing the chaos of scar tissue there, and she smiles for me.

On my knees in an alley, my head spinning, and the night air stinks of puke and saltwater.

“Okay, so I first heard about this from a woman I interviewed who knew the family,” the man in the Radiohead T-shirt says. We’re sitting on the patio of a bar in Pacific Grove, and the sun is hot and glimmers white off the bay. His name isn’t important, and neither is the name of the bar. He’s a student from LA, writing a book about the Open Door of Night, and he got my e-mail address from someone in New York. He has bad teeth and smiles too much.

“This happened back in ’76, the year before Jacova’s mother died. Her father, he’d take them down to the beach at Moss Landing two or three times every summer. He got a lot of his writing done out there. Anyway, apparently the kid was a great swimmer, like a duck to water, but her mother never let her to go very far out at that beach because there are these bad rip currents. Lots of people drown out there, surfers and shit.”

He pauses and takes a couple of swallows of beer, then wipes the sweat from his forehead.

“One day, her mother’s not watching, and Jacova swims too far out and gets pulled down. By the time the lifeguards get her back to shore, she’s stopped breathing. The kid’s turning blue, but they keep up the mouth-to-mouth and CPR, and she finally comes around. They get Jacova to the hospital up in Watsonville, and the doctors say she’s fine, but they keep her for a few days anyhow, just for observation.”

“She drowned,” I say, staring at my own beer. I haven’t taken a single sip. Beads of condensation cling to the bottle and sparkle like diamonds.

“Technically, yeah. She wasn’t breathing. Her heart had stopped. But
that’s
not the fucked-up part. While she’s in Watsonville, she keeps telling her mother some crazy story about mermaids and sea monsters and demons, about these things trying to drag her down to the bottom of the sea and drown her, and how it wasn’t an undertow at all. She’s terrified, convinced that they’re still after her, these monsters. Her mother wants to call in a shrink, but her father says no, fuck that, the kid’s just had a bad shock, she’ll be fine. Then, the second night she’s in the hospital, these two nurses turn up dead. A janitor found them in a closet just down the hall from Jacova’s room. And here’s the thing you’re not gonna believe, but I’ve seen the death certificates and the autopsy reports, and I swear to you this is the God’s honest truth.”

Whatever’s coming next, I don’t want to hear it. I know that I don’t
need
to hear it. I turn my head and watch a sailboat out on the bay, bobbing about like a toy.

“They’d drowned, both of them. Their lungs were full of saltwater. Five miles from the goddamn ocean, but these two women drowned right there in a
broom closet.”

“And you’re going to put this in your book?” I ask him, not taking my eyes off the bay and the little boat.

“Yeah,” he replies. “I am. It fucking happened, man, just like I said, and I can prove it.”

I close my eyes, shutting out the dazzling, bright day, and wish I’d never agreed to meet with him.

I close my eyes.

“Down there,” Jacova whispers, “you will know nothing but peace, in her mansions, in the endless night of her coils.”

We would be warm below the storm 

In our little hideaway beneath the waves 

I close my eyes. Oh god, I’ve closed my eyes.

She wraps her strong, suntanned arms tightly around me and takes me down, down, down, like the lifeless body of a child caught in an undertow. And I’d go with her, like a flash I’d go, if this were anything more than a dream, anything more than an infidel’s sour regret, anything more than eleven thousand words cast like a handful of sand across the face of the ocean. I would go with her, because, like a stone that has become an incarnation of mystery, she has drawn a circle around me. 

Houses Under The Sea

It began with a line from an R.E.M. song. Then, Jacova Angevine. Circling back to John Steinbeck (
Cannery Row
and
Sweet Thursday
). Mother Hydra, Panthalassa, MBARI, gulper eels, whispered apocalypse, those who go down to the sea
without
ships.

We don’t doubt, we don’t take direction,

Lucretia, my reflection, dance the ghost with me…

Sisters of Mercy, “Lucretia, My Reflection” (1987)

“I am alone. There is no God where I am.”

Aleister Crowley,
The Book of the Law
(
Liber AL vel Legis
, 1904)

Publication History

Original publication dates appear first, followed in parentheses by the year each story was written. Sometimes, there were considerable discrepancies between the two.

“Emptiness Spoke Eloquent”
Secret City: Strange Tales of London,
1997 (1993)

“Two Worlds, and In Between”
Dark of the Night,
1997 (1994)

“To This Water (Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)”
Dark Terrors 2,
1996 (1994)

“Tears Seven Times Salt”
Darkside: Horror for the Next Millennium,
1996 (1994)

“Breakfast in the House of the Rising of the Rising Sun”
Noirotica 2
, 1997 (1995)

“Estate”
Dark Terrors 3,
1997 (1997)

“Giants in the Earth”
Pawn of Chaos: Tales of the Eternal Champion
, 1996 (1995)

“Rats Live On No Evil Star”
White of the Moon,
1999 (1997)

“Postcards from the King of Tides”
Candles for Elizabeth,
1998 (1997)

“Salmagundi (New York City, 1981)”
Carpe Noctem
, 1998 (1998)

“Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire”
Tales of Pain and Wonder,
2000 (1995-1999)

“Spindleshanks (News Orleans, 1956)
Queer Fear,
2000 (2000)

“The Road of Pins”
Dark Terrors 6
, 2002 (2001)

“Onion”
Wrongs Things,
2001 (2001)

“Les Fleurs Empoisonnées” Subterranean Press 2001 (2001)

“Night Story (1973)”
Wrong Things,
2001 (2001)

“From Cabinet 34, Drawer 6”
Weird Shadows Over Innsmouth,
2005 (2002)

“Andromeda Among the Stones”
Embrace the Mutation,
2003 (2002)

“La Peau Verte”
To Charles Fort, With Love,
2005 (2003)

“Riding the White Bull”
Argosy
#1, 2004 (2003)

“Waycross” Subterranean Press, 2004 (2003)

“The Dead and the Moonstruck”
Gothic! Ten Original Dark Tales,
2004 (2004)

“Daughter of the Four of Pentacles”
Thrillers II,
2007 (2004)

The Dry Salvages
Subterranean Press, 2004 (2004)

“The Worm in My Mind’s Eye” Subterranean Press (chapbook, 2004)

“Houses Under the Sea”
Thrillers II
, 2007 (2004)

The author wishes to note that the text for each of these stories, as it appears in this collection, will differ, often significantly, from the originally published texts. In some cases, stories were revised for each reprinting (and some have been reprinted numerous times). No story is ever finished. There’s only the moment when I force myself to stop and provisionally type THE END.

To Be Continued in
Volume 2… 

(Coming in 2014)

Acknowledgements

Knowing there isn’t anyway to thank everyone, I’m going to have to settle for a very sincere blanket thank you to all those people who held me up and pushed me forward and sometimes caught me in those early years, between 1992 and 2004, and in all the time since, all the friends, lovers, family, writers (peers and mentors), readers, agents, editors, artists, publishers, booksellers, librarians, fellow travelers, academics, bluestockings, bartenders, and baristas. There are thousands of you, and I can only hope you know who you are. Special thanks, though, to William K. Schafer for suggesting this book, and for his patience during all the long months I dithered. And to Richard A. Kirk, Ryan Obermeyer, Dame Darcy, Ted Naifeh, Steve Leialoha for their vision, and to Lee Moyer for magick and the truest portrait he could have painted, and to Kyle Cassidy for the Other Portrait. A special thanks to Karen Berger and DC Comics for permission to reprint pages from
The Dreaming
#56, and also to the Harvard Museum of Natural History, Boston. Finally, to Sonya Taaffe, who came to the rescue in the eleventh hour, to Geoffrey H. Goodwin, and to Kathryn – my bear, my goat girl, my cranky, melancholic love.

About the Author

She wrote this book.

About the Font

This book was set in Garamond, a typeface named after the French punch-cutter Claude Garamond (c. 1480 – 1561). Garamond has been chosen here for its ability to convey a sense of fluidity and consistency. It has been chosen by the author because this typeface is among the most legible and readable old-style serif print typefaces. In terms of ink usage, Garamond is also considered to be one of the most eco-friendly major fonts.