Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (15 page)

Some dream or night terror, and Angeline left her rooms, wandered half-awake, confused, through the sleeping house, no slippers or stockings, bare feet sneak-thief soft over Turkish carpets and cold stone, looking for something or someone real. Someone to touch or talk to, someone to bring her back to this world from her clinging nightmares. Something against the storm rubbing itself across the walls and windows, savage snow pelt, wild and wanting in and her alone on the second story: the servants down below, her child and his nurse far away in another part of the house that, at that derelict hour, seemed to weave endlessly back upon itself. Halls as unfamiliar as if she’d never walked them, doors that opened on rooms she couldn’t recall. Strange paintings to watch over her, stranger sights whenever she came to a window to stand staring into the swirling silver night, bare trees and unremembered statuary or hedges. Alien gardens, and all of it so much like the dream, as empty, as hungry.

Lost in her husband’s house and inside herself, Angeline came at last to the mahogany doors to Silas’ gallery, wood like old blood and his cabinet beyond, and how many years since she’d come that way? But
this
she recognized, hinge creak and wood squeal as she stepped across the threshold, the crude design traced into the floor there, design within designs that made her dizzy to look directly at.

“Silas?” No answer but the storm outside, smothering a dead world. Her so small, so alone at the mouth of this long and cluttered gallery of glass and dust and careful labels, his grotesquerie, cache of hideous treasures. Everything he loved instead of her; the grey years of hating herself flashing to anger like steam, flashing to scalding revelation. Something in her hands, an aboriginal weapon or talisman pulled from its bracket on the wall, and she swung it in long and ruthless arcs, smashing, breaking, shadow become destroyer. Glass like rain, shatter puddles that sliced at the soles of her feet, splinter and crash and the sick-sweet stench of formaldehyde. Angeline imagining gratitude in the blank green eyes of a two-headed bobcat that tumbled off its pedestal and lay fiercely still, stuffed, moth-gnawed, in her path. 

And the wail rising up from the depths of her, soul’s waters stagnant so long become all at once a tempest to rival the fury and thundervoice of the blizzard. Become a war cry, dragging her in its red undertow, and when she reached the far side, the high velvet drapes hiding some final rivalry: tearing at the cloth with her hands, pulling so hard the drapes ripped free of brass rings and slipped like shedding skin to the floor.

Iron bars, a cage, and at first nothing else, gloom thick as the fog in her head, thick as jam, but nothing more. One step backwards, panting, feeling the damage to her feet, and the subtle shift of light or dark, then, all the nothing in the cage coalescing, made solid and beautiful and hateful, hurting eyes that she understood the way she understood her own captivity, her own loneliness.

The woman with wings and shining bird eyes said her name,
Angeline
, said her name so it meant things she’d never suspected, some way the name held everything she was in just three syllables. One long arm out to her, arm too long and thin to believe, skin like moonlight or afterbirth, fingers longer still and pointing to the door of the cage. Padlocked steel and the interlace design from the threshold again, engraved there like a warning. “Please,” the woman in the cage said. “
Please,
Angeline.”

Angeline Desvernine ran, ran from even the possibility of this pleading thing, gallery door slammed shut behind her, closing it away and closing away the fading illusion of her victory. Almost an hour before she found her way back to her own room, trailing pools and crusting smears of blood from her ruined feet; crawling, hands and knees, at the end. She locked her door. By then, the sound of servants awake, distant commotion, her name called again and again, but there was no comfort left after those eyes, the ragged holes they’d burned in her. No way not to see them or hear that silk and thorny voice.

Most of the storm’s fury spent by dawn, by the time the maids and cooks and various man servants gave up and called for someone from the stables to take the door off its hinges. First sight, leadflat morning light filling up the empty room, the balcony doors standing open wide and tiny drifts of snow reaching almost to the bed. They found her hanging from the balustrade, noose from curtain-cord tiebacks, snow in her tangled black hair, crimson icicles from the sliced flesh of her toes and heels. Her eyes open wide and staring sightlessly towards the Storm King.

“They’re my dreams,” he says, whispers loud, and she says “They’re lies,” and he keeps his eyes on the last colorless smudges of afternoon and says low, mumbled so she won’t hear, “Then they’re my lies.”

This time, this dog-eared incarnation of the climb up Storm King, he’s alone, except for the thunder and lightning and rain like wet needles against exposed skin, wind that would take him in its cold fist and fling him, broken, back down to the rocks below, to the impatient, waiting river. No sign anymore of the trail he’s followed from the road, faintest path for deer or whatever else might come this way and now even that’s gone. He can see in the white spaces after the thunder, flash-powder snapshots of the mountain, trees bending and the hulk of Breakneck across the river, Storm King’s twin. Jealous Siamese thing severed by the acid Hudson, and he thinks,
No, somewhere deep they’re still connected,
still bound safe by their granite vinculum below the water’s slash and silt.

Thunder that sounds like angels burning, and he slips, catches himself, numb hands into the roots of something small that writhes, woodsy revulsion at his touch. He’s shivering now, the mud and wet straight through his clothes. He lies so still, waiting to fall, to drown in the gurgling runoff, until the thunder says it’s time to get moving again and so he opens his eyes. And soon he’s standing at the summit, a little clearing and the tall stone at its heart like a stake to hold the world in place. Grey megalith-like things he’s seen in England or Denmark or France, and in the crackling brief electric flash he can discern the marks made in the stone, marks smoothed almost away by time and frost and a hundred thousand storms before. Forgotten characters traced in clean rivulets like emphasis. He would turn and run, from the place and the moment (
if you had it to do over again, if you could take it back
), but the roots have twisted about his wrists, becoming greenstick pythons, and for all his clever, distracting variations, there’s only this one way it can go.

She steps out of the place where the stone is, brilliant moment, thinnest sliver of an instant caught and held in forked-lightning teeth; the rain that beads, rolls off her feathers, each exquisite, rough-gem drop and the strange angles of her arms and legs, too many joints. The head that turns on its elegant neck, and the eyes that find him, sharp face and molten eyes that will never let him go.

“Nothing from the Pterodactyle, I shouldn’t think,” says Professor Osborn, standing somewhere behind him. “Though the cranium is oddly reminiscent of
Dimorphodon
, isn’t it?” and Silas Desvernine bows his head, staring down at the soggy darkness where his feet must be, and waits for the leather and satin rustle of her wings, gentle loversound through the storm. The rain catches his tears and washes them away with everything else.

The funeral over and the servants busy downstairs when Silas opened the doors of his gallery; viewed the damage she’d done for the first time, knew it was mostly broken glass and little that couldn’t be put right again, but the sight hurt his chest, hurt his eyes. Heart already so broken and eyes already so raw, but new pain anyway. No bottom to this pain, and he bent over and picked up his dodo, retrieved it from a bed of diamond shards, and Silas brushed the glass from its dusty beak and rump feathers. Set it back on the high shelf between passenger pigeons and three Carolina parakeets. He took step closer to her cage, the drapes still pulled open, and his shoes crunched. Her, crouched in the shadows, wings wrapped tightly about her like a cocoon, living shield against him, and he said, “What did you do to her, Tisiphone?” And surprise at how calm his voice could be, how empty of everything locked inside him and clawing to get out.

The wings shivered, cringed and folded back; “That’s not my name,” she said.

“What did you do to her, Megaera?”

“Shut up,” his words spat at the wall where her face was still hidden, spat at him. “You know that I’m not one of the three, you’ve known that much all along.”

“She couldn’t have hurt you, even if she’d wanted to,” he said, hearing her words, but this is as close as he would ever come to being able to ignore them: her weak, and his grief too wide to cross even for her voice. “Did you think she could hurt you?” he asked.

“
No,
” and she was shaking her head now, forehead bang and smack against brick, and he could see the sticky, black smear she left on the wall.

“Then you did it to get back at me. Is that it? You thought to hurt me by hurting her.”

“No,” she said, and that was the only time he ever saw her cry, if it was crying, the dim phosphorescence leaking from the corners of her eyes. “No,
no
.”

“But you know she’s dead, don’t you?”

“Yes,” she said, that small
yes
too quick, and it made him want to wring her white throat, lock his strong hands around her neck and twist until he was rewarded with the pop and cartilage grind of ruined vertebrae. Squeeze until her tongue hung useless from her lipless mouth.

“She never hurt anyone, Alecto,” he hissed, and she turned around, snake-sudden movement, and he took a step away from the bars despite himself.

“I asked her to
help
me,” and she was screaming now, perfect crystal teeth bared. “I asked her to free me,” and her hurt and fury swept over him, blast furnace heat rushing away from her, and the faint smell of nutmeg and decay left in the air around his head.

“I
asked
her to unlock the fucking cage, Silas!” and abruptly the wings slipped from off her back and lay bloody and very still on the unclean metal and hay-strewn floor of the cage.

In the simplest sense, these things, at least, are true: that during the last week of June 1916, Silas Desvernine hired workmen from Haverstraw to excavate a large stone from a spot near the summit of Storm King, and that during this excavation several men died or fell seriously ill, each under circumstances that only seemed unusual if considered in connection with one another. When the foreman resigned (a mink-eyed little Scotsman with a face like ripe cranberries), Silas hired a second crew, and in July the stone was carried down and away from the mountain, an ingenious block-and-tackle of his own design, then horse and wagon, and finally, barge, the short distance upriver to Pollepel Island. Moneys were paid to a Mr. Harriman of the Palisades Interstate Park Commission, well enough known for his discretion in such matters, and no questions were ever asked.

And also, that archaeologists and anthropologists, linguists and cryptographers were allowed brief viewings of the artifact over the next year, though only the sketchiest, conflicting conclusions regarding the glyphs on the stone were drawn: that they might have been made by Vikings, or Phoenicians, or Minoans, or Atlanteans; that they might be something like Sanskrit, or perhaps only the tracks of prehistoric sea worms, or have been etched by Silas Desvernine himself. The suggestion by a geologist of no particular note, that the stone, oily black shale with cream flecks of calcite, was not even native to the region, was summarily ignored by everyone but Silas, who ignored nothing. 

One passing footnote mention of “the Butterhill Stone” in a monograph on Mahican pottery, and by 1918 it was forgotten by the busy, forgetful world of men and words beyond the safeguarding walls of Silas’ Castle.

“Wake up,” she says. “You must wake up,” and he does, gummy blink, unfocused, and the room’s dark except for the light of brass lamps with stained-glass shades like willows and dragonflies and drooping purple wisteria.

“You’re dying, Silas.”

He squints towards the great cage, cage that could hold lions or leopards, and she looks so terribly small in there. Deceptive contrast of iron and white, white skin, and she says, “Before the sun rises again…”

Big sigh rattle from his bony chest, and “No,” looking about the desk for his spectacles. “No, not yet,” but she says, “You’re an old man, Silas, and old men die, eventually. All of them.”

“Not yet,” and there they are, his bifocals perched on a thick book about African beetles. “There’s a new war, new ships that have to be built,” and he slips them on, frame wire bent and straightened and bent again so they won’t sit quite right on his face any longer. Walking cane within reach, but he doesn’t stand, waiting for the murky room to become solid again.

“Let me go now,” she says, as if she hasn’t said it a thousand, thousand times before, as if it were a new idea, never occurred to her before, and he laughs. Froggy little strangled sound more like a burp.

“You’re trying to trick me,” he says, grinning his false-toothed grin at her and one crooked finger pointed at the cage so there can be no doubt. “You’re not a sibyl,” and it takes him five minutes to remember where he’s put his pocket watch.

“I can hear your tired old heart, and it’s winding down, like your watch,” and here it is, in his vest pocket; 4:19, but the hour hand and minute hand and splinter second hand still as ice. He forgets to wind it a lot these days, and how much time has he lost, dozing at his desk? Stiff-neck crane, and he can see stars through the high windows.

“You can’t leave me here, Silas.”

“Haven’t I always
told
you that I won’t?” still watching the stars, dim glimpse of Canes Venatici or part of the Little Bear. The anger in his voice surprises him. “Haven’t I said that? That I’ll let you go before I die?”