Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (16 page)

“You’re a liar, Silas Desvernine. You’ll leave me here with all these other things that you’ve stolen,” and he notices that her eyes have settled on the tall glass case near her cage, four tall panes and the supporting metal armature inside, the shriveled, leathery things wired there. The dead feathers that have come loose and lie scattered like October leaves at the bottom of the case. 

“You would have destroyed them if I hadn’t put them there,” he mumbles. “Don’t tell me that’s not the truth,” turning away, anything now to occupy his attention, and it was true, that part. That she’d tried to eat them after they’d fallen off, before he took them away from her, still warm and oozing blood from their ragged stumps.

“
Please
,” she whispers, the softest snowflake excuse for sound, and “Please, Silas,” as he opens a book, yellow-brown paper to crackle loud between his fingers, and adjusts his bent spectacles.

“I keep my promises,” he grumbles, and turns a dry page. 

Estate

First time I saw the Hudson River, this story began. Finally, I saw the castle, which still stands. Mostly. My first to make a “year’s best” anthology, and that meant all the world to me for a short while. So many of my obsessions are locked inside this story, that hummingbird in amber.

Rats Live on No Evil Star

“I think that we’re fished for,” Olan says, menthol cigarette smoked almost down to the filter, and he’s sitting at the unsteady little card table by the window, staring out at the high January sky, that disheartening sky like a flawed blue gemstone, and Jessie stops smearing peanut butter on slices of soft white bread and looks at him.

“What?” she asks, and he only nods at the sky so that she has to ask again. “What did you say, Olan?”

“I think we are
fished
for,” the words repeated loudly and more slowly, as if she’s only deaf and stupid, after all, and he’s making perfect sense.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” not meaning to sound annoyed, and she puts two pieces of thickly peanut-buttered bread together, another sandwich for this lean and crazy man who lives down the hall, this man to whom she is neither related nor can call her friend. But if no one looks in on him, he doesn’t eat. Jessie cuts the sandwich into neat triangles, trims away the crust because he only pulls it off anyhow. She places it on one of the pink saucers that she’s rescued from the kitchen’s clutter of filthy dishes, wasteland of cracked plates and coffee cups for the cockroaches to roam. She had to bring the soap from her own apartment down the hall, of course, that and a clean dishrag.

“I don’t mind listening,” she says, setting his sandwich down in front of him. “If you want to try to explain.”

Olan exhales, stubbing out his cigarette in a ceramic ashtray shaped like Florida, dozens of butts and cinder-grey ash spilling onto the top of the table. He looks at the sandwich instead of the sky, but his expression doesn’t change, the one as much a mystery to him as the other. He takes a hesitant, small sip from the beer that Jessie has brought him. She doesn’t often do that, but sometimes, just a bottle of the cheap stuff she drinks while she writes, Old Milwaukee or Sterling or PBR sacrificed to his reliable indifference.

“Never mind,” he says and glances at her through his spectacles, wire and some Scotch tape wrapped around one corner, thick glass to frame his distant eyes. He takes a bite of the sandwich and looks at the sky while he chews.

“What are you working on today, Jessie?” he asks around the mouthful of peanut butter as she sits down across the table from him. “Anne Sexton,” she says. Same answer as always, but that doesn’t matter, because she knows he only asks to be polite, to seem to care. Her eyes are drawn to the window, too, past the dead plant in its clay pot on the radiator, leaves gone to dry and wilt-brown tendrils. Out there, the railroad glints dull silver beneath the white, white sun, parallel lines of steel and creosote-stained cross ties, granite and slag ballast, the abandoned factories and empty warehouses on the other side, a few stunted trees to emphasize the desolation.

She looks away, back down at her own lunch, bread with the crust still on, something mundane to break the spell. “I’m beginning a new chapter this afternoon,” she says, not feeling hungry anymore.

“The Death Baby?” he asks, and she shakes her head
no
, “I’m done with the Death Baby for now.”

“
There
,” Olan says and presses the tip of one finger against the flyblown glass, pointing at something he sees in the sky. “Right there. See it?” And Jessie looks. She always looks, and she’s never seen anything yet. But she doesn’t lie to him, either.

“I don’t see it,” she says. “But my eyes are going to shit. I spend too much time staring at fucking computer screens.”

“Well, it’s gone now,” he says very quietly, but only as if to let her off the hook, because his eyes don’t leave the window. Olan takes another bite of the sandwich, another sip of beer to wash it down, and his eyes don’t leave the window.

The tiny apartment on the west side of a Southern city that once knew thriving industry and has seen long decades of decay, foundries and mills closed and the black smoking skies gone and the jobs gone with them. Not the Birmingham of his childhood, only the shell of the memory of that city, and farther east the hungry seeds of gentrification have been planted. In the newspapers, he has read about the “Historic Loft District,” a phrase they use like Hope or Expectancy. But
this
apartment existing on its own terms, or his terms, this space selected twenty years ago for its unobstructed view of the sky, and that hasn’t changed. 

Three very small rooms and each of them filled with his books and newspapers, his files and clippings and folders. The things he has written directly on the walls with Magic Marker because there wasn’t time to find a sheet of paper before he forgot. Mountains of magazines slumped like glossy landslides to bury silverfish and roaches,
Fate
and
Fortean Times
, journals for modern alchemists and cryptozoological societies and ufology cults. Exactly 1,348 index cards thumbtacked or stapled to plaster the fragile, drained color of dirty eggshells and coffee-ground stains. Testaments uncorrelated, data uncollated, and someday the concordance and cross-reference alone will be a hundred thousand pages long.

After the girl has left (The Academic, as he thinks of her), Olan finds the fresh and stickybrown smear of peanut butter on the kitchen window, his shitcolored fingerprint still there to mark the exact spot, and he draws a black circle onto the glass around it. There are other circles there, twenty-three black
and
red circles on this window, and someday he will draw interconnecting lines to reveal another part of the whole, his map of the roof of the sky.

“I don’t see it,” he whispers, remembering what she said, and something a doctor told him to say years ago, when he was still a boy and might have only have grown to be a man who could say “I don’t see it” when he does. 

Olan sits at the window, new ink drying as the sun sinks towards twilight. Black ink to indicate a Probable Inorganic, tentative classification of the shimmering orb he saw hanging in the empty sky above the city. A pencil sketch already in one of his notebooks, and best-guessed estimates of height and dimension underneath it, something like a bowling ball as perfectly motionless as the train tracks down below. 

“Visible for approx. 14 minutes, 1:56 until 2:10 P.M. CST,” he wrote, not sure of exactly how long because the girl kept talking and talking, and then he saw her to the door, and when he got back it wasn’t there anymore, had fallen or vanished or simply drifted away.

“I don’t see it,” he says again, her borrowed words and inflection, and then he takes off his glasses and rubs at his tired and certain eyes.

This is Page One. Which is to say – this is where the story begins when he is asked to tell it as a story, when he
used
to tell it for the doctors who gave him pills and advice and diagnoses. The linear narrative that has as little and as much truth as any necessary fiction ever has, any attempt to relate, to make the subjective objective.

“I was seven, and we lived on my granddaddy’s farm in Bibb County, after my father went away, and my mother and I lived there with my grandmother because my granddaddy was already dead by then. It wasn’t a
real
farm anymore, but we did have chickens and grew okra and tomatoes and collards. I had a dog named Biscuit.

“One day – it was July – one July day in 1955, when I was seven, Biscuit chased a rabbit into the woods. And I was standing in the field beside the house calling him, and there were no clouds in the sky. No clouds at all. I’m sure there were no clouds. I was calling Biscuit, and it began to rain, even though there weren’t any clouds. But it wasn’t raining water, it was raining blood and little bits of meat like you put into a stew, shreds of red raw meat with white veins of fat. I stopped calling Biscuit and watched the blood and meat hitting the ground, turning it red and black. There was a crunchy sound, like digging in a box of Rice Crispies for the toy at the bottom, a very faint cereal-crunching sound that came from the sky, I think.

“And then my mother was yelling and dragging me back towards the house. She dragged me onto the front porch, and we stood there watching the blood and meat fall from the clear sky, making puddles and streams on the ground.

“No, Biscuit never came home. I couldn’t blame him. It smelled very bad, afterwards.”

He has a big jar on the table beside the mattress where he sleeps, quart mayonnaise jar, and inside is the mummified corpse of something like a mouse. It fell out of the sky three years ago, dropped at his feet while he was walking the tracks near the apartment building, this mouse-thing husk from a clear sky, and he has labeled it in violet, for Definitive Organic.

 The girl from #407 doesn’t usually bring him supper, but she did one night a month ago now, and she also brought some typed pages from her dissertation. She cooked him canned ravioli with Parmesan cheese and made a fresh salad of lettuce with radish and cucumber slices. They ate it together, sitting on the paper-cluttered floor while she talked about the work of a poet who had committed suicide in 1974. He had never read the poet, but it would have been impolite not to listen, not to offer a few words when he thought he wouldn’t sound too foolish.

“It’s a palindrome from a barn somewhere in Ireland,” the girl said, answering a question about the title to one of the poems. “Someone had painted it on a barn,” and then she produced a tattered paperback that he hadn’t noticed in among her pages. She read him the poem that began with the title from the barn. He didn’t understand it, exactly, Adam and Eve and the Fall, words that sounded good put together that way, he supposed. But, those words, STAR. RATS STAR, those words like a hand placed flat against a mirror, like bookends with nothing in between.

“Sometimes she called herself Ms. Dog,” the girl said, and he saw the trick at once – Dog, God.

“I would very much like a copy of that poem,” he said to her, chewing the last bite of his salad. And three days later she brought him a photocopy of those pages from the paperback, and he keeps them thumbtacked to a wall near the window. He has written RATS and STAR and RAT’S STAR on the wall in several places. 

The sun is down, down for hours now, and Olan sits at the card table at the window, studying by the dim fluorescent light from the kitchenette. He has
The Book of the Damned
by Charles Fort opened to page 260, and he copies a line into one of his notebooks: “Vast thing, black and poised, like a crow, over the moon.” This is one of the books that makes him nervous – no, one of the books that frightens him.
The Golden Bough
makes him nervous, Gilgamesh makes him nervous, and
this
book, this book frightens him. Goosebumps on his arms for a sentence like that: “Vast thing, black and poised…” Things that were seen casting shadows on the moon in 1788, things between earth and moon, perhaps, casting shadows. 

He flips back two pages and copies another line: “Was it the thing or the shadow of a thing?” Fort’s taunting question put down in Olan’s obsessive-neat cursive, restated in precisely the same ten words. He pauses and lights a Newport and sits smoking, staring out the window, trying to find the sense in the question, the terrible logic past his fear. 

There is only a third-quarter sliver of moon tonight, and that’s good, he thinks, too poor a screen for anything’s shadow.

Down on the railroad tracks there’s movement, then, and a flash, twin flashes of emerald, a glinting reflection like cats’ eyes caught in a flashlight or headlights. Olan sits very, very still, cigarette hanging limp from his lips, cough-drop smoke coiling about his face, and he does not even blink. Waits for the flashes to come again, and if there were a moon tonight he might see a little better, he thinks, a moment ago happy there was no more light in the sky but now, the not knowing worse than the knowing, and so he strains his eyes into the night. But he sees nothing else, so in a moment he goes to the buzzing fluorescent bulbs above the sink and switches them off, then sits back down in the dark. There’s still a little glow from the next room, but now he can see the tracks better.

“I don’t see it,” he says aloud, but he does, that thin shape walking between the rails, the jointed, stilt-long legs, and if there are feet he cannot see them. “It
could
be a dog,” he whispers, certain of nothing but that it isn’t a dog. He thinks it has fur, and it turns its head towards him, then, and smiles, yes, yes, Olan, it’s smiling, so don’t pretend it isn’t, don’t fucking pretend. He squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them again it’s still there. He sits very still, cold sweat and smoke in the dark, as it lingers a moment more on the tracks, and then gallops away towards the row of abandoned factories.