The Very Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  For an instant, there was no cave, and no pool, and no cavern beneath a resentful, wicked house. Only the fire, pouring from the cave that was no longer there, to swallow her whole, only the voices of the void, and Meredith Dandridge made her fear a shield and a lance and held the line.

  And in the days and weeks that followed, sometimes Machen Dandridge came down the stairs to stand on the pier and gaze across the pool to the place where the thing that had been his daughter nestled in the shadows, in the hollows between the stones. And every day the sea gave her more of its armour, gilding her frail human skin with the calcareous shells and stinging tentacles that other creatures had spent countless cycles of Creation refining from the rawest matter of life, the needle teeth, the scales and poisonous barbs. Where his wife and son had failed, his daughter crouched triumphant as any martyr. And sometimes, late at night, alone with the sound of the surf pounding against the edge of the continent, he sometimes thought of setting fire to the house and letting it burn down around him.

  He read the newspapers.

  He watched the stars for signs and portents.

  When the moon was bright, the women still came to dance beside the sea, but he’d begun to believe they were only bad memories from some time before, and so he rarely paid them any heed.

  When the weather was good, he climbed the hills behind the house and sat at the grave of his dead wife and whispered to her, telling her how proud he was of Meredith, reciting snatches of half-remembered poetry for Ellen, telling her the world would come very close to the brink because of what he’d done. Because of his blind pride. But, in the end, it would survive because of what their daughter had done and would do for ages yet.

  On a long, rainy afternoon in May, he opened the attic door and killed what he found there with an axe and his old Colt revolver. He buried it beside his wife, but left nothing to mark Avery’s grave.

  He wrote long letters to men he’d once known in England and New York and Rio de Janeiro, but there were never any replies.

  And time rolled on, neither malign nor beneficent, settling across the universe like the grey caul of dust settling thick upon the relics he’d brought back from India and Iran and the Sudan a quarter of a century before. The birth and death of stars, light reaching his aging eyes after a billion years racing across the near-vacuum of space, and sometimes he spent the days gathering fossils from the cliffs and arranging them in precise geometric patterns in the tall grass around the house. He left lines of salt and drew elaborate runes, the meanings of which he’d long since forgotten.

  His daughter spoke to him only in his dreams, or hers, no way to ever be sure which was which, and her voice grew stronger and more terrible as the years rushed past. In the end, she was a maelstrom to swallow his withered soul, to rock him to sleep one last time, to show him the way across.

  And the house by the sea, weathered and weary and insane, kept its secrets.

  LA PEAU VERTE

  1.

  IN A DUSTY, antique-littered back room of the loft on St. Mark’s Place, a room with walls the color of ripe cranberries, Hannah stands naked in front of the towering mahogany-framed mirror and stares at herself. No—not her self any longer, but the new thing that the man and woman have made of her. Three long hours busy with their airbrushes and latex prosthetics, grease paints and powders and spirit gum, their four hands moving as one, roaming excitedly and certainly across her body, hands sure of their purpose. She doesn’t remember their names, if, in fact, they ever told their names to her. Maybe they did, but the two glasses of brandy she’s had have set the names somewhere just beyond recall. Him tall and thin, her thin but not so very tall, and now they’ve both gone, leaving Hannah alone. Perhaps their part in this is finished; perhaps the man and woman are being paid, and she’ll never see either of them again, and she feels a sudden, unexpected pang at the thought, never one for casual intimacies, and they have been both casual and intimate with her body.

  The door opens, and the music from the party grows suddenly louder. Nothing she would ever recognize, probably nothing that has a name, even; wild impromptu of drumming hands and flutes, violins and cellos, an incongruent music that is both primitive and drawing-room practiced. The old woman with the mask of peacock feathers and gown of iridescent satin stands in the doorway, watching Hannah. After a moment, she smiles and nods her head slowly, appreciatively.

  “Very pretty,” she says. “How does it feel?”

  “A little strange,” Hannah replies and looks at the mirror again. “I’ve never done anything like this before.”

  “Haven’t you?” the old woman asks her, and Hannah remembers her name, then—Jackie, Jackie something that sounds like Shady or Sadie, but isn’t either. A sculptor from England, someone said. When she was very young, she knew Picasso, and someone said that, too.

  “No,” Hannah replies. “I haven’t. Are they ready for me now?”

  “Fifteen more minutes, give or take. I’ll be back to bring you in. Relax. Would you like another brandy?”

  Would I? Hannah thinks and glances down at the crystal snifter sitting atop an old secretary next to the mirror. It’s almost empty now, maybe one last warm amber sip standing between it and empty. She wants another drink, something to burn away the last, lingering dregs of her inhibition and self-doubt, but “No,” she tells the woman. “I’m fine.”

  “Then chill, and I’ll see you in fifteen,” Jackie Whomever says, smiles again, her disarming, inviting smile of perfect white teeth, and she closes the door, leaving Hannah alone with the green thing watching her from the mirror.

  The old Tiffany lamps scattered around the room shed candy puddles of stained-glass light, light as warm as the brandy, warm as the dark-chocolate tones of the intricately carved frame holding the tall mirror. She takes one tentative step nearer the glass, and the green thing takes an equally tentative step nearer her. I’m in there somewhere, she thinks. Aren’t I?

  Her skin painted too many competing, complementary shades of green to possibly count, one shade bleeding into the next, an infinity of greens that seem to roil and flow around her bare legs, her flat, hard stomach, her breasts. No patch of skin left uncovered, her flesh become a rain-forest canopy, autumn waves in rough, shallow coves, the shells of beetles and leaves from a thousand gardens, moss and emeralds, jade statues and the brilliant scales of poisonous tropical serpents. Her nails polished a green so deep it might almost be black, instead. The uncomfortable scleral contacts to turn her eyes into the blaze of twin chartreuse stars, and Hannah leans a little closer to the mirror, blinking at those eyes, with those eyes, the windows to a soul she doesn’t have. A soul of everything vegetable and living, everything growing or not, soul of sage and pond scum, malachite and verdigris. The fragile translucent wings sprouting from her shoulder blades—at least another thousand greens to consider in those wings alone—and all the many places where they’ve been painstakingly attached to her skin are hidden so expertly she’s no longer sure where the wings end and she begins.

  The one, and the other.

  “I definitely should have asked for another brandy,” Hannah says out loud, spilling the words nervously from her ocher, olive, turquoise lips.

  Her hair—not her hair, but the wig hiding her hair—like something parasitic, something growing from the bark of a rotting tree, epiphyte curls across her painted shoulders, spilling down her back between and around the base of the wings. The long tips the man and woman added to her ears so dark that they almost match her nails, and her nipples airbrushed the same lightless, bottomless green, as well. She smiles, and even her teeth have been tinted a matte pea green.

  There is a single teardrop of green glass glued firmly between her lichen eyebrows.

  I could get lost in here, she thinks, and immediately wishes she’d thought something else instead.

  Perhaps I am already.

  And then Hannah forces herself to look away from the mirror, reaches for the brandy snifter and the last swall
ow of her drink. Too much of the night still lies ahead of her to get freaked out over a costume, too much left to do and way too much money for her to risk getting cold feet now. She finishes the brandy, and the new warmth spreading through her belly is reassuring.

  Hannah sets the empty glass back down on the secretary and then looks at herself again. And this time it is her self, after all, the familiar lines of her face still visible just beneath the make-up. But it’s a damn good illusion. Whoever the hell’s paying for this is certainly getting his money’s worth, she thinks.

  Beyond the back room, the music seems to be rising, swelling quickly towards crescendo, the strings racing the flutes, the drums hammering along underneath. The old woman named Jackie will be back for her soon. Hannah takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with air that smells and tastes like dust and old furniture, like the paint on her skin, more faintly of the summer rain falling on the roof of the building. She exhales slowly and stares longingly at the empty snifter.

  “Better to keep a clear head,” she reminds herself.

  Is that what I have here? And she laughs, but something about the room or her reflection in the tall mirror turns the sound into little more than a cheerless cough.

  And then Hannah stares at the beautiful, impossible green woman staring back at her, and waits.

  2.

  “Anything forbidden becomes mysterious,” Peter says and picks up his remaining bishop, then sets it back down on the board without making a move. “And mysterious things always become attractive to us, sooner or later. Usually sooner.”

  “What is that? Some sort of unwritten social law?” Hannah asks him, distracted by the Beethoven that he always insists on whenever they play chess. Die Geschöpfe des Prometheus at the moment, and she’s pretty sure he only does it to break her concentration.

  “No, dear. Just a statement of the fucking obvious.”

  Peter picks up the black bishop again, and this time he almost uses it to capture one of her rooks, then thinks better of it. More than thirty years her senior and the first friend she made after coming to Manhattan, his salt-and-pepper beard and mustache that’s mostly salt, his eyes as grey as a winter sky.

  “Oh,” she says, wishing he’d just take the damn rook and be done with it. Two moves from checkmate, barring an act of divine intervention. But that’s another of his games, Delaying the Inevitable. She thinks he probably has a couple of trophies for it stashed away somewhere in his cluttered apartment, chintzy faux golden loving cups for his Skill and Excellence in Procrastination.

  “Taboo breeds desire. Gluttony breeds disinterest.”

  “Jesus, I ought to write these things down,” she says, and he smirks at her, dangling the bishop teasingly only an inch or so above the chessboard.

  “Yes, you really should. My agent could probably sell them to someone or another. Peter Mulligan’s Big Book of Tiresome Truths. I’m sure it would be more popular than my last novel. It certainly couldn’t be less—”

  “Will you stop it and move already? Take the damned rook, and get it over with.”

  “But it might be a mistake,” he says and leans back in his chair, mock suspicion on his face, one eyebrow cocked, and he points towards her queen. “It could be a trap. You might be one of those predators that fakes out its quarry by playing dead.”

  “You have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Yes I do. You know what I mean. Those animals, the ones that only pretend to be dead. You might be one of those.”

  “I might just get tired of this and go the hell home,” she sighs, because he knows that she won’t, so she can say whatever she wants.

  “Anyway,” he says, “it’s work, if you want it. It’s just a party. Sounds like an easy gig to me.”

  “I have that thing on Tuesday morning though, and I don’t want to be up all night.”

  “Another shoot with Kellerman?” asks Peter and frowns at her, taking his eyes off the board, tapping at his chin with the bishop’s mitre.

  “Is there something wrong with that?”

  “You hear things, that’s all. Well, I hear things. I don’t think you ever hear anything at all.”

  “I need the work, Pete. The last time I sold a piece, I think Lincoln was still president. I’ll never make as much money painting as I do posing for other people’s art.”

  “Poor Hannah,” Peter says. He sets the bishop back down beside his king and lights a cigarette. She almost asks him for one, but he thinks she quit three months ago, and it’s nice having at least that one thing to lord over him; sometimes it’s even useful. “At least you have a fallback,” he mutters and exhales; the smoke lingers above the board like fog on a battlefield.

  “Do you even know who these people are?” she asks and looks impatiently at the clock above his kitchen sink.

  “Not firsthand, no. But then they’re not exactly my sort. Entirely too, well . . .” and Peter pauses, searching for a word that never comes, so he continues without it. “But the Frenchman who owns the place on St. Mark’s, Mr. Ordinaire—excuse me, Monsieur Ordinaire—I heard he used to be some sort of anthropologist. I think he might have written a book once.”

  “Maybe Kellerman would reschedule for the afternoon,” Hannah says, talking half to herself.

  “You’ve actually never tasted it?” he asks, picking up the bishop again and waving it ominously towards her side of the board.

  “No,” she replies, too busy now wondering if the photographer will rearrange his Tuesday schedule on her behalf to be annoyed at Peter’s cat and mouse with her rook.

  “Dreadful stuff,” he says and makes a face like a kid tasting Brussels sprouts or Pepto-Bismol for the first time. “Might as well have a big glass of black jelly beans and cheap vodka, if you ask me. La Fée Verte, my fat ass.”

  “Your ass isn’t fat, you skinny old queen.” Hannah scowls playfully, reaching quickly across the table and snatching the bishop from Peter’s hand. He doesn’t resist. This isn’t the first time she’s grown too tired of waiting for him to move to wait any longer. She removes her white rook off the board and sets the black bishop in its place.

  “That’s suicide, dear,” Peter says, shaking his head and frowning. “You’re aware of that, yes?”

  “You know those animals that bore their prey into submission?”

  “No, I don’t believe I’ve ever heard of them before.”

  “Then maybe you should get out more often.”

  “Maybe I should,” he replies, setting the captured rook down with all the other prisoners he’s taken. “So, are you going to do the party? It’s a quick grand, you ask me.”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You’re not the one who’ll be getting naked for a bunch of drunken strangers.”

  “A fact for which we should all be forevermore and eternally grateful.”

  “You have his number?” she asks, giving in, because that’s almost a whole month’s rent in one night and, after her last gallery show, beggars can’t be choosers.

  “There’s a smart girl,” Peter says and takes another drag off his cigarette. “The number’s on my desk somewhere. Remind me again before you leave. Your move.”

  3.

  “How old were you when that happened, when your sister died?” the psychologist asks, Dr. Edith Valloton and her smartly-cut hair so black it always makes Hannah think of fresh tar, or old tar gone deadly soft again beneath a summer sun to lay a trap for unwary, crawling things. Someone she sees when the nightmares get bad, which is whenever the painting isn’t going well or the modeling jobs aren’t coming in or both. Someone she can tell her secrets to who has to keep them secret, someone who listens as long as she pays by the hour, a place to turn when faith runs out and priests are just another bad memory to be confessed.

  “Almost twelve,” Hannah tells her and watches while Edith Valloton scribbles a note on her yellow legal pad.

  “Do you remember if you’d begun menstruating yet?”

  “Yeah. My
periods started right after my eleventh birthday.”

  “And these dreams, and the stones. This is something you’ve never told anyone?”

  “I tried to tell my mother once.”

  “She didn’t believe you?”

  Hannah coughs into her hand and tries not to smile, that bitter, wry smile to give away things she didn’t come here to show.

  “She didn’t even hear me,” she says.

  “Did you try more than once to tell her about the fairies?”

  “I don’t think so. Mom was always pretty good at letting us know whenever she didn’t want to hear what was being said. You learned not to waste your breath.”

  “Your sister’s death, you’ve said before that it’s something she was never able to come to terms with.”

  “She never tried. Whenever my father tried, or I tried, she treated us like traitors. Like we were the ones who put Judith in her grave. Or like we were the ones keeping her there.”

  “If she couldn’t face it, Hannah, then I’m sure it did seem that way to her.”

  “So, no,” Hannah says, annoyed that she’s actually paying someone to sympathize with her mother. “No. I guess I never really told anyone about it.”

  “But you think you want to tell me now?” the psychologist asks and sips her bottled water, never taking her eyes off Hannah.

  “You said to talk about all the nightmares, all the things I think are nightmares. It’s the only one that I’m not sure about.”

  “Not sure if it’s a nightmare, or not sure if it’s even a dream?”

  “Well, I always thought I was awake. For years, it never once occurred to me I might have only been dreaming.”

  Edith Valloton watches her silently for a moment, her cat-calm, cat-smirk face unreadable, too well-trained to let whatever’s behind those dark eyes slip and show. Too detached to be smug, too concerned to be indifferent. Sometimes, Hannah thinks she might be a dyke, but maybe that’s only because the friend who recommended her is a lesbian.