Thin Places
Page 15
Lilianne’s face showed that she understood perfectly the nature of the question, and the answer it was intended to produce. “My father and mother are very well,” she said. Then, with an almost malicious stab of courage, “Have you seen how the grass is coming up on the dunes, Miss Augusta? It is so thick and black this year. It is long as my shoulders.”
“You shouldn’t go to the shore alone, Lilianne,” said Miss Augusta, too stricken to manage any other answer. “The waves come high, this time of year.”
“I don’t go at all,” said Lilianne. “My mother goes for rambles. At night, early in the morning. She comes home with heaps of that grass in a paper bag. She says she can put it back, if I let her, but I won’t. I think it will hurt too much.”
“Your father? What does he say?”
“He doesn’t know.”
Miss Augusta could think of no reply for a long and burdensome moment. At last, she succumbed to the horrifying inadequacy of politeness, and said, “That chalkboard looks very clean, Lilianne. You may go. Thank you.”
For a long while after the girl surrendered her rag and left the schoolhouse, Miss Augusta sat at her desk, her hands shaking. The fire had burnt down to cinders and the room was dark when she stood and gathered her belongings, then made her way to the sagging grey cottage on the cliffs above the sea. The moon alone accompanied her. The Widow Clary was the only person in Branaugh who received fewer visitors than the schoolteacher.
◊
“You are going to want to save her life,” said the Widow Clary, when she opened the door. “And you can’t.”
At this flat-voiced affront, Miss Augusta’s cheeks reddened with something between anger and humiliation. She had not spoken a word and yet the old woman already knew. She must be the laughingstock of Branaugh. “Please,” she said. “I need to speak with you.”
The Widow opened the door a little wider, squinting unpleasantly at her. “Come in, then,” she said. “Hurry, now.”
The inside of the cottage had a deep, briny scent, like the ocean preserved too long and gone sour. Miss Augusta exhaled in a huff to rid her lungs of the wet thick feeling that came when she breathed. The widow, unaffected, struck a match and lit a series of long, wax-mottled tapers, then retreated to the stove to heat the kettle. Miss Augusta sank onto an under-stuffed ottoman, preferring this minor disgrace to the more inconceivable theft of the widow’s only armchair. The Widow Clary, as anticipated, claimed the seat without a moment of polite hesitation, only looking awkwardly for a surface to set the tea tray before Miss Augusta volunteered her own lap.
With the tea steaming before them, Miss Augusta lost and regained her courage ten times in a moment. She wavered, her hands trembled. She was remembering her own furious shame, not long ago, at being accosted in the delicate shell of her own lonely home. She was trying to remember that Branaugh was many years older than the Widow Clary, that the old woman sitting across from her could not really be at fault. The Widow Clary had read the lighthouse-keeper’s name from the innards of a fish, but she had not summoned him, or his daughter.
“What is happening,” she said, finally, “to Lilianne Eisner?”
“What will you do if I tell you?” said the Widow Clary, sipping languidly from her teacup. “I suppose you’ll want to be her mother. I suppose you’ll think you must take full responsibility. You are a sad, squirming thing.”
Miss Augusta did not let herself flinch; if she flinched now, she could never go on. “She says she lives inside a thin place.”
“Well, she doesn’t. What does she know? Only what you say in the schoolhouse. What did you tell her a thin place was? Repeat it to me now.”
Miss Augusta obeyed. “Thin places are parts of the world where the barrier between the clay and the mist is more fragile, where it can be broken.” She stopped, then, because she’d forgotten the old words as soon as she began truly listening to them.
But the Widow Clary had been a Branaugh schoolchild once too, and her memory did not fail: “Things happen in thin places that can’t happen anywhere else, but they are never safe from getting lost between clay and mist. They are always in-between.”
“But,” Miss Augusta said desperately, “what does it mean?”
“Listen,” said the Widow Clary with infinite patience, settling back in her armchair, “you cannot understand. I doubt that any of your schoolchildren can. Perhaps the lighthouse-keeper’s girl is the only one among you with half a chance of ever understanding at all. But she’s wrong. She doesn’t live inside a thin place, any more than the rest of us. We are always in a thin place. We have always lived in-between.”
◊
The red rain came to Branaugh in mid-April. The children trudged to school in rubber boots and rainslickers. Inside the schoolhouse, they shook the moisture from their coats into shimmering crimson puddles on the floor, murmuring excitedly that harvest was soon to come, that Branaugh again lived. Miss Augusta struggled to quiet them. When at last they were all seated, she saw that Lilianne Eisner’s desk was empty. Miss Augusta’s throat swelled, she thought, they are never safe from getting lost, and the words formed a different shape now that they had been uttered by an old woman in a dark hovel: now they had the sheen of truth on them, of magic.
“Has anyone seen Lilianne?” she inquired of the class, her eyes drifting across the rows of faces. No, they all chorused, rote as if they were saying multiplication tables.
Miss Augusta waited for school to end, then slipped on her own rubber boots, her own raincoat. She had never shown up unannounced at anyone’s house before. The lighthouse was not quite a house, the lighthouse-keeper not quite anyone, and in some sense that was worse: she might find anything on the other side of that weathered old door. Miss Augusta’s knocking went unanswered, and she had almost resolved to leave when a fork of lightning split the mist behind her, followed closely by thunder. She would not be able to go home until the storm passed; she had no choice but to enter. Miss Augusta held her breath and counted to three, then opened the door to the lighthouse.
The lighthouse-keeper’s quarters were white-walled and austere, almost handsome in their simplicity except that no one had washed the dishes or cleaned the countertops or swept the floor in days, possibly weeks. An oriental rug unfurled massively across the floorboards in the center of the room, the ends vanishing beneath the footboard of the four-poster bed where the lighthouse-keeper slept, curled fetally beneath thick layers of flannel. He had not stirred when Miss Augusta first came inside, and he did not stir now that she approached the bed. For a moment, she thought he must be dead, but then she heard his breathing come steadily, a soft intermittent wisp of sound between gusts of wind. She lifted her eyes to the room’s sole window, bare and obtrusively large. Outside the cliffs protruded blackly into the mist, as if there were no sea, as if Branaugh were melting into the horizon. When Miss Augusta saw the lighthouse-keeper’s wife and daughter, at first she thought they were walking on air.
◊
Mrs. Eisner’s hair was as dark as Lilianne’s, though much thicker than Lilianne’s hair was now. She was pale in her nightgown, but her mouth was insatiable-red, and her eyes blazed when she whirled to face Miss Augusta. Yet she was distant, as if in a trance, and her feet crept unceasingly forward, steps now from the precipice, moments from the sea.
Lilianne, weak and loose-limbed beside her, was still awake; with great struggle, Lilianne reeled her mother back. “Miss,” she cried through the flume of waves and wind, her voice muffled and obscure. “Miss, my mother wants to leave.”
There was no possibility of the lighthouse-keeper’s wife, or any of them, leaving Branaugh. “Lilianne, walk her back to me,” said Miss Augusta, and the girl obeyed. Halfway back to the lighthouse, Mrs. Eisner began to weep with the loose unrestrained sobs of a child, her eyes red-rimmed and her mouth opened in a choral O.
“I want to go home,” she said to her daughter.
“We’re almost there,” said Miss Augusta.
“Why not?” The lighthouse-keeper’s quarters assumed, abruptly, a sinister quality for Miss Augusta. She hesitated before the door.
“She saw something one day, she said.”
Lilianne’s mother collapsed on the threshold, curling her knees to her chest. “Look under the rug,” she urged Miss Augusta. “Don’t make me go in, but look under the rug.”
Miss Augusta knew that if she returned home now, despite the lightning, despite the wind, she would be safe: she would remain where she had always stood, and tomorrow when she opened the schoolhouse doors, Lilianne Eisner would not be there, and for a few days she would feel the girl’s absence, but soon she would not notice anymore.
“Please,” said Lilianne. “None of us are ever quite awake anymore.”
Miss Augusta opened the door to the lighthouse, stepped inside, and rolled back the oriental rug. The floorboards beneath were pale and rounded, a divot cut into the center which Miss Augusta could grip like a handle. The hatch in the floor opened with a soft compliant whine, and inside, Miss Augusta found the old lighthouse-keeper, and his predecessor, and that man’s predecessor too. But they weren’t skeletons, they weren’t corpses, they were still living. They were stranger than they had been before, hairless and wax-colored and limp as if boneless, but they were still alive. In fact, they looked not unlike Lilianne Eisner.
◊
Miss Augusta closed her curtains and hid the lighthouse-keeper’s work boots beneath her front porch, but someone still found out that she had the Eisners in her house, the daughter on the sofa and the parents on a makeshift mattress of folded blankets. When Miss Augusta went to the schoolhouse in the morning, a padlock she’d never seen before had been thrown across the doors and a paper notice had been posted, its message now rain-blurred almost to incoherence: she caught the word closed and the word breach, and the word safe, but she could not decipher the meaning as a whole, and she was afraid to linger long.
The first knock on her door came in the afternoon, when enough hours had elapsed that she should have come to her senses and sent the Eisners home. So said Mrs. O’Neill, and then Mrs. Bryant, and then Mr. Tillman the grocer, who promised he had a basket of fresh bread and salted cod for their supper, then lingered carnivorously on the doorstep for several minutes before he retreated. Miss Augusta knew the food, if he truly had any, was only a means of getting the door open. No one in Branaugh would dream of forcing open the schoolteacher’s front door, but once the door had been open, the barrier broken, they might never be persuaded to go until she had done as they wanted.
It was close to dusk when the Widow Clary came. Miss Augusta recognized the sound of her plodding step, the small seismic creaks of her frame in motion.
“You might as well come outside,” the widow said, after waiting on the doorstep for a moment. “If you pull aside that curtain, you’ll see that I’m alone now, but if I have to come back, I’ll bring all the men in Branaugh to tear down your front door.”
She spoke so lightly, so gently, that the prospect of the broken-down door sounded like a bothersome eventuality instead of a threat. Miss Augusta peered through a crack in the curtains and saw that she was telling the truth about being alone.
“It’ll just be a moment,” she said to Lilianne, who sat with her legs drawn to her chest in one of Miss Augusta’s threadbare secondhand armchairs, a novel open across her knees.
Miss Augusta stepped onto the porch and locked the front door, gripping her housekey in a closed fist. “Do you know what’s happening in that lighthouse?” she demanded of the Widow Clary. “Does everyone know?”
“You are a stupid girl,” said the widow, “but that doesn’t matter anymore. Someone should have interfered much sooner, I suppose. How old are you? Twenty? Twenty-one?”
“Twenty-four,” said Miss Augusta primly.
“Well, at any rate, you were too young then,” she said. “Not so many years ago, we had a lighthouse-keeper who said he wanted to build a house instead of living in the lighthouse-keeper’s quarters. I told him that he couldn’t be allowed to leave the lighthouse, but I was the only one who remembered why it mattered. Branaugh isn’t so ancient that our traditions don’t still mean something, and when we walk away from them, we put ourselves at risk. But they wouldn’t listen to me. And the next spring, Branaugh started to get lost instead of starting to live. No rain, no plants, no fish. The mist was so thick you couldn’t see through it. The waves were coming up to the grocer’s door. I swept water out of my house like I was chasing down vermin. We were thin and getting thinner. Starving to death. I will not see it happen again.”
“What happened to that man?” said Miss Augusta, thinking of the plaintive waxy faces that had stared up from underneath the lighthouse floorboards. “What happens to any of them?”
“Quiet now, the child will hear you,” said the widow, and Miss Augusta turned and saw that Lilianne Eisner had parted the curtains just enough to peek out at them. “It isn’t our question to ask. The island settles all that. It brings them here and does with them what it will.”
“Can’t we bring someone else?” Miss Augusta said helplessly.
The Widow Clary looked very stern then, her lips pursed, her eyes narrowed. “We’ve never had a family before,” she said. “But I knew as soon as they came that Branaugh would take the little girl before her mother or father. It’s very sad. I’m sure you’ll say it’s unfair. Still—would you rather it have been the father? Would that make you feel better?”
For a long time, Miss Augusta was silent. Lilianne Eisner was still at the window. If only she would close the curtain and retreat. It was too much, her dark eyes like stones in her pale malnourished face, her scalp white and pristine beneath her thinning thatch of black hair. She had the look of a shell nearly emptied.
“What am I to do with them?” Miss Augusta whispered, at last.
“You must send them back to the lighthouse,” said the Widow Clary. “And then we all must ask Branaugh for forgiveness.”
◊
All Branaugh danced again at midsummer, the fishermen trampling the black dune grass with their work boots and the children at last screaming some new song besides the tiresome February ditty. This time they had no barefooted stranger among their number.
Miss Augusta did not look to the lighthouse tower at first, afraid that she would see someone there, more afraid she would not. When at last the urge became irresistible and she lifted her eyes, the beatific glow of the lighthouse-eye nearly blinded her, and it was through a field of spots that she glimpsed two figures standing on the balcony. For a moment she thought she was seeing Lilianne, but it was only Mr. and Mrs. Eisner, looking pale and slack, hanging limply on the railing like they would crumple if they let go.
Seized with the desire to speak, Miss Augusta paused, her lips parted, summoning words of apology. But before she could say anything, Mrs. O’Neill grasped her by the arm and flung her back into the fevered motions of the dance, and Miss Augusta wanted to stop, but she was afraid that if she did, she would be trampled.
Acknowledgements
First, many thanks to Michael Kelly for taking this collection on and walking me through the publication process, and thanks to the entire team at Undertow Publications for their work on the book: Courtney Kelly provided important edits, and Vince Haig designed an absolute dream of a cover with art from Stephen Mackey.
Thanks to all the editors who have provided homes for my stories, especially Andy Cox at Black Static and Sean Wallace at The Dark. Thanks to Sheila Williams and Rick Wilber for starting my career with the Dell Magazine Award. Thanks also to Diane Turnshek, the Alpha Workshop instructors and staff of 2013, and the Alpha alumni community for an incredible workshop experience as well as ongoing support, feedback, and resources.
Thank you to my parents for their encouragement and
their confidence in me, and to my mother in particular for all the library books. Thanks to Andrew, Rachel, and Zach for the imagination. And thank you to Joe: for loving me, and for finding the stories scary.
About the Author
Kay Chronister lives in Tucson, Arizona, where she is completing a PhD in Literature. Her fiction has appeared in venues such as Clarkesworld, Strange Horizons, Shimmer, Black Static, Shadows & Tall Trees, and The Dark. This is her first collection.
Find her online at kaychronister.com.