Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “My father…” she begins, then trails off, and I feel the temperature in my dingy little fourth-floor room at the end of Gar Fish Street plummet ten or fifteen degrees.

  – was likely a Russian foot soldier, I continue for her on cue, bound for some flea-ridden Kamchatkan hellhole, when he met up with whichever Koryak witch-sow you would have called your mother, had she ever given you the chance. And yes, these are words from my mouth, spoken by my tongue and passing between my lips, but still they are always her words. I shut my eyes, willing silence upon myself (which is easy, as this particular soliloquy has come to its end), and she reaches out and brushes frozen fingertips across the space between my shoulder blades. I gasp, and at least it is me gasping, an honest gasp at the pain and cold flowing out of her and into me. All the breath driven from my lungs in that instant, and now I must surely look like some gulping, fish-eyed thing hauled up from the briny sea, my lips going a cyanotic tint and my mouth opening and closing, closing and opening, suffocating on this thin air I coughed out and can’t seem to remember how to breathe back in. Then she presses her palm flat against my back and the chill doubles, trebles, expands tenfold and tenfold again between one gasp and the next. She draws the warmth from me, because she can manufacture none of her own, because, she says, she has been cursed by her own father, a man who conjures blizzards from clear summer skies and commands the grinding courses of mighty glaciers. A wizard king of snow and ice who has so condemned his own daughter because she would not be his consort in some unnatural and incestuous liaison. It’s as good an explanation as any for what she is and what she’s done to me, again and again and again, though I can believe it no more than I can believe that six and three are ten or that the sun and moon move round about the Earth. I am unaccustomed and unreceptive to phantasia and make-believe, even when I find myself trapped hopelessly within it. Perhaps my disbelief can be a prison as surely as this room, as surely as her wintry hand pressed against my spine, but I’ve little enough remaining of my former life, those vanished years when there was still camaraderie and purpose and dignity, and by all the gods in which I have never sought comfort I will cling to Reason, no matter how useless it may prove before she is done with me. She leans near, and her breath spills across my face like Arctic waters. “I am alone,” she says sweetly and with a brittle edge of loss. “I have no one now but you, no one and nothing, only you and that damned stone. You will love me. You will love me as you have never comprehended love before. And your love will be the furnace to finally melt the sorcery that binds me.” I would laugh at her, at these preposterous lines she might have ripped from the pages of some penny dreadful or stolen from a bit of low burlesque, but my throat has frozen over. I might as well be stone now. She has made of me the very thing I’ve spent my life researching and cataloging, for what is ice but water assuming a solid mineral form? I am made her petrifaction, and she leans nearer still and kisses me upon my icy lips. I wish that she’d at least allowed me to shut my eyes this time, just this once, that I would not now be forced to see her, to stare back into the daemon lover who is staring into me. That too-round, china-doll face and the wild, tumbling cataract of hair as white as snow spun into silk, her bitter lazulite grin, her own eyes the colour of a living oyster pulled from out its bivalve shell. In this moment, I could almost believe her tales of broken mirrors and snow queens, lost children and cruel magician fathers. And then she touches me, her hands seeking out the frigid gash of my sex, and I am no longer even granted the tethered freedoms of a marionette. I am at best a chiseled pagan idol to polar bears and hungry killer whales, a statue upon which she will prostrate herself, stealing from me such pleasures as she might wish and can yet endure.

  II.

  Later, long hours later, after she’s grown bored with me and after dawn and sunrise and after my blood has thawed to slush and I’m left shivering and fevery, I sit naked at the foot of the bed in the boarding-house room on Gar Fish Street and sip the cheapest available gin from a tin cup. She’s gone out. I can not say with any certainty where she goes, but she disappears from time to time. It’s not unusual if she doesn’t return for days, and I can not help but to imagine that she must have other unfortunates trapped in other dingy rooms scattered throughout the city. I stare back at my reflection, watching myself from the cracked mirror mounted crookedly on the dressing table. Perhaps, I think, she is gathering to her an army of puppets, and at the last she will have us take up flaming brands and march against her wizard father locked in his palace of ice and baling wire. I raise the cup to my lips, and the woman in the mirror obligingly does the same. I’ve seen corpses floating in the harbour that looked more alive than her, more alive than me. I could have aged ten years in these three few weeks. My lover has stolen more from me than simple warmth, of that I am certain. She’s diminished me with every successive freeze and thaw, and this reflection is little more than a ghost of the woman who arrived here from San Francisco last summer. I came to hide and drink and maybe die, for there would never be any return to that former life of privilege and reward which had been so hastily, so thoughtlessly, traded for a hurried tryst with one of my first-year students, a yellow-haired girl whose name I can hardly now recollect. I only came here to be a drunkard and, in time, a suicide, to drift farther and farther away from the world which would have no more of me. I thought surely that would be penance enough for all my sins. I never dared conceive of any punishment so sublime as the wizard’s daughter. No, I do not believe she is the daughter of a wizard, but how else would I name her? One night, I tried to make a game of guessing at some other appellation, whether Christian or heathen, but she waved away every suggestion I made. Hundreds or thousands of names dismissed, and there was never anything in her wet oyster eyes but truth. But I may be a poor, poor judge of truth, and we should keep that in mind. After all, remember, some fraction of me believed the yellow-haired girl in San Francisco when she promised that she’d never so much as whisper even the most nebulous hint of our nights together to another living soul. Indeed, I may be no fit judge of truth at all. The woman in the mirror who looks exactly like my corpse takes another sip of gin, realizes the cup is almost empty, and reaches for the quart bottle on the floor. She fills my cup halfway, and I thank her for such boundless generosity. The wizard’s daughter, she won’t ever deign to drink with me, though she sometimes returns from her disappearances with the gift of a fresh bottle – gin or rye whiskey or the peaty brown ale they brew down by the waterfront. She says she doesn’t drink with anyone or alone, so I don’t take it personally.

  “Aren’t you a sorry sight,” the woman in the mirror says to me. “A shame the way you’ve let yourself go. Can you even remember the last time you bathed? Or took a comb to your hair, perhaps?” And so I tell her to go fuck herself.

  Then there are footsteps in the hallway, and I listen, expecting them to stop outside my door, expecting the dry rattle of a key in the lock and then the cut-glass knob will turn and –

  “The Tolowa Indians have a story about a crazy woman who talks to her reflection –”

  Shut up, I hiss at my own face in the dressing-table mirror and almost drop the tin cup, my heart pounding and hands shaking so badly that no small measure of gin splashes over the rim and darkens the grimy floor at my feet. Such a waste, I think, such a pointless, goddamned waste, and by then the footsteps in question have come and gone, and it isn’t the wizard’s daughter, after all. Only another lodger or someone else, a prostitute or sneak thief or a dutiful officer of the law, coming to call upon another lodger. I reach for the gin bottle before the woman in the mirror does it for me. She gives me dreams, I say and, having refilled my cup, shove the cork firmly back into the mouth of the bottle. I can not afford another spill today, for I am in no condition to dress myself and descend the stairs to the smoky lobby and the narrow street beyond and still have to walk the two blocks (uphill) from the boarding house on Gar Fish Street to the Gramercy Digs Saloon on the corner of Muskie and Walley
e. And I have no guarantee that she will bring me another bottle, either, as her small mercies and smaller kindnesses are, at best, capricious and wholly unpredictable. She gives me dreams, I say again, because I do not think the mirror woman heard me the first time.

  “Does she?” the doppelgänger asks. It’s grinning at me now, only that is not my grin, those rotting lazulite pegs in swollen stormy gums, but its is still my face. “I was until this moment quite unaware that any among the Oneiroi concealed a cunt between its legs.”

  I shut my eyes, praying to no one and nothing that I’ll stop shaking and my teeth with stop chattering, wishing for warmth and sunlight and wishing, too, that I had even half the strength I’d need to get to my feet and stand and walk the five or six steps to the three-legged chair where my overcoat and gloves are lying in a careless heap. But I am too sick and much too drunk to try. I would wind up on the floor, and that’s where she would find me when she returns. I would rather suffer this chill in my veins and my bones than have her find me sprawled naked upon the floor, unconscious in a pool of spilled gin and my own piss. Behind my eyelids, the dreams she has given unfold like flickering cinematograph projections. And I keep my eyes tightly closed, lest these Lumière images escape from out the windows of my blighted soul and fall upon the silvered glass, for I have no mind to share them with that grinning fiend behind the mirror. The wizard’s daughter has given them to me, and so they are mine and mine alone – this clouded, snow-dimmed sky spread wide above a winter forest of blue spruce and fir and pine, the uneasy shadows huddled beneath the sagging boughs. I have been walking all my life, it seems, or, more precisely, all my afterlife, those many long months since my abrupt departure from San Francisco. The howling, wolf-throated wind stings, then numbs, my bare face, and I stumble blindly forward through snow piled almost as high as my knees. I can not feel my feet. I am become no more or less than a phantom of frostbite and rags, lost and certain that I will never again be anything but lost. I know what lies ahead of me, what she brings me here to see, again and again and again. It was only a surprise that first time I walked these woods, and also the second time, as I’ve never suffered from recurring dreams. My lungs ache, filled as they are with the thin air which, paradoxically, seems heavy and thick as lead, and then I’ve reached the place where the trees end, opening onto a high alpine meadow. In summer, the ground here would be resplendent in green and splashed with the gay blooms of black-eyed susans and Joe-Pye weed, columbine and parry clover, but this is a dead month, a smothered month – December or January, the ending or beginning of the year – and perhaps all months are dead here. Perhaps every word she’s told me is the truth, plain and simple, and this is truly a blasted land which will never again know spring grasses nor the quickening hues of wildflowers. Do not show me this, I plead, but I can not ever say whether these are words spoken or merely words thought. Either way, they tumble from me, silently or whispered from my cracked and bleeding lips. Do not show me this. Don’t make me see. I know, I know already what happened here, because I’ve seen it all before, and there is no profit in seeing it ever again. She does not answer me. Only the wind speaks to me here, as it rushes down from the raw charcoal-coloured peaks, the sky’s breath pouring out across splintered metamorphic teeth and over the meadow. And this is what I behold: a great crimson sleigh with gilded rails and runners drawn by Indian ponies, like something a red-skinned Father Christmas might command; a single granite standing stone or menhir of a sort not known to exist in the Americas – there are glyphs or pictographs graven upon the stone, which I can never quite see clearly; and in the lee of the menhir, there is an enormously obese man wrapped in bearskin robes and a naked girl child kneeling in the snow at his feet. The man holds a four-gallon metal pail over her, and the furs which the girl must have worn only moments before are spread out very near the crimson sleigh. The man and the girl can not be more than fifty feet away from me, and every time I have tried to cry out, to draw his attention towards myself, to forestall what I know is coming next. And I have tried, too, to leave the shelter of the tree line and cross the meadow to the spot where he stands and she kneels and the granite menhir looms threatfully above them both. From the first time I beheld it with my dreaming eyes, I have understood that there is more to this awful standing stone than its constituent molecules, far more than mere chemistry and mineralogy can fathom. It is an evil thing, and the man in the bearskin robes is somehow in its service or its debt. It has stood a thousand years, perhaps, demanding offerings and forfeiture – and no, it matters not that I do not even now believe in the existence of evil beyond a shorthand phrase for the cruelties and insanity of human beings. It matters not in the least, for in the dream the menhir or something trapped within the stone glances towards the edge of the forest, and it sees me there. And I can feel its delight, that there is an audience to this atrocity, and I feel its perfect hatred, deeper and blacker than the submarine canyons out beyond the harbour. “Are you cold, my darling,” the enormous man growls, and then he spits on the shivering girl at his feet. “Would you have me build for you a lovely roaring fire to chase the frostnip from your toes and fingertips?”

  But she was not the same girl, my reflection calmly professes from its place behind the dressing table. Not the same girl as your visitor.

  She was, I reply through gritted teeth and without opening my eyes. She was that very same girl.

  But the girl in your dream – her hair is red as a sunset and her eyes blue as lapis lazuli. So, you see, she can not possibly be your pale companion.

  The Tolowa Indians have a story about a crazy woman who talks to her reflection, I say, and at that the mirror falls silent again, but I know it wears a smirking satisfaction on its borrowed face. And there in the high meadow, the man wrapped in bearskins slowly pours water from his pail over the naked body of the red-haired girl. She screams, but only once, and makes no attempt whatsoever to escape. Her cry startles the ponies, and they neigh and stamp their hooves. “Is that better?” the man asks her, and already the water has begun to freeze on her skin, before the pail is even empty. “Are you warmer now?” I can hear the menhir laughing behind his back, an ancient, ugly sound which I could never hope to describe, the laughter of granite which isn’t granite at all. For a moment it seems somehow less solid, and in my horror I imagine the menhir bending down low over the man and the dying girl. “See there?” the fat man cackles and tosses his pail away. “You are mine, child. You were mine from the start, from the day you slithered from twixt your momma’s nethers, and you’ll never be anyone else’s.” But she can no longer hear him. I am certain of that, for the cold mountain air has turned the water solid, sealing and stealing her away, and I can not help but think of the fossils of prehistoric flies and ants which I’ve seen encased in polished lumps of Baltic amber. The man spits on her again, spits at the crust of new ice concealing her, and then he turns and trudges away through the snow to the sleigh and the two waiting ponies. “Let her lie there till the spring,” he bellows, taking up the leather reins and giving them a violent shake. “Let her lie there seven winters and another after that!” And then the sleigh is racing away, those golden runners not slicing through the snow, but seeming instead to float somehow an inch or so above it. And then I feel the ground fall away beneath my feet, in this nightmare which she has given to me that I might witness her desecration and murder a hundred, hundred times. The day vanishes, and I drop feet-first into an abyss, through the hollow, rotten heart of the world, and for a time I am grateful my eyes can no longer see and that the only sound is the air rushing past my ears as I fall.

  III.

  She comes back early the next morning, shortly after I have risen and had my first drink of the day and managed to dress in my slovenly, mannish best, feeling just a little more myself for her time away from me. The night before, I hardly slept, tossing and turning, starting awake at every sound, no matter how far off or insignificant it might have been. Towards dawn there was a forebod
ing, melancholy sort of dream in which I watched a waxing quarter moon sinking into the Pacific and the sun coming up over the town where it huddles at the crumbling western edge of the continent. This cluttered grotesquerie of winding lanes and leaning clapboard cottages, chimneys and cisterns and rusting corrugated tin roofs, and the few brick-and-mortar buildings so scabbed with mosses and ferns and such other local flora that one might easily mistake them for some natural part of the landscape, only lately and incompletely modified to the needs of men. The morning washed away the night, finishing off the drowning moon, and the motley assortment of boats and small ships moored along the wharves seemed no more than bobbing toys awaiting the hands of children. The morning light snagged in their sails and rigging, and a grey flock of gulls arising from the narrow, mussel-littered beach screeched out her name, which I heard clearly, but knew I would forget immediately upon waking. It was a peaceable scene, in its way, and I thought perhaps this is as good a place to lie down and die as any other. But, even so, I could not shake the sense that something immeasurably old and malign watched the town from the redwood forests crowding in on every side. Something that had trailed her here, possibly. Or something that had been here all along, something that was already here aeons before the mountains were heaved up from a sea swarming with great reptiles and ammonites and archaic species of gigantic predatory fish. Either way, they were in league now, the wizard’s wayward daughter and this unseen watcher in the trees, and I alone knew of their alliance. The dream ended as a velvet curtain was drawn suddenly closed to hide what I realized had only been the most elaborate set arranged upon a theatre stage, a cleverly lit and orchestrated miniature to fool my sleeping eyes, and then there was vaudeville and then opera, and I woke to Verdi from a phonograph playing loudly across the hallway from my room.