Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “We should go for a walk together,” she says and half fills my tin cup with gin. “Hand in hand, yes? Brazen in our forbidden love for one another.”

  I don’t love you, I tell her. I have never loved you, but I can see from the knowing glimmer in her oyster eyes that she recognizes my lie at once. Besides, I add, nothing which is properly depraved or deviant is forbidden here, unless it be some arcane offence to the patron saints of kelp and syphilitic mariners which I’ve yet to stumble upon. Why else would we be so tolerated here, you and I? And, at that, she puts the cork back into the bottle and scowls at me. “Speak for yourself,” she says. “I go where I like. I do as I wish.” I laugh at her and sip my gin. She stands up, her petticoats rustling like snowy boughs, and I wonder what the townspeople descry when they look at her. Do they see her breath fog on balmy summer afternoons? Do they notice the scum of frost left behind on anything she’s touched? Do they ever detect the faint auroral flicker from her pupils, a momentary glint of brilliant reds or greens or blues from her otherwise lifeless eyes? Or are they so accustomed to minding their own affairs – for I am convinced this town is a refuge for the damned and cast-away – that they see only some shabby girl too plain for even the most unpretentious sporting house? I’ll never know, for I’ll never have the courage to ask them. Secretly, I fear I am the only one who can see her, and I am possessed of no pressing desire to have this irrational dread confirmed. “Oh, they see well enough,” she says, and I am not surprised. Puppets have no private thoughts. She lingers before the dressing table mirror, straightening the folds of her skirt. “They see and stay awake nights, wishing they could forget the sight of me.” This seems to please her, and so she smiles, and I have another drink from my dented tin cup. “Or they long for my embrace,” she continues. “They pine for my attentions. They can think of naught else save the torment of my cold hand about their prick or pressed tight to their windward passage. Some have been driven nigh unto seppuku or have learned to tie a hangman’s noose, should the longing grow more than merely unbearable.” And I reply that I can believe that part, at least, though myself I would prefer a bullet in the brain. “No, that’s a real man’s death,” she says and turns to face me. “Now, have you figured out my stone? Last night, a magpie found me behind the livery and brought word from my father who wishes me home at the earliest possible date. But not without your learn’d observations, my sweet professor.” I stare silently into my cup for a moment, my stomach sour and cramping, and I tell that her I’m in no mood for the game today. Tomorrow, maybe. Maybe the day after, and, in the meantime, she should haunt some other poor bitch or bastard. “But the magpie was quite insistent,” she says. “You know by now that my father is not a patient man, even at his best, and he has long since tired of waiting on your verdict.” And she holds the peculiar stone out to me as she has done so many times before. But what of the curse? I ask her, resigned that there will be no allowances today for hangovers and sour stomachs. I know all these lines by heart. What of winning my love, the furnace to finally melt the sorcery that binds you? Has someone gone and changed the rules? Do you begin to miss the old man’s cock between you legs? She smiles her vitreous smile once more to flash those bluish pegs she wears for teeth and closes her fingers around the stone resting in her palm. “Surely you didn’t take me seriously?” she scoffs. “My father is a proud man, a man of principles and lofty morals, and he would never permit me to take a lesbian dipsomaniac for my husband.”

  You have no father, I remind her, because I know all these lines by heart, and she would have me say nothing more or less. You were born into a brothel but a few miles farther up the coast, the albino child of a half-nigger whore and a chink from a medicine show. Fortunately, your mother sold you to a kind-hearted merchant marine for two-pints and a black pearl broach, saving you from a life spent peddling pussy and Clark Stanley’s snake oil liniment. Sadly, though, your adoptive father soon perished at sea when his ship was pulled down by the arms of a giant cephalopod. She smiles again, licks her lips, and asks eagerly, “The Kraken of Norwegian legend?” One and the same, I have no doubt about it. But you survived, and I pause to drain and then refill my cup. You were discovered in a leaky wicker basket one midsummer eve, carried in on the high tide. And she tells me she’d almost forgotten that story, but I know that she’s lying, that it’s her most-favored of the lot. “That’s so much better than the one in which I’m a Cossack’s illegitimate daughter on the run from Czarist spies, or the other one, where we’re actually half sisters, but I have been stricken with an hysterical amnesia beyond the curative powers of even the most accomplished alienists.” Her voice rattles inside my skull like dice, like razor shards of ice. It is slicing apart my brain, and soon my thoughts will be little more than tatters. No, they were tattered long ago, if truth be told. I place three fingers against the soft spot at my left temple, as if this mere laying on of hands would alone would be enough to still the mad somersault of her words. “Though I was only an infant,” she says, “I can almost recall my valiant, grief-stricken father swaddling me in his pea jacket and placing me inside that basket as the sea monster wailed and gnawed at the bowsprit.” No, I reply, you never had a father, and for the briefest fraction of a moment I see (or only wish I’d see) the dull gleam of disappointment in her damp oyster eyes, as though she’s begun to believe (or at least wishes to believe) in her own canard. “No matter,” she sighs. “As I was saying, the snowflakes grew bigger and bigger until they resembled nothing so much as fat white geese.” That’s not what you were saying, I tell her. You were reminding me of the stone and your father’s impatient need to know its provenance. But she ignores me, already deep into the middle of a story she’s told so many times it hardly matters where she begins the tale. “The big sled stopped, and the child saw then that it was driven by a tall and upright lady, all shining white – the Snow Queen herself. ‘It is cold enough to kill one,’ she said. ‘Creep inside my bearskin.’” But you’ve never had a mother, either, I say, and then, before she can reply or withdraw any deeper into that moth-eaten narrative, Kay and Gerda and the Snow Queen, the demons and their grinning looking glass, I ask to see the stone.

  “Again? But I should think you’d have the damned thing memorized by now.”

  I stop rubbing at my aching head and hold out my left hand to her. Give it to me, I say, and she narrows her grey eyes suspiciously, as I’ve never once before asked to see the stone, and it isn’t like me to deviate from the confines of the events and dialogue which she has scripted so meticulously. Possibly, she begins to suspect the unthinkable, rebellion from her wooden puppet, and must wonder if she’s allowed me too much string, too much slack upon my tethers. I half expect her to turn away again, to seek such refuge as might be had in the cracked dressing-table mirror or to walk out the door and leave me alone in my dingy room. Instead, she nods her head and places the peculiar stone into my outstretched hand.

  …and there would be no mention anywhere of her tiresome fairy stories or my deceitful, subjective desires.

  I would reduce her to the driest of crystallographies.

  The stone is not quite round and is somewhat flattened side to side, the approximate colour of licorice, and I tell her what I’ve already told her before, that it’s only a beach cobble, a bit of Mesozoic slate fallen from the headlands or the high cliffs surrounding the harbour, then polished smooth by time and the ocean. I describe its mineral composition for her – muscovite and quartz, with small quantities of biotite, pyrite, and hematite, and perhaps also traces of kaolin and tourmaline. But I have said repeatedly that it is a peculiar stone, have I not, and none of these things make it peculiar in the least. “What else?” she asks. A flurry of minute snowflakes escapes her lips, borne upon her voice and blown towards me on her Siberian breath, and they look nothing at all like fat white geese. “What is there about it that I couldn’t learn from the pages of one of your schoolbooks?” It grows so heavy in my hand then, her stone, as though it
has suddenly trebled or quadrupled in size while appearing just exactly the same as always. It is a sympathetic stone, I say to her, surprising myself, and she takes a quick step backwards and bumps hard against a corner of the dressing table. What? I ask. Did you believe we’d never get this far? But she only looks afraid and doesn’t answer me. And I understand now, at last, that the wizard’s daughter is as surely a puppet as am I. She is frozen to her core, kneeling in an alpine meadow, trapped forever in the icy shadow of an old man’s despite. It does not matter whether these things are literally true or only figurative. It does not matter, either, what I can and can not believe, or whether I am sane. A sympathetic stone, I say again, and the snow from her lips settles in my hair and on the harsh angles of my face. These markings scratched into its surface, I can’t read those, but I suspect that’s not important. It isn’t what we can see in this stone, but what this stone can see in us. Are you following me? She licks her lips nervously, and they sparkle with the thinnest sheen of frozen saliva. That’s its genius, you see. It truly is a looking glass. She rubs at her hip where it struck the dressing table and laughs the driest, most unconvincing laugh that I have ever heard. “You think me simple, an imbecile, is that it? Do you think you might gain the upper hand, and your freedom, too, with only a quick-witted riddle and a straight face? My father –” But that was such a very long time ago, I say, interrupting her. Long ago and far away, in a country I have never visited outside your dreams.

  “One day, the old hobgoblin invented a mirror,” she says, and those cold auroral fires burn brightly in the twin voids of her pupils. Red, then blue, then green, and then back to red again; I can plainly hear them crackle in the sky above the boarding house on Gar Fish Street. “A mirror with this peculiarity – that every good thing reflected in its surface shrank away almost to nothing.”

  I set the tin cup down upon my bed, and for the third time I say to her, It is a sympathetic stone, as I have always heard there is magic contained within the number three. In my palm, the licorice-coloured cobble quivers and transforms into a crude sort of dagger. Many days or nights later, when these grim and fabulous events have run their course and I have weighted her corpse with an anvil and a burlap bag filled with rusted horseshoes, I shall ponder the question of her relationship with the stone. Or the stone’s relationship with her. If, for instance, it is as Coleridge’s murdered albatross, some cross she has been condemned to bear in penance for all eternity, acting out this marionette performance down countless centuries. I will draw no conclusions to satisfy me, nor will I find any sense in any fraction of it, but, still, I will lay awake nights, turning the question over and over in my persistent, gin-addled mind. But I think, in contradiction to the evidence of her fear, the tremble in her snowy voice, the northern lights blazing in her eyes, that she was glad when we were done (and here I surrender to more a truthful, more comforting past tense, for that day has come and gone). Perhaps she was permitted some brief period of oblivion between one haunting and the next, and so I’d granted her exhausted spirit an interval of rest, a respite from the trials and horrors of her damnation. Without speaking another word, I rose from the bed and drove the stone dagger deep into her chest just beneath the sternum, then twisted it sharply up and to the right, that the blade might find and pierce her heart. Her lips parted and a trickle of something dark which was not blood leaked from her mouth and spattered on my hand and the floor between us. In her grey eyes, the polar fires were extinguished, and she did not so much seem to fall at my feet as flow downward, as though her body had never been anything more substantial than water held forever but one degree below freezing. In my hand, the stone was only a stone again, still bearing those indecipherable runes or glyphs, the same ones I might have glimpsed, dreaming, carved into a granite menhir. And for the first time since she came to me, all those months ago, I felt warm, genuinely warm. But it is late, and the candle by which I have put down on paper these strange occurrences – being possibly nothing greater than a confession or the ramblings of a lunatic – has melted to little more than a puddle of beeswax and a guttering scrap of blackened wick. So I will not trouble myself with the details of how it was I removed her body from my room and the boarding house. However, I will add that I placed the peculiar, sympathetic stone inside her mouth, which was then sewn shut with a needle and thread I borrowed from the wife of my landlord. I told her simply that my socks had worn almost through and needed darning. I have considered leaving this place, before I am utterly bereft of even the price of a train ticket. I’ve looked at my maps and considered traveling north to Coos Bay, or inland to Salem or Pendleton. I might even go so far as Seattle. I have thought, too, that I might find gainful employment as a geologist in a mining camp. In the wild places, men are not so concerned with a woman’s indiscretions, or so I have been led to believe.

  THE CRYOMANCER’S DAUGHTER

  (MURDER BALLAD NO. 3)

  The story presages many stories I’d yet to write, including the Cherry Creek tales and even The Drowning Girl: A Memoir. Its obvious inspiration is Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” I’d intended to set several stories in the town where all the streets are named for fish, but, so far, there’s only this one.

  The Ammonite Violin

  (Murder Ballad No. 4)

  If he were ever to try to write this story, he would not know where to begin. It’s that sort of a story, so fraught with unlikely things, so perfectly turned and filled with such wicked artifice and contrivances that readers would look away, unable to suspend their disbelief even for a page. But he will never try to write it, because he is not a poet, or a novelist, or a man who writes short stories for the newsstand pulp magazines. He is a collector. Or, as he thinks of himself, a Collector. He has never dared to think of himself as The Collector, as he is not without an ounce or two of modesty, and there must surely be those out there who are far better than he, shadow men, and maybe shadow women, too, haunting a busy, forgetful world that is only aware of its phantoms when one or another of them slips up and is exposed to flashing cameras and prison cells. Then people will stare, and maybe, for a time, there is horror and fear in their dull, wet eyes, but they soon enough forget again. They are busy people, after all, and they have lives to live, and jobs to show up for five days a week, and bills to pay, and secret nightmares all their own, and in their world there is very little time for phantoms.

  He lives in a small house in a small town near the sea, for the only time the Collector is ever truly at peace is when he is in the presence of the sea. Even collecting has never brought him to that complete and utter peace, the quiet which finally fills him whenever there is only the crash of waves against a granite jetty and the saltwater mists to breathe in and hold in his lungs like opium fumes. He would love the sea, were she a woman. And sometimes he imagines her so, a wild and beautiful woman clothed all in blue and green, trailing sand and mussels in her wake. Her grey eyes would contain hurricanes, and her voice would be the lonely toll of bell buoys and the cries of gulls and a December wind scraping itself raw against the shore. But, he thinks, were the sea but a women, and were she his lover, then he would have her, as he is a Collector and must have all those things he loves, so that no one else might ever have them. He must draw them to him and keep them safe from a blind and busy world that cannot even comprehend its phantoms. And having her, he would lose her, and he would never again know the peace which only she can bring.

  He has two specialties, this Collector. There are some who are perfectly content with only one, and he has never thought any less of them for it. But he has two, because, so long as he can recall, there has been this dual fascination, and he never saw the point in forsaking one for the other. Not if he might have them both and yet be a richer man for sharing his devotion between the two. They are his two mistresses, and neither has ever condemned his polyamorous heart. Like the sea, who is not his mistress, but only his constant savior, they understand who and what and why he is, and tha
t he would be somehow diminished, perhaps even undone, were he forced to devote himself wholly to the one or the other. The first of the two is his vast collection of fossilized ammonites, gathered up from the quarries and ocean-side cliffs and the stony, barren places of half the globe’s nations. The second are all the young women he has murdered by suffocation, always by suffocation, for that is how the sea would kill, how the sea does kill, usually, and in taking life he would ever pay tribute and honor that first mother of the world.

  That first Collector.