The Countess whispers, “I called to the King of Cats.”
The girl answers, “Cats rarely ever come when called. And certainly not ninety all at once.”
And the brown girl leans forward, her lips pressed to the pale Countess’ right ear. Whatever she says, it’s nothing you can make out from your seat, from your side of the silver mirror. The gypsy girl kisses the Countess on the forehead.
“I’m so very tired.”
“Shhhhh, Mother. I know. It’s okay. You can rest now.”
The Countess asks, “Who are you.”
“I am the peace at the end of all things.”
EXT. COURTYARD BELOW COUNTESS’ BALCONY. MORNING.
The body of Elizabeth Báthory lies shattered on the flagstones, her face and clothes a mask of frozen blood. Fresh snow is falling on her corpse. A number of noisy crows surround the body. No music now, only the wind and the birds.
FADE TO BLACK:
ROLL CREDITS.
THE END.
As always, you don’t leave your seat until the credits are finished and the curtain has swept shut again, hiding the screen from view. As always, you’ve made no notes, preferring to rely on your memories.
You follow the aisle to the auditorium doors and step out into the almost deserted lobby. The lights seem painfully bright. You hurry to the restroom. When you’re finished, you wash your hands, dry them, then spend almost an entire minute staring at your face in the mirror above the sink.
Outside, it’s started to rain, and you wish you’d brought an umbrella.
THE PRAYER OF NINETY CATS
A story that began with a recurring dream of a demonic child visiting an old and ailing woman who struggled to protect her secrets from the child. On moonless nights, the child would climb the walls of a stone tower and slip in through an open window. That was the nucleus about which accreted this exploration of my fascination with cinema, lost films, and the Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed. Brit Mandelo writes, “Kiernan’s ‘The Prayer of Ninety Cats’ has a curious, seductive structure that leads the reader ever deeper into the experience of viewing a film, on a metatextual level and a literal level. The film that the protagonist is watching for review is one layer of story; the actual world outside the film and the protagonist’s experience of it is another. Yet, somehow, it is this fictional film that lingers – the film that I feel, having read this story, I have seen myself. That Kiernan manages evoke this visceral and visual memory in a purely textual story, when giving us the film only in snippets of script and description as the protagonist relays them, is nothing short of stunning. The layer of story about the theater, the often-inexplicable immersion of the artificial screen and what is displayed on it – that layer, for a watcher of movies, is breathtaking in its simple, concise, and real observations about the nature of the medium and the nature of the time spent indulging in it.” The story was nominated for the 2014 Locus Award in the novelette category and also won the 2014 World Fantasy Award for best short fiction.
Daughter Dear Desmodus
If there were any proper name for her specific teratism, the deformity that determined the course of her life, Ileana never learned it. Her life was not filled with doctors or medical researchers to poke and prod, chart genetic abnormalities, to erect a new syndrome in her honor, and publish their exacting findings for all the world to see. That is what did not happen. Instead, she was only abandoned by horrified parents, suspecting some imp, succubus, or minor devil might have played a role in the gestation of their child. It was duly noted, with some irony, that her parents’ small farm was located within a few miles of the nowhere-in-particular crossroad burg of Batson, Mississippi. Late one night, Ileana’s mother and father (who did not bestow that name upon her) visited a carnival passing through the relative metropolis of Hattiesburg and sold the infant for the princely sum of five-hundred dollars, tax free. And so Ileana was raised by a dwarf in a rusty, battered 1966 Airstream Overlander trailer, which the dwarf (a clown) shared with the “human blockhead,” a fellow paid to insert an ice pick and nails through his sinus cavities. She grew up “where the barkers called the moon down,” among the smell of cotton candy, the reek of lion piss, the sweet perfume of camel dung, and the casual profanity of roustabouts. The owner of the carnival didn’t dare unveil her to the cake eaters who lined up for his sideshow of anatomical wonders and nightmares until she was eighteen, for fear of various and sundry child-labor laws, deviating as they do from state to state. Besides, as Ileana entered, then passed through puberty, her malformations became markedly more pronounced, and so the carnival owner considered his investment and patience a wise move, indeed.
Three nights after her birthday, after the carnival set up outside the Lawrenceville, Kansas city limits, she took her place among the other freaks. A tall section of bally canvas was painted with a somewhat less than accurate – but undeniably sensational – portrait of DESMODIA: THE BAT GIRL!!!! The name had been suggested by the fat lady, who’d once read a book on bats and remembered that some vampire bats belong to the genus Desmodus. This was plenty good enough for the owner of the carnival, and so Desmodia it was (though her dwarf foster father had long since christened her Ileana, after his grandmother, who’d died in a German concentration camp). Outside the canvas flaps, the talker shouted his blind-opening rant to every soul within earshot and then some: “Gonna have to see it to believe it! Flapper the seal boy, the Lady Mariah so corpulent she needs a forklift to get from place to place, Siamese sisters – Bethany and Bathsheba – joined at the backside, Mr. Shattertongue the Glass Eater, and Electra, the Lightning Girl! The horror and the thrill, spread out before you’re very eyes! Yesssiree! All pregnant women refused entry – apologies, show policy, and all members of the fairer sex, be warned and you take your chances! But you ain’t heard the best and worst of it yet! We’ve something new and this something beats the rest hands down, for the very first time on this very night! [pause, voice descending into a sorrowful tone] Truth be told and in all honestly, ladies and gentlemen, I do wish I’d never set eyes on this pitiful creature, found in the tropical wilds of Indonesia. Rumored to be the offspring of an unspeakable congress between a native witch and a flying fox, I wish to the Good Jesus hisself I’d never seen her, and I’ll tell you that for free. Gentlemen and mothers, when you get home, look at your dear, dear children. Love them, hold them to your bosom, and give thanks to God that you have not been cursed with a child like this! [voice rises again with former enthusiasm] Come one, come all! See the freaks of humanity!”
He went on like this for almost ten minutes, while the penny whistles and calliope, the drums and glockenspiel cacophony from the midway and the thunderous clatter of machinery and a hundred other voices filled the air. In that ten minutes (or so), sufficient tickets were sold, and incredulous, fearful, skeptical, and amused rubes filed into the darkened tent. By the light of bare electric bulbs strung overhead, they saw what they had been promised, a little more or a little less. But plenty close enough no one asked for his or her money back.
Ileana, in her first appearance as Desmodia, was the last of them all, the penultimate oddity. They’d built a sturdy wooden cage for her, and over long months she’d learned to hang upside down from a steel rod that ran from one side to the other, hanging by her three-toed feet, an accomplishment of which she was more than a little proud, and one that had made her bony legs strong and lean. So, there she dangled, almost nude as the night she was squirted from betwixt her mama’s thighs, her “wings” spread wide, teeth bared in a perpetual snarl. It hardly mattered that she was incapable of flight; the rubes didn’t know that, and what they don’t know, don’t tell them. The membranes of flesh (a patagium so thin as to be translucent) extending from her ribcage all the way to the tip ends of her long two-fingered hands; seeing that was quite enough without any aerial demonstration, thank you very much. The overall effect was significantly enhanced by the addition of scarlet contact lenses and strips of fake fur glued here and there on
to her body with spirit gum. But the jaws and teeth, those were her own, that fearsome malocclusion of maxilla and dentary, plus unnaturally sharp incisors protruding at least half an inch below her rouged lower lip. A few in the crowd caught a glimpse of the short tail, sprouting from the end of her spine, no longer than a pinkie finger. Her jet-black hair (dyed from its natural brown) hung down all the way to the straw dust covering the floor of the cage. She spat and hissed as effectively as any movie vampire ever had hissed and spat.
On cue, a terrified looking man (who usually sold candy apples) entered the enclosure and held out to her a bowl of “blood” (in actuality, a mixture of cherry Kool-Aid and a dash or two of black food coloring). She craned her neck at what seemed a completely impossible angle and lapped greedily at the liquid. Then she snarled an extra loud snarl, and the vendor of candy apples dropped the bowl of fake blood and dashed to “safety.”
Women turned away at the grisly sight and men gasped. How could such an abomination be real, and yet, there she was, and there was no denying the truth of her. Ileana had turned a trick – damned enough near to magic – to put her fellow freaks to shame: she had entered the depths of her audience’s unconscious minds, to plague their thoughts for months and even years to come. The most rational among them left the tent impressed and scrambling for a reassuring, soothing, and scientific explanation for what they’d just witnessed.
And once five more crowds had filed past, and the talker counted out the night’s bunce, and Ileana’s compatriots grumbled about “Little Miss Flutter” and “Dracula’s Daughter,” the Yale padlock on Ileana’s cage was unlocked. and she was helped into a bathrobe, then hoppled on her crutches back to the Airstream trailer. The dwarf was still busy with the nightly walkaround that was expected of all the clowns if they wished a check come payday (which, by the way, did not always come). She let herself in the trailer, and was relieved that the blockhead was also out, most likely getting drunk with the shanty and the sledge gang. Of late, he’d taken to looking at her with a desirous eye, and neither she nor the dwarf were equal to fending off his advances. She removed the contacts – which had begun to smart halfway through the show – stripped away the fake fur, and wiped away grease paint with cold cream and tissues. She worked the stiffness from her legs, which had begun to cramp after half an hour, and combed the saw dust from her pretend-ebony hair. Then she went to bed, scrambling clumsily into her upper berth above her dwarf stepfather’s lower. There she looked at photographs of beautiful women in a year-old Parisian fashion magazine (stolen from a dentist’s office) until she drifted off to sleep with the dim reading light still burning.
She dreamt the sorts of dreams that bat girls dream. She dreamt of normalcy, and she dreamt of flying. She dreamt of a phonograph playing
Twinkle, twinkle, little bat!
How I wonder where you’re at!
Up above the world you fly.
Like a tea-tray in the sky.
again and again and again (as a child, the dwarf had frequently read to her from Alice in Wonderland). But she also dreamt the familiar dream of a handsome young man who didn’t work for any carnival whatsoever, and how he told her, repeatedly, that “What is different is beautiful.” In that dream, Ileana had five fingers and five toes on each hand and on each foot, respectively, and she didn’t need crutches to walk. As always, he led her away across a summer field festooned with black-eyed Susans and lavender and Queen Anne’s Lace.
DAUGHTER DEAR DESMODUS
I believe that I often do my best work when I free myself from the tyranny of Plot, from the artifice of Story, from reader expectations of what constitutes a proper short story. I read this tale aloud at KGB Bar in Manhattan on the evening of October 16, 2013. I think it was among the best readings I’ve ever given. The phrase “where the barkers call the moon down” is borrowed from the Decemberists and Colin Meloy.
Goggles (c. 1910)
1.
Eleven-year old Samuel is sitting alone at the entrance to the Confluence Park bunkers, huddled against the hot, stinking wind, ruffling his hair even though they’ve all been forbidden to go alone to the entrance. It’s long past midnight, and the dreams have been keeping him awake again. The ruins and the storm-wracked sky outside are less frightening than the dreams - all of them taken together as a whole, or any single one of dreams. Better he sit and stare out through the gate’s iron bars, fairly certain he can be back in his berth before Miss makes her early morning rounds. He always feels bad whenever he breaks the rules, going against her orders, the dictates that keep them all alive, the children that she tends here in the sanctuary of the winding rat’s maze of tunnels. He feels bad, too, that he’s figured out a way to pick the padlock on the iron door that has to be opened in order to stare out the bars, and Samuel feels worst of all that he thinks often of picking that lock, too, and disobeying her first and most inviolable rule: never, ever leave the bunker alone. Still, regret and guilt are not enough to keep him in his upper berth, staring at the concrete ceiling pressing down less than a metre above his face.
Outside, the wind screams, and sickly chartreuse lightning flashes and jabs with its forked lightning fingers at the shattered, blackened ruins of the dead city of Cherry Creek, Colorado. Samuel shuts his eyes, and he tries to ignore the afterimages of the flashes swimming about behind his lids. He counts off the seconds on his fingers, counting aloud, though not daring to speak above a whisper – sixteen, seventeen, eighteen full seconds before the thunder reaches him, thunder so loud that it almost seems to rattle deep down in his bones. He divides eighteen by three, as Miss has taught them, and so he knows the strike was about six kilometres from the entrance to the tunnels.
Sam, that’s much too close, she would say. Now, you shut that door and get your butt back downstairs.
He might be so bold as to reply that at least they didn’t have to worry about the dogs and the rats during a squall. But that might be enough to earn him whatever punishment she was in the mood to mete out to someone who’d not only flagrantly broken the rules, but then had the unmitigated gall to sass her.
The boy opens his eyes, blinking at the lightening ghosts swirling before them. He stares at his filthy hands a moment, vaguely remembering when he was much younger and his mother was always at him to scrub beneath his nails and behind his ears. When she saw to it he had clean clothes every day, and shoes with laces, shoes without soles worn so thin they may as well be paper. He stares at the ruins and half remembers the city that was, before the War, before men set the sky on fire and seared the world.
Miss tells them it’s best not to let one’s thoughts dwell on those days. “That time is never coming back,” she says. “We have to learn to live in this age, if we’re going to have any hope of survival.”
But all they have – their clothing, beds, dishes, school books, the dwindling medicinals and foodstuffs – all of it is scavenged remnants of the time before. He knows that. They all know that, even if no one ever says it aloud.
There’s another flash of the lightning that is not quite green and not quite yellow. But this time Samuel doesn’t close his eyes or bother counting. It’s obvious this one’s nearer than the last strike. It’s obvious it’s high time that he shut the inner door, lock it, and slip back through the tunnels to the room where the boys all sleep. Miss always looks in on them about three, and she’s ever quick to notice an empty bunk. That’s another thing from the world before: her silver pocket watch that she’s very, very careful to keep wound. She’s said that it belonged to her father who died in the Battle of New Amsterdam in those earliest months of the War. Miss is, Samuel thinks, a woman of many contradictions. She admonishes them when they talk of their old lives, yet, in certain melancholy moods, she will regale them with tales of lost wonders and conveniences, of the sun and stars and of airships, and her kindly father, a physician who went away to tend wounded soldiers and subsequently died in New Amsterdam.
Walking back to his bed as quietly as he
can walk, Samuel considers those among his companions who are convinced that Miss isn’t sane. Jessamine says that, and the twins – Parthena and Hortence – and also Luther. Sometimes, when Miss has her back to them, they’ll draw circles in the air about their ears and roll their eyes and snigger. But Samuel doesn’t think she’s insane. Just very lonely and sad and scared.
We keep her alive, he thinks. Because she has all of us to tend to she’s still alive, against her recollections. He knows of lots of folks who survived the bombardments, and then the burning of the skies and the storms that followed, and whom the feral dogs didn’t catch up with, lots of those folks did themselves in, rather than face such a shattered world. Samuel thinks it was their inescapable memories of before that killed them.
He crawls back into bed, and lies on the cool sheets and stares at the ceiling until the dreams come again. In the dreams – which he thinks of as nightmares – there’s bright sunshine, green fields, and his mother’s blonde hair like spun gold. In his dreams, there’s plenty of food and there’s laughter, and no lightning whatsoever. There is never lightning, nor is there the oily rain that sizzles when it touches anything metal. He’s never told Miss about his dreams. She wouldn’t want to hear them, and she’d only frown and make him promise not to dare mention them to the others. Not that he ever has. Not that he ever will. Samuel figures they all have their own good-bad dreams to contend with.
2.
The storm lasts for two days and two nights. Miss reads to them from the Bible, and from The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, and from Mark Twain. She feeds her filthy, rawboned children the last of the tinned beef and peaches, and Samuel has begun to resign himself to the possibility that this might be the occasion on which they starve before an expedition for more provisions can be mounted.
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