by Paula Guran
I could have started by explaining that I happen to own one of those old houses along Euclid, passed down to me from my paternal grandparents. I could have begun with the antique bridle, which I found wrapped in a moth-eaten blanket, hidden at the bottom of a steamer trunk in the attic, or . . . I could have started almost anywhere. With my bad dreams, for example, the things I only choose to call my bad dreams out of cowardice. The dreams—no, the dream, singular, which has recurred too many times to count, and which is possibly my shortest and most honest route to this confession.
(No, I didn’t kill the boy, if that’s what you’re thinking. I’m no proper murderess. It’ll never be so simple as that. This is a different sort of confession.)
In the dream, I’m standing alone on the little stone bridge, standing there stark naked, and the park is washed in the light of a moon that is either full or very near to full. I have no recollection of getting out of bed, or of having left the house, or of the short walk down to the bridge. I’m cold, and I wonder why I didn’t at least think to wear my robe and slippers. I’m holding the bridle from the trunk, which is always much heavier than I remember it being. Something’s moving in the water, and I want to turn away. Always, I want to turn away, and when I look down I see that the drowned boy floating in the water smiles up at me and laughs. Then he sinks below the surface, or something unseen pulls him down, and that’s when I see the girl, standing far out near the center of the pool, bathing in one of the fountains.
A week ago, I laid the pen down after that last sentence, and I had no intention of ever picking it up again. At least, not to finish writing this. But there was a package in the mail this afternoon—a cardboard mailing tube addressed to me—and one thing leads to another, so to speak. The only return address on the tube was Chicago, IL 60625. No street address or post-office box, no sender’s name. And I noticed almost immediately that the postmark didn’t match the Chicago zip. The zip code on the postmark was 93650, which turns out to be Fresno, California. I opened the tube and found two things inside. The first was a print of a painting I’d never seen before, and the second was a note neatly typed out and paper-clipped to a corner of the print, which read as follows:
A blacksmith from Raasay lost his daughter to the Each Uisge. In revenge, the blacksmith and his son made a set of large hooks, in a forge they set up by the lochside. They then roasted a sheep and heated the hooks until they were red hot. At last, a great mist appeared from the water and the Each Uisge rose from the depths and seized the sheep. The blacksmith and his son rammed the red-hot hooks into its flesh and, after a short struggle, dispatched it. In the morning there was nothing left of the creature apart from a foul jelly-like substance.
(More West Highland Tales; J. F. Campbell, 1883)
The print was labeled on the back, with a sticker affixed directly to the paper, as The Black Lake by Jan Preisler, 1904. It shows a nude young man standing beside a tall white horse at the edge of a lake that is, indeed, entirely black. The horse’s mane is black, as well, as is its tail and the lower portions of it legs. The young man is holding some black garment I can’t identify. The sticker informed me that the original hangs in the Nárdoni Gallerie in Prague. I sat and stared at it for a long time, and then I came back upstairs and picked up this pen again.
These are only words. Only ink on paper.
I had the dream again tonight, and now it’s almost dawn, and I’m sitting in my study at my desk, trying to finish what I started.
And I am standing on the stone bridge in the park, standing naked under the full moon, and I can hear the fountains, all that water forced up and then spattering down again across the pool, which, in my dream, is as black as the lake in Preisler’s painting. The girl’s wading towards me, parting the muddy, dark water with the prow of her thighs, and her skin is white and her long hair is black, black as ink, the ink in this pen, the lake in a picture painted one hundred and two years ago.
Her eyes are black, too, and I can read no expression in them. She stops a few yards from the bridge and gazes up at me. She points to the heavy bridle in my hands, and I hold it out for her to see. She smiles, showing me a mouthful of teeth that would be at home in the jaws of some devouring ocean thing, and she holds both her arms out to me. And I understand what she’s asking me to do, that she wants me to drop the bridle into the pool. I step back from the edge of the bridge, moving so slowly now I might as well be mired to the ankles in molasses; she takes another quick step towards me, and her teeth glint in the moonlight. I clutch the bridle more tightly than before, and the bit and curb chains jingle softly.
I found this online an hour or so after I opened the mailing tube and copied it down on a Post-it note, something from a website, “Folklore of the British Isles”—There was one way in which a kelpie could be defeated and tamed; the kelpie’s power of shape shifting was said to reside in its bridle, and anybody who could claim possession of it could force the kelpie to submit to their will.
One thing leads to another.
In my dream, I have laid the bridle in the fallen leaves gathered about the base of a drinking fountain that hasn’t worked in decades, setting it a safe distance from the water, and she’s standing at the edge of the pool, waiting for me. I go to her, because I can’t imagine what else I would ever do. She takes my hand and leads me down into the cold black water. She kisses me, presses her thin, pale lips to mine, and I taste what any drowning woman might taste—silt and algae, fish shit and all the fine particulate filth that drifts in icy currents and settles, at last, to the bottoms of lakes that have no bottoms. Her mouth is filled with water, and it flows into me like ice. Her piranha’s teeth scrape against my cheek, drawing blood. She laughs and whispers in a language I can’t understand, a language that I can somehow only vaguely even hear, and then she’s forcing me down into the muck and weeds beneath the bridge. She cups my left breast in one hand, and I can see the webbing between her fingers.
And then . . .
Then we are riding wild through the midnight streets of the city, her hooves pounding loud as thunder on the blacktop, and no one we pass turns to look. No one sees. No one would dare. I tangle my fingers in her black mane, and the wind is a hurricane whisper in my ears. We pass automobiles and their unseeing drivers. We pass shops and restaurants and service stations closed up for the night. We race along a railroad track past landscapes of kudzu and broken concrete, and the night air smells of creosote and rust. I think the ride will surely never end. I pray that it will never end, and I feel her body so strong between my legs.
Beneath the stone bridge, she slides her fingers down and across my belly, between my legs. The mud squelches beneath us, and she asks me for the bridle, stolen from her almost two hundred years ago, when she was tricked into leaving her lake. She promises no harm will ever come to me, at least no harm from her, if only I will return the bridle, a bewitched and fairie thing that is rightfully hers and which I have no conceivable use for.
Her hooves against the streets seem to rattle the stars above us, seem to loosen them from their places in the firmament. I beg her to let the ride never end. I promise her everything, except the old bridle.
In the fetid darkness beneath the bridge, away from the glare of the moon, her eyes blaze bright as burning forests, and she slips two fingers deep inside me. More words I can’t understand, and then more that I do, and I imagine myself crawling back to the spot where I left the bridle lying next to the broken drinking fountain. I imagine myself giving it to her.
Her hooves are thunder and cyclones, cannon fire and the splintering of bedrock bones deep within the hearts of ancient mountains. I am deaf and blind and there is nothing remaining in the universe except her. In another instant, my soul will flicker out, and she will consume even the memory of me.
And then I see the dead boy watching me, standing near the bridge and watching as she fucks me, or he’s watching from a street corner as we hurry past. Holes where his eyes once were, holes the hungry
insects and birds have made, but I know that he can see us, nonetheless. One does not need eyes to see such things. Indeed, I think, eyes only blind a woman or a dead boy to the truth of things as terrible as the white woman leaning over me or the black horse bearing me along deserted avenues. And he is a warning, and I see him dragged down and down into depths only the kelpie can find in a knee-deep pool in a city park. The air rushes from his lungs, bleeds from his mouth and nostrils, and streams back towards the surface. I see him riding her all the way to the bottom, and I push her away from me.
The night is filled with the screams of horses.
And I come awake in my bed, gasping and sweat-drenched, sick to my stomach and fumbling for the light, almost knocking the lamp off the table beside my bed. My skin is smeared with stinking mud, and there’s mud on the white sheets and green-gray bits of weed caught in my wet hair. When I can walk, I go to the shower and stand beneath the hot water beating down on me, trying to forget again, and afterwards, I take the soiled sheets down to the washing machine in the basement. Again. And, the last part of this ritual, I find a flashlight and go to the trunk in the attic to be sure that the bridle is still there, wrapped safe inside its wool blanket.
Caitlín R. Kiernan’s award-winning short fiction has been collected, to date, in fourteen volumes, one of which, The Ape’s Wife and Other Stories received the World Fantasy Award. Novels include The Red Tree and The Drowning Girl: A Memoir (winner of the James Tiptree, Jr. Award and the Bram Stoker Award, nominated for the Nebula, Locus, Shirley Jackson, World Fantasy, British Fantasy, and Mythopoeic awards). Mid-World Productions has optioned both to develop into feature films. Kiernan is currently writing the screenplay for The Red Tree.
Fishmere is a crumbling town that never really came to much. There are some decent neighborhoods, but shadowy streets, vacant lots, and dead brick buildings eclipse them. It’s also the only place to find the magic Spell of the Last Triangle.
The Last Triangle
Jeffrey Ford
I was on the street with nowhere to go, broke, with a habit. It was around Halloween, cold as a motherfucker in Fishmere—part suburb, part crumbling city that never happened. I was getting by, roaming the neighborhoods after dark, looking for unlocked cars to see what I could snatch. Sometimes I stole shit out of people’s yards and pawned it or sold it on the street. One night I didn’t have enough to cop, and I was in a bad way. There was nobody on the street to even beg from. It was freezing. Eventually I found this house on a corner and noticed an open garage out back. I got in there where it was warmer, lay down on the concrete, and went into withdrawal.
You can’t understand what that’s like unless you’ve done it. Remember that Twilight Zone where you make your own hell? Like that. I eventually passed out or fell asleep, and woke, shivering, to daylight, unable to get off the floor. Standing in the entrance to the garage was this little old woman with her arms folded, staring down through her bifocals at me. The second she saw I was awake, she turned and walked away. I felt like I’d frozen straight through to my spine during the night and couldn’t get up. A splitting headache, and the nausea was pretty intense too. My first thought was to take off, but too much of me just didn’t give a shit. The old woman reappeared, but now she was carrying a pistol in her left hand.
“What’s wrong with you?” she said.
I told her I was sick.
“I’ve seen you around town,” she said. “You’re an addict.” She didn’t seem freaked out by the situation, even though I was. I managed to get up on one elbow. I shrugged and said, “True.”
And then she left again, and a few minutes later came back, toting an electric space heater. She set it down next to me, stepped away and said, “You missed it last night, but there’s a cot in the back of the garage. Look,” she said, “I’m going to give you some money. Go buy clothes. You can stay here and I’ll feed you. If I know you’re using, though, I’ll call the police. I hope you realize that if you do anything I don’t like I’ll shoot you.” She said it like it was a foregone conclusion, and, yeah, I could actually picture her pulling the trigger.
What could I say? I took the money, and she went back into her house. My first reaction to the whole thing was to laugh. I could score. I struggled up all dizzy and bleary, smelling like the devil’s own shit, and stumbled away.
I didn’t cop that day, only a small bag of weed. Why? I’m not sure, but there was something about the way the old woman talked to me, her unafraid, straight-up approach. That, maybe, and I was so tired of the cycle of falling hard out of a drug dream onto the street and scrabbling like a three-legged dog for the next fix. By noon, I was pot high, downtown, still feeling shitty, when I passed this old clothing store. It was one of those places like you can’t fucking believe is still in operation. The mannequin in the window had on a tan leisure suit. Something about the way the sunlight hit that window display, though, made me remember the old woman’s voice, and I had this feeling like I was on an errand for my mother.
I got the clothes. I went back and lived in her garage. The jitters, the chills, the scratching my scalp and forearms were bad, but when I could finally get to sleep, that cot was as comfortable as a bed in a fairy tale. She brought food a couple times a day. She never said much to me, and the gun was always around. The big problem was going to the bathroom. When you get off the junk, your insides really open up. I knew if I went near the house, she’d shoot me. Let’s just say I marked the surrounding territory. About two weeks in, she wondered herself and asked me, “Where are you evacuating?”
At first I wasn’t sure what she was saying. “Evacuating?” Eventually, I caught on and told her, “Around.” She said that I could come in the house to use the downstairs bathroom. It was tough, ’cause every other second I wanted to just bop her on the head, take everything she had, and score like there was no tomorrow. I kept a tight lid on it till one day, when I was sure I was going to blow, a delivery truck pulled up to the side of the house and delivered, to the garage, a set of barbells and a bench. Later when she brought me out some food, she nodded to the weights and said, “Use them before you jump out of your skin. I insist.”
Ms. Berkley was her name. She never told me her first name, but I saw it on her mail, “Ifanel.” What kind of name is that? She had iron-gray hair, pulled back tight into a bun, and strong green eyes behind the big glasses. Baggy corduroy pants and a zip-up sweater was her wardrobe. There was a yellow one with flowers around the collar. She was a busy old woman. Quick and low to the ground.
Her house was beautiful inside. The floors were polished and covered with those Persian rugs. Wallpaper and stained-glass windows. But there was none of that goofy shit I remembered my grandmother going in for: suffering Christs, knitted hats on the toilet paper. Every room was in perfect order and there were books everywhere. Once she let me move in from the garage to the basement, I’d see her reading at night, sitting at her desk in what she called her “office.” All the lights were out except for this one brass lamp shining right over the book that lay on her desk. She moved her lips when she read. “Good night, Ms. Berkley,” I’d say to her and head for the basement door. From down the hall I’d hear her voice come like out of a dream, “Good night.” She told me she’d been a history teacher at a college. You could tell she was really smart. It didn’t exactly take a genius, but she saw straight through my bullshit.
One morning we were sitting at her kitchen table having coffee, and I asked her why she’d helped me out. I was feeling pretty good then. She said, “That’s what you’re supposed to do. Didn’t anyone ever teach you that?”
“Weren’t you afraid?”
“Of you?” she said. She took the pistol out of her bathrobe pocket and put it on the table between us. “There’s no bullets in it,” she told me. “I went with a fellow who died and he left that behind. I wouldn’t know how to load it.”
Normally I would have laughed, but her expression made me think she was trying to tell me something.
“I’ll pay you back,” I said. “I’m gonna get a job this week and start paying you back.”
“No, I’ve got a way for you to pay me back,” she said and smiled for the first time. I was ninety-nine percent sure she wasn’t going to tell me to fuck her, but, you know, it crossed my mind.
Instead, she asked me to take a walk with her downtown. By then it was winter, cold as a witch’s tit. Snow was coming. We must have been a sight on the street. Ms. Berkley, marching along in her puffy ski parka and wool hat, blue with gold stars and a tassel. I don’t think she was even five foot. I walked a couple of steps behind her. I’m six foot four inches, I hadn’t shaved or had a haircut in a long while, and I was wearing this brown suit jacket that she’d found in her closet. I couldn’t button it if you had a gun to my head and my arms stuck out the sleeves almost to the elbow. She told me, “It belonged to the dead man.”
Just past the library, we cut down an alley, crossed a vacant lot, snow still on the ground, and then hit a dirt road that led back to this abandoned factory. One story, white stucco, all the windows empty, glass on the ground, part of the roof caved in. She led me through a stand of trees around to the left side of the old building.
From where we stood, I could see a lake through the woods. She pointed at the wall and said, “Do you see that symbol in red there?” I looked but all I saw was a couple of Fucks.