Table of Contents
Dedication
Making Her Own Light: An Introduction
Madonna Littoralis
Orpheus at Mount Pangaeum
Bridle
For One Who has Lost Herself
Ode to Edvard Munch
The Cryomancer’s Daughter (Murder Ballad No. 3)
A Child’s Guide to the Hollow Hills
The Ammonite Violin (Murder Ballad No. 4)
The Lovesong of Lady Ratteanrufer
Metamorphosis A
The Sphinx’s Kiss
The Voyeur in the House of Glass
Metamorphosis B
Skin Game
The Hole with a Girl in Its Heart
Outside the Gates of Eden
In the Dreamtime of Lady Resurrection
Anamnesis, or the Sleepless Nights of Leon Spilliaert
Scene in the Museum (1896)
The Madam of the Narrow Houses
Acknowledgments
About the Author
To the memory of Diane Arbus,
in lieu of the eloquence of silence.
Making Her Own Light:
An Introduction
by Jeff VanderMeer
Some writers cannot help themselves. Some writers, by the sheer complexity and reach of their imaginations, will always be somewhat unclassifiable. For this reason, it’s their view of the world we value, not the category in which a publisher places them. These are the writers who create what they find to be perfectly normal, only to be told it is strange. Such writers I value the most, for they are sui generis. Caitlín R. Kiernan is one of these writers, and in The Ammonite Violin &’ Others she goes to very strange places, indeed.
In effect, she has created a collection that positions supernatural elements of myth and folktale in a place far more primal than even their original context, In a radical move that no doubt came to her as naturally as a dolphin takes to swimming, Kiernan has managed, through texture and point of view, to show us the reality of these archetypes. Angela Carter, in a collection like The Bloody Chamber; reclaimed iconic stories for feminism, but still used her lush prose in a stylized way that mimicked the flatness of tales, which are generally two-dimensional compared to short stories. Kiernan has accomplished something much more subversive—hers is a kind of dirty, modern lyricism. Like many of the Decadents, her prose is, yes, lush, but it’s also muscular, allows for psychologically three-dimensional portraits of her characters, and has the flexibility to be blunt, even shocking. Mermaids, selkies, vampires, and fairies all make appearances in this collection. However, the method of description and storytelling creates a sheer physicality and alien quality to the context for these creatures that both humanizes them—in the sense of making them real, if not always understandable—and makes it impossible to see them as just people in disguise or as caricatures we can dismiss because they exist solely for our passing frisson of unease or terror (which is so often the case when writers describe “monsters”).
Part of this authenticity—part of the reason I find them disturbing—comes from the simple fact that the people in these stories don’t really survive their encounter with the supernatural. Whether in, among others, “Madonna Littoralis” or the two “Metamorphosis” stories, this inability to survive can be literal or figurative, or both—and it occurs because the supernatural isn’t so much something terrifying in Kiernan’s view—it can be, but that’s not the true point. The supernatural to Kiernan is also something beautiful and unknowable in intent, and often wedded to the natural world. In a sense, trying to know something unknowable will always destroy the seeker.
In almost all of these stories, too, the characters seem to encounter the supernatural as part of a need for connection, even if the thing they connect with is Other and will be the death of them. And, once the connection is made, the implications of that passing over; are never what they might have seemed to be before the crossing. For example, the powerful, controlled yet intensely interior narrative “The Cryomancer’s Daughter (Murder Ballad No. 3)” burns with its description of an obsessed, unequal relationship: “... 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.” That there is often a graphic sexual component to these stories shouldn’t come as a surprise—it supports this idea of trying to connect, even if the connection can turn from erotic to grotesque, the two elements commingling until it’s not always clear which is which.
Kiernan also discards the typical plots that you see in fantasy or supernatural fiction. There are few twists here, little action in the conventional sense. Such artifice would form a barrier to getting at truths about the relationships in these stories, some of which form intricate snapshots of dysfunction and the attempt to communicate (underscoring that even in normal human relationships, we are all encased in our separate skulls and, ultimately, unknowable).
This focus contributes to the sense that we’re reading something new here, even though these stories fit comfortably within Kiernan’s overall oeuvre—something that is unrelenting in peeling away layers of falsehood in an attempt to get somewhere real. It’s not just the characters but readers who receive what seem like true glimpses of what it might be like to encounter the inexplicable, with all blinders off, stripped of any niceties. I won’t lie—Kiernan’s approach can be brutal at times, the true fodder for nightmares, but it’s also brave and true.
“A Child’s Guide to the Hollow Hills” exemplifies these qualities, with its depiction of a faerie girl mistreated by the Queen of Decay. She’s trapped by the Queen when she chases a lizard—“verdant, iridian, gazing out at me with crimson eyes”—through the forest and becomes a slave, and then even less than that.
The descriptions in this story, which serve to underscore the themes, are devastatingly brilliant. The Queen is “fashioned of some viscous, shapeless substance that is not quite flesh, but always there is the dim impression of leathery wings, as of some immense bat, and wherever the Queen brushes against the girl, there is the sensation of touching or being touched by matted fur and the blasted bark of dying, lightning-struck trees.” The girl sits on a “black bed far below the forest floor,” while the “Queen of Decay moves across her like the eclipse of the sun,” surrounded by “mirrors hung on bits of root and bone and the fishhook mandibles of beetles.”
Here, then, is the true terrible unknownbleness of that which is often sanitized or only brought forward for our amusement, revealed as terrible because we cannot truly fathom it. Even more important, perhaps, is the sense that this is all part of the natural cycle from the faerie Queen’s point of view, as much as the pattern of the seasons, and that the natural world around us is a deeply alien place, even though we try so hard to control it. Thus, it’s appropriate that the story ends with the lizard that led the girl to her fate. The lizard is the real main character in “A Child’s Guide to the Hollow Hills,” the secret sharer: that which we forever chase without realizing the depths of what we chase. It’s a stunner of a story, and it’s one that only Kiernan could have written.
Throughout The Ammonite Violin & Others, these moments proliferate, mixed with moments of pure horror—“It’s loose in the room with us,” “I cannot look away”—that always serve to support something beyond just unsettling us. These stories are, ultimately, driven by deeply human, deeply humane, deeply secret moments.
In the second story in The Ammonite Violin & Others the beleaguered narrator tells the reader, “There are things that are born into darkness and live their entire lives in darkness, in deep places, and they’ve learned to make whate
ver light they need. It sprouts from them, lanterns of flesh to dot the abyss like bare bulbs strung on electrical cords, and I wish I could make my own light at the bottom of the walls of the earth.”
Caitlín K. Kiernan creates her own light in this remarkable collection, and shines it on dark places. In doing so, she gives us gritty, lyrical, horrible, beautiful truths.
Madonna Littoralis
Like the hooves of Neptune’s horses or only the waves breaking themselves upon the shore, my thoughts have broken apart again, shattered white foam spray on sharp granite boulders, and I’m staring at the tub or I’m staring at you stretched out naked upon my bed or I’m staring into that other darkness huddled beneath the rocks. That darkness filled up with the semen reek of seaweed and stranded things, with the sound of dripping water and lapping water and someone whispering half to herself, and I do not know if I’m meant to listen or to turn away. I always turn away, in time, when push comes to shove, but for now I listen, and the bathroom light off the old tub glints too brightly incandescent from cast iron enameled white and rusted claw feet on ceramic tiles the color of a broken promise. I listen, and you pause, smile that smile that will never stop frightening me, and then continue again.
“Jenny Haniver,” you say. And I ask Who? What was that? and so you whisper the name again—“Jenny Haniver.”
The cold Massachusetts night, night below the lighthouse and the sand and the rocks, in that hollow the sea has worried deep into the edge of the world, and I am crouched at the entrance, because I haven’t yet found the courage to crawl inside. That would be felo-de-se, just like the white bathtub, and you roll over onto your back and smile for me.
“Oh, it’s a pathetic, shriveled thing,” you say. “An ape above, a mackerel below. Yon know the sort. Even P. T. Barnum had his Fiji mermaid.”
I squint into the stinking sea-cave darkness, seeing nothing at all and thinking that I really should have brought a kerosene lantern or a flashlight. Knowing that I never have and likely never will. It’s not permitted; there will be light, of a sort, farther along.
“The Fiji mermaid,” you say again, repeating yourself because I must be hard of hearing. “Exhibited throughout North America and the Continent in 1840, ’41, and ’42, to the wonder and astonishment of thousands of naturalists and other scientific and scholarly persons, whose previous doubts as to the existence of such an astonishing creation were entirely removed.”
“Now you sound like a carnival barker,” I say, and there’s that smile again.
“Step right up,” you say. “Just two bits, my lady, and I’ll show you everything there is to see.” And you spread your legs wide, and for a long, disquieting moment I can seem to find no difference between the sea cave aid your exposed sex. I cannot, for that moment, place myself in time or space, and it might be night on Cape Anne or only another night in my room. My dislocation passes, slowly, and the lamp light casts your restless shadow on the walls.
“Something I haven’t seen before?” I ask, and your laughter is an undertow dragging me down and down and down, silver bubbles leaking from my lips and racing towards the drowning sky. You draw your knees together once again, hiding the passage below the lighthouse, hiding my dreams, and roll over so your back’s to me.
“You don’t ask much, do you?” and I don’t want to answer, but I answer, anyway. I always answer. Then I want to know if it was really from Fiji, the Fiji mermaid.
“Who knows. Barnum leased the thing from a man named Moses Kimball for twelve dollars and fifty cents a week.”
I look over my shoulder, because there’s unexpected music from the hallway; I turn towards the open bedroom door and stare out the entrance of the cave at the waning moon laying molten silver across the Atlantic. I know that the two of you—you and her—are coconspirators, secret accomplices, comrades in my undoing. Wicked, wicked things, my loves, my licentious saints of tide and beached whales and dry, salt-stained kisses.
“Stop stalling,” you say. “Come to bed. I’m so cold,” and I turn back and stare at your shoulders and keep my seat. The moon is one night past full now, a pocked and shining coin tacked up somewhere beyond the window pane.
And sang in a voice so hoarse,
“My comrades and my messmates,
Oh, do not weep for me,
For I’m married to a mermaid,
At the bottom of the deep blue sea.”
I have been down here so many times that I’ve long ago lost count. Awake and dreaming, I’ve traced the winding path between the low dunes and through the rocks, past the winking, whitewashed tower of the Annisquam lighthouse. When the tide is out, I can always reach the cave, and she is almost always there, the lady and her court, the maiden empress of urchins and stingrays. If I were a sane woman, I’d go home to Boston and forget what I’ve seen and done. But if I were merely sane, I would never have found this place.
I wonder how many have died here, how many have lost their way or lingered too long, hypnotized by the siren songs, by her hurricane voice and the booming voice of the ocean echoing off the high granite walls, and then found themselves trapped when the moon dragged the waves back in again. I’ve seen their bones, crusty and sharp with tiny barnacles, green with algae. I’ve seen skulls that have become cradles for anemones and scuttling crabs. Before it’s done, I’ll take my place among them. I know this because she’s told me so again and again. There was a time when that knowledge frightened me. There was a time when I still valued my life more than the sight of her.
I wonder what it will take to get the tub clean.
“I’m growing bored,” you say and sigh and roll over onto your back again. “Are you going to sit there all night or are you going to fuck me?”
He said that as he went down,
Great fishes he did see;
They seemed to think as he did wink,
That he was rather free.
“Soon the stitches will have to come out,” you say and laugh, and I’m not imagining that you’re laughing at me.
“People believed in it, the Fiji mermaid?” I ask.
“People believe what pleases them most. People see what they want to believe. Show them a baby orangutan sewn to a fish’s tail, a little papier-mâché, and they’ll see what they want to see.”
I close my eyes, shutting out the cold light through the window, and what was that name you used? Jenny Haniver, Jenny Hanvers, Antwerp Anvers, jeune de Antwerp...
She came at once unto him,
And gave him her white hand,
Saying, “I have waited long, my dear,
To welcome you to land.
Go to your ship and tell them,
You’ll leave them all for me...”
I don’t remember standing and walking to the bed. I can’t recall standing over you or taking off my dress and my stockings and my boots. Your eyes are black and bottomless, and your teeth are razor shards of alabaster set in purple gums.
... For you’re married to a mermaid
At the bottom of the deep blue sea.
“Yes, that’s my girl,” you murmur, and your breath is no different from the air imprisoned beneath the lighthouse, sea-damp exhalations from the crystalline lips of the cave. “My father was a taxidermist,” you whisper playfully in my ear. “My mother was a shark got caught on his line. They made me from love and needles, from fish heads and silken thread.”
“Maybe they should have thrown you back,” I say, and my fingertips brush quickly across your glistening thighs, then loiter a moment on your pale belly. I touch the smooth place where your navel should be.
“Maybe they did,” you reply.
I am very near the heart of the cave now, moving past twin columns carved and shaped by the constant attentions of the sea, the perfect lancet archway fashioned by nameless architects, its keystone marked by the idiot countenance of some dim, abyssal god. And here is the pool, glowing phosphorescent with the false light of jellyfish and tiny squids, the yellow-green glow of a hu
ndred thousand coelenterate tendrils washed up here and clinging to the rocks. She’s floating facedown in the shallow water just a little ways out from the pool’s nearest edge, her long hair spread wide for a strangling halo, the fins along her spine sagging limp and tattered, and a more careless or indifferent eye might easily mistake her for a dead thing.
I look away from the tub. There are spatters and bloody smears on the floor at my feet, already drying to a crust. There’s more blood waiting in the sink, clinging to the scalpels and Metzenbaum scissors I dropped there when she finally stopped breathing, the retractors and stainless steel hooks and hemostatic forceps. Blood in the tub and on the floor, in the sink and on my hands. All the cleaning to be done, though I’m so tired that I only want to close my eyes and pray she’ll have given my dreams back to me. Certainly, she has no use for them now, for the sea is ever dreaming, that ever slumbering, sunless kingdom of nightmares which lies so many thousands of leagues down, balanced always oil the bright edge of waking.
“Did you actually write that?” you ask me, and I nod yes. You shake your head and frown; your lower lip looks swollen. “Well, it’s wretched,” you tell me. “No wonder no one will publish your silly book. Is that really the best that you can do?”
Later, I’ll admit there’s much more blood than I’d expected. Later, I’ll say something like, “You’d have thought that I’d used a hacksaw and an axe.” I reach for a clean towel to wipe some of it away.
And you impatiently guide my left hand to the cleft between your legs, the skin shaved smooth, and the ocean inside you is beginning to leak out. It moistens my rough fingertips with a few sticky drops of brine, and you’re still talking, describing again for me exactly how it should be done.
“You would tightly bind my legs before making the first incision,” you whisper, as if someone else might overhear. “You would press the blade here and draw it slowly down.”
I’m in the cave beneath the lighthouse, and outside, the ocean roars and rages as I wade into the glowing pool. The water is cold enough to steal my breath, and I pause, gasping as it washes about my legs and quickly soaks through my woolen trousers. At that moment, I can almost believe it is a conscious thing, that chill, and that it means to drive me shivering back out onto the rocks. The jealous souls of all those who have come before me to keep her safe and keep her distant and keep her to themselves.
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