Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  And, at last, delivered across the decades, a furious red century and decades more, into the small, slender hands of Miss Aramat Drawdes, great-great-great granddaughter of a Civil War munitions merchant and unspoken matriarch of the Stephens Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists. The first female descendent of Old Ybanes not to take a husband, her sexual, social, and culinary proclivities entirely too unorthodox to permit even a marriage of convenience, but Miss Aramat keeps her own sort of family in the rambling mansion on East Hall Street. Behind yellow glazed-brick walls, azaleas and ivy, windows blinded by heavy drapes, the house keeps its own counsel, its own world apart from the prosaic customs and concerns of the city.

  And from appearances, this particular night in June is nothing special, not like the time they found the transsexual junky who'd hung herself with baling wire in Forsyth Park, or last October, when Candida had the idea of carving all their jack-o'-lanterns from human and ape skulls and then setting them out on the porches in plain sight. Nothing so unusual or extravagant, only the traditional Saturday night indulgences: the nine ladies of the League and Society (nine now, but there have been more and less, at other times), assembled in the Yellow Room. Antique velvet wallpaper the pungent color of saffron, and they sit, or stand, or lie outstretched on the Turkish carpet, the cushions strewn about the floor and a couple of threadbare rècamiers. Miss Aramat and her eight exquisite sisters, the nine who would be proper ghouls if only they'd been born to better skins than these fallible, ephemeral womanhusks. They paint their lips like open wounds, their eyes like bruises. Their fine dresses are not reproductions, every gown and corset and crinoline vintage Victorian or Edwardian, and never anything later than 1914, because that's the year the world ended, Miss Aramat says.

  A lump of sticky black opium in the tall octopean hookah, and there are bottles of burgundy, pear brandy, chartreuse, and cognac, but tonight Miss Aramat prefers the bitter Spanish absinthe, and she watches lazily as Isolde balances a slotted silver trowel on the rim of her glass. A single sugar cube, and the girl pours water from a carafe over the trowel, dissolving the sugar, drip, drip, drip, and the liqueur turns the milky green of polished jade.

  "Me next," Emily demands from her seat on one of the yellow rècamiers, but Isolde ignores her, pours herself an absinthe and sits on the floor at Miss Aramat's bare feet. She smirks at Emily, who rolls her blue, exasperated eyes and reaches for the brandy, instead.

  "Better watch yourself, Isolde," Biancabella warns playfully from her place beneath a Tiffany floor lamp, stained-glass light like shattered sunflowers to spill across her face and shoulders. "One day we're gonna have your carcass on the table."

  "In your dreams," Isolde snaps back, but she nestles in deeper between Miss Aramat's legs, anyway, takes refuge in the protective cocoon of her stockings and petticoat, the folds of her skirt.

  Later, of course, there will be dinner, the mahogany sideboard in the dining room laid out with sweetbreads des champignon, boiled terrapin lightly flavored with nutmeg and sherry, yams and okra and red rice, raw oysters, Jerusalem artichokes and a dozen deserts to choose from. Then Alma and Biancabella will play for them, cello and violin until it's time to go down to the basement and the evening's anatomizings.

  Madeleine turns another card, the Queen of Cups, and Porcelina frowns, not exactly what she was hoping for, already growing bored with Maddy's dry prognostications; she looks over her left shoulder at Miss Aramat.

  "I saw Samuel again this week," she says. "He told me the bottle has started to sing at night, if the moon's bright enough."

  Miss Aramat stops running her fingers through Isolde's curly blonde hair and stares silently at Porcelina for a moment. Another sip of absinthe, sugar and anise on her tongue, and "I thought we had an understanding," she says. "I thought I'd asked you not to mention him ever again, not in my presence, not in this house."

  Porcelina glances back down at the Tarot card, pushes her violet-tinted pince-nez farther up the bridge of her nose.

  "He says that the Jamaicans are offering him a lot of money for it."

  Across the room, Candida stops reading to Mary Rose, closes the copy of Unaussprechlichen Kulten and glares at Porcelina. "You may be the youngest," she says. "But that's no excuse for impudence. You were told-"

  "But I've seen it, with my own eyes I've seen it," and now she doesn't sound so bold, not half so confident as only an instant before. Madeleine is trying to ignore the whole affair, gathers up her deck and shuffles the cards.

  "You've seen what he wants you to see. What he made you see," Miss Aramat says. "Nothing more. The bottle's a fairy tale, and Samuel and the rest of those old conjurers know damn well that's all it will ever be."

  "But what if it isn't? What if just one half the things he says are true?"

  "Drop it," Candida mutters and opens her book again. "Yes," Mary Rose says. "We're all sick to death of hearing about Samuel and that goddamn bottle."

  But Miss Aramat keeps her bottomless hazel-green eyes on Porcelina, takes another small swallow of absinthe. She tangles her fingers in Isolde's hair and pulls her head back sharply, exposing the girl's pale throat to the room; they can all see the scars, the puckered worm-pink slashes between Isolde's pretty chin and her high lace collar.

  "Then you go and call him, Porcelina," Miss Aramat says very softly. "Tell him to bring the bottle here, tonight. Tell him I want a demonstration."

  Madeleine stops shuffling her cards, and Biancabella reaches for the brandy, even though her glass isn't empty.

  "Before four o'clock, tell him, but after three. I don't want him or one of his little boys interrupting the formalities."

  And when she's absolutely certain that Miss Aramat has finished, when Isolde has finally been allowed to lower her chin and hide the scars, Porcelina stands up and goes alone to the telephone in the hallway.

  * * *

  In the basement of the house on East Hall Street there are three marble embalming tables laid end to end beneath a row of fluorescent lights. The lights one of Miss Aramat's few, grudging concessions to modernity, though for a time they worked only by candlelight, and then incandescent bulbs strung above the tables. But her eyes aren't what they used to be, and there was Biancabella's astigmatism to consider, as well. So she bought the fluorescents in a government auction at Travis Field, and now every corner of the basement is bathed in stark white light, clinical light to illuminate the most secret recesses of their subjects.

  Moldering redbrick walls, and here and there the sandy, earthern floor has been covered with sheets of varnished plywood, a makeshift, patchwork walkway so their boots don't get too muddy whenever it rains. An assortment of old cabinets and shelves lines the walls, bookshelves and glass-fronted display cases; at least a thousand stoppered apothecary bottles, specimen jars of various shapes and sizes filled with ethyl alcohol or formalin to preserve the ragged things and bits of things that float inside. Antique microscopes, magnifying lenses, and prosthetic limbs, a human skeleton dangling from a hook screwed into the roof of its yellowed skull, each bone carefully labeled with India ink in Miss Aramat's spidery hand.

  Alma 's collection of aborted and pathologic fetuses occupies the entire northwest corner of the basement, and another corner has been given over to Mary Rose's obsession with the cranium of Homo sapiens. So far, she has fifty-three (including the dozen or so sacrificed for Candida's jack-o'-lanterns), classified as Negroid, Australoid, Mongoloid, and Xanthochroid, according T. H. Huxley's 1870 treatise on the races of man. Opposite the embalming tables is a long, low counter of carved and polished oak-half funereal shrine, half laboratory workbench-where Emily's framed photographs of deceased members of the League and Society, lovingly adorned with personal mementos and bouquets of dried flowers, vie for space with Madeleine's jumble of beakers, test tubes, and bell jars.

  Nearer the stairs, there's a great black double-doored safe that none of them has ever tried to open, gold filigree and l. h. miller safe and ironworks, balt
imore, m.d. painted on one door just above the brass combination dial. Long ago, before Miss Aramat was born, someone stored a portrait of an elderly woman in a blue dress atop the safe, anonymous, unframed canvas propped against the wall, and the years and constant damp have taken their toll. The painting has several large holes, the handiwork of insects and fungi, and the woman's features have been all but obliterated.

  "I've never even heard of a Skithian," Isolde says, reaching behind her back to tie the strings of her apron.

  "Scythian, dear," Miss Aramat corrects her. "S – C – Y, like 'scythe,' but the C and Y make a short 'i' instead of a long 'i.'"

  "Oh," Isolde says and yawns. "Well, I've never heard of them, either," and she watches as Biancabella makes the first cut, drawing her scalpel expertly between the small breasts of the woman lying on the middle table. Following the undertaker's original Y-incision, she slices cleanly through the sutures that hold the corpse's torso closed.

  "An ancient people who probably originated in Anatolia and Northern Mesopotamia," Biancabella says as she carefully traces the line of stitches. "Their kingdom was conquered by the Iranian Suoromata, and by the early Sixth Century b.c. they'd mostly become nomads wandering the Kuban, and later the Pontic Steppes-"

  Isolde yawns again, louder than before, loud enough to interrupt Biancabella. "You sound like a teacher I had in high school. He always smelled like mentholated cough drops."

  "They might have been Iranian," Madeleine says. "I know I read that somewhere."

  Biancabella sighs and stops cutting the sutures, her blade lingering an inch or so above the dead woman's navel, and she glares up at Madeleine.

  "They were not Iranian. Haven't you even bothered to read Plinius?" she asks and points the scalpel at Madeleine. "'Ultra sunt Scytharum populi, Persae illos Sacas in universum applelavere a proxima gente, antiqui Arameos.'"

  "Where the hell is Arameos?" Madeleine asks, cocking one eyebrow suspiciously.

  " Northern Mesopotamia."

  "Who cares?" Isolde mumbles, and Biancabella shakes her head in disgust and goes back to work. "Obviously, some more than others," she says.

  Miss Aramat reaches for the half-empty bottle of wine that Mary Rose has left on the table near the corpse's knees. She takes a long swallow of the burgundy, wipes her mouth across the back of her hand, smearing her lipstick slightly. "According to Herodotus, the Scythians disemboweled their dead kings," she says and passes the bottle to Isolde. "Then they stuffed the abdominal cavity with cypress, parsley-seed, frankincense, and anise. Afterwards, the body was sewn shut again and entirely covered with wax."

  Biancabella finishes with the sutures, lays aside her scalpel and uses both hands to force open the dead woman's belly. The sweet, caustic smells of embalming fluid and rot, already palpable in the stagnant basement air, seem to rise like steam from the interior of the corpse.

  "Of course, we don't have the parsley-seed," she says and glances across the table at Porcelina, "because someone's Greek isn't exactly what it ought to be."

  "It's close enough," Porcelina says defensively, and she points an index finger at the bowl of fresh, chopped parsley lined up with all the other ingredients for the ritual. "I can't imagine that Miss Whomever She Might Be here's going to give a damn one way or another."

  Biancabella begins inserting her steel dissection hooks through the stiffened flesh at the edges of the incision, each hook attached to a slender chain fastened securely to the rafters overhead. "Will someone please remind me again why we took this little quim in?"

  "Well, she's a damn good fuck," Madeleine says. "At least when she's sober."

  "And she makes a mean corn pudding," Alma adds.

  "Oh, yes. The corn pudding. How could I have possibly forgotten the corn pudding."

  "Next time," Porcelina growls, "you can fucking do it yourselves."

  "No, dear," Miss Aramat says, her voice smooth as the table top, cold as the heart of the dead woman. "Next time, you'll do it right. Or there may not be another time after that."

  Porcelina turns her back on them, then, turning because she's afraid they might see straight through her eyes to the hurt and doubt coiled about her soul. She stares instead at the louvered window above Mary Rose's skulls, the glass painted black, shiny, thick black latex to stop the day and snooping eyes.

  "Well, you have to admit, at least then we'd never have to hear about that fucking bottle again," Candida laughs, and, as though her laughter were an incantation, skillful magic to shatter the moment, the back doorbell rings directly overhead. A buzz like angry, electric wasps filtered through the floorboards, and Miss Aramat looks at Porcelina, who hasn't taken her eyes off the window.

  "You told him three o'clock?" Miss Aramat asks.

  "I told him," Porcelina replies, sounding scared, and Miss Aramat nods her head once, takes off her apron, and returns it to a bracket on the wall.

  "If I need you, I'll call," she says to Biancabella, and, taking what remains of the burgundy, goes upstairs to answer the door.

  * * *

  "Maybe Bobby and me should stay with the car," Dead Girl says again, in case the Bailiff didn't hear her the first time. Big, blustery man fiddling with his keys, searching for the one that fits the padlock on the iron gate; he stops long enough to glance back at her and shake his head no. The moonlight glints dull off his bald scalp, and he scratches at his beard and glares at the uncooperative keys.

  "But I saw a cop back there," Dead Girl says. "What if he finds the car and runs the plates? What if-"

  "We can always get another car," the Bailiff grumbles. "Better he finds a stolen car than a stolen car with the two of you sitting inside."

  "And I wanna see the ladies," Bobby chirps, swings the Bailiff's leather satchel, and Dead Girl wishes she could smack him, would if the Bailiff weren't standing right there to see her do it.

  Bobby leans close to the albino girl and stands on tiptoes, his lips pressed somewhere below her left ear. There's a piece of duct tape across her mouth, silver duct tape wrapped tight around her wrists, and Dead Girl's holding onto the collar of her Minnie Mouse T-shirt. "They're like ghouls," he whispers, "only nicer."

  "No, they're not," Dead Girl snorts. "Not real ghouls. Real ghouls don't live in great big fucking houses."

  "You'll see," Bobby whispers to Dancy. "They dig up dead people and cut them into pieces. That's what ghouls do."

  And the Bailiff finds the right key, then-"There you are, my rusty little sparrow."-and the hasp pops open and in a moment they're through the gate and standing in the garden. Dead Girl looks longingly back at the alleyway and the Monte Carlo as the Bailiff pulls the gate shut behind him, clang, and snaps the padlock closed again.

  The garden is darker than the alley, the low, sprawling limbs of live oaks and magnolias to hide the moon, crooked limbs draped with Spanish moss and epiphytic ferns. Dancy has to squint to see. She draws a deep breath through her nostrils, taking in the sticky, flowerscented night, camellias and boxwood, the fleshy white magnolia blossoms. Behind her, the Bailiff's keys jangle, and Dead Girl shoves Dancy roughly forward, towards the house.

  The Bailiff leads the way down the narrow cobblestone path that winds between the trees, past a brass sundial and marble statues set on marble pedestals, nude bodies wrapped in shadow garments, unseeing stone eyes staring after Heaven. Dancy counts her steps, listens to the Bailiff's fat-man wheeze, the twin silences where Dead Girl and Bobby's breath should be. Only the slightest warm breeze to disturb the leaves, the drone of crickets and katydids, and, somewhere nearby, a whippoorwill calling out to other whippoorwills.

  A thick hedge of oleander bushes, and then the path turns abruptly and they're standing at the edge of a reflecting pool choked with hya-cinth and water lilies; broad flagstones to ring its dark circumference, and the Bailiff pauses here, stares down at the water and rubs his beard. An expression on his face like someone who's lost something, someone who knows he'll never find it again, or it'll never find him.
>
  "What is it?" Dead Girl asks. "What's wrong?" but the Bailiff only shrugs his broad shoulders, and takes another step nearer the pool, standing right at the very edge now.

  "One day," he says. "One day, when you're older, maybe, I'll tell you about this place. One day maybe I'll even tell you what she keeps trapped down there at the bottom with the goldfish and the tadpoles."

  He laughs, an ugly, bitter sound, and Dancy makes herself turn away from the pool. She can hear the drowned things muttering to themselves below the surface, even if Dead Girl can't, the rheumy voices twined with roots and slime. She looks up at the house instead and sees they've almost reached the steps leading to the high back porch. Some of the downstairs windows glow with soft yellow light, light that can't help but seem inviting after so much darkness. But Dancy knows better, knows a lie when she sees one, and there's nothing to comfort or save her behind those walls. She takes another deep breath and starts walking towards the steps before Dead Girl decides to shove her again.

  "You still got that satchel?" the Bailiff asks, and "Yes sir," the boy with silver eyes answers and holds it up so he can see. "It's getting heavy."

  "Well, you just hang in there, boy. It's going to be getting a whole lot lighter any minute now."

  And they climb the stairs together, Dancy in the lead, still counting the paces, the Bailiff at the rear, and the wooden steps creak loudly beneath their feet. At the top, the Bailiff presses the doorbell, and Dead Girl pushes Dancy into an old wicker chair.

  "Where's your angel now?" she sneers and digs her sharp nails into the back of Dancy's neck, forcing her head down between her knees.