Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  "Don't make no difference to me," the man says. "But don't you forget to flush, you understand me?"

  "Sure thing," Dancy says. "I understand," and she steps past him, climbs the four squeaky wooden steps up to the screen door and lets it bang shut. Inside, the musty air stinks of motor oil and dust, dirty rags and cigarette smoke, and the only light comes from the door and the fly-specked windows. The walls and floor are bare pine boards gone dark as rotten teeth, and a huge taxidermied bass hangs above the cash register. There are three short rows of canned goods, candy bars in brightly colored paper wrappers, oil and windshield wipers and transmission fluid, snack foods and mousetraps, bottles of Bayer aspirin and cherry-flavored Maalox. There's a wall of hardware and fishing tackle. She finds the tiny restroom right where he said she would, and Dancy latches the door behind her.

  * * *

  The restroom is illuminated by a single, naked incandescent bulb hanging from the ceiling. Dancy squints up at it, raises her left hand for an eclipse, and then glances at her reflection in the smudgy mirror above a sink stained by decades of iron water. She isn't sure how long it's been since she's seen herself like that; not since sometime before Bainbridge, so more than a week, at least. Her white hair is still wet from the rain, wet and tangled like a drowned thing. A drowned rabbit that spent its whole short life trapped in a cage called a hutch, maybe, and she lowers her hand so the stark light spills down on her again.

  The albino girl in the mirror lowers her hand, too, and stares back at Dancy with eyes that seem a lot older than Dancy's sixteen years. Eyes that might have been her grandmother's, if they were brown, or her mother's, if they were the easy green of magnolia leaves.

  "You should wash your face," the albino girl in the mirror says. "You look like some sort of hobo."

  "I didn't know it was so dirty," Dancy replies, embarrassed at her own raggedness, and almost adds, I thought the rain would have washed it clean, but then she thinks better of it.

  There's a stingy violet-brown sliver of soap on the sink, but when she turns on the hot water, the knob marked h, she remembers how badly she has to pee and turns the water off again. She loosens her belt, and the pearl-handled straight razor tucked into the waistband of her jeans almost falls out onto the floor. She catches it and slips it into her back pocket. The razor, like the duffel bag, was her grandfather's, and he carried both of them when he fought the Nazis in Italy and France. Dancy didn't take many things out of her grandmother's cabin in Shrove Wood before she burned it, and the bodies inside, to the ground. But she took the straight razor, because the old man had shaved with it every morning, and it helped her remember him.

  After she pees, Dancy wipes off the seat with a big wad of toilet paper, even though there's not a drop of urine on it anywhere. She drops the wad into the porcelain bowl, flushes, and the water swirls round and round like the hot wind that always swirls about her angel.

  "You look like hell," the albino girl in the mirror says and frowns.

  "I'm just tired, that's all. I didn't sleep very well last night," which is the truth. She slept a few hours in the backseat of an abandoned car that someone had stolen, stripped, and left in the woods, and her dreams were filled with images of the things she'd seen and done in Bainbridge and Shrove Wood, the angel and the things that want her dead and damned, the past and the present and the slippery, hungry future.

  Dancy turns the hot water on again and uses the yellowish sliver of soap to wash her hands, her arms, her grimy face and neck. The soap smells like soap, but it also smells very faintly of black-eyed susans and clover and sunshine, and she doesn't remember ever having smelled that sort of soap before. When she's done, she dries with brown paper towels from a chrome dispenser mounted on the wall. All that hot water's steamed up the mirror, and she uses another paper towel to wipe it clear again.

  The albino girl is still there, watching Dancy from the other side.

  "That's better," the girl in the mirror says. "Don't you think so?"

  "It feels better," Dancy says, "if that's what you mean. And I like the way that soap smells."

  "You know, I think you're running out of time," the girl in the mirror tells her, smoothing her hair with her wet hands, just like Dancy's doing. "I don't even think you're going to have to worry about Waycross, or Sinethella and her hound, or the nine crazy ladies in their big house in Savannah, not the way things are going."

  "I don't even know what you're talking about. Who's Sinethella?"

  The mirror girl looks skeptical and furrows her brow. "It hasn't even told you about-"

  "He tells me what I need to know, when I need to know it. He tells me-"

  "Just enough to keep you moving, and not one word more, because it knows the big picture would shut you down, send you running off back to the swamp with your tail tucked between your legs."

  "I don't have a tail," Dancy says, wishing the albino girl in the mirror, the girl who isn't her reflection after all, would shut up and go away.

  "You might as well, as far as the Seraphim are concerned. To them, you're nothing but a trained monkey, an ugly little freak of evolution they can swindle into wiping their Heavenly asses for them."

  "Is this another test?" Dancy asks the mirror, and she imagines balling up her fist and punching the glass as hard as she can, imagines the blood and pain, the glittering shards and the silvery sound they would make falling into the rust-stained sink.

  "Christ, you can be a tiresome little cunt," the girl in the mirror sighs, and now her face is changing, years rolling through her rose-colored eyes like waves against a sandy shore, waves to diminish her grain by grain and draw deep lines in her pale skin. And, in only a moment more, the girl in the mirror is a grown woman-thirty, thirty-five, forty-looking backwards at the lost child she was, or Dancy's only looking ahead to the lost woman she'll become, if she lives that long. Or maybe it works both ways, Dancy thinks, and she reaches out, expecting their fingers to brush, but there's only the cold, impenetrable surface of the looking glass and her own sixteen-year-old face gazing back at her again.

  "Just a trick," Dancy whispers, even though she doesn't really believe it. "The angel said there would be lots of tricks."

  The girl in the mirror says nothing more or less than Dancy says, and does nothing that she doesn't do, and Dancy Flammarion turns her back on the sink, and whatever it might, or might not, mean. She makes sure her jeans are zipped, and tightens her belt again, and unlocks the restroom door.

  * * *

  Dancy's holding a red and white can of Campbell 's chicken and stars soup, the label enough to make her mouth water, and she thinks briefly about trying to steal it before she sets it back on the shelf. She glances towards the screen door leading out to the cloudy day and the old man and the front of the Texaco station. There's a shiny black pickup truck idling by the pumps, and the old man is talking to the driver. No one who's looking for her, just someone who's stopped to buy gas or a pack of cigarettes, someone the old man knows, or maybe he talks like that to everyone who stops. Maybe he offers everyone a wintergreen Certs and tells them to be sure and flush.

  "He's a son of a bitch," she hears the old man say. "When the Good Lord was handin' out assholes, that cocksucker went back for seconds."

  The driver of the black truck laughs, laughs the way that fat men and very small demons laugh, and Dancy looks at the can of soup again.

  "Son of a whore wanted his money back," the old man says. "I told him sure thing, just as soon as ol' Gabriel starts playin' taps."

  The man from the black truck laughs again, and Dancy's empty stomach rumbles.

  And then she looks the other way, towards the rear of the store. There's another screen door back there that she didn't notice before she went into the restroom, a door with a wooden plaque hung above it, but she has to get closer to read all the words painted on it. Hyenas will howl in their fortified towers And jackals in their luxurious palaces, the plaque declares in fancy calligraphied letters like the ones
on the cover of her grandmother's old Bible. Her fateful time also will soon come And her days will not be prolonged. Isaiah 13:19-22.

  "I'm doing my part," she whispers, reaching for the brass door handle, smelling the musky wild animal smell getting in through the screen wire. "Now you better keep him busy long enough for me to finish this, you hear?"

  The angel doesn't answer her, but then it rarely ever does, so she doesn't take the silence one way or another.

  The door creaks very loudly, like the hinges have never once seen so much as a single drop of oil, the hinges and the long spring that's there to snap the door closed again. Dancy steps over the threshold, eases the noisy door shut behind her, and now she's standing on a small back porch cluttered with an assortment of crates and cardboard boxes and greasy, rusting pieces of machinery that she doesn't recognize.

  And before she even sees the cage, before she sees what's waiting in the cage, Dancy Flammarion is out on the highway again, the air filled with that thunder that isn't thunder, and the Seraph shrieks and slices the storm-damp air with its sword of fire and molten steel.

  The scorching light pouring from the angel's purple-blue eyes almost blinds her, and she turns her head away.

  In His right hand he held seven stars, and out of His mouth came a sharp double-edged sword. His face was like the sun shining in all its brilliance-

  On the porch behind the Texaco station, Dancy reaches for her knife, the big carving knife she used in Bainbridge, something else salvaged from the cabin in Shrove Wood. But her knife is still tucked safely inside the duffel bag, and her bag's out front with the old man.

  And then she sees the cage, big enough to hold at least five panthers, a great confining box of thick steel bars and seam welds and black iron bolts. But the only thing inside is a naked woman huddled in the dirt and filthy hay covering the floor of the cage. Her long auburn hair hangs about her narrow face in knots and matted coils, and her skin is so streaked with shit and mud and grime that Dancy can't be sure if she's black or white or some other color altogether. The woman looks up, her eyes so deep and dark and filled with pain, and when she speaks Dancy thinks that it's surely the most broken and desperate voice she's ever heard from simple human lips.

  "Help me," the woman pleads. "You have to help me. He's insane."

  Dancy slowly descends the four steps to the weathered square of concrete laid between the porch and the cage and stands only five or six feet back from the bars. "That old man locked you up in there?" she asks, and there are tears streaming from the woman's brown eyes, eyes the same rich brown as chocolate. She nods her head and reaches through the bars for Dancy.

  I don't have my knife, she thinks, half-praying to anything that's listening, and Dancy imagines the angel's fiery sword sweeping down to divide her careless soul from her flesh, to burn her so completely that there'll be nothing left to send to Hell.

  "He's crazy," the woman says. "He's going to kill me. Whoever you are, you have to help me."

  "He said there was a live panther back here," Dancy tells her and looks over her shoulder at the back door of the little store, wondering if the old man is still busy talking to the guy in the pickup truck about the cocksucker who went back for seconds.

  "I just told you. He's insane. He'll say anything. Please-"

  "He put you in that cage? Why'd he do that? Why didn't he just kill you?"

  "You're not listening to me!" the woman hisses and bares her teeth; her voice has changed, has grown as angry and impatient as it was desperate and broken only a few seconds before. "We don't have much time. He'll figure out you're back here and come after you."

  Dancy looks at the heavy Yale padlock holding the cage door shut, and then she looks back at the woman. "I don't have the key," she says. "How am I supposed to open that, if I don't have the key?"

  The woman's dark eyes glimmer and flash, and Dancy realizes that they're not the same color they were before, the deep and chocolate brown replaced suddenly by amber shot through with gleaming splinters of red. She retreats one step, then another, putting that much more distance between herself and the naked woman in the cage.

  "I know who you are, Dancy Flammarion. I know what you did in Bainbridge. I know about the angel." And the woman's voice has changed again, too. This is the voice of an animal that has learned to talk, or a human being who's forgetting. "I know you've been sent here to save me."

  "Who told you that?" Dancy asks, and she kicks at a loose bit of concrete, pretending that she isn't afraid. "I was just looking for the panther, that's all."

  "We don't have time for this shit," the woman growls and seizes the iron bars in both hands, and now Dancy can see the long black claws where her fingernails used to be. The naked woman, who isn't really a woman at all, slams herself against the bars so hard that the whole cage shakes and the padlock rattles loudly.

  "Now open this fucking cage!"

  "Don't you talk to me like that," Dancy says; her face feels hot and flushed, and her heart's beating so fast she thinks maybe it means to explode. "I don't care what you are, I don't like to be talked to that way."

  The thing in the cage presses its face to the bars, and its thick lips curl back to show Dancy eyeteeth that have grown long and sharp, the teeth of something that hunts for its supper, something that might even send a panther packing. Its amber eyes blaze and spark, and Dancy tries not to imagine the soul burning beneath its skin, inside that skull, a soul so hot it will wither her own if she doesn't look away.

  "What? You think you're some kind of holy fucking saint," it snarls and then makes a sound that isn't precisely laughter. "Is that it? You think you're something so goddamn pure that strong language is gonna make your ears bleed?"

  "I think maybe it's a good thing, you being in that cage," Dancy replies, almost whispering now.

  And the thing locked in the iron cage roars, half the cheated, bottomless fury in the whole world bound up in that roar, and then it slams itself against the bars again. Its bones have begun to twist and pop, rearranging themselves inside its shifting skin. Its hands have become a big cat's paws, sickle talons sheathed in velvet, and its spine buckles and stretches and grows a long tail that ends in a tuft of black fur.

  And Dancy turns to run, because she doesn't have her knife, because somehow she wasn't ready for this, no matter what she saw in Bainbridge or Shrove Wood, no matter if maybe those things were more terrible; maybe the angel was wrong about this one. She turns to run, running for the first time, and she'll worry about the angel later, but the old man is right there to stop her. He holds her firmly by the shoulders and grins down at her with his tobacco-stained teeth.

  "Where you goin', sport? I thought you wanted to see my panther?"

  "Let go of me. I told you I ain't got three dollars."

  "Hey, that's right. You did say that. So that makes this sort of like stealin', don't it? That means you owe me somethin'," and he spins her roughly around so she's facing the cage again. The thing inside has changed so much that there's hardly any trace of the cowering, filthy woman left; it paces restlessly, expectantly, from one side of the cage to the other, its burning, ravenous eyes never leaving Dancy for very long. And she can still hear its animal voice inside her head.

  You were supposed to save me, it lies. You were supposed to set me free.

  "Big ol' cat like that one there," the old man says and spits a stream of Beech-Nut onto the concrete, "she'll just about eat a fella out of house and home. And seein' as how you owe me that three bucks-"

  "Do you even know what you've got in that cage, old man? You got any idea?"

  "Near enough to know she ain't none too picky in her eatin' habits."

  "You don't hold a thing like that with steel and locks," Dancy says, matching the monster's gaze because she knows this has gone so far that it'll be worse for her if she looks away.

  "Oh, don't you fret about locks. I might not be old Mr. Merlin at the goddamn round table, but I can cast a binding good enough. Now, t
ell me somethin', Dancy," the old man says and shoves her nearer the cage. "How far d'you think you'd get after that mess you made down in Bainbridge? You think they were gonna just let you stroll away, pretty as you please?"

  And she reaches for her grandfather's straight razor, tucked into the back pocket of her jeans, not her knife but it's plenty enough to deal with this old wizard.

  "You think there's not gonna be a price to pay?" he asks, watching the thing in the cage, and he doesn't even notice until it's too late and she's folded the razor open. The blade catches the dull, cloud-filtered sun and shines it back at her.

  "Whole lot of good folks out there want you dead, sport. Lots of folks, they want you fuckin' crucified. It's only a matter of time before some ol' boy puts you down for what you done."

  But then she slips free of his big, callused hands, and before the old man can say another word, she's slashed him twice across the face, laying open his wrinkled forehead all the way to the bone and slicing a three-inch gash beneath his chin that just misses his carotid artery. The old man yelps in pain and surprise and grabs for her, but Dancy steps quickly to one side and shoves him stumbling towards the cage. He trips and goes down hard on his knees; the wet crunch of shattered bone is loud, and the thing that isn't a woman or a panther stops pacing and lunges towards the bars and the old man.

  "Yeah, that may be so," Dancy says, breathless, blood spattered across her face and T-shirt and dripping from the razor to the cracked grey concrete. "But you won't be the one to do it."

  And then the thing is on him, dragging the old man up against side of the cage, its sickle claws to part his clothes and flesh like a warm fork passing through butter, but he only screams until it wriggles its short muzzle between the bars and bites through the top of his skull. The old man's body shudders once and is still. And then the thing looks up at her, more blood spilling from its jaws, flecks of brain and gore caught in its long whiskers.