Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

"Well?" it growls at her. "You gonna do what they sent you here to do, or you just gonna stand there all damn day with your mouth hanging open?"

  Dancy nods her head once, wanting to tell it that there's no way she could have ever opened the cage door, even if she had the key, even if the angel hadn't told her to kill them both.

  "Then you best stop gawking and get to work."

  And Dancy wipes the bloody razor on her jeans, then folds it shut, and she runs back up the steps to the cluttered porch and the noisy screen door and the shadows waiting for her inside the little store.

  * * *

  It doesn't take her very long to find what she's looking for among the dusty shelves and pegboard wall displays, a cardboard box of Diamond kitchen matches and a one-gallon gasoline can. She takes out a handful of the wooden matches and puts them in her pocket, tears away the strip of sandpaper on the side of the box, and puts that in her pocket, as well. Then Dancy gets a paper bag from behind the cash register and also takes some of the Campbell 's chicken and stars soup and a handful of Zero bars, some Slim Jims and a cold bottle of Coca-Cola. While she's bagging the food, she hears thunder, and at first she thinks that its the angel, the angel come back around to check up on her, to be sure she's doing it right. But then there's lightning and the tat-tat-tat of rain starting to fall on the tin roof, so she knows it's only another thunderstorm. She rolls the top of the paper bag down tight and tells herself it's not stealing, not really, that she's not taking much and nothing that she doesn't need, so whatever it is, it isn't stealing.

  Over the staccato patter of the rain against the roof, she can hear the noises the cat thing in its cage is making as it tears the old man apart. She thinks about looking for a key to the cage, no matter what the angel has said. The old man might have it hidden in the register, or somewhere in the clutter behind the counter, or in an old snuff tin somewhere. She might get lucky and find it, if it's even there to be found, if she spends the rest of the afternoon searching the Texaco station. Or she might not. And anyway, there would still be the binding spell, and she wouldn't know where to begin with that.

  "It's just another monster," Dancy says, as though saying the words aloud might make it easier for her to believe them. And she remembers her mother reading to her from the Bible about King Darius and Daniel and the angel God sent down to shut the mouths of the lions in the pit. Would it even be grateful, the thing in the cage, or would it try to kill her for setting it free? And would her angel shut its mouth, or would it let the thing eat her the way it's eating the old man? Would that be her punishment for disobeying the angel's instructions?

  Then there's another thunderclap, louder than the first, loud enough to rattle the windows, and this time the lightning follows almost right on top of it, no seconds in between to be counted, no distance to calculate, and Dancy takes her brown paper bag and the matches and the gas can and goes out to the pumps. The screen door slams shut behind her, and she finds her duffel bag right where she left it with the old man, beneath the corrugated tin awning. The rain's not coming down so hard as she thought, but she has a feeling it's just getting started. She opens the duffel and tucks the paper bag inside with her clothes and the carving knife, then Dancy shoulders the heavy duffel again and steps out from beneath the cover of the awning.

  The rain feels good, the soothing tears of Heaven to wash her clean again, and she goes to the pump marked regular, switches it on, and fills the gasoline can to overflowing. Then she lays the nozzle down on the ground at her feet, and the fuel gushes eagerly out across the gravel and the mud and cement. Dancy takes a few steps back, then stands there in the rain and watches the wide puddle that quickly forms around the pumps. She wrinkles her nose at the fumes, and glances up at the low purple-black clouds sailing past overhead. The rain speckles her upturned face; it's cold, but not unpleasantly so.

  "Is this really what you want from me?" she asks the clouds, whatever might be up there staring down at her. "Is this really what happens next?" There's no answer, because the angel doesn't ever repeat itself.

  Dancy picks up the gas can, and there's a moment when she's afraid that it might be too heavy now, that the weight of the duffel bag and the full can together might be too much for her to manage. But then she shifts the duffel to one side, ignoring the pain as the thick canvas strap cuts into her right shoulder, and the can doesn't seem so heavy after all. She splashes a stream of gasoline that leads from the pumps, across the highway and then down the road for another hundred yards, before she stops and sets down the almost empty can.

  This is what I do, she thinks, taking one of the matches and the rough strip of cardboard from her pocket. Just like our cabin, just like that old church in Bainbridge, this is what I do next.

  She strikes the match and drops it onto the blacktop, and the gasoline catches fire immediately, a yellow-orange beast, undaunted by the summer rain, blooming to life to race hungrily back the way she's come. Dancy gets off the highway as quickly as she can and crouches low in a shallow, bramble- and trash-filled ditch at the side of the road. She squeezes her eyes shut and covers her ears, trying not to think about the thing in the iron cage, or the naked woman it pretended to be, or the old man who would have fed her to the monster, trying not to think of anything but the angel and all the promises it's made.

  That there will someday be an end to this, the horrors and the blood, the doubt and pain, the cleansing fires and the killing.

  That she is strong, and one day soon she will be in Paradise with her grandmother and grandfather and her mother, and even though they will know all the terrible things she's had to do for the angel, they'll still love her, anyway.

  And then she feels the sudden rush of air pushed out before the blast, and Dancy makes herself as small as she can, curling fetal into the grass and prickling blackberries, and the ancient, unfeeling earth, indifferent to the affairs of men and monsters, gods and angels, trembles beneath her.

  Bainbridge

  I. Dry Creek Road

  Only a few miles south and west of the sleeping city of electric lights and sensible paved streets, where a crooked red-clay road ends finally before nettle thickets and impassable cypress swamps leading away through the night to the twisting, marshy banks of the Flint River, sits the ruined husk of Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church. Erected sometime late in 1889 by two freed slaves from Alabama, forsaken now by any Christian congregation for more than two decades, it has become another sort of sanctuary. Four straight white walls, no longer precisely white nor standing precisely straight, rise from a crumbling foundation of Ocala Limestone to brace the sagging grey roof, most of its tar-paper shingles lost over the years to summer gales and autumn storms. In places, the roof has collapsed entirely, open wounds to expose decaying pine struts and ridge beams, to let in the rain and falling leaves and the birds and squirrels that have built their nests in the rafters. Here and there, the holes go straight through the attic floor, and on nights when the moon is bright, clean white shafts fall on the old pews and rotting hymnals. But this night there is no moon. This night there are only low black clouds and heat lightning, a persistent, distant rumble somewhere to the north of Dry Creek Road, and Dancy Flammarion stands alone on the cinderblock steps leading up to the wide front doors of the church.

  There are two dozen or more symbols drawn on the weathered doors in what looks like colored chalk and charcoal. She recognizes some of them, the one's that the angel has warned her about or that Dancy learned from her grandmother before she died-an Egyptian Eye of Horus and something that looks like a letter H but she knows is really the rune Hagal, a pentagram, an open, watchful eye drawn inside a triangle, a circle with a fish at its center. They're all there for the same reason, to keep her out, to keep whatever's hiding inside safe, as if she were the monster.

  As if she's the one the angel wants dead.

  Dancy's dreamed of this place many times, a hundred nightmares spent on this old church brooding alone at the nub end of its narrow, muddy road,
the steeple that lists a bit to one side, threatening to topple over, the tiny graveyard almost lost to blackberry briars and buckeye, ferns and polk weed. At least a hundred times, a hundred dream-sweat nights, she's walked the long path to this place, and sometimes the doors have no protective symbols to ward her off, but are standing open, waiting for her, inviting her to enter. Sometimes, the stained-glass windows and the empty window frames where all the glass has been broken out are filled with flickering orange light, like dozens of candles or maybe a bonfire someone's built inside the church. Tonight, the windows are dark, even darker than the summer sky.

  She sets her heavy duffel bag down on the cinderblocks, which were painted green a very long time ago. Now, though, most of the green paint has flaked away or is hidden beneath a thick crust of moss and lichens. Dancy opens the canvas bag, and it only takes her a moment to find what she's looking for, the big carving knife she's carried all the way from Florida and the burned-out cabin on Eleanore Road. She ties the duffel bag closed again and looks up at the sky just as a silent flash of lightning illuminates the clouds and silhouettes the craggy limbs of the trees pressing in close around the churchyard.

  "Please," she says, "if there's another way," and from the other side of the door there are sounds like small claws against the dry wood and a woman's nervous laughter, and Dancy squeezes her eyes shut.

  "I don't have to do this," she says, trying to ignore the noises coming from the church. "There must be somebody else besides me, somebody stronger or older or more-"

  Something slams itself hard against the inside of the door, and Dancy screams as the carving knife slips from her sweaty fingers-

  – and the church doors splinter and burst open, unleashing a gout of freezing, oily blackness that flows down the cinderblock steps towards her. Darkness that's not merely the absence of light, but a darkness so absolute that only in passing has it even dared to imagine the possibility of light, darkness become a living force possessed of intellect and hate, memory and appetite. It surges greedily around Dancy's legs, stickier than roofing pitch, tighter than steel jaws about her calves, and in a moment more it has begun to drag her towards the open doorway-

  – and Dancy catches the knife in the last second before it strikes the cinderblock steps, and she shakes off the deception, nothing but some unguarded scrap of childhood fear turned against her. She glances over her left shoulder, wondering if the angel's hiding itself somewhere in the trees, if it's watching just in case she needs help.

  You never needed anyone's help before, her dead mother whispers. That night at the creek, the night it dragged me down to the deep place, or that day in the Wood, you didn't need anyone's help with the first two.

  "With those first two, I had the shotgun," Dancy tells her, which is the truth, and she wishes that she'd thought to take her grandfather's Winchester out of the cabin in Shrove Wood before she burned it to the ground.

  It wasn't the shotgun killed them, her mother whispers, her voice like someone who's trying to drown and talk at the same time.

  "It helped, I reckon," Dancy says. "It was better than having nothing but this old knife. I don't know if you've noticed, but it's not even very sharp anymore."

  This time her mother doesn't bother to answer, so Dancy knows that she's alone again, no murdered ghosts and no vengeful angels, and so it's time; she takes a deep breath and stares at the doors to the old church, the peeling white paint and the symbols that have been put there to keep her out. Then Dancy uses the tip of the knife to cut something invisible into the air, something like the sign of the cross, only there are more lines and angles to it. She does it exactly the way the angel said to, her own secret magic to undo all the monsters' hexes, and then the albino girl climbs the last two steps and reaches for one of the rusted iron door handles. She isn't surprised that the door isn't locked.

  II. The Retreat to Kearvan Weal

  "It was lunacy to bring her here," snarls the Glaistig, Queen Consort to the King of Immolations, and then she bares her teeth and stamps angrily at the rough stone floor of the hall with her goatish hooves. There's still blood in her tangled ash-blonde hair, bloodstains on her long green gown and a few spatters drying on her face. It might only be her own blood, the vampire woman named Selwith Tinker thinks, or it might be the blood of the Glaistig's defeated King. Either way, it hardly seems to matter now.

  "Then tell me, my Lady, where would you have had us take it?" Selwith snarls back, staring the Glaistig directly in her simmering yellow eyes, and never mind propriety or inevitable recriminations or the Glaistig's celebrated temper. A nervous murmur begins at one end of the long hall and moves to and fro through the press of bodies, passed from one to another of the creatures who have crowded into the deep rift near the roiling, molten heart of the world. The ragged handful of captains and corporals and sergeants of the Dragon's army who have somehow survived the Weaver's latest and boldest assault upon the Dog's Bridge, all the leathery wings and skittering, jointed legs, the spiderkin and troll wives, the werewolves and demons and sloe-eyed wraith folk. The lucky ones who lived long enough to be driven back by the silver shields and lances of white light, who fled like midnight before an untimely dawn, racing one another across the hublands, over glistening lava fields and dry calderas, through ash storms and oil marshes and steam to the black dunes and beyond, past the shattered foothills and into the deep mountain passes, coming finally to the ancient gates of the Dragon's hall at Kearvan Weal. Now, as one, they cringe and draw back from the Glaistig and Selwith Tinker, from the broken but not yet dead thing lying on the floor between them.

  The Queen Consort narrows her eyes and licks at her thin, pale lips. "Should I think you wondrous brave, vampire, for dragging this filth into our last sanctuary? Did you expect there might be some reward for your fatuous audacity? The Weaver's Arch Seraph, and you bring it still breathing here amongst us."

  "And I say to you again," Selwith replies, baring her own teeth, her razor canines and incisors, and she leans nearer the Glaistig, "where would you have had me take her?"

  "Why is it still living?" the Glaistig asks and kicks viciously at the unconscious form sprawled between them. "That, my dear witless Selwith, is the question which I would put to you in this hour. Why, by all that burns, is this abomination still drawing air? Why have you not divided its wings from its shoulder blades and its head from off its throat?"

  Selwith Tinker smiles and takes one step back, then bows her head as she unsheathes her sword and holds it out to the Queen Consort. "Perhaps," she says, "it's only that I had no desire to rob my glorious Lady, newly widowed and so freshly come down from her tower into this war, of the honour of sealing all our fates. Take my own blade, my Queen, and deliver the whole world into the arms of the Weaver."

  "Don't mock me," the Glaistig growls, and the folds of her gown shift and flutter furiously. "Whatever favor you may have wrestled from my husband, do not consider it handed down to me."

  "I wouldn't dare, my Lady, neither his good favor nor his knowledge of our enemies."

  The Glaistig snorts and turns to address one of her court ministers, a tall man in vestments the color of embers and smoke. "What is this fool saying, Bartolomei?"

  The minister frowns and glances anxiously from the Queen Consort to the fallen Seraph and back again to the Glaistig. He swallows and clears his throat. When he speaks, Selwith can hear the fear in his voice.

  "This is indeed a very delicate matter, your Grace. The Weaver has invested her most terrible magics in the creation of these beings, these fiends that she's set against us. They cannot simply be killed. That is, they can die, yes, certainly, but their deaths, as best we have been able to ascertain, would trigger a sort of, well, let's say a sort of inertial countercurrent. A vortex, so to speak."

  "Please, my Lady," Selwith persists, speaking loud enough that she knows everyone and everything in the hall will hear her. "Honor me this day by striking the death blow with my humble, undeserving-"

&n
bsp; "Silence," the minister hisses and snatches the vampire's weapon from her hands. There's a dim, hesitant titter of laughter from somewhere in the crowd which the Glaistig's minister immediately stifles by rapping the butt-end of his staff sharply against the paving stones. "By this childish impudence, you hazard your own undoing, Captain Selwith," he sneers, and a moment later, the sword dissolves into wisps of iron-scented vapor that are quickly scattered by the hot wind blowing through the hall.

  "Good sirrah, I meant no offense," Selwith Tinker says, still smiling. "I assure you, I have not this day escaped the Weaver's noose only to lose my head for the sullied honor of a dead king's prized trollop."

  And this time the laughter rises like a storm, like an ugly bit of flotsam buoyed on the crest of a wave, echoing off the high obsidian walls of Kearvan Weal. The Glaistig's minister repeatedly strikes his staff against the stones to no avail, and soon the laughter has been joined by hoarse shouts and catcalls and profanities shrieked and bellowed in a dozen black tongues. Selwith stands up straight and spreads her wings, welcoming any reprisals, any challenge after the frenzied retreat from the bridge. Better to end it here, she thinks, than endure another century with the memory of that defeat, the merciless red slaughter as the Weaver's shock troops finally broke the King's lines and surged over the ramparts. Better to die now and be finished and maybe take this preening bitch down with her, than wait for the Dragon to wake or for the Weaver to track them all back to the Weal. She draws a dagger from her belt, steel forged in ages of free night before the coming of the Weaver, before this war, but the Glaistig shakes her head and turns away. The minister steps between them, and Selwith flares her nostrils and looks down at the bright and shining face of the fallen Seraph. She spits, and her saliva sizzles on its armor, the cuirass forged from platinum and gold and the fossil bone of leviathans. She stops smiling and glances up at the Glaistig's minister.