Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Look at me, Julia, the angel says. Turn and behold me. Look upon me and know that I am but one fraction of the innumerable host of the Ancient of Days.

  "Go away," Julia replies. "I don't want to listen to you anymore. You make me angry, and I don't want to be angry at the end."

  The angel howls and hacks at the morning air with its four wings like hatchets of flame. The air around Julia grows uncomfortably warm and a patch of the sea in front of her has begun to boil violently.

  "It's still my choice," she says again. "Now leave me alone. Go haunt someone else."

  Waves rushing up the sand towards her are dappled with the corpses of tiny silver fish and a small crab that have been boiled alive.

  "It's still my choice," Julia says for the third time.

  And then the angel is gone, and the sea has stopped bubbling. She waits a moment, then glances over her shoulder. Ten or fifteen feet behind her, there's a star-shaped place where the sand has been melted into a glassy crust. Back towards the motel, the man with the guitar is still sitting on his produce crate. He waves at her, and Julia waves back. And then she turns and wades into the surf, grateful now it's so cold that the waves breaking about her calves take her breath away. The sea has already swept the boiled fish farther down the beach. She shuts her eyes and recites the Lord's Prayer. She thinks of her mother and her father and the old cabin in Shrove Wood, and she thinks about the mostly wonderful week she's had in Pensacola Beach and Gulf Breeze, a whole lifetime in only six days, six days and a morning. She reminds herself it's more than a lot of people get, and when the water is as high as her waist, Julia opens her eyes and starts to swim.

  VI. The Forsaken Church

  After the unlocked doors and the things she saw coiled up in a corner of the foyer, things that might have been dead or might only have wanted her to think that they were dead, Dancy Flammarion stands between the rows of broken and upturned pews, already halfway down the aisle to the wrecked altar. She's surprised that there are so many of them hiding out in the old church and wishes the angel might have been just a little more specific. They line the walls, black figures blacker than the summer night, shadows of shadows, and some of them have taken seats in the pews; several have slipped in behind her, blocking her way back to the doors. They have no faces, though a few of them might have eyes, brighter smudges of shadow set into their indistinct skulls. Some of them seem to have wings, and others move about on all fours like bobcats or coyotes made of spilled India ink, but most of them stand up straight and tall, as if they might fool her into thinking they were once men and women. They whisper expectantly among themselves, and here and there one of them sniggers nervously or grinds its teeth or taps its long claws against the back of a varnished pew.

  "Will she kill us all?" one of them asks.

  "What? With that silly little knife?" asks another.

  "Perhaps we should choose a champion," another of the black figures suggests and several of them begin to laugh.

  Dancy licks her lips, her mouth gone dry as dust, and she holds the carving knife out in front of her.

  "Will you look at that now," one of them cackles and takes a step towards her. "She's a regular white-trash Joan of Arc, wouldn't you say? Our Lady of Rags and Swamp Gas." And for a time, the old church fills up with the sound of their laughter. Dancy grips the wooden hilt of the knife and waits for whatever it is that she's supposed to do.

  "We've been watching for you child," one of the shades says. It's seated very near her, like the silhouette of something that's learned how to be a woman and a wolf at the same time. Its grey-smudge eyes flash a hungry emerald, and when it stands up, it's much, much taller than Dancy expected. "We've been hearing rumors about what happened down in Florida. There was a crow, wouldn't talk about nothing else. Miss Dancy Flammarion, the vengeful right hand of Jehovah, some pissed-off angel's albino concubine. But what the hell, you know? Rumors aren't usually much more than that, especially when you get them from crows. But here you stand, girl, big as life and twice as shabby," and the monsters laugh again.

  "What I'm wondering," the wolf woman says, taking a step closer to Dancy, "is how you ever got yourself out of that insane asylum way down in Tallahassee. Or isn't that part of the rumors true?"

  Dancy licks her lips again. "I can't fight you all," she says. "I wasn't sent here to fight you all."

  More laughter, laughter loud enough to wake whatever dead might still lie sleeping in the overgrown cemetery next to Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church. And the thing that is neither a wolf nor a woman, the thing that's hardly anything more than a patch of smoke and depravity and wishful thinking, cocks its head and blinks at her.

  "Something else drew you here," Dancy tells it. "All of you. Some-thing born of hurt and ill will, death and the cruelty of men, an old evil which lay a thousand years in the mud at the bottom of the river-"

  "She's a regular William goddamn Shakespeare," the wolf-woman shade says, interrupting her, and there's more laughter from the black things that have taken refuge in the abandoned church. "We knew you were a force to be reckoned with, child, but no one mentioned you were a poet in the bargain."

  "That's just what the angel told me," Dancy says, wishing she didn't sound so scared, wishing she'd known there'd be so many of them. "Something drew you here. And that's the one I've come for."

  "I see," the shade replies and sits down in the pew again. "Fair enough, then. You won't have to wait much longer. She'll be along shortly, that one. In the meantime, why don't you have a seat here and-"

  "You can't trick me," Dancy tells the shade and points her carving knife at it.The others laugh again, but not quite as loudly as before. Come and get me, Dancy prays silently, because she knows the angel can hear her, wherever it's gone. Please come now and take me away.

  "Why don't you kiss me," the thing on the pew purrs. "You'd be sweet, I bet. I wager you'd be just as sweet as spring water and strawberries. Me, I haven't had a kiss in such an awful long time. Has anyone ever kissed you, Dancy Flammarion? I mean, besides that angel of yours."

  Dancy shifts the carving knife from one hand to the other and wipes her sweaty palm on her the front of her T-shirt. The angel isn't coming for her. It led her here, and she followed of her own accord, and now it won't have anything else to do with her until she's finished what it's brought her here to do. The shade's eyes flash brilliant green again, and Dancy shakes her head and continues down the aisle towards the desecrated altar and the pulpit and the benches where a choir once sat on Sunday mornings when the sanctuary was filled with dazzling sunlight and song and a preacher's booming voice.

  "Have it your way, kid," the wolf-woman shade calls out after her. "I'll just sit tight and watch the show. But if you change your mind, I'll be right here."

  VII. Counsel Among the Dead

  In King's Hale, the Glaistig has only just started her prayers of passage and release when the quake begins to rock the tower. She gets slowly to her feet, holding tight to one of the sturdy pediments of her husband's granite tomb, the clat clat clat of her unsteady hooves lost in the rumbling, splitting, cracking din rising up from the tortured earth far below the Weal. She stands alone on the wide funerary dais. Her ministers and astronomers and alchemists, her marshals and magistrates and the High Executioner and her Ladies Who Walk Behind, the Lord Chancellor and all the other members of her inner court are still kneeling at their assigned stations beyond the base of the dais. Their heads are bowed, to varying degrees, anxiously waiting for her word to stand, her permission to vacate the Hale and move to someplace safer.

  How much longer before they'd run? the Glaistig wonders. How long before ceremony and protocol wouldn't matter anymore?

  The ancient walls of the Hale loom gigantic around her, two hundred feet from the glass mosaics set into the floor to the formerets and buttresses of the vaulted roof. The ceiling has been painted with the constellations of the Midsummer's Eve, yellow and white tempera stars dabbed against a sky of deepest indi
go. A precise mural of the heavens so that all the generations of kings sleeping here can always find their way back down to the hub on that one night of the year. Their immense black statues line the walls, watching her, and the Glaistig wonders, too, if there will ever be another Midsummer's Eve and where the ghosts of kings go when their world has died.

  "Kypre Alundshaw," she calls out, shouting to be heard above the upheaval, and the Glaistig jabs her glittering scepter of silver and ruby and andesite at one of the alchemists. Alundshaw, a short, balding man missing his left ear and his right eye, nods and begins to rise. But then the tower shakes again and the floor rolls like a stormy sea, and the alchemist, along with most of the other supplicants, is thrown roughly against the shattered tiles. The convulsion passes, but a narrow sort of rift or fissure has opened near the rear of the chamber, and now a geyser of steam and soot spews out from it, the breath of the Dragon himself or only the death rattle of Kearvan Weal.

  "Yes, your Grace," Kypre Alundshaw wheezes as he manages to get to his feet, his hands and face cut and bleeding from the broken glass tiles. He brushes sparkling, kaleidoscopic slivers from his aubergine robes.

  "You must understand," the Glaistig says, "I would not ask you this question if I did not believe that we have come finally to the hour of our uttermost need and that all other avenues have been exhausted."

  The alchemist stops picking glass from his robes and nods his head once. "Yes, your Grace. Certainly. I understand."

  The Glaistig takes a deep breath and shuts her eyes, letting a few more seconds slip past, and she silently curses the gods of chance and circumstance that she has lived to know how the damned-to-be feel in that last instant before the trespass that will insure their spirits are forever consigned to perdition. She opens her eyes, and steam is still pouring from the crack in the floor; the air has begun to stink of sulfur and rotting eggs.

  "The Weaver's constructs, these Seraphim, may not be killed," she says. "This much I understand, and also I understand why. But I have been told there may be another way, something which you've learned from the red witches. I ask you, is this true?"

  When Kypre Alundshaw doesn't reply, she strikes her scepter against the dais with enough force that sparks fly from the impact of silver against the flagstones. Alundshaw flinches and immediately looks back down at the floor.

  "Alchemist, you will tell me now, is this true? Or have I been wrongly advised?"

  "No, your Grace. You have not," the alchemist replies, a quaver in his voice. "There may, indeed, be another way, but it would be a terrible deed if-"

  "I am not asking you for a lesson in ethics," the Glaistig snarls and turns back towards her husband's tomb. She places one hand flat on its polished lid and listens to the foundations of Kearvan Weal trembling beneath her.

  "No, your Grace, but the consequences-"

  "I'm only asking if it might be accomplished," the Glaistig explains, wishing that the heavy lid of the tomb had not been closed so soon, that she could look one last time upon the face of her King and find there the answers she needs. Answers that might save her world without bringing harm to some other universe.

  "I think so," the alchemist says, and she can hear the reluctance in his reply. "The red witches' calculations seem sound enough. We can find no fault."

  "And why do you believe that we can trust the Nesmians, Alundshaw? They have ever been enemies of the Dragon. Might not this be some deceit?"

  The alchemist glances nervously over his shoulder at the steam billowing from the fissure, then clears his throat. "I need not remind your Grace that the Nesmians despise the Weaver, perhaps even as much as do our own people. In this instance, our enemy has become an ally against a common threat."

  "And this sorcery would take them all, not merely that one the vampire has captured?"

  "Yes, your Grace. If the process works as the Nesmians have predicted, it would take all of the Seraphim, each removed to another…" and he pauses, as if he's forgotten how to end the sentence.

  "To another world," the Glaistig finishes for him.

  "Yes, mum," he says. "They would be forever scattered across the celestial planes."

  "Beyond her recall?"

  "Yes, your Grace. Forever beyond her recall."

  The floor groans and rolls again, and the alchemist waves his arms about and shuffles his feet to keep from falling. Near the rift in the floor of King's Hale, the glass tiles of the mosaic have begun to melt, their candy colors bleeding one into the other. And now a second fissure has opened, this one a vertical rent in the northern wall of the tower, wide enough that dim streaks of daylight shine through.

  "Is there still time?" the Glaistig asks.

  "I believe so," Kypre Alundshaw answers. "The place of sacrifice has already been prepared. We've done precisely as the Kenzia woman has directed. We only await your command."

  "Then you tell her to do it," she says. "Tell her to do it immediately. And by the spokes and all our fathers, may the gods show mercy on us in our desperation."

  Before the next tremor shakes the Hale, Alundshaw and the other alchemists and the astronomers have filed out of the chamber, and the Glaistig motions for the men and women of her court to kneel once more. She leans against the tomb of the King of Immolations, her cheek pressed to the cool, consoling granite, and, in another moment, she begins her prayers again.

  VIII. PensacolaBeach (December 1982)

  Julia Flammarion swims until the cold has done its job, exactly what she's asked it to do for her, and her arms and legs have grown too stiff and numb to possibly swim any farther. Which means that she'll never be able to swim all the way back to shore, either, so there's no losing her nerve now. It doesn't matter if she turns coward and changes her mind or decides that life as a crazy girl who talks to angels is still better than drowning in the Gulf of Mexico. She squints back towards the beach, nothing visible but a faint white stripe against the blue horizon, and wonders about the handsome man with the guitar, what he thought as she walked into the water in her clothes and shoes and began to swim away. Did he even notice? Is he watching her now? Has he gone looking for help? She hopes not. She hopes that he's still sitting there on his apple crate playing beautiful songs she'll never hear.

  "And what now?" she asks the high and unconsoling sun, the sun that might as well be the eye of God staring bitterly down at a fifteen-year-old suicide. The eye of a God who's finally washing his hands of her once and for all. A moment later, Julia gets a big mouthful of saltwater, and it strangles her and burns her sinuses and throat.

  "Is that your answer?" she sputters weakly, and the sun continues to hang mute in the cloudless winter sky, however many tens or hundreds of millions of miles away from her it might be.

  Much too far to matter, she thinks and shuts her eyes. The cold and the effort of swimming out this far have made her very sleepy, and so maybe that's what happens next. Maybe it's as simple as shutting her eyes and drifting on the swells until she falls asleep. Maybe there will even be one last dream, something warm and gentle that shows her another way her life might have gone, if she weren't insane and had never spoken to the angel that first day in the clearing in Shrove Wood. If the rattlesnake had never been burned to charcoal. If the angel had never started telling her stories about monsters. Julia uses the last of her strength to imagine a dream just like that, a very good dream in which she marries the handsome man with the guitar and they have children and even grandchildren, and she grows old and dies at home in her bed with all of them about her. She tells herself that the sound of wings close by is nothing but a curious seagull or a pelican, and only a few seconds later, too exhausted to tread water any longer, she slips beneath the welcoming surface of the sea.

  IX. The Demon of HopekillSwamp

  She might have had a name once, distant ages ago, before the white men came with their noisy, stinking cities and their clattering railroads and their murderous highways, back when the Muskogee were the only men she'd ever seen and who'd e
ver seen her. But if she did have a name, she's long since forgotten it. She might have had a mother, too, and perhaps even a father, like all the other things that creep and slither and swim and fly through the bayous and sloughs spread out along the Flint River. The shadow things hiding in the old church at the edge of the swamp call her Elandrion, Daughter of the Great Mother Nerpuz, but she's pretty sure it's just some shit they made up to stay on her good side and Elandrion wasn't ever really her name.

  On this summer night, she's resting in the mud beneath a bald cypress log at the very bottom of a deep, still pool, gnawing the last pale shreds of flesh from the bones of a great bullhead catfish. The bullhead was a giant, seven feet from snout to tail, and maybe it lived at the bottom of the pool for twenty years or more before she crept up and wrapped it in her strong arms and cracked it's skull open between her jaws. Nothing in this whole damn swamp that's even half a match for her, not the mud cats or the huge old snapping turtles, not the cottonmouth moccasins, not even the goddamned alligators. Nothing out here she can't make her dinner from, not if she's gone and set her sights on it.

  She's using a claw to get at the last bits of the bullhead's brains when she hears the shadows calling out across the night to her, their voices tangling in Spanish moss and the limbs of the trees and dripping down into the black water.

  Elandrion, she's finally come. She's here.

  She's found us all, Elandrion. She's right here in the church.

  For a moment, she considers ignoring them, leaving them to their own fates. She thinks about finishing with the catfish and then sleeping through the scorch of the coming day right here beneath this cypress log. Surely together they can handle one skinny human girl, even if there's any truth to the gossip she's heard from mockingbirds and egrets and a couple of red-winged blackbirds.