Alabaster

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  But every now and then I can say, This, this nasty, little thing right here. See it? That's why I wrote story-x or Chapter-Y. It doesn't happen very often, but it's sort of satisfying in no particular way I can explain when it does happen like that.

  In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers is one of those rare stories, rarer still in that it had not one, but two identifiable inspirations. The first is a Dame Darcy illustration (reprinted in the novella) from an issue of her ever-fabulous comic, Meat Cake, a wondrously detailed scene of young Victorian women engaged in ghoulish delights, sex, and other mischief in the basement of an old house. An inset shows them armed with shovels and stylish coats, braving a snowy night to rob a grave; we can see the fruits of their labors stretched out on a slab, and some of the women attend the corpse while others attend each other. Yes, well, it's that sort of a drawing, and Miss Aramat and other ladies of The Stephen's Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists owe their existence to that drawing. That's the first inspiration.

  The second is a little bit more complicated and a whole lot stranger…

  2

  During my time in Athens, Georgia, way, way back in the mid-nineties, I did a stint as the vocalist and songwriter for a local goth-folk-blues band called Death's Little Sister. This wasn't long after I'd finished writing Silk, and it was taking a lot longer to sell than either my agent or I had expected. So I decided I'd be a rock star instead. Luckily, the work for Vertigo came along and the novel did eventually sell, shocking me back to my senses and rescuing me from the indie-rock purgatory that is Athens.

  Anyway, one bitterly cold night in November 1996 we played a show at the 40-Watt Club on Washington Street. All our original material, which amounted to about seven or eight songs, plus all our covers-"House of the Rising Sun," "Crimson and Clover," "Sweet Jane," "Bloodletting," and so forth. Enough people showed up that at least it didn't feel like one of our interminable practices, and no one threw anything at us. To make matters worse, someone approached us after the show to ask if we'd like to contribute a track to a compilation of Bowie covers being put together by a local record label. So, we were in pretty good spirits afterwards, which was anything but usual. About one a.m., we loaded out, collected whatever paltry few bucks we had coming from the club, sold a couple of tapes, and then piled into my blue Honda station wagon. All four of us, plus a couple of hangers-on, squished in amongst our gear (amps, a mixing board, mike stands, instruments), elbows in ribs, shoes where shoes ought not be, and our keyboardist sitting in the backseat floorboard (she was very, very tiny). We had about half a case of truly crappy beer-PBR or Sterling or some such weasel piss-a big bottle of Jagermeister, and another bottle of Wild Turkey, a little weed, and we headed north out of town on I-129.

  A pretty bleak stretch of road, leading nowhere any of us had any business going at one o'clock in the morning, half-drunk, stoned, and dressed like a bunch of whores from Hell's cotillion (thank you, Matthew Grasse, wherever you are). To our credit, we did have a destination in mind, the old Woodbine Cemetery in Jefferson, about 20 miles north of Athens. At some point, Barry Dillard, our guitarist, had told us a story about a murder-suicide at UGA in 1918 and, he'd said, the murderer was buried in Woodbine. His victim was buried three miles from Woodbine, in a Presbyterian cemetery. I'm sure it has a name, too, but I've forgotten it. And, so the story went, because such stories always go this way, his ghost and the ghost of the woman he killed could be glimpsed at Woodbine from time to time, reunited, wandering aimlessly about the tombstones.

  There isn't much between Athens and Jefferson – kudzu, cows, junk cars, house trailers, and "towns" with names like Red Stone, Arcade, Attica, and Clarksboro. Maybe a few state troopers looking for drunken idiots in blue Honda station wagons. Nothing you want to run into on a dark night. And it was a very dark night, no moon at all, but not cloudy, either. I remember the sky was clear and the stars were bright, in the way that stars can fill the whole sky, horizon to horizon, and yet give off no light whatsoever. I remember that someone put in an Echo and the Bunnymen tape and we were half-heartedly singing along. And then, about the time we passed Arcade, one of us spotted a ball of blue-white light, roughly the size of a football and floating maybe ten feet above the ground, slipping along the side of the highway on our right. There were pine trees along this stretch of road and the ball of light weaved and bobbed along between the trunks.

  "Jesus, man, it's Saint Elmo's fire," Barry said. Or maybe that was Mike, our bass player. Someone else said it was a ghost, and I said that it couldn't be because we hadn't even reached the cemetery yet.

  We slowed down, and the ball of light slowed down. We sped up, and it sped up. After a mile or so, the novelty began to wear thin and the situation started to get seriously creepy. The girl I'd drafted to drive pulled over to the side of the road just as the pines ended and the land opened up into pasture again. The ball of light floated out of the trees, turned and drifted over a barbed-wire fence, coming to a stop in the middle of the road, maybe ten yards in front of the Honda.

  We sat and stared. It bobbed up and down. We sat and stared some more. I don't remember anyone saying much of anything, just Echo and the Bunnymen crooning from the tape deck. The thing above the road made no sound and didn't seem to give off light. I recall wondering why we weren't bathed in blue-white light. The road beneath it was perfectly dark.

  "Let's just get the fuck out of here," Barry said and, as if the thing had heard him, it dimmed slightly and then began to rise, going straight up, higher and higher until it seemed not much more than a particularly bright star. At some point we finally lost sight of it and the driver pulled back onto the I-129, heading for Jefferson.

  "I don't think I want to go anymore," Shelly, the keyboardist-in-the-floorboard, said. There was a little nervous laughter and then, "No, I'm serious," she said. "Turn the car around and let's go back to town."

  And before we had time to start arguing about whether we were going back to Athens or continuing on to Jefferson to hunt ghosts, there was an extremely loud BLAM and the car swerved off the road into a weedy ditch. A few seconds later, once we were sure that none of us were bleeding or unconscious or disemboweled or anything, Barry climbed out one of the windows (his door was jammed shut).

  "It's a blowout," he reported. "We blew a tire."

  I had a spare, of course, And, of course, it was also flat.

  For the next ten minutes, maybe less, we sat there in the car, rubbing at our various scrapes and bruises, drinking the weasel-piss beer and Jagermeister, and debating whether we'd get shot if we went to one of the houses along the road and asked to use the phone. The girl who was driving (she had a name, but none of this was her idea, so I'm not using it) turned on the flashers and declared that we never should have left town in the first place. I don't remember anyone disagreeing with her.

  "What if that thing comes back?" Shelly asked anxiously.

  "It won't," I said, hoping I was right, and started looking for the bottle of Wild Turkey, which had rolled under the front seat when we went into the ditch.

  And that's when the black Monte Carlo came along, heading south towards Athens, away from Jefferson. It only had one headlight and that didn't seem to work very well. "Thank god," Shelly grumbled, as the big, ugly Chevy glided across the yellow center line and came to a stop directly in front of us. After sitting in the dark, even that one weak headlight seemed blindingly bright.

  Mike-whose door wasn't jammed shut-got out of the car, and a very tall, very fat man, a veritable mountain of human flesh, climbed out of the Monte Carlo, and the two of them stood staring at the crippled Honda, shaking their heads. The man from the Monte Carlo was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, a long coat that almost reached the ground, and a derby hat. He had a long beard, which may have been gray. Echo and the Bunnymen weren't singing anymore because we were still sober enough to think the stereo might run down the battery, and the night was so quiet, so still, those of us in the car had no trouble h
earing what Mike and the man from the black car were saying. It went something like this:

  "Where are you kids headed this late?"

  "Nowhere."

  "Well, good, because that's the only place you're gonna get to with that tire. Don't you think you should change it?"

  "Our spare's flat."

  "You're kidding?"

  "No sir. Are you going to Athens? If you're going to Athens, maybe you could give one of us a ride back to town."

  "I'm not going to Athens. I'm going to Savannah. I'm going to Savannah, and I don't pick up hitchers."

  Their breath fogged in the cold, and Mike hugged himself for warmth, though the guy from the Monte Carlo seemed oblivious to the temperature. He scratched his beard and stared at the flat tire.

  "You kids been drinking?" he asked.

  "A little," Mike lied.

  "So it wouldn't do to just sit here until a cop comes along, then, would it?"

  "No sir. We'd really rather not."

  "I don't pick up hitchers."

  "Yes sir."

  "I'm going to Savannah. I got to make my delivery before morning."

  "Yes sir," Mike said again, and Shelly, who happened to be his girlfriend, mumbled something rude from the backseat.

  I opened the bottle of bourbon, took a small drink, coughed, and that's when I noticed two shiny points of light, like cat eyes caught in the beam of a flashlight, that sort of iridescence, but silver. Two points of light, like silver cat eyes watching us from inside the Monte Carlo. I was suddenly very aware of the cold, the Georgia night stretching out around us, and just how far we were from anywhere light and safe and warm.

  I took another sip of bourbon.

  "Well, I'll tell someone you're out here," the big man said.

  "We'd sure appreciate that."

  "I'll tell them to send a wrecker."

  "Thank you."

  "I'd give you a ride, son, but I don't take hitchers. And I gotta be in Savannah."

  And then the big man got back into his black Monte Carlo and drove away. As he passed, I swear I saw a second set of the iridescent eyes watching us from the backseat of the Chevrolet. I drank more Wild Turkey, and then Mike was back in the car again, shivering, letting in the cold.

  "What the fuck was that?" Barry asked him.

  "Lock the doors," Mike said.

  "Why?" Shelly asked.

  "Just lock the goddamned doors!" And we did, because Mike didn't raise his voice very often and I'd never heard him sound scared before.

  "Did you see that kid in the front seat?" Mike asked, and I didn't say anything about the silver eyes. "Jesus," Mike said, his teeth chattering, and he stared out his window, up at the November sky full of unhelpful stars.

  "So, is he sending someone?" Barry asked, though I'm sure he'd heard the big guy from the Monte Carlo as clearly as the rest of us.

  "Yeah, man, he's sending someone, okay? He said he was sending someone. Hell, I don't know."

  "I can't feel my feet anymore," Shelly said, stomping them against the back of the front seat. "I think I'm freezing to death. I think I'm getting hydrophobia."

  "You mean hypothermia," the girl behind the wheel said. "Hydrophobia is rabies."

  "Whatever," Shelly replied and stomped her feet twice as hard.

  "Jesus, did you fucking see that kid?"

  "What kid?" Barry asked, and Mike shook his head and shivered.

  "The kid sitting right there in the fucking front seat. Jesus."

  "I didn't see anyone but the big fucker in the bowler."

  "It was a derby," the driver said quietly.

  "What's the fucking difference?"

  I passed the bottle back to Mike, and he stared at it a moment like maybe he'd forgotten what it was for.

  "That dude, man, he smelled like something fucking dead. He smelled like rotten meat."

  Barry lit a cigarette then, his face caught for a moment in the yellow-orange glow from his lighter, and no one said much of anything else that I can recall. A few cars passed, heading north or heading south, but no one else stopped to help. In a little while, maybe twenty or thirty minutes, a red tow truck showed up, just like the big guy had promised, and took us all back to town.

  3.

  I'm forever drawing connections where none exist, or, to be more precise, where many other people would not draw connections, which is another thing entirely.

  The hovering ball of blue light.

  The blow out.

  The strange man from the Monte Carlo.

  The silver eyes shining from the dark car.

  All these things in the space of fifteen minutes. My mind draws connections, and I'm left to puzzle over their legitimacy.

  I don't believe in UFOs, not in the popular sense, anyway, that unidentified flying objects are extraterrestrial space craft. I do believe in extraterrestrial life, but I know, as a scientist, that the odds of its getting from planet to planet, much less crossing interstellar distances, are remote. Anyway, what we saw that night didn't look like a "space craft." I'm entirely willing to entertain the possibility that the blue ball of light was some unusual electrical discharge, though I couldn't begin to imagine what its origin might have been, or why it shone so brightly but didn't seem to radiate any light at all. Was it something meteorological? Seismic? Man-made? Insects? I have no idea whatsoever. I can only say it was one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

  As for the big man in the Monte Carlo, well, one meets strange people on the highway late at night, and sometimes they don't smell so great. It's the silver eyes that still bother me, from time to time. A couple days after the interrupted trip to Jefferson and Woodbine Cemetery, Death's Little Sister got together in the East Athens attic we'd converted into a practice space and, at some point, someone finally mentioned the odd events after the show. I think we'd all been avoiding talking about that night-the light, the Monte Carlo and its driver-and I don't remember who finally brought it up. I also don't remember who suggested that the silver eyes might have been a dog's eyes, that there might have been a dog in the car with the man, which also might have helped explain the odor. But I do remember how that suggestion upset Mike, and he insisted that there hadn't been a dog, just a kid sitting up front, and that there had been something "all wrong" about the kid, but he wouldn't elaborate, and we didn't press him.

  I think that, all those years later, when I sat down to write the short story that grew into the novella In The Garden of Poisonous Flowers, I'd hoped that by burying some of the events of that strange night in fiction I might divest them of at least a modicum of their weirdness. But it doesn't seem to have worked. Lonely country roads still make me nervous now, and they never did before. I watch for lights in the sky more than I once did, and dread the glint of silver eyes from the windows of passing cars.

  Caitlín R. Kiernan

  9 January 2002

  Liberty House, Birmingham

  For the other three-quarters of Death's Little Sister: Barry Dillard (guitars), Michael Graves (bass), and Shelly Ross (keyboards).

  Author's Biography

  Alabaster is Caitlín R. Kiernan's fourth collection of short fiction in only six years, following Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, and To Charles Fort, With Love. She has also published six novels, including Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, and Daughter of Hounds. Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, Caitlín now lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her partner, Kathryn, her cat, Sophie, thousands of books and fossils, and her winter white dwarf hamster, Chiana Marshmallow Pipsqueak.

  Artist's Biography

  Eisner-award nominee Ted Naifeh has been working in comics and related fields since 1990. His work includes Gloomcookie, How Loathsome, Courtney Crumrin and the Night Things, Courtney Crumrin and the Coven of Mystics, Courtney Crumrin in the Twilight Kingdom, Polly and the Pirates, and the manga Unearthly. Ted lives in San Francisco with his girlfriend Kelly.

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