by Unknown
“Fine. Chennai.” The trilby man’s rubber soles reached the hardwood floor. Kagome watched him come. I will not move, she was chanting, deep inside herself. I will not move.
Trilby.
“That’s cheating,” Joe said.
Through her tears, Kagome watched the trilby man twitch closer, and gripped the doorframe to keep from collapsing. The grin that broke over her face was different than any she’d ever felt there.
“How so?” she whispered. Knowing the answer. Wanting him to tell her. To have the pleasure. To play, once more. Fight, a little longer.
“It’s… the name changed. Not the name… it was.”
“Madras,” she said.
“Madras,” said Joe. “I’m sorry, Kagome.”
The trilby man was five feet away; next time he moved they’d be touching. There was nothing to swing at him. Nowhere to run, and even if there was.
Mulliner. Coming to live…
“Sorry?” Kagome said, staring at the hat tipped down, the hidden face. I KNOW you. “Joe, you have nothing—”
“For not staying. I can’t stay.”
“Joe. Let me in.”
“Can’t… reach the door. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry.”
Weeping, glaring her defiance, Kagome turned her back on the trilby man, put her mouth to the crack between the door and the wall, and began to whisper. “I love you, Joe. I love you, Joe. I love you, Joe.”
Then she remembered.
Where else would she have heard such a nothing word but from her husband? Tall things, he’d called them, in the year of his interferon dreams. Whisperers, in trilby hats.
Angels of death? Walking tumors, whispering in the blood?
Or… What had that doctor said?
From the top of the stairs, there was a new sound, now. A whimper, climbing toward keening.
In her ears, Kagome could still hear the slow song Ryan had sung. Sworn he hadn’t sung. On her shoulders, she could feel his hands, the way they’d moved, and hadn’t moved. And in her mouth, she could taste his tongue. The sweat on his cheek that had tasted so sweet. So sweetly familiar.
Mulliner. Never before, not even once…
“Kagome?” Mrs. Thiel sobbed.
“It’s a myth, you know. That we can’t kill cancer. We can kill anything. Just… not selectively.” That’s what that doctor had said. “Now, if your husband could oblige by stepping aside, figure a way to climb out of there, just for a month or two…
Had he?
Kagome whirled, heart hurtling up her chest, borne on a boil of grief and nausea and loneliness and terror and hope? Joe?
Mrs. Thiel had reached the bottom of the stairs, was staring at Kagome, at the closed door behind her. The rattling in the bathroom had stopped. Had been stopped for too long now. Kagome glared back, across the empty room, past her mother-in-law toward the pine trees outside. All that empty, useless wind.
“No,” Mrs. Thiel said, and Kagome felt her mouth curl once more, into a snarl she’d never known she had in her. Because it had never been there. She’d seen it before, though. In those rare moments Joe didn’t think she was looking, and the pain came for him, and he somehow roused that fury in there and fought it back one more time.
Whatever was coming, she thought. It was here.
With special thanks to Norman Partridge for the loan of the nightmare…
THE AMMONITE VIOLIN (MURDER BALLAD NO. 4)
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN
IF HE WERE ever to try to write this story, he would not know where to begin. It’s that sort of a story, so fraught with unlikely things, so perfectly turned and filled with such wicked artifice and contrivances that readers would look away, unable to suspend their disbelief even for a page. But he will never try to write it, because he is not a poet or a novelist or a man who writes short stories for the newsstand pulp magazines. He is a collector. Or, as he thinks of himself, a Collector. He has never dared to think of himself as The Collector, as he is not without an ounce or two of modesty, and there must surely be those out there who are far better than he, shadow men, and maybe shadow women, too, haunting a busy, forgetful world that is only aware of its phantoms when one or another of them slips up and is exposed to flashing cameras and prison cells. Then people will stare, and maybe, for a time, there is horror and fear in their dull, wet eyes, but they soon enough forget again. They are busy people, after all, and they have lives to live, and jobs to show up for five days a week, and bills to pay, and secret nightmares all their own, and in their world there is very little time for phantoms.
He lives in a small house in a small town near the sea, for the only time the Collector is ever truly at peace is when he is in the presence of the sea. Even collecting has never brought him to that complete and utter peace, the quiet that finally fills him whenever there is only the crash of waves against a granite jetty and the saltwater mists to breathe in and hold in his lungs like opium fumes. He would love the sea, were she a woman. And sometimes he imagines her so, a wild and beautiful woman clothed all in blue and green, trailing sand and mussels in her wake. Her gray eyes would contain hurricanes, and her voice would be the lonely toll of bell buoys and the cries of gulls and a December wind scraping itself raw against the shore. But, he thinks, were the sea but a woman, and were she his lover, then he would have her, as he is a Collector and must have all those things he loves, so that no one else might ever have them. He must draw them to him and keep them safe from a blind and busy world that cannot even comprehend its phantoms. And having her, he would lose her, and he would never again know the peace which only she can bring.
He has two specialties, this Collector. There are some who are perfectly content with only one, and he has never thought any less of them for it. But he has two, because, so long as he can recall, there has been this twin fascination, and he never saw the point in forsaking one for the other. Not if he might have them both and yet be a richer man for sharing his devotion between the two. They are his two mistresses, and neither has ever condemned his polyamorous heart. Like the sea, who is not his mistress but only his constant savior, they understand who and what and why he is, and that he would be somehow diminished, perhaps even undone, were he forced to devote himself wholly to the one or the other. The first of the two is his vast collection of fossilized ammonites, gathered up from the quarries and ocean-side cliffs and the stony, barren places of half the globe’s nations. The second are all the young women he has murdered by suffocation, always by suffocation, for that is how the sea would kill, how the sea does kill, usually, and in taking life he would ever pay tribute and honor that first mother of the world.
That first Collector.
He has never had to explain his collecting of suffocations, of the deaths of suffocated girls, as it is such a commonplace thing and a secret collection, besides. But he has frequently found it necessary to explain to some acquaintance or another, someone who thinks that she or he knows the Collector, about the ammonites. The ammonites are not a secret and, it would seem, neither are they commonplace. It is simple enough to say that they are mollusks, a subdivision of the Cephalopoda, kin to the octopus and cuttlefish and squid, but possessing exquisite shells, not unlike another living cousin, the chambered nautilus. It is less easy to say that they became extinct at the end of the Cretaceous, along with most dinosaurs, or that they first appear in the fossil record in early Devonian times, as this only leads to the need to explain the Cretaceous and Devonian. Often, when asked that question, What is an ammonite?, he will change the subject. Or he will sidestep the truth of his collection, talking only of mathematics and the geometry of the ancient Greeks and how one arrives at the Golden Curve. Ammonites, he knows, are one of the sea’s many exquisite expressions of the Golden Curve, but he does not bother to explain that part, keeping it back for himself. And sometimes he talks about the horns of Ammon, an Egyptian god of the air, or, if he is feeling especially impatient and annoyed by the question, he limits his response to a description of th
e Ammonites from the Book of Mormon and how they embraced the god of the Nephites and so came to know peace. He is not a Mormon, of course, as he has use of only a singly deity, who is the sea and who kindly grants him peace when he can no longer bear the clamor in his head or the far more terrible clamor of mankind.
On this hazy winter day, he has returned to his small house from a very long walk along a favorite beach, as there was a great need to clear his head. He has made a steaming cup of Red Zinger tea with a few drops of honey and sits now in the room which has become the gallery for the best of his ammonites, oak shelves and glass display cases filled with their graceful planispiral or heteromorph curves, a thousand fragile aragonite bodies transformed by time and geochemistry into mere silica or pyrite or some other permineralization. He sits at his desk, sipping his tea and glancing occasionally at some beloved specimen or another—this one from South Dakota or that one from the banks of the Volga River in Russia or one of the many that have come from Whitby, England. And then he looks back to the desktop and the violin case lying open in front of him, crimson silk to cradle this newest and perhaps most precious of all the items which he has yet collected in his lifetime, the single miraculous piece which belongs strictly in neither one gallery nor the other. The piece which will at last form a bridge, he believes, allowing his two collections to remain distinct, but also affording a tangible transition between them.
The keystone, he thinks. Yes, you will be my keystone. But he knows, too, that the violin will be something more than that, that he has devised it to serve as something far grander than a token unification of the two halves of his delight. It will be a tool, a mediator or go-between in an act which may, he hopes, transcend collecting in its simplest sense. It has only just arrived today, special delivery, from the Belgian luthier to whom the Collector had hesitantly entrusted its birth.
“It must be done precisely as I have said,” he told the violin-maker, four months ago, when he flew to Hotton to hand-deliver a substantial portion of the materials from which the instrument would be constructed. “You may not deviate in any significant way from these instructions.”
“Yes,” the luthier replied, “I understand. I understand completely.” A man who appreciates discretion, the Belgian violin-maker, so there were no inconvenient questions asked, no prying inquiries as to why, and what’s more, he’d even known something about ammonites beforehand.
“No substitutions,” the Collector said firmly, just in case it needed to be stated one last time.
“No substitutions of any sort,” replied the luthier.
“And the back must be carved—”
“I understand,” the violin-maker assured him. “I have the sketches, and I will follow them exactly.”
“And the pegs—”
“Will be precisely as we have discussed.”
And so the collector paid the luthier half the price of the commission, the other half due upon delivery, and he took a six A.M. flight back across the wide Atlantic to New England and his small house in the small town near the sea. And he has waited, hardly daring to half-believe that the violin-maker would, in fact, get it all right. Indeed—for men are ever at war with their hearts and minds and innermost demons—some infinitesimal scrap of the Collector has even hoped that there would be a mistake, the most trifling portion of his plan ignored or the violin finished and perfect but then lost in transit and so the whole plot ruined. For it is no small thing, what the Collector has set in motion, and having always considered himself a very wise and sober man, he suspects that he understands fully the consequences he would suffer should he be discovered by lesser men who have no regard for the ocean and her needs. Men who cannot see the flesh and blood phantoms walking among them in broad daylight, much less be bothered to pay tithes that are long overdue to a goddess who has cradled them all, each and every one, through the innumerable twists and turns of evolution’s crucible, for three and a half thousand million years.
But there has been no mistake, and, if anything, the violin-maker can be faulted only in the complete sublimation of his craft to the will of his customer. In every way, this is the instrument the Collector asked him to make, and the varnish gleams faintly in the light from the display cases. The top is carved from spruce, and four small ammonites have been set into the wood—Xipheroceras from Jurassic rocks exposed along the Dorset Coast at Lyme Regis—two inlaid on the upper bout, two on the lower. He found the fossils himself, many years ago, and they are as perfectly preserved an example of their genus as he has yet seen anywhere, for any price. The violin’s neck has been fashioned from maple, as is so often the tradition, and, likewise, the fingerboard is the customary ebony. However, the scroll has been formed from a fifth ammonite, and the Collector knows it is a far more perfect logarithmic spiral than any volute that could have ever been hacked from out a block of wood. In his mind, the five ammonites form the points of a pentacle. The luthier used maple for the back and ribs, and when the Collector turns the violin over, he’s greeted by the intricate bas-relief he requested, faithfully reproduced from his own drawings—a great octopus, the ravenous devilfish of so many sea legends, and the maze of its eight tentacles makes a looping, tangled interweave.
As for the pegs and bridge, the chinrest and tailpiece, all these have been carved from the bits of bone he provided the luthier. They seem no more than antique ivory, the stolen tusks of an elephant or a walrus or the tooth of a sperm whale, perhaps. The Collector also provided the dried gut for the five strings, and when the violin-maker pointed out that they would not be nearly so durable as good stranded steel, that they would be much more likely to break and harder to keep in tune, the Collector told him that the instrument would be played only once and so these matters were of very little concern. For the bow, the luthier was given strands of hair which the Collector told him had come from the tail of a gelding, a fine grey horse from Kentucky thoroughbred stock. He’d even ordered a special rosin, and so the sap of an Aleppo Pine was supplemented with a vial of oil he’d left in the care of the violin-maker.
And now, four long months later, the Collector is rewarded for all his painstaking designs, rewarded or damned, if indeed there is some distinction between the two, and the instrument he holds is more beautiful than he’d ever dared to imagine it could be.
The Collector finishes his tea, pausing for a moment to lick the commingled flavors of hibiscus and rose hips, honey and lemongrass from his thin, chapped lips. Then he closes the violin case and locks it, before writing a second, final check to the Belgian luthier. He slips it into an envelope bearing the violin-maker’s name and the address of the shop on the rue de Centre in Hotton; the check will go out in the morning’s mail, along with other checks for the gas, telephone, and electric bills, and a handwritten letter on lilac-scented stationary, addressed to a Brooklyn violinist. When he is done with these chores, the Collector sits there at the desk in his gallery, one hand resting lightly on the violin case, his face marred by an unaccustomed smile and his eyes filling up with the gluttonous wonder of so many precious things brought together in one room, content in the certain knowledge that they belong to him and will never belong to anyone else.
The violinist would never write this story, either. Words have never come easily for her. Sometimes, it seems she does not even think in words, but only in notes of music. When the lilac-scented letter arrives, she reads it several times, then does what it asks of her, because she can’t imagine what else she would do. She buys a ticket and the next day she takes the train through Connecticut and Rhode Island and Massachusetts until, finally, she comes to a small town on a rocky spit of land very near the sea. She has never cared for the sea, as it has seemed always to her some awful, insoluble mystery, not so very different from the awful, insoluble mystery of death. Even before the loss of her sister, the violinist avoided the sea when possible. She loathes the taste of fish and lobster and of clams, and the smell of the ocean, too, which reminds her of raw sewage. She has often
dreamt of drowning, and of slimy things with bulging black eyes, eyes as empty as night, that have slithered up from abyssal depths to drag her back down with them to lightless plains of silt and diatomaceous ooze or to the ruins of haunted, sunken cities. But those are only dreams, and they do her only the bloodless harm that comes from dreams, and she has lived long enough to understand that she has worse things than the sea to fear.
She takes a taxi from the train depot, and it ferries her through the town and over a murky river winding between empty warehouses and rotting docks, a few fishing boats stranded at low tide, and then to a small house painted the color of sunflowers or canary feathers. The address on the mailbox matches the address on the lilac-scented letter, so she pays the driver and he leaves her there. Then she stands in the driveway, watching the yellow house, which has begun to seem a disquieting shade of yellow, or a shade of yellow made disquieting because there is so much of it all in one place. It’s almost twilight, and she shivers, wishing she’d thought to wear a cardigan under her coat, and then a porch light comes on and there’s a man waving to her.
He’s the man who wrote the letter, she thinks. The man who wants me to play for him. And for some reason she had expected him to be a lot younger and not so fat. He looks a bit like Captain Kangaroo, this man, and he waves and calls her name and smiles. And the violinist wishes that the taxi were still waiting there to take her back to the station, that she didn’t need the money the fat man in the yellow house had offered her, that she’d had the good sense to stay in the city where she belongs. You could still turn and walk away, she reminds herself. There’s nothing at all stopping you from just turning right around and walking away and never once looking back, and you could still forget about this whole ridiculous affair.
And maybe that’s true, and maybe it isn’t, but there’s more than a month’s rent on the line, and the way work’s been lately, a few students and catch-as-catch-can, she can’t afford to find out. She nods and waves back at the smiling man on the porch, the man who told her not to bring her own instrument because he’d prefer to hear her play a particular one that he’d just brought back from a trip to Europe.