Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One)

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Thirty feet down to the tracks, and she inches along the sheer granite walls, nothing but scraggly, winter-dry clumps of goldenrod and poison sumac for treacherous hand holds. Then she slips and drops the last eight feet to the gravel roadbed below, landing hard on her ass, heart pounding and blood in her mouth from a bitten tongue, table salt and pennies, but nothing broken.

  In front and behind, the old railroad disappears into the rock, blasted away over a hundred years ago, and nothing comes through here anymore but the occasional freight train. She takes off her sunglasses, stuffs them into a coat pocket, and walks into the darkness on a welcoming carpet of clothing and shattered green Thunderbird bottles, empty crack vials, and discarded syringes.

  Inside, the stench of urine and human feces is as thick, as complete, as the dark; Jenny gags, acid-bitter taste of bile, and hides her mouth and nose in the crook of one arm. She knows that there are people watching her, can feel the wary or stark terrified track of their eyes, and sometimes she can hear faint whispering from the side tunnels. Something whooshes past her left ear, and, with a loud, wet pop, a bottle smashes against the tunnel wall. She’s peppered with glass shards and drops of soured wine or beer.

  “Who are you?” a hoarse and sexless voice demands. “Who the hell are you?”

  She does not answer, stands perfectly still and stares back at the gloom, feigned defiance, pretending that she’s not afraid, that her heart’s not thumping crazy in her chest and her mouth isn’t gone dry as the gravel ballast underfoot.

  Not another word from the dark, only the far-off growl of cars and trucks on the street above, and Jenny starts walking again, thankful for the company of her own footsteps.

  There are iron grates set into the roof of the tunnel at irregular intervals, dazzling, checkerboard sunlight from the unsuspecting world overhead that only makes the blackness that much more absolute. She walks around, not through them, but keeps careful count of the blinding, gaudy pools in her head; one, three, five, and at the seventh, she turns left. The basket-handle arch of the side tunnel is faintly visible, dim reflection off the measured stagger of brickwork, and spray painted sloppy white above and across the chunky keystone – jesus saves and a tag like a preschooler’s goldfish. Jenny looks over her shoulder once before she leaves the light behind and follows the gentle slope of the side tunnel west, down towards the river.

  She learned to hear the voices in the pipes three years before her first period, hardly a month after her grandmother had told her about Old Papa finding her in the sewers.

  Very late at night, when she was sure that everyone else was asleep – her father lost in his fitful dreams and Old Mama snoring like a jackhammer down the hall – Jenny would slip out of bed and tiptoe to the upstairs bathroom. She would bring a blanket because the tile floor and cast-iron tub were always freezing, and then lie for hours, curled fetal, with her ear pressed tight against the drain.

  And at first there was nothing but a far-off ocean hum like conch shells and the sounds of the building’s old copper plumbing clearing its hundred throats, the gurgle or glug of water on its way up from the mains or back down to the sewers. The metal-hammered clank of pipes expanding or contracting. Sometimes, she would doze and dream in the muted greens and browns of the big Coney Island aquarium, lazy sway of sea plants and anemone tendrils and the strange shadows that moved like storm clouds overhead.

  And then, three nights before Christmas and a fresh blanket of snow like vanilla icing, she heard their voices, so faint at first that it might have been anything else, trapped air or her straining imagination. And Jenny lay very still, suddenly wide awake and every muscle tensed, hearing and not believing that she was hearing, not wanting to believe that she was hearing.

  The softest, sibilant mumble, and gooseflesh washed prickling cold across her skin.

  Not words, at least not words that she could understand, a muffled weave of hisses and clicks and velvet sighs that rose and fell in overlapping, breathy waves. Jenny fought the fear, that slick red thing twisting inside, and her pounding heart, the urge to pull away, to run wailing to her father and tell him everything, everything that Old Mama had said that day in the kitchen and everything since. The urge to turn the tap on scalding hot and drown whatever was down there.

  The fish people who live down there.

  But Jenny Haniver did not run. She squeezed her eyes shut and ignored everything but the wet voices. She lay with fists clenched and knees braced against the sides of the tub. Tried to wrestle something like meaning or sense from the gibbering. And afterwards, she would come back every night, would spend the house’s dead hours listening patient and terrified until she began to understand.

  The city beneath the city, accumulated labyrinth of pipe and tunnel extending skyscraper-deep beneath the asphalt and concrete Manhattan crust; sewer and rumbling subway and tens of thousands of miles of gas and steam and water mains. Electric and telephone cables like sizzling neurons buried in the city’s flesh, copper dendrites wrapped safe inside neoprene and rubber and lead.

  Jenny Haniver walks the anthill maze, walls of crumbling masonry and solid granite. She counts off each blind step, Ariadne’s directions remembered like a combination lock’s code; forty-five, then right, seventy-one, then left, deeper and deeper into the honeycombed earth beneath Hell’s Kitchen. The air grows warmer by slow degrees, and the only sounds left are the nervous scritch and squeak of the rats, the faint drip and splash of water from the walls and ceilings as the musty air turns damp.

  Her eyes do not adjust, register only the ever increasing absence of light, a thousand shades past pitch already; dark that can smother, that seeps up her nostrils and settles in her lungs like black pneumonia. She walks clumsy as a stumbling zombie, hands out Frankenstein-stiff in front of her, lifts her feet high to keep from tripping over garbage or stepping on a rat.

  Fifty-seven, then right, and that’s the last, and for all she knows she’s lost, almost certain that she’ll never be able to reverse the order and follow the numbers backwards to the surface. And when she catches the dimmest shimmer up ahead, she believes it can only be panic, hallucination, a cruel will-o’-the-wisp tease dreamed up by the rods and cones of her light-starved eyes. But with every step the light seems to swell, becoming a faint bluish glow now, and she can almost make out the tunnel walls, her own white hands somewhere in front of her face.

  There are new sounds, too, parchment-dry susurrance and the moist smack and slap of skin against mud. The air smells like shit, and the cold rot of long-neglected refrigerators. The tunnel widens, then, abruptly opening out into a small cavern, low walls caked thick with niter and a scum of luminescent fungus, and she can see well enough to make out the forms huddled inside. Skin bleached colorless by the constant dark, stretched much too tight over kite-frame skeletons, razor shoulders, xylophone ribs. Bodies naked to the chill and damp or clothes that hang in tatters like a shedding second skin.

  Jenny follows the narrow path between them, and they watch her pass with empty, hungry eyes, shark eyes, grab at her calves and ankles in halfhearted frenzy, hands no more than blue-veined claws, arms no more than twigs.

  Ariadne Moreau sits by herself on a crooked metal folding chair at the far end of the chamber, lion’s mane nimbus of tangled black hair and necklaces of rat bone draped like beads around her neck. She wears nothing else but her tall leather boots and vinyl jacket, both scabby with dried mud and mildew. Her thighs, the backs of her bony hands, are splotched with weeping track marks, and she smiles, sickly weak approval or relief, as Jenny approaches.

  “I knew that you’d come,” she says, and her voice sighs out of her, a husky wheeze, and she extends one hand to Jenny, trembling fingers and nails chewed down to filthy nubs. “I never stopped believing that you’d come.”

  Jenny does not take her hand, hangs a few feet back.

  “It isn’t working,” she says, and opens her peacoat, displays her own ruined flesh to prove the point. She’s only wearing b
oxers underneath, and all the bandages are oozing, stains that look like sepia ink by the weird blue light of the cave. A few have come completely undone, revealing her clumsy sutures and the necrotic patchwork of grafts.

  “I have to know if you’ve learned anything. If you’ve seen anything down here,” she says, and closes her coat again.

  Ariadne’s smile fades, jerky, stop-motion dissolve, and she lets her arm drop limply again at her side. She laughs, an aching, broken sound, and shakes her shaggy head.

  “Anything,” Jenny says again. “Please,” and she takes the baggie of white powder from her coat pocket, holds it out to Ariadne. Behind Jenny, the mole people whisper nervously among themselves.

  “Fuck you, Jenny,” words spit softly out like melon seeds. “Fuck you, and fuck the voices in your sick fucking head.”

  Jenny steps closer, sets the heroin gently on Ariadne’s bare knee. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t stay.”

  “Then at least let me kiss you, Jen,” and Ariadne’s arms strike like moray eels, locking firmly around Jenny’s neck and pull her roughly down. Ariadne’s mouth tastes like ashes and bad teeth, and her tongue probes quickly past the jagged reef of sharpened incisors. Jenny tries to pull away, pushes hard, and Ariadne bites the tip end of her tongue as their mouths part, bites hard, and Jenny stumbles backwards and almost falls among the restless mole people, the pain and the deceitful copper warmth of her own blood on her lips.

  Ariadne laughs again, vicious, hopeless chuckle, wipes her mouth with the back of one hand and snatches the baggie of dope from her knee with the other.

  “Get out of here, Jenny. Go back up there and slice yourself to fucking ribbons.”

  Eyes that are all pupil now, and the dark smudge of Jenny’s blood on her chin.

  Jenny Haniver runs back the way she came, dodging the forest of grasping hands that rises up around her.

  In the dream, the dream that she’s had again and again since the first night she heard their voices, Jenny Haniver drifts weightless in silent hues of malachite and ocher green. The sun filters into and through the world from somewhere else above, Bible storybook shafts in the perfect, silting murk. She moves her long tail slowly from side to side and sinks deeper, spreads her silver arms wide, accepting and inviting. And he rises from below, from the cold, still depths where the sun never reaches, the viperfish night, and folds her away in pelvic webs and stiletto spines. She gasps, and the salt water rushes into her throat through the crimson-feathered slits beneath her chin.

  Jenny sinks her teeth, row after serrate row, into the tender meat of his shoulder, scrapes his smooth chest with the erect spurs of her nipples.

  And the voices are all around, bathypelagic echoes, as tangible as the sweet taste of his blood in her mouth.

  She has never felt this safe, has never felt half this whole.

  Their bodies twine, a living braid of glimmering scales and iridescent scaleless flesh, and together they roll over and over and down, until the only light is the yellowish photophore glow of anglerfish lures and jellyfish veils.

  She wakes up again, stiff crammed into the dank cubby hole, more blind than in the last moment before she opened her eyes. There’s no sense of time anymore, only the vague certainty that she’s been wandering the tunnels for what must be days and days and days now, and the burning pain in her mouth and throat, Ariadne’s infection gift rotting its way into her skull. She is drowning, mind and body, in the tunnels’ incessant night tide and the sour fluids that drain from her wounded tongue.

  Jenny Haniver coughs, fishhook barbs gouging her chest and throat, and spits something thick and hot into the dark. She tries to stand, braces herself, unsteady arms and shoulders against the slick tunnel wall, but the knifing spasms in her feet and legs and the fever’s vertigo force her to sit back down, quickly, before she falls.

  The rats are still there, waiting with infinite carrion patience for her to die. She can hear their breath and the snick of their tiny claws on the stone floor. She doesn’t know why they haven’t taken her in her sleep; she no longer has a voice to shout at them, so kicks hard at the soft, flea-seething bodies when they come too close.

  Because she cannot walk, she crawls.

  Here, past the merciful failure of punky concrete and steel-rod reinforcements, where one forgotten tunnel has collapsed, tumbled into the void of one much older, she lies at the bottom of the wide rubble scree. Face down in the commingled cement debris and shattered work of Colonial stonemasons, and the sluggish river of waste and filth-glazed water moves along inches from her face. The rats and the muttering ghosts of Old Mama and Old Papa and her father will not follow her down; they wait like a jury, like ribsy vultures, like the living (which they are not) keeping deathbed vigil.

  There is wavering yellow-green light beneath the water, the gaudy drab light of things which will never see the sun and have learned to make their own. So much light that it hurts her eyes, and she has to squint. The ancient sewer vibrates with their voices, their siren songs of clicks and trills and throaty bellows, but she can’t answer, her ruined tongue so swollen that she can hardly even close her mouth or draw breath around it. Instead, she splashes weakly with the fingers of one straining, outstretched hand, smacking the surface with her palm.

  Old Mama laughs again, and then her father and Old Papa try to call her back, and they promise her things she never had and never wanted. This only makes Old Mama laugh louder. Jenny ignores them, watches the long and sinuous shadows that move lazily across the vaulted ceiling. Something big brushes her fingertips, silky roughness and fins like lace, unimaginable strength in the lateral flex of those muscles, and she wants to cry but the fever scorch has sealed her tear ducts.

  With both hands, she digs deep into the froth and sludge that mark the boundary between worlds, stone and water, and pulls herself the last few feet. Dragging her useless legs behind her, Jenny Haniver slides into the pisswarm river, and lets the familiar currents carry her down to the sea.

  O that this too too solid flesh would melt…

  William Shakespeare, Hamlet

  * * *

  Tears Seven Times Salt

  A dry run for so very many stories since, my fevered punk-rock retelling of “The Little Mermaid.” You’ll see that, I think. Also, my first Manhattan story, because once in the subways I couldn’t stop thinking about what lay below the subways.

  Breakfast in the House of the Rising Sun

  (Murder Ballad No. 1)

  Out here on the tattered north rim of the Quarter, past sensible bricks to keep the living out and the dead inside, weathered-marble glimpses above the wall of St. Louis #1, and on past planned Iberville squalor and Our Lady of Guadalupe. Hours left till dawn, and the tall man in his long car turns another corner and glides down Burgundy. Almost dreaming, it’s been too long since he slept or ate, so long since he left Matamoros and the long Texas day before of sun and gulf-blind blue. All that fucking coke sewn up in the seats, white blocks snug in plastic wrap beneath his numb ass, and he checks the Lincoln’s rear-view mirror, watching, watching in case some Big Easy pig doesn’t like his looks. The fat veins in his eyes are almost the same shade of red as the little crimson pills that keep him awake, keep him moving. But there isn’t much of anything back there – silhouette and streetlight shadow of a crazy old black man in the street, and he’s pointing up at the sky and falls to his knees on the asphalt, but he’s nothing for Jimmy DeSade to worry about. He lights another Camel, breathes grey smoke, and there’s the House, just like every time before. Gaudy Victorian ruin, grotesquerie of sagging shutters and missing gingerbread shingles, the slow rot of time and Louisiana damp. Maybe it’s leaning into itself a little more than last time, and maybe there are a couple of new dog or gator skulls dangling in the big magnolia standing guard out front. Hard to tell in the dark, no streetlights here, no sodium-arc revelation, and every downstairs window painted black as mourning whores. Jimmy DeSade drives on by, checks his mirror one more time,
and circles around to the alley.

  Rabbit opens his door a crack and watches the trick stagger away down the long hall, the fat man that stank like garlic and aftershave, fat man that tied Rabbit’s hands behind his back and bent him over the bed, pulled down his lacy panties and whacked his butt with a wooden hairbrush until he pretended to cry. Until he screamed stop, Daddy, stop, I’ll be a good little girl now. They still give him the creeps worst of all, the call-me-Daddy men. Rabbit eases the door shut again, whispering half a prayer there will be no more tonight, no more appetite and huffing desperation, and maybe he can have a little time alone before he fixes and falls asleep.

  Let’s not count on it, he thinks and kicks off the black patent pumps, walks the familiar five steps back to the low stool in front of his dressing table, sits down and stares at himself in the mirror. Every minute of twenty-two years showing in his face tonight – and then some – a handful of hard age shining out mean from beneath powder and mascara smears. Rabbit finds his lighter, finds the stingy, skinny joint Arlo slipped him earlier in the evening, and the smoke doesn’t make it easier to face that reflection; the smoke makes it remotely possible. He pulls a scratchy tissue from the box, something cheap that comes apart in cold cream, and wipes away the magenta ghost of his lipstick, sucks another hit from the joint and holds the smoke until his ears begin to buzz, high electric sound like angry wasps or power lines, then breathes it out slow through his nostrils. And those grey-blue eyes squint sharply back at him through the haze – Dresden blue, his Momma used to say – pretty Dresden blue eyes a girl should have, and Rabbit licks thumb and forefinger, pinches out the fire and stashes the rest of the joint for later. Tucks it safely beneath one corner of a jewelry box; later he’ll need it more than he needs it now.