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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Oh, Jagged,” he says and runs across flagstones to stand at the shining bronze rail that separates them from the garden. “Oh, it is marvelous, indeed! It is the best present ever! What exactly is it?”

  “A Palaeozoic Museum,” Lord Jagged says and stands behind Jherek, his slender, alabaster hands on the boy’s shoulders. “I understand that they were quite the rage during the reign of Nixon Kennedy II, menageries of primordial flora and fauna.”

  Jherek claps his small palms together – loud smack of childflesh against childflesh – frightening a flock of rooks and tiny rhamphorhynchi. The blackbirds and winged saurians rise squawking, midnight feathers and stiletto-beaked cloud, circling the dome, darting through the trees, drawing fresh gales of laughter from Jherek.

  “I found some paintings and holograms in the rotted cities,” says Lord Jagged. “An archive devoted to the history of the Dead Sciences, I believe.”

  There’s a sudden roar, then, and a howl of pain. Jherek looks and sees the clumsy, rhino-nosed iguanodon, the instant before it hauls its scaly, quadrapedal bulk into a maroon grove of cedars. The giant ground sloth that pursues the dinosaur across the impeccable meadow roars again, drags itself forward with sickle claws, disappears after its prey.

  “Of course, I’ll have it transported back to your own house after the party,” and Jagged sits down on a wrought cardboard bench, a perfect replica down to the faintly glowing neon detail.

  “May I stay here?” Jherek asks. “I mean, surely I don’t have to go back to the soirée instead.”

  “Of course,” he says. “I can hardly blame you for tiring of all that tedious melancholy.” He stands, then, goes to Jherek and bends to kiss the boy, their lips and tongues brushing, tasting one another. Lord Jagged runs his fingers through Jherek’s white ponytail.

  “No one could ever doubt the Iron Orchid is your mother, sweet Jherek.”

  And then Jagged pulls his charcoal cape tighter about his shoulders and steps back through the entrance of the Palaeozoic Museum, back into the must and pallor of My Lady Charlotina’s Four Year Empire.

  And Jherek is alone.

  The walkway of flagstones and glazed ceramic tiles, Jherek has discovered, completely encircles the garden, gentle ellipse and no short stroll, all the way around. The air inside the Palaeozoic Museum is sultry and sticky hot, if he walks in the sun, and when he steps back into the shadows, cool as the halls of My Lady Charlotina’s caverns. It smells of growing things, and quarried stone, and the spoor of creatures extinct a hundred million years before Piltdown Man built his first primitive cities at Babylon and Muncie.

  From the amber sandy shores of the lagoon, shallows awash with the spiral shells of Pre-Cambrian and Ordovician mollusks, pink clouds of trilobites and bronze-plated Devonian fishes, the garden rises, up through forgotten geological ages, to a grassy knoll where mastodons and a small herd of unicorns graze. The dark and tangled plots of jungle in between echo with deliciously frightful cries of life and death, sounds that prick Jherek’s bare arms and back with goose bumps.

  And Lord Jagged has decorated the walls of the Museum as well, the tidy cabinet of a proper 19th-Century geologist: quaintly ancient cases of oak and styroglass filled with the petrified bones of leviathans, the fossilized tracks of behemoths. Entire varnished skeletons of quartz and silica reassembled for his pleasure.

  More than halfway round, Jherek comes upon a little bridge, an iron arch spanning a brook that exits the wall through the mouth of a stone porpoise and runs a short distance through a concrete sluice before joining the lagoon. He sits, winded, legs aching, but still as pleased as when he first laid eyes on Jagged’s gift.

  “You are my most fabulous friend,” he says, as a brightly plumaged archaeopteryx lights on the bronze rail, meaning, of course, Lord Jagged and not the ur-bird. “Except for dear Mother.”

  Smallest splash then, and he peers down past his dangling legs, beneath the bridge and there’s the girl, the only child he’s ever seen besides his own reflection. She’s ankle-deep in the gurgling brook, fending off a curious mesosaur with the toe of one soggy boot. Jherek recognizes her at once as one of My Lady Charlotina’s Four Year fabrications. Her waxy complexion and skin like shriveled apple peel, grey eyes and raven, bone-threaded dreadlocks.

  “Hello,” he says, and she only takes her eyes off the little reptile long enough to aim a distressed half-smile his way. “Whatever are you doing under there?”

  The mesosaur, sensing her distraction, its opportunity, leaps from the water like a salmon, snags needle-teeth into one stockinged leg and the girl slaps it loose.

  “Help me, please,” she begs. “I think they intend to eat me alive.”

  “I should think they’re entirely too small for that,” he says, but Jherek lies flat on his stomach, sun-warmed metal beneath him, a chilling breeze rising off the water, and holds out one hand to the girl, helping her scramble up and onto the bridge.

  She stands before him, dripping, water pooling around her clunky black boots. Her entire costume is the same unremarkable shade of black, dull and lifeless matte that seems completely indifferent to the noonday brightness of the Museum: a black dress of some drab and unfamiliar fabric down past her knees, ragged black lace draping her wrists, a stiff black frock coat with big black buttons and a stiffer black fraise around her throat. A rather moth-gnawed black tricorne perched crookedly on her head.

  “Doesn’t it get awfully tiresome,” he asks her, “always being dressed so somber?”

  “It is respectful,” she says, haughty and sharp chin up.

  “Respectful of whom?” he asks, still lying on the bridge, but rolled over on his side so that he can see her better.

  “Of the Presently and Future Dead, you blasphemous dullard.” She makes some odd gesture with her hands.

  There is a long tear in one of her black and purple candy-striped stockings and a small bloody place where the mesosaur broke skin, the hint of crimson and spreading stain of darker fabric. Jherek has never before seen anyone bleed.

  “Do you think,” he asks her, “that if I went wading I might be bitten as well? It looks very interesting, to bleed.”

  The girl cocks one black eyebrow and gives him a look that’s one part bewildered exasperation, one part dawning curiosity.

  “Does it actually hurt?” Jherek Carnelian asks the girl hopefully.

  “Yes,” she says. “Of course it hurts. What are you, some sort of bloody fool?”

  “I don’t think so,” he says, “never having actually bled myself.”

  “You’re a queer one, right enough,” and she stoops to unlace her wet boots. “The whole lot of you folk are stranger than wormfunk, if you’d have bothered asking me.”

  Jherek sits up and watches, alert, as she drains her shoes, chases the tiniest of crustaceans from the left, and hangs them both to dry by black laces; the boots dangle from the bronze rail like twin parasites.

  Jherek shrugs, deciding he might be better off if he saves bleeding for another time, better off changing the subject.

  “Do you like it?” he asks her, indicating the garden and the Museum’s fossil-crowded walls. “Is it not the most charming gift ever?”

  “What is it?” she asks.

  “A Palaeozoic Museum, of course,” Jherek answers. “My special gift from sweet Lord Jagged.”

  “It’s very bright,” she says uncertainly, shading her eyes and squinting up at the high dome, the white sun blazing in through the glass and metal and twining ivy. “So much light is very disrespectful. I think I will be punished if Anubis or Ligeia find out I’ve been here.”

  “Who?”

  “My Elders,” she says, still watching the sky. “Master Copticians of Count Perfidy’s Court. I’m only in the second year of my apprenticeship. This sort of thing could keep me out of the Guild altogether.”

  “Then why’d you leave the party?” Jherek asks. He has no clear idea what the girl’s talking about, but isn’t interested enough to ask
too many questions, wishing she’d be happy to enjoy the muggy antediluvian afternoon, the gentle bleat of the hadrosauri resting in the shade of the fig palms.

  “I didn’t mean to come in here,” she says, “I was only trying to find the Grand Mortis…”

  Jherek yawns, realizes he’s grown quite sleepy in the heat, and the girl stops in mid-sentence.

  “You’re very rude,” she says.

  “I didn’t mean to be, honestly,” Jherek replies, beginning to wonder what he might say or do that will not somehow offend the girl.

  “Well,” she says, sitting down next to him, carefully smoothing her skirt and the long tails of her frock coat. “I expect it’s not your fault. I can’t imagine that you’ve been raised any better. Your folk are all so horribly disrespectful. Absolute heathens, the lot of you.”

  “Heathens?” Jherek recognizes the word, but has always thought it some archaic botanical term.

  “Yes,” she says, a new note of passion in her voice. “Heathens. Why, the very thought of so much sunlight, and then simply refusing to die. And what’s worse, coming back if any of you should ever happen to be killed!”

  “Heathens, then, are people who don’t die?”

  The girl sighs loudly, frightening away the archaeopteryx.

  “If you were not a heathen, you’d never have asked such a silly and ignorant question. Heathens do not respect the Dead, but revel instead in the transient pleasures of life, disregarding the Holy Rites of Mortification. And along that road lies corporeal dissolution and eternal decay.

  “Death is as sacred as Life, which it preserves, which is why we must preserve Death. That is why the words and holy deeds of the Guild Elders, the Copticians and Embalmers, the Tanners and Shroudsmiths, even the lowliest shiners of common bone, must be heeded.”

  And she repeats the odd hand motion she made earlier.

  “Oh,” Jherek says, resigning himself to the truth, that he must indeed be a heathen, that everyone he loves must also be heathens. “I see. Do you have a name?”

  “Sexton,” she says, staring gloomily between her boots as the hadrosauri. “Sexton Dakhmas.”

  “And I am Jherek Carnelian, birth son of the Iron Orchid.”

  “A heathen name,” Sexton Dakhmas sighs, “Poor lost Jherek. But I shall not blame you.”

  “You are kind.”

  “I am merciful,” she replies.

  “Are you part of My Lady Charlotina’s menagerie, Sexton Dakhmas?” Jherek asks, having decided the girl is not an automaton, not a simple reproduction of a Four Year Empire child.

  “My Lord Perfidy’s entire court was stolen from their crypts before I was born, abandoned here.” And she pauses, correcting herself. “No, abandoned now, I suppose. Nonetheless, we have struggled bravely to observe the Rites and preserve the sacrosanct remains of our Dead.”

  Jherek nods his head, has heard stories of temporal abductions, has heard the Iron Orchid say to Jagged that more than one menagerie has been greatly enriched with beings rescued from time slavers.

  Past the hadrosauri and across a small hillock, the snaky teal-and-cream neck of a plesiosaur rises, swan-elegant, from the lagoon. Jherek closes his eyes, content with the moment, the luxury of the Palaeozoic Museum and its treasures, the company of the strange and displaced girl.

  “I cannot say that it is unpleasant, though,” she says, whispering almost too quietly for him to hear, Jherek drifting, considering sleep. “The warmth,” she says.

  Following Jagged’s careful directions, the Iron Orchid comes, ethereal hematite and lady of petals and gold-dust pollen, finally, to the Palaeozoic Museum. She twists one zircon ring to tint her eyes against the sudden bright, then stands a moment at the rail, admiring the craftsmanship, the impeccable balance of restoration and imagination, that would have given away the Museum’s authorship, if she’d not known already. After the unrelenting glower of My Lady Charlotina’s party (“Twelve-hundred distinct shades of grey,” Werther de Goethe bragged, betraying his hand in the whole ill-considered affair), after the endless “entertainments,” consisting entirely of wearisome demonstrations of embalming and mummification techniques, the fragrant air and vibrance of this garden makes her feel clean again.

  “Carnelian?” she calls, not seeing Jherek, but is answered only by the grunts and chirrups of the Museum’s exhibits. She suspects, at first, that he is playing a game with her, hide-and-seek or qwerty zotz, but finds him easily enough a moment later, asleep on a little bridge near the entrance. And the darkly-clothed girl child, one of My Lady Charlotina’s props, no doubt, snoring softly at his side. The girl’s skin, alien to the sun, has turned a bright carnation hue of red.

  An improvement, surely, the Iron Orchid thinks, as she lifts Jherek in her gleaming arms. He stirs, a gentle dream noise from his slightly parted lips.

  “Loveliest Jherek,” she says. She kisses his forehead, walks away from the sleeping, dowdy, sun-burned child of the Four Year Empire. “Even forever will seem too short, with you to spend it with.”

  Behind her, Jagged’s garden, exquisite tapestry of anachronisms, ages stitched together like wounded soldiers, whispers and screams as they leave.

  If all time is eternally present,

  All time is unredeemable.

  T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton” (1935 – 1936)

  * * *

  Giants in the Earth

  An oddity of the early years of my career, the “tie-in” anthology, playing in other people’s sandboxes. Here, it was Michael Moorcock’s Dancers At the End of Time, and this may or may not make sense to you if you’ve not read those books. But I love the way I fit he words together, and this impossible, decadent, distant future which so misunderstands the past (as always we do). So, here’s my tribute to Moorcock, and also to Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins, and the stillborn Palaeozoic Museum that should, to this day, stand in Central Park. This story takes place before Moorcock’s An Alien Heat (1971). Also, never confuse mesosaurs (Mesosauria) and mosasaurs (Squamata).

  Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire

  1

  In this absence of others

  There is not the peace we’re led

  To believe in like Sunday school

  I cannot hear for the roar This wind

  Has me half-deaf Good as that

  Or more

  Nothing has been restored Things fall apart and That’s the way

  They stay

  Nothing to be learned except edges slice and

  Children take apart because

  They can and cry at the mess

  They’ve made Oh

  Look to Father for the glue (which is Heaven)

  To mother for licking wounds (which is this

  Brooding shade with crystal wrists) Oh

  2

  Ugly lines of paper houses

  The sky is never dark

  And the stars forget themselves

  We are pink eyes in cages

  3

  Our lives are not innocent

  Any more than they can be romantic;

  The long red century has laid dull stone

  Between us and any finer attribute.

  We have buried what we might have known of

  Such things,

  Sown the graves with salt and indifference

  That nothing might grow there ever again

  Except dim and orphaned memory.

  There are words we cannot even write,

  Or speak, for the forgetting of their sincerity.

  Eggshell and no

  Royal restoration.

  These fragments shored

  For you, and I finally see for you alone.

  October 12, 1995 – July 20, 1999

  * * *

  Zelda Fitzgerald in Ballet Attire

  I don’t write much poetry. Too many reasons to go into. This one was the first I thought was good enough to show anyone, the first I would allow to be published. Here’s many years I lived and survived, condensed, distille
d into a few stanzas.

  PART TWO

  2000 – 2004

  Spindleshanks

  (New Orleans, 1956)

  The end of July, indolent, dog-day swelter inside the big white house on Prytania Street; Greek Revival columns painted as cool and white as a vanilla ice cream cone, and from the second-floor verandah Reese can see right over the wall into Lafayette Cemetery, if she wants to – Lafayette No 1, and the black iron letters above the black iron gate to remind anyone who forgets. She doesn’t dislike the house, not the way that she began to dislike her apartment in Boston before she finally left, but it’s much too big, even with Emma, and so far she hasn’t even bothered to take the sheets off most of the furniture downstairs. This one bedroom almost more than they need, anyway, her typewriter and the electric fan from Woolworth’s on the table by the wide French doors to the verandah, so she can sit there all day, sip her gin and tonic and stare out at the whitewashed brick walls and the crypts whenever the words aren’t coming.