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

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “Hey, what is this shit?” someone shouts near the front of the theater, a fat man, and he stands and glares up at the projection booth. Some of the others have started mumbling, confused or annoyed whispers, and Alex has no idea what the film is, only that it isn’t The Seventh Seal. Onscreen, the camera cuts away from the peasant, and now there’s a close-up of a dead animal, instead, a ragged, woolly mass streaked with gore the color of molasses. It takes her a second or two to realize that it’s a sheep. Its throat has been ripped out, and its tongue lolls from its mouth. The camera pulls back as the man kneels beside the dead animal, then cuts to a close-up of the dog. It’s stopped barking and licks at its lips.

  “Jesus fucking Christ,” the fat man growls, and then he storms up the aisle, past Alex and out the swinging doors to the lobby. No one else leaves their seat, though a few heads have turned to watch the fat man’s exit. Someone laughs nervously, and onscreen the peasant man has lifted the dead sheep in his arms, is walking quickly away from the camera, and his dog follows close behind. The camera lingers as the man grows smaller and smaller in the distance. The ground where the sheep lay glistens wetly.

  A woman sitting a couple of seats in front of Alex turns around. “Do you have any idea at all what this is?” she asks.

  “No,” Alex replies. “No, I don’t.”

  The woman frowns and sighs loudly. “The projectionist must have made a mistake,” she says and turns back towards the screen before Alex can say anything else.

  When the man and the dog have shrunk to bobbing specks, the camera finally cuts away, trades the stony pasture, the blood-soaked patch of grass, for a close-up of a church steeple and the cacophony of tolling bells spills out through tinny stereo speakers and fills the theater.

  “Well, this isn’t what I paid six dollars to see,” the woman two seats in front of Alex grumbles.

  The fat man doesn’t come back, and if the projectionist has made a mistake, no one seems to be in much of a hurry to correct it. The audience has grown quiet again, apparently more curious than perturbed, and the film moves from scene to scene, a flickering progression of images and story, dialogue pared to little more than whispers and occasional, furtive glances between the actors. A mountain village and a wolf killing sheep somewhere that might be France or Italy, but it’s impossible to tell because everyone speaks with British accents. The peasant man from the opening scene (if that truly was the opening scene) has a blind daughter who spends her days inside their little house gazing out a window, as though she could see the mountains in the distance.

  “Ingmar Bergman didn’t make this film,” the woman sitting in front of Alex says conclusively. “I don’t know who made this film,” and then someone turns and asks the woman to stop talking, please.

  Finally, a young boy is found dead and a frantic hunt for the wolf ensues, night and wrathful villagers with torches, hounds and antique rifles wandering through a mist-shrouded forest. It’s obvious that this scene was shot on a soundstage, the contorted nightmare trees too bizarre to possibly be real, nothing but plywood and chicken wire and papier-mâché. Some of the trunks, the tortuous limbs, are undoubtedly meant to suggest random scraps of human anatomy – the arch of a spine, a pair of arms ending in gnarled roots, a female torso sprouting half-formed from the bole of an oak.

  Alex thinks that maybe there’s something big skulking along through the gloom just beyond the wavering light of the torches, insinuation of spider-long legs, and sometimes it seems to move a little ahead of the hunters; other times it trails behind.

  The woman seated two rows in front of Alex makes a disgusted, exasperated sound and stands up, her silhouette momentarily eclipsing the screen. “This is absurd,” she says. “I’m asking for my money back right now,” speaking to no one or to everyone who might be listening. She leaves the theater, and someone down front laughs. “Good fucking riddance,” a husky male voice whispers.

  Onscreen, a shout, the bonewet snap of living wood, and one of the villagers raises his gun, extreme close-up of his finger around the trigger before the boom and flash of gunpowder. The tinny speakers blare rifle fire and the furious barking of dogs, so loud that Alex puts her hands over her ears. A man screams and the scene dissolves, then, fades away to daylight and a high-angle view of a dirt road winding across the fields towards the village. The camera zooms slowly in on a small gathering of peasant women waiting at the end of the road; silent despair in their weathered faces, loss, resignation, fear, and one by one they turn and walk back towards their homes.

  Alex squints down at her watch, leans forward in her seat, and angles her wrist towards the screen, the grey-silver light off the scratched crystal so she can read the black hour and minute hands. Only half an hour since the film began, though it seems like it’s been much longer, and she wonders if Margot is home yet. She thinks again about the pay phone outside the theater, about the gallery and the answering machine.

  She glances back at the screen, and now there’s a close-up of a skull, a sheep’s, perhaps, but Alex isn’t sure; bone bleached dry and stark as chalk, a leathery patch of hide still clinging to its muzzle, the empty sockets for eyes that have rotted away or been eaten by insects and crows. The lonely sound of the wind, and the film cuts to the peasant’s blind daughter, a music box playing the theme from Swan Lake softly in the background, and she stares out the window of her dead father’s house. She’s neither smiling nor does she look unhappy, her hands folded neatly in her lap. Then a man is speaking from somewhere behind her. The cold, guttural voice is so entirely unexpected that Alex jumps, startled, and she misses the first part of it, whatever was said before the girl turns her head towards the unseen speaker, raises a hand and places one index finger to the center of her forehead.

  “I saw the light again last night,” she says, the milky, colorless cataracts to prove that she’s a liar or insane, and then the girl’s hand returns to her lap. “Floating across the meadow,” she adds.

  The music box stops abruptly, and now there’s the small, hard sound of a dog barking far, far away.

  “Who are you? Your hand is cold – ”

  “Which road will you take?” the guttural voice asks, interrupting her. “That of the needles or that of the pins?”

  She turns to the window again, imperfect, transparent mirror for her plain face. For an instant there seems to be another reflection there, a lean and hungry shadow crouched close behind the blind girl’s chair. And then there’s a popping, fluttering racket from the projection booth as the world is swallowed in pure white light, and Alex knows that the film hasn’t ended, it’s merely stopped as inexplicably as it began.

  The house lights come up, but she keeps her seat, sits waiting for her eyes to adjust as the handful of people remaining in the theater stands and begins to drift towards the lobby doors, confused and thoughtful faces, overheard bits of conjecture and undisguised bewilderment.

  “It could’ve been Robert Florey,” a man who looks like a college professor says to a blonde girl in a KMFDM T-shirt, slender girl young enough to be his daughter. “Do you know, Florey, dear?” he asks. “I’ve always heard there was a lost Florey out there somewhere.”

  “Well, they might have told us they didn’t have The Seventh Seal,” another man complains. “They could have said something.”

  And when they’ve all gone, and Alex is alone with the matte-black walls and the sugar-and-vinegar theater smells, she sits and stares at the blank screen for another minute, trying to be certain what she saw, or didn’t see, at the end.

  3.

  July

  Margot away for the entire week, a lecture series in Montreal – ”Formalism, Expressionism, and the Post-Modernist Denial,” according to the flier stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an apple core – and Alex left alone in the Midtown condo paid for with the advance money from The Boats of Morning. Four days now since she’s gone any farther than the row of mailboxes in the building’s lobby. Too hot to go out if s
he doesn’t absolutely have to, eggs frying on sidewalks out there, so she stays half-drunk on Absolut and grapefruit juice, smokes too much and watches black-and-white movies on television. Whatever it takes not to think about the typewriter in her office down the hall from their bedroom, the desk drawer full of blank paper. Margot called on Wednesday night, and they talked for twenty minutes about nothing in particular, which is almost all they ever talk about these days.

  “You’d like it here,” Margot said. “You’d like the sky here. It’s very big and blue.”

  Late Thursday afternoon, and Alex comes back upstairs with the day’s mail, the usual assortment of bills and glossy catalogs, a new Rolling Stone, an offer for a platinum Visa card at twenty-one-and-one-half percent interest. And a large padded envelope the color of a grocery bag. Her name and address are printed neatly on the front in tall, blocky letters – MS. ALEX MARLOWE – and there’s no return address, only the initials J. S. written very small in the upper left-hand corner. She leaves everything else on the dining table, a small mountain of unopened mail accumulated there already, debts and distractions for Margot to deal with when she gets home. Alex pours herself a drink, then takes the big brown envelope to the sofa in front of the television and opens it with the pull tab on the back. Inside, there’s a videocassette, along with a couple of pages of lavender stationary and some newspaper and magazine clippings held together with a lavender paper clip.

  Alex sips her drink, the vodka too strong, so she stirs it absently with an index finger and looks down at the top sheet of stationary. It takes her a moment to place the name there – Jude Sinclair – a moment before she remembers the pretty girl from the gallery, dark-skinned, blue-eyed girl who’d tried ardently to explain Albert Perrault’s work to her. Alex leans back against the sofa cushions, glancing at the TV screen (an old gangster film she doesn’t recognize), and takes another sip from her glass. “Dear Alex,” the letter begins, and she notices that it was typed on a typewriter that drops its Ts.

  Dear Alex,

  I’m sure ha you won’ remember me. We alked briefly ahe gallery in May. I was he chick wih a serious hard-on for M. Perraul. I hink I old you ha I’d wrien poems abouhe “Secunda rais,” do you remember ha? I suspec you may have hough I was a flake. Did you know abou P.’s acciden?? errible. I was ahe funeral in Paris. I hough you migh wano read one of he poems (I have burned he oher one). Hope you are well. My love o Margo.

  Jude S.

  Alex pulls the pages free of the lavender paper clip, places the first page on the bottom, and the second is the poem, the one Jude Sinclair didn’t burn. Alex looks at the black videocassette, considers stuffing it all back into the envelope and tossing the whole mess into the garbage can in the kitchen. Perrault’s one of the last things she’s in the mood to think about right now. She’d almost managed to forget him and his paintings, although Margot talked about him for weeks after the show. They heard about the accident, of course, a motorcycle wreck somewhere in France, and finally, that seemed to close the subject.

  Alex takes a long swallow of her drink and scans the first few lines of the short poem, a copy obviously produced on the same typewriter as the letter, the same telltale dropped Ts and a few inky smudges and fingerprints on the lavender stationary.

  “Jesus, who the hell still uses carbon paper,” she wonders aloud, setting her drink down on the coffee table. Alex starts over and reads the poem through from the beginning. “The Night We Found Red Cap” and then a forced and clumsy attempt at Italian sonnet form, eight-line stanza, six-line stanza, to relay Jude Sinclair’s slightly stilted, perfectly unremarkable impressions of the painting.

  Alex glances quickly through the clippings: the Artforum review of the show at Artifice, a review of another Perrault exhibit last summer in Manhattan, Le Monde’s account of his motorcycle accident, and a short French obituary. And at the bottom of the stack, a photocopy of a very old lithograph. She sets the rest aside and stares at it, a pastoral scene centered around some strange animal that resembles a huge wolf more than anything else she can think of, though it’s reared up on its hind limbs and its long, sinuous tail makes her think of a big cat, a lion or a panther, maybe. The creature is attacking a young woman, and there are other mutilated bodies scattered about on the ground. In the distance are men on horseback wearing tricorne hats, and the creature has raised its head, is gazing fearlessly over one shoulder towards them. Beneath the scene is the legend, “La Bête du Gévaudan.” On the back, someone, presumably Jude Sinclair, has scribbled a date in pencil – 1767.

  Alex lays the small bundle of paper down on the coffee table and picks up her drink. The glass has left a ring of condensation on the dark wood, the finish already beginning to turn pale and opaque underneath. An heirloom from Margot’s grandmother or a great aunt or some such, and she’ll have a cow when she sees it, so Alex wipes the water away with the hem of her T-shirt. But the ring stays put, a defiant, accusing, condemning tattoo. She sighs, sits back, and takes another swallow of the vodka and grapefruit juice.

  “What are you supposed to be, anyway?” she asks the videotape. No label of any sort on it for an answer, but almost certainly more Perraultiana, an interview, possibly, or maybe something a bit more exotic, more morbid, a news report of his accident taped off TF1 or even footage shot during the funeral. Alex wouldn’t be surprised, has seen and heard of worse things being done by art groupies like Jude Sinclair. She decides to save the video for later, a few moments’ diversion before bed, leaves it on the couch, and she goes to fix herself a fresh drink.

  Something from the freezer for dinner, prepackaged Chinese that came out of the microwave looking nothing at all like the photograph on the cardboard box, Kung Pao pencil erasers and a bottle of beer, and Alex sits on the living room floor, watching Scooby Doo on the Cartoon Network. The end of another day that might as well not have happened, more of yesterday and the day before that, the weeks and months since she’s finished anything at all piling up so fast that soon it’ll have been a year. Today, she stood in the doorway to her office for fifteen minutes and stared uselessly at her typewriter, the vintage Royal she inherited from her father. She’s never been able to write on anything else, the rough clack-clack-clack of steel keys, all the mechanical clicks and clatters and pings to mark her progress down a page, through a scene, the inharmonious chapter-to-chapter symphony towards conclusion and THE END.

  When the beer’s gone and she’s swallowed enough of the stuff from the freezer to be convinced that she’s better off not finishing it, Alex slides her plate beneath the coffee table and retrieves Jude Sinclair’s videocassette from the couch. She puts it into the VCR, hits the play button, and in a moment Scooby and Shaggy are replaced by a loud flurry of static. Alex starts to turn down the volume, but the snow and white noise have already been replaced by a silent black screen. She sits watching it, half-curious, impatient, waiting for whatever it is to begin, whatever the blue-eyed girl from the gallery wants her to see.

  In the kitchen, the phone rings, and Alex looks away from the television screen, not particularly interested in talking to anyone, and so she thinks she’ll let the machine pick up. On the third ring, she turns back to the TV, but it’s still just as dark as before, and she checks to be sure that she doesn’t have it on pause by mistake. The soft, green glow of digital letters, play and a flashing arrow to let her know that she doesn’t, that either the tape’s blank or the recording hasn’t begun yet. Or maybe Jude Sinclair’s filmed a perfectly dark room as a tribute or eulogy to Perrault.

  “This is bullshit,” Alex mutters, and she presses fast forward. Now the blackness flickers past as the counter tallies all the minutes of nothing stored on the tape. In the kitchen, the telephone rings once more and then the answering machine switches on, Margot’s voice reciting their number, politely informing the caller that no one can come to the phone right now, but if you’ll please leave your name and number, the date and time, someone will get back to you as soon as possible.


  And then Margot answers herself, her voice sounding small and distant, sounding upset, and “Alex?” she says. “Alex, if you’re there please pick up, okay? I need to talk to you.”

  Alex sighs and rubs at her temples. A bright burst of pain behind her left eye, maybe the beginnings of a migraine, and she’s really not up to one of Margot’s long-distance crises, the two of them yelling at each other with half a continent in between. She glances back to the television screen, presses play, and the nothing stops flickering.

  “Hello? Alex? Come on. I know you’re at home. Pick up the damned phone, please.”

  It really is blank, she thinks. The crazy bitch sent me a fucking blank videotape.

  “Alex! I’m not kidding, okay? Please answer the goddamn telephone!”

  “Alright! Jesus, I’m coming!” she shouts at the kitchen, gets up too fast and one foot knocks over the empty beer bottle. It rolls noisily away towards a bookshelf, leaves behind a glistening, semi-circular trickle of liquid as it goes. By the time Alex lifts the receiver, Margot has started crying.

  “What? What’s wrong?”

  “Christ, Alex. Why can’t you just answer the fucking phone? Why do I have to get fucking hysterical to get you to answer the

  phone?”

  For a second, Alex considers the simple efficacy of a lie, the harmless convenience of I was on the toilet, or I just walked in the front door. Any plausible excuse to cover her ass.