Gunfire, and the smell of blood and smoke and spent powder; the fear and anger glinting bright in the Captain’s eyes before the mutineers shot him in the head and dumped his corpse over the side of the ship; the pastor smearing his clothes with pitch, setting himself on fire after renouncing Christ and calling on Heaven to drag the bark all the way down to Hell; all the unspeakable things that were done by and to the other passengers; the thirst, and heat, and hunger, and the sudden blow to the back of Maryse’s head that should have killed her.
The Atlantic laps impotently at the thick hull of the Cumbria, water against wood to summon a listless, hungry sound like an old man without teeth, lips and gums and spittle smacking tirelessly to no effect. Maryse tries to recall how she got into the lifeboat, but that’s something the pain seems to be keeping back, something it doesn’t want her to know, at least not yet. There’s a gaping hole hacked through the bottom of the boat, and a small axe lying nearby.
“Did I do that?” she asks and reaches for the axe, but pulls her hand back when she sees the crust of dried blood on the handle. She thinks about trying to climb out of the lifeboat and onto the deck, searching the ship to see if anyone else is alive, but she might be better off not seeing whatever she would find, or whatever might find her, so she stares out at the sea instead.
It might almost be a silvered looking glass, a gently rippling mirror stretching away in every direction until it’s lost in the mist. There’s no way to be sure how long she lay unconscious in the little boat, but she does know that the Cumbria was becalmed fifteen days before the crew turned on Captain Malmstrom. So this might be the sixteenth day since the ship sailed into the mist, somewhere south and west of São Filipe and the Cape Verde archipelago. Or it might be the seventeenth. It hardly seems to matter now. This is as far as they’re going, Maryse and the Cumbria. Her family is dead – her two sisters, her father and mother – all of them bound for Cape Town and a new life on a South African tobacco plantation. She’s the very last. She’ll be dead soon, too, surely, if there’s any mercy.
But there is no mercy, she thinks. No mercy at all. God has forsaken me and there is no mercy left. We have sailed completely off the world and into some damned and infernal region. She lies back down in the lifeboat and stares up into the roiling mist. Her head hurts just a little less when she’s lying down, and, besides, she doesn’t want to see the ocean anymore.
She imagines a huge black raven perched on the davit above her head, watching her with eyes the color of molten gold, and Maryse reminds herself its only the fever, only the thirst, only her mind slipping away from sanity as her body gives up the ghost. Sometime later, as the sun smudge drags itself towards mid-day, the raven squawks once and dissolves in a shimmer of ebony rose petals. Maryse closes her eyes and tries hard to picture herself home again, her father’s manor house in Kent, the copse where her mother once showed her a fairy ring, where she and her sisters played King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table and she was always Guinevere. The raven petals, which smell like licorice and coal dust, settle lightly about her face, and Maryse realizes for the first time that someone’s removed her dress. There are stiff maroon spatters across the front of her muslin petticoat, but it’s best not to think about that, either.
The ghost of the pastor sits at her feet, and there’s another gold-eyed raven perched on his shoulder. The man’s face has been scorched almost beyond recognition, but there’s enough left of his face that he can smile for her. His broken teeth are shades of yellow and brown and ivory.
“What are you still hanging on for, missy?” he asks, but she doesn’t answer him. “You think there’s an angel coming to bear you up to Paradise? You think your strength will be rewarded?”
Maryse closes her eyes so that she won’t have to see him. “Isn’t this Hell?” she asks the ghost. “Didn’t you send us all to Hell?”
“No, I don’t know where this is,” he replies, and the raven laughs at him. There’s a crackling sound like paper burning, but Maryse keeps her eyes shut tight. “I can’t say for certain,” the parson mutters, “but I don’t believe it’s Hell. I think we’re lost, that’s all. I don’t think we’re even on the ocean anymore.”
“They’re all dead,” Maryse says, trying not to consider what he meant by not on the ocean anymore, and the crackling sound stops.
“Oh, don’t you worry your pretty little head over it, girl. You’re not far behind them.”
The raven flaps its wings and Maryse almost remembers what the sails sounded like, fluttering and swollen with wind, bearing them quickly across the sparkling sea.
If I had black wings, she thinks, I could fly away from here. If I had wings, I could fly away home.
“All in a hot and copper sky,” the raven squawks. “The bloody Sun, at noon, Right up above the mast did stand, No bigger than the Moon.”
“Please tell it to shut up,” she says, but the pastor doesn’t respond.
“Day after day, day after day,” the bird continues undaunted, “We stuck, nor breath nor motion; As idle as a painted ship, Upon a painted ocean.”
“But there wasn’t any albatross,” Maryse whispers, her mouth so dry it’s getting hard to speak, her lips cracked open and she tastes blood.
“Then it was some other sin,” the pastor tells her. “Let’s not start thinking ourselves innocent, child. There’s always plenty of sin to go around, whether there’s an albatross or not.”
Maryse swallows, her throat gone raw as the floor of a slaughterhouse, and she lies very, very still, listening to the bird reciting Coleridge. She wonders how long it will take for all the others to find their way back onto the Cumbria, and how long it will be, this time, before the crew mutinies, how long before the pastor’s suicide, and if she’ll make it into the lifeboat again.
II
The old man sits in an unsteady chair near the single window of his small apartment. On the folding aluminum card table in front of him is a revolver, a box of .45-caliber shells, the pearl-handled straight razor he’s had since his days in Korea, a Bible that he stole from a motel room in Toledo years ago, and photographs stacked up like a deck of playing cards. Some of the photographs are black and white, creased and turning yellow at the edges, and some are faded Polaroids, and some are in color. The apartment smells like fried food and Raid bug spray and stale cigarettes. It’s very, very quiet in the room with the unsteady chair and the folding aluminum card table, and there are no sounds leaking in from the world outside, because, as far as the old man can tell, there is no longer a world outside.
He cannot remember the last time he ate, or took a piss, or heard another human voice. He sleeps, sometimes, on the narrow, swaybacked bed shoved into one corner of the room, but he doesn’t dream. He changes his clothes, trading one white T-shirt for another, one pair of boxers for the next.
The old man takes the topmost photograph from the stack, and glances at the window. There’s a curtain, a dingy piece of cloth with make-believe sunflowers printed on it. When he prays, which is less frequently than he changes his underwear, he thanks God for that piece of cloth, grateful that there’s something between him and the view, so he only has to look when he needs to be reminded.
The color photograph in his hand was taken on July 4, 1973. He knows this because the date is written on the back in his dead wife’s swooping, left-leaning cursive. There are three children in the photograph, and a plastic wading pool. He slips the picture to the bottom of the stack and takes the next photo off the top. This one’s in black and white, himself at age sixteen, smiling proudly and holding the rifle that his father gave him for his birthday, the first gun he ever used to kill anything. He glances at the curtain again, then places the photo at the bottom of the stack.
The third photograph shows him at forty-five, and his son at twenty-one, standing on a pier in Destin, Florida. His son is grinning and holding up the seven-pound Jack Crevalle he caught that day. There’s no date on the back of this photograph. The old m
an lays it down next to the pearl-handled razor and shuts his eyes for a moment. When he opens them again, there’s a cockroach crawling across the picture and he flicks it away from his right index finger. It’s so quiet in the apartment that he can hear the bug hit the floor on the other side of the room and then scramble away.
The old man tries to remember how long it’s been since he baited the mousetraps beneath the sink. He thinks it was the same day that he last looked out the window. The traps never catch anything, but the bits of stale bread and breakfast cereal are always gone whenever he bothers to check them.
He pushes the unsteady chair away from the card table, its legs squeaking loudly as they slide across the linoleum floor, then stands up and looks again at the sunflower curtain hiding the window. Sometimes, he imagines that the curtain rustles slightly in a breeze that isn’t there; sometimes, he thinks that he hears birds and traffic and human voices. So he always carries the Bible with him, whenever he goes to the window, whenever he can’t stand not to look, the Bible and the revolver, because the sounds he imagines might be the demons that are waiting just beyond the limits of Purgatory. He knows that neither the Bible nor the Colt would stop them, if they ever found a way through, but the one makes him feel better and he could use the other to put a bullet in his brain before the demons reach him. He picks up the gun first, opens the cylinder to be sure that there are no empty chambers, then closes it again and reaches for the stolen King James Bible. He’s read it six hundred and forty times, cover to cover, since the world went away and left him here.
The window is never more than five steps from the card table. The old man uses the barrel of the pistol to push the curtain to one side.
This time, he thinks, the city will be there. This time the city will be there, and I’ll be able to see all the way to Lake Michigan.
And he also thinks, Or the demons will have gotten through, and there won’t be anything left but fire raining down from the sky and rivers of blood.
The sunflower curtain slides easily along its metal rod, left to right, and in a moment more the old man can see that nothing out there has changed – no city, no view of Lake Michigan, no demons, no clotting rivers of blood. There’s only the short space between the fourth-floor window and the place where the world ends. It’s near enough he could touch it, if he leaned far out the window and used the broom handle. But he’s never done that, and he doesn’t think he ever will, because he doesn’t want to know what would happen.
He can see himself reflected dimly in the smooth, faintly shiny surface, the face he hasn’t shaved in days, the dark smudges beneath his eyes, his dirty hair, the black gun clutched in his right hand. He looks down, but the brick wall of the apartment building and the glassy surface both vanish in a soupy mist, no more than nine or ten feet below the sill. The third floor is lost somewhere in the mist. He looks up, and it’s the same, the shifting grey mist and something white that might be the sun, or only a hole in a sky that isn’t there anymore. It never gets dark, but he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t call this daylight, either.
He jumped once, not long after it began, but the old man woke up back in his bed with a splitting headache and something sticky that looked like tar, but smelled like vomit, staining his clothes. So he never jumped again.
Standing here, staring at himself staring back at himself, he curses and makes wild, hopeless promises involving the gun and the razor, promises he knows he’s too much of a coward to ever keep. If he weren’t, he suspects that it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. He could stick the revolver in his mouth and blow the back of his fucking head off, or cut his throat from ear to ear, and he’d only wake up on the bed again, stinking of puke. Because old men who have been damned do not exit Purgatory with bullets and sharp steel blades.
He stands at the window until he can’t bear the sight of his own reflection any longer, and then the old man pulls the sunflower curtain shut again and goes back to the card table and his stack of photographs.
“Holy shit,” the changeling boy named Airdrie whispers. The brown girl is somewhere just behind him, but he’s almost forgotten about her. They’re standing near what might be the center of the attic of the yellow house, though he can’t be certain about that. He followed her through the darkness and clutter for ten or fifteen minutes to get here, time enough to have walked all the way from Benefit Street to the old observatory over on Hope if he’d wanted to go for a stroll. Airdrie had just about decided that the attic went on forever, or they must be going in circles, when they finally came to a pool of silver-white moonlight shining in through a narrow pane set into the roof of the house. Rows of tall curio cabinets are arranged beneath the skylight, and the glass orbs they hold sparkle like iridescent gems. Like pearls, he thinks, remembering how Hester had lied to him about her name.
“There must be a thousand of them,” he says.
“Oh, considerably more than that,” the brown girl replies proudly.
“I heard some stories, but I never thought there’d be so many,” and he’s pretty sure that none of the others – the other Children of the Cuckoo and the ghul pups – are going to believe him.
“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” the brown girl says anxiously. “We should go back right now.”
“How many more than a thousand?” he asks.
“I don’t remember exactly, but we really ought – ”
“How do you know? Did you ever count them all?”
Airdrie takes a step towards the nearest cabinet, so tall that it reaches almost all the way to the sloped attic ceiling. It’s built from sturdy planks of some dark wood, wood shellacked the color of chocolate, and its shelves are crowded with dust and cobwebs and the glass orbs, hundreds of them. Most are no larger than a hen’s egg, but a few are as big around as rutabagas, and at least a couple are twice that size. He picks up one of the smaller ones and holds it to the moonlight. The orb is very cold to the touch, same as the brown girl’s hand, and its surface swirls with color, like the wavering, rainbow sheen of oil on water.
“No!” the brown girl shouts at him, and she plucks the orb from his fingers. “You can’t touch them. I’m not even supposed to touch them. Not ever.”
“I wasn’t gonna drop it,” he says sheepishly and backs away from the cabinet.
“That hardly matters, Airdrie,” she admonishes, carefully returning the orb to its spot on the shelf, the perfect circle of undusty wood where it must have sat for three quarters of a century. “Nobody touches them. That’s what my father said and so that’s the rule.”
Airdrie shrugs and stares down at the fingers of the hand that held the orb. They’re tingling faintly, almost painfully, and he thinks the cold might have burned him if she hadn’t taken it when she did.
“So this is why they sent him away?” he asks and blows on his fingertips to warm them.
“He said they didn’t understand,” the brown girl replies, turning to face him, turning her back on the tall cabinet.
“That’s not what I asked you,” Airdrie says. “I asked you if this is why they sent him away.”
“I know what you asked me. I have ears.”
“Then why don’t you just answer my question?”
“You never had a father, did you?” she asks instead. “I mean, not one you can remember. The ghouls stole you away from your mother and father when you were only a little baby, so you don’t understand.”
“Understand what? I understand it’s rude not to answer a question.”
“But not that there are some questions that it’s rude to ask in the first place. You’re just the same as the hounds that raised you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Never you mind. But I shouldn’t have brought you here and now you have to leave.”
Airdrie’s heard stories that the brown girl’s insane, that living alone in the attic and never getting any older has driven her crazy, and he’s beginning to believe them, regardless of what Miss Josephi
ne and Madam Terpsichore have told him to the contrary. Standing there, looking into her piercing velvet-brown eyes, he thinks that maybe she’s gone mad as a March hare in May and it’s supposed to be some sort of secret.
“Was your momma really an Indian?” he asks her. “That’s what I’ve always heard.”
“I don’t remember her,” the brown girl replies and shakes her head.
“See there? You’re doing it again. That’s not an answer. I didn’t ask whether or not you remembered her.”
“Yes,” the brown girl snaps, and she turns away from him again. “My mother was an Indian. She was a Montauk woman that my father brought to Providence from Long Island. I want you to leave.”
Airdrie realizes that his fingers have stopped tingling and he steps around Hester for another look at the orbs.
“Don’t worry,” he tells her. “I’m not going to touch any of them. I just want to see, that’s all. Did your father ever say that looking was against the rules?”
“No. He never said that. Although I know I shouldn’t have brought you up here.”
“But you already did, so now you may as well let me see what all the fuss is about.” Then Airdrie leans close to one of the larger orbs; the glass is very dusty, but he can still make out the oily colors writhing across its surface. There are two symbols that appear to have been scratched deeply into the orb with something sharp – an Ω, which he remembers from his lessons, and something that looks sort of like an open eye at the center of two interlocking triangles.
“What do those mean?” he asks her, pointing at the symbols, but the brown girl doesn’t answer.
“Is it magic?”
“It’s all magic,” she sighs impatiently. “You’ve seen enough, haven’t you? Won’t they start wondering where you’ve gone?”
“They might,” he says, “but Miss Josephine said I could talk to you for a little while, if I wanted to.”
“I bet she didn’t say you could go wandering off into the attic, though.”
Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) Page 50