Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Woonsocket

  “I t wasn’t like that,” Odd Willie mumbles indignantly, and lights another cigarette off the butt of the one before, crumpling the empty Winston pack and tossing it out the car window. “That sour old cunt, she needed a lesson in the finer fucking points of minding her own business, you know.”

  “Yeah, well, be that as it may,” Soldier says, “don’t think you’re gonna make a habit out of shit like that.” She squints through her sunglasses and the windshield of the Dodge at the cloudy afternoon, the sky still threatening snow. The Bailiff told her to keep driving the old Intrepid for now, even after what Odd Willie pulled at the Dunkin’ Donuts and then the scene out at Rocky Point, and that was only one of the dozen or so unwelcome surprises in the last twenty-four hours that have Soldier wondering if maybe she’s finally running out of luck, or if maybe the Bailiff’s just running out of patience.

  “You’re wound way too tight, Odd Willie,” she says. “You’re like the center of a goddamn golf ball.”

  On the radio, Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs are singing “Lil’ Red Riding Hood,” and Soldier bumps up the volume a notch. The Dodge rushes past the turnoff for the West Wrentham Road, and the final mile or so of I-22 before Woonsocket stretches out before her, gray and crooked and almost as narrow as her chances of coming out of this thing in one piece. Her eyes ache, and she could have used a few more hours sleep.

  “I just can’t stand people fucking staring at me,” Odd Willie says, and then to Saben White, sitting alone in the backseat, “You make me sound like some kind of goddamn irrational lunatic.”

  “That’s the way Soldier told it to me,” Saben replies. “And you’re not exactly known for your judicious conduct, Mr. Lothrop.” Soldier glares at her in the rearview mirror, but Saben doesn’t seem to notice. “You got that nickname somewhere.”

  “You’re one to fucking talk,” Odd Willie cackles and shakes his head. “Shit, Saben, I ain’t never yet thrown down on a goddamned priest. And, you know, now that I think about it, that’s probably why you don’t hear people calling me fucking Dead Willie.”

  “You do what you have to do,” Saben says and rubs at the gauze bandage on the back of her neck. “If you knew the whole story—”

  “Yeah, well maybe that’s the problem,” Soldier says. “No one’s bothered to let us in on the whole story.”

  “No one ever tells me jack shit anymore,” Odd Willie mutters and sucks sullenly on his cigarette.

  Soldier spares another glance at the rearview mirror, at Saben sitting there in the backseat, sitting up very straight and defiant in her neat black clothes, that one fucking outfit probably worth more than Soldier’s entire wardrobe. The left side of Saben’s face is swollen and splotched various bruised shades of red and purple, her lower lip split badly enough that it took two stitches to close. And the sight of her, all the damage done to that pretty, smug face, makes Soldier feel just a little bit better about almost everything.

  “What I want to know,” Willie says, “is why these goddamn beaver-beaters up in Woonsocket decided they couldn’t wait until Monday to do this thing, and, for that matter, why the fuck the Bailiff let them go and change their minds on him like that?”

  “Likely as not, that’s none of your goddamn business,” Soldier tells him. “Anyway, what difference does it make to you? Did you have a fucking date or something?”

  “You can suck my dick, the both of you,” Odd Willie snorts and breathes out a cloud of smoke.

  “You scared, Odd Willie?” Saben asks, trying to sound amused, but Soldier can hear the deceit.

  “Damn straight, and if you aren’t too, it’s only because what precious little sense you ever had got knocked out of you yesterday. After I got back from Rocky Point last night, I started asking around about Woonsocket.”

  “What you mean is, you went looking for spook stories,” Soldier says, and Odd Willie frowns at her.

  “Jesus Christ, you’re the one made the place out like it was the goddamned fifth level of Hades or something, so I just asked around, that’s all. I talked to Patience Bacon, you know, that little creep used to run with Scarborough Pentecost back before he—”

  “I know fucking Patience Bacon.”

  “Well, yeah, so he says it’s never been much of anything, Woonsocket. Leastways, no one’s ever given much of a shit what goes on up there. Boston leaves it alone. Providence leaves it alone. Bunch of inbred motherfuckers, he said, half-breeds and quadroons and messed-up shit like that. Total fucking Deliverance territory.”

  “Yeah, it’s a shithole,” Soldier says, wishing she’d made Odd Willie drive, because he doesn’t talk so damned much when he’s driving.

  “Patience says it was a big mill town way back when, full of, you know, decent working-class folk,” and Willie Lothrop snickers and taps ash onto the floorboard. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled motherfuckers yearning to get dicked up the ass by fat-cat mill owners, right?”

  “We don’t need a history lesson,” Saben says. “Some of us know our own backyards.”

  “Shut the fuck up,” Soldier says and smiles at Saben’s reflection. “You keep right on talking, Odd Willie. Fancy-pants cunts that ride in the backseat never know half as much as they think they do.”

  “Hell, Soldier, I don’t even remember what I was saying. What’s the difference? We do what we’re told, like good little henchmen, no matter what’s on the other end. Into the Valley of Death rode the six fucking hundred, et cetera, et cetera.”

  “Whatever you say,” Saben mumbles, meaning Soldier or Odd Willie or the both of them at once.

  Willie Lothrop rubs at his nose. “Bad fucking mojo up there,” he says. “That’s what Patience Bacon says. Said that place was rotten to the core before the mills and the beaver-beaters and the fucking hounds showed up, said even the damned Indians knew that place was bad news, but they had the good sense to stay away. You know what Woonsocket means in Algonquin Indian talk? It means the fucking way down to hell; that’s what it means.”

  “No, it doesn’t, you moron,” Soldier says and laughs. “It means ‘place of deep descent,’ because of the valley and all the damn waterfalls on the Blackstone River.”

  Odd Willie glares at her for a second or two and then gives Soldier the finger. “Fine,” he says. “I didn’t know we had Miss Hollywood fucking Squares in the car with us, Miss I’ll-take-goddamn-geography-for-five-hundred-Alex. Jesus fucking crap. You’re the one was telling me how messed up the place is.”

  “I never said it was the gates of hell. It’s a rough neighborhood, that’s all.” Soldier knows better, knows it’s more than that, way more than that, but doesn’t see the point, at this late date, of telling Odd Willie the truth if he doesn’t know it already. He’ll see for himself soon enough.

  “You want me just to shut the hell up?”

  “No,” Soldier lies. “I want to hear the rest of it. The history of Woonsocket as told by the illustrious and learned Patience Bacon. By the way, you know he’s the same jackass who accidentally locked himself in a mausoleum over at Swan Point, right? He was there three days—”

  “You’re fucking making fun of me, and I hate that almost as much as crazy old ladies fucking staring at me.”

  “Oh, come on, Willie. Do it for Saben. She needs something to take her mind off being such a craven pain in my rectum.”

  Willie sighs and taps more ash onto the floorboard, ignoring the ashtray. “Patience Bacon says it’s a bad place, that’s all. He says it was always a rough neck of the woods, but after the mills left in the seventies, things kind of went to—”

  “Hell?” Saben asks quietly.

  “If you gotta put a goddamned name on it, yeah. Things kinda went to hell. It’s fucking anarchy up there. Quadroons and octoroons wandering around in broad fucking daylight, buying their crack and crystal and shit right there on the street just like everybody else. The whole town might as well be a goddamn warren—”

  “You curse an
awful lot, you know that?” Soldier asks him. “You might just be the most foulmouthed bastard I’ve ever had to work with.”

  “Fuck you. You know about Ballou?” he asks her.

  “Yeah, Willie. I know all about Ballou.”

  “Crazy son of a whore. Crazy as a shithouse rat. Way I hear it, he’s spent the last couple of decades hidden away up here trying to open doors, doors no one’s supposed to ever fucking open. No one. Ever. But there he is with his little inbred fuckfest, doing whatever he pleases, and the rest of us be damned. Lots of people go missing in Woonsocket.”

  “If I lived there, I’d go missing, too,” Saben says.

  “You might just go missing anyway,” Soldier tells her, speaking to the rearview mirror.

  “This guy Ballou, he’s not even a changeling,” Odd Willie says. “He’s not a Child of the Cuckoo, and he’s not a ghoul, either, just some half-breed mutt, and he’s running the whole damn show, right? Descended from some kind of goddamn French Lancelots—”

  “Huguenots,” Saben White cuts in. “French Huguenots.”

  Odd Willie looks over his shoulder at her, peering past the rims of his expensive Wayfarers, and she gets the middle finger, too. “Soldier, if you want to pull over, I’d be glad to finish what you started yesterday.”

  “You’d be glad to fucking try,” Saben tells him.

  “Shut up, Saben. Interrupt Odd Willie again, and I’m not only going to take him up on his offer, I’m gonna lend a fucking hand.”

  “Whatever. Fucking Huguenots,” Odd Willie says, turning back to face the windshield again. “They started all this textile shit way back in the 1840s, right? And they’ve been running the place ever since. Fucking half-breed loup-garou sons of bitches. Patience Bacon, he says there’s this Precious Blood beaver-beater cemetery with some sort of big marble coliseum, you know, like a ruined Greek temple, and this Ballou fucker and his mongrels have been making human sacrifices there on the Full Worm Moons—”

  “—trying to open doors,” Saben says. “You’re starting to sound like a bad monster movie.”

  “Oh, that’s real fucking funny,” Odd Willie sneers back at her.

  “Ballou’s a thug and a cunt,” Soldier says, quoting the Bailiff. “Someone on the outside who’s too stupid to know he’s never getting in.” Never mind how much it annoys Saben, she’s tired of listening to Odd Willie. There’s enough on her mind already without him making it worse.

  “Okay. So, you tell me, why the hell does the Bailiff jump when Ballou says ‘boo’?” Odd Willie asks. “Answer me that.”

  “There’s some business we got to settle,” Soldier replies. “That’s all. So, please, as a personal fucking favor—drop the ‘Valley of Death’ shtick.”

  “Yeah, well, what about you, Soldier?” Saben asks. “Are you scared, too? Is he right? Are we really walking into something that bad?”

  Soldier shrugs and pushes her sunglasses farther up the bridge of her nose. “Well,” she says, “for someone who gets her kicks murdering men of the cloth, I suspect it might seem a little tame.”

  “I’d tell you,” Saben says. “I’d tell you what really happened, if he’d let me.”

  Soldier glances at the rearview mirror again, and this time Saben’s staring back at her. But there’s more fear than bravado in her brown eyes, no matter how she’s holding herself, no matter how straight her shoulders or high her chin. It’s just bluster, and Soldier wonders how Saben White never managed to learn how to back down until after she’s been bitten.

  “Would you?” Soldier asks her. “Would you really do that? If you could, I mean. If he’d let you.”

  “I just said that I would.”

  “I think you’re lying. I think it’s possible you haven’t even told the Bailiff everything. You look like someone with an awfully big secret.”

  “Did you tell the Bailiff that?” Saben asks, and then she looks down at her hands folded in her lap, the Seal of Solomon tattooed there like something that might actually have the power to protect her from whatever’s waiting for them farther down the road. Soldier doesn’t answer right away. Instead she listens to Sam the Sham, and the Dodge’s tires spinning on the asphalt, the cold breeze rushing into Willie’s window, which is still open a crack, and the roar of passing cars.

  “I asked you if you told him that,” Saben says, and now she’s almost whispering. Odd Willie laughs and smokes his Winston.

  “No,” Soldier tells her. “I didn’t say a fucking word.” It’s not the truth, but Soldier figures even a lie’s more than Saben deserves to hear. “Whatever you did, why ever you did it, that’s between you and him, because that’s the way he wants it.”

  “Hey, ladies,” Odd Willie Lothrop snickers. “How about a fucking joke to ease the tension?” and before Soldier can tell him to shut up, he’s already started. “Okay, so, a Catholic boy and a Jewish boy were talking, you see, and the Catholic boy, being an arrogant Irish cocksucker, was like, ‘Hey, man, my priest knows more than your rabbi.’ And the Jewish boy, being such a wily cocksucker, he was like, ‘Yeah? Well, of course he does. You fucking tell him everything.’” Odd Willie giggles and takes another drag off his Winston.

  “Shut the hell up,” Soldier says.

  “Oh, come on. You know that was wicked funny,” Odd Willie laughs. “I’m about to piss myself over here. Moreover, if you’ll think about it a second, you’ll see it was not entirely irrelevant to certain current events,” and he turns and winks at Saben.

  “Just shut up,” Soldier says again, which only makes Willie giggle that much more.

  “Thank you,” Saben says from the backseat.

  Soldier shakes her head and doesn’t look at the rearview mirror. “Oh, no. It isn’t like that, Saben. It isn’t like that at all. Don’t you dare start thanking me for anything.”

  “Yeah,” Saben replies, and for a little while, no one says anything else.

  “Your responsibility,” the Bailiff had told her, no uncertain terms there, so Saturday night, after Rocky Point, Soldier drove Saben White to see the greasy old croaker over on Federal Hill who sews them up and sets broken bones and extracts bullets whenever something goes wrong. The basement where he works smelled like mildew and disinfectant, and Soldier sat in a moldering, duct-taped recliner in one corner while he cleaned up the mess she’d made of Saben’s face and gave her an injection of antibiotics for the bite on the back of her neck. She’d heard the doctor had been a field medic in Vietnam, that he’d been sent home on a Section Eight after the My Lai Massacre back in sixty-eight. Now he works for the Bailiff, which means he also works for the ghouls and the Cuckoo, though, if his luck’s improved any in the past forty-two years, the croaker knows nothing at all of the powers that held the Bailiff’s leash.

  “Human teeth are filthy things,” the croaker mumbled gravely around his loose dentures while he filled the syringe with amoxicillin. “I’ll tell you, I’d rather be bitten by a mangy, three-legged bitch than by a human mouth.”

  “Maybe it was a dog,” Saben said and risked a glance at Soldier. “But I didn’t count her legs.”

  “Just two,” Soldier said, and then Saben winced when the old man jabbed her with the needle.

  “That bite goes septic, missy, you won’t be giving much of a shit if it had six legs and a pogo stick, now, will you?” the croaker asked Saben once he’d emptied the syringe.

  Afterwards, Soldier drove across the Seekonk and left Saben on the sidewalk outside a renovated warehouse where she lived in a studio apartment on the third floor. All this time, except for the comments in the doctor’s basement, neither of them had talked, because Saben was still too frightened, and there was nothing Soldier wanted to hear and even less she wanted to say. Soldier drove her home, left her on the sidewalk, and that, Soldier thought, was enough babysitting and fucking hand-holding for one night, enough responsibility, and she stopped at Fellini’s for a couple of slices of pepperoni pizza on the way home. She drank Coke instead of beer, because
a beer or three would only lead to the unopened bottle of whiskey beneath the front seat being opened, and she wasn’t such a drunkard that the Bailiff couldn’t scare her into staying sober for a few days every now and then. Not yet, anyway.

  After the pizza, she went home to her own apartment, a dingy little hole on Lancaster Street. The Bailiff had rented it for her years before, the week she turned sixteen and was allowed to leave the warrens, just someplace to sleep until she could find something better. But Soldier had never really seen the point in looking for another place. It was quiet, and no one there ever fucked with her or got nosy. She had two rooms and a tiny kitchen, a bathroom and a view of the North Burial Ground past the rooftops. Soldier carried the bottle of Dickel in with her and set it on top of the television, then took a hot shower. The water and soap felt good, even if they weren’t half clean enough to wash away the anxiety or the wall of angry black thoughts building itself high inside her head, but then, nothing was. Nothing ever was, not even the booze. She lay in bed naked, her wet hair and skin slowly drying in the not-quite-cold, not-quite-warm air of the apartment, and stared at the whiskey bottle on the TV. She imagined it stared back at her, taunting, tempting, reminding her how good it would feel, and all she had to do was crack the seal and take a few swallows. No one would ever know, it promised. Not a single soul, living or dead or anything in between. So then Soldier stared at the low water-stained ceiling instead.

  A little while later she dozed, hardly more than half-asleep but dreaming about the night out on the Argilla Road, about Sheldon and the hearse, the cold November rain, and this time it all went more or less the way they’d planned it would, the way the Bailiff had laid it all out for them. At the end, Sheldon helped her burn down Quaker Jameson’s roadhouse, and the gaunt and the orchid-skinned demon stood nearby, watching indifferently, and when they were done, the demon taught her a British drinking song that it sang to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner”—

  The news through Olympus immediately flew;

  Where Old Thunder pretended to give himself airs—