Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “A ways to go where?”

  “Don’t be impatient. You’ll see,” the girl said. “I want it to be a surprise. I never get to surprise anyone anymore. Not since my father went away and all the clocks stopped and—”

  “There’s no one up here but you?” Soldier asked, not particularly interested in surprises.

  “Oh, there are very many people up here,” Pearl replied—unless Soldier were to believe everyone downstairs and in the warrens, in which case Hester replied. “I’m not alone. I have company. All the people and things and places caught inside the constructions that my father fashioned. No, I’m not alone, Soldier, not at all. But it’s all very complicated, I’m afraid. You’re much too young to understand such complex metaphysical—”

  “You’re not that much older than me,” Soldier said, interrupting her.

  “I most certainly am,” the girl said and then stared at her a moment, taken aback. “Soldier, I’m twelve years old, and you, well, you’re still not much more than a baby, are you?”

  “If I were only a baby, they never would have sent me up here to see you,” Soldier said, angry that the girl would say such a thing, and besides, hadn’t the Bailiff just told her that she wasn’t a baby anymore, and that’s why he could trust her with secrets?

  “They’ve sent me babies before.”

  “Liar,” Soldier said and then she kicked the Noah’s ark as hard as she could, and animals fell over and flew through the air and tumbled about this way and that. The great boat swung to starboard and capsized, then rolled away into the shadows, leaving most of the animals behind.

  “What did you do that for?” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles gasped, and when Soldier didn’t answer her, the girl just stood staring at her, and there were tears welling up at the corners of her eyes.

  “What? Are you going to cry now?” Soldier asked her, and prodded a fallen zebra with the toe of her shoe. She thought about grinding it under her heel until it was only sawdust. “Are you going to cry like a great big twelve-year-old baby?”

  “No,” the girl replied. “I’m most certainly not going to do anything of the sort,” and she bent down and began setting all the animals upright again. “But that was a horrible, horrible thing to do. I’ve never shown this to anyone before. You were the very first.”

  Soldier watched while Hester (or Pearl) righted all the animals and then retrieved the ark from where it had rolled. There was a small bashed-in place on the left side near the prow.

  “Guess Noah’s going to have to fix that before the flood,” she said, but the dark-skinned girl ignored her. “It’s just an old toy,” Soldier told her. “No one cares about all this junk up here. I bet no one even remembers most of it anymore. It’s a wonder, really, they haven’t forgotten you.”

  “Follow me,” the girl said coldly, when she was finished with the ark, when she’d undone as much of the damage as she could, and she led Soldier deeper and deeper into the attic of the yellow house. After a while they came to a gaping hole in the floor. There was a board laid over it for a bridge, and Pearl crossed it without comment. But Soldier lingered alone at the edge, looking down into the inexplicable cavity. There was nothing in that hole and no bottom to it; as far as she could see, it went on forever.

  “Why can’t I see anything down there?” she asked, shouting across the gap. “If that’s a hole in the ceiling, I should be able to see the upstairs.”

  “Maybe it’s not a hole in the floor,” the girl replied. “Maybe it’s a hole in something else. Now come on. I’m tired of standing here waiting for you. There are other things I could be doing.”

  Soldier reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out one of the wooden animals from the Noah’s ark, a wildebeest she’d picked up while the alchemist’s daughter was busy with the mess she’d made.

  “Hey!” the girl shouted from the far side of the gap. “What are you doing with that? That’s not yours—”

  “It’s not yours, either,” Soldier replied. “You told me so yourself.”

  “No, but it’s my responsibility. We have to put it back, right now.”

  “Oops,” Soldier said, letting go of the tempera-brown wildebeest. It fell into the hole and vanished.

  “You beastly little brat!” the girl shouted at her, but Soldier wasn’t listening; she’d sat down at the edge of the hole and was waiting for the sound the wooden wildebeest would make when it hit bottom. But there was no sound, unless she’d missed it somehow, unless all the noise the alchemist’s daughter was making had covered it up. She waited awhile longer, what she figured must have been five minutes, at least, ignoring the brown-skinned girl, who was still shouting at her and stomping back and forth on the other side of the gap.

  “I didn’t hear it,” Soldier said finally, when it had become clear that the hole went down much farther than she’d guessed. “But you were making such a commotion, it’s no wonder.”

  “Cross the bridge, changeling,” the girl said, standing there with her hands on her hips, glowering at Soldier from the other side. “Unless, that is, you’re afraid that you’ll fall. You might, you know. It’s not a very wide board, and it isn’t very sturdy, and you might end up like that poor animal, falling forever, wondering if you’ll ever find the bottom.”

  “You don’t scare me. It’s just a hole.”

  “Yes, that’s all it is. A hole. Now come across it.”

  Soldier set one foot on the board, because that’s all it was, a hole, and all holes had bottoms somewhere.

  “Don’t look down,” Pearl said and took a step back from the edge. “That will only make it harder. I’d hate to have to explain this to the Bailiff or Miss Josephine, if you should fall or the board should break and—”

  “Stop talking,” Soldier said, and she took another step, the board bowing almost imperceptibly beneath her. “How old are you?” she asked the brown-skinned girl again.

  “I told you already. I’m twelve. In fact, I’m almost thirteen.”

  “Everyone down there says you’ve been up here a very long time. Twelve’s not a very long time.” And she took another step.

  “It’s a temporal contrariety,” the girl replied. “That’s what my father called it. Time’s not the same up here. It’s a part of his punishment.”

  Soldier took another step, keeping her eyes straight ahead, keeping her eyes on Pearl; she was almost a third of the way across now. “Because he betrayed the ghouls,” she said. “Because he lied to them.”

  “It’s all very complicated.”

  “Madam Terpsichore said that he was a villain, and that he has been chained in the deepest abyss for his crimes. She said that his daughter is a ghost, and that his wife was killed for his misdeeds.”

  “My mother died of a fever,” Pearl said, and Soldier took another step.

  “Did you see her die?”

  “I was very young,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles said, speaking now through clenched teeth. “My mother was a Montauk Indian princess that my father brought to Providence all the way from Long Island. She was a beautiful woman and—”

  “Did you see what they did to her?” Soldier asked, and the board popped loudly beneath her, and she almost lost her balance. She glanced down, trying to see the board and her feet, but not the hole. She was halfway across now.

  “It was consumption,” Pearl said—Pearl, Hester, the brown girl, the alchemist’s daughter, the ghostly Daughter of the Four of Pentacles whom Soldier had been taught lived off rats and spiders and devoured anyone who dared wander into her attic.

  “Did they wait until she was dead before they ate her?” Soldier asked, and the girl shook her head and stared at the floor. “Did they let you have a taste?”

  “You’re horrid. You’re a monster,” she said, and Soldier figured she was probably right, but then maybe the brown girl was only a different kind of monster.

  “What year did they take your father away?”

  “Why won’t you sto
p? Why won’t you leave me alone?”

  “Don’t you even remember?”

  The Daughter of the Four of Pentacles walked back to the edge of the bottomless hole and placed her foot firmly on the end of the board. She leaned forward suddenly, and the board bounced a little, and Soldier had to hold her arms out like a trapeze artist to keep from falling off.

  “Don’t do that,” Soldier yelped. “Are you crazy?”

  “August twelfth, 1929,” the girl said, and then she made the board bounce again. “They took him away on August twelfth, 1929. It was a Monday night. It was raining.”

  Soldier pinwheeled her arms once, twice, then stood very still until she was sure she wasn’t going to fall. She was good with numbers. Madam Mnemosyne said she was “quite precocious at arithmetic,” and it took her only a moment to figure out that the brown girl had been shut away in the attic of the yellow house for more than seventy-eight years.

  “You’re an old woman,” Soldier said. “You might look like you’re only twelve, but you’re really an old woman.”

  “I’m not an old woman,” Pearl replied. “I’m not an old woman, because there’s no time up here anymore, except when the attic door’s open. The clocks only tick when the attic door’s open. It’s a temporal contrariety, and I’m not even thirteen years old yet.” And then she bounced the board a third time, and Soldier had to squat down to keep from falling off.

  “It would be very easy to make me fall, Hester, if that’s really what you want. All you’d have to do is kick that end of the board over the edge.”

  “That’s not why they sent you up here. The Bailiff said that—”

  “Then stop jumping on the goddamn board,” Soldier shouted as loud as she dared, even the effort of shouting enough to make her wobble and bob, and she knew the wildebeest would be falling forever. She was barely more than halfway across, and if she slipped, she’d still be tumbling after it, head over heels, ass over tits, when the universe had burned itself down to a frozen cinder. Her voice echoed through the ancient timbers, off the distant walls of the cavernous attic, and the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles cursed her, cursed all the changelings and the ghul. And then she turned and ran, vanishing in an instant into the gloom, as though the attic shadows were her true parents, and they would always be there to keep her safe.

  In the tunnel beneath Woonsocket, Soldier marks time in footsteps, in Odd Willie’s ragged, wheezing breaths, in her own heartbeats. She doesn’t know how long they’ve been following the passageway, not in minutes and seconds, but it’s been longer than she expected it would be. Odd Willie is muttering and snickering to himself, and the smell of smoke has grown very strong. It stings her sinuses and makes her eyes water, and it’s no longer only the scent of woodsmoke; Soldier knows the smell of roasting human flesh, and the air inside the tunnel reeks of it.

  “Yippee damn,” Odd Willie croaks. “We’re going to a goddamn barbecue.”

  “How about you shut up and concentrate on walking,” Soldier tells him, and just then Odd Willie slips on a bit of the glowing slime and almost falls, almost pulls her down with him. “And watch your fucking step, please.”

  “Miss Soldier here, she don’t like her no barbecue.” Odd Willie snickers. “This lady takes it raw, or she takes it not at all.”

  And Soldier’s about to ask him how much farther until they catch up with the familiar, if the thing can tell him that, when the main tunnel makes a sharp turn to the right and the incline grows suddenly much steeper. There are stairs cut deep into the stone here, slick and worn down the middle from centuries of use.

  “I think she went thataway,” Odd Willie says and points at the stairs, but that much is plain to see from the phosphorescent goo streaking the walls. And then he slides easily from Soldier’s grip and sits down hard on the bottommost step, his long legs splayed out in front of him. “I can’t climb those things, Soldier. Not for all the pussy in China could I climb those goddamn things.”

  “Well, I’m not carrying you.”

  “Then you’ll just have to go on without me, Sarge,” he says, and Odd Willie Lothrop hacks out a feeble laugh and wipes fresh blood from his lips. “Tell Laura I love her. Give my regards to fucking Broadway. Tell me dear old mum she was the last thought on me mind. But ain’t no way I’m climbing those fuckers.”

  “It’s right up there, isn’t it? He’s right up there, Ballou?”

  “And don’t you just fucking hate the irony,” Odd Willie says, and coughs and wipes his mouth again.

  “You should stop talking so much, Odd Willie. You’re wasting your strength.”

  “And just what exactly, my lady sweet, am I supposed to be saving it up for? Are you perhaps hoping for one last go at the ol’ arbor vitae here before the bitter end?” and Odd Willie waggles his limp penis at her. “One final ride on the ham bone of love before abandoning poor Willie Lothrop to his cruel, cruel fucking fate?”

  “You’re a sick fucking fuck,” she says and shakes her head, and Soldier wants more than anything to sit down next to him and shut her eyes for maybe five or ten minutes, just long enough to catch her breath. But she’s pretty sure if she does that, she’ll never get back on her feet and moving again. So, she glances past Odd Willie instead, gazing up the long, uneven stairwell at the place where it ends two or three hundred feet farther on in a bright smudge of restless firelight.

  “But we’re so goddamn close. It’s right up there,” Soldier says and realizes that the draft she felt outside the ossuary earlier has changed direction, and now the hungry fire in front of them is drawing the air back towards it. “It’s not fucking fair.”

  “Don’t you go getting soft on me. Not this late in the game. I still can’t climb those stairs.”

  “I promised not to leave you,” she says, then pauses to swallow, her throat dry and sore and scratchy from the smoke and everything else. “I promised I wouldn’t leave you alone down here…not alive.”

  Odd Willie stops playing with himself, spits, and lies back against the stone steps. “And that was truly very noble of you, my captain. So don’t you think I’m not grateful. But I’m afraid you’re gonna have to renege on that promise. You kill me, Sparky up there goes bye-bye, and she might not be done with Big Daddy Ballou.”

  “I’m sorry,” Soldier says, ashamed that she feels relief at not having to kill Odd Willie, ashamed and confused. “I’ll come back for you if I can. I swear, if there’s any way.”

  “Yeah. And maybe I’ll try crawling up those stairs, just as soon as I’ve found my second wind. Hope springs fucking eternal, right? Now, get the hell out of here, before I change my mind and make you do something unpleasant.”

  And so she leaves him there and climbs the stairs as quickly as she can. With every few steps, the light at the top of the stairs grows brighter, and it’s getting hot, despite the cool, dank air being drawn up from the tunnels below. She doesn’t look back, because there isn’t any point, no matter how ashamed she might feel. No matter how fucked up things have gotten, and by the time Soldier reaches the brick and mortar landing at the top of the stairs, she has to shield her eyes from the light and can feel the heat of the flames beginning to sear her bare skin. There’s a stone archway and then a great chamber spread out past the landing, what she takes to be a natural cavern uncovered during the ghouls’ tunneling. There’s thick black smoke, oily and choking, and steam, and a blistering curtain of heat that makes it hard to be sure what she’s really seeing and what’s only a mirage. The crumpled, blazing bodies of several of Ballou’s changelings and mongrels lie near the landing. Soldier steps past them into the cavern, which seems to have been long used as a burial chamber, moldering bodies wrapped in winding sheets and skeletons tucked into hundreds of nooks in the walls, and now she’s walking on stone that’s hot enough to scald her feet if she stands still too long.

  In the center of the cavern are the remains of a bonfire, a guttering mound of charred wood heaped seven or eight feet high, and a very tall
, broad-shouldered man is standing directly in front of it. Glittering embers swirl around him, filling the air, and he raises his right hand so that Soldier can see what he’s holding. It’s a stoppered bottle, and even through the smoke and heat haze, she can see that there’s something fiery trapped inside. His yellow eyes glimmer triumphantly, and he smiles.

  “It was a damn good try,” he says, shouting to be heard above the roar of the flames. “I’ve always said, an honest man gives credit wherever and whenever it’s fucking due. Mr. Lothrop is to be commended. I lost some good men before I finally managed to get this beast under control. A goddamned elemental. I ask you, now, who’d have thought such a thing from a twerp like Willie Lothrop?”

  Soldier looks around the chamber, and sees that there are others, crouched in the shadows or slinking in through the entrances to other tunnels, emerging through cracks in the walls. Some of them are human, some of them aren’t, but most she couldn’t say for sure.

  “The Bailiff sent me here to kill you,” she shouts back at George Ballou.

  “Yes, I know. Miss White was very clear on that point. She insisted we should have killed you straight out. Why take chances, she said. Why fuck around? She’s usually a cautious woman, but me, I do admit I like a little sport now and again.”

  “They sent me here to kill you,” Soldier says again, and Ballou nods and sets the bottle holding Odd Willie’s familiar down on the ground at his feet. The assembling crowd of changelings and half-breeds and ghouls begins to chatter and bark excitedly among themselves.

  “Well then,” says George Ballou, and he slips a very large hunting knife from a long scabbard on his belt; the blade flashes in the firelight. “Let’s start the fucking dance, shall we?”

  SEVEN

  Star

  I t’s a little warmer inside the old tunnel, if only because Emmie’s finally out of the storm, out of the wind and snow. But the subterranean air is stale and stinks of neglect and the tiny, long-stemmed mushrooms growing from the old railroad ties. Their caps are neither red nor white, but not exactly pink, either, and Emmie figures she’d probably die if she were to eat one of them. The tunnel is flooded on either side of the tracks, but the brown girl has assured her the water isn’t deep. The smooth cement walls rise up around them, converging overhead in a wide arch encrusted with icicles and stained with the soot of forgotten trains. Emmie can see because the brown girl is carrying some sort of fist-sized flashlight or lantern, something she pulled from a pocket of her dress shortly after they entered the darkness. Emmie thinks it looks more like a snow globe with a lightbulb sealed up inside than any sort of flashlight, but when she asked the girl what it was, she wouldn’t say, only that it was one of her father’s experiments, and she really shouldn’t have brought it down from the attic. No one was ever supposed to touch her father’s things, she said, not even her. The brown girl holds the light above their heads and walks toe to heel, balanced on one of the steel ties, and the yellow-white light rains down around them. Emmie stays off the rails, because they look slick with moisture and a fuzzy sheen of charcoal-colored mold; the thought of losing her footing and falling into the scummy black water makes her feel queasy. So, instead, she follows the girl by keeping to the half-submerged string of wooden pallets laid down over the railroad ties.