Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “That’s the prettiest sky I’ve ever seen,” Emmie says, though it’s more than that, more than pretty, but she can’t think of the words that would do it justice. Staring up at all those stars, at the brilliant swath of the Milky Way, makes her a little dizzy, and for a moment Emmie thinks it would be easy to fall, the sand and sky reversed, and all she’d have to do is stop trying not to fall.

  “It comforts me,” the woman says, glancing up into the night. “When I’m lost, it helps me find my way.”

  “I’m afraid Pearl’s not right,” Emmie tells the black-skinned woman. “She’s even weirder than me, and that’s saying a lot. I think there’s something wrong with her.”

  “She misses her father,” the woman suggests.

  “I’d be worried about her, if she were real.”

  Then neither of them says anything for a minute or two, and Emmie lies still, listening to the wind blowing through the dunes. I could lie here forever, she thinks. I could lie here forever, counting stars, and never go back to that smelly tunnel. Never go back to the cold, or my room, or—

  “But what about Deacon?” the woman asks. “Wouldn’t you miss him?”

  “Of course I’d miss him. I’d miss him more than anything. But maybe he’d be better off. Maybe things would be easier for him if I wasn’t there, if he didn’t have to worry about me all the time.”

  The woman picks up a handful of sand and then lets it sift out between her fingers; some of it is carried away on the breeze, and some of it falls back onto the dune. “I’m going to ask something of you,” she says.

  “I don’t even know who you are,” Emmie replies.

  “It’s not important who I am. I can’t tell you that, not tonight. But I’m still going to ask something of you, something important.”

  “You mean a favor?”

  “You could think of it that way, I suppose.”

  “Deacon says I shouldn’t talk to strangers, so I doubt seriously I’m supposed to go around doing them favors.”

  “When you first met Pearl,” the black woman says, “the day the horse was killed, do you remember what she said to you? She said, ‘Build me a bridge, Emmie. I have long desired one.’”

  Emmie starts to ask the woman how she knows that, then decides there’s no point, that it doesn’t matter anyway, and she nods her head instead. “I told her she was a loony bird,” Emmie says.

  “But she was telling you the truth. You are a bridge builder. Indeed, you are a bridge yourself. You span the distance between humanity and the creatures Pearl calls the Hounds of Cain.”

  “The ghouls,” Emmie mumbles and works the fingers of her left hand into and under the sand.

  “Yes,” the black-skinned woman says. “And they’ve been seeking a bridge as well. They have been seeking a bridge desperately for thousands of years. Some among them believe they have found her, but they’re mistaken.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Child, listen to me,” the woman says; her words have become urgent, half whispered, and she’s dropped down onto her hands and knees, her lips near Emmie’s left ear. For an instant she seems like something more animal than human, some night-colored, reptilian thing that sleeps away the days in caverns beneath the shifting sand and slips out at sunset to stalk the desert. Her breath smells of ashes and sage. “Listen to what I’m saying, child. Your mother is a changeling, and your father was the son of the union of a changeling and a hound. There is a secret locked up in your soul, a terrible secret that would free the ghul, if they could only reach it. The hounds believe the bridge builder is the daughter of Deacon Silvey, but they’re mistaken.”

  “I’m the daughter of Deacon Silvey,” Emmie says.

  “One among them suspects the truth, I think, and he is the one you must fear above all the rest. He is not a hound, but he keeps their counsel.”

  “This is a big fat load of baloney,” Emmie says. “I’m going to wake up now. And not in that damned tunnel, either. I’m going to wake up in my house, in my bed.”

  “He’ll have you dead, Emmie, if he gets his way.”

  And Emmie’s about to tell the woman to shut the hell up, to stop talking and go away and leave her alone so that she can wake up, when something rises from the sand a few yards from her feet. The keels of its dusky scales scrape roughly across the sand, and its eyes shine bright and red, two holes burned deep into the fabric of the night. Emmie has never imagined a snake even half this big, and she’s seen pythons at the zoo, pythons and even an anaconda from Brazil, but this snake makes them look like the worms she finds dying on the sidewalk whenever it rains. The snake, if it is a snake, grins and flicks its long forked tongue, and she can see there are at least a thousand needle teeth set into its jaws.

  “Whatever have you found this time, old whore?” the huge snake hisses, dragging more of itself up from the sand, and the sides of its neck open wide like the hood of a cobra. Emmie begins to scramble backwards away from it, but the woman lays a strong hand on her shoulder and tells her not to move.

  “You can’t ever outrun it, child, though it would be pleased if you were to try. Be still. Be still and wait.”

  “It’s only a dream,” Emmie says and shuts her eyes. “It’s only a dream, and I’m going to wake up now.”

  “Share it with me,” the snake hisses. “It’s a plump little thing. There’s plenty enough for us both, and maybe even a few scraps for the jackals and vultures left over.”

  “Stay away from her,” the woman says to the snake. “She’s not for eating,” and the serpent makes a sound that isn’t a laugh, but Emmie knows it was meant to be.

  “No?” the snake asks. “That’s too, too bad. But tell me, if it isn’t for eating, then what’s it for? Is it for diversion, perhaps? For play? It’s so soft, so pale, so, so young.”

  “Go, Emmie,” the black-skinned woman says. “Go now. This instant. You know the way back across. I don’t expect you need me to show you.”

  And she’s surprised to find that she does know the way, sure as she knows all the scars that Deacon says he got the day she was born or the winter-sky color of Sadie’s eyes, sure as she knows the way from one side of Angell Street to the other. She could do it blindfolded. She could do it in her sleep.

  “Who were you talking to just then?” Pearl asks, and Emmie rubs her eyes and blinks, trying to remember where she is and why she’s so cold and hungry. “Where did you go, Emma Jean? What did you see?”

  “I didn’t go anywhere,” she mutters, remembering the railroad tunnel, the long walk through the storm, the desert and the snake and the woman with amber eyes. “I fell asleep, that’s all.”

  “You were talking to someone. I heard you.”

  “I was dreaming,” Emmie says, and then she tells herself that she’s still dreaming, that this is only the outer dream wrapped around that darker inner dream. There could be a lot more than two layers, she thinks. It might go on forever, dreams within dreams within dreams, like letting go of the sand and falling up into the sky. “Anyway, it’s none of your business what I was dreaming.”

  Pearl looks annoyed and offended, frowns, then turns away from Emmie and reaches for her father’s snow globe, which is still sitting on the dashboard. “I do have my own dreams,” she says. “I certainly don’t have any need of yours. But we’d better get moving soon, changeling. Something’s coming. We shouldn’t have slept so long.”

  “What’s coming?” Emmie asks her, sitting up, hugging herself against the dampness and the chill.

  “At first I thought it might only be Barnaby,” Pearl says, lowering her voice, and then she rubs her bare hands over the surface of the glowing ball, as if to warm them. “But there’s more than one of them. The tunnel connects with the warrens, back towards Benefit Street.”

  “You said we’d be safe—”

  “Actually, no. I said that we’d be safe until morning, which it may well be by now, for all I know. By now, Emma, they’ve probably
figured out where we are. If you sit there talking long enough, you’re sure to find out.”

  “Christ, Pearl. Just slow down, okay? I’m not even awake yet. I’m freezing and—”

  “Swearing is a sign of a poor upbringing. And, in any case, you probably shouldn’t talk so loud. They have very good ears, the hounds. They can hear—”

  “My upbringing is something else that’s none of your business. My upbringing has been just fine.”

  “Well, Deacon’s a drunkard, and your stepmother’s a witch who runs away whenever things get too scary,” Pearl says and glances at Emmie.

  “And just what the hell was your father, Pearl, putting stars inside that…whatever that is…and leaving you locked up in an attic. People who live in glass houses—”

  “Point taken,” Pearl says and shrugs. She stares down at the globe, looking deeply into it despite her earlier warnings about damaged eyes and blindness; her face is underlit, washed in the softly pulsating yellow-orange-white light shining from the ball. Emmie squints and rubs her eyes again.

  “We’re still in the tunnel?” she asks.

  “Where else would we be, dear? Can’t you hear them?”

  Emmie listens, holds her breath and listens for at least a full minute, but she doesn’t hear anything at all except the water dripping from the concrete ceiling to the flooded floor of the tunnel. “No,” she says. “I can’t. Maybe you’re wrong.” Her hands are cold, and she takes her gloves and mittens from her pocket and puts them on again.

  “Maybe your ears are full of wax and fluff,” Pearl says and stands up. “There’s still a pear left in the bag that Barnaby brought for us, but I’m afraid we don’t have time for breakfast, even if you’d deign to eat garbage I found in—”

  “What will they do if they catch us?” Emmie asks, standing up and peering into the darkness farther along the railroad tunnel.

  “They’ll put me back in my attic. They aren’t allowed to hurt me. But I can’t say precisely what they’ll do with you, except that it likely won’t be pleasant. It won’t be pretty.”

  “I was dreaming about a woman in a desert,” Emmie says, and looks back at the brown girl. “And a giant snake that wanted to eat me. The woman was about to ask me a favor, but the snake came along before she got around to it. Now will you please stop acting like such a bitch?”

  Pearl pushes back her bangs, which have fallen across her eyes, and then she glances at Emmie. “A woman with skin as black as a lump of coal?” she asks. “A kind woman with white hair?”

  “She didn’t seem very kind to me,” Emmie says. “But her skin was black and her hair was white. Why? You know who she is?”

  “We should go now,” Pearl tells her, instead of answering the question. “Maybe if we head back the way we came, they might not try to follow. If the sun’s up, they won’t follow us outside.”

  “No. First, you tell me who she is,” Emmie says. She still hasn’t heard anything but the dripping water and is unconvinced that someone’s coming for them. “Tell me what she wants.”

  “These days, they don’t get fresh meat very often,” Pearl says, and begins climbing out of the car and back onto the tracks. She moves slowly, the snow globe cradled in the crook of her left arm so both hands are free as she picks her way through the wreckage.

  “I could have held that for you,” Emmie says and points at the globe.

  “No, you couldn’t have. There are rules. Hurry along, Emma. They’re coming fast now.”

  “Is she one of them?” Emmie asks, stealing another look into the darkness beyond the car before she follows Pearl. “The black woman in the desert? Is she one of the ghouls?”

  “Hardly,” Pearl replies. She’s standing on the wooden pallets between the rails now, holding the snow globe in her right hand. “Now stop your dillydallying, unless you want to wind up on Miss Josephine’s vivisection table.”

  “Why won’t you tell me who she is?”

  “There’s not time. I can tell you later, unless they catch us, in which case it won’t matter.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m smart enough to walk and talk at the same time.”

  “Sticks and stones, dear heart,” Pearl says, and then she flips her head to one side and smiles a conceited, insincere smile.

  I hate you, too, Emmie thinks, thinking it hard and sharp so maybe Pearl will overhear, wondering if she’s ever hated anyone or anything half as much as she’s starting to hate this strange girl. Emmie wishes that she’d brought her cell phone, because then she’d know what time it is. If she had her phone, she could call Deacon and tell him where to find her, and he could stop worrying whether she’d been kidnapped or murdered or worse.

  “Nothing’s coming,” she says. “I have pretty good hearing, too. The doctor said so, and if there were anything coming, I’d have heard it by now.” But then she does hear something—a wet and breathy sound like panting dogs, the splash of feet moving quickly through the flooded tunnel. Her heart seems to pause between beats, her mouth gone dry and cottony, her left foot dangling halfway between the wrecked car and the slick steel rail.

  “You’ll have to do better than that,” Pearl says and pulls her the rest of the way down to the tracks. Emmie almost falls, her feet slipping, balance lost, and she would have gone down face first in the mud and gravel ballast and splintery, rotting pallets if the brown girl hadn’t been there to catch her. “We’ll try to go back to the entrance,” Pearl says. “Maybe we can get outside and make it across the river. Barnaby said there are places to hide over there.”

  “Let me go home,” Emmie says. Her legs are shaky, and she wants to sit down, wants to cry. “Please, Pearl. Just let me wake up and go home. I can’t do this anymore.”

  “Stop whining and follow me,” the brown girl says and begins towing her along the tracks, back the way they entered the railroad tunnel. Emmie stumbles once or twice, the toes of her boots catching on the edges of the pallets, but then she’s running on her own. The panting sounds are getting louder, and the splashing feet, too, and Emmie doesn’t know why it took her so long to hear them. Maybe, she thinks, I didn’t hear them because they weren’t there to hear. Maybe it’s only Pearl making those noises, making me hear them. But she doesn’t stop moving. There’s no way to be sure of anything anymore, and she’d rather run from make-believe monsters than find out that she’s wrong. The soles of their boots are loud against the boards, her bulky winter boots and the brown girl’s old-fashioned lace-up boots.

  “We waited too long,” Pearl says, out of breath, and she stops and looks hastily back over her shoulder. The noise the ghouls are making is much louder now, and Emmie can hear them calling back and forth to each other in guttural animal voices. “You shouldn’t have wasted so much time.”

  “No, Pearl, we can make it. It’s not that far. We should be almost there.”

  “Then tell me, why can’t I see the doorway out? We should be able to see it by now, but it’s not there.”

  “Maybe someone shut it,” Emmie says and reaches for Pearl’s hand, because they can’t stop running now, not with those splashing, yelping things bearing down on them.

  “No, they’ve changed something, Emma Jean. They’ve changed the tunnel. Maybe there isn’t a door out anymore. Maybe the tunnel just loops ’round and ’round. Maybe—”

  “That’s crazy. They couldn’t have changed the whole tunnel. We just haven’t gone far enough; that’s all.”

  Pearl sighs, and her breath steams white in the cold air, a sudden rush of mist visible in the light from the snow globe, there and gone in only an instant, and she looks down at the alien sun inside the glass ball.

  “They can see it, can’t they?” Emmie asks, pointing at the snow globe. “We should hide it, get rid of it or something. If they can see it.”

  “Of course they can see it. But hiding it wouldn’t make any difference. They see better in the dark than in daylight. We’re in their element, Emma. And even if they were blind and d
eaf, they’d still find us by our smell alone.”

  “Why are we just standing here?” And Emmie takes two or three steps farther along the tracks, but Pearl doesn’t move. “Come on,” she says. “You don’t know the door’s shut. You don’t know for sure.”

  “Sometimes,” Pearl says, her words wrapped in a veil of white breath, “sometimes, Emma Jean, I think that they’ve killed him. Sometimes I think my father’s never coming back because they’ve killed him, or they’ve sent him so far from me he can never find his way home again.”

  “No place is that far away,” Emmie tells her, and one of the pallet boards cracks loudly beneath her feet, and she takes another step. “You can fly all the way around the world in just a couple of days, so nowhere’s that far away.”

  Pearl watches her a moment, her expression enough to say that she’s not sure if she knows what Emmie’s talking about. “My father never learned to fly,” she says. “Once, a demon offered to teach him, but he was never interested.”

  “Airplanes,” Emmie says. “I meant flying in airplanes.”

  “Oh, aeroplanes. Yes, of course that’s what you meant. But there are many, many places where aeroplanes cannot go, Emma Jean Silvey. Most places, in fact.”

  “Hester? Hester, can you hear me?” a voice calls out from the murk, someone or something half barking, half speaking, and Pearl bites at her lower lip and sighs again.

  “That’s Barnaby,” she says and smiles, but not a relieved or happy smile, a sad, disappointed sort of a smile. “They probably threatened him. He must have lost his nerve. He didn’t have that much to start with. Do you know the way back to the desert, back to the black woman?”

  “Pearl, that was only a dream.”

  “You think this is only a dream.”

  “Hester, you must stop running now. No one wants to see harm come to you, I promise. They’ll take you home again; that’s all.”