Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  ~ Deacon’s bedroom in their house on Angell Street, and he’s taken the box from beneath his bed, his cardboard box of secrets. He carries it downstairs and out the front door to the place where they leave the garbage cans by the curb. Emmie’s watching him from a living room window. She’s only six years old, and she decides that whatever’s in the box, it’s probably nothing but old clothes or worn-out shoes or something else she has no interest in. He comes back inside and fixes them hot dogs for dinner, and he tells her a very funny story about how her mother once thought she’d found a dinosaur bone, but it turned out she’d only found part of a fossil tree stump instead.

  ~ A woman who looks a lot like Chance Silvey is sitting in a hearse at the end of a country road, talking to a man named Sheldon. “Something’s wrong,” she says and rolls her window down just enough to toss out the butt of a cigarette. “I don’t know what, but something’s gotten fucked-up.” It’s raining hard, rain slamming loud against the roof of the hearse, and a flash of lightning reveals the marshes at the edge of the road and a ramshackle building farther out. “Fuck it, Shelly. Let’s get the hell out of here,” the woman says, and the man named Sheldon shoots her in the face.

  ~ “She died when you were still just a little baby,” Deacon tells Emmie and sips his beer. “Her name was Sadie, and she wanted to write books. I’ll be damned if she wouldn’t have gotten a kick outta you, kiddo.”

  Emmie looks back, hoping to see the black-skinned woman and the warm desert sun, hoping it’s not too late to turn around and head back that way, hoping she knows how to turn around. But behind her there is only the void, the slipstream of her passage erasing a trillion possible outcomes to a hundred thousand worldlines.

  ~ Deacon is standing on the front porch of their house talking to two policemen, and he’s barefoot despite the snow piled high in the yard and at the edges of the porch. He’s been drinking, and he calls one of the policemen a son of a bitch and a cocksucker, and the two officers exchange glances and frown at each other. “We need you to come with us, Mr. Silvey,” one of them says. “I’m sorry. I know how hard this must be, but we need you to come down and look at the body, to be sure that it’s your daughter.”

  No, Emmie says and squeezes her eyes shut, her voice lost in the clamor of all these possible existences playing out around her. That’s not what happens. That’s a lie.

  Then you’d better start looking where it is you’re putting your feet, the black-skinned woman says, or maybe it’s really the girl from the attic who’s talking, or her stepmother. There’s no way to be sure. But Emmie keeps her eyes closed and drifts in the current, letting it drag her she thinks, and then there’s heat and light and the smell of meat cooking reminds her how hungry she is. In an instant, all potential collapses around her into and she opens her eyes in the hollow carved out beneath Woonsocket.

  one moment

  and

  one place,

  “I have to admit,” George Ballou says, his face a grinning mask of blood and grime and soot, “I was expecting just a wee bit more from ol’ Terpsichore’s prize bulldog. You’ve got me kind of fucking disappointed here.” He’s squatting next to Soldier, who went down fast and hard shortly after Ballou decided that he’d be better off fighting her with incantations than with knives. She’s lying naked at his feet, her back and buttocks beginning to blister on the hot stone.

  “You’re breaking my fucking heart,” she mumbles around a busted upper lip, and he slaps her again.

  Firelight fills the burial chamber and casts wild, shifting patterns across the high walls as Ballou’s mongrels feed a mix of cordwood and corpses to the hungry flames. Some of the men and women and half-breeds have begun a frenzied summoning dance, cavorting around and around and around the fire, shouting and howling, taunting an unseen sky, cackling and recklessly calling out the names of gods that Soldier’s been taught never to speak aloud. The very few full-blooded ghouls present stand apart from all the others, lingering in twos and threes near the periphery of the chamber, watching and waiting, patient and curious as all immortal things.

  “Now look what you’ve gone and done,” Ballou sighs. “You made me lose my goddamned train of thought. No damn wonder the Bailiff decided he’d be better off without a mouthy little cockshy like you.”

  “So why don’t you kill me, and then maybe I’ll shut the fuck up,” Soldier says; she keeps her eyes on the dancers and the bonfire because she’s already seen more than enough of George Ballou. He’s a mountain, a living mountain dressed up in muscle and bone, as if that might be enough to hide the truth, and his eyes blaze bright and vicious as any ghoul’s. His long gray hair is pulled back in a ponytail that hangs down past his waist; his huge knuckles are a patchwork of scars and fresh gashes, knuckles like the gnarled roots of an ancient willow tree, if any willow ever bled.

  “Down here, Providence, we do things in my time,” he replies and leans closer. His breath smells like bad teeth and wintergreen. “Down here, you die when I say you die. And I’m thinking maybe that’s gonna be a while longer yet, seeing how you’re hardly the hellcat I was led to expect. You might even make a halfway decent meretrice, once the dogs have softened you up a little. We can always use fresh breeding stock down here. And who’ll be the wiser, eh?”

  “Kill her,” one of ghouls barks out above the roar of the fire. “That was the bargain.”

  George Ballou glares at the ghoul, then glances back down at Soldier. “Is that so?” he asks. “See, I don’t remember the exact wording. In fact, I don’t seem to remember anything quite that goddamned specific at all.”

  “Kill her,” the ghoul barks again, louder than before.

  “You shut the fuck up!” Ballou shouts back. “She’ll die. When I’m done with her, she’ll die just fine.”

  “Maybe the leash is a little shorter than you thought,” Soldier says, wincing at the heat and all the raw and wounded places where his magick brushed against and through her. He grabs hold of her chin, forcing her head up, forcing her to look into his glittering holocaust eyes.

  “Don’t you think for a goddamned minute I don’t know that game,” he snarls, baring his crooked yellow teeth. “That mouth might get you hurt a little more, but it won’t get you dead, Providence, not until I’m good and ready for you to be dead.”

  “Just seems like that collar of yours might be getting tight,” she says through clenched teeth, and Ballou slaps her again, this time opening her left cheek with his long nails.

  “See what I mean? That hurts, but you’re still breathing. Want to try again? Who knows, you might get lucky.”

  Soldier doesn’t answer him. She rolls over on her left side and watches the dancers and the flames and the darting, swooping shadows they’re painting on the walls. There are tears streaming from her eyes now, and she begins laughing out loud so she won’t start sobbing.

  “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Ballou snorts. He shakes his head, and beads of sweat and spittle, snot and blood spatter Soldier’s naked body. “Damn, but those Benefit Street cunts are gonna wish they’d been choosier about their messiahs. They’re gonna wish they’d put their money on a horse that could actually fucking run, aren’t they, Providence? Maybe if they’d ever gotten around to teaching you what to do with that special rewind switch you got, if they hadn’t been too afraid to try, you might not be in this predicament. Fuck it, you could just send us all back to next fucking Friday and be done with it.”

  “I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about,” Soldier says and blinks back salt water and pain. “Maybe you’ve got the wrong mouthy cockshy. Maybe—”

  “Oh, no. No, don’t you worry your pretty head about that. I’ve got just exactly who and what I want,” he says and gets to his feet. “George Ballou does his homework, yes, ma’am, and your friend Saben, she might be a sloppy killer and a lousy fuck, but she’s pretty good at keeping her promises. You’re the one, all right, the holy goddamned changeling whore that’s supposed to lead th
em all back to the land of milk and fucking honey. Now, how about you hush up for half a second or so, and I’ll see if I can’t loosen you up myself.” And he unzips his pants.

  There’s a sudden keening sound from the direction of the bonfire, something loud enough to rise above the din echoing off the walls of the cavern, and a cloud of sparks swirls up from the flames and hangs a few seconds in the smoky air. The dancers cry out triumphantly and begin moving faster, their bare feet slapping ash and paving stones, arms and legs a drunken blur, their matted hair and contorted faces rendering them all but indistinguishable from one another. Soldier doesn’t shut her eyes, and she tries not to flinch as a few of the embers settle on her exposed skin.

  Ballou leans close again, and his penis slips out of his pants and dangles limply between his legs. It’s tattooed to look like the head of a serpent.

  “Seems to me like they’ve done sent you straight on down to hell, Providence,” he says, screaming at her to be heard over the keening sound and all the noise the dancers are making. “But maybe you better shut your eyes now. You’re a tough piece of snatch, all right, but everybody’s got a breaking point, and I’d like you sane and fully fucking cognizant of your situation when I finally do get around to slitting that sweet little throat of yours.”

  Soldier blinks, and there’s the Bailiff watching her from the far side of the bonfire, and it’s almost like seeing him from underwater or seeing a ghost of the man, the way the heat makes the light bend and writhe.

  Stay ignorant, he says, and someone will almost always benefit from your ignorance, and then she realizes that it’s not the Bailiff at all, just one of the Woonsocket ghul, a thin and mangy bitch waiting to see what happens next.

  “What do you want from me?” Soldier asks, asking the Bailiff who isn’t there, but Ballou thinks she’s asking him.

  “No more than your masters and mistresses have ever wanted,” he says. “Your soul. Your heart, my dear. Every iota of your being. A little sport, while we’re at it. Your flesh and bones when there’s no more sport to be had.”

  “I wasn’t talking to you.” someone will almost always benefit

  “Whatever were they thinking, Providence, leaving you all alone, unprepared and unprotected? They’ve dithered your life away, unable to make a simple decision. It all might have gone another way, but for the turn of a friendly fucking card.”

  Occasionally, the weapons are reluctant to fulfill their purpose. Guns jam. Arrows miss their mark. Shots go wild….

  Ballou touches her, his calloused palm moving slowly across her flat, hard belly, moving down towards the bloodied tangle of her pubic hair, and he nips at her right shoulder with his sharp teeth.

  “What do you want, George Ballou?” Soldier asks him. She’s noticed that the bonfire is expanding, its circumference steadily increasing like the pupil of some giant’s eye dilating as it forces the world into focus—whatever the Woonsocket half-breeds have summoned, waking up, shaking off aeons of sleep. Bright tendrils of fire and glowing ash slither across the floor, licking tentatively at the feet of the dancers. Then Soldier sees that one of the mongrels has the stoppered bottle with Odd Willie’s captured elemental inside, a silver-haired woman with a bristling gray mane. She holds the bottle high and casts it into the bonfire.

  “Only the respect due to me and mine,” Ballou mutters in her ear. “That, and maybe just a little fucking more. Right now, I’m in the mood to watch the whole goddamn world burn, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.”

  Do you want to die here? the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles asks, the words that Soldier dreamed or only imagined, delirious and half-awake, because the girl is locked away in the attic of the yellow house, locked away forever or near enough. But that doesn’t change Soldier’s answer to the question.

  George Ballou bites down on the back of her neck, and his hand slides roughly between her legs.

  It’s a simple spell, something she doesn’t even remember having learned, only a few lines of Tadjik to set an elementary alchemy in motion. She doesn’t even have to say the words aloud, just follow through with the pantomime, the silent interplay of her lips and teeth, her palate and her tongue. A simple spell, a very small magick, but there’s nothing simple or small about the pain, the searing white ache in her hands as molecular bonds are broken and reforged, and she opens her mouth wide and screams.

  The thing the bonfire is becoming screams back at her, but no one else seems to notice.

  “Whoa,” George Ballou laughs, and then he laps at the damage he’s done to her neck. “Slow down, girl. You’re getting ahead of me.”

  When she turns on him, her fingers have become lightning and molten steel, and Soldier screams again and drives both her hands deep into his rib cage until she finds his spine. It snaps like a rotten branch in the hands of a child. For an instant, Ballou only stares at her, surprised and disbelieving, and then his whole body shudders violently and his yellow-orange eyes roll back in his head; Soldier feels his soul slipping free of its tethers, and she lets it go.

  Emmie Silvey stands alone in the entrance of the cavern, the stone stairwell at her back, the brown girl’s glowing orb cradled in her mittens, and she watches as the naked woman pulls her hands free of the dead man’s shattered chest. The woman and the dead man and all the rest of what she sees, the great fire and the monsters skipping and hopping and dancing crazy circles around it, the burning whirlwind rising from the center of the fire towards the high ceiling. And Emmie knows that wherever this is, wherever and whenever she’s emerged from the starry place, it’s the very worst part of the dream so far. The naked woman glances up at her, looking Emmie directly in the eyes, and for a second Emmie thinks that the woman has knives for fingers.

  “Soldier?” Emmie whispers, her voice immediately lost in the pandemonium, swallowed by the mad wails of the dancers and the train-whistle bellow of the fire. The woman looks confused, but she nods her head and then glances down at the dark blood and clots of gore dripping to the floor from the ends of her fingers (which aren’t knives after all). Then Emmie sees the two hairy, dog-jawed creatures standing together near the wall, and she knows immediately that they’re the same sort of beasts that came for her and Pearl in the old railway tunnel. She takes a step backwards, and the naked woman looks up at her again.

  “Help me,” Emmie says. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t understand any of this,” and she holds out the glass orb because the black-skinned woman said she was supposed to find someone named Soldier and give it to her.

  One of the ghouls shakes its head and makes an ugly mewling sound. It glares at Emmie and bares its long teeth.

  “Don’t move!” Soldier shouts at her, and then she turns towards the ghouls, and they snarl and whine and huddle against the wall. They’re afraid of her, Emmie thinks. They’re monsters, but they’re still afraid of her.

  Soldier has turned to watch the immense and crackling thing dragging itself free of the bonfire, the thing that has begun to coalesce from the fire itself, and she stands silhouetted against the conflagration. Emmie wants to run back down the stairs, vanishing into the darkness behind her. Maybe there would be a place to hide, a cold and lightless place where it won’t ever be able to find her. Maybe she could even discover a way out of the dream.

  Some of the dancers have started to burn, their thrashing bodies wreathed in tendrils of blue-white flame.

  “We have to get out of here!” Emmie screams, and Soldier looks back over her shoulder.

  You have to go to her, Emma Jean Silvey. And you have to carry this thing to her.

  Don’t move, the naked woman says again, but Emmie can’t hear the words, can only see the shapes her lips are making. Don’t move, but the heat has begun to sting Emmie’s eyes and make them water, and she can feel it getting in through all her heavy winter clothes, pushing past her coat and sweater and T-shirt, touching her. She knows that in a minute or only a few more seconds, the fire thing will be done with the dancers
, and then it’ll eat the woman named Soldier, and the ghouls, and then it will eat her, too.

  “We can’t stay here!” Emmie screams, squinting against the light and the heat, but Soldier only shakes her head and points at her ears—I can’t hear you.

  And then the ground begins to lurch and roll, ripples passing quickly through the stone as though it were only mud, the shock waves beginning at the bonfire and racing out towards the walls of the chamber. Emmie almost falls, and the snow globe with a star inside it slips from her clumsy, mittened hands and hits the floor hard enough that a labyrinth of hairline cracks opens up on its glassy surface.

  If this broke, Pearl said, we wouldn’t have to worry about finding our way back. We wouldn’t live that long.

  Emmie reaches for the orb, but then the ground begins to shake and roll again, and this time she does fall, goes down hard, and her chin strikes her left knee; she bites her tongue, and her mouth begins to fill with blood. The floor groans and tilts towards the scrabbling fire thing clawing itself free of its bonfire womb as the last of the dancers are incinerated alive, and the orb pulses once, twice, and rolls away towards Soldier.

  Emmie begins crawling on her hands and knees, heading for the stairs, and even though there are only a few feet between her and the wide landing, it might as well be a hundred times that far, the way the floor is pitching and rolling about underneath her. All she had to do was give the snow globe to the woman named Soldier, but now she’s screwed it up. She’s broken the orb, ruined the fragile shell of glass and magick spun by Pearl’s father, and soon the star imprisoned inside will escape, and Emmie knows there’s no point in running from a star. But she runs anyway, crawls because she can’t run; she’s been brave too long, and now there’s no courage left inside her.

  “I want to go home,” she says, because maybe that’s all it will take, just like Dorothy and Glinda and the ruby slippers. In the desert, hadn’t the black-skinned woman told her that she already knew the way, that she didn’t need anyone to show it to her? “I want to go home and wake up,” she says. “I want to be home with Deacon now. I want to be home.”