Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  Another convulsion racks the cavern, and dust and sand and bits of rock and roots pepper the floor all around her. Emmie stops crawling towards the stairs and lies down flat, despite the heat of the stone against her cheek, trying to hold on because she’s afraid if she doesn’t she’s going to start slipping back towards the bonfire and the thing coming out of the bonfire.

  “Now,” she says. “I want to go home now. I know the way, and I want to go home.”

  “Kid, I don’t know who the hell you are, but I think I know exactly what you mean.”

  Emmie looks up, and there’s a very thin, tall man kneeling next to her. He’s naked and filthy, too, just like the woman named Soldier, and he’s holding half a long human thighbone clutched tightly in his right hand. He smiles at her, but Emmie doesn’t smile back. For all she knows, he’s just another crazy person or some other sort of monster. For all she knows, he’s someone else who wants to hurt her.

  “Stay away from me,” she says. “You leave me alone.”

  “Duck,” he says, then puts his free hand on top of Emmie’s head and forces her back down onto the hot floor. He swings the thighbone, and there’s a dull thud, barely audible above the noise from the fire. Emmie rolls over, and one of the ghouls is lying crumpled at her feet, the left side of its face caved in. There’s a rusty carving knife, the wooden handle wrapped in duct tape, lying on the floor beside it.

  “Holy mother of crap, I’ve always wanted to do that,” the tall man says and grins. “Just haul off and let one of the ugly motherfuckers have it.”

  “You saved me. It was going to stab me. It was gonna kill me, but you saved me.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” he says. “Now, maybe you can tell me what the hell she thinks she’s doing,” and he points and Emmie follows his finger, looking past the dead ghoul, and sees that the woman named Soldier is holding the cracked orb and standing much nearer the fire than before. All the dancers are dead now, smoldering, twisted heaps scattered in a charcoal ring, and the whirlwind of sparks and smoke and flame is spinning faster, gathering momentum.

  “I don’t know,” Emmie says, and then the thing that the dancers have summoned turns towards Soldier, and it opens three simmering eyes the color of nothing that Emmie’s ever seen, and she turns away.

  “Aren’t they wonderful?” the girl in the attic of the yellow house on Benefit Street said to Soldier when they’d finally reached the place where the alchemist had worked. They stood in front of the wooden shelves and the tall cases holding hundreds upon hundreds of glass or crystal spheres, most of which seemed to Soldier to be filled with fog or some milky whitish liquid.

  “Aren’t they simply the most wonderful things you’ve ever seen?”

  “What are they?” Soldier asked, and the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles smiled a secretive smile and shrugged her shoulders.

  “I’m not supposed to tell you that. But maybe you could try to guess.”

  “I don’t like guessing games,” Soldier said. “If you don’t want to tell me, then I don’t want to know.”

  “I’d tell you if I could. They told me not to.”

  “You could tell me anyway.”

  “Why? Why should I do that? You’ve been nothing but dreadful since you climbed up that ladder. And besides, they’re not the reason that you’re here. I just wanted you to see. My father is so proud of them.”

  “I think you don’t know what they are,” Soldier said. “You don’t know, and you’re lying about being told not to tell because you don’t want to look stupid.”

  “You’re impossible,” the girl replied. “Of course I know what they are.”

  “Then prove it.”

  “I shouldn’t even have shown them to you. A brat like you doesn’t deserve to see anything this wonderful. Anyway, we should get started soon. There’s an awful lot to be done before the Bailiff comes back for you.”

  “He’s never coming back,” Soldier sighed and took a step nearer the shelves. One of the spheres had caught her eye. It seemed less foggy than the others, and she thought maybe there was something moving around inside it besides the milky stuff. “He’s left me here forever. We have to be sisters now.”

  “Frankly, I’d rather have a spider for a sister,” the alchemist’s daughter said and made a face like she’d bitten into something bitter. “No, wait. I like spiders. I’d rather have an old toad for a sister.”

  “What’s in there?” Soldier said, ignoring the insult and peering into the glass ball, at all the specks moving about inside. She thought they must be bugs—ants or fleas, maybe. But then she saw that they weren’t bugs at all.

  “Hey,” she said, “those are people. Those are tiny little people.”

  “We’re wasting time, changeling. I’m a very busy person, you know.”

  “But that’s what they are. They’re a bunch of tiny little people in a glass ball.”

  “Don’t you dare touch it,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles said sharply, because Soldier was reaching for the sphere. “You mustn’t ever touch any of them. Not ever, you hear me? It can be very dangerous.”

  “How’d they get in there?” Soldier asked.

  “Never you mind about that. That’s not any of your business.”

  Soldier leaned as close to the sphere as she could without her nose bumping against it, and stared at the scene inside. There were rooms within it, and there were tiny people in most of the rooms—people who seemed no larger than ants or fleas. Some of them appeared to be talking to each other. Some were running about, as if they were being chased by something invisible, something that Soldier couldn’t see. Some were sitting alone on miniature chairs or sofas or lying on tiny beds. One was on its knees, praying at an altar festooned with minuscule candles.

  “You’ve seen enough,” the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles said and took Soldier by the arm. “You’re here for a reason. We need to get started.”

  “Do they know they’re inside a glass ball?” Soldier asked and tried to pull free, but the girl was holding her too tightly.

  “Who cares? What difference does it make? Now come on. I have other things to do.”

  Soldier frowned and glanced at the glass ball one last time, then let the alchemist’s daughter lead her away from the shelves and the tall cabinets, towards whatever it was the Bailiff had sent her up into the attic to see or do.

  “And what the hell did he put inside you?” Soldier asks, staring down at the orb in her hand. The glass is freezing, so cold that it hurts to hold, but she holds it anyway. A fine mist has begun leaking out through the cracked surface, and the reek of ammonia rises from it to mix with all the hot, burning smells. She can see that there’s some sort of fire sealed in behind the glass, a bright mote drifting in a sea of night, and she wonders if it might be something like Odd Willie’s elemental. Soldier looks up at whatever it is that Ballou’s mongrels and the Woonsocket ghul have midwifed and finds it gazing furiously back down at her. Three gaping holes leading nowhere, holes that must be its eyes, and they open and close, close and open, one after the other in a fierce counterclockwise gyre.

  Right now, I’m in the mood to watch the whole goddamn world burn, so we’ll just have to see how it goes.

  A thin blue wisp flickers from the thing in the bonfire, like the stinging, phosphorescent tentacle of some deep-sea creature, and it briefly grazes the left side of her throat, then disappears again. Soldier winces, but after the beating in the ossuary, after the tunnels and George Ballou, it’s only a very small pain.

  “I know that you were invited,” she says and swallows, her throat so sore and dry it’s getting hard to talk. “But I’m afraid we’ve changed our minds. Here. Take this for your troubles,” and Soldier heaves the freezing glass ball at the gyre of blinking eyes. It sinks into the thing, passing straight through flesh that’s still mostly flame, and disappears.

  “You can go now. We don’t want you here.”

  The three eyes shut in unison and then
open again, much wider than before. Chasms of hate, the most perfect expression of hatred that Soldier has ever seen or imagined, malevolence in the absence of any other sentiment that might taint or dilute its purity. Above the thing, the whirlwind breaks apart, scattering cinders across the burial chamber, and she instinctively covers her face with her hands. The floor trembles and tilts again, then seems to drop several inches all at once, and Soldier is hurled to her hands and knees.

  This is it, she thinks. This is where I’m going to die, and the thought’s not so very terrible, not even so unwelcome, after everything that’s happened since she drove through the gates of Oak Hill Cemetery and straight into Ballou’s glamour. There is regret, though—that she’s not going to live long enough to murder Saben White, that she’ll never understand why the Bailiff let her walk into this mess or what the hell George Ballou was up to down here, what he thought he could accomplish by summoning beings he could never hope to control. And other questions, too; the nagging, unanswerable questions she might never have remembered, except for the dream of Sheldon Vale’s ghost and a clock with a dead girl’s face.

  A sound fills the cavern, then, a sound like the world dying and being born again, a sound like tumbling cataracts and falling leaves and the grinding teeth of sleeping gods. Soldier clenches her hands into fists and whispers half-forgotten prayers she’s never believed, supplication and benediction, a mumbled litany for Mother Hydra and Father Kraken waiting in their silent, flooded halls at the bottom of the bottom of the sea.

  And then the fracturing, rending sound ceases as suddenly as it began, and the thing writhing inside its birth caul of fire howls one last time and breaks apart, dissolving, collapsing into itself, becoming no more than tattered, glimmering shreds of ash and slag. The bonfire is only a bonfire again, and in the instant before Soldier loses consciousness, she can hear Odd Willie calling her name. It sounds like he’s at least a thousand miles away.

  When it’s over, when the brown girl’s snow globe has been swallowed by the fire, and the monster has been destroyed or driven away or whatever it is that Soldier has managed to do, Emmie carefully picks her way up the split and buckled sections of flooring to the landing and sits alone at the top of the stairs with her back to the dead bodies and the sputtering remains of the bonfire. She takes off her coat and mittens and gloves, and lets the cool, moist air flowing up the dark stairs wash over her.

  The handful of surviving ghouls have fled the chamber through narrow fissures in the walls, and the thin man who told her that his name was Willie is wearing the clothes of the man that Soldier killed, though they’re much too big for him and the pants keep sliding down. He’s wrapped Soldier in a long linen robe that he stripped from the body of the ghoul he killed with the thighbone, and then it takes him at least half an hour to carry her over the rubble and up to the landing. He lays her next to Emmie and sits down, slicked with sweat, looking sick and gasping for breath.

  Emmie brushes hair from Soldier’s face. “Is she going to be okay?” she asks him.

  “Maybe,” Willie Lothrop says and wipes at his sweaty face. “Maybe not. I’m not a doctor, kid. I’m not even sure I’m going to make it.”

  “My name’s Emmie,” she says. “The black woman in the desert sent me here.”

  Odd Willie laughs and wipes at his face again. “Is that a fact? Well, I have no idea what the hell you’re talking about, Emmie, but perhaps we’ll figure it all out later. Unless we die down here.”

  “She can’t be Deacon’s daughter,” Emmie says, speaking to herself now instead of the skinny man with no eyebrows. “She’s too old. She can’t possibly be Deacon’s daughter.”

  “She ain’t nobody’s daughter, nobody except the hounds. Jesus fucking Christ, did you see that shit?”

  “I saw,” Emmie says. “I don’t know what any of it was, but I saw it.”

  “Yeah, me either. Me and you both. But it was sure some crazy, fucked-up shit; I know that much.”

  “She’s hurt,” Emmie says, then pulls off her right glove and lays her palm against Soldier’s forehead. Her skin is pink, like someone with a sunburn, and she has a fever. “I think she needs a doctor.”

  “Hell, at this point she probably needs a goddamned exorcist. Whatever the shit that thing was, it most certainly wasn’t a goddamn hobgoblin. Nobody goes up against something like that and comes out….” And then he stops wiping his face and stares at her a moment or two. “Who the hell are you?”

  “I told you. I’m Emmie Silvey. The black woman in the desert sent me to help Soldier.”

  The man named Willie takes a deep breath and spits. “You ain’t one of Ballou’s bunch?”

  “I’ve never heard of anyone named Ballou, except for that bear in The Jungle Book.”

  “Oh, that’s fucking cute. That’s just precious.”

  “Well, it’s the truth.”

  “Are you a witch?”

  “No, I’m Emmie Silvey. I live in Providence with my father, Deacon. He runs a used bookstore.”

  Odd Willie laughs again and cracks his knuckles. “Well, Emmie Silvey from Providence. I’m Odd Willie, also from fucking Providence. Now, just let me get my breath, and then we’ll see if we can’t figure out how to get Soldier out of here. How’s that sound to you?”

  “Okay,” Emmie says, and the skinny man nods and shuts his eyes. She sits with Soldier while he rests, and tries not to think about the monsters or the lost snow globe, Pearl or the woman in the desert, tries not to wonder where she is or how hard it’s going to be to get home again. There’ll be time for that later. There are strange noises from the darkness beyond the stairs, sounds like animals or people or both, and she tries not to think about those, either.

  Emmie opens her eyes, and at first she’s unable to remember where she is, and then, remembering, panics that she must have dozed off, and she has no idea how long she might have been asleep. But then she sees that the skinny man is standing over Soldier, who’s still unconscious. He’s holding a torch, and the landing and archway are bathed in its warm yellow light.

  “I fell asleep,” she says.

  “Yep, you sure as hell did.”

  Emmie rubs at her eyes, then asks him where he found the torch.

  “There were a few pieces of furniture,” and he nods towards the devastated chamber. The bonfire has almost burned itself out, and it’s mostly dark in there now, only a single shaft of white sunlight getting in from somewhere far overhead. Emmie thinks it might be coming in through a sort of chimney.

  “This used to be a table leg,” Odd Willie continues. “Toss in a couple of rags and some candle wax, and presto-changeo, abraca-fucking-dabra, voilà, and what’s the difference between me and a goddamned Boy Scout, I ask you?”

  “Your goddamned dirty mouth,” Emmie replies. “I don’t think Boy Scouts curse. I think it’s against the rules.”

  “Hey, fuck that,” Odd Willie says. “I have it on good authority that Boy Scouts curse like drunken sailors. Hell, there’s probably a goddamn merit badge for profanity.”

  “I’m hungry,” she says, wishing she had one of the sandwiches or pears from Pearl’s brown bag, and he shrugs.

  “Sorry. I can’t help you there. First things first. I want you to carry this,” and he waves the torch at Emmie; the flames make a loud whooshing noise in the air. “I’ll carry Soldier best I can. We need to get out of this place before one of those beaver-beater fucks stops licking its wounds and decides to come back looking for us.”

  Emmie stands, stretches, puts her coat on again, and then takes the torch from Willie. It’s heavier than she expected.

  “You gotta be careful with that thing. Hold it out away from you,” he says, and she does.

  “Can you carry her?” Emmie asks.

  “I think so. I’m starting to get some of my strength back. Right now, I only feel like one truck ran over me. She’s just real fucking lucky I didn’t make her shoot me before she came up here.”

  “I don’t
even want to know what you’re talking about,” Emmie says and holds the torch up as high as she can, trying to get an idea how far down the stone stairs go. She can see that the steps are slick, and there are patches of moss or algae growing on the rock.

  “Smart kid,” Odd Willie says. “Ignorance is fucking bliss.” And when Emmie gets tired of watching the stairs, staring at the murky place at the limit of the torchlight where the stairs blend imperceptibly into the darkness, she turns back to find that he’s managed to lift Soldier off the ground and is holding her slung over his left shoulder. Her head’s dangling towards the floor, her chin resting against his back and her mouth half-open, and he has both hands clasped together firmly beneath her butt.

  “You go first,” he says. “And keep that light on the stairs. I gotta be able to see where I’m putting my feet.”

  “Those steps are slippery,” Emmie warns.

  “No shit, the steps are slippery. You just make sure I can see where I’m going,” and then he curses and shifts Soldier’s weight so he has a better grip on her.

  So Emmie starts down the stairs, forgetting her mittens and the glove she took off, and Odd Willie follows her. He slips only once, but he doesn’t fall. It seems to Emmie that the steps go on almost forever, down and down, curving along the side of the rocky wall. When they finally reach the bottom, Emmie sits on the damp ground, and Willie leans against the side of the tunnel, his eyes shut, gulping air like a goldfish that’s jumped out of its bowl.

  “How much farther?” Emmie asks.

  “How the hell should I know?” he wheezes.

  “Left or right?” she asks.

  “Do I look like fucking Ranger Rick? Your guess is as good as mine. Flip a coin.”

  “I don’t have a coin,” Emmie says and stares at her reflection in a puddle. Her face is streaked with mud and soot, and she’s lost her toboggan cap somewhere. Maybe she left it back in the desert; her hair is tangled and sticking out in all directions.