Daughter of Hounds

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “You stay right by me,” Soldier cuts in, and she turns around in the seat and glares at Emmie. “None of that shit you pulled back at the gas station, you understand?”

  Emmie nods her head but doesn’t say anything.

  “I’m not fucking kidding with you,” Soldier says, and then she turns around again. She pops the clip out of the Smith & Wesson 9mm that Odd Willie picked up in a pawn shop back in Uxbridge and counts the rounds—six, seven, eight—then slides the clip in again. The Model 439 has seen better days, and Soldier wishes she had half the firepower Ballou took off them in Woonsocket. Right now she’d give her eyeteeth for a good shotgun. When she looks up, she sees that Odd Willie’s frowning at her.

  “What the hell’s your problem?” she asks him.

  “This is just dumb,” he replies, and his eyes drift from Soldier’s gun back to the museum building. “I mean, if it was a setup—”

  “We don’t know that.”

  “I know we don’t know it, but it’s what we’re both sitting here thinking. Don’t you try to lie to me and say that it’s not.”

  “You know I wouldn’t dream of lying to you, Odd Willie,” Soldier says and sticks the pistol back into the waistband of her jeans.

  “Yeah, well, I just don’t see what good fucking guns are gonna be. If he’s got it in for us, we won’t be shooting our way out of there.”

  “Chance favors the prepared,” Soldier says and looks at Emmie again. “Ain’t that right, little girl?”

  “Don’t call me that. You know my name.”

  “Okay, Emmie. You behave yourself, and that’s a deal. Now, listen, when we go through the front doors, there’s a staircase on the other side of the lobby—”

  “I have been here before,” Emmie says and sighs.

  “Then you know where the black bear is, right?”

  “No. I don’t remember a black bear.”

  “But you just said you’d been here before.”

  “Yeah, but I still don’t remember a bear.”

  Soldier takes a deep breath and clicks her tongue once against the roof of her mouth.

  “I’m sorry. I don’t remember a bear,” Emmie says again.

  “Well, trust me. Halfway up those stairs there’s a stuffed black bear, okay? You know, taxidermied.”

  “Looks like it’s got the fucking mange,” Odd Willie adds and opens his door, letting in a gust of cold air.

  “That’s where we’re going, Emmie,” Soldier continues. “Halfway up those stairs. We’re going in the front door and then straight to the bear.”

  “Why are we going to see a dead bear?” Emmie asks and opens her door, too.

  “We’re not going to see the goddamned bear. We’re going to see the Bailiff and—”

  “But you just said—”

  “Things aren’t always what they seem,” Odd Willie tells Emmie again, and he grins at her from the rearview mirror. “Just like the lady said,” and he nods at Soldier, “you’ll see. It’s magick.”

  “Fine,” Emmie replies, “but I don’t remember a dead bear,” and she starts to get out of the Chevy.

  “Hold up,” Soldier says. “Give me another second or two.” She stares out the smeary windshield at the museum. You’re just like everyone else, she tells herself. You’re afraid of him. Everyone’s afraid of him, everyone except the hounds, and he knows it. He banks on it.

  “Jesus, I just want to get this over with,” Odd Willie groans and pulls his door shut again.

  You’re scared half to death of the bastard, Soldier thinks, and he knows it.

  “Emmie,” she says, keeping her eyes on the hands of the clock mounted high above the museum doors. “You got that glass ball you gave me from a woman in a desert, a black-skinned woman. Not a black woman, but a woman with black skin.”

  “No, that’s not what I said. I got it from Pearl. The woman in the desert told me to bring it to you, but I got it from Pearl. She said it was one of her father’s experiments.”

  Odd Willie giggles to himself and shakes his head.

  “Did she tell you her name, the woman in the desert?” Soldier asks.

  “She said she had a lot of different names, but she likes to keep them to herself.”

  Willie Lothrop leans forward, resting his forehead on the steering wheel. “Anytime one of you ladies wants to tell me what the hell you’re talking about, I’ll be sitting right here.”

  “And she told you something about me?” Soldier asks Emmie, ignoring Odd Willie. The clock’s hour hand is at one, and the minute hand is at four, but the clock’s been broken for as long as she can recall.

  “Yeah,” Emmie says. “She did.”

  “Well, we’ll talk about it later,” Soldier tells her. “If that’s cool with you. When all this is over, we’ll talk about exactly what she told you.”

  “If I’m not dead yet,” Emmie grumbles.

  “Just stick close to me.” And then Soldier opens her door, and the sky above the old museum in Roger Williams Park seems to shudder and stretch for a moment, like something that’s grown too ripe and is almost ready to burst. And then it’s only sky again, and she gets out of the car.

  “It’s a tough row to hoe,” the Bailiff said and then leaned back in his squeaky chair. One day, Soldier thought, it’s gonna break, that old chair, and he’ll end up on the floor. He gazed down at her over the rim of his enormous belly and smiled.

  “Being a Child of the Cuckoo?” she asked. “Is that what you mean?”

  “I do,” he said. “I mean that very thing, little Soldier. The universe is a cruel old cunt, she is. But for the random vagaries of happenstance, you might have been any girl, safe and snug at home with a loving papa and a loving mama to watch over her.”

  Soldier wondered about it for a moment and chewed thoughtfully at the arrowroot cookie he’d given her after the vampire named Adelaide had led her into the study. “Maybe,” she said. “Or I might have ended up like Cinderella, with a wicked stepmother and three wicked stepsisters. Or like Hansel and Gretel. Or the pretty daughter in ‘Mother Hulda’ who has to spin until her fingers bleed.”

  “Ah, yes,” the Bailiff replied and nodded his head, seeming to consider what Soldier had said. “But all those stories have happy endings.”

  “That depends who’s telling them.”

  The Bailiff chuckled and tapped the side of his nose. “Too true, too true,” he said. “You are wise far beyond your years, child.”

  “I had another dream last night,” Soldier said, because she knew that was probably the reason he’d called for her. He rarely wanted much of anything but to listen to her dreams. “You were in this one.”

  “Was I now?” he asked and leaned forward again, one bushy eyebrow cocked, and she thought perhaps he looked more worried than curious. “Do tell. Whatever was I doing in one of your dreams?”

  “I didn’t understand all of it.”

  “Then let’s start with the parts you did understand, and we’ll get to the confusing bits later on.” He tugged at his beard and licked his thin lips like a hungry dog.

  So she told him about a winter day, still many years off, and a lost mongrel girl, and a demon of fire and cinders that she’d slain with nothing more than a crystal ball. There was something about the mongrel’s mother, something that had upset her so much she’d forgotten most of it, and, she said, she’d realized, in the dream, that she wasn’t a child anymore, that she was a grown woman who could barely even recall ever having been a child.

  “But you said that I was a part of this dream,” the Bailiff said impatiently. “So far I’ve not heard one word about me.”

  “I was coming to that part,” she said, annoyed that he was hurrying her, and swallowed another bite of arrowroot cookie. The Bailiff frowned and tugged on his gray beard.

  “You wanted to kill me,” Soldier told him. “We were standing in a room, and there was incense burning and silk pillows and all these pretty boys who at first I thought were girls. And we weren�
��t here.”

  “You mean we weren’t in this house?”

  “No, I mean we weren’t here. We were somewhere else. Somewhere you had called me to. Somewhere you went to be away from the hounds.”

  The Bailiff laughed and took out a handkerchief. He wiped fat droplets of sweat off his face, then laughed again. He’d begun staring at a particularly old book lying open on his desk instead of looking at Soldier.

  “Are you feeling well?” Soldier asked, and he wiped his face again.

  “Tell me the rest,” he said. “Tell me all of it.”

  But Soldier waited a moment, wishing that she had another cookie or maybe a piece of fudge or something else she’d never tasted.

  “Is there a problem?” he asked.

  “No,” she told him, “not really,” because she was pretty sure there was no point, this far along, in asking for fudge. So she told him that in the dream the hounds were leaving, going back to someplace they’d been before they’d found a way into this world. They were all going away forever and leaving him behind, and then he would only be a strange fat man with no work left to do.

  “I saw Madam Terpsichore,” Soldier said, “who was the last of the ghouls to leave, and she told me to watch after you, that you had become dissipated and decadent and careless, that you’d sunk too deeply into your appetites, forgetting—”

  “She said that?” the Bailiff asked, his lower lip trembling, and she saw that his hands were shaking.

  “If she hadn’t, I wouldn’t have told you she had.”

  “Pray tell, was there anything more?” he asked, laying his palms flat on the desk, on the pages of the old book.

  “Yes,” she replied, and Soldier watched him and considered whether or not she should say anything more. She’d never seen the Bailiff like this. Even if he wasn’t the Cuckoo or the god of men and churches, she’d thought he was something, something powerful enough that he certainly didn’t have to be afraid of the dreams of children.

  “Well?” he said. “I’m waiting.”

  Soldier picked a stray speck of cookie off the front of her dress and then continued. “You said to me, ‘We have fallen on hard times. Our lords and ladies have all deserted us, and our purpose lies in ruin. A masque which has endured down untold ages is ended here this night, and now we are castaways in our own land.’”

  “I said all that?” he asked and wiped his forehead with the damp handkerchief. “Quite the mouthful, don’t you think?”

  “Yes sir,” Soldier told him. “But you said it. Then you cut your throat from ear to ear, and the pretty boys whom I’d thought were girls went down on their hands and knees and lapped your blood from the floor. When they were done, they saved some in a little blue bottle. They locked the bottle in a lead box and dropped it into the sea. When I asked why, one of them told me it was so your soul would go down to the Mother and the Father, and so you’d not come back to haunt them.”

  “You are an ill wind, indeed,” he said, but she wasn’t sure what he meant, and since she wasn’t finished with the dream, she didn’t bother to ask.

  “And then,” she continued, “I remembered a magic trick I knew, and I…” And she paused, the words eluding her, the language she needed to describe something that seemed all but indescribable.

  “Oh, don’t stop now,” the Bailiff laughed and slammed the big book shut, startling Soldier. “Surely,” he said, “there’s some snippet of cataclysm yet to be revealed.”

  He’s scared, she thought. He’s really scared. And she knew then that the Bailiff was only a man and nothing more.

  “I unhappened it,” she said, making up a word because she could think of none that fit. “And you were back, and I took the knife away before you could hurt yourself with it. I promised to watch over you, because when I was a little girl you’d been good to me and given me cookies and candy and soda.”

  The Bailiff dabbed at his sweaty cheeks. “And that’s all?” he asked.

  “No, but I’ve mostly forgotten the rest. It wouldn’t make any sense if I tried to tell it. Can I have another cookie, please?”

  “No,” he said, standing up, and the handkerchief slipped from his fingers and fell to the floor at his feet. “You may not have another cookie. We’re quite finished for tonight.” And then he called out for the silver-eyed woman, who came and led Soldier back down the basement steps to the tunnels.

  And the next time the Bailiff called for Soldier, he took her to the long hall on the second floor of the yellow house and opened the foldaway stairs leading up into the attic….

  Through the heavy front doors of the museum, into shadows and the musty smell of very old things, past whale bones and mastodon tusks leaning against the foyer walls like the crooked walking canes of leviathans—through the doors and across the lobby, just like Soldier told her, and Emmie goes up the stairs with Odd Willie in front of her and Soldier behind. The girl in the gift shop, just past the entrance, doesn’t ask them to pay admission. She doesn’t even seem to notice them, and Emmie suspects that’s because she can’t see or hear them. We’re invisible, she thinks, like the seventh point on the Seal of Solomon, but it doesn’t seem nearly as remarkable as it ought to. Then she spots the black bear, a neglected, moth-eaten thing rearing up on its hind legs, swiping at the air with its shaggy forepaws, its muzzle frozen permanently in an expression of mock ferocity. The bear is exactly where they said it would be, halfway up the stairs on a wide landing, but she still doesn’t remember it ever being there before. There are six stained-glass windows behind it, and the bear is silhouetted against pale kaleidoscope patterns of yellow and red and blue sunlight.

  “You know, it’s still not too late—” Odd Willie begins, but Soldier interrupts him.

  “Not too late for what? You want to go to the hounds, instead? Or maybe you’d rather try to cut and run?”

  “Well, to tell you the gods’-honest fucking truth, I was growing kind of fond of that motel room back in Massachusetts.”

  “We don’t know,” Soldier says and takes a long, deep breath. “We don’t know that he set us up. Until we do, Willie, he’s still calling the shots. He’s a bastard and a son of a bitch, but he’s never betrayed the hounds.”

  “Not that you know of,” Odd Willie sighs. “Maybe those things Saben said last night, maybe she wasn’t so far off the mark.”

  Emmie flinches at the mention of Saben White. She looks at Odd Willie and Soldier and then back to the taxidermied black bear towering over her. There’s a Plexiglas barrier surrounding it, so no one can get too close. So no one can pull out its fur or try to snap off a tooth or a claw or something.

  “She wanted us dead,” Soldier says. “She sold me out to that cocksucker Joey Bittern, and then she sold us both out to Ballou. She’d have done or said anything to get to the kid. I do know that much.”

  “We could always head for Boston. Ask for sanctuary—”

  “Right now, he can hear every single goddamn word we’re saying. You think you’d even make it back to the car alive?”

  “Killjoy,” Odd Willie sighs and shakes his head.

  Emmie places her hand flat against the Plexiglas, and it ripples like water. “Is it supposed to do that?” she asks Soldier, who nods her head and places her own hand against the clear plastic, creating a second set of ripples that spreads out and eclipses the ones that Emmie made. Where the ripples cross, there are gentle shimmers of light.

  “You stay close to me,” Soldier tells Emmie again. “Stay close and don’t touch anything.”

  Soldier takes her hand, and for a second Emmie Silvey pretends she’s any child at the museum, and maybe Soldier is only her big sister. Maybe they’ll go to Ben & Jerry’s after the museum. Maybe they’ll go to Johnny Rockets and have chocolate milkshakes and chili-cheese fries. Maybe, she thinks, I have green eyes, just like her. Maybe Deacon’s waiting outside to take us both home.

  “The horse is dead,” she says and squeezes Soldier’s hand. “From here we walk.”
>
  “Anyone ever told you you’re sort of a creepy kid?” Odd Willie asks.

  “All the damn time,” Emmie tells him. “I don’t bother keeping count anymore.”

  “Just checking.” Then Odd Willie brushes the Plexiglas with the fingertips of his left hand, and a third set of ripples spreads rapidly across the barrier. Emmie realizes that she can see through the bear now, through the bear and the stained-glass window behind it. There’s some sort of hallway on the other side, past the museum wall, where the park should be, a long hallway dimly lit by bare lightbulbs screwed into sockets strung up along the ceiling.

  “That’s where the Bailiff is?” Emmie asks, but no one answers her. Soldier takes a step forward, and the rippling, shimmering Plexiglas and the stuffed bear and the wall of the museum parts for her like a theater curtain…

  …and before Soldier went up the foldaway stairs, before she climbed into the attic of the yellow house and met the Daughter of the Four of Pentacles, but after the Bailiff lied and promised her that he was coming, too, that he’d be right behind her—in the fleeting moments in between, she almost told him the truth about her dream. She paused at the first step and looked at him and almost said, In my dream, you didn’t slit your own throat. I did that.

  But there was something slick and sharp and icy in his eyes, something like a snowy January night or the edge of one of Madam Terpsichore’s scalpels, and Soldier had decided, even if he might be better off knowing, she’d be better off keeping that part to herself. There are worse things than lies, she thought (and it seemed like a very practical, grown-up thought), and then Soldier said her silent prayer to the Lady of the Abyssal Plains and started up the ladder.

  “Oh, but he’s in a most peculiar temperament,” the rat who isn’t Reepicheep, who probably isn’t even a real rat at all, says nervously and scratches at a scabby spot behind its right ear.

  Emmie looks back the way they’ve just come, at the bricked-up doorway where there ought to be a museum and a stuffed bear. Coming through, entering the hall, there was only a slight shiver and the faintest passing nausea, and she wonders if the bricks would ripple the way the Plexiglas did were she to walk back and touch them.