“And I shall go back down to the hounds. Is that what I’ll do, Emmie Silvey?”
“Will they hurt you?”
The child with Soldier’s green eyes picks up the pistol lying on the floor, and Emmie immediately bends down and takes it away from her.
“No, I don’t think they’ll hurt me. I think it will take them a while to understand exactly what’s happened, and then, then…” and Soldier trails off and stares at her hands, as if the pistol has left some stain behind that only she can see. “I won’t tell them,” she says to Emmie. “I won’t ever tell them that you’re the bridge builder.”
“Thank you, Soldier. But do you think they’ll let me leave?” Emmie asks her and lays the pistol down on the table beside the clarinet-sextant contraption. “Do you really think they’ll let me go home now?”
“I don’t know,” Soldier says after a moment.
“Then I guess that’s what happens next. I guess we find a way out of this place and see if they’ll let me go home to Deacon.”
“My father,” Soldier says and frowns.
“He’s my father, too,” Emmie tells her and helps Soldier up off the dusty attic floor. When she stands, the too-big jeans slide right back down, and Soldier steps out of them. Fortunately, the sweater reaches all the way to her knees, and Emmie helps her roll up the sleeves so they don’t flop down over her hands.
“Maybe I can meet him someday,” Soldier says. “Maybe when I’m grown, maybe one day then.”
“I think he’d like that,” Emmie tells her, and she takes Soldier’s left hand, and together they cross from the alchemist’s workshop into the greater gloom of the attic, leaving behind the tall shelves of glass spheres filled with stolen places and Odd Willie’s corpse and the pawnshop 9mm that killed him. They get lost only once, in a twisting, roundabout maze of dollhouses and dressmaker’s dummies, before they reach the milking stool and trapdoor and the foldaway stairs. Miss Josephine and another silver-eyed woman, whose name is Adelaide, are waiting for them there, and at first Emmie’s afraid of the pale, waxen women in their high collars and black mourning gowns. But then Miss Josephine smiles and tells her there’s a taxicab waiting outside, a driver to take Emmie home to Angell Street, and the four of them go down the stairs, and Adelaide closes the trapdoor.
“I’ll try not to forget you,” Soldier tells Emmie, though she’s already having trouble recalling exactly who the yellow-eyed girl is or when they met.
“A shame about Master Lothrop,” Adelaide says. “I expect he’ll be missed Below.”
“Who?” Soldier asks and blinks up at the vampire.
“Never mind,” Emmie says. “It doesn’t matter anymore,” and then she remembers the gold ring, the ring from the box beneath Deacon’s bed, Soldier’s mother’s wedding ring, and takes it out of her pocket. “I want you to have this,” she tells Soldier. “Maybe it’ll help you remember me.”
“It’s pretty,” Soldier says, and Emmie lays the ring in her palm.
“What’s that?” Adelaide asks, bending close for a better look. “It’s rather plain,” and then Miss Josephine tells her to be quiet.
“Maybe you’ll look at it and dream about me sometime,” Emmie says, and then the two women with mercury eyes lead them downstairs.
Except the smaller size, no Lives are round,
These hurry to a sphere, and show, and end.
The larger, slower grow, and later hang—
The Summers of Hesperides are long.
—EMILY DICKINSON
EPILOGUE
April
U pstairs in Deacon Silvey’s big gray house on Angell Street, Emmie lies in her bed, listening to the rain drumming hard against the roof and the bedroom window. She was dreaming of the desert again, the desert and the black-skinned woman, and then something woke her, probably the rain or a thunderclap. She isn’t surprised to find that her father’s sitting at the foot of the bed, watching her. He does that a lot these days.
“Were you having a bad dream?” he asks. “You were talking in your sleep.”
“I was dreaming,” she replies, “but it wasn’t a bad dream.”
Deacon scratches his chin and nods his head.
“Why aren’t you asleep?” she asks him.
“I was, but then the storm woke me, and I thought maybe I should come up and look in on you.”
“I’m not afraid of thunderstorms,” she says, though he already knows that.
“Yeah, well…maybe I am. Anyway, no harm done.”
“No harm done,” Emmie says sleepily and rolls over to watch the spring rain streaking the window. The dream is still fresh, and she thinks about taking out the journal that Sadie bought her and writing down all of it she can remember. Sadie says her dreams are magick, the most powerful magick that Sadie’s ever seen, and that one day they’ll help her to become a very powerful witch, if that’s what she wants. Deacon says they’re only dreams and to ignore Sadie whenever she starts talking like that, but even he thought the dream journal was a good idea.
“Do you want me to go away?” Deacon asks.
“No,” Emmie says. “Sit with me until I fall asleep again,” and he says that he will.
I’m much too sleepy to write anything down, Emmie thinks, hoping that she’ll still remember the dream in the morning. Climbing up and over the dunes with Esmeribetheda, guarding the memories of the dead, and finally they’d come to a rocky place looking down on the sea.
“They have their suspicions,” Esmeribetheda said, and Emmie knew that she meant the ghouls. “They are watching you, always, Emmie. One day, when you’re older, they may come for you.”
“I won’t help them. I already made that decision,” Emmie told her and sat down in the shade of a huge red rock. There was a lizard beneath the rock, and it winked at her and then crawled quickly away.
“You may have to make it again.”
“That doesn’t seem fair,” Emmie told her.
“No,” the black-skinned woman said. “It doesn’t seem fair at all.”
And then Emmie woke up to the storm and Deacon at the foot of her bed.
“I should leave,” he says. “And you should get back to sleep, kiddo. Tomorrow’s a school day.”
“It’s already tomorrow, Deacon.”
“My point exactly,” he says. Before he goes, Deacon kisses her on the forehead, presses his rough lips to the small pink scar between her eyes. His breath doesn’t smell like beer or whiskey; it hasn’t for a long time, now.
“You want me to turn Doris Day back on?”
“No,” Emmie says. “That’s okay. I think I just want to hear the rain for a while.”
“Yeah, the rain’s good,” Deacon Silvey says, and then he leaves her, and Emmie watches the storm at the window until she finds her way back down to sleep and unfinished dreams.
About the Author
Caitlín R. Kiernan has written seven novels, including Threshold, Low Red Moon, and Daughter of Hounds, and her short fiction has been collected in four volumes—Tales of Pain and Wonder; From Weird and Distant Shores; To Charles Fort, With Love; and Alabaster. Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, she lives in Atlanta, Georgia.
Web sites: www.caitlinrkiernan.com
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