Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (10 page)

Jenny opened her mouth, but she was suddenly too scared to say anything. 

“Your Mama,
she
knew, Jenny. Yes, your Mama knew that you weren’t really her baby, and that’s why she went away.”

Old Mama laughed, then, dry cackle, and waggled one arthritis-crooked finger at Jenny.

“And don’t ask your Papa. He is too stupid and doesn’t know that his little girl is not a real little girl. If he knew, he would be so angry he would stick you back down there now, or he would kill you.” 

And then she put her head into the sink again, and Jenny sat staring at Old Mama’s skinny rump, still unable to speak, pinned between the cold, solid knot settling in her stomach and the hot salt sting of the tears gathering in her eyes. After a while, Old Mama got bored, or the fish people quit talking to her, and she went off to watch television, and left Jenny alone in the kitchen.

After the shower, after she dry-swallows two of the green cephalexin capsules – antibiotics she buys cheap on the street – and puts clean bandages on her legs, Jenny falls asleep on her stinking mattress. 

And she dreams of Ariadne Moreau and the hanging room and taut wires that hold her, suspended high above the slippery floor. A hundred stainless-steel barbs pierce the blood-dabbed flesh of her outstretched arms, shoulders and breasts and upturned face. She has become a matchless crucifixion. Ariadne holds her steady and draws the scalpel blade along the inside of her thighs, first one and then the other, down the length of each dangling leg.

“The old hag should have gone to jail for telling a kid crazy shit like that,” Ariadne says.

Jenny doesn’t take her eyes off the point far above where all the wires converge, the mad gyre of foam and salt spray eating up the ceiling, counterclockwise seethe of lath and plaster and rafters that snap like the ribs of dying giants.

“People like that,” Ariadne says, “make me sorry I don’t believe in Hell.”

And then she binds Jenny’s ankles together with duct tape and begins to sew, sinks the needle in just above her right ankle, draws fine surgical silk through and across to the left. Closing the wounds, stitching away the scalpel’s track and the hateful cleft of her legs.

Jenny Haniver follows Forty-Eighth Street westward, black wraparound shades against the late morning sun that shows itself for brief moments at a time, slipping in and out of the shale-grey clouds like a bashful, burning child. She walks with quick, determined steps, ignoring the sharp jolts of pain in her feet and legs that seem to rise from the sidewalk. She moves between and through the mindless jostle of shoulders and faces, avoids her reflection in the shop-front and office lobby panes of glass she passes. The chilling Hudson wind rips at her shabby peacoat, flutters her long, snarled hair.

The way down to the tunnels, the gully between Tenth and Eleventh Avenues that Ariadne showed her months ago, has not moved and has not been sealed. From the edge of a garbage dumpster, Jenny climbs over the chain-link fence that the city has put up to keep the mole people out or in; she clings to the steel tapestry, the diamond-shaped spaces like gar scales in between, with bare, wind-gnawed fingers and the worn toes of her tennis shoes. There is a single strand of barbed wire along the top that gives her a moment’s trouble, but the solution costs only a few drops of her blood and a ragged new tear in one of her coat sleeves.

Thirty feet down to the tracks, and she inches along the sheer granite walls, nothing but scraggly, winter-dry clumps of goldenrod and poison sumac for treacherous hand holds. Then she slips and drops the last eight feet to the gravel roadbed below, landing hard on her ass, heart pounding and blood in her mouth from a bitten tongue, table salt and pennies, but nothing broken.

In front and behind, the old railroad disappears into the rock, blasted away over a hundred years ago, and nothing comes through here anymore but the occasional freight train. She takes off her sunglasses, stuffs them into a coat pocket, and walks into the darkness on a welcoming carpet of clothing and shattered green Thunderbird bottles, empty crack vials, and discarded syringes.

Inside, the stench of urine and human feces is as thick, as complete, as the dark; Jenny gags, acid-bitter taste of bile, and hides her mouth and nose in the crook of one arm. She knows that there are people watching her, can feel the wary or stark terrified track of their eyes, and sometimes she can hear faint whispering from the side tunnels. Something whooshes past her left ear, and, with a loud, wet pop, a bottle smashes against the tunnel wall. She’s peppered with glass shards and drops of soured wine or beer. 

“Who
are
you?” a hoarse and sexless voice demands. “Who the
hell
are you?”

She does not answer, stands perfectly still and stares back at the gloom, feigned defiance, pretending that she’s not afraid, that her heart’s not thumping crazy in her chest and her mouth isn’t gone dry as the gravel ballast underfoot.

Not another word from the dark, only the far-off growl of cars and trucks on the street above, and Jenny starts walking again, thankful for the company of her own footsteps. 

There are iron grates set into the roof of the tunnel at irregular intervals, dazzling, checkerboard sunlight from the unsuspecting world overhead that only makes the blackness that much more absolute. She walks around, not through them, but keeps careful count of the blinding, gaudy pools in her head; one, three, five, and at the seventh, she turns left. The basket-handle arch of the side tunnel is faintly visible, dim reflection off the measured stagger of brickwork, and spray painted sloppy white above and across the chunky keystone – jesus saves and a tag like a preschooler’s goldfish. Jenny looks over her shoulder once before she leaves the light behind and follows the gentle slope of the side tunnel west, down towards the river.

She learned to hear the voices in the pipes three years before her first period, hardly a month after her grandmother had told her about Old Papa finding her in the sewers.

Very late at night, when she was sure that everyone else was asleep – her father lost in his fitful dreams and Old Mama snoring like a jackhammer down the hall – Jenny would slip out of bed and tiptoe to the upstairs bathroom. She would bring a blanket because the tile floor and cast-iron tub were always freezing, and then lie for hours, curled fetal, with her ear pressed tight against the drain.

And at first there was nothing but a far-off ocean hum like conch shells and the sounds of the building’s old copper plumbing clearing its hundred throats, the gurgle or glug of water on its way up from the mains or back down to the sewers. The metal-hammered clank of pipes expanding or contracting. Sometimes, she would doze and dream in the muted greens and browns of the big Coney Island aquarium, lazy sway of sea plants and anemone tendrils and the strange shadows that moved like storm clouds overhead.

And then, three nights before Christmas and a fresh blanket of snow like vanilla icing, she heard their voices, so faint at first that it might have been anything else, trapped air or her straining imagination. And Jenny lay very still, suddenly wide awake and every muscle tensed, hearing and not believing that she was hearing, not wanting to believe that she was hearing.

The softest, sibilant mumble, and gooseflesh washed prickling cold across her skin.

Not words, at least not words that she could understand, a muffled weave of hisses and clicks and velvet sighs that rose and fell in overlapping, breathy waves. Jenny fought the fear, that slick red thing twisting inside, and her pounding heart, the urge to pull away, to run wailing to her father and tell him
everything
, everything that Old Mama had said that day in the kitchen and everything since. The urge to turn the tap on scalding hot and drown whatever was down there.

The fish people who live down there.

But Jenny Haniver did not run. She squeezed her eyes shut and ignored everything but the wet voices. She lay with fists clenched and knees braced against the sides of the tub. Tried to wrestle something like meaning or sense from the gibbering. And afterwards, she would come back every night, would spend the house’s dead hours listening patient and terrified until she began to understand.

The city beneath the city, accumulated labyrinth of pipe and tunnel extending skyscraper-deep beneath the asphalt and concrete Manhattan crust; sewer and rumbling subway and tens of thousands of miles of gas and steam and water mains. Electric and telephone cables like sizzling neurons buried in the city’s flesh, copper dendrites wrapped safe inside neoprene and rubber and lead.

Jenny Haniver walks the anthill maze, walls of crumbling masonry and solid granite. She counts off each blind step, Ariadne’s directions remembered like a combination lock’s code; forty-five, then right, seventy-one, then left, deeper and deeper into the honeycombed earth beneath Hell’s Kitchen. The air grows warmer by slow degrees, and the only sounds left are the nervous scritch and squeak of the rats, the faint drip and splash of water from the walls and ceilings as the musty air turns damp.

Her eyes do not adjust, register only the ever increasing absence of light, a thousand shades past pitch already; dark that can smother, that seeps up her nostrils and settles in her lungs like black pneumonia. She walks clumsy as a stumbling zombie, hands out Frankenstein-stiff in front of her, lifts her feet high to keep from tripping over garbage or stepping on a rat. 

Fifty-seven, then right,
and that’s the last, and for all she knows she’s lost, almost certain that she’ll never be able to reverse the order and follow the numbers backwards to the surface. And when she catches the dimmest shimmer up ahead, she believes it can only be panic, hallucination, a cruel will-o’-the-wisp tease dreamed up by the rods and cones of her light-starved eyes. But with every step the light seems to swell, becoming a faint bluish glow now, and she can almost make out the tunnel walls, her own white hands somewhere in front of her face.

There are new sounds, too, parchment-dry susurrance and the moist smack and slap of skin against mud. The air smells like shit, and the cold rot of long-neglected refrigerators. The tunnel widens, then, abruptly opening out into a small cavern, low walls caked thick with niter and a scum of luminescent fungus, and she can see well enough to make out the forms huddled inside. Skin bleached colorless by the constant dark, stretched much too tight over kite-frame skeletons, razor shoulders, xylophone ribs. Bodies naked to the chill and damp or clothes that hang in tatters like a shedding second skin.

Jenny follows the narrow path between them, and they watch her pass with empty, hungry eyes, shark eyes, grab at her calves and ankles in halfhearted frenzy, hands no more than blue-veined claws, arms no more than twigs.

Ariadne Moreau sits by herself on a crooked metal folding chair at the far end of the chamber, lion’s mane nimbus of tangled black hair and necklaces of rat bone draped like beads around her neck. She wears nothing else but her tall leather boots and vinyl jacket, both scabby with dried mud and mildew. Her thighs, the backs of her bony hands, are splotched with weeping track marks, and she smiles, sickly weak approval or relief, as Jenny approaches.

“I knew that you’d come,” she says, and her voice sighs out of her, a husky wheeze, and she extends one hand to Jenny, trembling fingers and nails chewed down to filthy nubs. “I never stopped believing that you’d come.”

Jenny does not take her hand, hangs a few feet back.

“It isn’t working,” she says, and opens her peacoat, displays her own ruined flesh to prove the point. She’s only wearing boxers underneath, and all the bandages are oozing, stains that look like sepia ink by the weird blue light of the cave. A few have come completely undone, revealing her clumsy sutures and the necrotic patchwork of grafts. 

“I have to know if you’ve learned anything. If you’ve seen anything down here,” she says, and closes her coat again.

Ariadne’s smile fades, jerky, stop-motion dissolve, and she lets her arm drop limply again at her side. She laughs, an aching, broken sound, and shakes her shaggy head.

“
Anything,
” Jenny says again. “
Please,
” and she takes the baggie of white powder from her coat pocket, holds it out to Ariadne. Behind Jenny, the mole people whisper nervously among themselves.

“Fuck you, Jenny,” words spit softly out like melon seeds. “Fuck you, and fuck the voices in your sick fucking head.”

Jenny steps closer, sets the heroin gently on Ariadne’s bare knee. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I can’t stay.”

“Then at least let me kiss you, Jen,” and Ariadne’s arms strike like moray eels, locking firmly around Jenny’s neck and pull her roughly down. Ariadne’s mouth tastes like ashes and bad teeth, and her tongue probes quickly past the jagged reef of sharpened incisors. Jenny tries to pull away, pushes hard, and Ariadne bites the tip end of her tongue as their mouths part, bites hard, and Jenny stumbles backwards and almost falls among the restless mole people, the pain and the deceitful copper warmth of her own blood on her lips. 

Ariadne laughs again, vicious, hopeless chuckle, wipes her mouth with the back of one hand and snatches the baggie of dope from her knee with the other. 

“Get out of here, Jenny. Go back up there and slice yourself to fucking ribbons.”

Eyes that are all pupil now, and the dark smudge of Jenny’s blood on her chin.

Jenny Haniver runs back the way she came, dodging the forest of grasping hands that rises up around her. 

In the dream, the dream that she’s had again and again since the first night she heard their voices, Jenny Haniver drifts weightless in silent hues of malachite and ocher green. The sun filters into and through the world from somewhere else above, Bible storybook shafts in the perfect, silting murk. She moves her long tail slowly from side to side and sinks deeper, spreads her silver arms wide, accepting and inviting. And he rises from below, from the cold, still depths where the sun never reaches, the viperfish night, and folds her away in pelvic webs and stiletto spines. She gasps, and the salt water rushes into her throat through the crimson-feathered slits beneath her chin.