Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (22 page)

Lark steps over the threshold, the thin, tightrope line between the trailer and this place, ducks her head beneath the shower curtain, and the smell is stronger than ever now. It gags her, and she covers her mouth with one hand, another step and the curtain will close behind her, and there will be nothing but this perfect, absolute cold and darkness and her and the thing swimming through the black. Not really water in there, she knows, just
black
to hide it from the prying, jealous light – and then Crispin has her hand again, is pulling her back into the blinding glare of the trailer and the shower curtain falls closed with an unforgiving, disappointed
shoosh
. The old man and his fishlong face is staring at her with his rheumy, accusing eyes.

“That was not for you, girl,” he says. “I did not show you that.”

She wrenches her hand free of Crispin’s and almost manages to slip back behind the curtain before anyone can stop her, the only possible release from the sudden, empty feeling eating her up inside, like waking from a dream of Heaven or someone dead alive again, the glimpse of anything so pure and then it’s yanked away. But Crispin is stronger and the old man is blocking her, anyhow, grizzled Cerberus standing guard before the aquamarine plastic, a faint string of drool at one corner of his mouth.

“Come on, Lark,” Crispin says to her. “We shouldn’t be here. We shouldn’t ever have come in here.”

The look in the old man’s eyes says he’s right, and already the dream is fading, whatever she might have seen or heard already bleeding away in the last, watercolor dregs of daylight getting into the trailer.

“I’m sorry,” Crispin says as they pass the shriveled mermaid, and he pushes the door open, not so far back after all. “I didn’t want you to think I was afraid.”

“No,” she says. “No,” but doesn’t know what to say next, and it doesn’t really matter, because now they’re stumbling together down the trailer’s concrete-block steps, their feet in the sand again. The air is filled with gentle twilight and the screaming of gulls.

Tam has been standing by the stream for half an hour, at least that long since she wandered down to the beach looking for the twins, after the man in the pickup truck stopped and fixed the broken fan belt with an old pair of pantyhose from the back seat of the Impala and then refilled the radiator. “You take it easy, now, and that ought’a hold far as San Francisco,” he said. Then she couldn’t find Lark or Crispin. Her throat hurts from calling them. It’s nearly dark now, and she’s been standing here where their footprints end at the edge of the water, the past thirty minutes spent shouting their names. Getting angrier, getting fucking scared, the relief that the car’s running again melting away, deserting her for visions of the twins drowned or the twins lost or the twins raped and murdered. 

Twice she started across the stream, one foot out and plenty enough stones between her and the other side to cross without getting her feet wet. Twice she stopped, thinking that maybe she glimpsed dark shapes moving just below the surface, undulating forms like the wings of stingreys or the tentacles of an octopus or squid, black and eel-long things darting between the rocks. Never mind that the water is crystal clear and couldn’t possibly be more than a few inches deep. Never mind she
knows
it’s really nothing more than shadow tricks and the last glimmers of the setting sun caught in the rippling stream. These apprehensions too instinctual, the thought of what might be waiting for her if she slipped, sharp teeth eager for stray ankles, anxiety all but too deep to question. So she’s stood here, feeling stupid, calling them like she was their goddamn mother.

She looks up again and there they are, almost stumbling down the hill, the steep dirt path leading down from the creepy old trailer, Crispin in the lead, dragging Lark along, a cloud of dust trailing out behind them. When they reach the stream they don’t even bother with the stepping stones, just splash their way straight across, splashing Tam in the bargain.

“Mother
fucker
,” she says and steps backwards onto drier sand. “Will you please watch what the fuck you’re doing? Shit.” But neither twin says a word, just stands breathless at the edge of the stream, the low bank carved into the sand by the water; Crispin stares down at his soggy Docs, and Lark glances nervously back towards the trailer on the hill.

“Where the hell have you two bozos been? Didn’t you hear me calling you? I’m fucking hoarse from calling you.”

“An old man,” Lark gasps. “A terrible old man.” wheezing the words out. Before she can say anything else, Crispin adds, “A sideshow, Tam, that’s all.” He’s speaking quickly, like he’s afraid of what Lark will say if he doesn’t, what she might have been about to say. He adds, “Just some crazy old guy with a sort of a sideshow.”

“Jesus,” Tam sighs, tired and pissy sigh that she hopes sounds the way she feels, and she reaches out and snatches a wilted poppy from Crispin’s hair, tossing it to the sand at their feet. “That figures, you know? That just fucking figures. Next time, Magwitch comes or your asses stay home.” She turns her back on them, then, heading up the beach towards the car. She only stops once, turns around to be sure they’re following, and they are, close behind and their arms tight around one another’s shoulders as if they couldn’t make it alone. The twins’ faces are hidden in shadow, night-shrouded, and behind them, the sea has turned a cold, silvery indigo and stretches away to meet the rising stars.

Postcards from the King of Tides

Christa Faust and I on the 101 from Florence, Oregon to Fortuna, California in the Spring of 1997, past Winchester Bay, Coos Bay, Gold Beach and E. V. Nelson’s Prehistoric Gardens, redwoods, black sea cliffs, tracing the western shadow of the Klamath Mountains. Somewhere (and I wish I knew precisely where), I found the very spot where this story takes place, even if there was no old man with his sideshow oceanic house trailer. I have a single green stone on my desk, which I took away from that stream Tam and the twins crossed.

Giants in the Earth

For no particular reason that the Iron Orchid can recall, she has waited until her birth son, her beaming womb fruit, precious Jherek, is seven years old to present him, formally, at a soirée. By fits and starts, he has grown as normally as she can guess the course of such things should occur, and it hardly matters that she chose to forego the niceties and fluids of gestation, belly-swollen months, opted instead for the fern-shaded incubator while she scuttled across the glass bead and jade silk floors of silent and custom-made seas. Matters less, even, that the dome of plexibrass and the most transparent crystal mercury nursed the baby with its own glistening set of rubber nipples. He is nonetheless the pride of her cells, the mysterious multiplication of her genetic self, fused with the wriggling, sperm-born matter of his beautiful, nameless father. Such bright perfection from so crude a coupling, their giggling, joyously clumsy attempts to decode the ins and outs of that Dawn Age ritual, shadowed by the whispering old bones of Shanalorm.

“No, dear,” she laughed, his three-headed penis (it had seemed right enough at the time) slipping into the bristling slit between her shoulder blades. “Not
that
way, dearest thing.
Here
.”

So it is not as if she has held him back from any shame, not as if they haven’t picnicked with Li Pao and Lord Jagged and the ebullient Sweet Orb Mace. Not as if he has not been cradled and bounced on the knee of the Duke of Queens. 

Jherek, golden-eyed tonight although she’d have preferred something silver; white, white hair sleek and tied back from his face with the claws of something found and cracked neat between his curious teeth. His naked skin like an artifice, too smooth, too flawless, to be the product of mere biology.

“What will I wear, Mother?” he asks, because she has not tired of the appellation yet. “What would you
have
me wear, sweetest, hardest Mother?”

The Iron Orchid thinks for one impatient moment, runs gilded fingertips across her third bottom canine, before she twists the sapphire ring, slightest motion, and the new gown hangs in the jasmine and diesel-scented air of the room that Jherek has built from wood the color of pomegranate seeds. Salmon velvet, softer even than his skin, billowing sleeves, Formica cuff links and a high, stiff collar that looks like platinum. Jherek’s face glows, and he adds a jabot of seaweed lace and a tiger’s eye brooch.

He will wear nothing at all on his feet, still, but powders them to match the gown.

“Tell me again, absolute Mother, about Below-The-Lake and the beetlebats,” he pleads and she has to smile, because she has made this demanding beauty, because he has filled something inside her hearts.

“Better we go ahead now, Jherek, or we may not be late,” she says. 

Jherek Carnelian walks silent beside the Iron Orchid in the glittering travertine halls beneath Lake Billy the Kid, hands clasped, because otherwise they would not be still. The ceiling of this tunnel, vaulted path between one waterfall gateway and the great cavern to come, is close enough that he can see the iridescent black-green carapaces of the beetlebats for himself; bodies hung head downward in the pulsing violet light from the subterranean fungi decorating the walls in teardrop paisley swirls. He stomps his bare foot and the small fleshsound disturbs them so that they flutter their chitin wings, a crisp sound like breaking ice that makes him laugh.

And then the tunnel spills them out into the cavern, its stalactites at least a thousand feet overhead. There is gentle applause, though whether it is for him, or the Iron Orchid, or both he cannot tell. The cavern is startling ebon, onyx and obsidian arches and Texan gargoyle spires, veils of mourning gauze, inky curtains of mummy-shroud muslin. Corpseless necropolis, a hundred styles of crypts, and mausolea, and sealed sarcophagi defying blameless gravity. 

My Lady Charlotina greets them immediately. Jherek has met her only once before, on a three-day hunt for nothing important in a primeval forest of pines and apricot mangroves created especially for the occasion by Lord Jagged. When nothing important had actually been found, she was disappointed, he remembers, disseminated the whole wood without bothering to ask if Jagged minded.

“Oh,” she says through slick black lips. “He is most certainly everything a child born of your exquisite assembly should be, my industrial Orchid.
Everything
.”

My Lady Charlotina is dressed in a skin-tight body suit of latex (a marine animal the Iron Orchid has described to him in every detail), with cuffs and collars of polished cuttlebone. The neckline plunges to emphasize the new breast she has set above her sternum. Her smooth and navelless belly, not scarred like Jherek’s by his skin’s umbilical memories, has been carefully studded with needle rubies.

“Loveliest of breathing troglodytes,” the Iron Orchid says, leaning close to My Lady Charlotina, whispering, but he can hear anyway, catches the hint of pleasurable annoyance in her voice. “I
thought
you’d settled on a Baroque tribute to the Eleventh Equatorial Glaciation for your theme.”

“Oh, yes, well,” says My Lady Charlotina, smiling, “I had, originally, but then I thought of this at the
last
possible minute, the Four Year Empire, of course. Isn’t it so much better?”

“Surely,” the Iron Orchid says. “But you might have informed the guests of honor, so that costumes would be more suitably dire.” She twists a power ring so that her white chrome bruises to deepest indigo.

“Oh, but you should let the child be,” says My Lady Charlotina, running one latex hand lovingly over the Iron Orchid’s hull. “He’s a matchless contrast, the unconditional center of all our attentions.”

“Jherek?” his mother asks. “Would you prefer to change your gown?” But he’s busy staring up at one of the languid funeral ships sweeping slowly by overhead, its leathery wings rising and falling, its black sails billowed by unfelt gales. The sunken, oyster-grey faces of the sailors stare back down at him, expressionless regard.

“Jherek dear, harvest of my self,” she says, and he looks back to the Iron Orchid and My Lady Charlotina.

“Yes, Mother?”

“Do you wish to change your costume, to harmonize with the period My Lady Charlotina has belatedly chosen as her theme?” 

“Or,” My Lady Charlotina chimes in, “would you remain dressed in this marvelous affair, so that everyone might see you from the farthest corners of the hall?”

He looks up again, but the funeral ship has passed them by. “This is perfectly fine, Mother. After all, I want them
all
to see me.”

Tall Lord Jagged steps from the crowd, then, granite eyes and a greyer cloak of authentic selkie-hide, all black silk underneath and knuckle bones strung on catgut.

“Ah,” he says, wide and comforting smile, “sweet and forge-tempered Orchid. I trust you will not have too much trouble adjusting to our host’s whimsy?”

“Of course not,” and the Iron Orchid whispers to him, “The inconvenience is delicious. But be truthful, Jagged, our beloved, dismal Werther certainly had his hand in My Lady Charlotina’s change of heart, did he not?”

“Which hand do you mean, in particular, most luscious monocotyledon?” he replies, because young Werther de Goethe, whose natural birth was not nearly so fortunate as Jherek Carnelian’s, is still in the process of settling on a precise and desirable number of arms.

Jherek cranes his head far back, gold eyes wide and open-mouthed gawking, more intrigued by the simulbasalt skulls and vertebrae-encrusted tiers of Four Year Imperial Hypergoth architecture than the Iron Orchid’s queries. Hovering panoramas, glass stained a million somber shades with pigments ground and squeezed from blister and bone and bowel, ash-charred and blood-tinted; antimony solder and scabby frames of purest rust.

Occasionally, there are faces, as pale and drawn as the sailors’, and Jherek wonders if they’re genuine, maybe time travelers borrowed for the soirée from a score of menageries, or only clever fabrications.