Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (65 page)

The window is never more than five steps from the card table. The old man uses the barrel of the pistol to push the curtain to one side.

This time,
he thinks,
the city will be there. This time the city will be there, and I’ll be able to see all the way to Lake Michigan.

And he also thinks,
Or the demons will have gotten through, and there won’t be anything left but fire raining down from the sky and rivers of blood.

The sunflower curtain slides easily along its metal rod, left to right, and in a moment more the old man can see that nothing out there has changed – no city, no view of Lake Michigan, no demons, no clotting rivers of blood. There’s only the short space between the fourth-floor window and the place where the world ends. It’s near enough he could touch it, if he leaned far out the window and used the broom handle. But he’s never done that, and he doesn’t think he ever will, because he doesn’t want to know what would happen. 

He can see himself reflected dimly in the smooth, faintly shiny surface, the face he hasn’t shaved in days, the dark smudges beneath his eyes, his dirty hair, the black gun clutched in his right hand. He looks down, but the brick wall of the apartment building and the glassy surface both vanish in a soupy mist, no more than nine or ten feet below the sill. The third floor is lost somewhere in the mist. He looks up, and it’s the same, the shifting grey mist and something white that might be the sun, or only a hole in a sky that isn’t there anymore. It never gets dark, but he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t call this daylight, either.

He jumped once, not long after it began, but the old man woke up back in his bed with a splitting headache and something sticky that looked like tar, but smelled like vomit, staining his clothes. So he never jumped again.

Standing here, staring at himself staring back at himself, he curses and makes wild, hopeless promises involving the gun and the razor, promises he knows he’s too much of a coward to ever keep. If he weren’t, he suspects that it wouldn’t make any difference anyway. He could stick the revolver in his mouth and blow the back of his fucking head off, or cut his throat from ear to ear, and he’d only wake up on the bed again, stinking of puke. Because old men who have been damned do not exit Purgatory with bullets and sharp steel blades.

He stands at the window until he can’t bear the sight of his own reflection any longer, and then the old man pulls the sunflower curtain shut again and goes back to the card table and his stack of photographs. 

“Holy shit,” the changeling boy named Airdrie whispers. The brown girl is somewhere just behind him, but he’s almost forgotten about her. They’re standing near what might be the center of the attic of the yellow house, though he can’t be certain about that. He followed her through the darkness and clutter for ten or fifteen minutes to get here, time enough to have walked all the way from Benefit Street to the old observatory over on Hope if he’d wanted to go for a stroll. Airdrie had just about decided that the attic went on forever, or they must be going in circles, when they finally came to a pool of silver-white moonlight shining in through a narrow pane set into the roof of the house. Rows of tall curio cabinets are arranged beneath the skylight, and the glass orbs they hold sparkle like iridescent gems.
Like pearls,
he thinks, remembering how Hester had lied to him about her name.

“There must be a
thousand
of them,” he says.

“Oh, considerably more than that,” the brown girl replies proudly.

“I heard some stories, but I never thought there’d be so many,” and he’s pretty sure that none of the others – the other Children of the Cuckoo and the
ghul
pups – are going to believe him.

“I shouldn’t have brought you here,” the brown girl says anxiously. “We should go back right now.”

“How
many
more than a thousand?” he asks.

“I don’t remember exactly, but we really ought – ”

“How do you know? Did you ever count them all?”

Airdrie takes a step towards the nearest cabinet, so tall that it reaches almost all the way to the sloped attic ceiling. It’s built from sturdy planks of some dark wood, wood shellacked the color of chocolate, and its shelves are crowded with dust and cobwebs and the glass orbs, hundreds of them. Most are no larger than a hen’s egg, but a few are as big around as rutabagas, and at least a couple are twice that size. He picks up one of the smaller ones and holds it to the moonlight. The orb is very cold to the touch, same as the brown girl’s hand, and its surface swirls with color, like the wavering, rainbow sheen of oil on water.

“
No!
” the brown girl shouts at him, and she plucks the orb from his fingers. “You can’t
touch
them. I’m not even supposed to touch them. Not
ever.
”

“I wasn’t gonna drop it,” he says sheepishly and backs away from the cabinet.

“That hardly matters, Airdrie,” she admonishes, carefully returning the orb to its spot on the shelf, the perfect circle of undusty wood where it must have sat for three quarters of a century. “Nobody touches them. That’s what my father said and so that’s the rule.”

Airdrie shrugs and stares down at the fingers of the hand that held the orb. They’re tingling faintly, almost painfully, and he thinks the cold might have burned him if she hadn’t taken it when she did.

“So this is why they sent him away?” he asks and blows on his fingertips to warm them.

“He said they didn’t understand,” the brown girl replies, turning to face him, turning her back on the tall cabinet.

“That’s not what I asked you,” Airdrie says. “I asked you if this is why they sent him away.”

“I
know
what you asked me. I have ears.”

“Then why don’t you just answer my question?”

“You never had a father, did you?” she asks instead. “I mean, not one you can remember. The ghouls stole you away from your mother and father when you were only a little baby, so you don’t understand.”

“Understand what? I understand it’s rude not to answer a question.”

“But not that there are some questions that it’s rude to ask in the first place. You’re just the same as the hounds that raised you.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“Never you mind. But I shouldn’t have brought you here and now you have to leave.”

Airdrie’s heard stories that the brown girl’s insane, that living alone in the attic and never getting any older has driven her crazy, and he’s beginning to believe them, regardless of what Miss Josephine and Madam Terpsichore have told him to the contrary. Standing there, looking into her piercing velvet-brown eyes, he thinks that maybe she’s gone mad as a March hare in May and it’s supposed to be some sort of secret.

“Was your momma really an Indian?” he asks her. “That’s what I’ve always heard.”

“I don’t remember her,” the brown girl replies and shakes her head.

“See there? You’re doing it again. That’s not an answer. I didn’t ask whether or not you remembered her.”

“
Yes
,” the brown girl snaps, and she turns away from him again. “My mother was an Indian. She was a Montauk woman that my father brought to Providence from Long Island. I want you to leave.”

Airdrie realizes that his fingers have stopped tingling and he steps around Hester for another look at the orbs.

“Don’t worry,” he tells her. “I’m not going to touch any of them. I just want to see, that’s all. Did your father ever say that looking was against the rules?”

“No. He never said that. Although I know I shouldn’t have brought you up here.”

“But you already did, so now you may as well let me see what all the fuss is about.” Then Airdrie leans close to one of the larger orbs; the glass is very dusty, but he can still make out the oily colors writhing across its surface. There are two symbols that appear to have been scratched deeply into the orb with something sharp – an Ω, which he remembers from his lessons, and something that looks sort of like an open eye at the center of two interlocking triangles.

“What do those mean?” he asks her, pointing at the symbols, but the brown girl doesn’t answer.

“Is it magic?”

“It’s
all
magic,” she sighs impatiently. “You’ve seen enough, haven’t you? Won’t they start wondering where you’ve gone?”

“They might,” he says, “but Miss Josephine said I could talk to you for a little while, if I wanted to.”

“I bet she didn’t say you could go wandering off into the attic, though.”

Airdrie blows some of the dust off the orb, disturbing a fat ginger-colored spider that he hadn’t noticed, and it scurries away into the shadows.

“Don’t
do
that,” the brown girl says, and she puts a strong hand on his right shoulder. “I told you – ”

“I didn’t touch. I just blew on it, that’s all.”

“Don’t touch it
or
blow on it.”

Airdrie ignores her, keeping his eyes on the orb. He thinks that maybe the iridescence is a bit dimmer than before he blew the dust away, and now there seems to be something inside.

“Did I do that?” he asks, and the brown girl mumbles angrily beneath her breath. Airdrie realizes that the something inside the orb is water, the flat calm surface of a sea, and that there’s a tiny ship floating on it. He counts the masts, four from stem to stern, and then the surface of the orb grows milky, hiding the ship from view, and suddenly the iridescent motley returns brighter than before.

“That’s
all
?” he laughs, glancing at the brown girl. “A ship in a bottle? Your father built ships – ”

“It’s not a bottle,” she says, watching the orb instead of him.

“Well, it’s almost the same damn thing, ain’t it? I can’t believe they sent your father away to Weir and locked you up in here because he was building little ships inside glass balls.”

“He didn’t build anything,” the brown girl says very softly. “He only found things.”

III

Asrith Wagoti checks the settings on her glove, sees that there’s still enough pressure in the wrist sac to get off six or seven quick shots, and then she stares up from the bottom of the deep crevasse at the colorless, roiling sky. The heavy mist is lingering just above the glacier, but at least it hasn’t settled into the fissures yet. She flares her nostrils and sniffs at the freezing air, perks her sensitive ears, searching for even the faintest trace of the Olgalnic stalkers or their mechanical drones. They were so damn close, almost right on top of her when she finally blew her last smoker and lost the lot of them in the tunnels, the winding caverns of blue ice that opened, finally, into this crevasse. When she’s satisfied that she’s alone, Asrith crouches in the snow, wrapping herself in the rustling folds of her cloak, hoping there will be time enough to catch her breath before they figure out which way she went.

A few snowflakes spiral down from above and settle on her broad shoulders and exposed forearms, the white flecks bright against her hairless, indigo skin.

She’s lost track of how many times she’s found herself hiding in this very same crevasse, or how long the stalkers have been pursuing her through the bowels of the glacier flowing down from the barren, obsidian flanks of the Szurshee Mountains. And yet there’s never any evidence that she’s come this way before. Sometimes, Asrith tries to remember how it must have begun, the soldiers of the Olgaln catching up with her in the blizzard, catching her off her guard, and there was no way she’d ever have made it across the wide valley to the tarn on the other side, the place where she was supposed to meet the void pilot who’d been paid to get her offworld.

They’re coming,
says the sleeper spiked into the base of her hindbrain.
You can’t stop here. They’re coming. They’ll find me.

“Just shut the fuck up and let me do this,” she growls and rubs at the rough nubbin of horn between her eyebrows. Her whole head throbs whenever the sleeper starts talking, and Asrith curses herself for having accepted such a heavy package. She’s always made it a policy to stick strictly to the criminal lightweights – quick thieves, political dissidents, memory traitors, rogue clones – certainly no one that the Olgaln wants badly enough that they’d waste time chasing her halfway to hell and back.

“Listen to me, Wagoti, this one’s worth a fortune,” Skeller said, after she’d told him no three times and then threatened to jump agents if he asked again. “It’s risky, you bet, but you’re one of the best, and if you get this load across you’ll never have to carry for anyone again.”

She laughed and told him to go fuck himself with the hot end of his spike thread, then finished her drink and left the
sha’lír
bar. But two days later, when she’d sobered up and there was only her hangover and the prospect of growing old with a head full of echoes to finally drive her insane, she tabbed him and took the package. 

Can’t you smell them?
the sleeper whines from the back of her skull.
Can’t you hear them?

“I can’t hear anything but
you,”
she whispers and flexes her left hand, arming the glove. The sleeper’s panic is starting to bleed over into her own consciousness, and if she has to use one of the barrier plugs to maintain the spike’s integrity, she’ll be too sick to walk, much less elude a stalker retrieval.

Overhead, the mist drifts endlessly by, rolling, coiling, rearranging itself into the silver ghosts of her worst nightmares.

They told me you could do this. I trusted you with my soul.

Asrith takes a deep breath, coughs out steam, and slowly gets to her feet again. She glances back at the spot where the tunnel empties into the crevasse, a ragged, vertical tear in the ice, a cavity black as a night without stars or moons, and prays to all her mother’s gods that they’ve lost her trail. 

How long have we been running?
the sleeper asks.
We’ve been running forever, haven’t we?

“
I’ve
been running,
nas’meer.
You’re just along for the fucking ride.”