Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) (66 page)

We
have
been running forever,
the sleeper replies hopelessly.
Forever and ever and ever. There was never a time before, never anything but the Olgaln hunting us and us running.

“You’re the biggest idiot I’ve ever had stuck inside my head, you know that?”

You know it’s true, Asrith. You just don’t want to believe it.

The first stalker scrambles out of the tunnel and into the crevasse, all quills and sinew and thannuled grafts, and it sees her only a few seconds after she sees it. She shoots first, a sizzling blast of light as blue as the heart of the glacier but hot as the sun, and hits the stalker in the soft depression just beneath the keel of its sternum. It screams in pain and rage and surprise and crumples lifelessly to the ground. But the others are coming right behind it, and Asrith knows that there’s no way she’s going to get that lucky twice in a row.

You would remember this,
the sleeper mutters behind her eyes,
if you were less of a coward. You’d know how many times we’ve died.

Asrith makes a fist, and the sac implanted in her wrist pumps another round into the glove. “You better fucking hope I don’t live through your extraction,” she snarls at the sleeper and begins retreating down the crevasse as the second and third stalkers emerge from the tunnel. They’re much bigger than the first, two great red corporals hung with mirrored optic banks and revolving sensory relays, and they bristle and howl and raise their weapons.

It’s a dead end, Asrith Wagoti. There’s nowhere left to run. We have to die again before we can run any farther.

“You don’t know that. There might be another tunnel – ”

Then the stalkers start shooting, waves of fire and thunder trapped between the high walls of the crevasse, concussions to bring down razor sheets of ice, and Asrith forgets about fighting back and runs for whatever’s left of her life. She squeezes her left thumb until the brittle plastic capsule beneath her skin breaks open, activating the grid of shield cells wedged in between her third and fourth cervical vertebrae. But the shield was only designed to take small-arms fire and it loops and crashes after the first impact.

Skeller said you were the best,
the sleeper whispers from its crackling, electrostatic nest
. I trusted you with my soul.

Asrith feels the shield go down, the sudden, dizzying pain that means there’s nothing at all between her and the stalkers’ lances, and she dives for cover behind a glittering slab of ice and snow that’s fallen from somewhere above.

She almost makes it.

Again, and again, and again…

IV

The wounded Confederate soldier, Private John Bailey, born in Albany, Georgia, and lately of the 2nd Georgia Calvary, squats in a thick tangle of blackberry briars and honeysuckle. He shivers and clutches the stock of his Springfield, his head filled to bursting with the smothering silence of the cold November night. Sometimes he prays for forgiveness and an end to his pain, though he doesn’t think the Lord listens to deserters and cowards, so he doesn’t expect that either of his prayers will be granted. Sometimes he cries like a lost child, alone in the wild, war-torn Tennessee night. Sometimes he tries to remember all the names of every single Confederate and Yankee officer he’s ever heard, and then he curses them to the hottest pit of Hell, one by one by one. There’s a musket ball lodged deep in his left leg, somewhere just above the knee, and the ground around him is sticky with blood. He imagines the sun rising on frost the color of the red roses in his grandmother’s garden.

Beyond the underbrush is the thickest fog John Bailey’s ever seen, and it creeps through and over the Knox County woods like a hungry battalion of phantoms. The whole world overrun by ghosts, the world slaughtered and left wandering without purpose or hope, only useless, fading memories of what’s been lost. 

That’s the fairy story that he keeps telling himself, because it’s surely less terrible than the truth. John Bailey rubs at his eyes and stares up through the black tangle of brambles and vines, wishing he could at least see the moon, the same silver crescent that other men, men who have not somehow tumbled off the face of the earth, might look up this night and also see. But the mist hides both the moon and stars, and whatever the eyes of living men might see is hidden from him.

“I am not a dead man,” he whispers. The mist doesn’t answer him, one way or the other; it is an army of phantoms without tongues. “This is all a goddamned dream, or a fever. If I can live until the morning, someone will find me,
someone
– ”

But then he stops talking and quickly covers his mouth with his right hand. His voice is much too loud, and the mist seems to play tricks with it, setting it against him.

There will never be another morning,
he thinks,
not in this damned place,
and his thoughts seem almost as loud as his voice.

From the darkness behind him, there’s a very small, rustling sort of sound, and John Bailey rolls over and stares into the night and the mist, straining his eyes, his heart hammering in time to the ache in his left leg.

All nights have mornings at the other end of them.

“Who’s out there!” he shouts. “You show yourself!”

All nights have mornings.

There’s neither powder nor ball left for the Springfield, and he somehow lost the ramrod when he made the dash for the woods, when he abandoned his regiment to their fates out on the Concord Road, but the rifle feels safe and solid in his hands. Wood and steel against every insubstantial fear, and he sets the stock against his cheek and sights down the long barrel, cocks the empty weapon and waits for whatever’s making the sound to show itself.

After a moment or two, the rustling ceases, and he lies there, face down in the wet leaves, too weak to roll over again.

“Oh, god,” he whimpers, muttering into the stink of soil and decay and grub worms, the sweet, fermenting smells of the forest floor – a fetor that is both life and death – slipping up his nostrils as effortlessly as the mist moves between the trees. “I ain’t gonna die like this. I ain’t gonna die in the dirt with my own bullet in my leg.”

The sound comes again, closer than before, but this time he ignores it. This time he keeps his head down, trying to remember how long the night has lasted, if perhaps he dozed off at some point, if he’s dozed more than once and that’s why he’s so completely disoriented. He clearly remembers the twilight, scrambling down a steep ravine and almost falling into the narrow creek bed below. Afterwards, after he splashed across the creek and headed deeper into the woods south of Campbell’s Station, everything starts to blur together and he can’t be certain of the order of things.“The wall,” John Bailey says, “
that’s
what came first,” even though he knows he isn’t at all sure that it did. He might have hidden in the thicket first, then wandered out later on and found the glass wall, then come back here. It might have happened that way round, instead. He shuts his eyes tightly and listens to the rustling in the leaves.

Nothing out there but a possum,
he thinks,
a possum or a coon or an old polecat,
but he doesn’t know that either. He fired at the wall twice; both shots ricocheted and the second hit him in the leg. But the Springfield left not so much as a scratch in the milky glass, if it truly was glass, that smooth, seamless barrier rising from the ground and stretching skyward until it was finally lost in the mist. He’d tried to find a way around it first, before he’d started shooting at the thing, and had walked at least a mile in either direction, east and west, but the wall went on and on, forever, as far as he could tell.

The rustling finally stops and John Bailey opens his eyes. There’s a rabbit watching him from only five or six feet away. His stomach rumbles and he imagines it dead and dressed and roasting over a fire.

“Don’t worry, rabbit,” he whispers. “I haven’t got anything much left to kill you with.” Then he laughs, and the rabbit blinks once and bolts for cover, and he’s alone again. And the mist, like the tattered souls of all the men he’s seen fall in battle, from Perryville to Murfreesboro to Chickamauga, drifts past his eyes, and soon he’s asleep.

In the attic of the yellow house on Benefit Street, the brown girl stands near the center of the ring of tall curio cabinets, watching nervously as the boy named Airdrie examines their contents. She looks at her father’s pocket watch and sees that it’s just after nine o’clock, that more than an hour and a half has passed since he knocked on the underside of the trapdoor. Nobody’s ever stayed this long before, and she doesn’t understand why someone hasn’t come to claim Airdrie. Maybe they have, she thinks, but they’ve gotten lost in the attic. It’s very easy to do.

The boy leans close to one of the orbs and blows the dust off it, even though she’s asked him over and over not to do that. “There’s a forest in this one, too,” he says. “And a little man with a rifle.”

“Do you know what time it is?” the brown girl asks him.

“No,” he replies, “but I’d have thought you’d be happy to have someone to talk to. Isn’t that what you wanted? You said we could talk and tell each other stories – ”

 “You don’t want to talk to me. You just want to gawk at my father’s work, so you can tell people what you’ve seen up here, so you can impress them.”

“What makes you think anyone cares?”

“I’m still up here, aren’t I?”

The boy moves on to the next cabinet, a different orb, and doesn’t bother to answer her.

“I swear, if you blow on another one, I’m gonna kick you,” she says, and he stops and glances over his shoulder at her.

“No, you won’t.”

“Well, then, do it and let’s see.” 

Airdrie blows on one of the bigger orbs, raising a tiny dust storm, and the brown girl sighs and stares down at the floor between the scuffed toes of her shoes. “I’m starting to think the ghouls did your mother and father a favor, stealing you away,” she says.

“I knew you wouldn’t kick me,” he says, then coughs from all the dust getting up his nose and down his throat.

The brown girl walks over to where he’s standing by the cabinet and kicks Airdrie in the left ankle as hard as she can. He yelps, calls her something unkind in the coarse, barking tongue of the ghouls, and then sits down and rubs at his ankle.

“Sorry. I don’t speak
Ghul,
” she tells him. “So, if you want to insult me, I’m afraid you’ll just have to do it in English or French or – ”

“You broke my damn ankle!”

“They’re not toys, Airdrie. They’re not here for you to play with, just because you’ve never seen anything like them before. They’re very, very fragile.”

“Didn’t you hear what I said? You
broke my ankle
,
”
and the brown girl thinks the boy’s starting to sound like someone who’s about to cry. 

“That’s not likely,” she replies, but kneels down beside him and rolls up his pant leg for a look at Airdrie’s ankle. He doesn’t try to stop her.

“It’s no damn wonder they keep you locked away up here,” he says. “That’s just what you deserve.”

“It’s not broken,” the brown girl says and rolls his pant leg down again. “It’s just bruised, that’s all.”

“How do
you
know? You
don’t
know, do you? It’s broken, and now I’ll probably have to crawl all the way out of this place.”

The brown girl frowns and stares him in the eyes. “Well, it’s an awfully,
awfully
long way to have to crawl, but, if you like, I’ll carry the lantern for you. And if any of the rats come along – ” 

“I was wrong,” Airdrie snarls, but he looks away, glares at his injured ankle instead of at her. “Being locked up in here’s too good for someone as mean as you. Someone mean as you, they ought to stick
you
in one of those balls.”

“Maybe that’s exactly what they did,” she says and then gets to her feet again. “Now, give me your hand and I’ll help you back to the trapdoor. Believe me, you don’t want to go crawling around on these floors.”

The boy sniffs and wipes his nose. “That’s not true,” he says. “That’s not what they did to you. They locked you in the attic, that’s all.”

“Give me your hand, Airdrie,” the brown girl says, and he looks up at her. There’s fear in his green eyes now, like flecks of mica and gold, and the barest hint of something she thinks might be remorse. “You’ve been up here a long time. It’s not good for you.”

“I didn’t mean any harm,” he says and sniffs again.

“I know that. You just didn’t know any better. Now, give me your hand.”

This time the boy with hair the color of cinnamon does as he’s told, and she hauls him to his feet. 

“Can you stand on it?” she asks. “Can you walk?”

“Yeah, I think so,” he says, but winces when he puts his weight on the foot.

“I’ll go very slowly,” the brown girl says, and she leads him away from the skylight and the orbs and the ring of tall curio cabinets. She carries the oil lantern for him, shining the way back through the gloom and clutter, and he follows a few steps behind, limping and mumbling things to himself that she doesn’t try to overhear. When they finally reach the trapdoor, he doesn’t have as much trouble with the ladder as she’d have thought.

“If they ever ask me to do this again,” he tells her, when he’s past the loose rung and already halfway to the landing below, “I’ll tell them no way. I’ll tell them to find somebody else.”

“That’s probably for the best,” she calls down after him, and in a few moments more, Airdrie pulls the attic door shut again. “By the time they get around to sending someone else,” she says, speaking softly because she knows that he won’t hear, “you’ll be a grown man, with better things to do than bring sweets and toys to little girls locked away in attics. By then, you probably won’t even remember me anymore.”

Then the brown girl sits down next to the milking stool and the mostly purple paisley handkerchief, and she takes her father’s watch from the pocket of her dress. All three of the hands have stopped moving now, frozen at nine twenty-one and seven seconds, the moment when Airdrie pulled the trapdoor closed.
I’m exactly that much older,
she thinks, though she honestly doesn’t
feel
any older. The brown girl, whose name is Hester, but who has always thought of herself as Pearl, sets the watch on the floor, then folds the handkerchief open again and breaks a small piece off one of the red and white candy canes. It’s spicy and makes her tongue a little bit numb, and she sits, and waits, and fashions a new game for herself from all the noises that the ancient yellow house makes in its long and fitful sleep.