Beneath an Oil-Dark Sea (55 page)

The Countess looks up at the girl, who seems to have grown four or five inches taller since entering the room. “You are my daughter?” Elizabeth asks, the question a mouthful of fog.

“I am,” the girl replies, kneeling to gently kiss the Countess’ right cheek. “I have many mothers, as I have many daughters of my own. I watch over them all. I hold them to me and keep them safe.”

“I’ve lost my mind,” the Countess whispers. “long, long ago, I lost my mind.” She hesitantly raises her left hand, brushing back the girl’s filthy, matted hair, dislodging another feather. The Countess looks like an old woman. All traces of the youth she clung to with such ferocity have left her face, and her eyes have grown cloudy. “I am a madwoman.”

“It makes no difference,” the gypsy girl replies.

“Anna lied to me.”

“Let that go, Mother. Let it all go. There are things I would show you. Wondrous things.”

“I thought she loved me.”

“She is a sorceress, Mother, and an inconstant lover. But I am true. And you’ll need no other’s love but mine.”

The movie’s score has dwindled to a slow smattering of piano notes, a bow drawn slowly, nimbly across the string of a cello. A hint of flute.

The Countess whispers, “I called to the King of Cats.”

The girl answers, “Cats rarely ever come when called. And certainly not ninety all at once.”

And the brown girl leans forward, her lips pressed to the pale Countess’ right ear. Whatever she says, it’s nothing you can make out from your seat, from your side of the silver mirror. The gypsy girl kisses the Countess on the forehead.

“I’m so very tired.”

“Shhhhh, Mother. I know. It’s okay. You can rest now.”

The Countess asks, “Who are you.”

“I am the peace at the end of all things.”

EXT. COURTYARD BELOW COUNTESS’ BALCONY. MORNING.

The body of Elizabeth Báthory lies shattered on the flagstones, her face and clothes a mask of frozen blood. Fresh snow is falling on her corpse. A number of noisy crows surround the body. No music now, only the wind and the birds.

FADE TO BLACK:

ROLL CREDITS.

THE END.

As always, you don’t leave your seat until the credits are finished and the curtain has swept shut again, hiding the screen from view. As always, you’ve made no notes, preferring to rely on your memories.

You follow the aisle to the auditorium doors and step out into the almost deserted lobby. The lights seem painfully bright. You hurry to the restroom. When you’re finished, you wash your hands, dry them, then spend almost an entire minute staring at your face in the mirror above the sink.

Outside, it’s started to rain, and you wish you’d brought an umbrella.

THE PRAYER OF NINETY CATS

A story that began with a recurring dream of a demonic child visiting an old and ailing woman who struggled to protect her secrets from the child. On moonless nights, the child would climb the walls of a stone tower and slip in through an open window. That was the nucleus about which accreted this exploration of my fascination with cinema, lost films, and the Countess Elizabeth Báthory de Ecsed. Brit Mandelo writes, “Kiernan’s ‘The Prayer of Ninety Cats’ has a curious, seductive structure that leads the reader ever deeper into the
experience
of viewing a film, on a metatextual level and a literal level. The film that the protagonist is watching for review is one layer of story; the actual world outside the film and the protagonist’s experience of it is another. Yet, somehow, it is this fictional film that lingers – the film that I feel, having read this story, I
have
seen myself. That Kiernan manages evoke this visceral and visual memory in a purely textual story, when giving us the film only in snippets of script and description as the protagonist relays them, is nothing short of stunning. The layer of story about the theater, the often-inexplicable immersion of the artificial screen and what is displayed on it – that layer, for a watcher of movies, is breathtaking in its simple, concise, and
real
observations about the nature of the medium and the nature of the time spent indulging in it.” The story was nominated for the 2014 Locus Award in the novelette category and also won the 2014 World Fantasy Award for best short fiction.

Daughter Dear Desmodus

If there were any proper name for her specific teratism, the deformity that determined the course of her life, Ileana never learned it. Her life was not filled with doctors or medical researchers to poke and prod, chart genetic abnormalities, to erect a new syndrome in her honor, and publish their exacting findings for all the world to see. That is what did
not
happen. Instead, she was only abandoned by horrified parents, suspecting some imp, succubus, or minor devil might have played a role in the gestation of their child. It
was
duly noted, with some irony, that her parents’ small farm was located within a few miles of the nowhere-in-particular crossroad burg of Batson, Mississippi. Late one night, Ileana’s mother and father (who did not bestow that name upon her) visited a carnival passing through the relative metropolis of Hattiesburg and sold the infant for the princely sum of five-hundred dollars, tax free. And so Ileana was raised by a dwarf in a rusty, battered 1966 Airstream Overlander trailer, which the dwarf (a clown) shared with the “human blockhead,” a fellow paid to insert an ice pick and nails through his sinus cavities. She grew up “where the barkers called the moon down,” among the smell of cotton candy, the reek of lion piss, the sweet perfume of camel dung, and the casual profanity of roustabouts. The owner of the carnival didn’t dare unveil her to the cake eaters who lined up for his sideshow of anatomical wonders and nightmares until she was eighteen, for fear of various and sundry child-labor laws, deviating as they do from state to state. Besides, as Ileana entered, then passed through puberty, her malformations became markedly more pronounced, and so the carnival owner considered his investment and patience a wise move, indeed.

Three nights after her birthday, after the carnival set up outside the Lawrenceville, Kansas city limits, she took her place among the other freaks. A tall section of bally canvas was painted with a somewhat less than accurate – but undeniably sensational – portrait of DESMODIA: THE BAT GIRL!!!! The name had been suggested by the fat lady, who’d once read a book on bats and remembered that some vampire bats belong to the genus
Desmodus
. This was plenty good enough for the owner of the carnival, and so Desmodia it was (though her dwarf foster father had long since christened her Ileana, after his grandmother, who’d died in a German concentration camp). Outside the canvas flaps, the talker shouted his blind-opening rant to every soul within earshot and then some: “Gonna have to
see
it to believe it! Flapper the seal boy, the Lady Mariah so corpulent she needs a forklift to get from place to place, Siamese sisters – Bethany and Bathsheba – joined at the backside, Mr. Shattertongue the Glass Eater, and Electra, the Lightning Girl! The
horror and the thrill
, spread out before you’re very eyes! Yesssiree! All pregnant women refused entry – apologies, show policy, and all members of the fairer sex, be warned and you take your chances! But you ain’t heard the best and worst of it yet! We’ve something new and this something beats the rest
hands down
, for the
very first time
on
this very night!
[pause, voice descending into a sorrowful tone] Truth be told and in all honestly, ladies and gentlemen, I do wish I’d never set eyes on this pitiful creature, found in the tropical wilds of Indonesia. Rumored to be the offspring of an unspeakable congress between a native witch and a flying fox, I wish to the Good Jesus hisself
I’d
never seen her, and I’ll tell you
that
for free. Gentlemen and mothers, when you get home, look at
your
dear, dear children.
Love
them, hold them to your
bosom
, and give thanks to God that
you
have not been cursed with a child like this! [voice rises again with former enthusiasm] Come one, come all! See the freaks of humanity!”

He went on like this for almost ten minutes, while the penny whistles and calliope, the drums and glockenspiel cacophony from the midway and the thunderous clatter of machinery and a hundred other voices filled the air. In that ten minutes (or so), sufficient tickets were sold, and incredulous, fearful, skeptical, and amused rubes filed into the darkened tent. By the light of bare electric bulbs strung overhead, they saw what they had been promised, a little more or a little less. But plenty close enough no one asked for his or her money back.

Ileana, in her first appearance as Desmodia, was the last of them all, the penultimate oddity. They’d built a sturdy wooden cage for her, and over long months she’d learned to hang upside down from a steel rod that ran from one side to the other, hanging by her three-toed feet, an accomplishment of which she was more than a little proud, and one that had made her bony legs strong and lean. So, there she dangled, almost nude as the night she was squirted from betwixt her mama’s thighs, her “wings” spread wide, teeth bared in a perpetual snarl. It hardly mattered that she was incapable of flight; the rubes didn’t know that, and what they don’t know, don’t tell them. The membranes of flesh (a patagium so thin as to be translucent) extending from her ribcage all the way to the tip ends of her long two-fingered hands; seeing that was quite enough
without
any aerial demonstration, thank you very much. The overall effect was significantly enhanced by the addition of scarlet contact lenses and strips of fake fur glued here and there onto her body with spirit gum. But the jaws and teeth,
those
were her own, that fearsome malocclusion of maxilla and dentary, plus unnaturally sharp incisors protruding at least half an inch below her rouged lower lip. A few in the crowd caught a glimpse of the short tail, sprouting from the end of her spine, no longer than a pinkie finger. Her jet-black hair (dyed from its natural brown) hung down all the way to the straw dust covering the floor of the cage. She spat and hissed as effectively as any movie vampire ever had hissed and spat.

On cue, a terrified
looking
man (who usually sold candy apples) entered the enclosure and held out to her a bowl of “blood” (in actuality, a mixture of cherry Kool-Aid and a dash or two of black food coloring). She craned her neck at what seemed a completely impossible angle and lapped greedily at the liquid. Then she snarled an extra loud snarl, and the vendor of candy apples dropped the bowl of fake blood and dashed to “safety.”

Women turned away at the grisly sight and men gasped. How could such an abomination be real, and yet, there she was, and there was no denying the truth of her. Ileana had turned a trick – damned enough near to magic – to put her fellow freaks to shame: she had entered the depths of her audience’s unconscious minds, to plague their thoughts for months and even years to come. The most rational among them left the tent impressed and scrambling for a reassuring, soothing, and
scientific
explanation for what they’d just witnessed.

And once five more crowds had filed past, and the talker counted out the night’s bunce, and Ileana’s compatriots grumbled about “Little Miss Flutter” and “Dracula’s Daughter,” the Yale padlock on Ileana’s cage was unlocked. and she was helped into a bathrobe, then hoppled on her crutches back to the Airstream trailer. The dwarf was still busy with the nightly walkaround that was expected of all the clowns if they wished a check come payday (which, by the way, did not always come). She let herself in the trailer, and was relieved that the blockhead was also out, most likely getting drunk with the shanty and the sledge gang. Of late, he’d taken to looking at her with a desirous eye, and neither she nor the dwarf were equal to fending off his advances. She removed the contacts – which had begun to smart halfway through the show – stripped away the fake fur, and wiped away grease paint with cold cream and tissues. She worked the stiffness from her legs, which had begun to cramp after half an hour, and combed the saw dust from her pretend-ebony hair. Then she went to bed, scrambling clumsily into her upper berth above her dwarf stepfather’s lower. There she looked at photographs of beautiful women in a year-old Parisian fashion magazine (stolen from a dentist’s office) until she drifted off to sleep with the dim reading light still burning.

She dreamt the sorts of dreams that bat girls dream. She dreamt of normalcy, and she dreamt of flying. She dreamt of a phonograph playing

again and again and again (as a child, the dwarf had frequently read to her from
Alice in Wonderland
). But she also dreamt the familiar dream of a handsome young man who didn’t work for any carnival whatsoever, and how he told her, repeatedly, that “What is different is beautiful.” In that dream, Ileana had five fingers and five toes on each hand and on each foot, respectively, and she didn’t need crutches to walk. As always, he led her away across a summer field festooned with black-eyed Susans and lavender and Queen Anne’s Lace.

DAUGHTER DEAR DESMODUS

I believe that I often do my best work when I free myself from the tyranny of Plot, from the artifice of Story, from reader expectations of what constitutes a
proper
short story. I read this tale aloud at KGB Bar in Manhattan on the evening of October 16, 2013. I think it was among the best readings I’ve ever given. The phrase “where the barkers call the moon down” is borrowed from the Decemberists and Colin Meloy.

Goggles (c. 1910)

1.

Eleven-year old Samuel is sitting alone at the entrance to the Confluence Park bunkers, huddled against the hot, stinking wind, ruffling his hair even though they’ve all been forbidden to go alone to the entrance. It’s long past midnight, and the dreams have been keeping him awake again. The ruins and the storm-wracked sky outside are less frightening than the dreams - all of them taken together as a whole, or any single one of dreams. Better he sit and stare out through the gate’s iron bars, fairly certain he can be back in his berth before Miss makes her early morning rounds. He always feels bad whenever he breaks the rules, going against her orders, the dictates that keep them all alive, the children that she tends here in the sanctuary of the winding rat’s maze of tunnels. He feels bad, too, that he’s figured out a way to pick the padlock on the iron door that has to be opened in order to stare out the bars, and Samuel feels worst of all that he thinks often of picking that lock, too, and disobeying her first and most inviolable rule: never, ever leave the bunker alone. Still, regret and guilt are not enough to keep him in his upper berth, staring at the concrete ceiling pressing down less than a metre above his face.

Outside, the wind screams, and sickly chartreuse lightning flashes and jabs with its forked lightning fingers at the shattered, blackened ruins of the dead city of Cherry Creek, Colorado. Samuel shuts his eyes, and he tries to ignore the afterimages of the flashes swimming about behind his lids. He counts off the seconds on his fingers, counting aloud, though not daring to speak above a whisper – sixteen, seventeen, eighteen full seconds before the thunder reaches him, thunder so loud that it almost seems to rattle deep down in his bones. He divides eighteen by three, as Miss has taught them, and so he knows the strike was about six kilometres from the entrance to the tunnels.

Sam, that’s much too close,
she would say.
Now, you shut that door and get your butt back downstairs.

He might be so bold as to reply that at least they didn’t have to worry about the dogs and the rats during a squall. But that might be enough to earn him whatever punishment she was in the mood to mete out to someone who’d not only flagrantly broken the rules, but then had the unmitigated gall to sass her.

The boy opens his eyes, blinking at the lightening ghosts swirling before them. He stares at his filthy hands a moment, vaguely remembering when he was much younger and his mother was always at him to scrub beneath his nails and behind his ears. When she saw to it he had clean clothes every day, and shoes with laces, shoes without soles worn so thin they may as well be paper. He stares at the ruins and half remembers the city that was, before the War, before men set the sky on fire and seared the world.

Miss tells them it’s best not to let one’s thoughts dwell on those days. “That time is never coming back,” she says. “We have to learn to live in
this
age, if we’re going to have any hope of survival.”

But all they have – their clothing, beds, dishes, school books, the dwindling medicinals and foodstuffs – all of it is scavenged remnants of the time before. He knows that. They all know that, even if no one ever says it aloud.

There’s another flash of the lightning that is not quite green and not quite yellow. But this time Samuel doesn’t close his eyes or bother counting. It’s obvious this one’s nearer than the last strike. It’s obvious it’s high time that he shut the inner door, lock it, and slip back through the tunnels to the room where the boys all sleep. Miss always looks in on them about three, and she’s ever quick to notice an empty bunk. That’s another thing from the world before: her silver pocket watch that she’s very, very careful to keep wound. She’s said that it belonged to her father who died in the Battle of New Amsterdam in those earliest months of the War. Miss is, Samuel thinks, a woman of many contradictions. She admonishes them when they talk of their old lives, yet, in certain melancholy moods, she will regale them with tales of lost wonders and conveniences, of the sun and stars and of airships, and her kindly father, a physician who went away to tend wounded soldiers and subsequently died in New Amsterdam.

Walking back to his bed as quietly as he can walk, Samuel considers those among his companions who are convinced that Miss isn’t sane. Jessamine says that, and the twins – Parthena and Hortence – and also Luther. Sometimes, when Miss has her back to them, they’ll draw circles in the air about their ears and roll their eyes and snigger. But Samuel doesn’t think she’s insane. Just very lonely and sad and scared.

We keep her alive,
he thinks.
Because she has all of us to tend to she’s still alive, against her recollections.
He knows of lots of folks who survived the bombardments, and then the burning of the skies and the storms that followed, and whom the feral dogs didn’t catch up with, lots of those folks did themselves in, rather than face such a shattered world. Samuel thinks it was their inescapable memories of before that killed them.

He crawls back into bed, and lies on the cool sheets and stares at the ceiling until the dreams come again. In the dreams – which he thinks of as nightmares – there’s bright sunshine, green fields, and his mother’s blonde hair like spun gold. In his dreams, there’s plenty of food and there’s laughter, and no lightning whatsoever. There is never lightning, nor is there the oily rain that sizzles when it touches anything metal. He’s never told Miss about his dreams. She wouldn’t want to hear them, and she’d only frown and make him promise not to dare mention them to the others. Not that he ever has. Not that he ever will. Samuel figures they all have their own good-bad dreams to contend with.

2.

The storm lasts for two days and two nights. Miss reads to them from the Bible, and from
The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe,
and from Mark Twain. She feeds her filthy, rawboned children the last of the tinned beef and peaches, and Samuel has begun to resign himself to the possibility that this might be the occasion on which they starve before an expedition for more provisions can be mounted.

But the storm ends, and no one starves.

Early the morning after the last peals of thunder, after a meager breakfast – one sardine each and tea so weak that it’s hardly more than cups of steaming water – Miss calls them all to the assembly room. They know it was not originally
intended
as an assembly room, but as an armory. The steel cabinets with their guns, grenades, and sabers still line the walls. Only the kegs of black powder and crates of dynamite have been removed. The children line up in two neat rows, boys in front, girls behind them, and she examines them each in their turn, inspecting gaunt faces and bodies, looking closely at their shoes and garments, before choosing the three whom she will send out of the bunker in search of food and other necessaries.

Once, there were older kids to whom this duty fell, but with every passing year there were fewer and fewer of them. Every year, fewer of them survived the necessary trips outside of the bunker, and, finally, there were none of them left at all. Finally, none came back. Samuel suspects a brave (or cowardly) few might have actually run away, deciding to take their chances in the wastelands that lie out beyond Cherry Creek, rather than return. However, this is only a suspicion, and he’s never spoken of it to anyone else.

The lighter sheets of rain that fall towards the end of the electrical storms are mostly only water, and after an hour or so it will have diluted most of the nitric acid. It’ll take that long to hand out the slickers and vulcanized overshoes and gloves, the airtight goggles and respirators, and for Miss to check that every rusty clasp is secure and every fraying cord has been tied as tightly as possible. Samuel imagines, as he always does, that the others are all holding their breath as she makes her choices. There have been too many instances when someone didn’t return, or when they returned dying or crippled, which is as good as dead, or worse, here in their bunker in the world after the War. Samuel also imagines he’s one of the few who ever
hopes
that he’ll be picked. He doesn’t know for certain, but he strongly suspects this to be the case.

If volunteers were permitted, he would always volunteer.

“Patrick Henry,” says Miss. Patrick Henry Olmstead takes one step forward and stares at the toes of his boots. His hair is either auburn or dirty blond, depending on the light, and his eyes are either hazel green or hazel brown, depending on the light. He’s two years younger than, Samuel. Or, at least he thinks he might be; a lot of the younger children don’t know their ages. Patrick Henry has a keloid scar on his chin, and he’s taller than one might expect from his nine years. He’s shy, and speaks so softly that it’s often necessary to ask him to please speak up and repeat himself.

“Molly,” says Miss.

“Please no, Miss.” Molly Peterson replies.

“You have good shoes, Molly. Your shoes are the best among the lot.”

“I’ll let someone else wear my shoes. I won’t even ask for them back afterwards. Please choose another, Miss.”

Molly is only eight, and her hair is black as coal tar. She’s missing the pinkie finger from her left hand, from a run in with the dogs before they found her at the corner of East Bateman and Vulcan Avenue. Before an expedition brought her back to the bunker two years ago. The dogs got her sister, and she’s only left the bunker once after her arrival. Molly has nightmares about the dogs, and sometimes she wakes screaming loudly enough that she startles them all from sleep, as her cries echo along the cavernous corridors. Her skin is very pale and freckled. She’s small for her age. Samuel fancies if he were to ever court a girl, Molly would do just fine.

“You will go, Molly. Your name has been read, my choice has been made, and we will not have this argument. No one will go in your stead.”

Molly only nods and chews at her lower lip.

“You will have eight hours,” Miss tells them, just like always. “After eight hours…”

Samuel tunes out her grim and familiar proclamations. No one’s ever come back after eight hours, and that’s all that matters. The rest, Miss only says to be sure his two companions fully understand the gravity of their situation, and Samuel understands completely. This will be his fifth trip out in just the last year. He’s good at scavenging, and Miss knows it. He enjoys entertaining the notion he’s the best of them all.

“Eight hours,” Miss says again.

“Eight hours, Ma’am,” the chosen three repeat in perfect unison, and then she shepherds them away to the room where the outside gear is stored. She gives them each a burlap sack and a Colt revolver and a single .44 caliber bullet; the bunker’s munitions cache is running too low to send them off with any more than that single round. She once whispered in his ear, “For yourself, or for one of the dogs. That has to be your decision.” He has no idea whether or not she’s ever said the same thing to any of the others. He doesn’t actually
want
to know, because maybe it’s a special acknowledgement of his bravery and approaching manhood, and if it’s a jot of wisdom she imparts to one and all, Samuel would be more than a little disappointed.

3.

As almost always, Samuel is given the responsibility of carrying the map. It’s a 15-minute topographic map of the Cherry Creek metropolitan area. It’s folded and tucked into a water-tight leather-and-PVC case, so he can see it, yet there’s minimal danger of its getting wet. But Samuel knows exactly where he’s going today, even through the dense fog, so he hardly needs the green and white topo sheet, with its black squares marking buildings and all its contour lines designating elevation. He and Patrick Henry and Molly are heading to what’s left of the Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Luftschiffahrt’s Arapahoe Station dirigible terminal. A few months back, he and two others were rummaging about in one of the airships that crashed when Cherry Creek was hit by the first wave of blowbacks from Tesla’s teleforce mechanism. Deck B was still more or less intact, which meant the kitchen was also mostly intact, along with its storerooms. The two boys with him hadn’t wanted to enter the crash, so Samuel had climbed alone through a ragged tear in the hull. He spent the better part of an hour picking his way through the crumpled remains of the gondola, always mindful of the hazards posed by rusted beams overhead and the rotting deck boards beneath his feet. But, at last, he found the storeroom, the shelves still weighted down with their wealth of cans and crates of bottles and jars, a surprising number of which hadn’t shattered on impact, thanks to having been carefully packed in excelsior.

Samuel had retraced his steps, marking the path with debris placed
just so,
then cajoled his two fellows to follow him back inside. The three of them had returned with enough food to last several weeks, including fruit juice that had not yet spoiled. The discovery had earned Samuel one night of double rations.

“Are you certain we’re not lost?” asks Patrick Henry, his already quiet voice muffled by the respirator covering the lower half of his face.

“I don’t get lost,” Samuel replied, then tossed half a brick against a lamppost. Someone had long ago shattered the globe crowning the post, or, more likely, a lightning storm had taken it out. “I’ve never gotten lost, not even once.”

“Everyone gets lost sometime,” says Molly. “Don’t be such a braggart.” She was so scared that she jumped at the thud of the brick hitting the lamppost.

“Then maybe I’m not everybody.”

“Now, you’re not even making sense,” mutters Molly.

“Are you sure we’re going west?” Patrick Henry asks.

Samuel stops and glares back at the younger boy. “Holy hell and horse shit, I wish Miss had let me come alone. Why are you asking me?
You’re
the one with the Brunton.”

No one – not even Samuel – is ever allowed to carry both the map
and
the Brunton compass. Just in case. Patrick Henry blushes, then digs the compass from the pocket of his overalls.

“Waste our time and take a reading if it’ll make you feel better, but we ain’t lost.”