Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) by Caitlin R. Kiernan Read Free Book Online

steps closer to the edge and broken shale crunches beneath her boots.
    Behind her, the sleepless dead shuffle and grunt, a zombie halo that winds sloppy single file along the rim of the pit, the clockwise march of leaden feet. Occasionally, something tears and drops loose and is kicked and stomped to paste. Any pretense at difference in the faces is merely hollow variation on a single, sloughing theme.
    No sound from the pit but the pop and crackle of burning. Like rain, she thinks, the sizzle of a thundershower, and above her the grey-green-yellow sky rumbles smugly to itself. Lightning as black and flat as a dead girl’s eyes needles down at the smoldering world and is instantly sucked back into the roil and tumble of the clouds.
    When it starts, the rain does not fall but seeps slomo from the wounded sky in oily, pus-sludgy drops. 
    Twila turns her face up to the storm, flinching when the first lukewarm drops strike her cheeks and forehead. Another thunderclap rattles the hive behind her eyes and jointed legs skitter and tickle their way from her sinuses down the back of her throat. She gags, coughing out a phlegmy clot of hornets, and already there are that many more filling her mouth again, whirring wings and restless barbs. They crawl across the threshold of her lips, climb from her nostrils and ears. 
    The rain becomes a downpour, sheeting corruption, pelting her, soaking her until her hair is slick and her clothes cling to her skin. Behind her, zombie feet suck and slap mud and wet stone.
    The tease of a thousand ribbon tongues as the insects take the nectar rot from her face, and clambering over one another, carry full bellies back inside her skull. Twila waits, patient, until they’ve all finished and her jaw aches and the rain is barely a sour mist.
    Was it this easy for Eve, she thinks. The fading thunder is the steel clang of garden gates swinging shut and locks clasped against her.
    Down in the dead pit, steam rises from charred bones and the shapeless burning things. 
     
    The sound is the creak of timbers deep in the hold of a movie-set pirate ship, grating wood-rhythm swing to the list and reel of a tireless ocean. For the time that it takes for late afternoon to fade to twilight and then the first smudges of night, Twila lies very still, keeping her back to the sound. There are no street lights anymore, no tangerine glow from the neon bar sign across the street. No phantom wash of headlights from the viaduct.
    But she has the hornets’ rustling instruction, ten thousand small voices in hushed and honeyed chorus, to play over and over in her mind.
    This finalmost catechism, these obvious do’s and don’t’s for a new order of one. Miss Manners for the shiny thing sprung from its chrysalis of fever and dreams.
    So she doesn’t have to see anything until she’s ready. 
    Arlene begins the gentlest assault on the bathroom door, irregular thuds and raw-knuckled raps.
    Twila rolls over, and there’s no surprise in the dangling limpness of her brother’s body, nothing past mute fact. For a while, she sits on the floor and watches the short arc and sway of his bare feet, toes pointed gracelessly down, meat pendulum skimming inches above the fallen kitchen chair. The breeze smells like rain and ozone and the day’s heat bleeding off into space. The leather belt noose creaks and strains, tied snugly around exposed plumbing painted the same latex oyster white as the ceiling.
    She finds a knife and cuts him down, standing on the same chair he stood on and sawing through black leather and between studs and spikes. Halfway through, his weight does the rest. She tries to catch him under the arms but it’s too much and Blondie drops loudly to the floor. His head smacks the wood, and she just stands there, holding the big knife, looking down on this pale, boy-shaped puddle. 
    He’d had his razor blades out again and his belly and thighs and the palms of his hands are sliced like fish gills. When she squats