Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) by Caitlin R. Kiernan Read Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
reaches the crest of a hill, dead-end street and a rust and Bondo Corvette shell is slewed crazily across the yellow dividing line. The driver’s side door is open and the threadbare upholstery is soaked maroon. Twila sits down on the hood, and already, where the trees and rooftops touch the eastern sky, the light is making promises she knows it can’t keep.
----
Two Worlds and In Between
An editor (doesn’t matter who) said, “Write me a zombie story. You know, like George Romero.” He didn’t say that exactly. I’m paraphrasing. This was supposed to be my “big break”; it wasn’t even close. Anyway, I wrote a zombie story, but not much like George Romero. “When the twins gave a party, everybody came.” That’s the very best of it, I think.
To This Water
(Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)
1.
Hardly dawn, and already Magda had made her way through the forest into the glittering frost at the foot of the Johnstown dam. When the sun climbed high enough, it would push aside the shadows and set the hollow on fire, sparkling crystal fire that would melt gently in the late spring sunrise and drip from hemlock and aspen branches, glaze the towering thickets of mountain laurel, later rise again as gauzy, soft steam. Everything, ice-crisped ferns and everything else, crunched beneath her shoes, loud in the cold, still air; no sound but morning birds and the steady gush from the spillway into South Fork Creek, noisy and secretive, like careless whispers behind her back.
Winded, her breath puffing out white through chapped lips and a stitch nagging her side, she rested a moment against a potato-shaped boulder, and the moss there frost-stiffened, too, ice-matted green fur and grey lichens like scabs. Back down the valley towards South Fork, night held on, a lazy thing curled in the lee of the mountain. Magda shivered and pulled her shawl tighter about her shoulders.
All the way from Johnstown since nightfall, fifteen miles or more since she’d slipped away from the darkened rows of company houses on Prospect Hill, following the railroad first and later, after the sleeping streets of South Fork, game trails and, finally, the winding creek, yellow-brown and swollen with the runoff of April thaw and heavy May rains. By now her family would be awake, her father already gone to the mill and twelve hours at the furnaces, her mother and sister neglecting chores, and soon they would be asking from house to house, porches and back doors.
But no one had seen her go, and there would be nothing but concerned and shaking heads, shrugs and suspicion for their questions and broken English. And when they’d gone, there would be whispers, like the murmur and purl of mountain streams.
As the sky faded from soft violet, unbruising, Magda turned and began to pick her way up the steep and rocky face of the dam.
This is not memory, this is a pricking new thing, time knotted, cat’s cradled or snarled like her sister’s brown hair. Magda is always closing her eyes, always opening them again, and always the narrow slit of sky is red, a wound-red slash between the alley’s black walls and rooftops, pine and shingle jaws. And there is nothing left of the men but callused, groping fingers, the scalding whiskey sour-sweetness of their breath. Sounds like laughter from dog throats and the whiskery lips of pigs, dogs and pigs laughing if they could.
And Magda does not scream, because they have said that if she screams, if she cries or even speaks they will cut her tongue out, will cut her bohunk throat from ear to ear, and she knows enough English to understand their threats. The big Irishman has shown her his knife; they will all show her their knives, and cut her, whether she screams or not.
The hands pushing and she turns her face away, better the cool mud, the water puddled that flows into her mouth, fills her nostrils, that tastes like earth and rot and the alcohol from empty barrels and overflowing crates of
----
Two Worlds and In Between
An editor (doesn’t matter who) said, “Write me a zombie story. You know, like George Romero.” He didn’t say that exactly. I’m paraphrasing. This was supposed to be my “big break”; it wasn’t even close. Anyway, I wrote a zombie story, but not much like George Romero. “When the twins gave a party, everybody came.” That’s the very best of it, I think.
To This Water
(Johnstown, Pennsylvania 1889)
1.
Hardly dawn, and already Magda had made her way through the forest into the glittering frost at the foot of the Johnstown dam. When the sun climbed high enough, it would push aside the shadows and set the hollow on fire, sparkling crystal fire that would melt gently in the late spring sunrise and drip from hemlock and aspen branches, glaze the towering thickets of mountain laurel, later rise again as gauzy, soft steam. Everything, ice-crisped ferns and everything else, crunched beneath her shoes, loud in the cold, still air; no sound but morning birds and the steady gush from the spillway into South Fork Creek, noisy and secretive, like careless whispers behind her back.
Winded, her breath puffing out white through chapped lips and a stitch nagging her side, she rested a moment against a potato-shaped boulder, and the moss there frost-stiffened, too, ice-matted green fur and grey lichens like scabs. Back down the valley towards South Fork, night held on, a lazy thing curled in the lee of the mountain. Magda shivered and pulled her shawl tighter about her shoulders.
All the way from Johnstown since nightfall, fifteen miles or more since she’d slipped away from the darkened rows of company houses on Prospect Hill, following the railroad first and later, after the sleeping streets of South Fork, game trails and, finally, the winding creek, yellow-brown and swollen with the runoff of April thaw and heavy May rains. By now her family would be awake, her father already gone to the mill and twelve hours at the furnaces, her mother and sister neglecting chores, and soon they would be asking from house to house, porches and back doors.
But no one had seen her go, and there would be nothing but concerned and shaking heads, shrugs and suspicion for their questions and broken English. And when they’d gone, there would be whispers, like the murmur and purl of mountain streams.
As the sky faded from soft violet, unbruising, Magda turned and began to pick her way up the steep and rocky face of the dam.
This is not memory, this is a pricking new thing, time knotted, cat’s cradled or snarled like her sister’s brown hair. Magda is always closing her eyes, always opening them again, and always the narrow slit of sky is red, a wound-red slash between the alley’s black walls and rooftops, pine and shingle jaws. And there is nothing left of the men but callused, groping fingers, the scalding whiskey sour-sweetness of their breath. Sounds like laughter from dog throats and the whiskery lips of pigs, dogs and pigs laughing if they could.
And Magda does not scream, because they have said that if she screams, if she cries or even speaks they will cut her tongue out, will cut her bohunk throat from ear to ear, and she knows enough English to understand their threats. The big Irishman has shown her his knife; they will all show her their knives, and cut her, whether she screams or not.
The hands pushing and she turns her face away, better the cool mud, the water puddled that flows into her mouth, fills her nostrils, that tastes like earth and rot and the alcohol from empty barrels and overflowing crates of
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