The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, volume 15

Caitlin R. Kiernan Waycross

RISE AND SHINE, SNOW WHITE,” the Gynander growls, and so the albino girl slowly opens her pink eyes, the dream of her dead mother and sunlight and the sheltering sky dissolving to the bare earth and meat-rot stink of the cellar.

Go back to sleep, and I’ll be home again, she thinks. Close my eyes, and none of this has ever happened. Not the truth, nothing like the truth, but cold comfort better than no comfort at all in this hole behind the place where the monster sleeps during the day. Dancy blinks at the darkness, licks her dry, chapped lips, and tries hard to remember the story her mother was telling her in the dream. Lion’s den, whale belly, fiery-furnace Bible story, but all the words and names running together in her head, the pain and numbness in her wrists and ankles more real and the dream growing smaller and farther away with every beat of her heart.

The red thing crouching somewhere at the other side of the cellar makes a soft, wet sound and strikes a match to light the hurricane lamp gripped in the long, raw fingers of its left hand. Dancy closes her eyes, because the angel has warned her never to look at its face until after it puts on one of the skins hanging from the rusted steel hooks set into the ceiling of the cellar. All those blind and shriveled hides like deflated people, deflated animals, and it has promised Dancy that some day very soon she’ll hang there, too, one more hollow face, one more mask for it to wear.

“What day… what day is it?” Dancy whispers, hard to talk because her throat’s so dry, hard even to swallow, and her tongue feels swollen. “How long have I been down here?”

“Why?” the Gynander asks her. “What difference does it make?”

“No difference,” Dancy croaks. “I just wanted to know.”

“You got some place to be? You got someone else to kill?”

“I just wanted to know what day it is.”

“It isn’t any day. It’s night.”

Yellow-orange lantern light getting in through Dancy’s eyelids, warm light and cold shadows, and she squeezes them shut tighter, turns her head to one side so her face is pressed against the hard dirt floor. Not taking any chances because she promised she wouldn’t ever look, and if she starts lying to the angel he might stop coming to her.

“Sooner or later, you’re gonna have to take a look at me, Dancy Flammarion,” the Gynander says and laughs its bone-shard, thistle laugh. “You’re gonna have to open them rabbity little eyes of yours and have a good, long look, before we’re done.”

“I was having a dream. You woke me up. Go away so I can go back to sleep. Kill me, or go away.”

“You’re already dead, child. Ain’t you figured that out yet? You been dead since the day you came looking for me.”

Footsteps, then, the heavy, stumbling sounds its splayed feet make against the hard-packed floor, and the clank and clatter of the hooks as it riffles through the hides, deciding what to wear.

“Kill me, or go away,” Dancy says again, gets dirt in her mouth and spits it back out.

“Dead as a doornail,” it purrs. “Dead as a dodo. Dead as I want you to be,” and Dancy tries not to hear what comes next, the dry, stretching noises it makes stuffing itself into the skin suit it’s chosen from one of the hooks. If her hands were free she could cover her ears; if they weren’t tied together behind her back with nylon rope she could shove her fingers deep into her ears and maybe block it out.

“You can open your eyes now,” the Gynander says. “I’m decent.”

“Kill me,” Dancy says, not opening her eyes.

“Why do you keep saying that? You don’t want to die. When people want to die, when they really want to die, they get a certain smell about them, a certain brittle incense. You, you smell like someone who wants to live.”

“I failed, and now I want this all to end.”

“See, now that’s the truth,” the Gynander says, and there’s a ragged, zipping-up sort of sound as it seals the skin closed around itself. “You done let that angel of yours down, and you’re ashamed, and you’re scared, and you sure as hell don’t want what you got coming to you. But you still don’t want to die.”

Dancy turns her head and opens her eyes, and now the thing is squatting there in front of her, holding the kerosene lamp close to its face. Borrowed skin stitched together from dead men and dogs, strips of diamond-backed snake hide, and it pokes at her right shoulder with one long black claw.

“This angel, he got hisself a name?”

“I don’t know,” Dancy says, though she knows well enough that all angels have names. “He’s never told me his name.”

“Must be one bad motherfucker, he gotta send little albino bitches out to do his dirty work. Must be one mean-ass son-of-a-whore.”

When it talks, the Gynander’s lips don’t move, but its chin jiggles loosely, and its blue-grey cheeks bulge a little. Where its eyes should be there’s nothing at all, blackness to put midnight at the bottom of the sea to shame. And Dancy knows about eyes, windows to the soul, so looks at the lamp instead.

“Maybe he ain’t no angel. You ever stop and let yourself think about that, Dancy? Maybe he’s a monster, too.”

When she doesn’t answer it pokes her again, harder than before, drawing blood with its ebony claw: warm, crimson trickle across her white shoulder, precious drops of her life wasted on the cellar floor, and she stares deep into the flame trapped inside the glass chimney. Her mother’s face hidden in there somewhere, and a thousand summer-bright days, and the sword her angel carries to divide the truth from lies.

“Maybe you got it turned round backwards,” the Gynander says and sets the lamp down on the floor. “Maybe what you think you know, you don’t know at all.”

“I knew right where to find you, didn’t I?” Dancy asks it, speaking very quietly and not taking her eyes off the lamp.

“Well, yeah, now that’s a fact. But someone like me, you know how it is. Someone like me always has enemies. Besides the angels, I mean. And word gets around, no matter how careful-”

“Are you afraid to kill me? Is that it?”

And there’s a loud and sudden flutter from the Gynander’s chest, then, like a dozen mockingbirds sewn up in there and wanting out, frantic wings beating against that leather husk. It leans closer, scalding carrion breath and the fainter smell of alcohol, the eager snik snik snik of its sharp white teeth, but Dancy keeps staring into the flickering heart of the hurricane lamp.

“Someone like you,” she says, “needs to know who its enemies are. Besides the angels, I mean.”

The Gynander hisses through its teeth and slips a hand around her throat, its palm rough as sandpaper, its needle claws spilling more of her blood.

“Patience, Snow White,” it sneers. “You’ll be dead a long, long time. I’ll wear your pretty alabaster skin to a thousand slaughters, and your soul will watch from Hell.”

“Yeah,” Dancy says. “I’m starting to think you’re gonna talk me to death,” and she smiles for the beast, shuts her eyes and the afterimage of the lamp flame bobs and swirls orange in the dark behind her lids.

“You’re still alive ‘cause I still got things to show you, girl,” the Gynander growls. “Things those fuckers, those angels, ain’t ever bothered with, ‘cause they don’t want you to know how it is. But if you’re gonna fight with monsters, if you’re gonna play saint and martyr for cowards that send children to do their killing, you’re gonna have to see it all.”

Its grip on her throat tightens, only a little more pressure to crush her windpipe, a careless flick of those claws to slice her throat, and for a moment Dancy thinks maybe she’s won after all.

“This whole goddamn world is my enemy,” the thing says. “Mine and yours both, Dancy Flammarion.”

And then it releases her, takes the lamp and leaves her alive, alone, not even capable of taunting a king of butchers into taking her life. Dancy keeps her eyes closed until she hears the trapdoor slam shut and latch, until she’s sure she’s alone again, and then she rolls over onto her back and stares up at the blackness that may as well go on forever.

After the things that happened in Bainbridge, Dancy hitched the long asphalt ribbon of US 84 to Thomasville and Valdosta, following the highway on to Waycross. Through the swampy, cypress-haunted south Georgia nights, hiding her skin and her pink eyes from the blazing June sun when she could, hiding herself from sunburn and melanoma and blindness. Catching rides with truckers and college students, farmers and salesmen, rides whenever she was lucky and found a driver who didn’t think she looked too strange to pick up, maybe even strange enough to be dangerous or contagious. And when she was unlucky, Dancy walked.

The last few miles, gravel and sandy, red-dirt back roads between Waycross and the vast Okefenokee wilderness, all of those unlucky, all of those on foot. She left the concrete and steel shade of the viaduct almost two hours before sunset, because the angel said she should. This time it wouldn’t be like Bainbridge. This time there would be sentries, and this time she was expected. Walking right down the middle of the road because the weedy ditches on either side made her nervous; anything could be hiding in those thickets of honeysuckle and blackberry briars, anything hungry, anything terrible, anything at all. Waiting patiently for her beneath the deepening slash-pine and magnolia shadows, and Dancy carried the old carving knife she usually kept tucked way down at the bottom of her duffel bag, held it gripped in her right hand and watched the close and darkening woods.

When the blackbird flapped noisily out of the twilight sky and landed on the dusty road in front of her, Dancy stopped and stared at it apprehensively. Scarlet splotches on its wings like fresh blood or poisonous berries, and the bird looked warily back at her.

“Oh Jesus, you gotta be pullin’ my leg,” the blackbird said and frowned at her.

“What’s your problem, bird?” Dancy asked, gripping the knife a little tighter than before.

“I mean, we wasn’t expecting no goddamn St George on his big white horse or nothin’, but for crying out loud.”

“You knew I was coming here tonight?” she asked the bird and glanced anxiously at the trees, the sky, wondering who else might know.

“Look, girly, do you have any idea what’s waitin’ for you at the end of this here road? Do you even have the foggiest-”

“This is where he sent me. I go where my angel sends me.”

The blackbird cocked its head to one side and blinked at her.

“Oh Lord and butter,” the bird said.

“I go where my angel tells me. He shows me what I need to know.”

The blackbird glanced back over the red patch on its shoulder at the place where the dirt road turned sharply, disappearing into a towering cathedral of kudzu vines. It ruffled its feathers and shook its head.

“Yeah, well, this time I think somebody up there musta goofed. So you just turn yourself right around and get a wiggle on before anyone notices.”

“Are you testing me? Is this a temptation? Did the monsters send you?”

“What?” the bird squawked indignantly and hopped a few inches closer to Dancy; she raised her carving knife and took one step backwards.

“Are you trying to stop me, bird? Is that what you’re doing?”

“No. I’m trying to save your dumb ass, you simple twit.”

“Nobody can save me,” Dancy said and looked down at her knife. In the half-light, the rust on the blade looked like old, dried blood. “Maybe once, a long, long time ago, but no one can save me now. That’s not the way this story ends.”

“Go home, little girl,” the bird said and hopped closer. “Run away home before it smells you and comes lookin’ for its supper.”

“I don’t have a home. I go where the angel tells me to go, and he told me to come here. He said there was something terrible hiding out here, something even the birds of the air and the beasts of the field are scared of, something I have to stop.”

“With what? That old knife there?”

“Did you call me here, blackbird?”

“Hell, no,” the bird cawed at her, angry, and glanced over its shoulder again. “Sure, we been prayin’ for someone, but not a crazy albino kid with a butcher knife.”

“I have to hurry now,” Dancy said. “I don’t have time to talk anymore. It’s getting dark.”

The bird stared up at her for a moment, and Dancy stared back at it, waiting for whatever was coming next, whatever she was meant to do or say, whatever the bird was there for.

“Jesus, you’re really goin’ through with this,” it said finally, and she nodded. The blackbird sighed a very small, exasperated sigh and pecked once at the thick dust between its feet.

“Follow the road, past that kudzu patch there, and the old well, all the way to down to-”

“I know where I’m going, bird,” Dancy said and shifted the weight of her duffel bag on her shoulder.

“Of course you do. Your angel told you.”

“The old blue trailer at the end of the road,” Dancy whispered. “The blue house trailer with three old refrigerators in the front yard.” In the trees, fireflies had begun to wink on and off, off and on, a thousand yellow-green beacons against the gathering night. “Three refrigerators and a broken-down truck.”

“Then you best shove in your clutch, girl. And don’t think for a minute that they don’t know you’re comin’. They know everything. They know the number of stars in the heavens and how many days left till the end of time.”

“This is what I do,” she told the bird and stepped past him, following the road that led to the blackness coiled like a jealous, ancient serpent beneath the summer sky.

Sometime later, when the Gynander finally comes back to her, it’s carrying a small wooden box that it holds out for Dancy to see. Wood like sweet, polished chocolate and an intricate design worked into the lid — a perfect circle filled in with a riot of intersecting lines to form a dozen or more triangles, and on either side of the circle a waning or waxing half-moon sickle. She blinks at the box in the unsteady lantern light, wondering if the design is supposed to mean something to her, if the monster thinks that it will.

“Pretty,” Dancy says without enthusiasm. “It’s a pretty box.”

The Gynander makes a hollow, grumbling sound in its throat, and the dead skin hiding its true face twitches slightly.

“You never saw that before?” it asks her and taps at the very center of the circular design with the tip of one claw. “You never saw that anywhere else?”

“No. Can I please have a drink of water?”

“Your angel never showed it to you?”

“No,” Dancy says again, giving up on the water, and she goes back to staring at the rootsy ceiling of the cellar. “I never saw anything like that before. Is it some sort of hex sign or something? My grandma knew a few of those. She’s dead-”

“But you’ve never seen it before?”

“That’s what I said.”

The Gynander sits down in the dirt beside her, sets the lamp nearby, and she can feel the black holes where its eyes should be watching her, wary nothingness peering suspiciously out from the slits in its mask.

“This box belonged to Sinethella.”

“Who?”

“The woman that you killed last night,” the Gynander growls, beginning to sound angry again.

“I didn’t kill a woman,” Dancy says confidently. “I don’t kill people.”

“It’s carved from a type of African cedar tree that’s been extinct for two thousand years,” the Gynander says, ignoring Dancy, and its crackling voice makes her think of dry autumn leaves and fire. “And she carried this box for eleven millennia. You got any idea what that means, child?”

“That she was a lot older than she looked,” Dancy replies, and the Gynander grunts and puts the box down roughly on her chest. Heavy for its size, and cold, like a small block of ice, and suddenly the musty cellar air smells like spices — cinnamon, basil, sage, a few others that Dancy doesn’t immediately recognize or has never smelled before.

“Get that thing off me,” she tells the monster. “Whatever it is, I don’t want it touching me. It isn’t clean.”

“Next to Sinethella,” the Gynander says, “I’m nothing, nothing at all. Next to her, I’m just a carny freak. So why did you come for me instead of her?”

“I go where my angel leads me. He shows me-”

“In a moment, Dancy Flammarion, I’m going to open up this box here and show you what’s inside.”

“Get it off me. It stinks.”

The Gynander grunts, then leans very close to Dancy and sniffs at her; something almost like a tongue, the dark, un-healthy color of indigo or polk-salad berries, darts out from between its shriveled lips and tastes the cellar air.

“That’s sorta the stew pot callin’ the kettle black, don’t you think? When’s the last time you had a bath, Snow White?”

And Dancy shuts her eyes, praying that her angel will come, after all, that he’ll appear in a whirling storm of white, white feathers and hurricane wind and take her away from this awful place. She imagines herself in his arms, flying high above the swamps and pine barrens, safe in the velvet and starlight spaces between the moon and Earth. I’ve done my best, she thinks, trying not to imagine what’s waiting for her inside the freezing wooden box pressing painfully down on her chest. I’ve done my best, and none of these things can ever touch my immortal soul.

“When men still huddled in their own filth and worshipped the sun because they were too afraid to face the night, she walked the wide world, and nobody and nothin’ stood against her. She was a goddess, almost.”

“I saw her with my own eyes,” Dancy whispers. “I saw exactly what she was.”

“You saw what you were told to see.”

Sailing with her angel high above the winding black waters of the Okefenokee, above the booming voices of bull alligators and the nervous ears of marsh rabbits, safe in his arms because she’s done the best that she can do. And he would tell her that, and that she doesn’t have to be strong anymore. Time now to lay down and die, finally, time to be with her grandmother and mother in Paradise, no more lonely roads, no more taunts for her pink eyes and alabaster skin, and no more monsters. The angel’s wings would sound like redemption, and she might glance down between her feet to see the Gynander’s blue house trailer blazing in the night. “It’ll be nothing but ashes by morning,” she’d say and the angel would smile and nod his head.

“The first time Sinethella brought this box to me, first time she opened it and let me have a peek inside, I thought that I would surely die. I thought my heart would burst.”

There are no more monsters left in the world, the angel would say to her as they flew across the land, east towards the sea. You don’t have to be afraid anymore. You can rest now, Dancy.

“She read me a poem, before she let me look inside,” the Gynander says. “I never was much for poetry, but I still remember this one. Hell, I’ll remember this one till the day I die.”

She would ask her angel about the box, and he would tell her not to worry. The box was destroyed. Or lost in the swamp in some pool so deep only the catfish will ever see it. Or locked away forever in the inviolable vaults of Heaven.

“But from my grave across my brow,” the Gynander whispers, “plays no wind of healing now, and fire and ice within me fight, beneath the suffocating night.”

Open your eyes, Dancy, the angel says, and she does, not afraid of falling anymore, and the Gynander opens the box sitting on her chest. Far, far away, there’s a sound like women crying, and the ebony and scarlet light that spills from the cedar box wraps Dancy tight in its searing, squirming tendrils, and slowly, bit by bit, drags her away.

Dancy walked through the long, dark tunnel formed by the strangling kudzu vines, the broad green leaves muffling her footsteps, the heavy lavender flowers turning the air to sugar. She moved as quickly as she dared, wishing now that the blackbird had come with her, wishing she’d gotten an earlier start and then there would still be a few bright shafts of late-afternoon sunlight to pierce the tunnel of vines. Surrounded by the droning scream of cicadas, the songs of crickets and small, peeping frogs hidden in amongst the rotten branches and trunks of the oaks that the kudzu had taken long ago for its skeleton, she counted her paces, like rosary beads, something to mark distance and occupy her mind, something to keep her focused and moving. No more than a hundred feet from one end to the next, a hundred feet at the most, but it might as well have been a mile. And halfway through, a spot where the air was as cold as a January morning, air so cold that her breath fogged, and Dancy jumped backwards, hugging herself and shivering.

Too late, she thought. It knows I’m coming now, realizing that the forest around her had gone completely quiet, not one insect or amphibian voice, no twilight birdsongs left to break the sudden silence.

Reluctantly, she held a hand out, penetrating the frigid curtain of air again, a cold that could burn, that could freeze living flesh to stone; she drew a deep breath and stepped quickly through it.

Beyond the vines, the blue house trailer was sitting there alone in a small, weedy clearing, just like she’d seen it in her dreams, just exactly the way the angel had shown it to her. Light spilled from the windows and the door standing wide open like a welcome sign — Come on in, I’ve been waiting for you, Dancy Flammarion.

She set her duffel bag down in the sand and looked first at her knife and then back to the blue trailer. Even the shimmering, mewling things she’d killed back in Bainbridge, even they were afraid of this haunted place, something so terrible inside those aluminum walls that even boogeymen and goblins were afraid to whisper its name. Dancy glanced up at the summer sky, hoping the angel might be there, watching over her, but there were only a few dim and disinterested stars.

Well, what are you waiting on} the trailer seemed to whisper.

“Nothing,” she said. “I’m not waiting on anything.”

She walked past the three refrigerators, the burned-out carcass of the old Ford pickup, and climbed the cinder-block steps to stand in the open doorway. For a moment, the light was so bright that she thought it might blind her, might shine straight into her head and burn her brain away, and Dancy squinted through the tears streaming from the corners of her eyes. Then the light seemed to ebb, dimming enough that she could make out the shoddy confusion of furniture crammed into the trailer: a sofa missing all its cushions, a recliner the color of Spanish moss, and a coffee table buried beneath dirty plates, magazines, chicken bones, beer cans, and overflowing ashtrays. A woman in a yellow raincoat was sitting in the recliner, watching Dancy and smiling. Her eyes were very green and pupilless, a statue’s jade-carved eyes, and her shaggy black hair fell about her round face in tangled curls.

“Hello there, Dancy,” she said. “We were beginning to think that you wouldn’t make it.”

“Who are you?” Dancy asked, confused, and raised her knife so she was sure the woman could see it. “You’re not supposed to be here. No one’s supposed to be here but-”

“I’m not? Well, someone should have told me.”

The woman stood up, slipping gracefully, slowly, from the grey recliner, her bare feet on the linoleum floor, and Dancy could see that she wasn’t wearing anything under the coat.

“Not exactly what you were expecting, am I?” she asked and took a single step towards Dancy. Beneath the bright trailer lights, her bare olive skin glinted wetly, skin as smooth and perfect as oil on deep, still water, and “Stop,” Dancy warned her and jabbed the knife at the air between herself and the woman.

“No one here wants to hurt you,” she said and smiled wider so that Dancy could see her long, sharp teeth.

“I didn’t come for you,” Dancy said, trying hard to hide the tremble in her voice, because she knew the woman wanted her to be afraid. “I don’t even know who you are.”

“But I know who you are, Dancy. News travels fast these days. I know all about what you did in Bainbridge, and I know what you came here to do tonight.”

“Don’t make me hurt you, too.”

“No one has to get hurt. Put the knife down and we can talk.”

“You’re just here to distract me, so it can run, so it can escape, and then I’ll have to find it all over again.”

The woman nodded and looked up at the low ceiling of the trailer, her green eyes staring directly into the flood of white light pouring down into the tiny room.

“You have a hole inside you,” she said, her smile beginning to fade. “Where your heart should be, there’s a hole so awfully deep and wide, an abyss in your soul.”

“That’s not true,” Dancy whispered.

“Yes, it is. You’ve lost everything, haven’t you? There’s nothing left in the world that you love and nothing that loves you.”

And Dancy almost turned and ran then, back down the cinder-block steps into the arms of the night, not prepared for this strange woman and her strange, sad voice, the secret things she had no right to know or ever say out loud. Not fair, the angel leaving this part out, not fair, when she’s always done everything he asked of her.

“You think that he loves you?” the woman asked. “He doesn’t. Angels love no one but themselves. They’re bitter, selfish things, every one of them.”

“Shut up.”

“But it’s the truth, dear. Cross my heart. Angels are nothing but spiteful-”

“I said to shut up”

The woman narrowed her eyes, still staring up at the ceiling, peering into the light reflecting off her glossy skin.

“You’ve become their willing puppet, their doll,” she said. “And, like the man said, they have made your life no more than a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. Nothing whatsoever.”

Dancy gripped the carving knife and took a hesitant step towards the woman.

“You’re a liar,” she said. “You don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”

“Oh, but I do” the woman replied, lowering her head and turning to gaze at Dancy with those startling, unreal eyes. “I know so very many things. I can show you, if you want to see. I can show you the faces of God, the moment you will die, the dark places behind the stars,” and she shrugged off the yellow raincoat, and it slipped to the linoleum floor.

Where her breasts should have been there were wriggling, tentacled masses instead, like the fiery heads of sea anemones, surrounding hungry, toothless mouths.

“There is almost no end to the things I can show you,” the woman said. “Unless you’re too afraid to see.”

Dancy screamed and lunged towards the naked woman, all of her confusion and anger and disgust, all of her fear, flashing like steam to blind, forward momentum, and she swung the rusty knife, slashing the woman’s throat open a couple of inches above her collarbones. The sudden, bright spray of blood across Dan-cy’s face was as cold as water drawn from a deep well, and she gasped and retreated to the door of the trailer. The knife slid from her hand and clattered against the aluminum threshold.

“You cut me,” the woman croaked, dismayed, and now there was blood trickling from her lips, too, blood to stain those sharp teeth pink and scarlet. Her green eyes had gone wide, swollen with surprise and pain, and she put one hand over the gash in her throat, as if to try and hide the wound hemorrhaging in time to her heart.

“You did it,” she said. “You really fucking did it,” and then the tentacles on her chest stopped wriggling, and she crumpled to the floor beside the recliner.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Dancy asked the angel, as if she expected an answer. “Why didn’t you tell me she would be here too?”

The woman’s body shuddered violently and then grew still, lying on top of the discarded raincoat, her blood spreading out across the floor like a living stain. The white light from the ceiling began to dim and, a moment later, winked out altogether, so that Dancy was left standing in the dark, alone in the doorway of the trailer.

“What have you done to her?” the Gynander growled from somewhere close, somewhere in the yard behind Dancy, its heavy, plodding footsteps coming closer, and she murmured a silent, doubtful prayer and turned to face it.

Unafraid of falling, but falling nonetheless, as the living light from the wooden box ebbs and flows beneath her skin, between the convolutions of her brain. Collapsing into herself, that hole where her heart should be, that abyss in her soul, and all the things she’s clung to for so long, the handholds clawed into the dry walls of her mind, melt beneath the corrosive, soothing voices of the light.

Where am I going? she asks, and the red and black tendrils squeezing her smaller and smaller, squeezing her away, reply in a hundred brilliant voices — Inside, they say, and Down, and Back, and finally, Where the monsters come from.

I don’t have my knife, she says.

You won’t need it, the light reassures her.

And Dancy watches herself, a white streak across a star-dappled sky, watches her long fall from the rolling deck of a sailing ship that burned and sank and rotted five hundred years ago. A sailor standing beside her curses, crosses himself, and points at Heaven.

“Did ye see it?” he asks in a terrified whisper, and Dancy can’t tell him that she did and that it was only the husk of her body burning itself away, because now she’s somewhere else, high above the masts and stays, and the boat is only a speck in the darkness below, stranded forever in a place where no wind blows and the sea is as still and flat as glass. As idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.

Falling, not up or down, but falling farther in, and Is there a bottom, or a top? Is there ever an end? she wonders and Yes, the voices reply, Yes and no, maybe and that depends.

Depends on what?

On you, my dear. That depends on you.

And she stands on a rocky, windswept ledge, grey stone ground smooth and steep by eons of frost and rain, and the mountains rise up around her until their jagged peaks scrape at the low-slung belly of the clouds. Below her is a long, narrow lake, black as pitch, and in the center of the lake the ruins of a vast, shattered temple rise from its depths. There are things stranded out there among the ruins, nervous orange eyes watching the waters from broken spires and the safety of crumbling archways. Dancy can hear their small and timorous thoughts, no one desire among them but to reach the shore, to escape this cold, forgotten place — and they would swim, the shore an easy swim for even the weakest among them, but, from time to time, the black waters of the lake ripple, or a stream of bubbles rises suddenly to the surface, and there’s no knowing what might be waiting down there. What might be hungry. What might have lain starving since time began.

“I want to go back now,” Dancy says, shouting to be heard above the howling wind.

There’s only one way back, the wind moans, speaking now for the light from the Gynander’s box. And that’s straight on to the center.

“The center of what?” Dancy shouts, and in a moment her voice has crossed the lake and echoed back to her, changed, mocking. The center of when? Center of where? Of who?

On the island of ruins, the orange-eyed things mutter ancient, half-remembered supplications and scuttle away into deeper shadows. Dancy’s voice has become the confirmation of their every waking nightmare, reverberating God-voice to rain the incalculable weight of truth and sentence. And the wind sweeps her away like ash…

“What about her bush?” the orderly asks the nurse as the needle slips into Dancy’s arm, and then he laughs.

“You’re a sick fuck, Parker, you know that?” the nurse tells him, pulling the needle out again and quickly covering the tiny hole she’s left with a cotton ball. “She’s just a kid, for Christ’s sake.”

“Hey, it seems like a perfectly natural question to me. You don’t see something like her every day of the week. Guys are curious about shit like that.”

“Is that a fact?” the nurse asks the orderly, and she removes the cotton ball from Dancy’s arm, stares for a moment at the single drop of crimson staining it.

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“If you tell anyone, I swear to fucking-”

“Babe, this shit’s between me and you. Not a peep, I swear.”

“Jesus, I oughta have my head examined,” the nurse whispers and drops the cotton ball and the syringe into a red plastic container labeled infectious waste, then checks Dancy’s restraints one by one until she’s sure they’re all secure.

“Is that me?” Dancy asks the lights, but they seem to have deserted her, left her alone with the nurse and the orderly in this haze of antiseptic stink and Thorazine.

“Is that me?”

The nurse lifts the hem of Dancy’s hospital gown and, “There,” she says and licks her lips. “Are you satisfied? Does that answer your question?” She sounds nervous and excited at the same time, and Dancy can see that she’s smiling.

“Goddam,” the orderly mumbles, rubs at his chin and shakes his head. “Goddam, that’s a sight to see.”

“Poor kid,” the nurse says and lowers Dancy’s gown again.

“Hey, wait a minute, I was gonna get some pictures,” the orderly protests and laughs again.

“Fuck you, Parker,” the nurse says.

“Anytime you’re ready, baby.”

“Go to hell.”

And Dancy shuts her eyes, shuts out the white tile walls and fluorescent glare, pretends that she can’t smell the nurse’s flowery perfume or the orderly’s sweat, that her arm doesn’t ache from the needle and her head isn’t swimming from the drugs.

Closing her eyes. Shutting one door and opening another.

The night air is very cold and smells like pine sap and dirt, night in the forest, and Dancy runs breathless and barefoot over sticks and stones and pine straw, has been running so long now that her feet are raw and bleeding. But she can hear the men on their horses getting closer, shouting to one another, the men and their hounds, and if she dares stop running they’ll be on top of her in a heartbeat.

She stumbles and almost falls, cracks her left shoulder hard against the trunk of a tree and the force of the blow spins her completely around so that she’s facing her pursuers, the few dark boughs left between them and her, and one of the dogs howls. The eager sound of something that knows it’s almost won, that can taste her even before its jaws close around her throat.

The light from the box swirls about her like a nagging swarm of nocturnal insects, whirring black wings and shiny, scarlet shells to get her moving again. Each step fresh agony now, but the pain in her feet and legs and chest is nothing next to her terror, the hammer of hooves and the barking hounds, the men with their guns and knives. Dancy cannot remember why they want her dead, what she might have done, if this is only some game or if it’s justice; she can’t remember when this night began or how long she’s been running. But she knows that none of it will matter in the end, when they catch her, and then the earth drops suddenly away beneath her, and she’s falling, really falling, the simple, helpless plummet of gravity. She crashes headlong through the branches of a deadfall and lands in a shallow, freezing stream.

The electric shock of cold water to rip the world around her open once again, the slow burn before it numbs her senseless, the fire before sleep and death to part the seams; she looks back to see the indistinct, frantic tumble of dog bodies already coming down the steep bank after her. Above them, the traitorous pines seem to part for the beautiful man on his tall black horse, his antique clothes, the torch in his hand as bright as the sun rising at midnight. His pale face is bruised with the anger and horror of everything he’s seen and done, and everything he will see and do before the dawn.

“Je l’ai trouve!” he shouts to the others. “Depechez-vous!”

Words Dancy doesn’t know, but she understands them perfectly well, just the same.

“La bete! Je l’ai trouve!”

And then she looks down at the reflection of the torch-light dancing in the icy, gurgling water, and her reflection there, as well, her albino’s face melting in the flowing mirror, becoming the long snout and frightened, iridescent eyes of a wolf, melting again and now the dead woman from the Gynander’s trailer stares back at her. She tries to stand, but she can’t feel her legs anymore, and the dogs are almost on top of her, anyway.

“Is this me?” she asks the faces swirling in the stream. “Is this my face, too?” But this when and where slides smoothly out from beneath her before the light can reply, before snapping dog teeth tear her apart; caught up in the implosion again, swallowed whole by her own disintegration.

“They’re all dead,” the nurse says, and her white shoes squeak loud against the white floor. “Cops up in Milligan think maybe she had something to do with it.”

“No shit?” the orderly says. He’s standing by the window, looking out at the rain, drawing circles in the condensation with his index finger. Circles and circles inside circles. “Where the hell’s Milligan?”

“If you don’t know already, trust me, you don’t want to know.”

Far away, the beautiful man on his black horse fires a rifle into the night.

“How old were you then?” the psychiatrist asks Dancy, and she doesn’t answer him right away, stares instead at the clock on the wall, wishing she could wait him out. Wishing there was that much time in the universe, but he has more time than she does. He keeps it nailed like Jesus to his office wall and doles it out in tiny paper cups, a mouthful at a time.

“Dancy, how old were you that night your mother took you to the fair?”

“Does it matter?” she asks him, and the psychiatrist raises his eyebrows and shrugs his bony, old-man shoulders.

“It might,” he says.

And the fair unfurls around her, giddy violence of colored lights and calliope wails, cotton-candy taffy air, sawdust air, barkers howling like drunken wolves, and the mechanical thunk and clank and wheeze of the rides. Her mother has an arm around her, holding her close as the sea of human bodies ebbs and surges about them, and Dancy thinks this must be Hell. Or Heaven. Too much of everything good or everything bad all shoved together into this tiny field, a deafening, swirling storm of laughter and screams; she wants to go home, but this is a birthday present, so she smiles and pretends that she isn’t afraid.

“You didn’t want to hurt your mother’s feelings,” the psychiatrist says and chews on the end of a yellow pencil. “You didn’t want her to think you weren’t having fun.”

“Look, Dancy,” her mother says. “Have you ever seen anything like that in your whole life?”

And the clown on stilts, tall as a tree, strides past them, wading stiffly through the crowd. He looks down as Dancy looks up and the clown smiles at her, real smile behind his painted smile, but she doesn’t smile back. She can see his shadow, the thing hiding in his shadow, its stilt-long legs and half-moon smile, its eyes like specks of molten lava burning their way out of its skull.

Dancy looks quickly down at the ground, trampled sawdust and mud, cigarette butts and a half-eaten candy apple, and “Get a load of her, will you?” a man says and laughs.

“Hey, girly. You part of the freak show or what?”

“Oh, you know she is. She’s one of the albinos. I saw a poster. They got a whole albino family. They got a boy that’s half-alligator and a stuffed cow with two heads. They got a Chinese hermaphrodite-”

“They ain’t got no cow with two heads. That’s a damn fake.”

“Well, she ain’t no fake, now is she?”

And then Dancy’s mother is shoving a path roughly through the crowd, towing Dancy behind her, trying to get away from the two men, but they follow close behind.

“Slow up, lady,” one of them shouts. “We just want to get a good look at her. We’ll pay you.”

“Yeah, that’s right,” the other one shouts, and now everyone is staring and pointing. “We’ll pay. How much just to look? We ain’t gonna touch.”

The psychiatrist taps his pencil against his chin and helps Dancy watch the clock. “Were you mad at her afterwards, for taking you to the fair?” he asks.

“That was a long time ago,” Dancy replies. “It was my birthday present.”

He takes a deep breath and exhales slowly, makes a whistling sound between his front teeth.

“We never went anywhere, so she took me to the fair for my birthday.”

“Did you know about freak shows, Dancy? Did your mother tell you about them before you went to the fair?”

“What’s the difference between freaks and monsters?” she asks the psychiatrist.

“Monsters aren’t real,” he says. “That’s the difference. Why? Do you think you’re a monster? Has anyone ever told you that you’re a monster?”

She doesn’t answer him. In only five more minutes she can go back to her room and think about anything she wants, anything but fairs and grinning clowns on stilts and the way the two men chased them through the crowd, anything but freaks and monsters. In the forest, the man fires his rifle again, and this time the shot tears a hole in the psychiatrist’s face, so Dancy can see shattered bone and torn muscle, his sparkling silver teeth and the little metal gears and springs that move his tongue up and down. He drops the pencil, and it rolls underneath his desk; she wants to ask him if it hurts, being shot, having half your face blown off like that, but he hasn’t stopped talking, too busy asking her questions to care if he’s hurt.

“Have you ever been afraid that she took you there to get rid of you, to leave you with the freaks?”

And all the world goes white, a suffocating white where there is no sky and no earth, nothing to divide the one from the other, and the Arctic wind shrieks in her ears, and snow stings her bare skin. Not the top of the world, but somewhere very near it, a rocky scrap of land spanning a freezing sea, connecting continents in a far-off time of glaciers. Dancy wants to shut her eyes; then, at least, it would only be black, not this appalling, endless white, and she thinks about going to sleep, drifting down to someplace farther inside herself, the final still-point in this implosion, down beyond the cold. But she knows that would mean death, in this place, this when, some mute instinct to keep her moving, answering to her empty belly when she only wants to be still.

“Ce n’est pas un loup!” the man on his horse shouts to the others in his company, and Dancy peers over her shoulder, but she can’t see him anywhere. Nothing at all back there but the wind-blown snow, and she wonders how he could have possibly followed her, when he won’t even be born for another thirteen thousand years. The storm picks his voice apart and scatters it across the plains.

With the impatient wind at her back, hurrying her along, Dancy stumbles on ahead, helpless to do otherwise.

She finds the camp just past a line of high granite boulders, men and women huddled together in the lee of the stones, a ragged, starving bunch wrapped in bear hides. She smells them before she sees them — the soot of their small, smoky fires, the oily stink of their bodies, the faint death smell from the skins they wear. She slips between the boulders, sure-footed, moving as quietly as she can, though, over the wind, they could never hear her coming. The wind that blows her own scent away, and she crouches above them and listens. The men clutching their long spears, the women clutching their children, and all eyes nervously watching the white-out blur beyond the safety of the fires.

Dancy doesn’t need to understand their language to read their minds, the red and ebony light coiled tight inside her head to translate their hushed words, their every fearful thought, to show her the hazy nightmares they’ve fashioned from the shadows and the wailing blizzard. They whisper about the strange white creature that has been trailing them for days, tracking them across the ice, the red-eyed demon like a young girl carved from the snow itself. Their shaman mumbles warnings that they must have trespassed into some unholy place protected by this spirit of the storms, but most of the men ignore him. They’ve never come across any beast so dangerous that it doesn’t bleed.

Crouched there among the boulders, her teeth chattering, Dancy gazes up into the swirling snow. The light leaks out of her nostrils and twines itself in the air above her head like a dozen softly glowing serpents.

They will come for you soon, it says. If you stay here, they’ll find you and kill you.

“Will they?” Dancy asks, too cold and hungry and tired to really care, one way or the other, and Yes, the light replies.

“Why? I can’t hurt them. I couldn’t hurt them if I wanted to.”

The light breaks apart into a sudden shower of sparks, bright drops of fire that splash against each other and bounce off the edges of the boulders. In a moment, they come together again and the woman from the Gynander’s trailer, the woman in the yellow raincoat that she knows isn’t a woman at all, steps out of the gloom and stands nearby, watching Dancy with her green eyes.

“It only matters that they are afraid of you,” she says. “Maybe you could hurt them, and maybe you could not, but it only matters that they are afraid.”

“I killed you,” Dancy says. “You’re dead. Go away.”

“I only wanted you to see,” the woman says and glances down at the camp below the boulders. “Sometimes we forget what we are and why we do the things we do. Sometimes we never learn.”

“It won’t make any difference,” Dancy growls at her, and the woman smiles and nods her head. Her raincoat flutters and flaps loudly in the wind, and Dancy tries hard not to look at the things writhing on her bare chest.

“It might,” the woman says. “Someday, when you can’t kill the thing that frightens you. When there’s nowhere left to run. Think of it as a gift-”

“Why would you give me a gift?”

“Because you gave me one, Dancy Flammarion,” and then the woman blows apart in the wind, and Dancy shivers and watches as the glittering pieces of her sail high into the winter sky and vanish.

“Is it over now?” Dancy asks the light, and in a moment it answers her. That depends, it says, and Is it ever over? it asks, but Dancy is already tumbling back the way she’s come. Head over heels, ass over tits, and when she opens her eyes, an instant later, an eternity later, she’s staring through the darkness at the ceiling of the Gynander’s root cellar.

Dancy coughs and rolls over onto her left side, breathing against the stabbing, sharp pain in her chest, and there’s the box sitting alone in the dust, its lid closed now. The dark, varnished wood glints dull in the orange light from the hurricane lantern hanging nearby, and whatever might have come out of the box has been locked away again. She looks up from the floor, past the drooping, empty husks on their hooks and the Gynander’s workbenches, and the creature is watching her from the other side of the cellar.

“What did you see?” it asks her, and she catches a guarded hint of apprehension in its rough voice.

“What was I supposed to see?” Dancy asks back, and she coughs again. “What did you think I’d see?”

“That’s not how it works. It’s different for everyone.”

“You wanted me to see things that would make me doubt what the angel tells me.”

“It’s different for everyone,” the Gynander says again and draws the blade of a straight razor slowly across a long leather strap.

“But that’s what you wanted, wasn’t it? That’s what you hoped I’d see, because that’s what you saw when she showed you the box.”

“I never talked to no angels. I made a point of that.”

And Dancy realizes that the nylon ropes around her ankles and wrists are gone, and her own knife is lying on the floor beside the box. She reaches for it, and the Gynander stops sharpening its razor and looks at her.

“Sinethella wanted to die, you know. She’d been wanting to die for ages,” it says. “She’d heard what you did to them folks over in Bainbridge, and down there in Florida. I swear, child, you’re like something come riding out of a Wild West movie, like goddamn Clint Eastwood, you are.”

Dancy sits up, a little dizzy from lying down so long, and wipes the rusty blade of her carving knife on her jeans.

“Like in that one picture, High Plains Drifter, where that nameless stranger fella shows up acting all holier than thou. The whole town thinks they’re using him, but turns out it’s really the other way round. Turns out, maybe he’s the most terrible thing there is, and maybe good’s a whole lot worse thing to have after your ass than evil. Course, you have a name-”

“I haven’t seen too many movies,” Dancy says, though, in truth, she’s never seen a single one. She glances from the Gynander to the wooden box to the lantern and back to the Gynander.

“I just want you to understand that she wasn’t no two-bit backwoods haint,” it says and starts sharpening the straight razor again. “Not like me. I just want you to know ain’t nothing happened here she didn’t want to happen.”

“Why did you untie me?”

“Why don’t you trying asking that angel of yours? I thought it had all the answers. Hell, I thought that angel of yours was all over the truth like flies on dog shit.”

“She told you to let me go?”

The Gynander makes a sound like sighing and lays the leather strap aside, holds the silver razor up so that it catches a little of the stray lantern light. Its stolen face sags and twitches slightly.

“Not exactly,” it says. “Ain’t nothing that easy, Snow White.”

Dancy stands up, her legs stiff and aching, and she lifts the hurricane lantern off its nail.

“Then you want to die, too,” she says.

“Not by a long sight, little girl. But I do like me some sport now and then. And Sinethella said you must be a goddam force of nature, a regular shatterer of worlds, to do the things you been getting away with.”

“What I saw in there,” Dancy says, and she cautiously prods at the box with the toe of one shoe. “It doesn’t make any difference. I know it was just a trick.”

“Well, then what’re you waiting for?” the thing whispers from the lips of its shabby, patchwork skin. “Show me what you got.”

The fire crackles and roars at the night sky lightening slowly towards dawn. Dancy sits on a fallen log at the side of the red-dirt road leading back to Waycross and watches as the spreading flames begin to devour the leafy walls of the kudzu tunnel.

“Well, I guess you showed me what for,” the blackbird says. It’s perched on the log next to her, the fire reflected in its beady eyes. “Maybe next time I’ll keep my big mouth shut.”

“You think there’s ever gonna be a next time?” Dancy asks without looking away from the fire.

“Lord, I hope not,” the bird squawks. “That was just, you know, a figure of speech.”

“Oh. I see.”

“Where you headed next?” the bird asks.

“I’m not sure.”

“I thought maybe the angels-”

“They’ll show me,” Dancy says, and she slips the carving knife back into her duffel bag and pulls the drawstrings tight again. “When it’s time, they’ll show me.”

And then neither of them says anything else for a while, just sit there together on the fallen pine log, as the fire she started in the cellar behind the trailer burns and bleeds black smoke into the hyacinth sky.