Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

"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 let you see 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, unhealthy color of indigo or polk-salad berries, darts out from between its shriveled lips and tastes the cellar air.

"That's sort'a the 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," the Gynander says, "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 lie 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, she reached a spot where the air was as cold as a January morning, air so cold her breath fogged, and Dancy jumped backwards, hugging herself and shivering.