Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

Too late, she thought. It knows I'm coming now, realising 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 on the ground and looked first at her knife and then back to the blue trailer. Even the shimmering, mewling things she'd faced 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 she wasn't wearing anything under the coat.

"Not exactly what you were expecting, am I?" she said, sounding pleased with herself, 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 sighed. "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 Dancy'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 sputtered, 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, even though she knew it probably wasn't listening. "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.