Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

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 sheer 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 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 ought'a 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.

"Goddamn," the orderly mumbles, rubs at his chin and shakes his head. "Goddamn, 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 baying 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 trouvèe!" he shouts to the others. "Dèpêchez-vous!"

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

"La bête! Je l'ai trouvèe!"

And then she looks down at the reflection of the torchlight 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. Dancy tries to stand, but she can't feel her legs anymore, and the dogs are almost on top of her, anyway.