Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

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 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 try 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 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 goddamn 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 birds 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.

The albino girl, whose name is Dancy Flammarion, has walked a long way since the fire in Bainbridge, five nights ago. It rained all morning long, and the blue-grey clouds are still hanging sullen and low above the pines, obscuring the wide south Georgia sky. But she's grateful for the clouds, for anything that hides her from the blistering June sun. She's already thanked both St. George and St. Anthony the Abbott for sending her the clouds, because her grandmother taught her they were the patron saints of people suffering from skin diseases. Her grandmother taught her lots of things. The damp air smells like pine straw and the fat white toadstools growing along the side of the highway. Dancy knows not to eat those, not ever, no matter how hungry she gets. Her grandmother taught her about toadstools, too.