Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

She stops, shifting the weight of her heavy old duffel bag from one shoulder to the other, the duffel bag and the black umbrella tied to it with hemp twine, and looks back the way she's just come. Sometimes it's hard to tell if the voices she hears are only inside her head or if they're coming from somewhere else. The highway glistens dark and wet and rough, like a cottonmouth moccasin that's just crawled out of the water. But there's no one and nothing back there that she can see, no one who might have spoken her name, so Dancy turns around and starts walking again.

It's what you don't see that's almost always the worst, her grandmother told her once. It's what you don't see will drag you down one day, if you ain't careful.

Dancy glances over her shoulder, and the angel is standing in the center of the highway, straddling the broken yellow dividing line. Its tattered muslin and silk robes are even blacker than the wet asphalt, and they flutter and flap in a fierce and holy wind that touches nothing else. The angel's four ebony wings are spread wide, and it holds a burning sword high above its four shimmering kaleidoscope faces, both skeletal hands gripped tightly around the weapon's silver hilt.

"I was starting to think maybe I'd lost you," Dancy says and turns to face the angel. She can hear the wind that swirls always about it, like hearing a freight train when you're only half way across a trestle and there's no way to get off the tracks before it catches up with you, nowhere to go unless you want to fall, and that sound drowns out or silences the noises coming from the woods at the edge of the road.

And there's another sound, too, a rumble like thunder, but she knows that it isn't thunder.

"If I went any slower," she replies, "I'd just about be standing still."

The thunder sound again, and the roar of the angel's scalding wind, and Dancy squints into the blinding light that's begun to leak from its eight sapphire eyes.

"No, angel," she says quietly. "I ain't forgot about you. I ain't forgotten about any of it."

The angel shrieks and swings its burning sword in a long, slow arc, leaving behind bits of fire and ember, ash and cinders, and now the air smells more like burning pitch and charred flesh than it smells like pine trees and summer rain and poisonous toadstools.

"Oh, I think you can probably keep up," she says, and turns her back on the Seraph.

And then there's only the dead, violated emptiness and the terrible silence that the angel always leaves behind when it goes. Very slowly, by hesitant degrees, all the murmuring forest noises return, and Dancy walks just a little faster than before; she's relieved when the high pines finally fall away on either side of the road and the land opens up, changing once more to farms and wild prairie. Pastures and cows, barbed-wire fences and a small service station maybe a hundred yards or so farther down the highway, and Dancy wishes she had the money for a Coke. A Coke would be good, syrupy sweet and ice cold and bubbling on her tongue. But at least they won't charge her to use the toilet, and she can wash up a little and piss without having to worry about squatting in poison oak.

She doesn't look back at the woods again, the trees standing straight and tall on either side of the highway. That part of her life is over, lived and past and done with, one small stretch of road she only needed to walk once, and, besides, she knows the angel won't come to her again for days.

After the rain and the Seraph's whirlwind, the afternoon is still and cool, and her boots seem very loud on the wet pavement. It only takes her a few more minutes to reach the service station, where an old man is sitting on a plastic milk crate beneath a corrugated tin awning. He waves to her, and Dancy waves back at him, then she tugs at the green canvas strap on her duffel bag because her shoulder's gone to sleep again.

There's a big plywood billboard beside the road, but it's not nearly so tall as the faded Texaco sign-that round placard dangling from a lamppost, a perfect black circle to contain its five-pointed red pentacle, that witch's symbol to keep out some great evil. Dancy already knows all about pentagrams, so she turns her attention to the billboard, instead; it reads live panther-deadly man eater in sloppy whitewash lettering.

She leaves the highway, skirting the edges of a wide orange-brown mud hole where the Texaco's parking lot and driveway begins, crunching across the white-grey limestone gravel strewn around the gasoline pumps. The old man is standing up now, digging about in a pocket of his overalls.

"How ya doin' there, sport?" he asks her, and his hand reappears with half a roll of wintergreen Certs.

"I'm fine," she says, not smiling because her shoulder hurts too much. "You got a bathroom I can use?"

"You gonna buy somethin'?" he asks and pops one of the Certs into his mouth. His teeth are stained yellow-brown, like turtle bones that have been lying for years at the bottom of a cypress spring.

"I don't have any money," she tells him.

"Hell," he says and sits back down on the plastic milk crate. "Well, I don't guess that makes no difference. The privy's right inside. But you better damn flush when you're done, you hear me? And don't you get piss on the seat."

Dancy nods her head, then stares at him until the old man leans back and blinks at her.

"You want somethin' else?"

"Do you really have a live panther?" she asks him, and the man arches both his eyebrows and grins, showing off his yellow-brown, tobacco-stained smile again.

"That's what the sign says, ain't it? Or cain't you read?"

"I can read," Dancy Flammarion replies and looks down at the toes of her boots. "I wouldn't have known to ask if I couldn't read."

"Then why'd you ask such a fool question for? You think I'm gonna put up a big ol' sign sayin' I got a live panther if I ain't?"

"Does it cost money to see it?"

"You better believe it does. I'll let you use the jake free of charge, 'cause it wouldn't be Christian to do otherwise, but a gander at that cat's gonna set you back three bucks, cold, hard cash."

"I don't have three dollars."

"Then I guess you ain't gonna be seein' my panther," the old man says, and he grins and offers her a Certs. She takes the candy from him and sets her duffel bag down on the gravel between them.

"How'd you get him?"

The old man rubs at the coarse salt-and-pepper stubble on his chin and slips what's left of the roll of Certs into the bib pocket of his overalls.

"You some kind of runaway or somethin'? You got people out lookin' for you, sport? You a druggie?"

"Is he in a cage?" she asks, matching his questions with a question of her own.

"He's a she," the old man grunts. "Course she's in a cage. What you think someone's gonna do with a panther? Keep it in a damned burlap sack?"

"No," she says. "How'd you say you caught him?"

"I didn't."

"Did someone else catch him for you?"

"It ain't no him. It's a she."

Dancy looks up at the old man and rolls the quickly shrinking piece of candy from one side of her mouth to the other and back again.

"You're some kind'a albino, ain't you," the old man says, and he leans a little closer. He smells like sweat and Beech-Nut chewing tobacco, old cars and fried food.

"Yeah," she says and nods her head.

"Yep. I thought so. I used to have some rabbits had eyes like yours."

"Did you keep them in cages, too?"

"You keep rabbits in hutches, sport."

"What's the difference?"

The old man glares at her a moment and then sighs and jabs his thumb at the screen door. "The shitter's inside," he grumbles. "Right past the Pepsi cooler. And don't you forget to flush."

"Where do you keep him?" Dancy asks, looking past the old man at the closed screen door and the shadows waiting on the other side.