Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

"Oh, little girl," the wolf-woman shade snorts, "you're so preciously earnest. Such a stalwart little urchin, you are. It's a crying shame there's just the one of you. A pity you won't last longer. If only we could bottle you, I dare say none of us would ever go hungry again."

And then Dancy hears something behind her, and she looks over her right shoulder to see the monster glaring down at her from the pulpit. Its gnarled fingers grip the edges of the lectern, fingers that end in sickle talons, and they sink into the rotten wood as though it were clay.

"You're Elandrion?" Dancy asks it, turning to face the monster, and it grins and stands up straighter, though its bandy hind legs and thorny, crooked spine hardly seem suited to standing upright at all. It's so tall that its head almost scrapes against the sagging sheetrock a good ten or twelve feet above her.

"That's not my name," the monster replies. "I let them call me that, but you, you should know better than to believe I have a name." And Dancy thinks the monster's rheumy mud and blackwater voice must be the very soul of the swamp, this swamp and every other swamp and bog, every single marsh and slough that has ever been since the first morning of Creation, the creeping, impenetrable spirit of every quagmire and bayou and bottomless, peat-stained lake. Since the days of dinosaurs and screeching pterodactyls and dragonflies big as herons, this thing must have lain waiting for her in the wet places of the world, biding its time, murmuring her name in its sleep.

It's too much for me, she thinks, but Dancy knows her angel believes otherwise and has no intention of coming for her until the monster's dead.

"Am I?" it asks, feigning disappointment, and the monster grins even wider than before. "But I've heard so many stories. All the birds know your name. The birds, they think you're the goddamn Second Coming or something. Yeah, they tweet and twitter and squawk your name just like you're the bloody Virgin Mary her own damn self, come down from Paradise to put matters right."

Dancy backs slowly away from the thing behind the pulpit, sparing a quick glance at the shadows. They've all fallen silent now, but have moved in closer to her. They loom up around her, stretching themselves tall and thin, made bolder by the monster's words, by the sight and stench and sound of it.

"No, you're something special," the monster says, and it's wide, unblinking eyes remind Dancy of hardboiled eggs-no pupils or irises in there, just those two bulging white balls poking out below its scaly brow. They loll lifelessly from one side to the other as it speaks and leak viscous rivulets into the hair sprouting from its gaunt cheeks.

"I remember one like you, long time ago, five hundred fucking years if it's a day. A red Indian boy, but I don't recollect what they called him. He came looking for me, too. Thought he was toiling for the gods, just like you. I still got a few of his teeth stuck up under a rock somewhere."

"I didn't walk all the way out here just to listen to you talk," Dancy says, gripping the knife as tightly as she can and wishing again that it were her grandfather's Winchester shotgun, instead. The monster stops grinning and hunches down so the end of its flat nose is only inches from Dancy's face.

"No, I reckon not," it snarls, and she can feel its voice rattling about inside her chest. Dancy thinks it's probably some sort of miracle her heart's still beating after the force of those four words inside her.

"You come here to lay me low," the monster says, "to show me what for and make the night safe for decent folks, ain't that about right."

"Something like that," Dancy tells the monster the shadows call Elandrion, the thing her angel had no name for. It flares its nostrils and sniffs the air around her.

"Then I guess we'd best get to it," the monster sighs and stands up again. "I got other business this night besides killing you."

All the shadow things suddenly withdraw, pressing themselves flat against the crumbling walls of the church or retreating into the foyer or the exposed rafters. And Dancy Flammarion stands her ground and waits for the monster to make the first move.

Held fast in invisible currents, Julia Flammarion drifts away from Santa Rosa Island towards deeper water. She's almost weightless now, suspended here in the twilight realm between two worlds; above her, the clamorous lands of sunlight and seagulls, and far below her feet, the silent, lightless lands of cold abyssal solitude. There were a long and terrible few seconds of panic when she opened her mouth and the sea rushed past her teeth, forcing its way down her throat, flooding her lungs and stomach. Her head and chest seared with that alien, saltwater fire as her life streamed so easily from between her parted lips, racing back towards the shifting mirror surface, a dancing line of bubbles like the silvery bells of jellyfish. But then the panic passed, because the dead don't need to breathe, and the pain passed, too, and now there's the most perfect peace she's ever known. Dimly, Julia thinks she must be sinking, and more dimly still, she wonders if the angel was right after all and maybe the gloom below her is only the yawning entrance of the burning Catholic hell that awaits all suicides. Not that she ever really doubted it, but it would be nice to learn that it was all bullshit, her mother's god and Jesus on his cross and the angels and all the rest. It would be nice to float a bit longer, neither quite here nor quite there, not dead and not alive, and then her consciousness pulling free at last and nothing to take its place but compassionate oblivion.

She would ask no more of heaven than that.

Julia's eyes flutter open as something that might have been a fish darts quickly past her face.

So, she thinks, at least I'm not alone.

And she's hoping that the fish comes back, that there might even be more than just the one, when a point of blue-white light appears in the murk far below her. Hardly more than a flicker at first, but then the water around her grows suddenly warmer, buoying her upwards as it rises, and the flicker blossoms into a dazzling wheel, so wide she can hardly even see its edges, spinning counterclockwise in the deep.

And then the wheel of light is gone, just as abruptly as it came, but the sea about Julia no longer seems peaceful or merciful or kind. And even half-awake, half-awake at best, she knows without knowing how she knows that something has come out of the wheel. The same way she knew she wasn't alone that first day in the clearing in Shrove Wood, the same way she always knew whenever the angel was about to start talking to her. And the panic returns, much worse than before, because this isn't simply pain or death, this is something unseen rising up towards her, and if there were a patron saint of suicides she'd pray that the unseen thing is only a shark or a barracuda, some great eel or stingray or sawfish, only sharp teeth and snapping jaws to take her apart, to tear her limb from limb and be done with this slow death.

And then she must be more than half-asleep, because the sea has vanished, and Julia Flammarion is walking through the Wood on a sunny autumn day, late afternoon, only an hour or so left until dusk, and the fallen leaves crunch beneath her shoes as she follows Wampee Creek towards the small waterfall and the crystal-clear pool that fills a wide sinkhole. When she was younger, she swam there on very hot days, swimming naked beneath the pines and wax myrtles, the air all around filled with the joyous, raucous calls of birds and frogs and insects. She stops beside a familiar tree, wondering if it's all been nothing more than a daydream, her stealing the money and running off to Pensacola, the men and the movies and the drunk old woman whose husband left her because he was gay, nothing but something she wished that she had the courage to do. Julia laughs and leans against the tree, laughing that her imagination could ever get away from her like that, laughing because she's relieved and feels silly and because it's good to laugh here in the fading October sun and the long, familiar shadows. She sits down and wipes her eyes, and that's when Julia notices the albino girl walking towards her up the creek, the legs of her baggy overalls rolled past the knees.