Caitlin Kiernan - Alabaster

She sits on the headstone for a few more minutes, until the angel is finished talking about the "live panther" sign and leaves her alone. Then Dancy stands up and slips the scabby knife into the waistband of her jeans. There will be somewhere nearby she can scrub it clean again. She picks up the heavy duffel bag and stares at the blazing ruins of Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church just a little longer before she leaves the cemetery, careful to shut the squeaky wrought-iron gate behind her, and Dancy Flammarion follows sunrise down Dry Creek Road, just the way her angel said she should.

Author's Note: This essay was originally released by Subterranean Press in 2002 as a chapbook to accompany In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers.

"Where do you get your ideas?"

I've been asked that goddamned, annoying question so many times in the last few years that I've not only lost count, I've lost patience. So, in retaliation, I've about two dozen smart-ass replies to keep at the ready whenever it comes up (and it almost always comes up). They range from the Marxist (that's Groucho, not Karl)-"From a little feed shop in Boise. They deliver."-to the stupefyingly subtle-"Um…"-to turn-about-is-fair-play tactics-"Where do you get yours?" Sometimes body language is best, and the question can be dismissed with a simple shrug or an exasperated rolling of the eyes. Sometimes I pretend I didn't hear what was being asked and just say the first thing that comes to mind, instead. And, honestly, I usually have no clue where I "get an idea." I don't get them. They usually just come to me, like pimples and troublesome men, without my having invited them. They occur.

But every now and then I can say, This , this nasty, little thing right here. See it? That's why I wrote story-x or Chapter-Y. It doesn't happen very often, but it's sort of satisfying in no particular way I can explain when it does happen like that.

In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers is one of those rare stories, rarer still in that it had not one, but two identifiable inspirations. The first is a Dame Darcy illustration (reprinted in the novella) from an issue of her ever-fabulous comic, Meat Cake, a wondrously detailed scene of young Victorian women engaged in ghoulish delights, sex, and other mischief in the basement of an old house. An inset shows them armed with shovels and stylish coats, braving a snowy night to rob a grave; we can see the fruits of their labors stretched out on a slab, and some of the women attend the corpse while others attend each other. Yes, well, it's that sort of a drawing, and Miss Aramat and other ladies of The Stephen's Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists owe their existence to that drawing. That's the first inspiration.

The second is a little bit more complicated and a whole lot stranger…

During my time in Athens, Georgia, way, way back in the mid-nineties, I did a stint as the vocalist and songwriter for a local goth-folk-blues band called Death's Little Sister. This wasn't long after I'd finished writing Silk, and it was taking a lot longer to sell than either my agent or I had expected. So I decided I'd be a rock star instead. Luckily, the work for Vertigo came along and the novel did eventually sell, shocking me back to my senses and rescuing me from the indie-rock purgatory that is Athens.

Anyway, one bitterly cold night in November 1996 we played a show at the 40-Watt Club on Washington Street. All our original material, which amounted to about seven or eight songs, plus all our covers-"House of the Rising Sun," "Crimson and Clover," "Sweet Jane," "Bloodletting," and so forth. Enough people showed up that at least it didn't feel like one of our interminable practices, and no one threw anything at us. To make matters worse, someone approached us after the show to ask if we'd like to contribute a track to a compilation of Bowie covers being put together by a local record label. So, we were in pretty good spirits afterwards, which was anything but usual. About one a.m., we loaded out, collected whatever paltry few bucks we had coming from the club, sold a couple of tapes, and then piled into my blue Honda station wagon. All four of us, plus a couple of hangers-on, squished in amongst our gear (amps, a mixing board, mike stands, instruments), elbows in ribs, shoes where shoes ought not be, and our keyboardist sitting in the backseat floorboard (she was very, very tiny). We had about half a case of truly crappy beer-PBR or Sterling or some such weasel piss-a big bottle of Jagermeister, and another bottle of Wild Turkey, a little weed, and we headed north out of town on I-129.

A pretty bleak stretch of road, leading nowhere any of us had any business going at one o'clock in the morning, half-drunk, stoned, and dressed like a bunch of whores from Hell's cotillion (thank you, Matthew Grasse, wherever you are). To our credit, we did have a destination in mind, the old Woodbine Cemetery in Jefferson, about 20 miles north of Athens. At some point, Barry Dillard, our guitarist, had told us a story about a murder-suicide at UGA in 1918 and, he'd said, the murderer was buried in Woodbine. His victim was buried three miles from Woodbine, in a Presbyterian cemetery. I'm sure it has a name, too, but I've forgotten it. And, so the story went, because such stories always go this way, his ghost and the ghost of the woman he killed could be glimpsed at Woodbine from time to time, reunited, wandering aimlessly about the tombstones.

There isn't much between Athens and Jefferson – kudzu, cows, junk cars, house trailers, and "towns" with names like Red Stone, Arcade, Attica, and Clarksboro. Maybe a few state troopers looking for drunken idiots in blue Honda station wagons. Nothing you want to run into on a dark night. And it was a very dark night, no moon at all, but not cloudy, either. I remember the sky was clear and the stars were bright, in the way that stars can fill the whole sky, horizon to horizon, and yet give off no light whatsoever. I remember that someone put in an Echo and the Bunnymen tape and we were half-heartedly singing along. And then, about the time we passed Arcade, one of us spotted a ball of blue-white light, roughly the size of a football and floating maybe ten feet above the ground, slipping along the side of the highway on our right. There were pine trees along this stretch of road and the ball of light weaved and bobbed along between the trunks.

"Jesus, man, it's Saint Elmo's fire," Barry said. Or maybe that was Mike, our bass player. Someone else said it was a ghost, and I said that it couldn't be because we hadn't even reached the cemetery yet.

We slowed down, and the ball of light slowed down. We sped up, and it sped up. After a mile or so, the novelty began to wear thin and the situation started to get seriously creepy. The girl I'd drafted to drive pulled over to the side of the road just as the pines ended and the land opened up into pasture again. The ball of light floated out of the trees, turned and drifted over a barbed-wire fence, coming to a stop in the middle of the road, maybe ten yards in front of the Honda.

We sat and stared. It bobbed up and down. We sat and stared some more. I don't remember anyone saying much of anything, just Echo and the Bunnymen crooning from the tape deck. The thing above the road made no sound and didn't seem to give off light. I recall wondering why we weren't bathed in blue-white light. The road beneath it was perfectly dark.

"Let's just get the fuck out of here," Barry said and, as if the thing had heard him, it dimmed slightly and then began to rise, going straight up, higher and higher until it seemed not much more than a particularly bright star. At some point we finally lost sight of it and the driver pulled back onto the I-129, heading for Jefferson.