Caitlín Kiernan - The Drowning Girl

“I got your attention,” she replies.

“You hurt Abalyn.”

“Imp, she’d have been harmed far worse if she hadn’t gone.” And Eva quotes from Hamlet , “ ‘I must be cruel only to be kind. Thus bad begins and worse remains behind.’ ”

I know there will be no arguing with her. That lilting voice foolish Ulysses heard, that he ordered himself lashed to a mast that he might hear. Eva reduces any objection to bald-faced absurdity.

“You’re a wicked thing. You’re an abomination.”

“I am as I am. As are you.”

Those silken fingertips glide across my lips, and then across the bridge of my nose. I have never been touched with such perfect intimacy.

“You’ve come to kill me,” I say very softly, and it surprises me that I don’t sound afraid.

“I’ve done nothing of the sort,” she replies, and that doesn’t surprise me, either. What she says, I mean. It’s easy to kill. It’s easy to be a predator. A shark. A wolf. Not easy, no. People hunt wolves and sharks for no reason except the fact that they are sharks and wolves. I’m trying to say, I realize that whatever Eva Canning is, it’s something far more subtle than a predator. She’s come to feed, and maybe to devour, but not to kill. My face is being stroked by a beast that does not need to feed to devour.

“You let him see you. Saltonstall, I mean.”

“I never said that.”

“ The Drowning Girl , you called it ‘my painting.’ ”

“Did I?” she asks, and she smiles.

Her hand lingers at my left earlobe, and goose bumps speckle my arms. Her fingers brush through my hair.

“So, why are you here?”

“You stopped for me. No one else ever did,” she says. “I’ve come to sing for you, because I owe you a kindness.”

“Even if it’s cruel.”

“Even if,” she says, and now her fingers are exploring the back of my neck. “And, in return, I will ask a small favor of you, Imp. But we’ll talk about that later. Don’t be afraid of me. You can’t yet see it, but I’ve come to lead you out of the dark place where you’ve always lived. You can’t glimpse it from here, but from there , you will.” (Look upon the thing monstrous and free.)

She kissed me then, and I thought, I’ve never been kissed before.

(Oh. I’ve shifted tense, but then there is no proper tense in this Blakean land of dreams, this mnemonic labyrinth, past and present indistinguishable. The past is the present, isn’t it? It’s the future, too. Just like Mary Cavan Tyrone said.)

She kissed me. She is kissing me. Always, she will be kissing me. This is the way of hauntings, as I’ve said. Eva Canning, I think—I think I only thought this, but it seemed as though Eva Canning tasted like the sea. Taste, smell, sight, audition, the sensation of touch…they all blur just as time has blurred.

Her tongue enters my mouth, probing, and there’s brief panic, because it’s not so different from the day I tried to breathe underwater, the day I tried to inhale a tub filled with ice water. She is flowing into me. Only, this time, my body doesn’t fight back. She is pouring down my throat, and I’m breathing her into me. But my lungs make no effort to resist the invasion.

This sounds like pornography. I read back over the page and it sounds like I’m writing pornography. It was never anything like that. My words aren’t good enough. They’re not equal to the task. I don’t know how to communicate passion and longing, the wetness between my thighs, desire, that wish to have her within and around me, and not cheapen it. A woman struggles to describe demons, angels, and, being only a woman, she does their beauty and terror a disservice. I do Eva Canning, as she came to me, as I saw her, an abhorrent disservice.

From childhood’s hour I have not been

As others were—I have not seen

Our lips parted, and the division brought greater despair by far even than the days I learned first of Rosemary’s death, then of Caroline’s, than the hour that Abalyn went away. I stumbled backwards and bumped against the arm of the sofa. I would have fallen, if it hadn’t been there.

You really have no notion how delightful…

She stood between me and the door, and I was just beginning to see her, not as the mask to hide the thing , monstrous and free, a few inches of black water, and seeing her even clearer than that day at the museum. Her cheeks and shoulders shimmer, green-red-cyan iridescence, and only now does it occur to me she isn’t wearing the sunglasses she wore that day at Wayland Square and that day at RISD, because her bottle-blue eyes are black, and I don’t know why I ever mistook them for bottle-blue or any other color. Black is all colors, the absorption of all colors. No light escapes black. No light escapes the eyes of Eva Canning, when I still believe her the Siren of Millville.

“I will sing for you, WinterIndia Morgan,” she said, smiling her frayed, sad, voracious, apologetic, sympathetic smile. That smile is etched evermore on the insides of my eyelids, and when I am dead, embalmed, and in my grave, I’ll still see that smile. “I’ve come to sing for you, and to draw your song from you. And when we are done singing, you’ll take me home, and I’ll go down to my mother, who dreams of me each night.”

The voyeur of utter destruction.

In hindsight.

The fortune from the fortune cookie I got the first time Abalyn and I ordered takeout: Don’t stop now.

But I want to, because what’s coming is as bad as those latest days off my meds, those last days spent in my corner or whispering madly into the typewriter until Abalyn used her key and found me. What’s coming, it’s that impossible to describe, I think, because it’s that terrible, that beautiful, that derelict, and that private. But I’m so, so near The End. Don’t stop now.

Much of what follows is confused, fuzzy. Especially the beginning of it. For one, I stopped taking my meds. And there was Eva, and whatever it meant that she’d crossed my threshold, and by that, I mean much more than she’d stepped across my doorsill. I mean very many things. I do recall that she called work and said she was a friend of mine, that I had an intestinal bug and would be out for a few days. I also remember that it was Eva who convinced me I’d be better off without my pills, because, after all, I had her now. And she said something like, “They would only blur your perceptions of me. They keep you from seeing what the gift of your insanity reveals, and what others never guess.” At her bidding, I actually flushed it all down the toilet. The prescriptions. I sat at the toilet, emptying each bottle as she stood in the doorway, watching on approvingly. I flushed, and the swirling water stole my counterfeit sanity away.

She offered a hand, and helped me up off the floor. Though, truthfully, I wanted to stay there. The apartment was so awfully hot, and the tiles were cool beneath me. She pulled me to her, and then led me…

It’ll be a lie if I settle for, “She pulled me to her, and then led me to bed.” Though she did do that. But if I say that, and only that, it’ll be a falsehood. It might be factual, but it wouldn’t be true. “Take my hand, India. I’ll show you how to fly.” Fly, sing, swim. She led me to the bed, and she undressed me. She kissed me again. She kissed my mouth, and my breasts, and my sex. And then she led me into deepest winter, and to the Blackstone River. She took me into song, which became a far white country, until it became a painting, until it became the sea. But first, song was only song, and her lips only her lips.

Shoo, shoo, shoo la roo, shoo la rack shack, shoo la baba boo, When I find my sally bally bill come dibb-a-lin a boo shy lor-ree, Hush-a-bye, don’t you cry, Go to sleepy little baby. When you wake, you shall have, All the pretty little horses. Blacks and bays, dapples and grays, Johnny’s gone for a soldier. “Come home with me, little Matty Groves, come home with me tonight. Come home with me, little Matty Groves, and sleep with me till light.” Johnny’s gone for a soldier. They grew and grew in the old churchyard Till they could grow no higher At the end they formed, a true lover’s knot And the rose grew round the briar. I am as brown as brown can be, And my eyes as black as sloe; I am as brisk as brisk can be, Johnny has gone for a soldier. “I put him in a tiny boat, And cast him out to sea, That he might sink or he might swim, But he’d never come back to me.” And the only sound I hear, as it blows through the town, is the cry of the wind as it blows through the town, weave and spin, weave and spin. His ghost walked at midnight to the bedside of his Mar-i-Jane When he told her how dead he was; said she: “I’ll go mad.” “Since my love he is so dead,” said she, “All joy on earth has fled for me.” “I never more will happy be,” and she went raving mad. Johnny has gone for a soldier. Twinki doodle dum, twinki doodle dum sang the bold fisherman. Shule, shule, shulagra, sure and sure and he loves me. Of thrupence a pound on the tea, of thrupence a pound on the tea. Siúl, Siúl, Siúl a ghrá Níl leigheas ar fáil ach leigheas an bháis Ó d’fhag tú mise is bocht mo chás Is go dté tú mo mhúirnín slán Way down yonder, down in the meadow There’s a poor wee little lamby. The bees and the butterflies pickin’ at its eyes, The poor wee thing cried for her mammy. Hush, little baby, don’t say a word, o follow the whale; Where the icebergs do float And the stormy winds blaw, Where the land and the ocean Are covered wi’ snaw. If that mockingbird don’t sing, Mama’s gonna buy you a diamond ring. Weave and spin, weave and spin, Johnny has gone for a soldier. He made a harp o her breast-bane, That he might play forever thereon. Johnny has gone for a soldier. Then three times ’round went our gallant ship, And three times ’round went she, And the third time that she went ’round She sank to the bottom of the sea. The boat capsized and four men were drowned, and we never caught that whale, Brave boys, And we never caught that whale. And a’ the live-lang winter night The dead corp followed she. Weave and spin, weave and spin. I saw, I saw the light from heaven Come shining all around. I saw the light come shining. I saw the light come down. As slow our ship her foamy track Against the wind was cleaving, Shoo, shoo, shoo la roo shoo la rack shack, shoo la baba boo When I find my sally bally bill come dibb-a-lin a boo shy lor-ree, Johnny has gone for a soldier.