Caitlín R. Kiernan is the author of several novels, including Daughter of Hounds (Penguin, 2007) and The Red Tree (Penguin, 2009), which was nominated for both the Shirley Jackson and World Fantasy awards. Her next novel, The Drowning Girl: A Memoir, will be released by Penguin in 2012. Since 2000, her shorter tales of the weird, fantastic, and macabre have been collected in several volumes, all published by Subterranean Press, including Tales of Pain and Wonder (2000, 2008), From Weird and Distant Shores (2002), To Charles Fort, with Love (2005), A is for Alien (2005), Alabaster (2006), and The Ammonite Violin & Others (2010). In 2012, Subterranean Press released a retrospective of her early writing, Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlín R. Kiernan (Volume One). She lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with her partner Kathryn.
MEMORY FAILS, MOMENTS BLEEDING ONE AGAINST AND into the next or the one before, merging and diverging and commingling again farther along. Rain streaking glass, muddy rivers flowing to the sea, or blood on a slaughterhouse floor, wending its way towards a drain. There was a time, I am still reasonably certain, when all this might have been set forth as a mere tale, starting at some more or less arbitrary, but seemingly consequential, moment: the day I first met Isobel Endecott, the evening I boarded a train from Savannah to Boston, or the turning of frail yellowed pages in a black-magician’s grimoire and coming upon the graven image of a jade idol. But I am passed now so far out beyond the conveniences and conventions of chronology and narrative, and gone down to some place so few (and so very many) women before me have ever gone. It cannot be a tale, anymore than a crystal goblet dropped on a marble floor may ever again hold half an ounce of wine. I have been dropped, like that, from a great height, and I have shattered on a marble floor. I may not have been dropped. I may have only fallen, but that hardly seems to matter now. I may have been pushed, also. And, too, it might well be I was dropped, fell, and was pushed, none of these actions necessarily being mutually exclusive of the others. I am no different from the broken goblet, whose shards do not worry overly about how they came to be divided from some former whole.
Memory fails. I fall. Not one or the other, but both. I tumble through the vulgar, musty shadows of sepulchers. I lie in my own grave, dug by my own hands, and listen to hungry black beetles and maggots busy at my corporeal undoing. I am led to the altar on the dais in the sanctuary of the Church of Starry Wisdom, to be bedded and worshipped and bled dry. I look up from a hole in the earth and see the bloated moon. There is no ordering these events, no matter how I might try, if I even cared to try. They occurred, or I am yet rushing towards them. They are past and present and future, realized and unrealized and imagined and inconceivable; I would be a damned fool to worry over such trivialities. Better I be only damned.
“It was lost,” Isobel tells me. “For a very long time it was lost. There were rumors it had gone to Holland, early in the fifteenth century, that it was buried there with one who’d worn it in life. Other stories say it was stolen from the grave of that man sometime in the 1920s and carried off to England.”
I sip coffee while she talks.
“It’s all bound up in irony and coincidence, and, really, I don’t give that sort of prattle much credence,” she continues. “The Dutchman who’s said to have been buried with the idol, some claim he was a grave robber, that he fancied himself a proper ghoul. Charming fellow, sure, and then, five hundred years later, along come these two British degenerates—from somewhere in Yorkshire, I think. Supposedly, they dug him up and stole the idol, which they found hung around his neck.”
“But before that… I mean, before the Dutchman, where might it have been?” I ask, and Isobel smiles. Her smile could melt ice, or freeze the blood, depending on one’s perspective and penchant for hyperbole and metaphor. She shrugs and sets her coffee cup down on the kitchen table. We’re sitting together in her loft on Atlantic Avenue. The building was constructed in the 1890s, as cold storage for the wares of fur merchants. The walls are thick and solid and keep our secrets. She lights a cigarette and watches me a moment.
My train is pulling into South Station; I’ve never visited Boston before, and I shall never leave. It’s a rainy day, and I’ve been promised that Isobel will be waiting for me on the platform.
“Well, before Holland—assuming, of course, it was ever in Holland—I’ve spoken with a man who thinks it might have spent time in Greece, hidden at the Monastery of Holy Trinity at Metéora, but the monastery wasn’t built until 1475, so this really doesn’t jibe with the story of the Dutch grave robber. Of course, the hound is mentioned in Al Azif. But you know that.” And then the conversation shifts from the jade idol to archaeology in Damascus, and then Yemen, and, finally, the ruins of Babylon. In particular, I listen to Isobel describe the blue-glazed tiles of the Ishtar Gate, with their golden bas-reliefs of lions and auroch bulls and the strange, dragon-like sirrush. She saw a reconstructed portion of the gate at the Pergamon Museum when she was in Berlin, many years ago.
“In Germany, I was still a young woman,” she says, and glances at a window and the city lights, the Massachusetts night and the yellow-orange skyglow that’s there so no one ever has to look too closely at the stars.
This is the night of the new moon, and Isobel kneels before me and bathes my feet. I’m naked save the jade idol on its silver chain, hung about my neck. The temple of the Starry Wisdom smells of frankincense, galbanum, sage, clove, myrrh, and saffron smoldering in iron braziers suspended from the high ceiling beams. Her ash-blonde hair is pulled back from her face, pinned into a neat chignon. Her robes are the color of raw meat. I don’t want her to look me in the eyes, and yet I cannot imagine going up the granite stairs to the dais without first having done so, without that easy, familiar reassurance. Dark figures in robes of half a dozen other shades of red and black and grey press in close from all sides. The colors of their robes denote their rank. I close my eyes, though I have been forbidden to do so.
“This is our daughter,” barks the High Priestess, the old one crouched near the base of the altar. Her voice is phlegm and stripped gears, discord and tumult. “Of her own will does she come, and of her own will and the will of the Nameless Gods will she make the passage.”
And even in this instant—here at the end of my life and the beginning of my existence—I cannot help but smile at the High Priestess’ choice of words, at force of habit, her calling them the Nameless Gods, when we have given them so very many names over the millennia.
“She will see what we cannot,” the High Priestess barks. “She will walk unhindered where our feet will never tread. She will know their faces and their embrace. She will suffer fire and flood and the frozen wastes, and she will dine with the Mother and the Father. She will take a place at their table. She will know their blood, as they will know hers. She will fall and sleep, be raised and walk.”
I am pulling into South Station.
I am drinking coffee with Isobel.
I am nineteen years old, dreaming of a Dutch churchyard and violated graves. My dream is filled with the rustle of leathery wings and the mournful baying of some great, unseen beast. I smell freshly broken earth. The sky glares down at all the world with a single cratered eye which humanity, in its ignorance, would mistake for a full autumnal moon. There are two men with shovels and pick axes. Fascinated, I watch their grim, determined work, an unspeakable thievery done sixty-three years before my own birth. I hear the shovel scrape stone and wood.
In the temple, Isobel rises and kisses me. It’s no more than the palest ghost of all the many kisses we’ve shared during our long nights of lovemaking, those afternoons and mornings spent exploring one another’s bodies and desires and most taboo fancies.
The Hermit passes a jade cup to the Hierophant, who in turn passes it to Isobel. Though, in this place and in this hour, Isobel is not Isobel Endecott. She is the Empress, as I am here named the Wheel of Fortune. I have never seen this cup until now, but I know well enough that it was carved untold thousands of years before this night and from the same vein of leek-green jadeite as the pendant I wear about my throat. The mad Arabian author of the Al Azif believed the jade to have come from the Plateau of Y’Pawfrm e’din Leng, and it may be he was correct. The Empress places the rim of the cup to my lips, and I drink. The bitter ecru tincture burns going down and kindles a fire in my chest and belly. I know this is the fire that will make ashes of me, and from those ashes will I rise as surely as any phoenix.
“She stands at the threshold,” the High Priestess growls, “and soon will enter the Hall of the Mother and the Father.” The crowd murmurs blessings and blasphemies. Isobel’s delicate fingers caress my face, and I see the longing in her blue eyes, but the High Priestess may not kiss me again, not in this life.
“I will be waiting,” she whispers.
My train leaves Savannah.
“Do you miss Georgia?” Isobel asks me, a week after I arrive in Boston, and I tell her yes, sometimes I do miss Georgia. “But it always passes,” I say, and she smiles.
I am almost twenty years old, standing alone on a wide white beach where the tannin-stained Tybee River empties into the Atlantic Ocean, watching as a hurricane barrels towards shore. The outermost rain bands lash the sea, but haven’t yet reached the beach. The sand around me is littered with dead fish and sharks, crabs and squid. On February 5th, 1958, a B-47 collided in midair with an F-86 Sabre fighter 7,200 feet above this very spot, and the crew of the B-47 was forced to jettison the Mark 15 hydrogen bomb it was carrying; the “Tybee bomb” was never recovered and lies buried somewhere in silt and mud below the brackish waters of Wassaw Sound, six or seven miles southwest of where I’m standing. I draw a line in the sand, connecting one moment to another, and the hurricane wails.
I am sixteen, and a high-school English teacher is telling me that if a gun appears at the beginning of a story, it should be fired by the end. If it’s a bomb, the conscientious author should take care to be certain it explodes, so that the reader’s expectations are not neglected. It all sounds very silly, and I cite several examples to the contrary. The English teacher scowls and changes the subject.
In the temple of the Church of Starry Wisdom, I walk through the flames consuming my soul and take my place on the altar.
IT’S A SWELTERING DAY IN LATE AUGUST 20—, AND I walk from the green shade of Telfair Square, moving north along Barnard Street. I would try to describe here the violence of the alabaster sun on this afternoon, hanging so far above Savannah, but I know I’d never come close to capturing in words the sheer spite and vehemence of it. The sky is bleached as pallid as the cement sidewalk and the whitewashed bricks on either side of the street. I pass what was once a cotton and grain warehouse, when the New South was still the Old South, more than a century ago. The building has been “repurposed” for lofts and boutiques and a trendy soul-food restaurant. I walk, and the stillness of the summer afternoon makes my footsteps seem almost loud as thunderclaps. I can feel the dull beginnings of a headache, and wish I had a Pepsi or an orange drink, something icy cold in a perspiring bottle. I glance through windows at the air-conditioned sanctuaries on the other side of the glass, but I don’t stop and go inside.
The night before this day, there were dreams I will never tell anyone until I meet Isobel Endecott, two years farther along. I had dreams of a Dutch graveyard, and of a baying hound, and awoke to find an address on West Broughton scribbled on the cover of a paperback book I’d been reading when I fell asleep. The handwriting was indisputably mine, though I have no memory of having picked up the ballpoint pen on my nightstand and written the address. I did not get back to sleep until sometime after sunrise, and then there were only more dreams of that cemetery and the spire of a cathedral and the two men, busy with their picks and shovels.
I glance directly at the sun, daring it to blind me.
“You knew where to go,” Isobel says, my first evening in Boston, my first evening with her and already I felt as though I’d known her all my life. “The time was right, and you were chosen. I can’t even imagine such an honor.”
It is late August, and I sweat, and walk north until I come to the intersection with West Broughton Street. I am clutching the copy of Absalom, Absalom! in my left hand, and I pause to read the address again. Then I turn left, which also means I turn west.
“The stars were right,” she says, and pours me another brandy. “Which is really only another way of saying these events cannot occur until it is time for them to occur. That there is a proper sequence.”
I walk west down West Broughton until I come to the address that my sleeping self wrote on the Faulkner book. It’s a shop (calling itself an “emporium”) specializing in antique jewelry, porcelain figurines, and “Oriental” curios. Inside, after the scorching gaze of the sun, the dusty gloom seems almost frigid. I find what I did not even know I was looking for in a display case near the register. It is one of the most hideous things I’ve ever seen, and one of the most beautiful, too. I guess the stone is jade, but it’s only a guess. I know next to nothing about gemstones and the lapidary arts. That day, I do not even know the word lapidary. I won’t learn it until later, when I begin asking questions about the pendant.
There’s a middle-aged man sitting on a stool behind the counter. He watches me through the lenses of his spectacles. He has about him a certain mincing fastidiousness. I notice the mole above his left eyebrow, and that his clean nails are trimmed almost to the quick. I notice there’s a hair growing from the mole. My mother always said I had an eye for detail.
“Anything I can show you today?” he wants to know, and I only almost hesitate before nodding and pointing to the jade pendant.
“Now, that is a very peculiar piece,” he says, leaning forward and sliding the back of the case open. He reaches inside and lifts the pendant and its chain from a felt-lined tray. The felt is a faded shade of burgundy. He sits up again and passes the pendant across the counter to me. I’d not expected it to be so heavy, or feel so slick in my fingers, almost as though it were coated with oil or wax.
“Picked it up at an estate sell, a few years back,” says the fastidious seller of antiques. “Never liked the thing myself, but different strokes, as they say. If I only stocked what I liked, wouldn’t make much of a living, now would I?”
“No,” I reply. “I don’t suppose you would.”
I stand alone on a beach at the south end of Tybee Island, watching the arrival of a hurricane. I’ve come to the beach to drown. However, I already know that’s not what’s going to happen, and the realization brings with it a faint pang of disappointment.
“Came from an old house down in Stephen’s Ward,” the man behind the counter says. “On East Hall Street, if memory serves. Strange bunch of women lived there, years ago, but then, one June, all of a sudden, the whole lot up and moved away. There were nine of them living in that house, and, well, you know how people talk.”
“Yes,” I say. “People talk.”
“Might be better if we all tended to our own business and let others be,” the man says and watches me as I examine the jade pendant. It looks a bit like a crouching dog, except for the wings, and it also puts me in mind of a sphinx. Its teeth are bared. Here, in my palm, carved from stone, is the countenance of every starving, tortured animal that has ever lived, the face of every madman, pure malevolence given form. I shiver, and the sensation is not entirely unpleasant. I realize that I am becoming aroused, that I am wet. There are letters from an alphabet I don’t recognize inscribed about the base of the figurine, and a stylized skull has been etched into the bottom. The pendant is wholly repellent, and I know I cannot possibly leave the shop without it. It occurs to me that I might kill to own this thing.
“I think it would be,” I tell him. “Be better if we all tended to our own business, I mean.”
“Still, you can’t change human nature,” he says.
“No, you can’t do that,” I agree.
The train is pulling into South Station.
The hurricane bears down on Tybee Island.
And I’m only eleven and standing at a wrought-iron gate set into a brick wall, a wall that surrounds a decrepit mansion on East Hall Street. The wall is yellow, not because it has been painted yellow, but because all the bricks used in its construction have been glazed the color of goldenrods. They shimmer in the heat of a late May afternoon. On the other side of the gate is a woman named Maddy (which she says is short for Madeleine). Sometimes, like today, I walk past and find Maddy waiting, as though I’m expected. She never opens the gate; we only ever talk through the bars, there in the cool below the live oak branches and Spanish moss. Sometimes, she reads my fortune with a pack of Tarot cards. Other times, we talk about books. On this day, though, she’s telling me about the woman who owns the house, whom she calls Aramat, a name I’m sure I’ve never heard before.
“Isn’t that the mountain where the Bible says Noah’s Ark landed after the flood?” I ask her.
“No, dear. That’s Mount Ararat.”
“Well, they sound very much alike, Ararat and Aramat,” I say, and Maddy stares at me. I can tell she’s thinking all sorts of things she’s not going to say aloud, things I’m not meant to ever hear.
And then Maddy says, almost whispering, “Write her name backwards sometime. Very often, what seems unusual becomes perfectly ordinary, if we take care to look at it from another angle.” She peers over her shoulder, and tells me that she has to go, and I should be on my way.
I’m twenty-three, and this is the day I found the pendant in an antique shop on West Broughton Street. I ask the man behind the counter how much he wants for it, and after he tells me, I ask him if it’s jade, or if it only looks like jade.
“Looks like real jade to me,” he replies, and I know from his expression that the question has offended him. “It’s not glass or plastic, if that’s what you mean. I don’t sell costume jewelry, Miss. The chain, that’s sterling silver. You want it, I’ll take ten bucks off the price on the tag. Frankly, it gives me the creeps, and I’ll be happy to be shed of it.”
I pay him twenty-five dollars, cash, and he puts the pendant into a small brown paper bag, and I go back out into the blazing sun.
I dream of a graveyard in Holland, and the October sky is filled with flittering bats. There is another sound, also of wings beating at the cold night air, but that sound is not being made by anything like a bat.
“This card,” says Maddy, “is the High Priestess. She has many meanings, depending.”
“Depending on what?” I want to know.
“Depending on many things,” Maddy says and smiles. Her Tarot cards are spread out on the mossy paving stones on her side of the black iron gate. She taps at the High Priestess with an index finger. “In this instance, I’d suspect a future that has yet to be revealed, and duality, and hidden influences at work in your life.”
“I’m not sure what you mean by duality,” I tell her, so she explains.
“The Empress, she sits there on her throne, with a pillar on either side. Some say, these are two pillars from the Temple of Solomon, king of the Israelites and a powerful mystic. And some say that the woman on the throne is Pope Joan.”
“I never knew there was a woman pope,” I say.
“There probably wasn’t. It’s just a legend from the Middle Ages.” And then Maddy brushes a stray wisp of hair from her eyes before she goes back to explaining duality and the card’s symbolism. “On the Empress’ right hand is a dark pillar, which is called Boaz. It represents the negative life principle. On her left is a white pillar, Jakin, which represents the positive life principle. Positive and negative, that’s duality, and because she sits here between them, we know that the Empress represents balance.”
Maddy turns over another card, the Wheel of Fortune, but it’s upside down, reversed.
I am twenty-five years old, and Isobel Endecott is asleep in the bed we share in her loft on Atlantic Avenue. I lie awake, listening to her breathing and the myriad of noises from the street three stories below. It’s four minutes after three a.m., and I briefly consider taking an Ambien. But I don’t want to sleep. That’s the truth of it. There’s so little time left to me, and I’d rather not spend it in dreams. The night is fast approaching when the Starry Wisdom will meet on my behalf, because of what I’ve brought with me on that train from Savannah, and on that night I will slip this mortal coil (or be pushed, one or the other or both), and there’ll be time enough for dreaming when I’m dead and in my grave, or during whatever’s to come after my resurrection.
I find a pencil and a notepad. The latter has the name of the law firm that Isobel works for printed across the top of each page: Jackson, Monk, & Rowe, with an ampersand instead of “and” being written out. I don’t bother to put on my robe. I go to the bathroom wearing only my panties, and stand before the wide mirror above the sink and stare back at my reflection a few minutes. I’ve never thought of myself as pretty, and I still don’t. Tonight, I look like someone who hasn’t slept much in a while. My hazel eyes seem more green than brown, when it’s usually the other way around. The tattoo between my breasts is beginning to heal, the ink worked into my skin by the thin, nervous man designated the Ace of Pentacles by the High Priestess of the Church of Starry Wisdom.
I write Aramat on the notepad, then hold it up to the mirror. I read it aloud, as it appears in the looking glass, and then I do the same with Isobel Endecott, speaking utter nonsense, my voice low so I won’t wake Isobel. In the mirror, my jade amulet does its impossible trick, which I first noticed a few nights after I bought it from a fastidious man in a shop on West Broughton Street. The reflection of the letters carved around the base, beneath the claws of the doglike beast, are precisely the same as when I look directly at them. The mirror does not reverse the image of the pendant. I have never yet found a mirror that will. I turn away from the sink, gazing into the darkness framed by the bathroom door.
I stand on a beach.
I sit on a sidewalk, eleven years old, and a woman named Maddy passes me the Wheel of Fortune between the bars of an iron gate.
MEMORY FAILS, AND MY THOUGHTS BECOME AN apparently disordered torrent. I’m a dead woman recalling the events of a life I have relinquished, a life I have repudiated. I sit in this chair at this desk and hold this pen in my hand because Isobel has asked it of me, not because I have any motivation of my own to speak of all the moments that have led me here. I’m helpless to deny her, so I didn’t bother asking why she would have me write this. I did very nearly ask why she didn’t request it before, when I was living and still bound by the beeline perception of time that marshals human recollection into more conventional recitals. But then an epiphany, or something like an epiphany, and I understood, without having asked. No linear account would ever satisfy the congregation of the Church of Starry Wisdom, for they seek more occult patterns, less intuitive paths, some alternate perception of the relationships between past and present, between one moment and the next (or, for that matter, one moment and the last). Cause and effect have not exactly been rejected, but have been found severely wanting.
“That is you,” says Madeleine, passing me the Tarot card. “You are the Wheel of Fortune, an avatar of Tyche, the goddess of fate.”
“I don’t understand,” I tell her, reluctantly accepting the card, taking it from her because I enjoy her company and don’t wish to be rude.
“In time,” she says, “it may make sense,” then gathers her deck and hurries back inside that dilapidated house on East Hall Street, kept safe from the world behind its moldering yellow brick walls.
Burning, I lie down upon the cold granite altar. Soon, my lover, the Empress, climbs on top of me—straddling my hips—while the ragged High Priestess snarls her incantations, while the Major Arcana and the Minor Arcana and all the members of the Four Suits (Pentacles, Cups, Swords, and Staves) chant mantras borrowed from the Al Azif.
The Acela Express rattles and sways and dips as it hurries me through Connecticut, and then Rhode Island, on my way to South Station. Because I could not stop for Death, He kindly stopped for me… The woman sitting next to me is reading a book by an author I’ve never heard of, and the man across the aisle is busy with his laptop.
I come awake to the dank embrace of the clayey soil that fills in my grave. It presses down on me, that astounding, unexpected weight, wishing to pin me forever to this spot. I am, after all, an abomination and an outlaw in the eyes of biology. I’ve cheated. The ferryman waits for a passenger who will never cross his river, or whose crossing has been delayed indefinitely. I lie here, not yet moving, marveling at every discomfort and at my collapsed lungs and the dirt filling my mouth and throat. I was not even permitted the luxury of a coffin.
“Caskets offend the Mother and the Father,” said the High Priestess. “What use have they of an offering they cannot touch?”
I drift in a fog of pain and impenetrable night. I cannot open my sunken eyes. And even now, through this agony and confusion, I’m aware of the jade pendant’s presence, icy against the tattoo on my chest.
I awaken in my bed, in my mother’s house, a few nights after her funeral. I lie still, listening to my heartbeat and the settling noises that old houses make when they think no one will hear. I lie there, listening for the sound that reached into my dream of a Dutch churchyard and dragged me back to consciousness—the mournful baying of a monstrous hound.
On the altar, beneath those smoking braziers, the Empress has begun to clean the mud and filth and maggots from my body. The Priestess mutters caustic sorceries, invoking those nameless gods burdened with innumerable names. The congregation chants. I am delirious, lost in some fever that afflicts the risen, and I wonder if Lazarus knew it, or Osiris, or if it is suffered by Persephone every spring? I’m not certain if this is the night of my rebirth or the night of my death. Possibly, they are not even two distinct events, but only a single one, a serpent looping forever back upon itself, tail clasped tightly between venomous jaws. I struggle to speak, but my vocal cords haven’t healed enough to permit more than the most incoherent, guttural croaking.
…I am Lazarus, come from the dead,
Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all…
“Hush, hush,” says the Empress, wiping earth and hungry larvae from my face. “The words will come, my darling. Be patient, and the words will come back to you. You didn’t crawl into Hell and all the way up again to be struck mute. Hush.” I know that Isobel Endecott is trying to console me, but I can also hear the fear and doubt and misgiving in her voice.
“Hush,” she says.
All around me, on the sand, are dead fish and crabs and the carcasses of gulls and pelicans.
It’s summer in Savannah, and from the wide verandah of the house on East Hall Street, an older woman calls to Maddy, ordering her back inside. She leaves me holding that single card, my card, and I sit there on the sidewalk for another half hour, staring at it intently, trying to make sense of the card and what Maddy has told me. A blue sphinx squats atop the Wheel of Fortune, and below it there is the nude figure of a man with red skin and the head of a dog.
“You are taking too long,” snaps the High Priestess, and Isobel answers her in an angry burst of French. I cannot speak French, but I’m not so ignorant that I don’t know it when I hear it spoken. I wonder dimly what Isobel has said, and I adore her for the outburst, for her brashness, for talking back. I begin to suspect something has gone wrong with the ritual, but the thought doesn’t frighten me. Though I’m still more than half blind, my eyes still raw and rheumy, I strain desperately for a better view of Isobel. In all the wide world, at this instant, there is nothing I want but her and nothing else I can imagine needing.
This is a Saturday morning, and I’m a few weeks from my tenth birthday. I’m sitting in the swing on the back porch. My mother is just inside the screen door, in the kitchen, talking to someone on the telephone. I can hear her voice quite plainly. It’s a warm day late in February, and the sky above our house is an immaculate and seemingly inviolable shade of blue. I’ve been daydreaming, woolgathering, staring up at that sky, past the sagging eaves of the porch, when I hear something and notice that there’s a very large black dog only a few yards away from me. It’s standing in the gravel alleyway that separates our tiny backyard from that of the next house over. I have no way of knowing how long the dog has been standing there. I watch it, and it watches me. The dog has bright amber eyes, and isn’t wearing a collar or tags. I’ve never before seen a dog smile, but this dog is smiling. After five minutes or so, it growls softly, then turns and trots away down the alley. I decide not to tell my mother about the smiling dog. She probably wouldn’t believe me anyway.
“What was that you said to her?” I ask Isobel, several nights after my resurrection. We’re sitting together on the floor of her loft on Atlantic, and there’s a Beatles album playing on the turntable.
“What did I say to who?” she wants to know.
“The High Priestess. You said something to her in French, while I was still on the altar. I’d forgotten about it until this morning. You sounded angry. I don’t understand French, so I don’t know what you said.”
“It doesn’t really matter what I said,” she replies, glancing over the liner notes for Hey Jude. “It only matters that I said it. The old woman is a coward…”
Somewhere in North Carolina, the rhythm of the train’s wheels against the rails lulls me to sleep. I dream of a neglected Dutch graveyard and the amulet, of hurricanes and smiling black dogs. Maddy is also in my dreams, reading fortunes at a carnival. I can smell sawdust and cotton candy, horseshit and sweating bodies. Maddy sits on a milking stool inside a tent beneath a canvas banner emblazoned with the words Lo! Behold! The Strikefire & Z. B. Harbinger Wonder Show! in bold crimson letters fully five feet high.
She turns another card, the Wheel of Fortune.
I lie in my grave, fully cognizant but immobile, unable to summon the will or the physical strength to begin worming my way towards the surface, six feet overhead. I lie there, thinking of Maddy and the jade pendant. I lie there considering, in the mocking solitude of my burial place, what it does and does not mean that I’ve returned with absolutely no conscious knowledge of anything I may have experienced in death. Whatever secrets the Starry Wisdom sent me off to discover remain secrets. After all that has been risked and forfeited, I have no revelations to offer my fellow seekers. They’ll ask their questions, and I’ll have no answers. This should upset me, but it doesn’t.
Now I can hear footsteps on the roof of my narrow house. Something is pacing heavily, back and forth, snuffling at the recently disturbed earth where I’ve been planted like a tulip bulb, like an acorn, like a seed that will unfold, but surely never sprout.
It goes about on four feet, I think, not two.
The hound bays.
I wonder, will it kindly dig me up, this restless visitor? And I wonder, too, about the rumors of the others who’ve worn the jade pendant before me, and the stories of their fates. Those two ghoulish Englishmen in 1922, for instance; they cross my reanimated mind. As does a passage from François-Honoré Balfour’s notorious grimoire, Cultes des Goules, and a few stray lines from the Al Azif. My bestial caller suddenly stops pacing and begins scratching at the soft dirt, urging me to move.
In the temple, as my lover takes my hand and I’m led towards the altar stone, through the fire devouring me from the inside out, the High Priestess of the Starry Wisdom reminds us all that only once in every thousand years does the hound choose a wife. Only once each millennium is any living woman accorded that privilege.
My train pulls into a depot somewhere in southern Rhode Island, grumbling to a slow stop, and my dreams are interrupted by other passengers bustling about around me, retrieving their bags and briefcases, talking too loudly. Or I’m jarred awake by the simple fact that the train is no longer moving.
After sex, I lie in bed with Isobel, and the only light comes from the television set mounted on the wall across the room. The sound is turned down, so the black-and-white world trapped inside that box exists in perfect grainy silence. I’m trying to tell her about the pacing thing from the night I awoke. I’m trying to describe the snuffling noises and the way it worried at the ground with its sharp claws. But she only scowls and shakes her head dismissively.
“No,” she insists. “The hound is nothing but a metaphor. We weren’t meant to take it literally. Whatever you heard that night, you imagined it, that’s all. You heard what some part of you expected, and maybe even needed, to hear. But the hound, it’s a superstition, and we’re not superstitious people.”
“Isobel, I fucking died,” I say, trying not to laugh, gazing across her belly towards the television. “And I came back from the dead. I tunneled out of my grave with my bare hands and then, blind, found my way to the temple alone. My flesh was already rotting, and now it’s good as new. Those things actually happened, to me, and you don’t doubt that they happened. You practice necromancy, but you want me to think I’m being superstitious if I believe that the hound is real?”
She’s quiet for a long moment. Finally, she says, “I worry about you, that’s all. You’re so very precious to me, to all of us, and you’ve been through so much already.” And she closes her hand tightly around the amulet still draped about my neck.
On a sweltering August day in Savannah, a fastidious man who sells antique jewelry and Chinese porcelain makes no attempt whatsoever to hide his relief when I tell him I’ve decided to buy the jade pendant. As he rings up the sale, he asks me if I’m a good Christian girl. He talks about the Pentecost, then admits he’ll be glad to have the pendant out of his shop.
I stand on a beach.
I board a train.
Maddy turns another card.
And on the altar of the Church of Starry Wisdom, I draw a deep, hitching breath. I smell incense burning and hear the lilting voices of all those assembled for my homecoming. My heart is a sledgehammer battering at my chest, and I would scream, but I can’t even speak. Isobel Endecott is straddling me, and her right hand goes to my vagina. With her fingers, she scoops out the slimy plug of soil and minute branches of fungal hyphae that has filled my sex during the week and a half I’ve spent below. When the pad of her thumb brushes my clit, every shadow and shape half-glimpsed by my wounded eyes seems to glow, as if my lust is contagious, as though light and darkness have become sympathetic. I lunge for her, my jaws snapping like the jaws of any starving creature; there are tears in her eyes as I’m restrained by the Sun and the Moon. The Hanged Man places a leather strap between my teeth.
Madness rides on the star-wind…
“Hush,” Isobel whispers. “Hush, hush,” whispers the Empress. “It’ll pass.”
It’s the day I leave Savannah for the last time. In the bedroom of the house where I grew up, I pack the few things that still hold meaning for me. These include a photo album, and tucked inside the album is the Tarot card that the woman named Madeleine gave me.
ISOBEL IS WATCHING ME FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE dining room. She’s been watching, while I write, for the better part of an hour. She asks, “How does it end? Do you even know?”
“Maybe it doesn’t end,” I reply. “I half think it’s hardly even started.”
“Then how will you know when to stop?” she asks. There’s dread wedged in between every word she speaks, between every syllable.
“I don’t think I will,” I say, this thought occurring to me for the first time. She nods, then stands and leaves the room, and when she’s gone, I’m glad. I can’t deny that there is a certain solace in her absence. I’ve been trying not to look too closely at Isobel’s eyes. I don’t like what I see there anymore…