‘Good morning, Dr Campbell.’
A moment before she can reply, two heartbeats before she can even look away from the revolver, the sun dull off its stubby chrome barrel, and ‘Good morning, Maire,’ she finally says. Her mouth is dry and the words come out small and flat.
‘Did ye sleep well, then?’ the girl asks and Anne nods her head and Maire turns back towards the ledge, back towards the sea. ‘I was afraid you might have bad dreams,’ she says, ‘After lookin’ at those pictures.’
‘What is it, Maire, the disc in the photograph? You know what it is, don’t you?’ and Anne takes one step closer to the girl, one step closer to the point where the sod ends and the grey stone begins.
‘I didn’t kill him,’ the girl says. ‘I want ye to know that. I didn’t do it, and neither did Billy.’ Her finger tight and trembling around the trigger now and Anne is only a few feet away, only two or three more steps between them and ‘It’s bad enough, what we’ve done. But it wasn’t murder.’
‘You’re going to have to tell me what you’re talking about,’ Anne says, afraid to move, afraid to stand still, and the girl turns towards her again.
‘You weren’t meant to see the pictures, Dr Campbell. I was supposed to burn them. After we’d done with the tracks, we were supposed to burn everything.’
Fresh tears from the girl’s bright eyes and Anne can see where she’s chewed her lower lip raw, fresh blood on her pale chin and Anne takes another step towards her.
‘Why were you supposed to burn the pictures? Did Morris tell you to burn the pictures, Maire?’
A blank, puzzled expression on the girl’s face then, her ragged smile gone for a moment before she shakes her head, rubs the barrel of the gun rough against her corduroy pants. And then she says something that Anne doesn’t understand, something that sounds like ‘Theena dow’an,’ and ‘I don’t know Irish,’ Anne says, pleading now, wanting to understand and she can see the hurt and anger in Maire’s eyes, the bottomless guilt growing there like a cancer. The girl raises the revolver and sets the barrel against her right temple.
‘Oh God, please Maire,’ and the girl says it again, ‘Theena dow’an,’ and she turns back towards the sea at the same instant she squeezes the trigger and the sound the gun makes is the sound from Anne Campbell’s nightmare, the sound of the sky ripping itself apart, the sound of the waves breaking against the shore.
‘In the west there is still a tradition of the Fomorii who dwelt in Ireland before the arrival of the Gael. They are perhaps the most feared of all the water fairies and are sometimes known as the Daoine Domhain, the Deep Ones, though they are rarely spoken of aloud.’
— Lady Wilde, Ancient Legends of Ireland (1888)
Caitlín R. Kiernan lives in Birmingham, Alabama. Trained as a palaeontologist, she didn’t begin writing fiction until 1992. Since then, her short stories have appeared in numerous anthologies, including Dark Terrors 2 and 3, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Eleventh Annual Collection, and The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror Volume Nine and Ten. Her debut novel, Silk, received both The International Horror Guild and Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage Awards for best first novel of 1998. More recently, two collections of her short fiction have been released — Tales of Pain and Wonder from Gauntlet Press, and From Weird and Distant Shores from Michael Matthews Press. ‘“Valentia” was written in July 1999,’ the author reveals, ‘immediately after a visit to the American Museum of Natural History to examine mosasaur fossils (mosasaurs are a group of large marine lizards which became extinct about sixty-five million years ago), and is the sort of story that usually results when I’m in the process of “shifting gears” from my palaeontological studies to fiction writing. The Devonian tetrapod tracks described in the story are real, discovered at Valentia Island in 1992 by the Swiss geologist Ivan Stossel. However, in “Valentia” I have relocated them to Culloo. As of this writing, the Geological Survey of Ireland is in the process of acquiring the actual site so that its fossils may be preserved and protected from looters.’
RICHARD CHRISTIAN MATHESON
Barking Sands
On vacation.
Hawaii. Where fat, brown people treat flowers like Jesus.
All us.
Mommy. Daddy. Grampa Don.
My brother who came out of Mommy with less brain than a cat. He smiles at everything. I call him Kitty. Daddy thinks it’s funny. Kitty can only open his mouth and stare and shake. Like there’s a maraca inside him.
We rented a Toyota Tercel.
‘Cheapest car worth dog-fuck.’ That’s Grampa Don talking. Mommy hates it when he says dirty stuff. But he’s always drinking beer. Loses track of where his tongue is pointing and just says it. Grampa Don’s always making trouble.
We’re on our way to Barking Sands.
It’s a beach on the southern tip of Kauai. The sand barks there. Big, bald-headed dunes of it chirping and growling like someone is poking it while it sleeps. The wind does it; like a ventriloquist using the grains of sand as its dummy. It’s a very sacred place. They say the ancient tribes are still living on the cliffs way above Barking Sands. I say that inside the Tercel while it bounces over the muddy road. The mud is red and splashes the car so it looks like it has scrapes that are bleeding. Like when Kitty falls down and cries and I just stand and watch him and hope he bleeds to death.
‘There’s no tribes still living,’ says Mommy, eating an ice cream cone I couldn’t finish, making sure it doesn’t drip on the upholstery.
Her tongue moves around it like a red bus going up a twisty road. Daddy breathes in the air and says it hasn’t smelled like this in Los Angeles since cave men went to work in three-piece fur suits.
Grampa Don spits out the window, and the car hops and rocks, having a spaz attack. The Kauai roads feel like the moon. There’s no one going out to Barking Sands but us. It’s getting late and the road is lonely.
It is the moon. Just on earth.
The sky will be dead soon. I feel a little afraid but for no reason.
Kitty looks at me and smiles but sees my face and starts to cry. If I had a knife I’d slash his throat. I imagine his dead body lying face-up, in the casket, suddenly awake. Screaming and trying to get out but making no sound. Muted by the birth defect that gave him a busted speaker. I feel bad for him down there, trapped forever under the earth, stuck in his box, screaming. But he’ll never do anything with his life anyway.
Maybe it’s better to know where he is.
Grampa Don just cut one and all four windows are cranked down. A sweet and sour old-man cloud is sucked out. The blue ocean is starting to seem like a choking face. We’re far from the hotel where we’re staying and I hate Hawaii. Being here with them.
Last night we went to a Luau and I stared at the pig on the long table. He looked alive. But his eyes didn’t move and as I tried to figure out what he was thinking, a big smiling man, in a white apron, cut into the pig with a shiny knife and slid a section of the pig’s body right out, like one of those wooden ball puzzles that’s made of different sections of wood.
He dropped it on my plate and the pig kept staring forward, unable to fight back. The man motioned me to move on with his bloody knife, and began to cut the pig into more pieces, erasing him.
I looked down at the piece of the pig and felt like throwing up.
Later I brought the piece back and tried to put it where it had been on his body; reattaching his flesh. But by then, he was just bones and a head. The eyes were still facing forward and I pet him a little, seeing my own value as no higher than his, and hating people for what they’d done to him.