She hadn’t worked out anyway. Didn’t want a new start. Just wanted what she’d had.
Doesn’t matter. I like a change. This life, I think it could be different. Could go on for longer. Well . . . to be honest, you only ever get about three, four days. But this will definitely be easier than the last one. More relaxing.
No sign of kids, for a start.
CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN born in Ireland and now lives in Atlanta, Georgia. She has published five novels: Silk, Threshold, The Five of Cups, Low Red Moon and, most recently, Murder of Angels, and her short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, Wrong Things (with Poppy Z. Brite) and To Charles Fort, With Love. She is currently writing her sixth novel, Daughter of Hounds.
Kiernan has a great affection for the sea, although her stories might lead you to believe otherwise.
As the author explains: “This short story is the third in a trilogy that began with ‘A Redress for Andromeda’ and also includes ‘Nor the Demons Down Under the Sea’. All these stories centre on the Dandridge House and the fate of Meredith Dandridge, but I think ‘Andromeda Among the Stones’ is by far the most effective and fully realised of them all. This is me playing with the short story as epic, something I’ve been reluctant to do for much of my writing career.
“The story was written in October 2002 and was composed entirely to Empires by VNV Nation (Metropolis Records, 2000).”
“I cannot think of the deep sea without shuddering
—H. P. Lovecraft
I
October 1914
“IS SHE REALLY AND truly dead, Father?” the girl asked, and Machen Dandridge, already an old man at fifty-one, looked up at the low buttermilk sky again and closed the black book clutched in his hands. He’d carved the tall headstone himself, the marker for his wife’s grave there by the relentless Pacific, black shale obelisk with its hasty death’s head, and his daughter stepped gingerly around the raw earth and pressed her fingers against the monument.
“Why did you not give her to the sea?” she asked. “She always wanted to go down to the sea at the end. She often told me so.”
“I’ve given her back to the earth instead,” Machen told her and rubbed at his eyes. The cold sunlight through thin clouds enough to make his head ache, his daughter’s voice like thunder, and he shut his aching eyes for a moment. Just a little comfort in the almost blackness trapped behind his lids, parchment skin too insubstantial to bring the balm of genuine darkness, void to match the shades of his soul, and Machen whispered one of the prayers from the heavy black book and then looked at the grave again.
“Well, that’s what she always said,” the girl said again, running her fingertips across the rough-hewn stone.
“Things changed at the end, child. The sea wouldn’t have taken her. I had to give her back to the earth.”
“She said it was a sacrilege, planting people in the ground like wheat, like kernels of corn.”
“She did?” and he glanced anxiously over his left shoulder, looking back across the waves the wind was making in the high and yellow-brown grass, the narrow trail leading back down to the tall and brooding house that he’d built for his wife twenty-four years ago, back towards the cliffs and the place where the sea and sky blurred seamlessly together.
“Yes, she did. She said only barbarians and heathens stick their dead in the ground like turnips.”
“I had no choice,” Machen replied, wondering if that was the truth, exactly, or only something he’d like to believe. “The sea wouldn’t take her, and I couldn’t bring myself to burn her.”
“Only heathens burn their dead,” his daughter said disapprovingly and leaned close to the obelisk, setting her ear against the charcoal shale.
“Do you hear anything?”
“No, Father. Of course not. She’s dead. You just said so.”
“Yes,” Machen whispered. “She is.” And the wind whipping across the hillside made a hungry, waiting sound that told him it was time for them to head back to the house.
This is where I stand, at the bottom gate, and I hold the key to the abyss . . .
“But it’s better that way,” the girl said, her ear still pressed tight against the obelisk. “She couldn’t stand the pain any longer. It was cutting her up inside.”
“She told you that?”
“She didn’t have to tell me that. I saw it in her eyes.”
The ebony key to the first day and the last, the key to the moment when the stars wink out, one by one, and the sea heaves its rotting belly at the empty, sagging sky . . .
“You’re only a child,” he said. “You shouldn’t have had to see such things. Not yet.”
“It can’t very well be helped now,” she answered and stepped away from her mother’s grave, one hand cupping her ear like maybe it had begun to hurt. “You know that, old man.”
“I do,” and he almost said her name then, Meredith, his mother’s name, but the wind was too close, the listening wind and the salt-and-semen stink of the breakers crashing against the cliffs. “But I can wish it were otherwise.”
“If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.”
And Machen watched silently as Meredith Dandridge knelt in the grass and placed her handful of wilting wildflowers on the freshly-turned soil; if it were spring instead of autumn, he thought, there would be dandelions and poppies. If it were spring instead of autumn, the woman wrapped in a quilt and nailed up inside a pine-board casket would still be breathing. If it were spring, they would not be alone now, him and his daughter at the edge of the world. The wind teased the girl’s long yellow hair, and the sun glittered dimly in her warm brown eyes.
The key I have accepted full in the knowledge of its weight.
“Remember me,” Meredith whispered, either to her dead mother or something else, and he didn’t ask her which.
“We should be heading back now,” he said and glanced over his shoulder again.
“So soon? Is that all you’re going to read from the book? Is that all of it?”
“Yes, that’s all of it, for now,” though there would be more, later, when the harvest moon swelled orange-red and bloated and hung itself in the wide California night. When the women came to dance, then there would be other words to say, to keep his wife in the ground and the gate shut for at least another year.
The weight that is the weight of all salvation, the weight that holds the line against the last, unending night.
“It’s better this way,” his daughter said again, standing up, brushing the dirt off her stockings, from the hem of her black dress. “There was so little left of her.”
“Don’t talk of that here,” Machen replied, more sternly than he’d intended, but Meredith didn’t seem to have noticed, or if she’d noticed, not to have minded the tone of her father’s voice.
“I will remember her the way she was before, when she was still beautiful.”
“That’s what she would want,” he said and took his daughter’s hand. “That’s the way I’ll remember her, as well,” but he knew that was a lie, as false as any lie any living man ever uttered. Knew that he would always see his wife as the writhing, twisted thing she’d become at the last, the way she was after the gates were almost thrown open and she placed herself on the threshold.
The frozen weight of the sea, the burning weight of starlight and my final breath. I hold the line. I hold the ebony key against the last day of all.