So that was all. I went home even less after that, so I never saw Joe again. But I saw them. Not her, not Joe's blonde or the cop or the guy from Priscilla's apartment, but others. Apparently once you'd seen them, you couldn't not see them. They were around. Sometimes they would dive me a nod, like they knew me. I kept on trucking, got my degree, got a job, got a life, and saw them some more.
I don't see them any more frequently but no less, either. They're around. If I don't see them, I see where they've been. A lot of the same places I've been. Sometimes I don't think about them and it's like a small intermission of freedom, but it doesn't last, of course. I see them and they see me and some day they'll find the time to come for me. So far, I've survived relevance and hedonism and I'm not a yuppie. Nor my brother's keeper.
But I'm something. I was always going to be something some day. And eventually, they're going to find out what it is.
So Runs the World Away
Caitlin R. Kiernan
Caitlin R. Kiernan's short fiction has been collected in Tales of Pain and Wonder and Candles for Elizabeth, as well as the forthcoming From Weird and Distant Shores., and has appeared in such anthologies as Love in Vein II, The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror. Her multiple award-winning first novel , Silk, was published in 1998 and it was followed recently by Trilobite.
" Some time in 1995," she reveals, "I publicly vowed to stop writing stories about vampires for at least six years and also encouraged other writers to do the same. Though I am a great admirer of good vampire fiction, a commodity almost as scarce as hens' teeth, and although I'd written and sold a vampire novel of my own (the wisely 'suppressed', or fortunately stillborn , The Five of Cups,), I could see very little sense in fantasy writers continuing to grind out mediocre tales of bloodsucking fiends when the shelves were already haemorrhaging with the things .
" So I did stop. I wrote no new vampire stories for five years (that's almost six, I tell myself). And then I got an idea, which actually had a lot more to do with ghouls, originally; but, somehow, vampires ended up worming their way in and taking over. I suppose that's what vampires do .
Anyway, that's how I came to write 'So Runs the World Away'.
" Now, if I can only make it another five years "
A falling star for your thoughts," she says and Gable, the girl with foil-silver eyes and teeth like the last day of winter, points at the night sky draped high above Providence and the wide Seekonk River. Night-secret New England sky, and a few miles further north you have to call it the Pawtucket River, but down here, where it laps fishy against Swan Point and the steep cemetery slopes, down here it's still the Seekonk and way over there are the orange industrial lights of Phillips-dale; Dead Girl blinks once or twice to get the taste out of her mouth, and then she follows Gable's grimy finger all the way up to heaven and there's the briefest streak of white light drawn quick across the eastern sky.
"That's very nice, but they aren't really, you know," she says and Gable makes a face, pale face squinched up like a very old woman, dried-apple face to say she doesn't understand and, "Aren't really what ?" she asks.
"Stars," says Dead Girl. "They're only meteorites. Just chunks of rock and metal flying around through space and burning up if they get too close. But they aren't stars. Not if they fall like that."
"Or angels," Bobby whispers and then goes right back to eating from the handful of blackberries he's picked from the brambles growing along the water's edge.
"I never said anything about angels," Gable growls at the boy, and he throws a blackberry at her. "There are lots of different words for angels."
"And for falling stars," Dead Girl says with a stony finality so they'll know that's all she wants to hear about it; meteorites that stop being meteors, Seekonk changing into Pawtucket, and in the end it's nothing but the distance between this point and that. As arbitrary as any change, and so she presses her lips against the jogging lady's left wrist again. Not even the sheet-thin ghost of a pulse left in there, cooling meat against her teeth, flesh that might as well be clay except there are still a few red mouthfuls and the sound of her busy lips isn't all that different from the sound of the waves against the shore.
"I know seven words for grey," Bobby says, talking through a mouthful of seeds and pulp and the dark juice dribbling down his bloodstained chin. "I got them out of a dictionary."
"You're a little faggot," Gable snarls at the boy, those narrow mercury eyes and her lower lip stuck way out like maybe someone's been beating her again, and Dead Girl knows she shouldn't have argued with Gable about falling stars and angels. Next time, she thinks, I'll remember that. Next time I'll smile and say whatever she wants me to say. And when she's finally finished with the jogging lady, Dead Girl's the first one to slip quiet as a mousey in silk bedroom slippers across the mud and pebbles and the river is as cold as the unfailing stars speckling the August night.
An hour and four minutes past midnight in the big house on Benefit Street and the ghouls are still picking at the corpses in the basement. Dead Girl sits with Bobby on the stairs that lead back up to the music and conversation overhead, the electric lights and acrid-sweet clouds of opium smoke; down here there are only candles and the air smells like bare dirt walls and mildew, like the embalmed meat spread out on the ghouls' long carving table. When they work like this, the ghouls stand up on their crooked hind legs and press their canine faces close together. The very thin one named Barnaby (his nervous ears alert to every footfall overhead, every creaking door, as if anyone up there even cares what they're up to down here) picks up a rusty boning knife and uses it to lift a strip of dry flesh the colour of old chewing gum.
"That's the gastrocnemius," he says and the yellow-orange iris of his left eye drifts nervously towards the others, towards Madam Terpsichore, especially, who shakes her head and laughs the way that all ghouls laugh. The way starving dogs would laugh, Dead Girl thinks, if they ever dared, and she's starting to wish she and Bobby had gone down to Warwick with Gable and the Bailiff after all.
"No, that's the soleus, dear," Madam Terpsichore says, and sneers at Barnaby, that practised curl of black lips to flash her jaundiced teeth like sharpened piano keys, a pink-red flick of her long tongue along the edge of her muzzle, and " That's the gastrocnemius, there," she says. "You haven't been paying attention."
Barnaby frowns and scratches at his head. "Well, if we ever got anything fresh, maybe I could keep them straight," he grumbles, making excuses again, and Dead Girl knows the dissection is beginning to bore Bobby. He's staring over his shoulder at the basement door, the warm sliver of light getting in around the edges.
"Now, show me the lower terminus of the long peroneal," Madam Terpsichore says, her professorial litany and the impatient clatter of Barnaby digging about in his kit for a pair of poultry shears or an oyster fork, one or the other or something else entirely.
"You want to go back upstairs for a while?" Dead Girl asks the boy and he shrugs, but doesn't take his eyes off the basement door, doesn't turn back around to watch the ghouls.
"Well, come on then," and she stands up, takes his hand, and that's when Madam Terpsichore finally notices them,
"Please don't go, dear," she says. "It's always better with an audience, and if Master Barnaby ever finds the proper instrument, there may be a flensing yet," and the other ghouls snicker and laugh.
"I don't think I like them very much," Bobby whispers very quietly and Dead Girl only nods and leads him back up the stairs to the party.