Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Volume One) Read Free

Trafalgar Square and had finally seemed to engulf the whole of London. He’d died in some unnamed village along the Belgian border, a little east of Valenciennes, a senseless German ambush only hours before the cease-fire. 
    She laid her spoon aside, and watched the spreading stain it made on her napkin. The sky was ugly, bruised.
    A man named MacDonnell, a grey-bearded Scotsman, had come to her house, bearing Jonathan’s personal things – his pipe, the brass-framed daguerreotype of her, an unfinished letter. The silver crucifix he’d worn like a scar the last twenty years. The man had tried to comfort her, offering half-heard reassurances that her husband had been as fine a corporal as any on the Front. She thought, sometimes, that she might have been more grateful to him for his trouble.
    She still had the unfinished letter carried with her from London, and she might look at it again later, though she knew it almost by heart now. Scribblings she could hardly recognize as his, mad and rambling words about something bestial trailing his battalion through the fields and muddy trenches. 
    Mina sipped her tea, barely noticing that it had gone cold, and watched the clouds outside as they swept in from the sea and rushed across the rocky headland.
     
    A soupy fog in the morning, misty ghosts of ships and men torn apart on the reef, and Mina Harker followed the curve of stairs up from the town, past the ruined Abbey, and into the old East Cliff churchyard. It seemed that even more of the tombstones had tumbled over, and she remembered the old sailors and fishermen and whalers that had come here before, Mr. Swales and the others, and wondered if anyone ever came here now. She found a bench and sat, looking back down to where Whitby lay hidden from view. The yellow lantern eyes of the lighthouses winked in the distance, bookending the invisible town below.
    She unfolded Jonathan’s letter and the chilling breeze fingered the edges of the paper.
    The foghorns sounded, that throaty bellow, perplexed and lonesome.
    Before leaving London, she’d taken all the papers, the typed pages and old notebooks, the impossible testament of the Company, from the wall safe where Jonathan had kept them. Now they were tucked carefully inside the brocade canvas satchel resting on the sandy cobbles at her feet.
    “ …and burn them, Mina, burn every trace of what we have seen, ” scrawled in that handwriting that was Jonathan’s, and no one’s she’d ever met.
    And so she had sat at the hearth, these records in her lap, watching the flames, feeling the heat on her face. Had lifted a letter to Lucy from the stack, held the envelope a moment, teasing the fire as a child might tease a cat with table scraps.
    “No,” whispered, closing her eyes against the hungry orange glow and putting the letter back with the rest. All I have left, and I’m not that strong.
    Far out at sea, she thought she heard bells, and down near Tate Hill Pier, a dog barking. But the fog made a game of sound, and she couldn’t be sure she’d heard anything but the surf and her own breathing. Mina lifted the satchel and set it on the bench beside her.
    Earlier that morning she’d stood before the looking glass in her room at the inn, staring into the soft eyes of a young woman, not someone who had seen almost forty-two years and the horrors of her twentieth. As she had so often done when standing before her own mirrors, she’d looked for the age that should have begun to crease and ruin her face and found only the faintest crow’s feet.
    “ …every trace, Mina, if we are ever to be truly free of this terrible damnation. ”
    She opened the satchel and laid Jonathan’s letter inside, pressed it between the pages of his old diary, then snapped the clasp shut again. Now, she thought, filled suddenly with the old anger, black and acid. I might fling it into the sea, lose these memories here, where it all started.
    Instead, she hugged the bag tightly to her and