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

watched the lighthouses as the day began to burn the mist away.
     
    Before dusk, the high clouds had stacked themselves out beyond Kettleness, filling the eastern sky with thunderheads, bruise-black underbellies already dumping sheets of rain on a foamy white sea. Before midnight, the storm had reared above Whitby Harbor and made landfall. In her narrow room above the kitchen, framed in wood and plaster and faded gingham wallpaper haunted by a hundred thousand boiled cabbages, Mina dreamed.
    She was sitting at the small window, shutters thrown back, watching the storm walk the streets, feeling the icy salt spray and rain on her face. Jonathan’s gold pocket watch lay open on the writing desk, ticking loud above the crash and boom outside. MacDonnell had not brought the watch back from Belgium, and she’d not asked him about it.
    Regardless, there it lay, ticking. Quick and palsied fingers of lightning forked above the rooftops and washed the world in an instant of daylight.
    On the bed behind her, Lucy said something about Churchill and the cold wind, and she laughed. Chandelier diamond tinkling and asylum snigger between velvet and gossamer and rust-scabbed iron bars.
    And still laughing, she says, “Bitch…apostate, Wilhelmina coward.”
    Mina looked down, watching the hands, hour, minute, second, racing themselves around the dial. The fob was twisted and crusted with something unpleasantly dark.
    “Lucy, please…” and her voice came from very far away, and it sounded like a child asking to be allowed up past her bedtime.
    Groan and bedspring creak, linen rustle and a sound even wetter than the pounding rain. Lucy Westenra’s footsteps moved across the bare floor, heels clocking, ticking off the shortening distance.
    Mina looked back down, and Drawbridge Road was absurdly crowded with bleating sheep, soppy wool in the downpour. The gangling shepherd was a scarecrow blown from the wheat fields west of Whitby. Twiggy fingers emerged from beneath his burlap sleeves, as he drove his flock towards the Harbor.
    Lucy was standing very close now. Stronger than the rain and the old cabbage stink, anger that smelled like blood, and garlic bulbs, and dust. Mina watched the sheep and the storm. 
    “Turn around , Mina. Turn around and look at me and tell me that you even loved Jonathan.”
    Turn around Mina and tell
    “Please, Lucy, don’t leave me here.”
    and tell me that you even loved 
    The sheep were turning, their short necks craning upwards, and they all had red little rat eyes, and then the scarecrow howled.
    Lucy’s hands were cool silk on Mina’s fevered shoulders.
    “Don’t leave, not yet…”
    Lucy’s fingers, hairless spider legs, had crawled around her cheeks and seized her jaw. Something brittle dry, something crackling papery against her teeth, was forced past her lips. 
    On the street, the sheep were coming apart in the storm, reduced to yellowed fleece and fat-marbled mutton; a river of crimson sluicing between paving stones. Grinning skulls and polished white ribs, and the scarecrow had turned away and broken up in the gale.
    Lucy’s fingers pushed the first clove of garlic over Mina’s tongue, then shoved another into her mouth.
    And she felt cold steel at her throat.
    we loved you, Mina, loved as much as the blood and the night and even as much as
    Mina Harker woke up in the hollow space between lightning and a thunderclap.
    Until dawn, when the storm tapered to gentle drizzle and distant echoes, she sat alone on the edge of the bed, shaking uncontrollably, and tasting bile and remembered garlic.
     
    January 1922
    Mina held the soup to the Professor’s lips, chicken steam curling in the cold air. Abraham Van Helsing, eighty-seven and so much more dead than alive, tried to accept a little of the thin broth. He took a clumsy sip, and the soup spilled from his mouth, dribbling down his chin into his beard. Mina wiped his lips with the stained napkin lying across her lap.
    He closed his