Waycross by Caitlin R. Kiernan

Author:Caitlin R. Kiernan [Kiernan, Caitlin R.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-11-25T10:40:05+00:00

* * * *

Unafraid of falling, but falling nonetheless, as the living light from the wooden box ebbs and flows beneath her skin, between the convolutions of her brain. Collapsing into herself, that hole where her heart should be, that abyss in her soul, and all the things she’s clung to for so long, the handholds clawed into the dry walls of her mind, melt beneath the corrosive, soothing voices of the light.

Where am I going? she asks, and the red and black tendrils squeezing her smaller and smaller, squeezing her away, reply in a hundred brilliant voices - Inside, they say, and Down, and Back, and finally, Where the monsters come from.

I don’t have my knife, she says.

You won’t need it, the light reassures her.

And Dancy watches herself, a white streak across a star-dappled sky, watches her long fall from the rolling deck of a sailing ship that burned and sank and rotted five hundred years ago. A sailor standing beside her curses, crosses himself, and points at Heaven.

“Did ye see it?” he asks in a terrified whisper, and Dancy can’t tell him that she did and that it was only the husk of her body burning itself away, because now she’s somewhere else, high above the masts and stays, and the boat is only a speck in the darkness below, stranded forever in a place where no wind blows and the sea is as still and flat as glass. As idle as a painted ship, upon a painted ocean.

Falling, not up or down, but falling farther in, and Is there a bottom, or a top? Is there ever an end?, she wonders and Yes, the voices reply, Yes and no, maybe and that depends.

Depends on what?

On you, my dear. That depends on you.

And she stands on a rocky, windswept ledge, grey stone ground smooth and steep by eons of frost and rain, and the mountains rise up around her until their jagged peaks scrape at the low-slung belly of the clouds. Below her is a long, narrow lake, black as pitch, and in the center of the lake the ruins of a vast, shattered temple rise from its depths. There are things stranded out there among the ruins, nervous orange eyes watching the waters from broken spires and the safety of crumbling archways. Dancy can hear their small and timorous thoughts, no one desire among them but to reach the shore, to escape this cold, forgotten place -and they would swim, the shore an easy swim for even the weakest among them, but, from time to time, the black waters of the lake ripple, or a stream of bubbles rises suddenly to the surface, and there’s no knowing what might be waiting down there. What might be hungry. What might have lain starving since time began.

“I want to go back now,” Dancy says, shouting to be heard above the howling wind.

There’s only one way back, the wind moans, speaking now for the light from the Gynander’s box. And that’s straight on to the center.

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