Dark Terrors 3: The Gollancz Book of Horror

Estate CAITLIN R. KIERNAN

Rough and hungry boy, barely nineteen, that first time Silas Desvernine saw the Storm King, laid bright young eyes to raw granite and green rash rising up and up above the river and then lost again in the Hudson morning mist. The craggy skull of the world, he thought, scalped by some Red Indian god and left to bleed, grain by mica grain, and he leaned out past the uncertain rails of the ferryboat’s stern, frothy wakes-lash on the dark water and no reflection there. He squinted and there was the railroad’s iron scar winding around its base, cross-tie stitches and already the fog was swallowing the mountain, the A.F. Beach’s restless sidewheel carrying him away, upriver, deeper into the Highlands, towards Newburgh and work in Albany and he opens his leathery old eyelids and it’s deadest winter 1941, not that wet May morning in 1889. Old, old man, parchment and twigs, instead of that boy and he’s been nodding off again, drifted away and her voice has brought him back. Her voice across the decades, and he wipes away a stringy bit of drool at the corner of his mouth.

‘Were you dreaming again?’ she asks, soft, velvet tongue from her corner and he blinks, stares up into the emptycold light spilling down through the high windows, stingy, narrow slits in the stone of the long mansard roof. And ‘No,’ he mumbles, No, knows damn well there’s no point to the lie, no hiding himself from her, but at least he’s made the effort.

‘Yes. You were,’ she says, Jesus that voice that’s never a moment older than the first time and the words squeeze his tired heart. ‘You were dreaming about Storm King, the first time you saw the mountain, the first morning…’

‘Please,’ no strength in him, begging and she stops, all he knows of mercy. He wishes the sun were warm on his face, warm where it falls in weaktea pools across the clutter of his gallery. Most of his collection here, the better part, gathered around him like the years and the creases in his stubbled face. Dying man’s pride, dead-man-to-be obsession, possessions, these things he spent a life gathering, stolen or secreted but made his own so they could be no one else’s. The things sentenced to float out his little for ever in murky formalin tombs, specimen jars and stoppered bottles, a thousand milky eyes staring nowhere. Glass eyes in taxidermied skulls, bodies stuffed with sawdust; wings and legs spread wide and pinned inside museum cases. Old bones yellowed and wired together in shabby mockeries of life, older bones gone to silica and varnished, shellacked, fossilized. Plaster and imagination where something might have been lost. Here, the teeth of leviathans, there, the claws of a behemoth; a piece of something fleshy that once fell from the sky over Missouri and kept inside a bell jar. Toads from stones found a mile underground. Sarcophagi and defiled Egyptian nobility ravelling inside, crumbling like him, and a chunk of amber as big as an orange and the carbonized hummingbird trapped inside fifty million years.

A narwhal’s ivory tooth bought for half a fortune and he once believed with the unflinching faith of martyrs that it was a unicorn’s horn. Precious bit of scaly hide from the Great Sea Serpent, harpooned off Malta in 1807, they said and never mind that he knew it was never anything but the peeling belly of a crocodile.

‘There’s not much more,’ she says, ‘A day, perhaps,’ and even her urgency, her fear, is patient, wetnurse gentle, but Silas Desvernine closes his eyes again, prays he can slip back, fifty-two trips wrong way round the sun and when he opens them he’ll be standing on the deck of the ferry, the damp and chill no match for his young wonder, his anticipation and a strong body and the river rolling slow and deep underneath his feet.

‘No,’ she says, ‘I’m still here, Silas.’

‘I know that,’ he says and the December wind makes a hard sound around the edges of this rich man’s house.

After the War, his father had run, run from defeat and reprisal and grief, from a wasted Confederacy. World broken and there would be no resurrection, no reconstruction. Captain Eustace Desvernine, who’d marched home in ‘65 to the shallow graves of wife and child, graves scooped from the red Georgia clay with free black hands. And so he faded into the arms of the enemy, trailing behind him the shreds of a life gone to ash and smoke, gone to lead and worms, hiding himself in the gaslight squalor and cobbled industrial sprawl of Manhattan; the first skyscrapers rose around him, and the Union licked its wounds and forgot its dead.

Another marriage, strong Galway girl who gave him another son, Silas Josiah; the last dregs of his fortune into a ferry, the Alexander Hamilton, sturdy name that meant nothing to him but he’d seen it painted on the side of a tall building. So, the Captain (as Silas would always remember him, the Captain in shoddy cap and shoddier coat on wide shoulders) carried men and freight from Weehawken to the foot of West 42nd Street. Later, another boat, whitewashed sidewheeler, double-ender he’d named the A.F. Beach and the year that Robert E. Lee died, the Captain began running the long route between New York and Albany.

And one night, when Silas was still eighteen years old, almost a man himself and strong, he stood beside his father in the wheelhouse of the A.F. Beach. The Captain’s face older by the unsteady lamp as they slipped past the lights of West Point on their way downriver. The Captain taking out his old revolving pistol, Confederate-issue Colt, dullshine tarnish and his callused thumb cocking the hammer back while Silas watched, watched the big muzzle pressed against the Captain’s left temple. Woman’s name across his father’s lips then, unfamiliar ‘Carrie’ burned for ever into Silas’ brain like the flash, the echo of the gunshot trapped between the high cliffs, slipping away into the river night and pressed for ever behind his eyes.

‘Are you sure that’s the way it happened?’ she asked him once, when he told her. Years and years ago, not so long after he brought her to his castle on Pollepel Island and she still wore the wings, then, and her eyes still shone new dollar silver from between the narrow bars of her cage.

‘I was young,’ he said, ‘Very young,’ and she sighed, short and matter-of-fact sigh that said something but he wasn’t certain what.

Whole minutes later, ‘Who was she?’ and him already turned away, unpacking a crate just arrived from Kathmandu; ‘What?’ he asked, but already remembering, the meaning of her question and the answer, absently picking a stray bit of excelsior from in his beard and watching those eyes watching him.

‘Carrie,’ she said. ‘Who was Carrie?’

‘Oh,’ and ‘I never found out,’ he lied, ‘I never tried,’ no reason, but already he felt the need to guard those odd details of his confessions, scraps of truth, trifling charms. Hoarding an empty purse, when all the coins have gone to beggars’ hands.

‘Ah,’ she said and Silas looked too quickly back to the things in the crate, pilfered treasures come halfway around the world to him, and it was a long time before he felt her eyes leave him.

Pollepel Island: uneven jut of rock above water where the Hudson gets wide past the Northern Gate, Wey- Gat, the long stony throat of Martyr’s Reach, greenscab at the foot of Newburgh Bay; white oak and briar tangle, birch skin over bones of gneiss and granite. Bones of the world laid down a billion years ago and raised again in the splitting of continents, divorce of lands; birth of the Highlands in the time of terrible lizards, then scraped and sculpted raw, made this scape of bald rock and gorge during the chill and fever of ice ages. And Pollepel Island like a footnote to so much time, little scar in this big wound of a place.

Silas Desvernine already a rich man when he first came here. Already a man who had traded the Captain’s ragtag ferries for a clattering empire of steel and sweat, Desvernine Consolidated Shipyard, turning out ironclad steamers, modern ships to carry modern men across the ocean, to carry men to modern war. And Pollepel chosen for his retreat from industry, the sprawling, ordered chaos of the yard, the noise and careless humanity of Manhattan. First glimpse, an engraving, frontispiece by Mr N.P. Willis for American Scenery: tall sails and rowboat serenity, Storm King rising in the misty distance. The island recalled from his trips up and down the river and the Captain had shown him where George Washington’s soldiers sank their chevaux-de-frises, sixty-foot logs carved to spikes and tipped with iron, set into stone caissons and dropped into the river off Pollepel to pierce the hulls of British warships.

And this valley already a valley of castles, self-conscious stately, Millionaire’s Row decades before Silas’ architects began, before his masons laid the first stones, since the coming of the men of new money, the men who