There was more yelling then, and banging, but then it stopped. I guess he talked some sense into them.
I wish he’d get back, though. There’s something dripping through the ceiling again.
It’s not water, though, it must be paint.
It’s bright red.
Caitlín R. Kiernan
Postcards from the King of Tides
Caitlín R. Kiernan’s short fiction has appeared in such anthologies as Love in Vein II, Dark Terrors 2 and 3, Dark of the Night, White of the Moon, Silver Birch, Blood Moon, Darkside, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and Best New Horror.
Her first novel, Silk, was published in 1998 and has so far received both the International Horror Guild and Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage awards for best first novel. She also writes the graphic novel series The Dreaming for DC Comics/Vertigo. A collection of her short fiction, Tales of Pain and Wonder, is forthcoming from Gauntlet Publications, and her second novel, Trilobite, will appear from Penguin/Roc. The author also publishes her own irregular newsletter, Salmagundi, and her official website is http://www.negia.net/~pandora, which she shares with Poppy Z. Brite and Christa Faust.
As Kiernan reveals, “I think that the ocean has always affected me the way that outer space affects a lot of people — that same dizzying sense of awe at the vastness of it, at the unknown. A lot of my childhood was spent by the sea, and it was always fascinating and terrifying at the same time. It still is.
“In ‘Postcards from the King of Tides’, the main thing I wanted to do was communicate these feelings about the sea, in particular, the way that my first visit to the Pacific coast of Oregon and northern California affected me. There aren’t many things I love as much as the sea, but there aren’t many things that frighten me as much, either. The title was suggested by George Darley’s poem, ‘The Rebellion of the Waters’ (1822).”
Here’s the scene: The three dark children, three souls past twenty but still adrift in the jaggedsmooth limbo of childhoods extended by chance and choice and circumstance, their clothes impeccable rags of night sewn with thread the color of ravens and anthracite; two of them fair, a boy and a girl and the stain of protracted innocence strongest on them; the third a mean scrap of girlflesh with a blacklipped smile and a heart to make holes in the resolve of the most jaded nihilist but still as much a child as her companions. And she sits behind the wheel of the old car, her sagegrey eyes straight ahead of her, matching their laughter with seething determination and annoyance, and there’s brightdark music, and the forest flowing around them, older times ten hundred than anything else alive.
The winding, long drive back from Seattle, almost two days now, and Highway 101 has become this narrow asphalt snake curving and recurving through the redwood wilderness and they’re still not even as far as San Francisco. Probably won’t see the city before dark, Tam thinks, headachy behind the wheel and her black sunglasses because she doesn’t trust either of the twins to drive. Neither Lark nor Crispin have their licenses, and it’s not even her car; Magwitch’s piece- of-shit Chevrolet Impala, antique ‘70s junk heap that might have been the murky green of cold pea soup a long, long time ago. Now it’s mostly rust and bondo and one off-white door on the driver’s side. A thousand bumper stickers to hold it all together.
“Oooh,” Lark whispers, awevoiced, as she cranes her neck to see through the trees rushing past, the craggy coast visible in brief glimpses between their trunks and branches. Her head stuck out the window, the wind whipping at her fine, silkwhite hair and Tam thinks how she looks like a dog, a stupid, slobbering dog, just before Crispin says, “You look like a dog.” He tries hard to sound disgusted with that last word, but Tam suspects he’s just as giddy, just as enchanted by the Pacific rain forest, as his sister (if they truly are brother and sister; Tam doesn’t know, not for sure, doesn’t know that anyone else does either, for that matter).
“You’ll get bugs in your teeth,” he says. “Bugs are gonna fly right straight down your throat and lay their eggs in your stomach.”
Lark’s response is nothing more or less than another chorus of “ooohs” and “ahhhs” as they round a tight bend, rush through a break in the tree line and the world ends there, drops suddenly away to the mercy of a silveryellowgrey sea that seems to go on forever, blending at some far-off and indefinite point with the almost colorless sky. There’s a sunbright smudge up there, but sinking slowly westward, and Tam looks at the clock on the dash again. It’s always twenty minutes fast, but still, it’ll be dark a long time before they reach San Francisco.
Tam punches the cigarette lighter with one carefully-manicured index finger, nail the color of an oil slick, and turns up the music already blaring from the Impala’s tape deck. Lark takes that as her cue to start singing, howling along to “Black Planet”, and the mostly bald tires squeal just a little as Tam takes the curve ten miles an hour above the speed limit. A moment in the cloudfiltered sun, blinding after the gloom, before the tree shadows swallow the car whole again. The cigarette lighter pops out, and Tam steals a glance at herself in the rearview mirror as she lights a Marlboro: yesterday’s eyeliner and she’s chewed off most of her lipstick, a black smudge on her right cheek. Her eyes a little bleary, a little red with swollen capillaries, but the ephedrine tablets she took two hours ago, two crimson tablets from a bottle she bought at a truck stop back in Oregon, are still doing their job and she’s wider than awake.
“Will you sit the fuck down, Lark, before you make me have a goddamn wreck and kill us all? Please?” she says, smoky words from her faded lips and Lark stops singing, pulls her head back inside and Crispin sticks his tongue out at her, fleshpink flick of I-told-you-so reproach. Lark puts her pointy, black boots on the dash, presses herself into the duct-taped upholstery, and doesn’t say a word.
They spent the night before in Eugene and then headed west, followed the meandering river valleys all the way down to the sea before turning south toward home. Almost a week now since the three of them left Los Angeles, just Tam and the twins because Maggie couldn’t get off work, but he’d told them to go anyway; she didn’t really want to go without him, knew that Lark and Crispin would drive her nuts without Magwitch around, but the tour wasn’t coming through L.A. or even San Francisco. So she went without too much persuading, they went, and it worked out better than she’d expected, really, at least until today.
At least until Golden Beach, only thirty or forty miles north of the California state line and Crispin spotted the swan neck of a Brachiosaurus towering above shaggy hemlock branches and he immediately started begging her to stop, even promised that he wouldn’t ask her to play the P. J. Harvey tape anymore if she’d Please Just Stop and let him see. So they lost an hour at The Prehistoric Gardens, actually paid money to get in and then spent a whole fucking hour wandering around seventy acres of drippywet trees, listening to Crispin prattle on about the life-sized sculptures of dinosaurs and things like dinosaurs, tourist-trap monstrosities built sometime in the 1950s, skeletons of steel and wood hidden somewhere beneath sleek skins of wire mesh and cement.
“They don’t even look real,” Tam said, as Crispin vamped in front of a scowling stegosaur while Lark rummaged around in her purse for her tiny Instamatic camera.