Free The Ammonite Violin & Others by Caitlin R. Kiernan

the decrepit boarding house where I live, bearing a peculiar stone and a threadbare carpetbag and asking after me. Oh, sometimes she yawns, or her eyes flutter in a way as to suggest the dimmest memory of sleep. Her eyes flutter, and those pale lashes scatter snowflakes across my bed, but I’ve never seen her asleep. Perhaps she sleeps only when I’m asleep; I can’t prove otherwise. “Most of the bits of the looking glass were so small they were like dust or grains of sand,” she says, still gazing down at the dim and gas-lit cobblestones. “But there were a few fragments large enough to be found and polished flat and smooth and fashioned into windowpanes.” It sounds like a threat, the way she puts it, and also the way she’s staring at the window, and then she turns her pretty head and looks at me, instead. “I should never have come to this terrible old house,” she tells me. “I should have gone to some other town, farther inland, over and across the Klamath Mountains, and we should never have met.” But I know this is a game, not so different from the stories she tells again and again, and I don’t reply. I roll over and bury my face in my pillow. “It’s a wicked, filthy place, this town,” she continues, “a sodden ghetto, fit only for leprous fishmongers and ten-cent Jezebels and—” And what ? I ask her, my words muffled by the pillow. So here I am playing after all. Here I am dancing for her, and I know without turning to see that she’s wearing that smug lazulite smile again. Just what else is this filthy old town fit for? She doesn’t answer me right away, because now I’m dancing, and so she has all the time she needs. I open my eyes and stare at the wall, the peeling ribbons of pin-striped wallpaper, the books stacked high on my rented chifforobe. I put out the lamp some time ago, so the only light in the room is coming from the window, and now she’s gone and blocked half that with the frost from her sigh. “My father,” she says, beginning this other lie, “he said that I should find you, that I must seek out the Sapphic professor, so recently disgraced and duly dismissed from her lofty post at University, fallen low and holed up in this squalid abode, drinking herself halfway to death and maybe then back again. He said you know all the deepest secrets of the earth, the mysteries of the ages, and that you even speak with her, the earth, in your dreams. He said I should show you the stone, that only you would know it for what it is.” But you have no father, I say, playing the good and faithless heretic, stumbling through my part like the puppet she’s made of me. You’re merely another wandering war orphan, an urchin whoring her way down the coast. And that precious rock of yours is nothing more than a cast-off ballast stone which you picked up on the beach the morning you crawled off that tramp steamer and first set foot in this wicked, filthy place. You’re an orphan, my dear, and the rock is no more than a gastrolith puked forth from the overfull craw of some whaling ship or another. She listens silently. She has never interrupted me, as that would be not so very different from interrupting herself. I can remember when there was some force behind these words, before I caught on. Before I wised up. I can remember when they had weight and anger. When I meant them, because I mistakenly believed that they were my own.
    “My father...” she begins, then trails off, and I feel the temperature in my dingy little fourth-floor room at the end of Gar Fish Street plummet ten or fifteen degrees.
    —was likely a Russian foot soldier, I continue for her on cue, bound for some flea-ridden Kamchatkan hellhole, when he met up with whichever Koryak witch-sow you would have called your mother, had she ever given you the chance. And yes, these are words from my mouth, spoken by my tongue and passing between my lips, but still they are always her words. I shut my eyes, willing silence upon