Alabaster

"Is it over?" Dancy asks her mother. "Do you think that was the last one?"

I ain't the one you ought to be asking that question, her mother replies, then rustles about in the briars like a raccoon or a possum or something.

"Sometimes I think I'm crazy," Dancy says.

You fight those thoughts, her mother says, sounding angry now. That ain't nothing but the demons trying to slow you down, trying to confuse you and slow you down.

"Is that what she was?" Dancy asks her mother. "Elandrion. Was she a demon?"

There's a long silence from the ghost of Julia Flammarion, then, and Dancy sits on the headstone listening to the roar and crackle of the burning church, to the screams of fleeing shadows and the uncomfortable, rustling sounds the trees are making, as if the fire frightens them.

No, her mother says. You remember what I taught you about the Watchers, the Nephilim? And Dancy says that yes, she remembers, even though she really only half remembers.

There were giants in the earth in those days; and also after that, when the sons of God came in unto the daughters of men, and they bare children unto them.

"So Elandrion, she was one of the Watchers? She was half angel?" Dancy asks and wipes the knife against her pants leg again with no better results than the first time.

They have many other names, her mother says, and then the blackberry thicket grows still and silent.

But the monster told Dancy that she should know better than to believe it had any name at all. She considers telling her mother that it said that, then decides she doesn't need to hear anything more just now about all the ways the evils of the world will try and de-ceive her.

She touches the tacky bloodstain on her jeans, the small smear the knife's left behind, and suddeny she's back inside the church and the fire hasn't started yet and the monster isn't dead. She's just buried her knife in its throat all the way up to the hilt, and it looks surprised, more surprised than hurt or scared or anything else. Blood that's black as molasses runs from between its sharp yellow teeth. She pulls the knife free, and the shadow things howl their disbelief as she raises her arm to plunge it in again, meaning to cut off the monster's head, just like her angel told her she ought to do.

But it's speaking again, strangling on its own blood, but she can make out the words clearly enough. And Dancy's hand hesitates, halfway down to the monster's windpipe.

"Now I see," it says. "Yeah, that's a damn good trick. That's an amazing fucking trick, hiding there in her skin, and I don't think she even knows-"

But then the knife comes down again, comes down so hard it goes in all the way to the monster's spine, and Elandrion closes its empty, boiled-egg eyes and doesn't try to say anything else at all. It's body shudders, and Dancy smells smoke, and then the shadows begin to scream-

She opens her eyes, disoriented and almost tumbling off the edge of the headstone, wondering how long it's been since she shut them, if its only been a moment or an hour. She glances back at the eastern sky, and it's not much brighter than the last time she looked, so it couldn't have been very long. There's an angry sound behind her, and she knows that it's the angel.

"I don't want to do this anymore," she tell it, as though what she wants might actually matter to it. "I've killed three of them now. Find someone else to chase down all the rest. I'm done for."

But she knows better, that there's a long road ahead of her, whether she's had enough or not, and she sits on the headstone and listens to the fire and the panicked cries of the shadow things. But mostly she's listening to what the angel's saying, how she's got to walk east, towards the scalding summer sun, and somewhere out there she'll find a gas station and a hand-painted sign that reads "Live Panther-Deadly Man Eater" in tall white letters. The angel tells her to kill everything and everyone she finds there, whether it looks like a monster or not.

And she nods her head, because she knows she'll never say no, and it doesn't matter how many monsters she has to kill. Because her mother's told her time and time again about seeing the gates of Hell and all the demons swimming beneath the sea that tried to make sure that she drowned herself. So she knows there are worse things, no matter how tired she might get.

She sits on the headstone for a few more minutes, until the angel is finished talking about the "live panther" sign and leaves her alone. Then Dancy stands up and slips the scabby knife into the waistband of her jeans. There will be somewhere nearby she can scrub it clean again. She picks up the heavy duffel bag and stares at the blazing ruins of Grace Ebeneezer Baptist Church just a little longer before she leaves the cemetery, careful to shut the squeaky wrought-iron gate behind her, and Dancy Flammarion follows sunrise down Dry Creek Road, just the way her angel said she should.

Afterword: On the Road to Jefferson

Author's Note: This essay was originally released by Subterranean Press in 2002 as a chapbook to accompany In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers.

1

"Where do you get your ideas?"

I've been asked that goddamned, a

But every now and then I can say, This, this nasty, little thing right here. See it? That's why I wrote story-x or Chapter-Y. It doesn't happen very often, but it's sort of satisfying in no particular way I can explain when it does happen like that.

In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers is one of those rare stories, rarer still in that it had not one, but two identifiable inspirations. The first is a Dame Darcy illustration (reprinted in the novella) from an issue of her ever-fabulous comic, Meat Cake, a wondrously detailed scene of young Victorian women engaged in ghoulish delights, sex, and other mischief in the basement of an old house. An inset shows them armed with shovels and stylish coats, braving a snowy night to rob a grave; we can see the fruits of their labors stretched out on a slab, and some of the women attend the corpse while others attend each other. Yes, well, it's that sort of a drawing, and Miss Aramat and other ladies of The Stephen's Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists owe their existence to that drawing. That's the first inspiration.

The second is a little bit more complicated and a whole lot stranger…