Alabaster

"I'm not going to Athens. I'm going to Sava

Their breath fogged in the cold, and Mike hugged himself for warmth, though the guy from the Monte Carlo seemed oblivious to the temperature. He scratched his beard and stared at the flat tire.

"You kids been drinking?" he asked.

"A little," Mike lied.

"So it wouldn't do to just sit here until a cop comes along, then, would it?"

"No sir. We'd really rather not."

"I don't pick up hitchers."

"Yes sir."

"I'm going to Sava

"Yes sir," Mike said again, and Shelly, who happened to be his girlfriend, mumbled something rude from the backseat.

I opened the bottle of bourbon, took a small drink, coughed, and that's when I noticed two shiny points of light, like cat eyes caught in the beam of a flashlight, that sort of iridescence, but silver. Two points of light, like silver cat eyes watching us from inside the Monte Carlo. I was suddenly very aware of the cold, the Georgia night stretching out around us, and just how far we were from anywhere light and safe and warm.

I took another sip of bourbon.

"Well, I'll tell someone you're out here," the big man said.

"We'd sure appreciate that."

"I'll tell them to send a wrecker."

"Thank you."

"I'd give you a ride, son, but I don't take hitchers. And I gotta be in Sava

And then the big man got back into his black Monte Carlo and drove away. As he passed, I swear I saw a second set of the iridescent eyes watching us from the backseat of the Chevrolet. I drank more Wild Turkey, and then Mike was back in the car again, shivering, letting in the cold.

"What the fuck was that?" Barry asked him.

"Lock the doors," Mike said.

"Why?" Shelly asked.

"Just lock the goddamned doors!" And we did, because Mike didn't raise his voice very often and I'd never heard him sound scared before.

"Did you see that kid in the front seat?" Mike asked, and I didn't say anything about the silver eyes. "Jesus," Mike said, his teeth chattering, and he stared out his window, up at the November sky full of unhelpful stars.

"So, is he sending someone?" Barry asked, though I'm sure he'd heard the big guy from the Monte Carlo as clearly as the rest of us.

"Yeah, man, he's sending someone, okay? He said he was sending someone. Hell, I don't know."

"I can't feel my feet anymore," Shelly said, stomping them against the back of the front seat. "I think I'm freezing to death. I think I'm getting hydrophobia."

"You mean hypothermia," the girl behind the wheel said. "Hydrophobia is rabies."

"Whatever," Shelly replied and stomped her feet twice as hard.

"Jesus, did you fucking see that kid?"

"What kid?" Barry asked, and Mike shook his head and shivered.

"The kid sitting right there in the fucking front seat. Jesus."

"I didn't see anyone but the big fucker in the bowler."

"It was a derby," the driver said quietly.

"What's the fucking difference?"

I passed the bottle back to Mike, and he stared at it a moment like maybe he'd forgotten what it was for.

"That dude, man, he smelled like something fucking dead. He smelled like rotten meat."

Barry lit a cigarette then, his face caught for a moment in the yellow-orange glow from his lighter, and no one said much of anything else that I can recall. A few cars passed, heading north or heading south, but no one else stopped to help. In a little while, maybe twenty or thirty minutes, a red tow truck showed up, just like the big guy had promised, and took us all back to town.

3.

I'm forever drawing co

The hovering ball of blue light.

The blow out.

The strange man from the Monte Carlo.

The silver eyes shining from the dark car.

All these things in the space of fifteen minutes. My mind draws co

I don't believe in UFOs, not in the popular sense, anyway, that unidentified flying objects are extraterrestrial space craft. I do believe in extraterrestrial life, but I know, as a scientist, that the odds of its getting from planet to planet, much less crossing interstellar distances, are remote. Anyway, what we saw that night didn't look like a "space craft." I'm entirely willing to entertain the possibility that the blue ball of light was some unusual electrical discharge, though I couldn't begin to imagine what its origin might have been, or why it shone so brightly but didn't seem to radiate any light at all. Was it something meteorological? Seismic? Man-made? Insects? I have no idea whatsoever. I can only say it was one of the strangest things I've ever seen.

As for the big man in the Monte Carlo, well, one meets strange people on the highway late at night, and sometimes they don't smell so great. It's the silver eyes that still bother me, from time to time. A couple days after the interrupted trip to Jefferson and Woodbine Cemetery, Death's Little Sister got together in the East Athens attic we'd converted into a practice space and, at some point, someone finally mentioned the odd events after the show. I think we'd all been avoiding talking about that night-the light, the Monte Carlo and its driver-and I don't remember who finally brought it up. I also don't remember who suggested that the silver eyes might have been a dog's eyes, that there might have been a dog in the car with the man, which also might have helped explain the odor. But I do remember how that suggestion upset Mike, and he insisted that there hadn't been a dog, just a kid sitting up front, and that there had been something "all wrong" about the kid, but he wouldn't elaborate, and we didn't press him.

I think that, all those years later, when I sat down to write the short story that grew into the novella In The Garden of Poisonous Flowers, I'd hoped that by burying some of the events of that strange night in fiction I might divest them of at least a modicum of their weirdness. But it doesn't seem to have worked. Lonely country roads still make me nervous now, and they never did before. I watch for lights in the sky more than I once did, and dread the glint of silver eyes from the windows of passing cars.

Caitlín R. Kiernan

9 January 2002

Liberty House, Birmingham

For the other three-quarters of Death's Little Sister: Barry Dillard (guitars), Michael Graves (bass), and Shelly Ross (keyboards).

Author's Biography

Alabaster is Caitlín R. Kiernan's fourth collection of short fiction in only six years, following Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores, and To Charles Fort, With Love. She has also published six novels, including Silk, Threshold, Low Red Moon, Murder of Angels, and Daughter of Hounds. Trained as a vertebrate paleontologist, Caitlín now lives in Atlanta, Georgia with her partner, Kathryn, her cat, Sophie, thousands of books and fossils, and her winter white dwarf hamster, Chiana Marshmallow Pipsqueak.