In celebration for the release of THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, Tachyon presents glimpses from some of the volume’s strange and macabre tales by the “reigning queen of dark fantasy.”

A
Season of Broken Dolls

by Caitlín R. Kiernan

August
16, 2027 (later, 11:47 p.m.)

Sabit
came back with a bag full of Indian takeaway, when she’d gone out
for sushi. I really couldn’t care less, one way or the other, these
days food is only fucking food—curry or wasabi, but when I
asked why she’d changed her mind, she just stared
at me, eyes blank as a goddamn dead codfish, & shrugged. Then she
was quiet all night long, & the last thing I need just now is
Sabit Abbasi going all silent and creepy on me. She’s asleep,
snoring bcause her sinuses are bad bcause she smokes too much. &
I’m losing the momentum I needed to say anything
more about what happened @ CeM on Sat.
night. It’s all fading, like a dream. I’ve been reading one of
Sabit’s books, The
Breathing Composition (Welleran Smith, 2025),
something from those long-ago days when the avant-garde abomination
of stitch & snip was still hardly more than nervous rumor &
theory & the wishful thinking of a handful of East Coast art
pervs. I don’t know what I was looking for, if it was just research
for the article, don’t know what I thought I might find—or what
any of this has to do with Sat. nite. Am I afraid to write it down?
That’s what Sabit would say. But I won’t ask Sabit. What do you
dream, Sabit, my dear sadistic plaything? Do you dream
in installations, muscles and tendons, gallery walls of sweating pig
flesh, living bone exposed for all to see, vivisection as not-quite
still life, portrait of the artist as a young atrocity? Are your
sweet dreams the same things keeping me awake, making me afraid to
sleep? There was so goddamn much @ CeM to turn my fucking
stomach, but just this one thing has me jigged and sleepless and
popping your blue Peruvian bonbons. Just this one thing. I’m not
the squeamish sort, and everyone knows it. That’s one reason the
agency tossed the Guro/Guro story at me. Gore & sex and
mutilation? Give it to Schuler. She’s seen the worst and keeps
coming back for more. Wasn’t she one of the first into Brooklyn
after the bomb? & she did that crazy whick out on the Stuyvesant
rat attacks. How many murders and suicides and serial killers does
that make for Schuler now? 9? Fourteen? 38? That kid in the Bronx,
the Puerto Rican bastard who sliced up his little sister & then
fed her through a food processor, that was one of Schuler’s, yeah?
Ad
infinitum, ad nauseam, Hail Mary, full of beans.
Cause they know I won’t be on my knees puking up lunch when I
should be making notes & getting the vid or asking questions. But
now, now
Sabit, I’m dancing round this one thing. This one little thing. So,
here there’s a big ol’ chink in these renowned nerves of steel.
Maybe I’ve got a weak spot after fucking all. Rings of flesh,
towers of iron—oh yeah, sure—fucking corpses heaped in dumpsters
and rats eating fucking babies alive & winos & don’t forget
the kid with the Cuisinart—sure, fine—but that one labeled #17,
oh, now that’s
another goddamn story. She saw something there, & ol’
Brass-Balls Schuler was never quite the same again, isn’t that the
way it goes?

Are
you laughing in your dreams, Sabit? Is that why you’re smiling next
to me in your goddamn sleep? I’ve dog-eared a page in your book,
Sabit, a page with a poem written in a New Jersey loony bin by a
woman, & Welleran Smith just calls her Jane Doe so I do not know
her name. But Welleran Smith & that mangy bunch of stitch
prophets called her a visionary, & I’m writing it down here,
while I try to find the nerve to say whatever it is I’d wanted to
say about #17:

spines
and bellies knitted & proud and all open

all
watching spines and bellies and the three;

triptych
& buckled, ragdoll fusion

3
of you so conjoined, my eyes from yours,

arterial
hallways knitted red proud flesh

Healing
and straining for cartilage & epidermis

Not
taking, we cannot imagine

So
many wet lips, your sky Raggedy alchemy

And
all expecting Jerusalem

And
Welleran Smith, he proclaims Jane Doe a “hyperlucid transcendent
schizo-oracle,” a “visionary calling into the maelstrom.” &
turns out, here in the footnotes, they put the bitch away bcause
she’d drugged her lover—she was a lesbian; of
course, she had
to be a lesbian—she drugged her lover and used surgical thread to
sew the woman’s lips & nostrils closed, after
performing a crude tracheotomy so she wouldn’t suffocate. Jane Doe
sewed her own vagina shut, and she removed her own nipples & then
tried grafting them onto her gf’s belly. She kept the woman (not
named, sorry, lost to anonymity) cuffed to a bed for almost 6 weeks
before someone finally came poking around & jesus fucking christ,
Sabit, this is the sort of sick bullshit set it all in motion. Jane
Doe’s still locked away in her padded cell, I’m
guessing—hyperlucid
& worshipped by the snips—& maybe the woman she mutilated
is alive somewhere, trying to forget. Maybe the doctors even patched
her up (ha, ha fucking ha). Maybe even made her good as new again,
but I doubt it. I need to sleep. I need to lie down & close my
eyes & not see #17 and sweating walls and Sabit ready to fucking
cum bcause she can never, ever get enough. It’s half an hour after
midnight, & they expect copy from me tomorrow night, eight sharp,
when I haven’t written a goddamn word about the phony stitchwork @
Guro/Guro. Fuck you, Sabit, and fuck Jane Doe & that jackoff
Welleran Smith and the girl with peacock eyes that I should have
screwed just to piss you off, Sabit. I should have brought her back
here and fucked her in our bed, let her use your toothbrush, &
maybe you’d have found some other snip tourist & even now I
could be basking in the sanguine cherry glow of happily ever fucking
after.

For more info about THE VERY BEST OF CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN, visit the Tachyon page.

Cover by Hannes Hummel
Design by Elizabeth Story