The Road of Pins

CAITLÍN R. KIERNAN

I

May

Without a doubt, Mr Perrault’s paintings are some of the most hideous things that Alex has ever seen and if her head didn’t hurt so much, if it hadn’t been hurting all day long, she might have kept her opinions to herself, might have made it all the way through the evening without pissing Margot off again. The first Thursday of the month so another opening night at ARTIFICE, another long evening of forced smiles for the aesthete zombies, the shaking of hands and digging about for dusty scraps of congeniality when all she wants is to be home soaking in a hot, soapy bath or lying facedown on the cool, hardwood floor of their bedroom while Margot massages her neck. Maybe something quiet playing on the stereo, something soothing, and the volume so low there’s almost no sound at all, and then her headache would slowly begin to pull its steelburr fingers out of the soft places behind her eyes and she could breathe again.

‘You shouldn’t have even come tonight,’ Margot whispers, sips cheap white wine from a plastic cup and stares glumly at the floor. ‘If you were going to be like this, I wish you’d gone home instead.’

‘You and me both, baby,’ and Alex frowns and looks past her lover at the smartly dressed crowd milling about the little gallery like a wary flock of pigeons.

‘So why don’t you leave? I can get a taxi home, or Paul will be happy to give me a ride,’ and now Alex thinks that Margot’s starting to sound even more impatient with her than usual, probably afraid that someone might have overheard the things she said about the paintings.

‘I’m here now,’ Alex says. ‘I suppose I might as well stick it out,’ and she rubs roughly at the aching space between her eyebrows, squints across the room at the high, white walls decorated with Perrault’s canvases, the track lights to fix each murky scene in its own warm, incandescent pool.

‘Then will you please try to stop sulking. Talk to someone. I have to get back to work.’

Alex shrugs noncommittally and Margot turns and walks away, threading herself effortlessly into the murmuring crowd. Almost at once, a man in a banana-yellow turtleneck sweater and tight black jeans stops her and he points at one of the paintings. Margot nods her head and smiles for him, already wearing her pleasant face again, annoyance tucked safe behind the mask, and the man smiles back at her and nods his head too.

Five minutes later and Alex has made her way across the gallery, another cup of the dry, slightly bitter Chardonnay in her hand, her fourth in half an hour, but it hasn’t helped her head at all and she wishes she had a gin and tonic instead. She’s been eavesdropping, listening in on an elderly German couple, even though she doesn’t speak a word of German. The man and woman are standing close together before one of the larger paintings, the same sooty blur of oils as all the rest, at least a thousand shades of grey, faint rumours of green and alabaster, and a single crimson smudge floating near the centre. The small, printed card on the wall beside the canvas reads Fecunda ratis, no date, no price, and Alex wonders if the old man and woman understand Latin any better than she understands German.

The man takes a sudden, deep breath then, hitching breath almost like the space between sobs, and holds one hand out, as if he intends to touch the canvas, to press his thick fingertips to the whirling chaos of charcoal brush strokes. But the woman stops him, her nervous hand at his elbow, hushed words passed between them, and in a moment they’ve wandered away and Alex is left standing alone in front of the painting.

She takes a swallow of wine, grimaces at the taste and tries to concentrate on the painting, tries to see whatever all the others seem to see; the red smudge for a still point, nexus or fulcrum, and she thinks maybe it’s supposed to be a cap or a hat, crimson wool cap stuck on the head of the nude girl down on her hands and knees, head bowed so that her face is hidden, only a wild snarl of hair and the cruel, incongruent red cap. There are dark, hulking forms surrounding the girl and at first glance Alex thought they were only stones, some crude, megalithic ring, standing stones, but now she sees that they’re meant to be beasts of some sort. Great, shaggy things squatting on their haunches, watching the girl, protective or imprisoning captors and perhaps this is the final, lingering moment before the kill.

‘Amazing, isn’t it,’ and Alex hadn’t realised that the girl was standing there beside her until she spoke. Pretty black girl with four silver rings in each earlobe and she has blue eyes.

‘No, actually,’ Alex says. ‘I think it’s horrible,’ never mind what Margot would want her to say because her head hurts too much to lie and she doesn’t like the way the painting is making her feel. Her stomach is sour from the migraine and the bitter Chardonnay.

‘Yes, it is, isn’t it,’ the black girl says, undaunted, and she leans closer to the canvas. ‘We saw this one in San Francisco last year. Sometimes I dream about it. I’ve written two poems about this piece.’

‘No kidding,’ Alex replies, not trying very hard to hide her sarcasm, and she scans the room, but there’s no sign of Margot anywhere. She catches a glimpse of the artist, though, a tall, scarecrow-thin and rumpled man in a shiny black suit that looks too big for him. He’s talking with the German couple. Or he’s only listening to them talk to him, or pretending to, standing with his long arms crossed and no particular expression on his sallow face. Then the crowd shifts and she can’t see him any more.

‘You’re Alex Marlowe, aren’t you? Margot’s girlfriend?’ the black girl asks and ‘Yeah,’ Alex says. ‘That’s me,’ and the girl smiles and laughs a musical, calculated sort of a laugh.

‘I liked your novel a lot,’ she says. ‘Aren’t you ever going to write another one?’

‘Well, my agent doesn’t think so,’ and maybe the girl can see how much Alex would rather talk about almost anything else in the world and she laughs again.

‘I’m Jude Sinclair. I’m writing a review of the show for Artforum. You don’t care very much for Perrault’s work, I take it.’

‘I’m pretty sure I’m not supposed to have opinions about painting, Jude. That’s strictly Margot’s department—’

‘But you don’t like it, do you?’ Jude says, pressing the point and her voice lower now and there’s something almost conspiratorial in the tone. A wry edge to her smile and she glances back at Fecunda ratis.

‘No,’ Alex says. ‘I’m sorry. I don’t.’

‘I’m not sure I did either, not at first. But he gets in your head. The first time I saw a Perrault I thought it was contrived, too selfconsciously retro. I thought, this guy wants to be Edvard Munch and Van Gogh and Albert Pinkham Ryder all rolled into one. I thought he was way too hung up on Romanticism.’

‘So are those things supposed to be bears?’ Alex asks, pointing at one of the looming objects that isn’t a megalith, and Jude Sinclair shakes her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘They’re wolves.’

‘Well, they don’t look like wolves to me,’ and then Jude takes her hand and leads Alex to the next painting, this one barely half the size of the last. A sky the sickly colour of sage and olives, ochre and cheese draped above a withered landscape, a few stunted trees in the foreground and their bare and crooked branches claw vainly at an irrevocable Heaven. Between their trunks the figure of a woman is visible in the middle distance, lean and twisted as the blighted limbs of the trees and she’s looking apprehensively over her shoulder at something the artist has only hinted at, shadows of shadows crouched menacingly at the lower edges of the canvas. The card on the wall next to the painting is blank except for a date - 1893. Jude points out a yellowed strip of paper pasted an inch or so above the woman’s head, narrow strip not much larger than a fortune-cookie prognostication.

‘Read it,’ she says and Alex has to bend close because the words are very small and she isn’t wearing her glasses.

‘No. Read it out loud.’

Alex sighs, growing tired of this, but’ “A woman in a field”,’ she says. ‘“Something grabbed her”,’ and then she reads it over again to herself, just in case she missed the sense of it the first time. ‘What the hell is that supposed to mean?’

‘It’s from a book by a man named Charles Fort. Have you ever heard of him?’

‘No,’ Alex says, ‘I haven’t.’ She looks back down at the woman standing in the wide and barren field beyond the trees, and the longer she stares the more frightened the woman seems to be. Not merely apprehensive, no, genuinely terrified, and she would run, Alex thinks, she would run away as fast as she could, but she’s too afraid to even move. Too afraid of whatever she sees waiting there in the shadows beneath the trees and the painter has trapped her in this moment for ever.

‘I hadn’t either, before Perrault. There are passages from Fort in most of these paintings. Sometimes they’re hard to find.’

Alex takes a step back from the wall, her mouth gone dry as dust and wishing she had more of the wine, wishing she had a cigarette, wondering if Judith Sinclair smokes.

‘His genius - Perrault’s, I mean - lies in what he suggests,’ the black girl says and her blue eyes sparkle like gems. ‘What he doesn’t have to show us. He understands that our worst fears come from the pictures that we make in our beads, not from anything he could ever paint.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Alex says, not exactly sure what she’s apologising for this time but it’s the only thing she can think to say, her head suddenly too full of the frightened woman and the writhing, threatful trees, the pain behind her eyes swelling, and she only knows for certain that she doesn’t want to look at any more of these ridiculous paintings. That they make her feel unclean, almost as if by simply seeing them she’s played some unwitting part in their creation.

‘There’s nothing to be sorry for,’ Jude says, ‘It’s pretty heady stuff. My boyfriend can’t stand Perrault, won’t even let me talk about him.’

And Alex says something polite then, nice to meet you, good luck with the review, see you around, something she doesn’t mean and won’t remember later, and she leaves the girl still gazing at the painting labelled 1893. On the far side of the gallery, Margot is busy smiling for the scarecrow in his baggy, black suit and Alex slips unnoticed through the crowd, past another dozen of Albert Perrault’s carefully hung grotesques, the ones she hasn’t examined and doesn’t ever want to; she keeps her eyes straight ahead until she’s made it through the front door and is finally standing alone on the sidewalk outside ARTIFICE, breathing in the safe and stagnant city smells of the warm Atlanta night.

II

June

The stuffy little screening room on Peachtree Street reeks of ancient cigarette smoke and the sticky, fermenting ghosts of candy and spilled sodas, stale popcorn and the fainter, musky scent of human sweat. Probably worse things, too, this place a porn theatre for more than a decade before new management and the unprofitable transition from skin flicks to art-house cinema. Alex sits alone in the back row and there are only eleven or twelve other people in the theatre, pitiful Saturday night turn-out for a Bergman double-feature. She’s stopped wondering if Margot’s ever going to show, stopped wondering that halfway through the third reel of Wild Strawberries, and she knows that if she goes to the pay phone outside the lobby, if she stands in the rain and calls their apartment, she’ll only get the answering machine.

Later, of course, Margot will apologise for standing her up, will explain how she couldn’t get away from the gallery because the carpenters tore out a wall when they were only supposed to mark studs, or the security system is on the fritz again and she had to wait two hours for a service tech to show. Nothing that could possibly be helped, hut she’s sorry anyway, and these things wouldn’t happen, she’ll say, if Alex would carry a cell phone, or a least a pager.

Wild Strawberries has ended and after a ten-or fifteen-minute intermission, the house lights have gone down again, a long moment of darkness marred only by the bottle-green glow of an exit sign before the screen is washed in a flood of light so brilliant it hurts Alex’s eyes. She blinks at the countdown leader, five, four, three, the staccato beep at two, one, and then the grainy black-and-white picture. No front titles - a man carrying a wooden staff walks slowly across a scrubby, rock-strewn pasture and a dog trails close behind him. The man is dressed in peasant clothes, at least the way that European peasants dress in old Hollywood movies, and when he reaches the crest of a hill he stops and looks down at something out of frame, something hidden from the audience. His lips part and his eyes grow wide, an expression that is anger and surprise, disgust and horror all at the same time. There’s no sound but his dog barking and the wind.

‘Hey, what is this shit?’ someone shouts near the front of the theatre, a fat man, and he stands and glares up at the projection booth. Some of the others have started mumbling, confused or annoyed whispers, and Alex has no idea what the film is, only that it isn’t The Seventh Seal. On-screen, the camera cuts away from the peasant and now there’s a close-up of a dead animal instead, a ragged, woolly mass streaked with gore the colour of molasses; it takes her a second or two to realise that it’s a sheep. Its throat has been ripped out and its tongue lolls from its mouth. The camera pulls back as the man kneels beside the dead animal, then cuts to a close-up of the dog. It’s stopped barking and licks at its lips.

‘Jesus fucking Christ,’ the fat man growls and then he storms up the aisle, past Alex and out the swinging doors to the lobby. No one else leaves their seat, though a few heads have turned to watch the fat man’s exit. Someone laughs nervously and on-screen the peasant man has lifted the dead sheep in his arms, is walking quickly away from the camera and his dog follows close behind. The camera lingers as the man grows smaller and smaller in the distance, and the ground where the sheep lay glistens wetly.

A woman sitting a couple of seats in front of Alex turns around and ‘Do you have any idea at all what this is?’ she asks.

‘No,’ Alex replies. ‘No, I don’t.’

The woman frowns and sighs loudly. ‘The projectionist must have made a mistake,’ she says and turns back towards the screen before Alex can say anything else.

When the man and the dog have shrunk to bobbing specks, the camera finally cuts away, trades the stony pasture, the blood-soaked patch of grass, for a close-up of a church steeple and the cacophony of tolling bells spills out through tinny stereo speakers and fills the theatre.

‘Well, this isn’t what I paid six dollars to see,’ the woman two seats in front of Alex grumbles.

The fat man doesn’t come back and if the projectionist has made a mistake, no one seems to be in much of a hurry to correct it. The audience has grown quiet again, apparently more curious than perturbed, and the film moves from scene to scene, flickering progression of images and story, dialogue pared to little more than whispers and occasional, furtive glances between the actors. A mountain village and a wolf killing sheep somewhere that might be France or Italy, but impossible to tell because everyone speaks with British accents. The peasant man from the opening scene (if that truly was the opening scene) has a blind daughter who spends her days inside their little house gazing out of a window, as though she could see the mountains in the distance.

‘Ingmar Bergman didn’t make this film,’ the woman sitting in front of Alex says conclusively. ‘I don’t know who made this film,’ and then someone turns and asks her to stop talking, please.

Finally a young boy is found dead and a frantic hunt for the wolf ensues, night and wrathful villagers with torches, hounds and antique rifles wandering through a mist-shrouded forest. It’s obvious that this scene was shot on a soundstage, the contorted, nightmare trees too bizarre to possibly be real, nothing but plywood and chicken wire and papier-mâché. Some of the trunks, the tortuous limbs, are undoubtedly meant to suggest random scraps of human anatomy - the arch of a spine, a pair of arms ending in gnarled roots, a female torso sprouting half-formed from the bole of an oak.

And Alex thinks that maybe there’s something big skulking along through the gloom just beyond the wavering light of the torches, insinuation of spiderlong legs and sometimes it seems to move a little ahead of the hunters, other times it trails behind.

The woman seated two rows in front of Alex makes a disgusted, exasperated sound and stands up, her silhouette momentarily eclipsing the screen. ‘This is absurd,’ she says. ‘I’m asking for my money back right now,’ speaking to no one or to everyone who might be listening. She leaves the theatre and someone down front laughs and ‘Good fucking riddance,’ a husky, male voice whispers.

On-screen, a shout, the bone-wet snap of living wood, and one of the villagers raises his gun, extreme close-up of his finger around the trigger before the boom and flash of gunpowder. The tinny speakers blare rifle-fire and the furious barking of dogs, so loud that Alex puts her hands over her ears. A man screams and the scene dissolves, then fades away to daylight and a high-angle view of a dirt road winding across the fields towards the village. The camera zooms slowly in on a small gathering of peasant women waiting at the end of the road; silent despair in their weathered faces, loss, resignation, fear, and one by one they turn and walk back towards their homes.

Alex squints down at her watch, leans forward in her seat and angles her wrist towards the screen, the greysilver light off the scratched crystal so she can read the black hour and minute hands. Only half an hour since the film began, though it seems like it’s been much longer, and she wonders if Margot is home yet. She thinks again about the pay-phone outside the theatre, about the gallery and the answering machine.

She glances back at the screen and now there’s a close-up of a skull, a sheep’s, perhaps, but Alex isn’t sure; bone bleached dry and stark as chalk, a leathery patch of hide still clinging to its muzzle, the empty sockets for eyes that have rotted away or been eaten by insects and crows. The lonely sound of the wind and the film cuts to the peasant’s blind daughter, a music box playing Swan Lake softly in the background and she stares out the window of her dead father’s house. She’s neither smiling nor does she look unhappy, her hands folded neatly in her lap, and then a man is speaking from somewhere behind her. The cold, guttural voice so entirely unexpected that Alex jumps, startled, and she misses the first part of it, whatever was said before the girl turns her head towards the unseen speaker, raises a hand and places one index finger to the centre of her forehead.

‘I saw the light again last night,’ she says, the milky, colourless cataracts to prove that she’s a liar or insane, and then the girl’s hand returns to her lap.

‘Floating across the meadow,’ she says.

The music box stops abruptly and now there’s the small, hard sound of a dog barking far, far away.

‘Who are you? Your hand is cold—’

‘Which road will you take?’ the guttural voice asks, interrupting her. ‘That of the needles, or that of the pins?’

She turns to the window again, imperfect, transparent mirror for her plain face, and for an instant there seems to be another reflection there, a lean and hungry shadow crouched close behind the blind girl’s chair. And then a popping, fluttering racket from the projection booth and the world is swallowed in pure, white light and Alex knows that the film hasn’t ended, it’s merely stopped, as inexplicably as it began.

The house lights come up and she keeps her seat, sits waiting for her eyes to adjust as the handful of people remaining in the theatre stand and begin to drift towards the lobby doors, confused and thoughtful faces, overheard bits of conjecture and undisguised bewilderment.

‘It could’ve been Robert Florey,’ a man who looks like a college professor says to a blonde girl in a KMFDM T-shirt, slender girl young enough to be his daughter, and ‘Do you know, Florey, dear?’ he asks. ‘I’ve always heard there was a lost Florey out there somewhere.’

‘Well, they might have told us they didn’t have The Seventh Seal,’ another man complains. ‘They could have said something.’

And when they’ve all gone and Alex is alone with the matte-black walls and the sugar-and-vinegar theatre smells, she sits and stares at the blank screen for another minute, trying to be certain what she saw, or didn’t see, at the end.

III

July

Margot away for the entire week, a lecture series in Montreal -’Formalism, Expressionism, and the Post-Modernist Denial’, according to the flier stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet shaped like an apple core - and Alex left alone in the Midtown condo paid for with the advance money from The Boats of Morning. Four days now since she’s gone any further than the row of mailboxes in the building’s lobby. Too hot to go out if she doesn’t absolutely have to, eggs frying on sidewalks out there, so she stays half-drunk on Absolut and grapefruit juice, smokes too much and watches black-and-white movies on television. Whatever it takes not to think about the typewriter in her office down the hall from their bedroom, the desk drawer full of blank paper. Margot called on Wednesday night and they talked for twenty minutes about nothing in particular, which is almost all they ever talk about these days.

‘You’d like it here,’ Margot said. ‘You’d like the sky here. It’s very big and blue.’

Late Thursday afternoon and Alex comes back upstairs with the day’s mail, the usual assortment of bills and glossy catalogues, a new Rolling Stone, an offer for a platinum Visa card at twenty-one and one-half per cent interest. And a large padded envelope the colour of a grocery bag.

Her name and address are printed neatly on the front in tall, blocky letters - MS ALEX MARLOWE - and there’s no return address, only the initials J. S. written very small in the upper left-hand corner. She leaves everything else on the dining table, a small mountain of unopened mail accumulated there already, debts and distractions for Margot to deal with when she gets home; Alex pours herself a drink, takes the big brown envelope to the sofa in front of the television and opens it with the pull tab on the back. Inside there’s a videocassette, along with a couple of pages of lavender stationery, some newspaper and magazine clippings held together with a lavender paper clip.

Alex sips her drink, the vodka too strong, so she stirs it absently with an index finger and looks down at the top sheet of stationery. It takes her a moment to place the name there - Jude Sinclair — a moment before she remembers the pretty girl from the gallery, dark-skinned, blue-eyed girl who’d tried ardently to explain Albert Perrault’s work to her. Alex leans back against the sofa cushions, glances at the TV screen (an old gangster film she doesn’t recognise), and takes another sip from her glass. ‘Dear Alex,’ the letter begins, and she notices that it was typed on a typewriter that drops its ‘t’s.

Dear Alex,

I’m sure that you won’t remember me. We talked briefly at the gallery in May. I was the chick with a serious hard-on for M. Perrault. I think I ^told you that^I’d written poems about the ‘Secunda ratis,‘ do you remember that? I suspect you may have thought I was a fLake. Did you know about P.‘s accident?? Terrible. I was at the funeral in Paris. I thought you might want to read one of the poems (I have burned the other one). Hope you are well. My love to Margot.

Jude S.

Alex pulls the pages free of the lavender paper clip, places the first page on the bottom and the second is the poem, the one Jude Sinclair didn’t burn; she looks at the black videocassette, considers stuffing it all back into the envelope and tossing the whole mess into the garbage can in the kitchen. Perrault one of the last things she’s in the mood to think about right now; she’d almost managed to forget him and his paintings, although Margot talked about him for weeks after the show. They heard about the accident, of course, a motorcycle wreck somewhere in France, and finally, that seemed to close the subject.

Alex takes a long swallow of her drink and scans the first few lines of the short poem, a copy obviously produced on the same typewriter as the letter, the same telltale dropped ‘t’s and a few inky smudges and fingerprints on the lavender stationery.

‘Jesus, who the hell still uses carbon paper,’ she wonders aloud, setting her drink down on the coffee table, and Alex starts over and reads the poem through from the beginning. ‘The Night We Found Red Cap’ and then a forced and clumsy attempt at Italian sonnet form, eight-line stanza, six-line stanza, Jude Sinclair’s slightly stilted, perfectly unremarkable impressions of the painting.

Alex glances quickly through the clippings, then: the Artforum review of the show at Artifice, review of another Perrault exhibit last summer in Manhattan, Le Monde’s account of his motorcycle accident and a short French obituary. And at the bottom of the stack, a photocopy of a very old lithograph; she sets the rest aside and stares at it, a pastoral scene centred around some strange animal that resembles a huge wolf more than anything else she can think of, though it’s reared up on its hind limbs and its long, sinuous tail makes her think of a big cat, a lion or a panther, maybe. The creature is attacking a young woman and there are other mutilated bodies scattered about on the ground. In the distance are men wearing tricorne hats on horseback and the creature has raised its head, is gazing fearlessly over one shoulder towards them. Beneath the scene is the legend, ‘La Bête du Gévaudan’. On the back, someone, presumably Jude Sinclair, has scribbled a date in pencil - 1767.

Alex lays the small bundle of paper down on the coffee table and picks up her drink. The glass has left a ring of condensation on the dark wood, the finish already beginning to turn pale and opaque underneath. An heirloom from Margot’s grandmother or a great-aunt or some such and she’ll have a cow when she sees it, so Alex wipes the water away with the hem of her T-shirt. But the ring stays put, defiant, accusing, condemning tattoo and she sighs, sits back and takes another swallow of the vodka and grapefruit juice.

‘What are you supposed to be, anyway?’ she asks the videotape; no label of any sort on it for an answer, but almost certainly more Perraultiana, an interview, possibly, or maybe something a bit more exotic, more morbid, a news report of his accident taped off TFI or even footage shot during the funeral. Alex wouldn’t be surprised, has seen and heard of worse things being done by art groupies like Jude Sinclair. She decides to save the video for later, a few moments’ diversion before bed, leaves it on the couch and goes to fix herself a fresh drink.

Something from the freezer for dinner, prepackaged Chinese that came out of the microwave looking nothing at all like the photograph on the cardboard box, Kung Pao pencil erasers and a bottle of beer, and Alex sits on the living room floor, watching Scooby Doo on the Cartoon Network. The end of another day that might as well not have happened, more of yesterday and the day before that, the weeks and months since she’s finished anything at all piling up so fast that soon it’ll have been a year. Today she stood in the doorway to her office for fifteen minutes and stared uselessly at her typewriter, vintage Royal she inherited from her father and she’s never been able to write on anything else, the rough clack-clack-clack of steel keys, all the mechanical clicks and clatters and pings to mark her progress down a page, through a scene, the inharmonious chapter to chapter symphony towards conclusion and THE END.

When the beer’s gone and she’s swallowed enough of the stuff from the freezer to be convinced that she’s better off not finishing it, Alex slides her plate beneath the coffee table and retrieves Jude Sinclair’s videocassette from the couch. She puts it into the VCR, hits the play button, and in a moment Scooby and Shaggy are replaced by a loud flurry of static. Alex starts to turn down the volume, but the snow and white noise have already been replaced by a silent, black screen. She sits watching it, half-curious, impatient, waiting for whatever it is to begin, whatever the blue-eyed girl from the gallery wants her to see.

In the kitchen, the phone rings and Alex looks away from the television screen, not particularly interested in talking to anyone and so she thinks she’ll let the machine pick up. Third ring and she turns back to the TV, but it’s still just as dark as before and she checks to be sure that she doesn’t have it on pause by mistake. The soft, green glow of digital letters, PLAY and a flashing arrow to let her know that she doesn’t, that either the tape’s blank or the recording hasn’t begun yet, or maybe Jude Sinclair’s filmed a perfectly dark room as a tribute or eulogy to Perrault.

‘This is bullshit,’ Alex mutters and she presses fast forward. Now the blackness flickers past as the counter tallies the minutes of nothing stored on the tape. In the kitchen, the telephone rings once more and then the answering machine switches on, Margot’s voice reciting their number, politely informing the caller that no one can come to the phone right now but if you’ll please leave your name and number, the date and time, someone will get back to you as soon as possible.

And then Margot answers herself, her voice sounding small and distant, sounding upset, and ‘Alex?’ she says. ‘Alex, if you’re there please pick up, okay? I need to talk to you.’

Alex sighs and rubs at her temples. A bright burst of pain behind her left eye, maybe the beginnings of a migraine, and she’s really not up to one of Margot’s long-distance crises, the two of them yelling at each other with half a continent in between. She glances back to the television screen, presses play and the nothing stops flickering.

‘Hello? Alex? Come on. I know you’re at home. Pick up the damned phone, please.’

It really is blank, she thinks. The crazy bitch sent me a fucking blank videotape.

‘Alex! I’m not kidding, okay? Please answer the goddamn telephone!’

‘All right! Jesus, I’m coming she shouts at the kitchen, gets up too fast and one foot knocks over the empty beer bottle; it rolls noisily away towards a bookshelf, leaves behind a glistening, semi-circular trickle of liquid as it goes. By the time Alex lifts the receiver, Margot has started crying.

‘What? What’s wrong?’

‘Christ, Alex. Why can’t you just answer the fucking phone? Why do I have to get fucking hysterical to get you to answer the phone?’

And for a second Alex considers the simple efficacy of a lie, the harmless convenience of I was on the toilet or I just walked in the front door. Any plausible excuse to cover her ass.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says, instead. ‘I’ve been in a funk all day long. I’m getting a headache. I just didn’t want to talk to anyone.’

‘For fuck’s sake, Alex,’ and then she coughs and Alex can tell that Margot’s trying to stop crying.

‘Margot, what’s wrong?’ Alex asks again. ‘Has something happened?’ She wants a cigarette but she left them in the living room, left her lighter, too, and she settles for chewing on a ragged thumbnail.

‘I saw something today,’ Margot says, speaking very quietly. Alex hears her draw a deep breath, the pause as she holds it in a moment, then the long, uneven exhalation and ‘I saw something terrible today,’ she says.

‘So what was it? What did you see?’

‘A dog attack,’ and she’s almost whispering now. ‘I saw a little girl attacked by a dog.’

For a moment, neither of them says anything and Alex stares out the window above the kitchen sink at the final indigo and violet dregs of sunset beyond the Atlanta skyline. The pain behind her left eye is back, more persistent than before, keeping time with her heartbeat. She has no idea what to say next, is about to tell Margot that she’s sorry, default sentiment better than nothing, better than standing here as the pain in her head gets bigger, listening to the faint, electric buzz and crackle coming through the telephone line.

‘I was walking in the park,’ Margot says. ‘Lafontaine, it’s not far from my hotel. This poor little girl, she couldn’t have been more than five and she must have wandered away from her mother—’

And now Alex realises that she can hear the faint, metallic notes of a music box playing from the next room, something on the video after all, and she turns and looks through the doorway at the television screen.

‘—she was dead before anyone could get it off her.’

Grainy blacks and whites, light and shadow, and at first Alex isn’t sure what she’s seeing, unable to force all those shades of grey into a coherent whole. Movement, chiaroscuro, the swarm of pixels pulled from a magnetised strip of plastic and then the picture resolves and a young woman’s face stares back at Alex from the screen. Pupilless eyes like the whites of hard-boiled eggs, a strand of hair across her cheek, and the music box stops playing. A dog barks.

‘Who are you? Your hand is cold—’

‘I never saw anything so horrible in my life,’ Margot says. ‘The damned thing was eating her, Alex.’

‘Which road will you take?’ a guttural voice from the videotape asks the young woman. ‘That of the needles, or that of the pins?’

The pain in Alex’s head suddenly doubling, trebling, and she shuts her eyes tight, grips the edge of the counter and waits for the dizziness and nausea to pass, the disorientation that has nothing whatsoever to do with the migraine. The entire world tilting drunkenly around her and ‘I have to go,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, Margot. I’ll call you back, but I have to go right now.’

‘Alex, no. Wait, please—’

‘I promise. I’ll call you back as soon as I can,’ and she opens her eyes, hangs up the phone quickly so she doesn’t have to hear the confusion in Margot’s voice, the anger, and the young woman on the television gazes at her blind reflection in the window of her father’s house. Her reflection and the less certain reflection of the hunched, dark figure crouched close behind her.

‘The road of pins,’ she says. ‘Isn’t it much easier to fasten things with pins, than to have to sew them together with needles—-’

Then the film cuts to a shot of the door of the house - unpainted, weathered boards, the bent and rusted heads of nails, a cross painted on the wood with something white; slow pan left and now the window is in frame, the clean glint of morning sunlight off glass and the round face of the peasant’s daughter, the indistinct shape bending over her, and the camera zooms out until the house is very small, a lonely, rundown speck in a desolate, windswept valley.

Alex hits the stop button and the VCR whirs and thunks and is silent, the screen filled with nothing now but shoddy, Saturday-morning animation, four hippie teenagers and a Great Dane bouncing along a swampy back road in their psychedelic van, the cartoon sliver moon hung high in the painted sky, and she sits down on the floor in front of the television. When she presses eject, the tape slides smoothly, obediently out of the cassette compartment and Alex reaches for it, holds it in trembling, sweatslick hands while her heart races and the pain behind her eyes fades to a dull, bearable ache.

A few minutes more and the phone begins to ring again and this time she doesn’t wait for the answering machine.

Incommensurable, impalpable,

Yet latent in it are forms;

Impalpable, incommensurable,

Yet within it are entities.

Shadowy it is and dim.

Lao-tzu, Tao Teh Ching

*

Caitlin R. Kiernan’s short fiction has been collected in Candles for Elizabeth, Tales of Pain and Wonder, From Weird and Distant Shores and Wrong Times (the latter with Poppy Z. Brite), and has been selected for both The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror and The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her first novel, Silk, received the Barnes & Noble Maiden Voyage and International Horror Guild awards, and her second, Threshold, appeared in 2001. More recent publications include In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers, a novella illustrated by Dame Darcy, and Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, both from Subterranean Press. She divides her time unevenly between writing and her work as a vertebrate palaeontologist, with the lion’s share going to the former. She has not yet been to Greece. ‘In early 2001,’ recalls Kiernan, ‘I experienced the first true bout of writer’s block in my career. I was a hundred pages into a novel, a sequel to Silk called Murder of Angels, and, suddenly, a few pages into Chapter Three, the words just stopped coming. From late January to mid-April I wrote almost nothing, and certainly nothing of any merit. It was terrifying. Finally, I shelved Murder of Angels and wrote this story, “The Road of Pins”, which is, at least in part, about writer’s block. The novel remains shelved to this day, a reminder of those awful two and a half months; I think I’m actually afraid of that manuscript at this point, as though it somehow caused the writer’s block. Anyway, “The Road of Pins” has a number of other inspirations: Charles Fort, “Little Red Riding Hood”, and the Beast of Gevaudan. It also draws on my fascination with “lost” films, a subject that I’d explored earlier in the stories “Salmagundi” and “.. . Between the Gargoyle Trees”.’