Les Fleurs Empoisonnées

"Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" (originally published as "In the Garden of Poisonous Flowers") is a novella by Caitlin R. Kiernan that features their recurring character Dancy Flammarion, the teenage albino monster-slayer. Published as a hardcover book by Subterranean Press in 2002, it was the first story Kiernan wrote about Dancy after her initial appearance in the novel Threshold (Roc/New American Library, 2001), but the second to be published, after "The Well of Stars and Shadow" (Gothic.net, 2001).
==Synopsis==
Hitchhiking in Georgia, Dancy Flammarion is picked up by a strange traveller with two undead companions, who happens to be going to the same house in Savannah that Dancy has been instructed to go to by her angel. The traveller kidnaps Dancy and offers her as a gift to the sinister women's society based in the Savannah mansion--but his hidden agenda is revealed when Dancy is left alone with a young man in a dress who carries a mysterious bottle.
==Characters==
Dancy Flammarion: A teenage albino, she has "talcum-powder skin" and hair like "milk spun into the finest silken thread." She wears "dark wrap-around sunglasses" that hide her "eyes the deep red-pink of pyrope or the pulpy hearts of fresh strawberries." She first appeared in Kiernan's novel Threshold, and went on to be featured in numerous short stories.
The Bailiff: Apparently a human, based in Providence, Rhode Island, he runs supernatural errands across the South. He has green eyes, an "easy smile," and "secretive parchment creases" on "his ancient face." He appears in numerous stories by Kiernan, and figures prominently in their novel Daughter of Hounds.
Dead Girl: A vampire from Providence, accompanying the Bailiff on his errands. Dancy tells her, "I dreamed about you sleeping at the bottom of a cold river," and refers to her as "Mercy Brown"--referring to a historical figure who was posthumously accused of vampirism in Rhode Island in 1892.Wikipedia, "Mercy Brown vampire incident." (Dead Girl angrily rejects this identification.) Dead Girl is the central character of Kiernan's 2001 short story "So Runs the World Away."
Bobby: Another vampire, Dead Girl's companion. He "might be any six-year-old boy," except that "his silver eyes flash like mercury and rainwater coins." He also appears in "So Runs the World Away."
Samuel: A mysterious figure, described as an "old conjurer," who never appears onstage. Porcelina describes his offer of a supernatural bottle despite Aramat's insistence that his name never be mentioned in her house. He may be one of the people the Bailiff tells Dancy "you best hope you never have to meet face to face.”
Samuel's Boy: An emissary sent with the bottle to the League and Society. He appears as a "pretty boy with star-shine eyes," "tall and very slender," in his late teens, "wearing a black velvet dress with a dark green symbol like an hourglass embroidered over his flat chest." Closer to his true form, he appears as a "maelstrom," a "counter-clock-wise gyre of snapping, twig-thin bones and mockingbird quills," with "eyes like swollen, seeping wounds."
===Stephen’s Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists===
The story centers around a secret club with nine members ("there have been more and less, at other times") dedicated to graverobbing, cannibalism, and occasional murder. Bobby says "they're like ghouls...only nicer," because they “dig up dead people and cut them into pieces." They "would be proper ghouls if only they’d been born to better skins than these fallible, ephemeral husks." "They paint their lips like open wounds. their eyes like bruises," and wear "vintage Victorian or Edwardian" gowns, corsets, and crinolines--none made after 1914, "the year the world ended," according to their leader. 
Their members are:
Miss Aramat Drawdes: The "great-great-great granddaughter of a Civil War munitions merchant," the owner of the mansion on East Hall Street, and the "unspoken matriarch" of the League and Society. She is the "first female descendant of Old Ybanes not to take a husband," as her "sexual, social, and culinary proclivities" are "entirely too unorthodox to permit even a marriage of convenience." Neither old nor young, she is a small woman with "china-doll hands and face," and "bottomless hazel-green eyes."
Biancabella: Second in status in the League and Society. Plays the violin and is "hardly ever wrong." Is an expert dissector. She is very tall.
Candida: Had the idea to carve jack-o'-lanterns from human and ape skulls. She reads Unaussprechlichen Kulten to Mary Rose. Chides Porcelina for her insolence.
Isolde: Has "curly blonde hair" and scars, "puckered worm-pink slashes" between her "pretty chin and her high lace collar."
Emily: Her "framed photographs of deceased members of the League and Society" are on display in the dissection room. Has "blue, exasperated eyes."
Alma: Plays the cello. She has a "collection of aborted and pathologic fetuses" in the basement. Fond of cooking, and has auburn hair.
Madeleine: Reads tarot with "dry prognostications." In the basement, she has a "jumble of beakers, test tubes, and bell jars." She appears again in Kiernan's 2010 short story "Houndwife."
Mary Rose: She has an "obsession with the cranium of Homo sapiens."
Porcelina: The youngest member of the Stephens Ward Tea League, there is "hurt and doubt coiled about her soul." Her "Greek isn’t exactly what it ought to be,” but she's "damn good" in bed (according to Madeleine), "at least when she's sober," and makes "a mean corn pudding." She wears "violet-tinted pince-nez" for her astigmatism.
==Setting==
Aside from a brief prelude on a Georgia road "miles past a town called Vidalia," the story is set in Savannah, Georgia, an "old city laid out wide and flat where the Savannah River runs finally into the patient, hungry sea." It takes place in Savannah's Stephens Ward, in "the mansion on East Hall Street," built by Theodosius W. Ybanes in 1883, an "eclectic, mismatched palace of masonry and wrought iron, Gothic pilasters and high Italiante balconies," designed by "a fashionable architect from Rhode Island," with a "mansard roof tacked on following a hurricane in 1888." "Unlike most of Savannah’s stately, old homes," it has "never passed from the direct bloodline of its first master," and is now owned by Aramat Drawdes, "great-great-great granddaughter of a Civil War munitions merchant."
The "rambling mansion" is "its own world," set off from the rest of the city by "yellow, glazed-brick walls, azaleas and ivy, [and] windows blinded by heavy drapes." 
The house features the Yellow Room, with "antique velvet wallpaper the pungent color of saffron," and the Crimson Room, "a room the color of a slaughterhouse," with "red walls, red floors, crossed swords above a red-tiled fireplace," and "a stuffed black bear wearing a red fez standing guard in one corner." The halls are hung with "midnight cemetery pictures" (that sound like the work of Richard Upton Pickman), depicting "hunched and prancing figures, dog-jawed, fire-eyed creatures, dragging corpses from the desecrated earth."
In the basement, with its "moldering redbrick walls," and a "sandy, earthen floor" partially "covered with sheets of varnished plywood," there are "three marble embalming tables laid end to end beneath a row of fluorescent lights." "An assortment of old cabinets and shelves lines the walls," displaying (among other things) "Alma’s collection of aborted and pathologic fetuses" and Mary Rose's assemblage of human skulls. There is "a long, low counter of carved and polished oak" that is "half funereal shrine, half laboratory work-bench," and "a great black double-door safe" that no one has tried to open.
The house is surrounded by a garden filled with "the low, sprawling limbs of live oaks and magnolias...crooked limbs draped with Spanish moss and epiphytic ferns." A "narrow cobblestone path...winds between the trees, past a brass sundial and marble statues set on marble pedestals." Beyond a "thick hedge of oleander bushes...the path turns abruptly"; there a reflecting pool is "choked with hyacinth and water lilies," with "broad flagstones to ring its dark circumference." Aramat keeps something "trapped down there at the bottom with the goldfish and the tadpoles”; they are "drowned things" with "rheumy voices twined with roots and slime." 
==Inspiration==
Kiernan says that they had no intention, after completing Threshold, of writing about Dancy Flammarion again. But when putting together Trilobite: The Writing of Threshold, they were struck by a passage in Chapter 8 that hinted at Dancy's backstory, particularly a line about "the pretty boy in Savannah who showed her a corked amber bottle that held three thousand ways to suffer, three thousand ways to hurt, before she killed him." "I wanted to know exactly what had happened to Dancy in Savannah when she met the pretty boy with the deadly amber bottle," they wrote in the introduction to the collection Alabaster.
For the specifics of what did happen, they credit two sources of inspiration: one is a drawing by the artist Dame Darcy,Etsy, "Meat Cake Vivisectvi Art Print Dame Darcy." from her Meat Cake comic, showing 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.This image provided the seed for the story's Stephen’s Ward Tea League and Society of Resurrectionists. The Bailiff, Dead Girl, and Bobby, on the other hand, were sparked by a real-life encounter Kiernan had in 1996 when they were the vocalist for a goth-folk-blues band named Death's Little Sister. After a show in Athens, Georgia, the band tried to drive to a supposedly haunted cemetery in nearby Jefferson, but the trip was cut short when they encountered a mysterious glowing ball, like a form of St. Elmo's Fire, and then had a tire of their car blow out. As they were stuck on the side of the road with a flat spare, a black Monte Carlo coming the other direction stopped for them. a very tall, very fat man, a veritable mountain of human flesh, climbed out of the Monte Carlo.... The man from the Monte Carlo was wearing a dark suit and a white shirt, a long coat that almost reached the ground, and a derby hat. He had a long beard, which may have been grey.He tells them he is going to Savannah, and that he can't give a ride to one of the band members because "I don't pick up hitchers," but that he would send a towtruck to help them. Before he drives off, Kiernan notices "two shiny points of light, like cat eyes caught in the beam of a flashlight, that sort of iridescence, but silver...watching us from inside the Monte Carlo." Kiernan's bandmate who had gotten out of the car, later said that their had been a kid in the car who was "all wrong"--though he wouldn't elaborate--and that the driver "smelled like rotten meat."
==Publication History==
"Les Fleurs Empoisonnées" has been republished in Kiernan's collections Alabaster (Subterranean Press, 2006) and Two Worlds and In Between: The Best of Caitlin R. Kiernan (Subterranean Press, 2011).
==References==
Category:Expanded Mythos Works
Category:Caitlin R. Kiernan works
Category:Novels