So Runs the World Away

"So Runs the World Away" is a short story by American author Caitlin R. Kiernan that introduces her setting of the supernatural underworld of Providence, Rhode Island, which she used as the milieu for several subsequent stories. It was first published in 2001 in The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women. It was later reprinted in Kiernan's collection To Charles Fort, With Love, and in their 2018 Cthulhu Mythos omnibus Houses Under the Sea.
== Overview ==
The story focuses on an undead creature known as Dead Girl who seems to have trouble fitting in to the societies of ghouls and vampires who dominate the Providence dark world. She is preoccupied with remembering the human life she had before her transition, an impulse discouraged by the character known as The Bailiff: “We forget for a reason, child,” he tells her. “Time is too heavy to carry so much of it strung about our necks.”
The story introduces characters and settings that will play important roles in later fiction by Kiernan, including The Bailiff, Madame Terpsichore, and the house on Benefit Street. It begins to sketch out Kiernan's vision of ghoul society, elaborated from the hints in H. P. Lovecraft's "Pickman's Model".
== Locations ==
The "big", "yellow" house on Benefit Street, described as "a house filled up with things that are pretty or broken or both." The aboveground portion of the house is occupied by vampires, described as "stiff and obsolescent beings... tragic waxwork shades sipping absinthe"; the basement is an entrance to the subterranean warrens of the ghouls. In Kiernan's 2007 novel Daughter of Hounds, its address is given as 135 Benefit Street--explicitly identifying it with the house that served as the model for the Lovecraft story "The Shunned House".
The bottom of Providence's Sekonk River is where Dead Girl, Bobby, and Gable sleep during the day--the latter "coiled like an eel in the roots of a drowned willow".
The Swan Point Cemetery has a mausoleum for the Stanton family where Dead Girl keeps a cigar box full of secrets. The story also contains a description of Lovecraft's gravesite in the cemetery, as well as a nearby tree where fans have carved the "unpronounceable names of dark, fictitious gods and entire passages from Lovecraft," as well "a scar in the shape of a tentacle-headed fish, a parody of the Christian ichthus."
== Characters ==
* Dead Girl, an undead woman who sleeps at the bottom of the Sekonk River. It's unclear whether she is a vampire or something else; she is acquainted with both vampires and ghouls but does not seem to be part of either society. She has memories, possibly stolen, of being a living human in the modern era, taking a boyfriend to see Lovecraft's grave, but she also has an attachment to a newspaper article about a suspected 19th century vampire named Mercy Lena Brown. (Brown was a real person who was actually accused of vampirism after her death.)Wikipedia, "Mercy Brown vampire incident"
* Bobby, Dead Girl's companion. He is described as having "quicksilver eyes", which in Kiernan's fiction generally indicates vampirism.
* Gable is introduced as "the girl with foil-silver eyes and teeth like the last day of winter". She has an antagonistic relationship with Dead Girl, and a close association with The Bailiff.
* Madam Terpsichore, a leader of the ghouls of Providence. She has "jaundiced teeth like sharpened piano keys".
* Barnaby, a low-status ghoul who is bullied by Madam Terpsichore. He is described as "very thin" with "inquisitive, dog-cocked ears".
* The Bailiff, an important figure in Providence's dark world. While in Daughter of Hounds he is identified as human, here he seems much more uncanny: He "squats in the dust and fallen leaves and begins to pick something stringy from his teeth." He has a "rust-crimson voice".
* Miss Josephine, the leader of the vampires who live upstairs in the house on Benefit Street. She has "sharp white teeth" but "blue-brilliant", "bright and sapphire eyes"; later, in Daughter of Hounds, she has quicksilver-coloered eyes like other vampires. She has "forgotten how or why to breathe, except to talk."
* Signior Garzarek, one of Miss Josephine's followers. He is a "tall man with slippery hair and ears that are too big for his head and almost come to points". He praises Josephine for her "delicious perversity wrapped up in such a comely package.”
* Addie Goodwine, another follower of Josephine.
* Nathaniel, a follower of Josephine who wears a bowler hat.
==Publication History==
*The Mammoth Book of Vampire Stories by Women (2001)
*To Charles Fort, With Love (2005)
*Into the Dreamlands (2007)
*Houses Under the Sea: Mythos Tales (2018)
*O grande livro dos vampiros (2021, Portuguese translation for the Brazilian market)
== References ==
Category:Caitlin R. Kiernan works