But there was no sign of anyone else, nothing but the lighthouse a mile or so to the south. No one to see or hear, no one to give a shit, and she’d tugged the smelly Speed Racer T-shirt off over her head and tossed it onto the hood of the Vega. The moon had flashed along the steel rings piercing both her nipples, and Niki had stood, looking down at her small, firm breasts in the pale light. She’d had the piercings done almost two years ago on a dare, her birthday and she and Danny wasted on rot-gut champagne, and he’d said I dare you, that’s all, I dare you.
She’d never been able to remember whether or not it had hurt much, if it had even hurt at all, could remember laughter and the piercer’s latex hands, the commingled aromas of disinfectant and sandalwood incense, but not so much as a sting as the needle had passed through one areola and then the other.
I dare you.
Oh hell, Niki, I double dare you.
Niki seized the left ring, worked both index fingers through and forced it open, tearing skin and flesh, until the tiny hematite ball that locked it closed popped free and fell to the sand. And that pain she had felt, pain so fine and honest that it had taken her breath, had left her gasping the salt air in great, helpless mouthfuls. She held the ring up against the sky, caught the moon inside and clenched it tight in her bloodslicked hand.
“I fuckin’ dare you, motherfucker!” each syllable punched into the blurring indigo sky, perfect blows driven by the blind red momentum of all the days and weeks and goddamned years and the emptiness waiting at the end.
The first wave had broken apart around her ankles, foam and unexpected warmth, and she’d realized dimly that she was moving forward, the headlights throwing her long shadow ahead. Her hands moved to her right breast, lingered there, and the water had rushed hard against her knees, enough force to push her back a step. The next wave had lifted her clear of the sand shifting beneath her feet, and she’d heard her mother shouting from the beach, Far enough, Niki, that’s far enough.
The spray splashed across her chest, spiced the fire spreading from her nipple. Her eyes were still dry.
“Goddamn you,” but the fury had been lost, and her voice had sounded papery thin and hollow. “You’re gone, and it’s going to hurt forever.”
Far enough now, Niki. Come back some.
A wave high enough to break over her head had driven her down, knees scraping bottom, and she’d come up coughing, spitting the ocean back into itself. She had opened her eyes and seen she was facing back toward shore, blinking through borrowed tears into the glare of the Vega’s headlights. Someone was standing in the black space between, someone small, watching her.
Come back some.
The next wave knocked her off her feet, and she had to dig her fingers into the sand to keep from being dragged further out by the undertow. Brief clarity, the illusion of clarity, fading with the pain, eclipsed by confusion and something that might have been fear if she’d cared enough to be afraid. And the silhouette in the headlights was still there, although she’d expected it not to be.
Niki had tried to stand, but another wave had slammed her forward, taken her another foot or two closer to the car and the shape in the light. And then a hand closed tightly around her own, a hand that felt firm and cold and terribly thin, and thin arms about her shoulders, hauling her gently back to the beach.
Niki tried to speak, had tried to say that she was all right, would be all right now, but had only been able to gag and cough up more water, sea water and bile and the half-digested hamburger she’d barely remembered eating for lunch. Slowly, the arms released her and she’d sunk to her knees in the dry sand. The water burned coming up, seared her throat and nostrils.
“You were going to drown yourself,” the girl said, and Niki had slumped back against the car.
The girl had been so small, smaller even than Niki, so pale she seemed to glow softly, concentration-camp skinny and dirty blond hair ratted beyond anything a comb or brush would ever be able to undo. She’d worn a black dress, filthy plain cloth, torn and ragged, and would have stood out even among the Jackson Square goth crowd.
“You were going to drown yourself,” the girl repeated, and it had almost sounded like an apology.
“No,” Niki croaked, before she started coughing again.
“It’s all right,” the girl had said, had reached out and brushed Niki’s straggling bangs from her eyes. “The sea doesn’t mind. I think it flatters her, mostly.”
Niki closed her eyes, trying to untangle her racing pulse from what the girl was saying. Her nipple hurt like hell, and her throat felt raw; her mouth tasted like puke and brine.
I wasn’t trying to drown.
“My name is Jenny,” the girl had said, “Jenny Dare.”
“I was not-Christ-I wasn’t trying to drown,” and she hadn’t known which sounded more ridiculous, her rasping voice or what she was saying out loud.
For a moment, Jenny Dare had said nothing else, just sat there in the sand, knees pulled close and her bare feet sticking out from under the tattered hem of her skirt, watching Niki with eyes the color of Wedgwood china.
“Jesus,” Niki said. “I’m not-not a fucking suicide.” There was blood in her mouth, and she’d realized that she must have bitten her tongue or lip.
The corners of Jenny Dare’s mouth turned down, faintest frown, her full lips the same color as her eyes.
“No,” she’d said, finally. “No, I don’t guess that you are. It isn’t hard to drown, not if that’s what you’re after, so I guess you’re not.”
Then Niki had begun to shiver, sudden chills and fresh nausea, thought that maybe she was going to pass out, and those arms encircled her again, had pulled her close and held her. She tried to push away; there was something vaguely sexual about her bare breasts against this strange girl, and it frightened her. But she was too weak, too sick to do anything but give up and rest her head against Jenny Dare’s bony shoulder, bury her face in the musty folds of the old dress, in the yellow-brown hair that had smelled like autumn, like woodsmoke and frost.
Niki had wrapped her arms around Jenny Dare, returned the embrace and held on with what little strength she had left.
“Shhhh…” the girl whispered, soothing dead-leaf sound, and she had stroked Niki’s sand-flecked temples and cheeks, the stubbly back of her neck. Her fingertips slid across Niki’s skin like an ointment, gelid cold that bled heat. Warmth that soaked inside her.
In the car, the Hendrix tape had still been playing, cycled back around to where it had begun, and Niki let the living warmth and the singer’s voice take her down.
Niki had dreamed of ships, wooden ships with tall pirate sails, and fishing boats, too, and gunmetal ships of war. And Jenny Dare, watching silently, expectantly, as they had passed in the night. And when she’d awakened, when she’d been pulled slowly into purple-gray dawn by the squawk and screech of gulls, she’d been alone again.
Through the white scorch of July and into August, Niki had worked her way south, never more than a few miles at a time, sleeping in air-conditioned motels during the day, wandering the dunes and beaches and getting drunk on bourbon after sundown. When she couldn’t sleep, when the alcohol had left her restless instead of unconscious, she’d watched cable television or read paperback horror novels until dark.
She’d gone as far as Savannah before she felt the homesick tug of New Orleans and had turned back. But the second time around, the roads and the marshy Carolina coastline had lost their comfort, and she only made it as far as Myrtle Beach. Niki had rented a room by the week there and found a job stripping in a boardwalk dive called the Palmetto Club; she slacked off the booze, replacing the sweet amber numbness with the ache of tired muscles and the adrenaline rush of performance.
And early in October, shortly after the first guarded hints of cooler weather, the dreams of Danny Boudreaux, like something in a butcher’s window, had become infrequent and finally stopped altogether, a long and difficult fever breaking, leaving her free to face her g
hosts awake.
5.
“So why the hell did you stop in Birmingham,” the girl said, the girl with hair like cherries who had surprised her, not only by knowing what a Cubano was, but by actually knowing how to make one. Niki held the demitasse to her nostrils, breathed in the rich steam rising off the black, sweet coffee.
“You’d have to ask my car,” Niki said. “My car must have decided this looked like a good place to drop dead.”
The girl, whose name was Daria Parker, which made Niki think of Dorothy Parker, smiled slightly. She was taller than Niki, but hardly tall, and her face was too angular to be called pretty, much too handsome to ever be anything so simple or straightforward as pretty.
“Shit,” she said. “I sure as hell know I could find a better place to kick off.”
Niki sipped at her Cubano, the warmth spreading from her throat into her stomach, soothing away the road ache and exhaustion like a reward for still being alive. At least she’d found the coffeehouse, the only thing that had been open on this odd street. She’d turned the corner and at first the sight had been disorienting, almost disquieting, the gaslights and cobblestones and nothing open, planned anachronism, more of a Hollywood backlot than a street she’d have expected to find here.
“Okay, so why were you even driving through Birmingham?” Livid pink scars crisscrossed Daria’s forearms, telltale barista tattoos, marking the careless and inevitable contact of soft flesh and the espresso machine’s steam arm.
“Gee,” Niki said, setting her cup down on the bar. “I must have missed the quarantine signs.”
“The Chamber of Commerce keeps taking them down.” And this time, there wasn’t even the hint of a smile.
“Okay, I confess. I was just following directions,” and she dug a crumpled, brightly colored brochure from one pocket of her jacket, smoothed it out flat on the bar. “SEE-Ave Maria Grotto!” it commanded, in bold black typeface on glossy blue. “Little Jerusalem -AN INSPIRATION AND WONDERMENT.”
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Daria said, and she picked the brochure up off the bar.
Niki shrugged. “Nope. I’m afraid it’s the truth.”
She’d found the brochure at the welcome station just across the state line, had grabbed a big handful from the display rack by the restrooms and read through them while she’d sipped a styrofoam cup of coffee that had been free and had tasted like it. She had discarded brochures advertising places like DeSoto Caverns (“Underground Fairyland!”) and Moundville (“Secrets of a Vanished Past!”). Ave Maria Grotto had been at the very bottom, last chance at direction, and she’d been hooked by the story of the Benedictine monk who’d spent his life creating a scale model of the holy city from bits of stone and trash.
“You must be one weird lady, Niki Ky,” Daria said and tossed the brochure back onto the counter.
And Niki looked at it for a moment, trying to remember why she’d made that particular choice, why it had seemed important, or even interesting, at the time. She’d driven away from Myrtle Beach with only the vaguest sense of purpose, little more than the blind need to be moving again. Had danced her last shift at the Palmetto two nights before and given herself some time to sleep before she’d settled her bill with the motel and tossed the gym bag into the back of the Vega.
“So, you got a place to stay?”
Niki shrugged again, shook her head.
“I guess I haven’t really thought about it,” she said. “I guess I’m gonna have to find a room.”
“Or you could crash at my place for a few days, if you can deal with cockroaches and noisy neighbors.”
“Are you sure?” The offer made her uncomfortable, made her automatically wary, and she wondered just when and where she’d gotten so goddamned paranoid. “I mean, a motel would do just fine.”
“I have an entirely better class of roaches. And besides, it’s not every day you get the chance to offer shelter to a wandering pilgrim.”
“What?” Niki said, but then she remembered the brochure, the miniature temples pieced together from broken soft drink bottles and scrap metal, got the joke and laughed.
“Maybe you know some kinda a blessing for doomed musicians and bands going nowhere at the speed of light,” Daria Parker said, and then someone was asking her for a steamed hazelnut soy milk and she rolled her eyes when the guy turned his back.
“One vegan pussy drink, coming up,” she whispered to Niki and headed for the cooler.
Niki drank the last lukewarm sip of her Cubano, stared down at the few stray espresso grounds at the bottom of her cup. The feeling that things had slipped out of her hands, that she was no longer running the show, had been growing stronger and stronger since the ride to the Texaco station with Wendel Sayer; a helpless feeling too much like the way she’d felt after Danny’s death, and it made her want to run.
She’d gotten awfully good at running.
Niki left the money for her drink and a tip on the bar and found an empty booth. She set her bag on the seat next to her and took out the dog-eared copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, scrunched herself into the corner, and this time she made it through four pages before she dozed off. When Daria woke her, gently shook her shoulder and whispered her name, the coffeehouse was empty and there was blue-gray dawn outside the steamfogged windows.
CHAPTER THREE
Spyder
1.
S pyder stood out of sight, almost invisible in the dust-scented shadows, and watched Daria Parker, watched her as she gazed in at something in the window display. She knew Daria well enough that they spoke, nodded, exchanged smiles whenever Daria came in to buy hair color or used records or just to prowl around the shop. And, of course, she’d seen her on stage at Dr. Jekyll’s, had sat and listened to her words and the steady hammer of her bass like a heart trapped inside the black-box speakers. When the streetlights came on, Daria looked over her shoulder, and Spyder knew that she’d seen the cop car, knew she was leaving before she even turned away.
“What do you think she was looking at?” Byron said, and Spyder ignored him. He was still sitting on the wobbly-legged stool behind the register, chain-smoking cloves in the dark. Two hours ago, he’d stuck a New Order cassette in the tape deck and now “Bizarre Love Triangle” was coming around for the third or fourth time.
Daria walked away with her head down, guitar case swinging in her hand like a portable monolith, and the cops followed, cruising slowly past Weird Trappings.
“If you don’t play something else,” Spyder said, “I’m gonna make you eat that fucking tape.”
“Like what, Spyder?” and without looking up, without having to see, she knew the sour, impatient expression on Byron’s face, the way his eyes narrowed and his lower lip pouted out like a wasp sting.
“Anything else,” she said. She couldn’t see Daria anymore, and the police had gone, too; the cars out there now could be anyone. Spyder turned around, and the big cardboard box was still sitting unopened on the floor, waiting right where she’d left it, only a few moments ago. The streetlights bled through the glass storefront, light pared, skinned down to its bones, and the shop was not nearly as dark as before.
Byron was rummaging through the cassettes she kept beneath the cash register, making as much noise as he could; big, pissy Byron racket just for her. Spyder sat down beside the box, drew her razor-toothed carton cutter expertly, schrunk, over and through the shiny membrane of packing tape. Inside, wrapped safe within polyurethane, were dozens of rubber snakes and lizards. Gently, she pierced the topmost bag, then used both hands to rip it open wide, and the rich smell of new car vinyl gushed up from the breach.
A plastic clatter across the room, and Byron cursed.
Spyder reached inside, slipped her left hand smoothly between newly slashed lips, and the air seemed much cooler, heavier, down there; she pulled something big out through the slit, molded scales and beady black eyes and a forked red tongue tasting the air.
Byron had put in her Best of the Doors tap
e, and Jim Morrison crooned “Spanish Caravan” through the cheesy little off-brand speakers rigged up on the walls, one each in the four cobwebby corners of the shop. He knew she knew that he hated the Doors; he was just being snitty, pushing at buttons, pulling chains, seeing how much more she’d let him get away with. Byron was leaning over the counter, looking at her.
“God, that’s ugly,” he said. “What is it supposed to be? Some kind of alligator?”
“No,” she replied. And Spyder read the shiny, gold paper tag to herself, gold and black tied around its neck with an elastic string. The African desert monitor, it said, Varanus griseus. She said the Latin aloud, and the syllables felt delicious on her tongue, like an incantation or eldritch password.
“What?” Byron asked, leaning out a little farther. “What did you say?”
Spyder set the monitor aside, hauled an identical twin from the box, one more and she had triplets. She tossed their empty bag away, deflated, transparent afterbirth, tore into the one underneath and found fifteen perfect red-eyed geckos. Digging deeper, she unearthed green iguanas with whiplash tails, a handful of coral snakes like deadly candy-striped canes and a single six-foot Indian cobra, coiled snug inside its own wicker basket. Spyder stuffed the empty bags back into the box, tossed it in the general direction of the stockroom curtain.
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