Silk

by Caitlin R. Kiernan

  “God, I hate this song,” Byron said, almost a whisper, just loud enough for her to hear.

  And she wheeled on him, no warning, threw one of the geckos hard, and it bounced cleanly off the side of his head.

  “Ow!” Byron clutched at his ear like he was really hurt. “Christ, Spyder! Be a goddamned bitch, why don’t you!”

  “Do some work, buy something, or go home,” she said.

  “Jesus, Spyder. What the fuck’s your damage?” and he smoothed at his hair by the faint reflection in the glass countertop, his face dimly superimposed on an assortment of bondage gear and bongs and clunky silver jewelry. “Did you fuckin’ forget to take your Prozac again this morning or what?”

  Byron Langly, pushing, poking, a mean little boy, always surprised when the animal in the cage finally bites his fingers. Spyder closed her eyes, prayed to herself that this time he would back off.

  “I mean it, Byron,” and her voice was still calm, but she could hear the brittle edge that hadn’t been there a minute before. “Go breathe someone else’s air.”

  A mean and thickheaded child, no regard for signs hung in plain view, the signs posted for his own protection.

  Byron took a deep drag on his cigarette, let the smoke ooze like lazy ectoplasm from his nostrils. His tweezed and painstakingly penciled eyebrows raised slightly, and he cocked his head the smallest bit to one side, twirled one finger absently into his black hair.

  Pushing.

  “I’m not kidding,” and she was slipping past brittle fast, slipping past the carefully constructed walls and brick-by-brick control, the masonry box she kept her mind in. A little more and things might start to spill out, slosh ugly and acid over the top or leak hissing between the cracks.

  And he knew that.

  Byron crushed his cigarette out in the big ceramic ashtray on the counter, the ghost of a smile wrinkling his red, rouged lips.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, purled in his silkiest honey-voice, “I shouldn’t have said that, Spyder.”

  “Please, Byron. Just go home now,” and it shouldn’t have been so easy for him to get to her like that; Spyder braced her hands flat against the floor, the smooth, cold floor, and tried to remember if maybe she had forgotten her meds that morning.

  “But you’re not mad at me?”

  “No,” she said. “Just please go.”

  “Sure, Spyder. If that’s what you want. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  She didn’t answer, stared down into her puddle of creepy crawlies until she heard his footsteps, a dramatic sigh, and then his footsteps and the cowbell over the door jangled loudly after him. And she was alone in her shop, except for the shadows and the stink of Byron’s cigarettes and the dead man singing through the stereo.

  Four blocks from Weird Trappings, Byron stopped in the shelter of an alley. He was not quite halfway home to the cramped apartment he shared with a drag queen named Billy (better known to her fans as the great Talulah Thunderpussy) and Billy’s butt-ugly Pekinese. The wind had picked up since he’d left the shop, had turned blustery and raw, and he’d forgotten his coat, the fine velveteen frock coat he’d rescued from a Southside estate sale, hanging useless on an old nail in Spyder’s stockroom.

  He cursed himself and took another step into the alley, deeper into the gloom nestled between the tall, old buildings, the walls on either side tattooed with spray paint tags and gang graffiti. He knew better, knew that he was safer if he kept to the main streets, the well lit sidewalks. And this particular alley was narrower than most, not even wide enough for a car. But he was freezing.

  By now, Spyder had probably found his coat, was probably having herself a good old belly laugh at his expense. He imagined her standing alone in the stockroom, stuffywarm, cozy in her maze of boxes and brooms and junk, and Byron hugged himself tightly, shivered in his thin cotton blouse.

  “Bitch,” he whispered to the empty street, the alley, to Spyder snickering in his head, and wiped his runny nose on the back of his hand. A little of the maroon lipstick he always wore rubbed off onto his knuckles, smudgy dull smear the color of cranberry sauce. He glanced nervously over his shoulder into the dark and realized that he couldn’t see light from the other side, that the alleyway must dead-end instead of opening back out onto Morris.

  A violent, sudden gust swept along First Avenue, air like ice-water breath, and Byron was forced even farther from the useless comfort of the streetlight pooled yellow-white on the sidewalk. The wind dragged the rustling pages of a discarded newspaper past the alley and they were gone.

  Just a couple more seconds, just until I can stop shaking so bad and get my…

  Somewhere behind him, something moved; a dry and weighty scritch, scritch, scritch over asphalt and gravel and trash, the glass tinkle of an empty bottle disturbed.

  And something else, something almost inaudible beneath the rising wail and whistle of the wind, a sound like crackling autumn leaves or the guilty whisperings of children. A murmur and a sigh and the sharp, wet wheeze of breath drawn in quickly through clenched teeth.

  Byron stepped out of the alley, three steps backwards and he was once again at the slicing mercy of the wind. But he did not run, knew at least enough to know that there was nothing to be gained by trying to run away, by wearing his fear like a gaudy gold cuff link on his sleeve.

  And there was nothing in the alley, either, nothing but the empty, lightless space between two buildings, a few bottles left behind by winos, needles left by junkies. He made himself stand still and look, never mind the cold or the way his heart was pounding, pounding like it was ready to explode in a gory spray from his chest.

  There ain’t nothing under the bed, Byron. Nothing in the closet. See?

  But he’d always told his mother, his grandmother, his big sister, that real monsters were fast, fast and much too smart to get caught when you turned on the light.

  I’m not afraid of you, and although Byron thought he’d spoken, had expected to hear the words out loud, his lips had gone numb, and there was no sound but the wind and the white noise backdrop of the city.

  And from the alley, perfect silence.

  Byron Langly turned and walked quickly away, not stopping once or even slowing down until it was to slide his key into the lock of his apartment door.

  2.

  Two-thirds up the side of Red Mountain, Spyder left the obstacle course of potholes and badly patched and repatched asphalt, pulled roughly into her narrow driveway. The turd-brown Celica coughed its oily exhaust against the cold, bald tires scrunching along the gravel furrow, haphazard excuse for a drive framed between tall, untended rows of holly and crape myrtle. Set far back from the last dim streetlight on Cullom Street, the house waited for her in its protective cocoon of dark, sheltered safe beneath the craggy limbs of water oaks and arthritic old pecans.

  Dark windows like cheap sunglasses or the eyes of birds, and the long dark front porch.

  By the time she reached the door she was shivering, stood fumbling with her cluttered key ring, keys to Weird Trappings and its half-dozen display cases, some that fit locks that no longer existed and a few she’d picked up at yard sales and antiques shops just because she’d liked how they looked or felt in her hands. The porch offered only the barest sanctuary from the wind; a wild, junky confusion of debris, things tossed out and pushed to the back, forgotten except when she happened to trip over something or, much more rarely, when she discovered a use for some discarded this or that and reclaimed it. Deflated bicycle wheels and unidentifiable machinery, cogs and sprockets, an ancient Maytag washing machine she’d dragged out of the house years ago, now stuffed to overflowing with rags and garbage. The old Norton she’d bought meaning to fix up, had even gotten as far as breaking down the transmission one day late last spring.

  She finally found the key that felt right, that had the right number of peaks and valleys of the proper heights and depths cut in the right order, held it tight in her trembling fingers and turned the dead bolt, opened
the door and stepped into the murky warmth of the house.

  And the house accepted her, slipped itself around her like a steaming bath, and it hardly mattered that she’d closed the door; the house had its own meteorology, its own gentle system of fronts and pressure centers. Spyder stood very still as her eyes adjusted to the shadows and the darkness behind the shadows, letting the day slide off her like grime, breathing in the whispery dustiness of the little foyer. A few seconds more and she easily found the switch on the wall, the ornate iron switchplate cooler to the touch than the wallpaper skin, and flooded the room, the hall beyond, with soft white light.

  Spyder blinked, squinted, dropped the brown paper grocery bag she’d carried from the car, bump to the floor, and one of the rubber monitor lizards tumbled out. It lay helpless on its back, legs in the air and “Made in China ” molded into its smooth cream-colored belly. She leaned down, set it on its feet, pointed the long snout and forever-extended tongue at the door. Then she made sure she’d reset the dead bolt and left the key ring dangling from the lock.

  “Nothing personal,” she said to the monitor. “I’m sure you’re a very good watch lizard.”

  Spyder checked the door again, rattled the sturdy knob, and followed the light down into the depths of the house.

  Three days after Spyder’s tenth birthday, her mother had died of uterine cancer. The irony had not been lost on her, that the creeping thing that had slowly devoured her mother from inside had begun in her womb, had grown itself there in secret like a seditious fetus. Her malignant, vindictive sibling, brother cancer, sister tumor. Her Aunt Margaret had kept Spyder out of school and together they had watched over her mother through the long last month. Spyder had washed her mother’s piss and blood from the bedsheets, had measured out careful doses of the tea-shaded morphine elixir, had held her mother’s head while she’d puked into the plastic garbage can that her aunt had moved from the kitchen.

  And Trisha Baxter had left her daughter the rambling Victorian house at the nub end of Cullom Street, the house her grandfather had built and the only thing she owned worth leaving behind. Spyder’s father had died years before, and her mother had kept them fed and clothed on what she’d made as a seamstress, that and the rare and grudging gifts from family members.

  So, after the funeral, after the Bible verses and carnation stink, Spyder had been packed off to live in Pensacola, handed down to cousins that she’d never met. And when she was thirteen she’d run away the first time, had been picked up by Florida state troopers, hitchhiking a few miles from the Alabama state line. Had finally spent a little time in juvie, and no one had really bothered to argue when she turned sixteen and dropped out of school. No one had come after her when she’d bought the bus ticket back to Birmingham with her own money. She’d walked from the Greyhound depot downtown, dragging an old duffel bag behind her, military canvas crammed full of her ratty jeans and T-shirts and comic books like some gigantic olive-drab sausage.

  But her Aunt Margaret had rented out the house, her house, and the fat woman who’d answered the door hadn’t even let Spyder come inside, had stood behind the latched screen, nervous, piggy eyes and children screaming over the television behind her. Had threatened to call the police when Spyder kicked the door and called the woman white trash. Spyder had dumped her clothes and junk out all over the front porch, had screamed obscenities while the terrified woman had frantically dialed the police and the children cheered from an open window. Finally, tired past exhausted, she’d sat down in the porch swing and waited quietly for the cops to come.

  They’d put her in handcuffs and had agreed with the fat woman that she was probably on drugs.

  Spyder had spent the next two months in the psycho ward at Cooper Green Hospital, courtesy her aunt and uncle’s signatures, had lost entire weeks in a gooey tranq haze of Xanax and amitriptyline, and once, after she’d punched an orderly, a needle full of Thorazine that had left her locked inside her useless body like a sentient corpse. But when they’d finally let her out, the fat woman and her children were gone, and her Aunt Margaret had handed over the keys and a savings account with the little money her mother had left and a third of what had come in from tenants over the years.

  “You’re on your own now, little lady,” her aunt had said, and Spyder had looked her straight in the eyes and laughed.

  “I always was,” she’d said.

  Most of her mother’s things had been parceled out to relatives or given away to the Salvation Army, and Spyder had spent the first night alone in the empty house, listening to the hardwood and plaster voices, the familiar settling creaks and murmurs. Like her, the house had remembered, remembered her, remembered everything. In the last hour before dawn, she’d finally fallen asleep, nestled into a musty pallet of quilts and one of her Uncle Fred’s mothball-scented sleeping bags.

  And in the house where she’d been born, where her mother had been born and died, Spyder Baxter had dreamed.

  Spyder was sitting at the kitchen table eating a cold Spam sandwich, washing it down with Buffalo Rock ginger ale, when the phone rang.

  “Yeah,” she barked into the receiver, gruff enough to put off anyone she didn’t want to talk to anyhow, firemen selling charity tickets or salespeople wanting her to switch long-distance companies. She took another sip of the cola-colored soda; Spyder loved Buffalo Rock, maybe because it was hard to find outside Birmingham and seemed sort of old-fashioned, or maybe just because nobody else she’d ever met could stand to drink the stuff.

  Nothing from the other end of the line for a second or two, and then Byron, his cultivated, slightly nasal Scar-lett O’Hara drawl, affected so long that it had become as much a part of him as his ferrety eyes or his pretty, tapering hands.

  “Spyder,” he said quietly, but it came out more like “Spah’da,” and she didn’t answer, listened instead to the parking lot sounds in the background. There was no telephone in Byron’s apartment, hadn’t been since his roommate had run up a four-hundred-dollar phone bill calling the Psychic Friends Network and gay sex numbers. Byron had to walk half a block to a Shop-A-Snak to use a pay phone; she pictured him standing there, shivering in the freezing wind, thoroughly, righteously miserable. Spyder took another bite of Spam and chewed deliberately.

  “I’m sorry, Spyder,” and there was the faintest ash-gray trace of regret in his voice, genuine regret, not the paper-doll remorse he usually tossed about like confetti.

  Or maybe he was just getting better at the charade.

  She swallowed, stared at the dirty venetian blinds covering the kitchen window.

  “I said I was sorry, Spyder.”

  “I’m busy, Byron.” She took a fresh slice of white bread, spread Blue Plate mayonnaise thick and added lots of black pepper. A car horn blared through the receiver.

  “You’re just eating,” he said, indignant, and there was no question about his sincerity this time.

  “Yeah, so I’m busy fucking eating, okay?” She sliced off a wedge of the spongy pink meat, wrapped the bread around it.

  “Just don’t be pissed at me, Spyder. Please? Just don’t be pissed anymore.”

  She laid the sandwich down on the tabletop and licked a dab of mayonnaise off her thumb.

  “Jesus, Spyder. Will you please say something?”

  “Stop sniveling, Byron.”

  Outside, a sudden gust of wind swept hard against the side of the house, wind that seemed to push itself slowly, painfully, against the old paint-flaky boards, pressing its insubstantial flanks against the windows.

  “Spyder? Spyder, are you still there?”

  The windows rattled and the wind thing slowly backed away, sighed itself roughly around the corners of the house and spread airflesh across the steeply pitched roof, over the cornices and gables. An icy draft leaked through the cracks in the window frame, winter breath oozing between glass and caulk and muntin.

  “Spyder?”

  “Yeah,” and she could hear the sudden flatness in her own voice, the glo
ating satisfaction drained away now. She closed her eyes and the world felt so thin, hammered down by the rumble and howl. Everything pressed into an onionskin moment, ready to tear and let the sagging, collapsing sky pour through.

  The blaze of Heaven bleeding through, no matter how hard she squeezed her eyes shut.

  “There was something in an alley, Spyder. On my way home,” and part of her was listening to him, still hearing anyway, registering the fear it was probably tearing him apart to show.

  “Just go home, Byron. Please, just go the hell on home before you catch pneumonia and die.”

  She didn’t give him time to answer, cut him short and left the receiver lying off the hook on the table. Spyder finished her supper with her eyes closed.

  This is the first time that Spyder’s father made them spend the night down in the cellar. She isn’t even Spyder yet, just plain old Lila Baxter. She’s six, barely, and at the end of the summer she’ll start first grade. Her hair is black, and there’s a filthy Band-aid on her left elbow where she fell off the swingset yesterday. She’s sitting with her mother at the kitchen table and it’s stickyhot July weather, dog day premonition, and still the supper is getting cold, the china bowl of butter beans and the greasy green tomatoes. She’s reading a Dr. Seuss book her Grandma Baxter gave her a long time ago, and the pages have dirty fingerprint smudges and the cover’s about to come off. She knows it by heart, can recite the words from beginning to end. Last winter, she had a black molly she named Sam-I-Am that died because she took it out of the water to watch it breathe.

  She’s thinking about Sam-I-Am, buried in a matchbox under her mother’s roses, deep so the cats can’t dig him up. She doesn’t really have to read the words anymore, spends more time looking at the pictures.

  The screen door slams shut (thwack), the way it does when she just lets it go, lets the spring snap it back. Her mother gets up, goes to the stove and takes the chicken out of the oven, is still standing there, peeling back the aluminum foil, when her father comes in. Her mother looks at him and frowns, wipes at a wisp of hair that’s slipped loose from her ponytail and is sweatplastered to her forehead.