“Spyder? What’s wrong? Did I say something wrong?”
Nothing for a second, hearts beating and sluggish time, and then, “I don’t want you to do this in the basement. Anywhere else is okay, Robin, but not the basement.”
Robin had stared at Spyder’s dim reflection in the window-Spyder reversed and so maybe that Spyder was sane-feeling her concern melting into annoyance, and anger not far enough behind.
“Why? What’s wrong with the basement?”
“I don’t want you to use it, that’s all, okay? I just don’t want you to use the basement.”
Robin had taken one step closer, still some hope of defusing this, if she didn’t get pissed, if Byron and Walter kept their mouths shut.
“It needs to be the basement, Spyder. I’ve worked this all out very precisely, and your basement is the only place I know that’s even close to what we need.”
In the window glass, Spyder’s eyes were just shadows beneath the ridge of her brow, her dark eyebrows, unreadable smudges, and she didn’t say anything.
“Come on. At least tell me why you don’t want us to use the basement for the ceremony-”
“I don’t want you to use the basement. You can do whatever you want in any other part of the house, okay? But I don’t want you to do this in the basement.”
“You said that already,” Byron mumbled, then, and Robin had glared at him, dry ice and razors, had given him a rough shove and silently mouthed Shut the hell up; he’d sneered and given her his middle finger in return.
“Just tell me why, Spyder, and maybe we can figure something out-”
“No, Robin. There’s nothing to figure out. I don’t want to do this in the basement. You’ll have to think of some other place.”
The finality in Spyder’s voice, the mulish resolution, and to her fleeting surprise, Robin had discovered that this time she didn’t really care if it was because Spyder was sick, if she couldn’t help these unpredictable barriers and taboos. She loved Spyder and had always walked on eggshells and china plates for her, had always been so careful, so mindful of the places and things and words that you could never know were off-limits until you’d already stepped across the line.
“Goddamn it, Spyder! Shit!” Robin wheeled around and Byron had flinched, maybe thinking she was going to hit him that time. Instead, she’d stomped across the floor and stood in the basket-handle archway separating the living room from the dining room that Spyder used as a dumping ground for her hundreds or thousands of books.
“There is no ‘why’ because there’s no reason for us not to perform the ceremony down there and you know it. You’re just freaking out over something, and you could at least tell me what the hell it is.”
Spyder had not turned around, still stared through herself and the window, vacant and intent, but Robin noticed the way she’d begun rubbing her left hand against her hip, her callused palm across ancient, ragged denim. As if her fingers had started to itch, as if there was a stain on her hand or her jeans, and Robin had known that Spyder wasn’t even aware that she was doing it.
“It’s my house, Robin.”
“Oh please, don’t give me that shit. Just tell me why the hell we shouldn’t use the basement and I’ll shut up about it. But I want a reason, Spyder.”
Robin had glanced at Byron, at Walter still standing there holding the bulging brown bags in his arms; both of them nervous, frightened, caught in the middle, and as if she could read their minds, scrape the thoughts off the gray folds of their brains: This is not the way it works, Robin, and Don’t push, and It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter near enough for this.
“Please, Spyder,” she said. “All I want is a reason.”
Then Walter had set the bags down again, both of them on the coffee table, and rammed his hands deep in his pockets.
“Maybe we should just forget about it, Robin,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just forgot about it? I didn’t really care that much any-”
“Shut up, Walter,” and Spyder had sounded like the still and quiet before a summer storm, the voiceless threat in the eyes of something wild. And she’d turned away from the window and crossed the room to stand in front of Robin; her left hand rubbing furiously at her jeans and the fingers of her right kneading the puckered cross between her eyes, the scarred flesh that turned scarlet when she was upset or angry.
“You do whatever you want,” she’d said, poisonous calm between each word, “if it’s so important to you. Do it and get it over with and then get out of my house.”
“Christ, Spyder. Jesus. Won’t you even try to tell me why you’re afraid?”
But Spyder had already stepped past her, had kicked over a towering stack of paperbacks on her way to the darkened hall, scattering dust and silverfish and brittle, yellowed pages. Robin had stared down at the jumbled collage of faded covers, a painting by Frazetta of a sword-wielding woman with impossible breasts, something dead and scaly at her feet, Stephen King and Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Knowing how badly she’d fucked this up, knowing that Spyder might never let her take back these things she’d said. And knowing that without her, the ceremony would be flawed, not hollow, but not whole, either.
“Well?” Byron had asked, some time later, long enough that her legs had begun to ache from standing in the same position. She’d kept her eyes on the floor, the heap of tumbledown fantasies.
“Take the bags down to the basement, now, Walter,” she’d said, and he hadn’t waited for her to tell him a third time.
6.
Later, what Robin had remembered of the ceremony and the basement was like pages torn apart and hastily Scotch-taped together again by a blind woman, pages illuminated with needles and metallic inks and black words that she was glad had all but lost their meanings.
She’d remembered the preparations, Walter hefting open the trapdoor in the hallway floor and the cool air rising from the darkness, acrid-sweet stench of dust and earth and mildew. No light but their candles, and her feet uncertain on the steep and narrow stairs down, wood that creaked, cried, beneath her bare feet and the dust against her skin had felt like velvet. Velvet that clung to the soles of her feet, and her lungs had filled up with the basement air like drowning waters. And Walter had closed the trapdoor behind them.
While she’d traced her lines on the red dirt, Walter had dug a very small pit in the center of the floor, rusty garden spade breaking through the stubborn crust packed down by almost a century. Byron had stood quiet and alone, smoking his cloves, throwing candlelight shadows like shifting, craggy people. Everyone trying not to think about Spyder and thinking of absolutely nothing else.
She had laid the signs in Morton’s salt and Crayola tempera, had driven the twenty-four white candles into the hard ground, markers of wax and fire in places that mattered.
And when she’d finished and the basement glowed soft and flickering orange, the dark driven back into cracks and corners and the spaces between floorboards overhead, she popped the lid off the little can of Sterno from one of Byron’s bags, struck a kitchen match and set the flaming can at the bottom of Walter’s shallow pit.
“Take off your clothes.” She remembered having said that, and the looks on their faces, and Byron’s exasperation and Walter trying not to look at her while he’d stripped. And then they’d sat in a circle around the Sterno fire, faint chemical heat against their faces and the circle incomplete, missing one, the one that mattered most of all. Walter had handed her the crumpled bag of peyote buttons, and she’d taken the first one, had bitten into the bitter, rubbery flesh and gagged. But she had swallowed, and then swallowed another bite, and there’d been lukewarm bottles of mineral water to calm her stomach. They’d passed the bag around, counterclockwise, each of them taking their turn again and again, chewing slowly and drinking water and not talking, until the nausea had found them and Robin had set the bag aside.
She had sprinkled salt and rosemary, nutmeg and mace, above the fire.
“I’m go
ing to puke,” Walter said, his rolling, seasick voice and, “No,” she’d said firmly, “Not yet. Hang on as long as you can.” And he had, but that hadn’t been much longer. “Please,” he’d whispered, sweat on all their faces, slack eyes, sweat on their naked bodies, and she’d only nodded. He’d crawled quickly away and emptied his stomach somewhere in the maze she’d drawn. Byron had gone next, before Walter had even finished his loud retching; and Robin last; had waited so long that she’d only made it three or four feet away from the fire before she’d thrown up the pulpy stew of chewed peyote, bile, and Perrier, the half-digested meal Spyder had cooked for her, and sat coughing, staring through watering eyes at the candle she’d drowned in vomit.
One at a time, they’d gone back to sit around the scrape in the earth and the Sterno, and Robin had taken Walter’s hand on her right, Byron’s on her left, held on tight, little-girl-on-a-carnival-ride grip. And Byron had taken Walter’s hand, and the warmth that had settled over her, peace inside and deeper peace than she’d ever known or imagined. And then she’d begun to speak, knowing that it was time, had clutched at the strict words she’d laid out as scrupulously as the designs drawn on the floor, the candles, the pinches of spice and salt. But the world was raveling, taking itself apart, and the words had run from her like scurrying black beetles. She’d squeezed their hands harder, so terrified and so completely beyond fear that she’d thought she would never be afraid again.
Later, she had remembered that Byron had begun to cry, joy and sadness, and that the wings of the angels that rose from the candle flames blazed and trailed razor night, obsidian shards that sliced her eyes, that cut her lips.
And that when the dry and whispering things had begun to dig themselves from the earthen walls-claws like Walter’s spade and the scrambling legs that glistened and drew blood from the shimmering air-she’d finally closed her eyes.
And the sound of thunder, and Spyder laughing, far away.
7.
In the world above, Spyder had come out of her room and stared for a long time at the trapdoor, silently watching its paper cut edges and the tarnished brass handle, handle borrowed from a chifforobe drawer, bolted there by her father after the old pine hand grip had broken off years and years and years before. No sound rose up through the floor, no evidence that anyone was down there, no proof that they’d left her behind. She wiped at her dry eyes and walked over to stand directly on top of the trapdoor; the wood had sagged slightly beneath her weight.
She went without you, her father chattered in her ear, from inside her ear. You see that, don’t you? They all went without you, and here you thought you were the big magic…
“Shut up,” she’d whispered, whispered the way she had learned to whisper so no one else would hear, so no one would ask, Who you talkin’ to, Spyder? Who you think you’re talkin’ to? And she’d chewed at her upper lip, toying with a ragged bit of skin.
Did you think they couldn’t do this without you, Lila? Did you think that little green-haired whore of yours wasn’t wicked enough to do this witchy shit on her own?
“Shut up,” and her teeth had ground through flesh, salty, warm blood in her mouth like chocolate melting on her tongue.
They don’t need you.
“Shut up!” and she covered her ears with both hands, useless, knowing that his voice wasn’t getting in that way.
“You don’t know, you don’t know shit!”
She’s taking them away from you, Lila. I know that.
“SHUT UP!” and then she’d thrown herself hard against a wall, so hard that the plaster had dented and cracked. “SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!”
Dull smack of her shoulder against the wall, again and again, meat-thud tattoo, and the cracks had spread like the patterns on her arms until she’d punched a hole through and plaster dust had silted to the floor like flour snow. Dark smear of herself down the wounded white wall. And she’d known he wasn’t wrong. That her father had eyes to see through the lies she told herself, the lies that Robin had been telling her.
Spyder had gone to the kitchen and found a claw hammer and the pickle jar full of different-sized nails beneath the sink, two-penny, ten-penny, and all the time him muttering in her skull, Bible verses and his own crimson prophecies. When she’d opened her mouth to answer the questions he put to her, his voice came out, red and gristle spew of dead-man words that she couldn’t stop. She’d poured the nails out across the hall floor, rusty iron scatter, picking them up at random and sinking one after another into the hardwood, crazy angles, but enough of them piercing both the trapdoor and the floor. All the way around, stitching them in, while jumbled gospel and condemnation dribbled from her lips.
When she’d finished, Spyder pushed and dragged the big steamer trunk from her mother’s room, great-grandmother heirloom, had used it to cover the smashed and crooked nail heads, the basement door, passage down to all her hells. And then she’d climbed on top, had crouched there, predator’s huddle, and through her mouth, her father had howled his Armageddon songs.
When Spyder woke up, curled next to the trunk, there’d been watery light, dawning shades of gray and ivory, shining from the dining room and through the little window at the other end of the hall. She did not remember having fallen asleep, ached everywhere at once, and when she sat up her back and neck and shoulders had hurt so badly that she’d had to lie right back down.
There was no one but herself inside her head, and she’d lain still and thankfully alone, her cheek pressed against the cool, smooth wood, wax and varnish, left ear against the floor. And at first, the scritching sounds had meant nothing to her, the faint sobbing like lost children, another part of the house and nothing more; she’d listened, squinting as the light through the dirty window had brightened toward morning.
And then, “Spyder?” But the voice was too small and broken to have been real, to have been anything but an echo of an echo of something she’d forgotten.
“Spyder, please…”
The sun had seeped into the hall and, by slow degrees, the night washed back over her: that they had all gone down to the basement without her, Robin and the peyote and her idiot ceremony; that the voices had come, her father’s jibes and eager barbs, her father’s paranoia and zealot’s fear.
“Please…please, Spyder.”
She sat up, ignoring the pain, the tilting dizziness it tried to force on her, and stared at the trunk, the banged and dented edges of the trapdoor and stray nails scattered everywhere like vicious pick-up sticks. Something under the floor thumped twice and was quiet.
“Robin?” and her throat hurt, strep raw; she tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone cottony and dry.
No sound from beneath the trunk, beneath the basement door nailed shut, no sound anywhere but her heart and a mockingbird squawking loudly in borrowed voices somewhere outside.
She’d tried to wrestle the trunk aside, but there was no strength at all in her right arm, dislocated bones and sickening pain, the black threat of unconsciousness, and so she’d had to use her feet to push it out of the way. But then there were the nails, dozens of them, and she’d looked around desperately for the hammer, had finally found it hiding on the other side of the trunk.
“I’m opening it,” she croaked, over and over again, protective mantra against what she’d done. “I’m opening it.”
A lot of the heads were sunk too deep for the claw end of the hammer to get at, pocked, circular wounds in the floor where she’d buried them. With her good hand, Spyder pulled and wrenched loose the ones she could reach, nail after bent and crooked nail squeaking free of the wood. When she finished at least half the nails were still firmly, smugly, in place; she tugged at the chifforobe handle, and the boards creaked and buckled, made pirate-ship sounds, and she was able to get her hand under one corner of the trapdoor, able to force it open a few inches and see the blackness beneath.
When Robin’s hand scrambled out, lunged through the narrow opening, Spyder had almost screamed. Fingernails split an
d torn down to the bloodied quicks, blood caked maroon and the ugly color of raisins.
“Move your fingers,” she’d grunted, struggling not to let the door slip shut again, imagined her hand and Robin’s trapped together in the squeezing crack, their blood mingling and dripping down into the darkness. “Move your fingers.”
Robin strained desperately toward the light leaking into the basement.
“I said move your goddamned fingers!”
The fingers pulled themselves back slow, one-at-a-time retreat like the heads or tentacles of some frightened sea thing. When they were all gone, Spyder had eased her own hand out, let the trapdoor snap closed again, and someone on the other side had cried out, a wild and terrified animal sound, impossible to tell who it might have been. Breathless and lost in the empty space gouged by the scream, Spyder bent low, prayer bow, her mouth almost touching the drying stain where Robin’s fingers had groped only seconds before.
“Listen to me,” she said, speaking too loudly, too fast, “There’s a crowbar out on the porch. I’ve got to go and get it so I can pry this open.”
“Don’t leave me…” and that had been Robin, something shattered using Robin’s tongue, Robin’s vocal chords.
“I’m coming right back, I swear, I’m coming right the fuck back, okay?”
There was no answer, and she hadn’t waited for one.
She’d found the crowbar wedged tightly between the old washing machine and the house, and she’d had to work it back and forth for three or four minutes before it had finally pulled free, unexpected, and she’d staggered backwards, had almost lost her balance and fallen onto a heap of rusted motorcycle parts. The morning was clear and warm, bright Alabama morning, spring fading into summer, and for a moment she’d stood there, holding the crowbar out in front of her like a weapon from a martial arts movie.
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