“You were down there the longest,” she said. “Spyder had to go down after you.”
“Fuck you, fuck you both,” he said, and this time Walter struck the little backseat window, hard enough that Robin was surprised it hadn’t broken. “You killed her, man. You’re both crazy, and you killed her, Byron.” But all the fury was draining away, something in his soul lanced, and his voice was suddenly as brittle as brown October leaves.
“I want out,” the porcelain boy said. “Just stop the car here, and I’ll get out.”
Byron glanced uncertainly at the rearview mirror, as if he’d forgotten all about the boy, as if he’d never known he was back there.
“I’m not gonna tell anyone anything, I promise. Just let me out, and I swear I won’t say a thing to anyone.”
“You didn’t see it, either?” Byron asked him.
“Please,” the boy said, “Please let me out,” and Robin could almost feel his fear and confusion like needles or a wire brush against her skin, knew that he’d be crying soon.
“Stop the goddamn car and let him the hell out, Byron,” she said.
Byron pulled over at the next light, green for go, but there was no one behind them; Robin opened her door and stepped out into the storm, her shoes making their shallow marks in the snow. She had to pull the little release lever before the seat popped forward, catapult quick, and the porcelain boy could climb out of the backseat.
“I didn’t see anything,” he told her, eyes wet, rouged cheeks already redder from the cold.
“I know,” she said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.” And then he walked quickly away, as quickly as he could without his black patent pumps sliding on the slippery sidewalk. She watched him for a moment, wet snowflakes gathering in her hair and sticking to her face, already missing Spyder.
2.
Walter had been the last one out of the basement, the one that Spyder had gone down for herself, while Robin and Byron had sat naked and filthy in the morning-filled hall, still clutching tightly to each other. Robin had cried, had pleaded with her not to leave them alone, not to step through the protecting floor into the hungry black.
“That’s what He wants,” she said, not meaning Walter, meaning Preacher Man and His red book. Meaning the Dragon.
“Robin, I can’t just leave him down there,” and then she’d been sucked down through the gaping trapdoor hole.
“No!” Robin had wailed. “Oh please god Spyder, no,” and she’d tried to scramble across the floor after her, but Byron hadn’t let her go, had held on, held her back.
And what had seemed like a long, long time later, Spyder had brought him back to them. Walter, his pale and hairless chest, his legs, scraped and gouged, his face caked with red basement dirt and maroon-brown streaks of his own blood. Spyder had whispered something in his ear and he’d sat down next to Robin and Byron, both hands crooked like arthritis claws and cradled close to his body. Robin had wanted to pull him to her, lock him up safe in her embrace with Byron, but his eyes, unblinking, full of nothing, had scared her too much to even touch him.
“It’s gonna be all right now,” Spyder said, and she was crying too, silent tears shiny beneath her eyes.
And then something had reached up out of the dark, two jointed legs or arms raised cautious from the trapdoor, probing, testing the bright, warm air; night-bristling hairs, quills and chitin barbs. Robin screamed, had pointed at the hole as Spyder turned and stood staring. The two appendages had rasped and tapped anxiously at the floor, and then a third rose straight from the center and unfolded like a pocketknife, felt its way eagerly along the wall.
“What?” Spyder had asked her. “What is it? There’s nothing there.”
“Oh Jesus, they’re still coming,” Byron had whimpered. “They’re still coming,” and he’d pushed flat against the wall at his back as if he could squeeze through. So Robin had known that he saw it too, that Spyder must see it and was only trying not to scare them. When the tip end of the fourth leg appeared and she’d screamed again, and Byron had started screaming too, Spyder lifted the trapdoor with the toe of her boot, wood studded with a hundred nails like slanting needle teeth, rising, falling, and the thing had pulled itself back through just as the door had slammed closed. And then she had pushed the old trunk over on top of the trapdoor.
“See?” she’d said. “Now you’re safe. Nothing’s gonna get out of there now.” She’d gone away for just a moment, had disappeared into her bedroom, and Robin’s eyes had drifted back to the trapdoor, the trunk like the stone that sealed the tomb. But Spyder had come right back, carrying one of her prescription bottles; she’d opened it and pretty blue pills had poured out into her palm. She’d made them each swallow one, had to force Walter’s past his lips and far back on his tongue.
And then she’d led them all down the hallway to the big bathroom and its lion-footed cast-iron tub, white enamel and sparkling warm water and the calming smell of soap.
3.
Sitting in the diner, faded sunflower walls and plastic yellow booths, the stink of pork fat and waffles and other people’s cigarettes. Walter held his head in both hands as if it had grown too heavy for his shoulders, his spine. Robin across from him, sipping the sour diner coffee, close to Byron, as if they’d chosen sides; Walter the puppy loyalist, and her and Byron somehow turned traitorous, coconspirators in an accidental coup d’état.
Outside, the snow was still coming down, half an inch or more on the ground already and falling so hard that she could see no farther out the plate-glass window than the first row of cars in the parking lot.
“We should just go back,” Walter said again.
“I’m fucking tired of hearing that shit, Walter, so can it, okay?” Byron folded and unfolded a paper napkin, making and unmaking a sloppy origami bat for the umpteenth time. His own coffee sat untouched, cold and black.
“I’m just saying it still might not be too late, not if we go back now.”
“Too late for what, Wally? Huh?” Byron said, loud enough that the waitress looked up from her pencil, pad, and scribbles.
“You mean it might not be too late to watch them loading that cracker’s corpse into a body bag? Might not be too late to catch the pretty lights on top of the ambulance? Or how about this one, Wally: it might not be too goddamn late to spend a little time in the Birmingham jail, getting fucked up the ass every time you bend over?”
Robin flinched, and Walter looked at them for the first time in ten or fifteen minutes, his eyes rimmed puffy red and irises seething with onionskin layers of hurt and fear and anger, palm-print impressions framing his face like the tailfeathers of kindergarten turkeys.
“You cold-hearted son of a bitch,” he said. “You don’t even care if she’s dead or not, do you? You’re just worried about yourself. You’re just worried about having to explain this mess to the cops.”
“Frankly, Walter, I think jail’s about the last thing I should be worrying about right now, don’t you?” and Byron pulled the wings off his napkin bat and let its torso flutter to the tabletop.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what he means, Walter,” she said and looked back out at the snow, the candyland world without sharp edges. “You can pretend all you want, but you’re still just as much a part of this as we are, as much as Spyder.”
“She lied to us,” Byron said. “She lied to us, and the whole thing is just a trap.”
“You two just don’t get it, do you?” Walter asked. “The game is fucking over, okay? This shit is for real.”
Robin closed her eyes, feeling the X still burning inside her, her stomach and muscles tight from the strychnine and everything that had gone wrong in the last hour.
“What did you see down there, Walter?” she asked without opening her eyes. “What did you see in the basement? What did you dream about before Spyder made the dream catcher?”
“Robin, we were just fucked up. We were tripping our fucking balls off. We di
dn’t see anything real, nothing that wasn’t in our heads all along.”
“That’s horseshit,” Byron said, rolling his dismembered bat into a wad and sinking it in his glass of ice water. “And you know it, and you’re just too big a pussy to admit it.”
“You never believed any of the story,” Robin said, not a question, a revelation, maybe, and she opened her eyes, turned slowly away from the window to face Walter; he winced and looked quickly back down at his hands.
“I know you guys aren’t this stupid,” he said. “It was just a bad trip, and all that other stuff was just something Spyder made up to try and make us sleep better.”
“You’re a liar,” said Robin, her voice more bitter than the coffee. “You think maybe it’ll all go away if you say it never happened. That you’ll stop seeing the shadows if you say they’re not there.”
“Robin, I haven’t seen jack shit, okay? I’m telling you the truth. I haven’t seen jack-fucking-shit.”
“I don’t believe you,” Robin said.
“That’s not my goddamn problem.”
Short silence then, and Byron tapping impatient black nails against Formica. “So, you’re not even going with us?” he asked, finally. “You won’t even do that much?”
“We’re in enough trouble already without breaking into Spyder’s house.”
“It wouldn’t be breaking in,” Byron said. “Robin has a key. You know she has a key, Walter,” and without asking permission, he grabbed for her purse, chrome cut and bolted into a tiny coffin with a handle and latch and a purple velvet ankh on the lid; she let him take it, let him in.
“We have to protect the dream catcher,” Byron said as he dug through the junk in her purse, dumping everything out on the table, and there was her key ring, more goth kitsch, a plastic spine and pelvis.
“I’m sorry,” Walter said and left his mouth open like there was more, but he couldn’t find the words.
“She used your hair, too,” Robin said, but now she was looking at the storm again, frantic blur, falling ice white sky, but not at Walter or the mess of her things Byron had spilled on the table. If they didn’t leave soon, they’d be spending the night in the diner or walking.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, no more meaning than the first time, a little more regret, and she could hear the bright jingle of her keys, Byron holding them up for Walter like something he’d be helpless to refuse.
“I’m going back,” he said. “Maybe I can explain-”
“Then to hell with you,” and Byron picked up one of the glasses of ice water the waitress had set down in front of them, obligatory courtesy, never mind the weather, and dashed it in Walter’s face. Walter gasped at the cold, the surprise, and Robin still looked at the snow, the softening shadows between the cars, perfect shadow canvas.
“I’m sorry,” Walter said, last time, third time the charm, and slid out of the booth, a dripping pocket-wrinkled dollar dropped on the table for his coffee. “Please be careful,” he said. “Please.”
“Fuck off,” Byron hissed, and then Walter was gone, the diner door jangling shut like a phantom cow, and they sat very alone in the booth, each waiting for the other to speak, waiting for whatever came next.
4.
“Before the World, there was a war in Heaven,” and then Spyder had stopped, had gripped Robin’s hand tighter and looked into all their eyes at once. Three pairs to her one, bright six to her pale two.
They’d all come back to her, after staying away for days and days, back to the house, with their nightmares and the lanky things they thought they saw during the day tagging along behind. Robin and Byron had sobbed out every detail, had told her all the things about the basement that at first they’d kept back, the burning things that Preacher Man had said. Walter had sat apart from them at the kitchen table, looking nervously from window to nightblack window. And Spyder, quietly watching them and listening and watching too the secret, jagged places inside herself.
She hadn’t told them the truth, or what she’d suspected might be the truth. Instead, she had held her lover’s hand hard so Robin’s fingertips had gone white, and she’d given them a lie so perfect and pretty she’d have died to make it true. Had prayed to the darkness in her head that the words would be enough to save them, to bring them all the way back to her.
The way she’d always kept herself alive.
“And after the angels had fallen,” she’d said, “there were a few who hid themselves where the World would be. And they were made into the World, stitched into the fabric so tight that it took them a million or a billion years to find their way out again. They slipped out without God seeing them, when volcanoes erupted or the rocks wore away into canyons or when caverns fell in and made sinkholes.
“But they knew that God was still looking for them, because they’d stolen things from Heaven, things they didn’t think could ever be trusted to Him again. And they’d hidden them deep inside the earth during their captivity, had found-”
“This is total bullshit,” Walter had whispered, watching the bushes that pressed themselves against screen and glass, switching twigs and restless green leaves.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” and Robin had whirled around at him, spitting the words out between teeth clenched and lips snarled back, rabid, furious warning that she had to hear what was being said and she might hurt him if he pissed Spyder off and she quit talking.
But Spyder had only pulled her closer, Robin and the kitchen chair scrunk across the old linoleum, fresh scuff marks on the checkerboard squares, and she’d pressed Robin’s tear-slicked face against her chest, hadn’t even looked at Walter.
“They’d stolen important things,” she said. “Very important things. Treasures.
“They thought they’d put them places that even He would never find them. But they were wrong, and He sent His lieutenants and angel captains down to bring them back. And to kill the thieves.”
Outside, something had padded quickly by, hurried feet below the window’s sill, and Walter had jumped, wiped sweat from his forehead. “Goddamn dogs,” he’d said. “Doesn’t anyone around here keep their fucking dog on a leash?”
Spyder had looked up at the window for a moment, and then she’d continued.
“Some of the exiled angels, although they weren’t really angels anymore because God had taken away their wings and made them all mortal, mortal enough that they’d grow old and finally die someday, some of them got away and took a few of the treasures with them, spent thousands and thousands of years running from the loyal angels that hunted them down one by one. Until there were only three or four, and the only treasure they had left was a stone…”
“That’s just the stuff I told you,” Walter said, almost as much contempt now as fear, cheated, lost emotion like whiskey stink on his voice. “The stuff from that fucking book that Robin told me to read. You’re not even making this up yourself.”
And Byron had lunged at him, reached across the table, knocking over everything, ketchup bottle and hot pepper sauce and a dusty dry vase of dead roses. Had seized Walter by the collar of his Misfits T-shirt and slammed him down hard against the metal tabletop, held his head pressed down with both hands while the red bottle of ketchup rolled over the edge and broke on the floor.
“It doesn’t matter,” Byron said, loud and male and not sounding much like anyone he’d ever been before. Each syllable a lead weight from his lips. “It doesn’t fucking matter where she knows it from,” and then he’d smacked Walter’s head against the table again.
“Byron, turn him loose, now,” and when she’d said that, Byron had looked at Spyder like he’d forgotten precisely who she was.
“Make him shut up,” he said.
“He’s not gonna say anything else. He’s just scared too. Turn him loose.”
And he had, had slowly let Walter stand up, Walter almost a foot taller than Byron, but the blood running from his busted lips and nose, anyway. He’d sat back down in his chair, not a curse or a threa
t, one hand held over his wounded face.
“Don’t stop,” Robin whispered, desperation like dirty oil, and “Please don’t stop, Spyder.”
She’d waited only as long as it took for Byron to sink back into his own chair, only as long as she dared.
“Please…” Robin said.
“The only part of the treasure left was a stone,” and a pause then, maybe a sort of challenge to Walter, but he’d been watching the windows again, his own blood in his hands.
“A beautiful blue-gray stone full of God’s most beautiful and terrible secrets. And they knew that they’d been wrong, that there was no way for them to hide themselves or the stone much longer. Instead, they found a way to take it apart and put it back together again inside themselves. But they knew that still wasn’t enough, so they found men and women and fucked them, seduced them or just raped them, and that passed the things in the stone into innocent human beings that they didn’t believe He would ever hurt to take back his secrets.”
“But they were wrong, weren’t they?” Byron asked, asked like he already knew the answer, had known it all his life.
“Yeah,” she said. “They were wrong. The people that carried the things from the stone inside them disappeared from the World one by one, but some of them had children first, and their children had children, and little bits and pieces got away after all.”
They were hanging on her words, then, even Walter, salvation in these lies, waiting just beyond the last thing she’d said. And Spyder had strained to see the fetal lies in front of her, curled slippery as moss-hairy stones almost invisible under rushing water, shitty steppingstones, but the only path she had to give them.
“These bits and pieces were passed along generation to generation, getting smaller and smaller all the time, spread out farther and farther. Getting harder and harder for the angels to track down, the angels and the things that hunted for them, the things that God made especially to be able to smell out those special people that looked human, but really were part stone and part secrets and part something that had once been angel.”
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