“Thanks,” Niki said, taking long strides to catch up.
4.
A long way off, still, but Niki could see the yellow crime tape fluttering in the wind. Familiar enough thing to know the words by heart, Crime Scene-Do Not Cross, a hundred different murders or burglaries in the Quarter, suspicious fires and that happy-bright plastic stretched across a doorway or burned-out window. But waiting for them, there at the top of Cullom Street, tied tight between two old trees, it had never looked more like a warning.
Halfway up the mountain, the snow had begun again, nothing like the night before, but hard enough that it intensified the impression that she was tramping through some fairyland or Ice Age waste, and Niki was starting to feel sick, ill from the cold and exhaustion, had been plagued for the last five minutes with the idea that there was someone else walking with them, someone visible just at the corner of her vision. She’d turn to see, expecting Mort, or maybe Theo, and there was never anyone but Keith, face red and pissed off, cursing her and Spyder and the storm, Daria the same. And now, there was the police tape.
Part of her wanted to sit down in the snow and cry, cry until this was over. That part she thought she’d left behind, thought she’d shed forever like a bad skin, but instead Niki kept walking, ignoring the new cold leading her stomach, dread and everything that tape might mean. Ignoring how tired she was and the urgent little voice inside that begged her to see this had nothing to do with her, begged her to walk away from it all, while there was still time.
Spyder paused at the barrier of tape, and Niki thought then that she would wait, that they would catch up at last, but then she vanished into the shadows beneath the trees; when they finally reached the yellow tape, there was nothing waiting for them but Spyder’s footprints. She hadn’t crossed the line, had gone through a hedge and around.
“Okay,” air gasped and Keith’s words slipped in between. “What…the hell’s…going on…now?”
“Cops,” Daria said, and Niki could only nod, point at the dark house set back away from the road and more of the yellow tape strung like garland around the porch, ripped loose and dangling at the front door.
The Radley house, she thought. It’s the goddamned Radley house. Spyder’s tracks and nothing else, lonesome scar across the snow, all traces of whatever might have happened in the night erased, buried, by the storm.
Hey, Boo? Wanna come out and play? and then the sound, the hurting, furious wail from the open door, broken sound, and Niki ran, fell once and hit her knee against something sharp hiding beneath the snow, got up and kept running. Until she’d ducked beneath the tape and was through the door, the house wrapping its musty shell around her, and in here, the sound was almost more than she could stand.
Howl from her dreams, civil defense siren wail and the sound that came from her when she opened her sleeping mouth to answer them. The sound, remembered, that had kept her mother awake on muggy suburban nights. The sound of the sky falling at the end of the world.
“Spyder!” she screamed, and “Spyder! Where are you?!” But the house ate her voice alive, digested the words whole and added them to the sound, and the sudden smash and tinkle of breaking glass.
Niki rushed from room to room, hardly a thing noticed but the smell of old dust and the way the wail grew louder the further she went, past a kitchen and down a hall with peeling paper and the ghosts of missing pictures hanging on the walls.
The last room, very last place she looked, a tall black utility shelf pulled over and the glass ankle deep, tiny bodies like drops of ink amid the wreckage, scarlet warnings on countless bellies. With one arm, Spyder cradled something against her chest, something small that Niki couldn’t see, and with her free hand she punched out window after window, windows painted black and spider-webbed with white paint and impossible care. And now the wail was changing, plunging octaves, an endless growl as Spyder drove her fist through another pane, shattered another perfect web, and the weak sun through the holes glistened on her bloody knuckles.
“Stop it!” Niki screamed and was crunching through the glass, scrambling across the bed to Spyder on the other side.
But Spyder pushed her easily away with the bloody hand, shoved her back down onto the bed and into the aqaurium glass biting at her thick clothes. And the growling was warping into words, pain and rage across Spyder’s lips and enough like words that Niki could understand them.
“I have to let them out,” she said. “All of them. I have to let them out. Houses catch things.”
And she turned away, and another window burst, blackened shards traded for the storm swirling in through half a dozen empty frames.
“Houses catch things, Niki.”
Niki wrestled her way free of the razor tangle on the bed, gashed her right palm in the process, and Keith’s dirty tube sock was immediately soaked a deep and ugly crimson. She grabbed Spyder again, soppy, bloody sock firm on one leather shoulder and spun her completely around, almost all the strength she had left, aimed the punch the way she’d been taught years and years ago, thumb safe outside so it wouldn’t break.
And as her fist connected with Spyder’s jaw, she saw the limp and lifeless things Spyder held close against her chest, like she might protect them, even now.
Daria had chased Niki across Spyder’s scraggly, snow-covered front yard, Keith never more than a couple of his long strides behind her, had followed melting tracks through the house to Spyder’s bedroom. The fallen shelf and glass everywhere, a purer, meaner version of the ice outside, broken windows and the snow getting in, flakes drifting and settling comfortably into the chaos. And on the other side of the bed, crouched in the narrow space between mattress and wall, Niki and Spyder.
“Shit…” Keith whispered, and Daria took one step into the room, the crunch beneath her boots like something she almost remembered from a nightmare, and then she stopped when Niki held up one bloody, sock-covered hand. There was a new sound where the terrible wailing had been, a softer sound and somehow worse for that. It took Daria a moment to realize that it was the sound of Spyder crying.
She took a step closer to the bed, ignoring Niki, and Spyder turned her head away, pressing one cheek hard against the wall, and Daria noticed a trickle of blood from the corner of her mouth, like maybe she’d bitten her lip or tongue.
“Oh,” Spyder said. “Oh, fuck them. Fuck them. Fuck them.”
“Who did this, Spyder?” Daria asked, but Niki only shook her head, shrugged, and Spyder pressed her face to the wall that much harder, ground it back and forth against the old wallpaper.
“Fuck them forever,” she whispered. “Fuck them until the fucking end of time.”
Behind Daria, Keith muttered, started to follow her into the room, his boots louder, heavy boy feet, until she stopped him with her eyes. He sighed loud, sagged inside his rags, and Whatever, silent from his lips.
“They don’t know,” Spyder said, “They have no fucking idea what they’ve done,” and then she was crying again, crying too hard to say anything else. But she held something out for Daria to see, stroked sienna fur and orange stripes as if she held a kitten, and it took Daria a second to recognize the crushed thing in her hands, no, two things crushed together. Two huge tarantulas, a sticky, bristling mess, some legs missing and others hanging over the sides of her palms, and Spyder held them out and up, like an offering, like a surrender or a promise.
And then the voice, dry paper voice of an old, old woman, straining to be heard, floating through the cold, still house, and Daria jumped, almost screamed.
“Lila?” the woman called. “Lila? Are you home, dear?” and a faint knock on wood.
Daria turned around, “Keith, will you go see who that is?” but the hall behind her was empty, and over the sound of Spyder’s sobs she could hear him walking away, the rhythm of his boots on the floor, tracing his way back through the house.
The whole fucking thing was giving him the creeps, and if nobody asked him soon, Keith was just about ready to tell them a
nyway. And that look in Daria’s eyes, colder than the goddamn blizzard, like he had no business even being alive, much less any chance that he could help. Because he had a dick. Well, she knew where she could stick her this-is-a-girl-thing bullshit.
The old woman sounded like a ghost, pathetic phantom, confused and lost and frightened, urgent. Keith was halfway across the living room, could see the pale light from the open front door leaking from the foyer when something snagged at his pants leg and he stumbled, almost tripped and fell sprawling on Spyder’s junk-cluttered coffee table.
“Goddammit…” and he reached down, thought for a moment he felt strong cord or nylon fishing line, like a tripwire, probably Spyder’s dumbfuck idea of a burglar alarm. Before he cut his fingers on nothing he could see, nothing there at all, nothing strung to snare intruding feet, and he pulled his hand back as the same taunt nothing gently brushed his forehead, cut him across the bridge of his nose.
“Lila, honey? Is that you?”
“Just a minute,” he shouted, slapping at the empty air, and for an instant, a noise drier than the old woman’s grating voice, almost too high or far away for him to hear, rustling around him, sand and bones and autumn leaves. Then he was staggering into the foyer and there was only the old woman, waiting in the doorway like a storybook witch. Incredible frizzy mane of hair as stark as the snow behind her, no coat and a dirty, stiff blue dress, torn stockings above her black galoshes. Dark, distrustful eyes and her frown setting like concrete.
“Who are you?” she demanded, then took a step back, and Keith tried wiping the blood off his nose, but that hand was bleeding even worse and he felt the wet smear across his face.
“I said, who are you?”
“Uh,” and he tried wiping the blood on his jeans, “Uh, I’m a friend of Spyder’s.”
“Where’s Lila?” the witch demanded. “I have to talk to Lila right now.”
“She’s, uh, right back there,” and he jabbed a thumb at the shadows over one shoulder. “In her room, I think.”
“I have to speak to Lila right now, young man.”
“Yeah,” he said, and the fresh cuts were stinging, the one across his nose making his eyes water. “I’ll go get her.”
“You gonna leave me standing here to catch my death?”
The cuts stung like alcohol or iodine, like salt rubbed into the wounds.
“No,” he said. “Of course not. Come on in,” and she crept past him, hugging close to the wall, as much distance between them as she could keep, just in case.
“Terrible business,” the witch said, shaking her head, her shaggy, tousled white hair. “And you know, I might have fallen and broken my hip coming up that hill. I could have broken my neck. But I promised the police I’d be here to tell Lila what happened,” and then Keith shouted for Daria, because he felt suddenly ill and dizzy, the world pressing its callused thumbs at his temples like a hangover or a bad fix, and he couldn’t imagine making it all the way back to Spyder’s bedroom.
“Daria! There’s someone out here to see Spyder!”
“Oh!” the witch said, eyes round and hands clamped over her ears. “Oh, please don’t shout so.”
“Sorry,” he said, and made it out onto the porch before he had to sit down. The fresh air helped a little, drove back the claustrophobia, washed soothing cool across the cuts on his hand and face. He sat on the steps, top step clean of snow or ice, head down, waiting for the sick, spinning sensation to pass.
“Terrible business,” the witch muttered again somewhere behind him; despite the clouds, it was too bright out here, too much white, and he squinted at his feet, old shoes like the old woman’s leathery skin.
He heard Daria now, questions in her voice and the witch answering them, and he looked up, slow and his eyes shielded from the murky day.
“They found her laying right out there in the street,” the witch said, and he heard her just as clearly as if she were standing next to him, heard a sharp breath drawn, and then the day seemed to brighten around him and he risked looking up through the branches, looking up for the sun breaking through the clouds.
“Someone called,” the witch said. “There wasn’t nothing they could do, though.”
The sky was still as overcast as it had been all morning, scraping its insubstantial violet belly across the mountaintop. So he looked away from it, counted the braid of footprints in the snow, five separate sets, coming together and splitting apart again, all except his own, the biggest, apart from the rest. He could count each individual print, each a pool of gloom now as the air shimmered and grew bright around him.
“You shouldn’t a had to hear it this way, Lila,” the witch said, the old woman who looked like a witch and his footsteps looked like a trail of giant and moldy bread crumbs in the snow. So we can find our way back, he thought. So we don’t get lost in the woods.
And then Spyder screamed again, and the air crackled, electric tendrils pricking at his skin and hair, ozone stench or burst fluorescent bulbs, and the sky flashed like a hundred thousand cameras snapping the same shot at the same instant, like a film he’d seen once about Hiroshima and this was just before the fireball and the mushroom cloud. And riding on the light, a brassy trumpet blare or simple thunder.
“Spyder…” and that was Niki Ky, pretty Niki Ky from New Orleans.
He barely felt Spyder pushing him aside as she rushed down the steps, barreling headlong into the darkness left behind after the flash, wanted to say something to her; a warning, or that he’d cut himself on her goddamn booby-trap, but she was screaming too loud to hear him and the cuts were sizzling.
Niki followed Spyder, across the sepia snow, between colorless trees, negative world, and he closed his eyes, calling out for Daria, calling her name as loud as he could, over and over until she was beside him, until she was close enough that he could put his arms around her.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m right here, Keith.”
He opened his eyes, and it was all just snow again, all just clouds, just Niki and Spyder kneeling in the street and Daria’s green and saving eyes.
“Spyder’s girlfriend’s dead,” she said. “Christ, what a mess,” and then she let him hold her.
PART II
Ecdysis
“I’m gonna kill you in my sleep
Hold a pillow over my face until you die…”
“Su(in)cide”
Stiff Kitten
CHAPTER TEN
Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory
1.
A nd a week later:
After Niki and Spyder had been taken from the house on Cullom Street in a noisy ambulance with snow chains on its tires;
After Spyder had spent six nights in the psych ward at Cooper Green, no one in to see her but Niki and a psychiatrist and the nurses in their squeaky white nurse shoes, paper cups of pills;
After Niki’s hand had been stitched, twelve silken loops across her palm, lifeline, heartline, soulline severed and the rift pulled neatly, deceptively, closed again;
After the police had asked everyone their urgent police questions and there’d been no answers good enough to satisfy them, and no one had found Byron Langly yet;
After Daria and Keith and Mort and Theo had each gone back to their respective routines, day or night jobs; Daria to the healing smell of roasting coffee beans, Keith to the needle and spoon, Mort to his crankshafts and busted transmissions, all three to Stiff Kitten, and Theo left somewhere around the edges.
A warm front, lighter air washed up from the Gulf, had melted almost all the snow, just scabby white patches left behind, hiding in places the sun rarely or never reached. Spyder went home and Niki went with her, Niki’s one bag retrieved from Daria’s apartment and she’d left Daria’s extra key with Jobless Claude, a few more things from the Vega she couldn’t afford to have fixed, couldn’t even afford to think about and so it was parked out back behind the service station to wait.
Consequence and fading shock.
False bott
om in a treacherous box of shattered glass and spider legs.
Daria and Keith began to have nightmares that left them wide awake and coldsweating in their beds, dreams they never mentioned to one another, never talked about; the white-haired old woman who’d always lived next door to Spyder had a heart attack, three o’clock in the morning the night after Spyder came home, and they took her away in an ambulance, too.
Papers signed and the doctor looking over the rim of her expensive spectacles, skeptical narrow eyes, telling Niki again when Spyder should take which pill, Mellaril and she couldn’t ever remember what the other was called, which hours and how important it was that she not skip a dose; the Suicide Crisis Line and other numbers scrawled on a pale pink page from a gummed memo pad and pressed, sticky, into Niki’s hand. Keep these, like they could protect her, could protect Spyder, like holy beads or dashboard saints, keep these close.
Spyder never asked Niki to stay with her and Niki never asked if it was what Spyder wanted. Unspoken, unagreed, Niki had visited her in the hospital every day, had brought her candy bars she didn’t eat and comics she didn’t read, and when it was time for Spyder to go home, she paid their cab fare back to Cullom Street. Spyder stared out the window of the cab, no words, her face so blank, so calm it still frightened Niki, nothing in those eyes but the cold reflection of the buildings and winter-bundled people and the other cars they passed on the streets, nothing getting in, nothing out. She worried at the white plastic ID bracelet the nurses hadn’t bothered to remove.
Short ride and then Niki counting out a five and ones to the driver, the stingy tip, and Spyder stood staring at the house waiting patient for them under its naked mourning veil of pecan branches. The cabby turned around in Spyder’s driveway, spitting a little gravel, like maybe he was anxious to leave them; spooky, silent Spyder or the solemn house, or maybe he just had another place to be.
Silk Page 23
