“Do you still want to hear what I was gonna say or not? I won’t tell you if you don’t.”
“I want to help you, Spyder.”
“Then listen, ’cause I don’t think there’s anything else you can do.”
Spyder saw the moment clear in Niki’s eyes, swollen moment of decision; saw it come like the shadows before a summer thundershower, lingering, sweet rain scent and ozone and the hair on your arms and the back of your neck prickling from the static charge, and then it was gone, and Niki sighed loudly, sat down next to Spyder and held her hand again. Decision made, and Spyder was glad for her touch, but couldn’t look at her face, the fear and regret stamped there, stared over the edge of the sink and out the kitchen window instead, the cold night gathering around the house, taking its place, and when it had settled, when it was comfortable, she started to talk.
Not the night that he cut her face, a month later, maybe, and the cross scar between her eyes is bubblegum pink and fresh. And it made no difference at all, because the angels still haven’t taken them all away, haven’t taken him away, and that’s really all that matters anymore. But they sit in the basement, inside his charm, listening to two radios at once, one playing the preaching and the other playing hymns. The orange extension cords hang in loops from the ceiling so they won’t break the circle; nothing must break the circle, ever.
The circle keeps out the monsters, the wicked things that are gonna crawl up from Hell at the end, will keep out the radiation when the bombs come down, when the sky burns and falls down to smash them and everyone in the world scorched flat. She isn’t sure what radiation is, but he says it will kill her even though she’ll never see it coming, and she doesn’t want to know any more than that.
And this is the time that her mother didn’t go down with them, the only time she said no, and so he hit her. Her mother a ball on the floor, skinny arms folded like a shield over her head while he punched and kicked and Lila watched it all from the shadows in the hall. Obedient, good girl standing beside the trapdoor, waiting, praying that he’ll stop, praying Jesus that he won’t really let her mother stay up here alone to burn, to get eaten by the radiation monsters. That they’ll make it down before the black sky outside begins to smudge and drip, squirming rain blood drops on the window-panes; her mother begs No, Carl. Please, she’s watching. Please, and he stops, steps back and looks lost, tired and lost and sad. Her mother holds her stomach where he kicked her, cries and says words Lila’s not supposed to use.
“Please,” she says. “For god’s sake, don’t take her down there tonight!”
And he reaches down, helps her mother up off the floor. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, my head hurts Trish or I would never hurt you, but my head hurts. It’s too small to hold it all in, everything I’ve seen, everything I know.”
“I just can’t do it anymore, Carl. I just can’t sit down there anymore. Please let me take her. Let us go.”
“No,” he says, turns around and looks at Lila, like she said something and he’s trying to think of an answer, like he’s forgotten who she is.
“We’ll go to the church. I’ll take her to the church, okay? We’ll be safe there, Carl. You could even come with us. It’ll be safe there.”
“There’s only one church,” he says and her mother starts screaming, fuck you fuck you fuck you you crazy drunk bastard shit she’s my daughter and there they sit, he in his chair, Lila in hers, her mother’s chair empty and both radios turned up loud. He’s been sitting for a long time with his head down in his hands, shaking hands, like his head’s gonna fly apart if he doesn’t hold it together, and there’s a muddy spot on the floor between his feet from the tears.
“They’re tellin’ me what I got to do,” he says, and by now her mother’s stopped banging on the basement door, she’s stopped screaming at him to let her in. So the monsters must have taken her away, but Lila would rather believe she ran away to hide in the church, that Brother Taylor and the woman who plays the organ are watching over her.
“They’re tellin’ me, and I’ve been tryin’ not to listen, Lila. ’Cause it don’t seem right. It don’t seem right at all.” She can hardly understand him, he’s crying so hard, wet face in the lamplight from crying and snot. “But it’s the only way, and this is the last night. They’re runnin’ out of patience with me. If I don’t listen and the trumpets start, they won’t take us with them…”
He stops, opens his red Bible and reads something from the back that she tries not to hear, locusts and seals, locusts and seals, and then she sees the jar beneath his chair for the first time when he reaches for it. Big Mason jar and there’s something inside, but she can’t tell what, except it moves when he picks it up. Her father holds the Bible up in one hand and the jar in the other, holds them high up, and he stands so that his long arms almost reach the ceiling. She watches his lips, moving and making words but no sound coming out until finally, Please don’t make me do this. Someone else, Lord. Not me.
“Daddy?” and there’s a sound above them like thunder, and she’s too scared to say anything else.
“You are not pure,” he says to her, his eyes shut now, shut tight. “You have to be made pure so that the angels can carry us into Paradise before it’s too late. It’s not your fault, Lila,” he says.
His arms come down slow, the Bible and the jar, and it’s not one thing in the jar, a lot of small black living things, nervous things, and he sets the Bible in his chair. Tells her to go to her cot, and then he counts backwards, big numbers she hasn’t learned yet. And he unzips his pants.
“It’s your mother. She’s a sinner, and now she’s lost forever, ’cause she’s too proud to listen, too proud to hear. She wants me to let her drag you down to Hell with her, but I won’t, Lila. This is bad, but it’s better than lettin’ her have your immortal soul.”
He bends over her, and she can see inside the jar now, can see the shiny black spiders and the red on their bellies. The bottom and sides of the jar covered with them, clinging to glass and each other; he hands her the jar, makes her take it in both hands, and now she’s too scared to say no, too scared to scream for her mother who wouldn’t hear her anyway because she’s dead or has run away. And her father puts his hands between her legs.
“When I say, Lila, you open that jar.”
All she can do is shake her head, no, no, she can’t do that, won’t let them out; her grandfather taught her about black widows when he taught her about rattlesnakes and copperheads and poison ivy.
“Don’t shake your head at me, little lady. You’re gonna do it when I say, and then it’ll be all right. Then it’ll all be over.”
He touches her where she pees, slides two fingers inside her; it hurts, and she can’t help but cry.
“Open the jar, Lila.
“Open the jar.”
And his fingers come out and something else goes in, rips into her and she screams and he says it again, Open the jar. Now, Lila.
The lid isn’t screwed on tight, makes a gritty sound when she turns it, and he drives the pain all the way in before the lid hits the floor, rings like bells and the spiders flow out, tickling legs over her hands, down her arms, onto her father.
“It’s almost over, baby,” her father says, and she closes her eyes and waits for the end of the world.
Nothing Niki could say, nothing for her to do but sit and wait for Spyder to finish. Or maybe the story was finished and Spyder was waiting on her, for a sign, for sympathy or a shred of consolation. Maybe Spyder only thought she’d finished, and she sat for five more minutes, not speaking, face a white and empty canvas, until Niki asked, “You’ve told your doctors all this?” and Spyder’s head snapped around, puppet-string whiplash, and for a moment Niki was sure Spyder was going to hit her.
“Mostly,” she said, instead of violence, the subtle, instant fury on her face, “But what the hell difference does that make? They can’t undo it, they can’t fix things so it never happened. They can’t even make me forget about it, so w
hat’s the fucking point?”
And Niki didn’t have an answer for that, either.
“My mother ran next door and called the cops, and when they finally got here they had to use a crowbar to get into the basement, because he’d put so many fucking locks on the door.”
Soft scrape against the floorboards under them, and Niki’s racing heart, wanting out; a gentle thwump against the wall of the house, and she opened her mouth to ask if Spyder had heard that, too, but Spyder was already talking again, and she made herself wait.
“I fainted or I was in shock or something. I don’t remember that part. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital. They had my mother sedated somewhere, and it was a week before I even knew he was dead, when my Aunt Maggie finally told me. It took him three days to die from all those bites.”
That sound again, thwump, solid basketball thwump against the side of the house, the basement scrub-brush sound right after it, and Niki pretended she hadn’t heard, that there was nothing in the world now except Spyder.
“It’s hard to get a black widow to bite you,” she said. “You almost have to force them, Niki. And most people don’t die, unless they’re allergic or already sick from asthma or a heart condition or something like that. Something to weaken them enough the poison does more than make them wish they were dead. He must have spent days and days down there in the dark, catching all those spiders.”
Thwump, and this time she looked at the wall and glanced back to Niki. “You’re not hearing things,” she said. “Unless we’re both hearing things. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”
“It’s probably just a dog,” pretend certain, pretend composure, but Niki didn’t look at the kitchen window, “or the wind.”
“The wind,” Spyder whispered and held out her arms, skin and ink, permanent, forever; turned them over to show her naked palms, unstained space but lines there, too, and she knotted her fingers together, lace of fingers, cup of flesh back behind her head, teeth gritted.
“They didn’t bite me, Niki,” almost a growl, throaty grinding up and out, leaking. “They’ve never bitten me.”
“Maybe they protected you, then,” and Niki as surprised as the look on Spyder’s face, the look that said How did you know, Niki? How did you know that?, as surprised and she knew how important it was that she’d said that, even if she was just fumbling in the dark and confusion, needing to say something reassuring, anything right and comforting.
“Like a totem animal.”
The pain from Spyder’s eyes, twisting under her skin so her forehead and eyebrows folded in like old, old mountains, so her lips trembled, and she held them open a moment before she could speak.
“But they won’t stop. They won’t ever stop. They took Robin because they thought they were protecting me. They took Byron,” and Niki didn’t look toward the thing on the table.
“You need someone to help you make them stop, Spyder.”
Thwump and the windows rattled; a coffee cup fell off the sink and shattered on the floor. Spyder covered her ears, hid her face between her knees, muffling what she said.
“Stop playing like you know what’s happening, Niki. You don’t know what’s happening. If I let you stay, they’ll just take you, too.”
“It’s my decision,” and she grabbed Spyder by the shoulders, pushed her back against the cabinet doors. “Look at me, Spyder. Look at me.”
Spyder opened her eyes, stared out through her dreads, through tears and the roil behind the tears.
“It’s my call. If I want to be here. If I want to help.”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Spyder growled. “There’s nothing in the whole fucking world you can do, even if I let you try.” She closed her eyes again and began to pound her head against the cabinets, once, twice, the back of her skull against the wood, hitting hard enough that the cabinet door split the third time, and then Niki shook her.
“Stop it, Spyder! Stop it right now, goddamnit! You’re gonna hurt yourself…”
Crack like lightning reaching for the ground and touching, splitting sound that wasn’t the cabinet door or Spyder’s skull; hungry light before Niki could shut her eyes, light that had mass and substance, cold as zero, broiling. And she couldn’t let go, couldn’t crawl away and hide in shadows that didn’t exist in the blinding-flash moment before it was over and the kitchen seemed so completely black there might never have been even the glow of a single candle in all the world. Her hands came away from Spyder’s shoulders with a sick and tearing noise, and Niki crawled to the sink, felt for the cold water knob in the dark and held her scalded hands under the tap, tasting ozone and something like dust, tasting her own blood where she’d bitten her tongue.
And there was no sound but the soothing, icy splash of water from the faucet and Spyder sobbing behind her.
“It’s still my call,” Niki said, blinking, wondering if her eyes had burned away to steam, if there was nothing now but empty red sockets in her face.
5.
Niki found Bactine in the medicine cabinet and sprayed some on her hands, the burns crisscrossing the backs of both, striping her wrists and forearms. Made bandages from an old bedsheet and then she sat alone in the living room, nothing for the pain but four extra-strength Tylenol, watched sitcoms with the sound turned too far down to hear. Her eyes itched and watered and there were still bright purplewhite splotches that danced about the room when she blinked. But the thwumping on the walls had stopped, the brushy rustling from the basement, and she could sit on the couch and watch mindless crap and almost not think about the familiar pattern the burns had etched into her skin or about what Spyder was doing in the kitchen or the racket when she wrestled the body off the kitchen table. The sounds the dead boy’s swaddled heels made as she dragged him to the trapdoor and down. Not think about what had happened or what to do next, about the things that had happened in this house, had never stopped happening because Spyder had been scarred and so the house had scars, too. There would be time to think later, when her hands stopped hurting, when the splotches in front of her eyes faded.
The phone began to ring and Spyder let it, seventh ring before Niki got up and went to the kitchen (no boy mummy body on the table, no salt on the floor, no sign of Spyder, either) to answer it.
“Hello?” and there was sweet, faint music from the other end, the Smiths, maybe, and then Mort said, “Hey, Niki. You guys doin’ okay?”
“Yeah,” and inside, No. No, we’re not. Not even a little bit okay. “We’re fine.”
“Well, look, I’ve got some bad news,” and she thought she heard Theo in the background; Mort paused, and the music went away.
“It’s about Keith, you know, our guitar player,” and “Yeah,” she said, “Is he all right?” just as the basement door slammed closed. And then Spyder, standing between crooked paperback stacks in the next room, watching her: dirty hands, red dirt like rust or blood, dirty bare feet. A smear of dirt across her face.
“No,” Mort said, “He’s not,” and Niki listened to the details, stared helpless into Spyder’s expectant, nervous eyes and listened. When it was over, she hung up and sat at the table, just a plain table again, not a mortuary slab, and all the salt and pepper shakers and bottles of hot sauce back in place. The plastic honey bear and the sugar bowl.
“What’s wrong, Niki?” Spyder asked, cautious, sounding frightened again; Niki shook her head, no words left in her. She looked down at her ridiculous, bandaged hands, already beginning to ravel, and when she began to cry, Spyder came and held her, wrapped her in consoling smells of mold and earth and sweat and stayed with her until she could talk again.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Sineaters
1.
T he real funeral and the one in her head; Daria, sitting on her bed, sitting with her back to the wall and squeezed into the corner like a gunfighter so no more of this shit could come sneaking up on her, the real shit and the shit in her head; the shit since Saturday night and her layi
ng down the law, the sentence, for the late and never-to-be-great Mr. Keith Barry, and the other shit like a 1950s Cold War big-bug movie. That last kept for herself, her pearl, more secret than the guilt over Keith. Because she knew it was crazy, because she was too afraid to say it out loud, too scared to say words to set the nightmares loose.
Claude had gone out for more coffee thirty minutes before, only had to walk down to the Bean and back, So where the hell is he? and she watched the clock-radio and wished him home, wished herself back to Saturday night and Heaven and the time when there was still opportunity, a million other ways things might have gone down, if she’d let them, and none of the wishes came true.
Outside, the sun was going down, already, going down again, and that meant that she’d lived through one, two, three, four, and this had been the fifth day since Saturday night: Thursday, Thursday night creeping up on her like a fucking vampire that would take away nothing anyone could ever see, would leave her a little less alive, but still hurting. Hurting like she’d never imagined she could hurt, and empty, and sick, and she thought she heard thunder.
She knew she looked like cold fucking shit, smelled just as bad or worse, maybe, same grody clothes, same underwear and no shower, so she smelled like sweat and puke and dried tears, old booze and stale smoke; mostly drunk since Tuesday afternoon, solid drunk since the funeral, drunk since the hours before his wake; hidden away in the apartment, sucking down the cheapest wine, the bottles of Wild Irish Rose and Boone’s Farm and MD 20/20 that had been left behind after she’d chased everyone away from the wake, the precious numbing bottles she’d lugged back from Keith’s old place in a huge, bulging paper bag.
Where are you, Claude? and she looked at the window, although she couldn’t see anything for the bedsheet she’d made Claude thumb-tack over it, could only tell how soon it would be dark. You fuckin’ promised, man, and Christ, she hadn’t even wanted the fucking coffee.
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