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 and 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.
Her car sat in the driveway, right where Byron had parked it the night before.
You could just go, and she’d had no idea whose ghost had said that, which lips had whispered behind her eyes, but not her father’s. He’d never tell her to leave the house, and not her mother, either. She’d let her arm drop limply to her side, the crowbar clunking against the junk at her feet.
The Celica’s keys were lying on top of her television. You could just go, the voice said again, They’d only be getting what they deserve. And this time she’d recognized it as her own, so no one to blame for these thoughts but herself.
You could drive away and just keep driving…wouldn’t ever have to come back here.
Pretending that she hadn’t heard, that she hadn’t seen the clean blue sky through the leaves of the pecans and water oaks, Spyder had lifted the crowbar again and stepped back inside the waiting house.
8.
After the sky had closed again, Robin cradled the hand the light had touched and given back against her chest, blessed thing, still glowing faintly at the lightless summit of the world where she and Byron had climbed. Mountain or tower of splinters, ladder hung above the pit and void, and he was pressed into the firmament, whispering his name again and again like it had power against the ribs of the night, like he would forget it and be no one and nothing if he ever stopped.
“Spyder…” she said, but the sky had closed and they were alone again, inside each other but outside themselves, and the wet edges of the hole wanted them back, wanted them to slide screaming back into its roiling, muddy belly. She thought that she’d given it Walter, thought that she’d seen his eyes wide at the end like frying eggs and glass slippers, dragged away, and that should have been enough.
Byron slid his arm around her again, hung around her neck like dry bones and wire, dried flowers and the ragged jewelry of martyrs. She held him close to her, his naked flesh as cold as sidewalk concrete beneath ice; her hand brushed across the gashes in his back, and he screamed again, twin and running sores from acromion to spine that wept hourglass sand and the memory of wings. Her own back burned, bled sand and regret from its own deep, unhealing wounds.
Behind them, the fire had stopped falling from Heaven, the dim red afterglow a million miles or years below, and there was nothing left in the World but the two of them and the skittering things, the bristle-haired things with their crowns of oildrop eyes. And the Preacher, the Dragon, the man with the Book and skin that fit too tightly. When He’d come for them, long strides across the earth and the skitterers dropping off his clothes, she’d begged Byron to tear her wings off, so that they would be as black as the night, as invisible. So that they would be nothing He could see or want. They’d hung their wings like trophies from the walls of razor wire, wreaths or trophies of feathers and fire and withering sinew.
And they’d left Walter, too, somewhere at the edge, on his knees, tearing madly at himself, and the World had shaken as He came.
She had reached out and touched the Dome of Heaven, tore again at its closed eyelids with her ruined hands. Behind them, the skitterers were getting braver, jabbering murmurs, and she’d heard their legs like sharpened pencils, the hairbrush scrape of their bodies against one another.
“Undo me. Swallow me,” Byron whispered. “Don’t let them take me.”
And then the sky, its single blazing eye, had ripped open wide, steel lashes tearing loose like jutting teeth, and the night had rushed back down toward the hole, catching the skitterers in its undertow rush and dragging them back to where the Dragon picked His teeth and waited. Her hand and the white serpents around Her white face, and the white nimbus of flame around Her head. Robin’s hand in Hers, and then they’d been hauled up into the light.
9.
Still three blocks from the club, Dr. Jekyll’s and its melting-pot mix of punks and slackers, queers and skins and goths, lookie-look rednecks and wannabes; Robin pulled into an empty parking lot and dug around in the glove compartment until she found the right prescription bottle. The name on the label was her mother’s, an old script for Halcion that she’d lifted from her parents’ medicine cabinet and exhausted months ago, half-filled now with the Lortab and carnation Demerol and powder-blue ten-milligram Valium that she bought from her connections. She dumped a few of the pills out in her palm, pastel scatter like Easter candy, picked out one of the Valium and dry swallowed it.
Too bad the pills never worked fast enough, or long enough, anymore, never managed to do much more than soften the edges of the things that came looking for her, the things that scampered and hummed, the things that only Spyder could send skulking back to the grayer parts of her brain.
Spyder, like a nursery rhyme or prayer, dim words from her mother’s lips when she was very small and the night-light had only seemed like a way for the monsters to see her better: From ghoulies and ghosties…
And long-leggity beasties…
Robin slumped back against the bucket seat and willed herself to relax, buying time until the Valium kicked in. She focused on the staggered pattern of bricks in a warehouse wall across the wide parking lot, a hundred rectangular shades between red and brown and black caught in the Civic’s headlights. Bricks laid before her parents had been born, when her grandparents had been children, maybe. The engine was still running, faint and soothing metal purr of fans and pistons, and Sarah McLachlan sighed like gravel and rain from the stereo.
The shadow slipped across the wall, blackened mercury, gangling arms or legs and so sudden that it was gone before she’d even jumped; she sat up straight and stared, unblinking, across the hood, the empty space between the car and the wall and the unbroken shafts of her headlights.
…and long-leggity beasties…
And then the pain between her shoulders, the shearing fire that left her breathless and wanting to puke, and she yanked the Civic out of Park, never taking her eyes off the wall, not daring to glance into the rearview mirror, as the tires squealed and she backed out into the street.
CHAPTER SIX
Keith
1.
The sun down an hour, first long hour of cold, and Keith Barry sat on one end of the old loading platform; no trains on these tracks now, just the rotten boards and brick and concrete crumbling down to grit and dust, the barrel that the bums and junkies kept their stingy little fire inside. He sat with Anthony Jones and his banged-up Honer harmonica, and they’d been playing Tom Waits and Leadbelly for the rambling empty stretch of railyard, the dry, whispering weeds between the ties and broken glass and a stripped pickup burned to a red-brown cicada shell. Keith plucked his pawnshop twelve-string and Anthony Jones’s harp cried like all the ghost whistles of all the trains that would never rumble past this platform again.
“Almighty Christ,” Long Joey muttered, Long Joey who stood in the crunchy gravel ballast and stomped his feet like someone trying to make wine from stones. “Too damn cold for November. We all gonna have blue balls by Thanksgiving.”
The last chords of “Gun Street Girl” and then Keith laid the guitar down beside him, although Anthony let a few more notes straggle from the instrument pressed to his dark lips. Keith took a big swallow from the half-empty pint of cheap rye whiskey and handed the bottle to Long Joey.
“Maybe this’ll put a little spark back in them,” and Joey grinned his crackhead smile and accepted the bottle in his shaky hands. “Just don’t drop it, okay? Drop it, and I’ll have to kick your ass.”
Anthony finished his solo and wiped the harmonica on a flannel sleeve. “And then you give it here, L.J.”
&
nbsp; Keith had been at the platform since late afternoon, since he’d made his connection, cooked and fixed in the men’s room of the Jack’s Hamburgers on First Avenue. He carried the twelve-string in a case so beat-up that it stayed together only by the sticky grace of a roll or two worth of duct tape and some copper wire he’d strung through the holes where the hinges used to be. He also kept his works in the case, hidden inside a compartment intended for picks and capos; Keith never used a pick, relied instead on his sure and callused fingers. He had enough stuff left for one more fix, tucked safely inside his left boot.
There were twelve or thirteen men on the platform tonight, most of them huddled around the flickering barrel, but he was the only one into junk. Most of them were winos or dirtbag crackheads, street addicts too far down the food chain to even have house fees. They bought their bits of rock from the cruisers who pushed from their cars. Every now and then he caught the caustic stink of someone’s pipe over the smell of piss and booze and burning wood.
Long Joey passed the bottle to Anthony, noticeably emptier for its time in his hands, and then he started stomping his feet again, pulling hard at his earlobes. Long Joey was a puller and sometimes his ears were raw and caked with dried blood. He liked to talk, but never talked about anything but crack and the women he either imagined or lied about having fucked.
“I told this bitch L.J. don’t put no jimmie cap on his dick, but she just kept on whining about the big A, so I finally slapped her around until she shut the hell up.”
“And you just took you some pussy, ain’t that right, L.J.?” and Anthony grinned and winked at Keith.
“Goddamn right. Goddamn right.”
Anthony passed the bottle back to Keith, just enough left for one more round; the rye felt warm burning down his throat, settling in his belly.
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