Silk

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “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 threat, 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.”

  “Oh,” Robin said. “Oh.” She’d almost stopped crying, her face still pressed urgent between Spyder’s breasts, her ear to Spyder’s wet drumbeat heart.

  “People like us,” Byron said. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it, Spyder?”

  But she hadn’t wanted to say that part, to take the
m that last deceitful step, had known that if she left just one or two seconds empty, they’d do it for themselves.

  “And what we did down in the basement,” he said, catching on so fast, as if he could follow inside her head and pick her thoughts like shiny scarlet berries. “We didn’t mean to, but we got their attention, didn’t we? That thing that Robin keeps calling Preacher Man, that’s one of the angels, isn’t it? And the other things, the shadows we keep seeing, those are what it uses to hunt down the…”

  A gentle, keening sound like something alive tearing itself in two, and Walter had pushed his chair back from the table then, slow and calculated movement, stood up and walked away into the house alone.

  Spyder had ached to call him back, ached to take this all back, take back the nails she’d driven through the trapdoor, the damning permission she’d given that had sent Robin and Byron and Walter down there to begin with. Better if she’d just lost them then, lost them clean.

  “Oh god,” each word barely a sigh, soft murmurs to her chest. “Oh god, Spyder. How do we stop them from finding us? How will we make them leave us alone?”

  “They’re using our dreams to find us,” Byron said. “They’re changing our dreams.”

  Robin had sat up, eyes watery-red and puffy, wiped her nose roughly on the back of her hand like a child, and she’d said, “A dream catcher. We have to make a dream catcher, Spyder. Like the Objibwas made to keep away evil spirits that caused nightmares, to trap them in the webs…”

  And then she’d touched Spyder’s arm, one finger tracing the silver-blue tattoos, inkscar patterns, and Robin had begun to cry all over again, but this time there had been as much hope and relief as fear, and she’d held Spyder, and Spyder had held her, too.

  5.

  At the end of the road, the house waited for them, crouched way down in its blanket of snow and bare tree limbs like an alley cat. They’d left the Celica blocks away, abandoned where the bald tires had finally lost traction for the last time, and they’d slid gracefully, dream smooth loss of control and direction, into a line of sugar-coated garbage cans. Their feet ached from the melted snow that had seeped into their shoes, lungs ached almost as much from the cold air and the extra effort required not to fall on their asses every time they took a step up the icy, steep slope.

  Spyder never bothered with the porch light, had always told Robin that it only attracted burglars, and past the pool of this last streetlamp there was only the glow that had gathered underneath the storm, creamy champagne light filtered so soft and kind it played with the eyes. Brighter back there away from the street than it should have been, but no comfort in the illumination.

  The snow falling around them, on them, made a crisp sound, like rice paper crumpled slowly in dry hands or small and padded paws on dead leaves.

  “We can’t back out,” she said, “not now,” before Byron had a chance to say that maybe Walter had been right after all, maybe they shouldn’t be here, and the cushioned world muffled her voice, magnified it at the same time, made it as wrong as the light.

  “We can’t back out now.”

  Lightning then, a dull and greenish flash trapped in the low clouds, unearthly, and thunder wrapped tight in velvet before the crackling boom of a transformer blowing somewhere, sympathetic chaos, echoed across the mountain. The streetlamp flickered, dimmed, and died.

  Byron said nothing, stepped silently past the withered scraggle of oleander and honeysuckle that framed the crooked walk to Spyder’s front door, cracked and weed-crowded flagstones lost now beneath the equalizing snow. And she followed as silent, her boots where his had gone before, pockmarking the perfect white mantle.

  Spyder’s house had never seemed anything but welcoming, the one sure sanctuary from her parents and the whole shitty world; even that first time she’d come back after the peyote and the basement horrors, even then, through all her dread, it had seemed to welcome her back, to want her inside where Spyder and the old walls could shield her safe. Tonight, it wasn’t friendly, sat gathering drifts on the tarshingle pitch of its roof, its dark windows staring straight through them with vicious indifference.

  Robin counted their steps to the porch, twenty, twenty-five, counted to keep herself from thinking about what they were about to do, what they’d already done; what might be pursuing them across the yard or waiting for them inside the house, watching, hungry and pleased with itself, from any or all of the stark blind windows. Thirty-five, forty-three, and they were standing amid the garbage and porch junk. Looking back the way they’d come, the arrow-straight scar of footprints disfiguring the snow, incriminating for however long it took the storm to fill them in again.

  Then there’ll be no way to tell we were ever even here, and that should have been a comfort.

  “Hurry,” Byron whispered, shivering, whispered like there was someone to overhear, and she realized that he was waiting on her now; for a moment, terrifying and optimistic seconds, she thought that maybe she’d left the keys in her purse, tucked beneath the passenger seat. She reached inside a pocket of her jacket, reluctant hand, anxious fingers, and there they were, right where she’d put them before she and Byron had even left the diner. Pocket lint and prescription bottle and the familiar weight of the key ring, the gently arched bridge of vertebrae connecting the plastic triumvirate of ilium and pubis and ischium at one end with the four keys at the other. And from the corner of her left eye, something quick and no real shape at all, slipping across the snow, crossing the space between pecan and oak before she could turn to see.

  “What?” Byron’s voice like stickpins, and “What is it?”

  She put the key ring in his hand without turning her back on the yard. The snow between the tall trees was smooth and sparkled faintly, no sign at all that there’d been anything there but her imagination, nerves and the X or a trick of the weird-ass light.

  “Just open the door,” she said.

  “Which key,” and she could hear the keys jingling in his hands, could hear the scratch of key metal on lock metal as he tried the wrong one. Another wrong one after that. “I don’t know which one it is,” he said, and there it was again, no fleeting, peripheral glimpse this time, the lingering impression that something was hunched down behind the trunk of the water oak, something almost narrow enough to hide itself behind the bole.

  “Open the fucking door, Byron. Open it now,” and she flashed back to Walter, two hours before, the same words, the same desperate, useless insistence.

  “I am trying, goddammit, so please just shut the hell up,” and the last key slid in cocksmooth and the dead bolt clicked back, gunshot loud. A sudden gust tossed the naked limbs like puppet arms and legs, set every shadow dancing, perfect diversion, and Robin turned and pushed, shoved Byron through the half-opened door, out of one cold and into another drier arctic, certain that something rushed liquid smooth toward them across the yard on jointed spindle legs. She slammed the door behind her, turned the bolt in the same frantic motion, and they both heard it, both thought they heard it: the softest thump against the other side of the door, the ragged, heavy breath, panting dog sound, and then nothing at all but the wind.

  “What…?” he started to ask, his sweatcool palm finding hers; she shook her head, stepped back from the door.

  “Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all.”

  She felt along the wall until she found the old iron switch plate, switches for the porch and foyer, and flipped both up, but the dark stayed put, no electricity, the lines down from wind or the weight of icicles, more likely that last transformer explosion.

  “The power’s out,” she said, and Byron’s grip tightened around her hand.

  “I can’t see for shit,” he said.

  “It isn’t that dark, pussy,” and it wasn’t, really, her eyes just beginning to adjust and there was enough pale light spilling in through the opaque rectangle of glass set high up on the door that she could see a little ways down the hall, could make out the darker entrance to the living room on
her left, the closed door to the front bedroom on her right.

  The room where Trisha Baxter had died and Spyder stored the junk there wasn’t space for on the porch.

  “Do you have your lighter?” and she heard the cloth rustle as Byron rummaged through the pockets of his frock coat.

  “Yeah, it’s right here.”

  “Then we can light candles,” and she led him by the hand, little-brother tow, deeper into Spyder’s house.

  6.

  They had sat together on Spyder’s bed, surrounded by the glint of aquarium glass and the web-painted windows, and watched Spyder make the dream catcher by the soothing light of rose-and cinnamon-scented candles. Had all gone out together to the wild backyard night, even Walter, and Spyder had cut a green and slender branch from one of the crape myrtle bushes. Back inside the house, she’d used her pocketknife to strip away the twigs and leaves, had left the cuttings in a scatter on the kitchen floor.

  And with the same knife, tiny thing but razor sharp, she’d taken locks of their hair. Robin’s first, emerald in the candlelight, then Byron’s, dyed jet-black and slick as mink, and Walter next, dirty, unwashed tortoiseshell. Had saved her own for last, sliced colorless strands from a place near her right temple where one of the dreads was coming loose. And then she’d laid each lock out on the quilt, four fraying streaks against the cotton patchwork.

  She had bent the branch carefully while they watched (all but Walter, who’d pretended to read from a thick book on fossil arachnids while she worked), bowed pliant wood into a perfect hoop, near-perfect mandala six or seven inches in diameter, and tied it closed with white nylon kite twine from a box beneath the bathroom sink. And then she picked up the pocketknife again, brass handle and stainless-steel gleam, had passed the blade slowly through the flame of the red votive candle burning on the table beside Lurch and Tickler’s tank.

  Spyder cut herself in the soft bend of one elbow, had drawn the cooling blade quick across her skin, severing tattooed lines and the vein hiding beneath. Dabbed her fingers in the wound and slicked the hoop with her blood.