Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [100]
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