Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [102]
“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