Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [103]
And then Spyder screamed again, and the air crackled, electric tendrils pricking at his skin and hair, ozone stench or burst fluorescent bulbs, and the sky flashed like a hundred thousand cameras snapping the same shot at the same instant, like a film he’d seen once about Hiroshima and this was just before the fireball and the mushroom cloud. And riding on the light, a brassy trumpet blare or simple thunder.
“Spyder…” and that was Niki Ky, pretty Niki Ky from New Orleans.
He barely felt Spyder pushing him aside as she rushed down the steps, barreling headlong into the darkness left behind after the flash, wanted to say something to her; a warning, or that he’d cut himself on her goddamn booby-trap, but she was screaming too loud to hear him and the cuts were sizzling.
Niki followed Spyder, across the sepia snow, between colorless trees, negative world, and he closed his eyes, calling out for Daria, calling her name as loud as he could, over and over until she was beside him, until she was close enough that he could put his arms around her.
“I’m here,” she said. “I’m right here, Keith.”
He opened his eyes, and it was all just snow again, all just clouds, just Niki and Spyder kneeling in the street and Daria’s green and saving eyes.
“Spyder’s girlfriend’s dead,” she said. “Christ, what a mess,” and then she let him hold her.
PART II
Ecdysis
“I’m gonna kill you in my sleep
Hold a pillow over my face until you die…”
“Su(in)cide”
Stiff Kitten
CHAPTER TEN
Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory
1.
And a week later:
After Niki and Spyder had been taken from the house on Cullom Street in a noisy ambulance with snow chains on its tires;
After Spyder had spent six nights in the psych ward at Cooper Green, no one in to see her but Niki and a psychiatrist and the nurses in their squeaky white nurse shoes, paper cups of pills;
After Niki’s hand had been stitched, twelve silken loops across her palm, lifeline, heartline, soulline severed and the rift pulled neatly, deceptively, closed again;
After the police had asked everyone their urgent police questions and there’d been no answers good enough to satisfy them, and no one had found Byron Langly yet;
After Daria and Keith and Mort and Theo had each gone back to their respective routines, day or night jobs; Daria to the healing smell of roasting coffee beans, Keith to the needle and spoon, Mort to his crankshafts and busted transmissions, all three to Stiff Kitten, and Theo left somewhere around the edges.
A warm front, lighter air washed up from the Gulf, had melted almost all the snow, just scabby white patches left behind, hiding in places the sun rarely or never reached. Spyder went home and Niki went with her, Niki’s one bag retrieved from Daria’s apartment and she’d left Daria’s extra key with Jobless Claude, a few more things from the Vega she couldn’t afford to have fixed, couldn’t even afford to think about and so it was parked out back behind the service station to wait.
Consequence and fading shock.
False bottom in a treacherous box of shattered glass and spider legs.
Daria and Keith began to have nightmares that left them wide awake and coldsweating in their beds, dreams they never mentioned to one another, never talked about; the white-haired old woman who’d always lived next door to Spyder had a heart attack, three o’clock in the morning the night after Spyder came home, and they took her away in an ambulance, too.
Papers signed and the doctor looking over the rim of her expensive spectacles, skeptical narrow eyes, telling Niki again when Spyder should take which pill, Mellaril and she couldn’t ever remember what the other was called, which hours and how important it was that she not skip a dose; the Suicide Crisis Line and other numbers scrawled on a pale pink page from a gummed memo pad and pressed,