Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [111]
Mort pulled the van into the circular drive out front, gravel pinging under the tires and red mud hardened to clay-red crust, while Niki parked the Celica in a pay lot across the street. Two dollars to the kid at the gate, and she paid it herself, locked the doors and they walked together across streetlit blacktop, the parking lot already half full, kids hanging around or heading for Dante’s to get in the line forming outside the ticket booth. Mostly punkers and goths, club kids, a few suburban casuals. Niki and Spyder reached the van and Keith was already opening the Econoline’s rear end. Claude had stopped to talk to someone that he knew. A couple of equally battered vans parked close by, one old Winnebago that looked like a prop from a Mad Max film; the other bands, four on the bill in all.
They were all listed on the fluorescent white marquee hung high on one wall, black plastic letters from top to bottom, order of appearance reversed, of course. The headliner was a funk-punk-industrial fusion band Niki had heard on the radio once or twice, Shard, thought they might have a video out. Then Stiff Kitten, second string so third to play. The two bottom, then, TranSister, a local riot grrrl group, and last of all, something called Seven Deadlies.
“Why don’t you guys go on in,” Daria said. “There’s no sense in you standing out here freezing while we load in.”
“We could help,” and Niki felt Spyder’s impatience just fine without having to see her face; swelling, burring, silent disapproval like something solid as the old mill.
“We can handle it just fine. Just tell the guy at the box office you’re on Stiff Kitten’s guest list, and you won’t have to stand in line.”
“Well, if you’re sure…”
“Hey, girl’o, we are three buff motherfuckers,” Daria said and flexed her biceps like Mr. Charles Atlas, her hard, scrawny arms hidden underneath her coat, anyway. “We can handle this shit just fine.”
And so they went to the box office, Claude catching up with them, and a guy with three steel rings through his left eyebrow and a violet goatee checked their IDs against sheets of paper on a clipboard, checked them off one after the other: Niki, Claude, and Spyder last, and he complimented the tattoos on the backs of her hands, the webs disappearing up and inside the cuffs of her leather jacket.
“Yeah. Thanks,” Spyder said. All three got Day-Glo orange bracelets and a stamp on one hand that left behind nothing they could see. Then they bypassed the long line of shivering faces waiting for nine o’clock to come, foggy breathers, passed under the wrought-iron sign into a short passage with an uneven dirt floor; must and the same bare stone walls seemed to go up forever, the ceiling lost somewhere high overhead.
On the right, a rough arch and the sense of vast space beyond, swallowing depth and dark lit only by incandescent lightning and black-light strobes, flashes that revealed empty cages hung, lasers that stabbed crimson shafts through a roiling haze of glycerine smoke. Some of the smoke drifted out into the bright hall, hesitant tendrils out of their element. A huge gargoyle the color of shit squatted on one side of the arch, warty plaster haunches and a spiked leather dog collar around its neck, the collar fastened to a chain bolted to the wall. In there, the DJ already warming up for the night, and the smoke shimmered and the dusty floor ached with the twining, remixed passion of synthesizers and drum machines.
And above the door, of course, another heavy iron sign on its rusted chains, one word burned through the metal, meaning in the emptiness left