Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [119]
But instead he followed the dusk-stained streets up Red Mountain, house by house, toward Cullom Street. Except he’d learned something, and this time he wouldn’t be walking up to the front door, bold and dumb, no way. This time he took Sixteenth Avenue, instead, and finally left the street, blocks from Spyder’s house, traded asphalt for the dry-cereal crunch of fallen leaves beneath his shoes, twig snap, and the naked craggy trees reaching for him all around. Safer this way, because he could hear them better, always just out of sight, but their erector-set legs as loud as his feet in the woods. He could tell the skitterers were trying to keep in step with him, to cover their pursuit in the sound of his own footsteps, but there were too many legs, too many needle hairs to scrape against tree bark, leather bellies dragged, raked along, and Byron kept speeding up and slowing down, walking tightrope on fallen logs when he could.
Slowly making his way up the mountain, rough angle that he guessed would take him close to Spyder’s overgrown backyard. The cold air made his chest ache, aching legs, but he kept moving, stumbling over chert and sandstone boulders like scabs sticking up through the leaf mould, bits of bone showing through the forest’s decay. And the dark as thick as the frigid air, until the moon slipped up over the ridge and bled its satin light through the trees, three-quarters full so he could see, could see that he’d wandered past the house and would have to double back.
He stood still and stared down, between the trees and briars, at the roof of Spyder’s house. Off to his left, something big moved fast, crawling forward three or four quick feet before it stopped and was silent, too.
“I know you’re out there,” he said, loud enough so anyone could hear, and turned around, nothing there, of course, but he spoke into the woods, anyway, because he knew they heard him, spoke slow and certain words and the rust-jagged edge of ephedrine and exhaustion and anger in his voice.
“Why don’t you just come on if you want me? Are you afraid? Are you fuckers afraid of me?” and he laughed at the skitterers, not an act, really laughed at them, skulking back there out of sight like roaches.
“Maybe you can’t stop me. Is that it? Maybe you can’t do anything but creep around and watch.”
And he took a step downhill, toward the house, and heard the nervous whispers and drought rustle of their bodies all around him in the dark.
“Does Spyder keep you guys on that fucking short a leash?” and he laughed louder, laughed like a lunatic, and then he was crying again before he could stop himself, cackling and crying and he took another step; their legs punched through the ground eight times, sixteen times, twenty-four times. Thirty-two, and Byron stooped, found a rock and hurled it into the night. He never heard it hit the ground.
“I’m right, aren’t I?” Urgent words spit at the skitterers, and “You’re all bark and no goddamn bite. You made Robin hurt herself, got us so fucking scared she pulled that shelf over on top of herself, and the goddamn widows and the snow did the rest for you.”
And then he was running, headlong, pell-mell rush, jumping deadfall tumbles and ripping his face and hands in blackberry thicket briars. Feet almost tangling, ankles almost twisting, balance nothing but accident, and the roof of Spyder’s house rising up to meet him. A hundred yards left, now, a hundred yards at most, and he almost whacked his forehead on a low sycamore limb as big around as his leg. Ducked at the last minute, the last minute before he hit something else, something that was and wasn’t there, and it wrapped around him, tripped him but held him up, let him stumble three or four steps more before it began to slice into his flesh, slice through