Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [122]
3.
From Birmingham to Nashville, Nashville to Louisville and on to Indianapolis, buses and interchangeable bus stations, and Walter had no idea where he was going, hardly why. Less money left every day and no direction, no solution but this movement that solved nothing, and nothing inside but dread and terror pushing him farther and farther from that spot on the earth where Spyder’s house sat festering in his head. Sometime Sunday morning, and he waited for the connection to Chicago, only half-awake in the molded blue plastic chair and his ass hurting, watching the faces around him, the eyes with their own simpler worries. Worries in the real world, solid world, not the insane things, what he didn’t believe and could no longer deny.
At the Greyhound counter, a greasy-looking woman in a Pennzoil windbreaker was arguing with the clerk, something he couldn’t hear, but something to watch anyway, her lips moving and the sneer on her face, white-trash contempt, the annoyed disinterest in the clerk’s eyes, and sleep moved silently up behind him…
…and it’s always the same, always Walter lost in those hours or minutes or days before Spyder comes down from the brilliant, burning hills to take him home, to lead him back to the World. And always that sudden sense of aloneness, severed cord, broken chain, knowing that Robin and Byron are free, that they’ve slipped away, escaped, and he’s still cowering in the sulfur rubble on the edge of the pit. He wants to be happy, to cheer, because they’re gone, like Dorothy to the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion, they got away, they got away; Preacher Man, the Dragon, knows at once, and He roars so loud the world rumbles and the pit rips wider, devours more of this place that is no place at all. The powderglass ground beneath his feet tilts and is turning, accelerating counterclockwise spiral down and down and the pit yawns and belches, grinds its granite teeth.
And the Dragon fills up the roiling floor-joist sky, spreads His scrawny hard sermon arms wide, his dragon wings, and the book is a blazing red sun bleeding out his voice. Ugly black things cling to His hands and face, biting things and Walter is on hands and bloody knees now, clambering for any hold, crawling as the earth shivers and goes powdery. And he remembers his wings, his beautiful charcoal wings, mockingbird boy, and that’s why Preacher Man hates him, isn’t it, and he tries to stand, spreads them wide, but the raining fire has scorched them raw, ragged feather scorch, and the Dragon laughs and laughs and laughs.
“Come back with me,” Spyder says, her hands around his wrists, but Preacher Man looming over her shoulder. “It’s gonna be all right now, Walter,” but the world turns, water down a drain, down that mouth, and the earth tremoring so he can’t even stand up.
“Help,” he says, every time, and every time she smiles, soft and secret Spyder smile, nods and puts her arms around him so that Preacher Man howls and claws the sagging sky belly until it bleeds; the sour rain sticks to them like pine sap, turning the powdered ground to tar. “He won’t let me leave, Spyder. He knows what I’ve seen, what I know.…”
And she turns and stares up and into His face, like there’s nothing to fear in those eyes, nothing that can pick her apart, strew her flesh to the winds and singe the bones, and she says, “He’s not part of this,” and “You can’t have him.” And the tattoos on her arms writhe electric blue loaded-gun threat, and now Preacher Man, who is also the Dragon, is not laughing. Now He takes a step backwards, puts the pit between them, His protector, and His face is a rictus of rage and pain, and He is fury.
“Lila,” He says, “what you’ve done to me, you’ll burn in Hell forever.” Voice of thunder and mountains splitting to spill molten bile. “What you’ve done to me, you’ll burn until the end of Time.”
And the blue fire flows from her, crackling static cage that He won’t touch, and she’s pulling