Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [131]
Niki wondered if Spyder was hiding in one of those old shafts now, or if maybe she’d stumbled into one of them in the night, if she’d been too upset to watch where she was walking and had fallen, had broken her leg or hit her head and couldn’t get back.
“Christ, this is crazy,” standing up, buttoning her army jacket, stomping her feet to warm up a little, to get the blood flowing again. And then she walked to the edge of the yard, crunching over the frosted ground, stood ankle deep in kudzu vines and called into the trees, “Spyder? Spyder, can you hear me?” Somewhere down the hill a dog began to bark, and then another one, farther away.
“Spyder!”
She looked back at the house, wanting to be inside, safe in its comfortable warmth and disorder, safe in bed with Spyder, then turned back to the trees, the vines like a slumping wall before the copperhead mat of leaves began farther in. Took another step, and this time her leg sunk in up to the knee and she almost lost her balance; off to her left, something rustled beneath the vines. “Jesus, Spyder, there’s no telling what’s living under all this shit.”
Nothing to be afraid of, though. Rats maybe, possums or raccoons. Stray cats. Nothing that won’t get out of your way if you just make a little racket.
“Spyder? I’m coming to look for you, okay?” and that sounded stupid, stupid as she felt wading around in dead kudzu at seven thirty in the morning.
“It’s okay,” but Niki almost screamed, actually opened her mouth to scream before she saw Spyder huddled in the shelter of some fallen logs; narrow pocket in the vines like a child’s tepee of quilts and blankets.
“I’m right here.”
No coat, short sleeves and bare feet, and Niki thought she could see the white glitter of frost on Spyder’s tattooed arms. “You’ve got to be freezing to death,” she said and took another step and went in up to her waist this time.
“You can’t get across that way. There’s a ditch there.”
“Great. Fucking wonderful,” and Niki tried to plow her way through anyway, stopped when the vines were level with her chest and began to trace her way back out again, wishing she could quit thinking about everything that might be lurking in the kudzu, watching the half of her body she couldn’t see, beady mean eyes that didn’t mind the always-dark down there, red eyes, sharp white teeth.
“So where the hell do I get across?” and when Spyder didn’t answer, Niki looked over her shoulder, caught Spyder staring up into the branches overhead, and she followed, like eyes could be a pointing finger, up, through the snarl and strangle, the draping leafless kudzu, up and there, maybe seven or eight feet off the ground, what Spyder was seeing. Niki rubbed at her eyes, rubbed them like a cartoon character to be sure it was real, those dangling arms and legs, limp and somehow stiff at the same time, sunken black sockets where his eyes had been open wide, and his mouth was open even wider than that.
“Oh,” and she felt like someone had punched her in the gut, had knocked the breath out of her. “Oh god, Spyder.”
“How are we ever gonna get him down?” Spyder said, said the words so quietly that Niki almost didn’t catch them. “I’ve been sitting here trying to figure that out, Niki, how to get him down.”
Niki struggled, fought her way out of the kudzu and vomited in the frozen grass, puked coffee and mostly digested supper, and the mess steamed in the morning shadows.
“Fuck,” she said, over and over, and there was no way to stop seeing that face, the most frightened face she’d ever seen, no way to pretend it wasn’t a dead face, no way not to see Danny Boudreaux up there. No way to get back to the moment before she’d turned around and looked.
No way except straight ahead.
“Spyder,” but then she had to stop, wait until the nausea passed, and then, “I’m gonna go back to the house and call some help, okay?”
“No, Niki. You can’t do that,” a little louder now, a little urgent, “No one’s ever gonna understand, not after Robin. I don’t want to go to jail.”
“Go to jail? Spyder, you didn’t do that!”
Spyder didn