Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [132]
“I have to call the police, Spyder. He’s dead.”
“Then calling the cops won’t make him any less dead, will it? You can come across down there,” and she pointed to a spot a few yards away. It didn’t look any different from the place Niki had tried to cross; she wiped her mouth, then spat again.
“He’s dead, Spyder. He’s fucking dead.”
“Yeah. I thought he’d just left town. I thought maybe he’d gone to Atlanta.”
“Okay, well, then that’s all you have to tell the police when they ask.”
“We’re not calling the cops, Niki,” so final there was no way to argue, not now, anyway; nothing to do but go to the place she’d pointed, go to Spyder and get her inside before she froze to death or caught pneumonia. The wind rattled through the trees, a dry, hungry rattle, and she realized the dogs were still barking.
Her feet only disappeared a little past the ankles this time, and the ground creaked beneath her shoes, tired wood creak, glimpses of weathered planks through the growth, and Niki realized she was walking on some sort of bridge, probably rotten, and she tried not to think about that, either. Tried to think about nothing but getting Spyder in out of the cold.
“Watch out,” Spyder said. “There’s a stump hole there,” and then Niki was standing next to her, standing directly under the body in the tree.
“Maybe if we just pull on the vines…”
“I think we should go inside now, Spyder. At least warm you up a little bit. Get your boots and coat.”
“…together. I tried it, but maybe if we were both pulling, the vines would come loose.”
“We shouldn’t do that,” and she caught a hint of something bad on the air, a ripe, meaty smell, and she told herself that it was too cold for the body to be rotting up there, but she knew that was total horseshit.
“You wouldn’t say that, if he’d been your friend. I can’t leave him there.”
“If he was my friend, Spyder…” and whatever she was about to say, whatever was true and wanted to be said, no need for Spyder to hear it, and instead, “If he was my friend, I’d call the police.”
Spyder stood, her feet raw, chapped pink, the palms of her hands the same color, the same painful shade across her forehead, under her eyes, around her mouth. But not a hint of frostbite gray, as far as Niki could tell; that was something, at least, something to hang on to. One way this could be worse.
Spyder grabbed on to one of the vines and pulled; Niki heard the limbs creak, the same grating sound the old boards over the ditch had made, same straining sound that might have been the last thing Danny heard after he stepped off the chair in his kitchen. “Help me, Niki,” and “Spyder,” she said, “Please,” but Spyder only pulled that much harder, frowned and chewed her lower lip.
“If I could just reach his feet,” she said.
The soles of the boy’s shoes, swaying now because of all the yanking Spyder was doing on the vines, a bit of gravel wedged between the treads, a yellow-green wad of hardened gum. The vine felt utterly alien in Niki’s hands, dried tendons from an alien corpse, the corpse of something big as the mountain, old as the world. She pulled and way up high there were popping sounds, rip-pings, and Spyder jerked so hard Niki could see where the skin on her fingers was cracking open and beginning to bleed.
“And what are we supposed to do with him if we ever do get him down?”
Spyder put all her weight on the vine, lifted herself off the ground a couple of inches. There was a loud crack then and bits of oak bark fell from the sky and peppered their heads.
“We put him inside, where no one’ll see.”
Niki followed her example, cringed when the body sank a little closer to them.
“What then? I mean, you don’t think you can keep him in there very long, do you? It’s a corpse, Spyder. Sooner or later…”
“He’ll have to be buried,” Spyder said, and Niki didn’t say anything else. Didn’t want to hear any more of this. She tugged until her arms ached, white clouds of breath from the exertion, the cold making