Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [137]
“You are not pure,” he says to her, his eyes shut now, shut tight. “You have to be made pure so that the angels can carry us into Paradise before it’s too late. It’s not your fault, Lila,” he says.
His arms come down slow, the Bible and the jar, and it’s not one thing in the jar, a lot of small black living things, nervous things, and he sets the Bible in his chair. Tells her to go to her cot, and then he counts backwards, big numbers she hasn’t learned yet. And he unzips his pants.
“It’s your mother. She’s a sinner, and now she’s lost forever, ’cause she’s too proud to listen, too proud to hear. She wants me to let her drag you down to Hell with her, but I won’t, Lila. This is bad, but it’s better than lettin’ her have your immortal soul.”
He bends over her, and she can see inside the jar now, can see the shiny black spiders and the red on their bellies. The bottom and sides of the jar covered with them, clinging to glass and each other; he hands her the jar, makes her take it in both hands, and now she’s too scared to say no, too scared to scream for her mother who wouldn’t hear her anyway because she’s dead or has run away. And her father puts his hands between her legs.
“When I say, Lila, you open that jar.”
All she can do is shake her head, no, no, she can’t do that, won’t let them out; her grandfather taught her about black widows when he taught her about rattlesnakes and copperheads and poison ivy.
“Don’t shake your head at me, little lady. You’re gonna do it when I say, and then it’ll be all right. Then it’ll all be over.”
He touches her where she pees, slides two fingers inside her; it hurts, and she can’t help but cry.
“Open the jar, Lila.
“Open the jar.”
And his fingers come out and something else goes in, rips into her and she screams and he says it again, Open the jar. Now, Lila.
The lid isn’t screwed on tight, makes a gritty sound when she turns it, and he drives the pain all the way in before the lid hits the floor, rings like bells and the spiders flow out, tickling legs over her hands, down her arms, onto her father.
“It’s almost over, baby,” her father says, and she closes her eyes and waits for the end of the world.
Nothing Niki could say, nothing for her to do but sit and wait for Spyder to finish. Or maybe the story was finished and Spyder was waiting on her, for a sign, for sympathy or a shred of consolation. Maybe Spyder only thought she’d finished, and she sat for five more minutes, not speaking, face a white and empty canvas, until Niki asked, “You’ve told your doctors all this?” and Spyder’s head snapped around, puppet-string whiplash, and for a moment Niki was sure Spyder was going to hit her.
“Mostly,” she said, instead of violence, the subtle, instant fury on her face, “But what the hell difference does that make? They can’t undo it, they can’t fix things so it never happened. They can’t even make me forget about it, so what’s the fucking point?”
And Niki didn’t have an answer for that, either.
“My mother ran next door and called the cops, and when they finally got here they had to use a crowbar to get into the basement, because he’d put so many fucking locks on the door.”
Soft scrape against the floorboards under them, and Niki’s racing heart, wanting out; a gentle thwump against the wall of the house, and she opened her mouth to ask if Spyder had heard that, too, but Spyder was already talking again, and she made herself wait.
“I fainted or I was in shock or something. I don’t remember that part. I don’t remember anything else until I woke up in the hospital. They had my mother sedated somewhere, and it was a week before I even knew he was dead, when my Aunt Maggie finally told me. It took him three days to die from all those bites.”
That sound again, thwump, solid basketball thwump against the side of the house, the basement scrub-brush sound right after it, and Niki pretended she hadn’t heard, that there was nothing in the world now except Spyder.
“It’s hard to get a black widow to bite you,” she said. “You almost have to force them, Niki.