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By Root 1136 0

extra-strength Tylenol, watched sitcoms with the sound turned too far down to hear. Her eyes itched and watered and there were still bright purplewhite splotches that danced about the room when she blinked. But the thwumping on the walls had stopped, the brushy rustling from the basement, and she could sit on the couch and watch mindless crap and almost not think about the familiar pattern the burns had etched into her skin or about what Spyder was doing in the kitchen or the racket when she wrestled the body off the kitchen table. The sounds the dead boy’s swaddled heels made as she dragged him to the trapdoor and down. Not think about what had happened or what to do next, about the things that had happened in this house, had never stopped happening because Spyder had been scarred and so the house had scars, too. There would be time to think later, when her hands stopped hurting, when the splotches in front of her eyes faded.

The phone began to ring and Spyder let it, seventh ring before Niki got up and went to the kitchen (no boy mummy body on the table, no salt on the floor, no sign of Spyder, either) to answer it.

“Hello?” and there was sweet, faint music from the other end, the Smiths, maybe, and then Mort said, “Hey, Niki. You guys doin’ okay?”

“Yeah,” and inside, No. No, we’re not. Not even a little bit okay. “We’re fine.”

“Well, look, I’ve got some bad news,” and she thought she heard Theo in the background; Mort paused, and the music went away.

“It’s about Keith, you know, our guitar player,” and “Yeah,” she said, “Is he all right?” just as the basement door slammed closed. And then Spyder, standing between crooked paperback stacks in the next room, watching her: dirty hands, red dirt like rust or blood, dirty bare feet. A smear of dirt across her face.

“No,” Mort said, “He’s not,” and Niki listened to the details, stared helpless into Spyder’s expectant, nervous eyes and listened. When it was over, she hung up and sat at the table, just a plain table again, not a mortuary slab, and all the salt and pepper shakers and bottles of hot sauce back in place. The plastic honey bear and the sugar bowl.

“What’s wrong, Niki?” Spyder asked, cautious, sounding frightened again; Niki shook her head, no words left in her. She looked down at her ridiculous, bandaged hands, already beginning to ravel, and when she began to cry, Spyder came and held her, wrapped her in consoling smells of mold and earth and sweat and stayed with her until she could talk again.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Sineaters

1.

The real funeral and the one in her head; Daria, sitting on her bed, sitting with her back to the wall and squeezed into the corner like a gunfighter so no more of this shit could come sneaking up on her, the real shit and the shit in her head; the shit since Saturday night and her laying down the law, the sentence, for the late and never-to-be-great Mr. Keith Barry, and the other shit like a 1950s Cold War big-bug movie. That last kept for herself, her pearl, more secret than the guilt over Keith. Because she knew it was crazy, because she was too afraid to say it out loud, too scared to say words to set the nightmares loose.

Claude had gone out for more coffee thirty minutes before, only had to walk down to the Bean and back, So where the hell is he? and she watched the clock-radio and wished him home, wished herself back to Saturday night and Heaven and the time when there was still opportunity, a million other ways things might have gone down, if she’d let them, and none of the wishes came true.

Outside, the sun was going down, already, going down again, and that meant that she’d lived through one, two, three, four, and this had been the fifth day since Saturday night: Thursday, Thursday night creeping up on her like a fucking vampire that would take away nothing anyone could ever see, would leave her a little less alive, but still hurting. Hurting like she’d never imagined she could hurt, and empty, and sick, and she thought she heard thunder.

She knew she looked like cold fucking shit, smelled just as bad or worse,