Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [154]
“Walter, Walter,” and there was still enough of them to know, what might have been them once, before this wrong and hurting thing, features blurred like melted wax, a green iris set along the rows of glinting black and pupilless eyes, cupid’s bow and prettysharp nose mashed between nervous, restless chelicerae and meat-hook fangs. Three delicate and black-nailed fingers at the end of one jointed leg, and the voice, neither Robin nor Byron, but both of them.
“What do you want?” he asked, his voice so calm, like he didn’t feel the warm piss running down the inside of his leg, like he thought he was gonna walk away from the thing in the mirror sane.
So much pain in that one human eye and the lips moved, working silently a moment, and he didn’t turn around, but didn’t look away from the mirror, either, watched its reflection.
“What? What the fuck do you want from me?”
“Help,” and it coughed something up, and he had to look away, down at the sink, the spotless, safe sink, or he would have puked. “Help,” it said again.
“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve done everything I could do.”
“Please, kill her,” it said, phlegmy voice that suddenly didn’t sound like anyone he’d ever known, and that made it easier. “Please help…”
“You’re not listening. I didn’t say I won’t; I said I fucking can’t. I can’t kill anyone. There’s nothing else I can do. And I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry.”
And he turned the water back on, twisted both knobs all the way so the gush and splash covered up the sounds it had begun to make.
“Now leave me the fuck alone,” and he looked at it one last time, backed into its corner, quivering bristles and thick tears from that one green eye, before he put his fist through the mirror. The glass shattered, big razor shards that rained down off the wall, broke into smaller pieces all around his feet, slicing at his knuckles and fingers.
He waited almost five minutes, and when nothing happened and no one came in to see what the noise had been, Walter turned around and saw he was alone again.
5.
Niki’s sitting with her back to the wrought-iron fence that surrounds Jackson Square like a spiked bracelet, silent, watching as the girl turns her cards over one by one. Wind in the palms, the sewer-mud smell of the river and the girl turns up the Hanged Man and there’s only one card left. She points at the man dangling by one leg from the T-shaped tree, triangle of his legs pointing toward the earth, cross of his arms and the glow around his head, saint’s nimbus. “Ah,” she says. “That one,” and “That one can be trouble.” And nothing else, no insight or prophecy before she reaches for the final card, reaches for the outcome, before the wind gusts and scatters the spread along the paving stones. The girl runs after her cards, barefoot with silver rings on her toes and the wind making bat wings of her black shawl. Niki looks at the sky, clouds so low and black, yellow-green lightning lying up there like electric serpents, and she thinks she should get inside, leaves money in the girl’s cigar box and when she stands, tries to stand, she feels the pain in her ankles, the bottoms of her feet, coursing angry and hot up her calves.
She looks down and the stones are breaking up around her, busted apart by the writhing snarl of roots, roots as smooth as the slick bellies of worms, the red of naked muscle, the blue of naked veins: the roots that grow time-lapse fast from her legs and feet, holding her to the spot, that bury themselves, herself, deeper and deeper into the soggy ground beneath the Square, rich black soil and fat white grubs. The murmuring tourists who point and stumble past with their souvenir New Orleans Jazz T-shirts and plastic beads, to-go cups of beer, daiquiris and hurricanes, and she can see the fear and the awe on their drunken, puffy faces.
And the sky begins to tear.
And fall.
She woke up, and the room was still and quiet. A little candle flicker from the floor that made it seem darker outside, and her head was full of the dream and the confusion the Klonopin