Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [156]
Daria leaned over the hole, the smells so much thicker close to the floor, and she almost gagged, swallowed and shouted, “Niki? Are you down there?” No reply, a crinkly faint sound that might have been people talking or radio static, and she knew if she let herself look back, she’d never do it, would choose any other way out of this, and so she put one foot down into the dark, tested her weight on wood that looked termite-chewed, punky and ready to break.
And someone screamed, close and sexless pain-scream and she almost toppled headfirst down the hole. In the quiet space after the scream, she clearly heard the top stair crack, split loud under her foot, and Daria stumbled backwards, away from the cellar. There was no mistaking the laughter filling up the emptiness beneath her feet, leaking from the open trapdoor, for anything else, no mistaking whether or not she was hearing it: many-throated patchwork of laughter that was lost and sad and utterly, hatefully insane. The way you’d laugh if there was nothing else left, if you heard the Emergency Broadcast System attention signal on television and there’d been no reassuring voice first to tell you it was just a test. The way you’d laugh at the very end.
“For fuck’s sake, Niki, where are you?” hardly more than a hesitant whisper, and she realized she was afraid maybe something besides Niki, besides Spyder, was listening. Cold sweat under her clothes, chilling sweat and adrenaline enough to tear her apart, and the scream again, but this time she knew it was Niki. This time she could tell that it was coming from a closed door directly across from Spyder’s bedroom, the plywood where the door to Spyder’s bedroom should have been. She used the cuff of her jacket to wipe away a knot of the strands, and it still stung her hand when she tried to turn the doorknob, no good anyway because it was locked.
She pounded the door and shouted, already hoarse from shouting. “Niki! Let me in! Spyder?” and Niki, then, echo-game mocking her, “Spyder,” and that was worse even than the laughter from the cellar, no spook-house creepiness to distract her, nothing but the rawest loss; scream like a missing finger, and Daria hit the door with her shoulder, hit hard and it shivered in its frame, but the lock held. She stepped back, all the way back to the other side of the hall, winced when one of the strands sliced into her forehead, and she let that sharp and sudden pain carry her forward, a wish that she was as big as Keith or Mort, as strong, and she threw herself at the door. The wood splintered, split layers, decades of paint strata, and the door slammed open.
Spyder, what had been Spyder, dangling from the bedroom ceiling, Niki naked and kneeling below her, and Daria almost turned and ran. Never mind the butchering gossamer or the laughing hole in the floor, Sunday school demons next to this. A sudden loud rapping at the window across the room, bam, bam, bam, and whatever new horror she might have expected, might have imagined, it was only Mort and Theo; urgent motions for her to open the window, and he looked over his shoulder at the night waiting past the porch.
The plaster had started to sag from her weight, cracks and flakes in the old paint where the thing was attached to the ceiling.
Think about it later. Get her out of here now. Her whole life left to think about it, and she knew that she would, would see Spyder Baxter every time she closed her eyes for the rest of her life, that it would always be there in the darkness, in her dreams, behind every unopened door. But that couldn’t be helped now; maybe Niki could. She ignored Mort, went to Niki, Niki with eyes shut tight, lips moving like silent prayer, and Daria shook her hard.