Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [19]
Used ’em all up on trifling shit, and now there’s nothing left to cry. Like something her mother or maybe a schoolteacher had said a long time ago. Stop bawling or someday you won’t be able to cry, someone you love will die: and you won’t ever be able to stop hurting. Stop it, Niki, or your face will stick that way.
She’d fumbled through the scatter of cassettes and empty plastic cases on the dashboard and front seat. They were almost all ambient goth, darkwave driving music, nothing she’d wanted to hear now, nothing hard and sharp enough to drive away the storm, the whir like locust wings behind her eyes. Finally, she’d lucked onto a Jimi Hendrix compilation she’d dubbed as a Christmas present two years before and never given away; the tape had kicked in halfway through “All Along the Watchtower,” and she’d turned up the volume until the speakers had begun to whine and distort.
An hour after nightfall, dry-eyed and empty, Niki had crossed the dark and brackish waters of the Alligator River, secret black flowing beneath the causeway’s three-mile span. Beyond that, the road signs had history-book names—Kitty Hawk, Nag’s Head, Kill Devil Hills—and the air roaring in through the open window had begun to smell salty.
For a while, then, there had only been more featureless night, far-off lights and occasional glimpses of the vast marshes stretching away on either side of the asphalt ribbon. Once, a fat raccoon had darted across the road and she’d almost run it down, had stomped the brakes and would have been dead if there’d been anyone behind her.
She’d reached another long bridge just as Hendrix had begun “The Wind Cries Mary”; a reflective green and silver sign had announced that she would be crossing Croatan Sound and that Roanoke Island waited for her on the other side. Niki wasn’t a history buff, but she knew the legend of the Lost Colony, the English settlement that had completely vanished, nothing left behind except the word “CROATOAN” carved into the trunk of a tree. And there was a Harlan Ellison story with the same name, about alligators and mutant fetuses living in the sewers underneath New York City.
As the raven-black Vega left the mainland behind and rushed toward the line of barrier islands and the cold Atlantic, she’d thought about what might hide itself at the blurry edges of her sight and rolled up her window.
Niki had stopped for gas and a fifth of Jim Beam in the waterfront town of Manteo. Any maritime charm the town might still have had twenty, twenty-five years ago, had been long since smothered beneath a gaudy flood of vacationers and housing developments, white-washed seafood joints and video rental stores. She’d avoided the eyes of the old man who’d come out to pump for her, the disdainful stares from the old woman behind the cash register she’d guessed was his wife. She had paid with a twenty, and the old woman had snorted when Niki had told her that she could keep the change, had snorted but hadn’t refused.
The highway crossed one more bridge, the last, and the sodium-arc halo of Manteo had faded behind her as the dunes of the Outer Banks had risen up around the car, and she’d followed the single blinking eye of Bodie Lighthouse down to the sea. This time the darkness had felt less threatening, less like a hiding place for monsters and more like a shelter against the grinding weight inside. Maybe it was the moon, butter yellow and three-quarters full, just beginning to show above the sea oats, or maybe it was the ocean, so close she’d caught shimmering glimpses of it between the dunes.
Past the old lighthouse, there’d been a narrow, unpaved road leading away from the highway, packed sand and shells crushed under tires, and Niki drove slowly until the road blended seamlessly into the beach. The tide had been in, and even over the blaring stereo, she heard the velvet crash of the breakers. She rolled the car to a stop a few feet from the waterline, shifted down from