Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [3]
Someone claps loudly, and Byron glares from the sofa where he’s still making out with the pretty black boy from Chicago, the boy who brought the sheets of blotter. Spyder smiles at him, runs her fingers through Robin’s improbable hair, dares him to say a word. Then Robin laughs and spills gray smoke from her lips, gives the pipe to someone else before she nestles snug into Spyder’s lap. And Byron turns away and hides his face deep in the boy’s neck.
Spyder squints through the gauze of marijuana and cigarette smoke hanging a few feet above the hardwood floor, through the strange half light, salt-and-pepper TV glare blending into the gentler glimmer from the candles scattered around the room. She lingers, admires the tattoos that cover both her arms from shoulder to knuckle, dark sleeves, tapestry of webs rendered in silvery blues and iridescent highlights against a field of deepest black and indigo.
On the screen, another latex disembowelment and the sudden seethe of maggots like boiling rice.
“Oh,” and Robin flinches like she hasn’t seen this tape fifteen times before, like there’s anything left to shock. Spyder closes her eyes again, tight, savoring the smoky aftertaste and the industrial throb and crash from the speakers, the soft snarl of Robin’s hair.
This moment, she thinks, and her head is clear, no acid or X and certainly none of Walter’s ugly little mushrooms. Only enough of the rich Mississippi pot to deal with the distractions, the blurry edges of her attention. This one moment, and behind her eyes, she imagines bottling the seconds, one whole minute, in antique green glass or amber vials, drives the cork in deep before it goes to past like vinegar or slips away.
Everything, she thinks, and everyone here around me.
“Ohhhh,” Robin says, almost whispers, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, that’s so beautiful.”
Later, the last precious hour before dawn, and the sable-skinned boy from Chicago has gone, and the hangers-on have gone, the girl from Atlanta with her tarot deck and the nameless child treading on her shadow, both so skinny it hurt to see. The two drag queens who dropped by looking for Walter, looking to score a quarter bag after their last show of the evening.
Just Spyder and Robin all but asleep in her lap, still tripping deep and hard on her three hits, three tiny white tabs stamped with prancing blue unicorns and dissolved like sugar on her tongue. Byron sits alone on the sofa now, staring at the television, Murnau’s original Nosferatu in scratchy blacks and whites like celluloid watercolors, and his eyes are somehow vacant and expectant at the same time.
And Walter, squatted like a ragged gargoyle before the stereo, digging noisily through her CDs and cassettes, singing or mumbling to himself. He settles on something, slips it into the deck and the Cure’s “Plainsong” pours like honey and raindrops from the speakers.
The girl rises from her bed like a living ghost and sleepwalks along the edge of a balcony; her bare feet, jerky tiptoe stride, barely seem to touch the stone balustrade. Byron picks up the remote, presses Pause, and she freezes in midstep. He holds her that way until the song’s overture is done and Robert Smith releases them both.
“Spyder?” and Robin’s voice slips from her like an echo of itself, something shouted far away and faded thin and hollow by the time it finally crosses her lips.
“I’m here,” Spyder answers.
“Talk to me, Spyder. Tell me the story.”
“You already know the story, Robin.”
But Robin squeezes