Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [34]
“Mort?” she whispers loud, the way she speaks at the library or a funeral parlor, and “Keith?”
Drifting back, then, from nowhere, from everywhere at once, “Over here, Dar. Over here,” and it might be Keith or Mort or anyone else. The darkness plays ventriloquist, throwing voices, bending sound, stealing words for its own.
“Where? I can’t see you.”
A long silence and finally something taunting like laughter or summer thunder way off, and the voice shouts back, “Over here!”
Daria takes one uncertain step forward, crunching the gritty, invisible debris scattered across the floor beneath the rubber soles of her boots. Her eyes are beginning to adjust, slowest fade to fuzzy twilight, and she swallows, her throat dry, dry mouth, and tastes the stale dustbunny air. She remembers the big cooler sweating sweet condensation diamonds inside the Pontiac, the bottles of Coke and Nehi floating in its little arctic sea. And forces herself another step, two, three, moving haltingly now across a gray concrete plain littered with darker patches and the faint glint of broken glass. Streaky sunlight bleeds down through the roof, sieved through shadow, and by the time the dark finishes with it, it’s nothing more than the pale ghost of the morning.
“Hey, Dar! Look at this!”
“What? What is it?”
Up ahead of her, something falls over, startlingly loud, weighty metal crash and glass tinkle, and the sudden feathery rustle of wings high overhead.
“Holy fuck, Keith! Will you watch what the hell you’re doing?”
And that laughter again, and the rustling, just swallows or pigeons, or bats.
“God, Dar, sometimes you can be such a goddamn pussy,” Keith says, and now she knows the laughter is his, mean laugh, the way you laugh at sissies and fat kids and Carol Yancy when the school nurse found cooties in her hair.
Stop! she screams. Stop it! but just screaming inside her head, the words just loud thoughts trapped inside her the way this darkness is contained inside the warehouse walls, within the walls of the shack that had seemed so much smaller from the outside.
Something touches her cheek, a tickling wisp of her hair or a cobweb, and she slaps at it.
“Lay off,” Mort says, and then there are footsteps moving toward her.
“I can’t see you…” but her voice trails off when the wispy thing brushes her face again. It isn’t her hair. Some of it clings stubbornly to her fingers.
“Stay where you are,” Mort says, Mort or her father. “Stand still, and I’ll find you.”
Hurry up, and she wishes that much had come out loud enough for someone to hear, but she’s too busy swiping at the sticky wisps to try again.
“I can’t see her, Keith. I can’t see her anywhere.”
Hurry.
“Dumb pussy bitch,” Keith says. “Fuck her, Mort.”
Stand still. Stand still and wait for him to find you. You’re freaking yourself out, that’s all.
It’s just a fucking dream.
The footsteps seem to pass her by, dissolving back into the murk, each one a little farther away than the last.
And then the scurry of tiny legs, delicate across her upper lip, the bridge of her nose. And she gasps, loud drowning noise, and sucks some of the clinging stuff into her mouth, her nostrils.
“Daria?!” and her dad sounds frightened, almost as much as she is. “Daria, where are you?”
She slaps at her face so hard it draws down violet stars, and there are others, all at once, moving rapidly up and down her arms, her bare legs, impatient as minute fingers drumming busily to themselves. One wriggles its way past the collar of her T-shirt, skitters along her spine, another over an eyelid. A hundred, a thousand legs dancing softly, crazily, and the webs like a living curtain all around her.
And finally she can scream, opens