Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [4]
“Please, Spyder?” she asks. “Please? I need to hear it again. I need to hear you tell it.”
Byron has set the remote down, watches them, arms crossed and waiting. Walter pretends to organize the careless scatter of jewel cases on the floor, pretends he hasn’t heard.
“It’s very late,” Spyder says, brushing Robin’s bangs from her eyes. “You look so sleepy.”
“No. No, I don’t want to sleep yet. Please, Spyder.”
When Spyder glances at Byron, he shifts his eyes quickly back to the television, back to the terrified solicitor and the vampire, and Walter shrugs and stacks the CDs.
“I need to hear,” Robin says, and now she sounds desperate, close to tears. “I need to hear.”
Spyder sighs and hugs Robin close.
“Yeah,” she says, nothing more, but already Byron has reached for the remote, flips the set off, and now the room is very dark, only a few guttering pools of yellow candlelight. Walter turns down the Cure until the music is just a murmur of guitars and keyboards, and he sits with his back to Spyder and Robin and Byron.
Outside the house, Spyder’s rambling, junkcluttered house where it is never anything but Halloween, the late October night is still and satisfied. No wolf-howling wind or bare branches scritching window glass, nothing but the sound of a car passing on the street outside. Spyder waits until it has gone, and then she clears her throat.
“Before the World,” she begins, “there was a war in Heaven….”
PART I
Apolycis
“There’s this thin place behind my ear Where time is getting heavy and as you say ‘I always meant, I always meant to open up’
My skin starts to tear.”
“Imperfect”
Stiff Kitten
CHAPTER ONE
Daria
1.
Daria sat by herself on the sidewalk, fat spiral-bound notebook open across her lap, back pressed firmly against the raw brick, pretentiously raw brick sandblasted for effect, for higher rent and the illusion of renewal, the luxury of history. The cobblestone street was lined with old warehouse and factory buildings, most dating back to the first two decades of the century or before and sacrificed years ago for office suites; sterile, track-lit spaces for architects and lawyers, design firms and advertising agencies.
The felt-tip business end of her pen hovered uselessly over the paper, over the verse she’d begun almost a week ago now. A solid hour staring stupidly at her own cursive scrawl, red ink too bright for blood, and she was no closer to finishing, and the cold—real Christmas weather—was beginning to numb her fingers, working its way in through her clothes. Daria closed the notebook, snapped the cap back on her pen, returned both to the army-surplus knapsack lying on the concrete.
This time of day, in this light, latest afternoon and the sun sliding like butterscotch from the pale November sky, she could almost make an uneasy peace with the city. Almost find a little comfort, something enough like comfort to do, in the mismatched cluster of taller buildings that passed themselves off as a downtown skyline. She ignored the stares and sidelong glances from the secretaries in their ridiculous heels and the men in suits who looked at her suspiciously; dumpy, rumpled Daria Parker growing from their sidewalk like a monstrous fungus. Thrift-store cardigan beyond baggy, the sharpei of cardigans, the unreal yellow of French’s mustard, tattered white T-shirt beneath. Black jeans worn almost straight through the knees and ass.
Her bass leaned against the wall next to her, the hulking rectangular case betraying no hint of the Fender’s sleek Coke-bottle curves. The case was almost completely covered with stickers pushing local bands, a few goth and grrrl groups, conflicting political slogans and Bob Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius. The newest addition, plastered dead front and center, confectioner’s pink and black filigree borders, was Daria’s band, Stiff Kitten. The zombified rendition of Hello Kitty had been her idea, brought to life by the band’s drummer, Mort.
Daria fished her last Marlboro from