Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [52]
“Goddamn it, Spyder! Shit!” Robin wheeled around and Byron had flinched, maybe thinking she was going to hit him that time. Instead, she’d stomped across the floor and stood in the basket-handle archway separating the living room from the dining room that Spyder used as a dumping ground for her hundreds or thousands of books.
“There is no ‘why’ because there’s no reason for us not to perform the ceremony down there and you know it. You’re just freaking out over something, and you could at least tell me what the hell it is.”
Spyder had not turned around, still stared through herself and the window, vacant and intent, but Robin noticed the way she’d begun rubbing her left hand against her hip, her callused palm across ancient, ragged denim. As if her fingers had started to itch, as if there was a stain on her hand or her jeans, and Robin had known that Spyder wasn’t even aware that she was doing it.
“It’s my house, Robin.”
“Oh please, don’t give me that shit. Just tell me why the hell we shouldn’t use the basement and I’ll shut up about it. But I want a reason, Spyder.”
Robin had glanced at Byron, at Walter still standing there holding the bulging brown bags in his arms; both of them nervous, frightened, caught in the middle, and as if she could read their minds, scrape the thoughts off the gray folds of their brains: This is not the way it works, Robin, and Don’t push, and It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter near enough for this.
“Please, Spyder,” she said. “All I want is a reason.”
Then Walter had set the bags down again, both of them on the coffee table, and rammed his hands deep in his pockets.
“Maybe we should just forget about it, Robin,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just forgot about it? I didn’t really care that much any—”
“Shut up, Walter,” and Spyder had sounded like the still and quiet before a summer storm, the voiceless threat in the eyes of something wild. And she’d turned away from the window and crossed the room to stand in front of Robin; her left hand rubbing furiously at her jeans and the fingers of her right kneading the puckered cross between her eyes, the scarred flesh that turned scarlet when she was upset or angry.
“You do whatever you want,” she’d said, poisonous calm between each word, “if it’s so important to you. Do it and get it over with and then get out of my house.”
“Christ, Spyder. Jesus. Won’t you even try to tell me why you’re afraid?”
But Spyder had already stepped past her, had kicked over a towering stack of paperbacks on her way to the darkened hall, scattering dust and silverfish and brittle, yellowed pages. Robin had stared down at the jumbled collage of faded covers, a painting by Frazetta of a sword-wielding woman with impossible breasts, something dead and scaly at her feet, Stephen King and Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Knowing how badly she’d fucked this up, knowing that Spyder might never let her take back these things she’d said. And knowing that without her, the ceremony would be flawed, not hollow, but not whole, either.
“Well?” Byron had asked, some time later, long enough that her legs had begun to ache from standing in the same position. She’d kept her eyes on the floor, the heap of tumbledown fantasies.
“Take the bags down to the basement, now, Walter,” she’d said, and he hadn’t waited for her to tell him a third time.
6.
Later, what Robin had remembered of the ceremony and the basement was like pages torn apart and hastily Scotch-taped together again by a blind woman, pages illuminated with needles and metallic inks and black words that she was glad had all but lost their meanings.
She’d remembered the preparations, Walter hefting open the trapdoor in the hallway floor and the cool air rising from the darkness, acrid-sweet stench of dust and earth and mildew. No light but their candles, and her feet uncertain on the steep and narrow stairs down, wood that creaked, cried, beneath her bare feet and the dust against her skin had felt like velvet. Velvet that clung to the soles of her feet, and her lungs had filled up with the basement