Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [54]
She went without you, her father chattered in her ear, from inside her ear. You see that, don’t you? They all went without you, and here you thought you were the big magic…
“Shut up,” she’d whispered, whispered the way she had learned to whisper so no one else would hear, so no one would ask, Who you talkin’ to, Spyder? Who you think you’re talkin’ to? And she’d chewed at her upper lip, toying with a ragged bit of skin.
Did you think they couldn’t do this without you, Lila? Did you think that little green-haired whore of yours wasn’t wicked enough to do this witchy shit on her own?
“Shut up,” and her teeth had ground through flesh, salty, warm blood in her mouth like chocolate melting on her tongue.
They don’t need you.
“Shut up!” and she covered her ears with both hands, useless, knowing that his voice wasn’t getting in that way.
“You don’t know, you don’t know shit!”
She’s taking them away from you, Lila. I know that.
“SHUT UP!” and then she’d thrown herself hard against a wall, so hard that the plaster had dented and cracked. “SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!”
Dull smack of her shoulder against the wall, again and again, meat-thud tattoo, and the cracks had spread like the patterns on her arms until she’d punched a hole through and plaster dust had silted to the floor like flour snow. Dark smear of herself down the wounded white wall. And she’d known he wasn’t wrong. That her father had eyes to see through the lies she told herself, the lies that Robin had been telling her.
Spyder had gone to the kitchen and found a claw hammer and the pickle jar full of different-sized nails beneath the sink, two-penny, ten-penny, and all the time him muttering in her skull, Bible verses and his own crimson prophecies. When she’d opened her mouth to answer the questions he put to her, his voice came out, red and gristle spew of dead-man words that she couldn’t stop. She’d poured the nails out across the hall floor, rusty iron scatter, picking them up at random and sinking one after another into the hardwood, crazy angles, but enough of them piercing both the trapdoor and the floor. All the way around, stitching them in, while jumbled gospel and condemnation dribbled from her lips.
When she’d finished, Spyder pushed and dragged the big steamer trunk from her mother’s room, great-grandmother heirloom, had used it to cover the smashed and crooked nail heads, the basement door, passage down to all her hells. And then she’d climbed on top, had crouched there, predator’s huddle, and through her mouth, her father had howled his Armageddon songs.
When Spyder woke up, curled next to the trunk, there’d been watery light, dawning shades of gray and ivory, shining from the dining room and through the little window at the other end of the hall. She did not remember having fallen asleep, ached everywhere at once, and when she sat up her back and neck and shoulders had hurt so badly that she’d had to lie right back down.
There was no one but herself inside her head, and she’d lain still and thankfully alone, her cheek pressed against the cool, smooth wood, wax and varnish, left ear against the floor. And at first, the scritching sounds had meant nothing to her, the faint sobbing like lost children, another part of the house and nothing more; she’d listened, squinting as the light through the dirty window had brightened toward morning.
And then, “Spyder?” But the voice was too small and broken to have been real, to have been anything but an echo of an echo of something she’d forgotten.
“Spyder, please…”
The sun had seeped into the hall and, by slow degrees, the night washed back over her: that they had all gone down to the basement without her, Robin