Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [55]
“Please…please, Spyder.”
She sat up, ignoring the pain, the tilting dizziness it tried to force on her, and stared at the trunk, the banged and dented edges of the trapdoor and stray nails scattered everywhere like vicious pick-up sticks. Something under the floor thumped twice and was quiet.
“Robin?” and her throat hurt, strep raw; she tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone cottony and dry.
No sound from beneath the trunk, beneath the basement door nailed shut, no sound anywhere but her heart and a mockingbird squawking loudly in borrowed voices somewhere outside.
She’d tried to wrestle the trunk aside, but there was no strength at all in her right arm, dislocated bones and sickening pain, the black threat of unconsciousness, and so she’d had to use her feet to push it out of the way. But then there were the nails, dozens of them, and she’d looked around desperately for the hammer, had finally found it hiding on the other side of the trunk.
“I’m opening it,” she croaked, over and over again, protective mantra against what she’d done. “I’m opening it.”
A lot of the heads were sunk too deep for the claw end of the hammer to get at, pocked, circular wounds in the floor where she’d buried them. With her good hand, Spyder pulled and wrenched loose the ones she could reach, nail after bent and crooked nail squeaking free of the wood. When she finished at least half the nails were still firmly, smugly, in place; she tugged at the chifforobe handle, and the boards creaked and buckled, made pirate-ship sounds, and she was able to get her hand under one corner of the trapdoor, able to force it open a few inches and see the blackness beneath.
When Robin’s hand scrambled out, lunged through the narrow opening, Spyder had almost screamed. Fingernails split and torn down to the bloodied quicks, blood caked maroon and the ugly color of raisins.
“Move your fingers,” she’d grunted, struggling not to let the door slip shut again, imagined her hand and Robin’s trapped together in the squeezing crack, their blood mingling and dripping down into the darkness. “Move your fingers.”
Robin strained desperately toward the light leaking into the basement.
“I said move your goddamned fingers!”
The fingers pulled themselves back slow, one-at-a-time retreat like the heads or tentacles of some frightened sea thing. When they were all gone, Spyder had eased her own hand out, let the trapdoor snap closed again, and someone on the other side had cried out, a wild and terrified animal sound, impossible to tell who it might have been. Breathless and lost in the empty space gouged by the scream, Spyder bent low, prayer bow, her mouth almost touching the drying stain where Robin’s fingers had groped only seconds before.
“Listen to me,” she said, speaking too loudly, too fast, “There’s a crowbar out on the porch. I’ve got to go and get it so I can pry this open.”
“Don’t leave me…” and that had been Robin, something shattered using Robin’s tongue, Robin’s vocal chords.
“I’m coming right back, I swear, I’m coming right the fuck back, okay?”
There was no answer, and she hadn’t waited for one.
She’d found the crowbar wedged tightly between the old washing machine and the house, and she’d had to work it back and forth for three or four minutes before it had finally pulled free, unexpected, and she’d staggered backwards, had almost lost her balance and fallen onto a heap of rusted motorcycle parts. The morning was clear and warm, bright Alabama morning, spring fading into summer, and for a moment she’d stood there, holding the crowbar out in front of her like a weapon from a martial arts movie.
Her car sat in the driveway, right where Byron had parked it the night before.
You could just go, and she’d had no idea whose ghost had said that, which lips had whispered behind her eyes, but not her father’s. He’d never tell her to leave the house, and not her mother, either. She’d let her arm drop limply to her