Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [6]
The LP was propped against the kneeling Virgin Mary, and Daria could just make out $4.50 in Spyder’s measured, careful script, ballpoint on the dime-sized price sticker. Not bad at all, if there weren’t a lot of scratches. And she’d been good, hadn’t spent a penny on herself in weeks, everything she made at the Fidgety Bean going for bills and rent, whatever was left over going into the band. And Jesus, she needed something to wake her up, to jog her out of this dry spell, something that she didn’t already know by heart. The album’s front cover was a shadowy portrait, indistinct profile in black and grays, the perfect image of Waits’ voice, growl and rasp, soothing jangle.
Overhead, the streetlights buzzed to life, mammoth fireflies flickering dirty sodium white from their tall poles. Inside Weird Trappings it was very dark, and the sudden light made a mirror of the plate glass, hiding the album and everything else behind her reflection. Daria glanced at the door and the sign said closed, but she could come back for the record tomorrow evening, as soon as she got up. Would even have a few hours free to listen to it before work, since Stiff Kitten didn’t practice Friday nights.
When she looked back to the window, she saw the patrol car, cruising slowly, watchfully, along, and she turned away from Weird Trappings, her boots loud and deliberate on the deserted street.
Stiff Kitten practiced, and when rent couldn’t be paid, lived, in the empty space above Storkland. A sort of baby’s K-Mart, Storkland sold everything from disposable diapers to cribs that rocked themselves, safety pins by the gross and rolls of pink and blue wallpaper. The cloying smell of talcum powder sifted up from below through the old floorboards, and their lease strictly forbade rehearsal before five thirty p.m. every day except Sundays, but it was roomy and just barely within their budget.
This late, the store was locked tight, salespeople closing out their registers, an old woman pushing her dust mop from aisle to aisle. Outside, the sidewalk was washed in the glow of the huge neon stork perched over the doors, a neon bundle of joy hanging from its beak.
Daria walked quickly across the employees’ parking lot, past the two or three cars still waiting patiently for their drivers, tried hard not to notice the “Equal Rights for Unborn Women” and “Pro-Family, Pro-Life” bumper stickers on the rear windshield of a banged-up Chevy Nova. She squeezed herself into the narrow space between masonry and the sagging chain-link fence that separated the building from a Texaco station, barely room enough to breathe, much less walk. Back here, the streetlights and shine from passing cars couldn’t reach, and already the night was pooled like runny tar. But the door was braced open, half a brick wedged there, and she was glad that at least she wouldn’t have to stand around in the cold and the shadows digging in the knapsack for her keys.
Daria pulled the heavy steel door open, careful to leave the brick in place on the slim chance she wasn’t the last, the latest, and stepped inside. For a moment, it seemed even darker, despite the thin and yellowy incandescence from a bare bulb strung way up at the top of the stairs, 40-watt light at the end of the tunnel. She followed it up, her bass bumping once or twice against the edge of a step, her breath, her footsteps, close in the gloom. Finally, the door that Mort had painted in charcoal grays and chalky whites, hints of crimson, a ring of tiny winged skeletons, bone rattles clutched in bone fists, leering fetal grins, and “Baby Heaven” inscribed in the perfect mimic of tombstone chisel. Mort loved Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson, Tim Burton and Mexican folk art, and