Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [61]
Daria hammered on the front door, hard fist against flaking wood; Mort stood just behind her, struggling to look calm and cool, obviously neither, trying to keep an eye on every corner and shadow. The only response from the darkened house was the steady, muffled thump-thump-thump of rap, and Daria pounded the door again, using both fists this time.
“Hey!” she shouted, howled, hands cupped around her mouth to make a megaphone. “Open the goddamn door, or I’m gonna call the cops!”
“Come on, Dar,” Mort whispered, urgent, but she’d already started kicking at the door. It shuddered in its frame with every blow from her Doc Martens.
The scrabbling, clicking sounds of locks turning, chain sliding back, and the door opened an inch or two. The face pressed into the crack was backlit and featureless in the glare of yellow incandescent light, leaking like pus or urine from the house.
“What the hell do you want, bitch?” the face hissed, voice worn raw and gravelly, female voice, old as someone’s grandmother.
“I’m looking for somebody,” Daria said, slipping the toe of her boot into the crack between door and jamb.
“Well, you’re lookin’ in the wrong place,” the woman said, glancing down at Daria’s intruding foot.
“He’s been here before.”
“Well he ain’t here now!”
“Then let me in, and I’ll see for myself.”
The woman opened the door an inch wider, and Niki caught a glimpse of her burning eyes, eyes like the pit of famine’s stomach, and the long, uneven keloid scar beneath her right eye, proud flesh like melted plastic.
“Look, white girl. If you keep shootin’ off your mouth and makin’ all this noise, Mr. Wilson’s gonna hear you, and he ain’t as tolerant as me.”
Mort’s big hand on Daria’s shoulder then, and Niki could see that he was almost ready to drag her from the porch, kicking and screaming and squeezing his balls if that was the only way back to the van.
“He’s not here, Dar. Let’s go,” he said.
“She might be lying,” Daria said, as if the woman wasn’t standing there, as if she couldn’t hear.
“Girl, you think tonight’s a good time to die or you just stupid?”
Behind the woman, down the half-glimpsed throat of pissy light and wallpaper peeling in long skin strips, someone shouted, “Who the hell is it, Tabs?”
The woman stared at them, at Daria, with her starvation eyes, and after a moment she yelled back, without turning around, yelled, “Goddamn Jehovah’s-fuckin’ Witnesses!”
And the other voice, male boom and rumble, “At night? Well, tell ’em to go the fuck away!”
“You heard the man,” she said. “He won’t say it that nice again.”
“Now, Dar,” and Mort was hauling her backwards, Niki sidestepping quickly to get out of their way.
The door slammed shut, and now the house was as dark and sealed away from the rest of the universe as it had been before. Daria pulled free of Mort and almost tumbled ass-first down the steps.
“What the hell did you think you were doing, Mort?” she demanded, looking back at the closed door.
“Trying to stop you from getting us all killed.”
“You’re so full of shit!”
A red and listing Plymouth crammed full of teenagers, black boys in sunglasses and black knit caps, cruised shark-slow past the van, big white van beached like a lunatic’s whale there against the curb.
“Can we just please get the hell out of here?” Niki asked, heard the fear and exasperation wrestling between her words, fussing over the tattered rags of her resolve.
“We’re already on our way,” Mort said and headed for the Ford. Niki, painfully uncertain, waited for Daria, who stood for one moment more, with fists clenched, staring back at the scarred and defiant house.
3.
And this is the first time that Keith had seen Daria, had laid eyes on her, this muggy summer weeknight in 1993 back when the junk still felt like gold and Dr. Jekyll’s was still the Cave. Barely six months since he’d had that last and grandest fight with Sarah and she’d driven off alone to find her own gilded peace pressed between rails