Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [83]
Byron said nothing, stepped silently past the withered scraggle of oleander and honeysuckle that framed the crooked walk to Spyder’s front door, cracked and weed-crowded flagstones lost now beneath the equalizing snow. And she followed as silent, her boots where his had gone before, pockmarking the perfect white mantle.
Spyder’s house had never seemed anything but welcoming, the one sure sanctuary from her parents and the whole shitty world; even that first time she’d come back after the peyote and the basement horrors, even then, through all her dread, it had seemed to welcome her back, to want her inside where Spyder and the old walls could shield her safe. Tonight, it wasn’t friendly, sat gathering drifts on the tarshingle pitch of its roof, its dark windows staring straight through them with vicious indifference.
Robin counted their steps to the porch, twenty, twenty-five, counted to keep herself from thinking about what they were about to do, what they’d already done; what might be pursuing them across the yard or waiting for them inside the house, watching, hungry and pleased with itself, from any or all of the stark blind windows. Thirty-five, forty-three, and they were standing amid the garbage and porch junk. Looking back the way they’d come, the arrow-straight scar of footprints disfiguring the snow, incriminating for however long it took the storm to fill them in again.
Then there’ll be no way to tell we were ever even here, and that should have been a comfort.
“Hurry,” Byron whispered, shivering, whispered like there was someone to overhear, and she realized that he was waiting on her now; for a moment, terrifying and optimistic seconds, she thought that maybe she’d left the keys in her purse, tucked beneath the passenger seat. She reached inside a pocket of her jacket, reluctant hand, anxious fingers, and there they were, right where she’d put them before she and Byron had even left the diner. Pocket lint and prescription bottle and the familiar weight of the key ring, the gently arched bridge of vertebrae connecting the plastic triumvirate of ilium and pubis and ischium at one end with the four keys at the other. And from the corner of her left eye, something quick and no real shape at all, slipping across the snow, crossing the space between pecan and oak before she could turn to see.
“What?” Byron’s voice like stickpins, and “What is it?”
She put the key ring in his hand without turning her back on the yard. The snow between the tall trees was smooth and sparkled faintly, no sign at all that there’d been anything there but her imagination, nerves and the X or a trick of the weird-ass light.
“Just open the door,” she said.
“Which key,” and she could hear the keys jingling in his hands, could hear the scratch of key metal on lock metal as he tried the wrong one. Another wrong one after that. “I don’t know which one it is,” he said, and there it was again, no fleeting, peripheral glimpse this time, the lingering impression that something was hunched down behind the trunk of the water oak, something almost narrow enough to hide itself behind the bole.
“Open the fucking door, Byron. Open it now,” and she flashed back to Walter, two hours before, the same words, the same desperate, useless insistence.
“I am trying, goddammit, so please just shut the hell up,” and the last key slid in cocksmooth and the dead bolt clicked back, gunshot loud. A sudden gust tossed the naked limbs like puppet arms and legs, set every shadow dancing, perfect diversion, and Robin turned and pushed, shoved Byron through the half-opened door, out of one cold and into another drier arctic, certain that something rushed liquid smooth toward them across the yard on jointed spindle legs. She slammed the door behind her, turned the bolt in the same frantic motion, and they both heard it, both thought they heard it: the softest thump against the other side of the door, the ragged, heavy breath,