Silk - Caitlin R. Kiernan [93]
And he’s still here.
Niki Ky sits next to her, holds her hand; cold air through the bus window as it bounces over railroad tracks, and Niki points at the gray lead clouds hanging low over the city, tells her that if it snows, maybe they can go home early.
Her father has crawled away from her cot, sobs in a dark corner, shadow hidden, and blames her, blames the bitch he married and his bitch-freak daughter.
And Robin walks past her across the cellar, doesn’t stop when Spyder calls her name, Robin and the ten-penny nails like rusted porcupine quills bristling from her skin, her crimson wrists and ankles, and then she’s gone, swallowed by the unforgiving, hungry earth.
“Is she the one? The one you said you loved?” Niki asks, and Spyder can only nod, too full of dust to speak.
And then there is perfect and absolute blackness, country midnight, and she thinks, This is new. This wasn’t here before. “Before when?” Niki asks with Robin’s voice, Niki an empty universe away. Spyder reaches out, strokes the tangible, rubbery nowhere and nothing and never that wraps her in kindly amoeba folds. Knows that it has come from her, out of her, excreted like sweat or piss or shit, puke or dark menstrual blood.
Her skin itches and goose bumps as big as pencil erasers, and papery crumbling noises from her guts.
Pain that is everywhere and means everything, and she welcomes it with open arms.
At the edge, her edges, at the quivering lips of the concealing, living dark, a single blazing shaft of impossible white, adamantine light singeing the ebon membrane, (“Spyder,” Niki says, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have done that….”) the whiskery little hairs. She smells woodsmoke and ash and burning tires.
And with hands that feel gloved, rubber gloves too small and tight to contain her, she pulls the slit in the starless night closed, and is alone, without Robin or Byron or Walter, without Niki Ky. Without Him.
Sometime before dawn, and the cold and the ache in Spyder’s neck and shoulders woke her; she’d fallen asleep sitting up, hunched over, Niki Ky propped against her. No particular expression on Niki’s sleeping face; peace, maybe, maybe the face of someone who didn’t have nightmares. Not something Spyder would recognize. But no tension in her lips or brows, no frantic REM flutter beneath her eyelids. Spyder watched the snow still falling outside, the drift and swirl, and she wondered if it was true that no two flakes were ever the same.
Didn’t it hurt?, just the memory of a question Niki had asked about her tattoos, but so loud and clear that for a moment Spyder thought maybe she was awake, too, and Spyder’s fingers went to the scar between her eyes, as if that’s what Niki had meant, instead. And the dream rolling back over her, weightless feather crush, the part she hadn’t told Niki, and the truth about the tattoos. Never mind the details, all the business she’d volunteered about ink and the sound of the artist’s silver gun, time and money and aftercare. Fact, but nothing true, and she stared unblinking at the storm.
After she’d come home from Florida, but years before Weird Trappings, before Robin, before Byron and Walter, and the dreams had been so bad she couldn’t sleep at all, not even with the pills; after sundown, she walked the streets and sat alone in all-night diners and empty parks. Talked to herself and bums, the street lunatics, other people too crazy to sleep, and there had been a woman with a rusty red wagon loaded full of rags and Coke cans and newspapers. A madwoman named Mary Ellen, and one night Spyder was sitting alone under a dogwood, crying because she was so tired and too fucking scared to even close her eyes. She’d bought a pack of Remington razor blades at a drugstore and sat beneath the tree, one of the blades out and pressed