Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

Niki took her other hand, held it tightly, silently mouthed two words that might have been I’m sorry.

“Nothing’s happening,” Spyder said. “Nothing at all. Don’t call me again, Walter.”

“Please, Spyder. Please don’t hang up on me. Christ, I’m fucking seeing things, and I can’t sleep anymore…”

“I’ve got to go. There’s something on the stove.”

“I’m scared shitless,” he said.

“I’m sorry,” and she hung up, shook her hand free of Niki’s and went to the back door, out into the night, down the back steps, and the screen banged shut behind her. Past the place where the kudzu came down from the mountain and swallowed the edge of the yard. No shoes and the leafsoft ground damp underfoot, rocks and sticks painful sharp, but she kept walking, climbing the hill, until the dark had wrapped itself all the way around her.

The next morning, Tuesday, Niki sat alone on the back stoop of Spyder’s house. No sleep all night, though she’d tried for a little while, had eaten supper by herself and then climbed into their thrift-store bed, pulled the covers around her, left the light in the foyer burning and the bedroom door open so she wouldn’t be in the dark room alone. But there’d been too much emptiness, inside and out, too much worry over Spyder and the memories waiting for her, and finally she’d started imagining that she was hearing noises under the floor, scritchy rat sounds and if she listened hard enough, the incessant mumble of voices, no single speaker, but the softest curtain of indecipherable words and phrases, crowd mutter, and after a while she’d gotten up again, drunk coffee in the kitchen until dawn.

Now she stared at the gray tangle of the mountainside and cursed herself again, for not going after Spyder right away. For fixing the telephone in the first place. For not being perfect, not even close. She tried to concentrate, watching for any sign of movement, any evidence that Spyder was on her way back. She didn’t like those trees, so close together and all those bare limbs that seemed to strain her way, crooked fingers restless in the cold wind, or the vines strung between them, drooping down to the ground, a sea of vines that she guessed was a smothering green sea of kudzu in the summer.

Spyder had told her it wasn’t a good idea to go wandering around up there alone, especially at night or if you didn’t know the woods already. Because there were a lot of old mine shafts and sinkholes that no one had marked or sealed up, deep pits left from the days when the mountain had been tunneled out for its iron-ore bones.

“But they’re really pretty neat, if you’re careful,” she’d said. “I’ll show you one sometime. They’re full of bats, and I’ll show you where to catch the biggest salamanders.”

Niki wondered if Spyder was hiding in one of those old shafts now, or if maybe she’d stumbled into one of them in the night, if she’d been too upset to watch where she was walking and had fallen, had broken her leg or hit her head and couldn’t get back.

“Christ, this is crazy,” standing up, buttoning her army jacket, stomping her feet to warm up a little, to get the blood flowing again. And then she walked to the edge of the yard, crunching over the frosted ground, stood ankle deep in kudzu vines and called into the trees, “Spyder? Spyder, can you hear me?” Somewhere down the hill a dog began to bark, and then another one, farther away.

“Spyder!”

She looked back at the house, wanting to be inside, safe in its comfortable warmth and disorder, safe in bed with Spyder, then turned back to the trees, the vines like a slumping wall before the copperhead mat of leaves began farther in. Took another step, and this time her leg sunk in up to the knee and she almost lost her balance; off to her left, something rustled beneath the vines. “Jesus, Spyder, there’s no telling what’s living under all this shit.”

Nothing to be afraid of, though. Rats maybe, possums or raccoons. Stray cats. Nothing that won’t get out of your way if you just make a little racket.

“Spyder? I’m coming to look for you, okay?” and that sounded stupid, stupid as she felt wading around in dead kudzu at seven thirty in the morning.

“It’s okay,” but Niki almost screamed, actually opened her mouth to scream before she saw Spyder huddled in the shelter of some fallen logs; narrow pocket in the vines like a child’s tepee of quilts and blankets.

“I’m right here.”

No coat, short sleeves and bare feet, and Niki thought she could see the white glitter of frost on Spyder’s tattooed arms. “You’ve got to be freezing to death,” she said and took another step and went in up to her waist this time.

“You can’t get across that way. There’s a ditch there.”

“Great. Fucking wonderful,” and Niki tried to plow her way through anyway, stopped when the vines were level with her chest and began to trace her way back out again, wishing she could quit thinking about everything that might be lurking in the kudzu, watching the half of her body she couldn’t see, beady mean eyes that didn’t mind the always-dark down there, red eyes, sharp white teeth.

“So where the hell do I get across?” and when Spyder didn’t answer, Niki looked over her shoulder, caught Spyder staring up into the branches overhead, and she followed, like eyes could be a pointing finger, up, through the snarl and strangle, the draping leafless kudzu, up and there, maybe seven or eight feet off the ground, what Spyder was seeing. Niki rubbed at her eyes, rubbed them like a cartoon character to be sure it was real, those dangling arms and legs, limp and somehow stiff at the same time, sunken black sockets where his eyes had been open wide, and his mouth was open even wider than that.

“Oh,” and she felt like someone had punched her in the gut, had knocked the breath out of her. “Oh god, Spyder.”

“How are we ever gonna get him down?” Spyder said, said the words so quietly that Niki almost didn’t catch them. “I’ve been sitting here trying to figure that out, Niki, how to get him down.”

Niki struggled, fought her way out of the kudzu and vomited in the frozen grass, puked coffee and mostly digested supper, and the mess steamed in the morning shadows.

“Fuck,” she said, over and over, and there was no way to stop seeing that face, the most frightened face she’d ever seen, no way to pretend it wasn’t a dead face, no way not to see Danny Boudreaux up there. No way to get back to the moment before she’d turned around and looked.

No way except straight ahead.

“Spyder,” but then she had to stop, wait until the nausea passed, and then, “I’m gonna go back to the house and call some help, okay?”

“No, Niki. You can’t do that,” a little louder now, a little urgent, “No one’s ever gonna understand, not after Robin. I don’t want to go to jail.”

“Go to jail? Spyder, you didn’t do that!”

Spyder didn’t reply, just gazed up at the dead boy in the tree like she was waiting for him to do something besides just hang there.

“I have to call the police, Spyder. He’s dead.”

“Then calling the cops won’t make him any less dead, will it? You can come across down there,” and she pointed to a spot a few yards away. It didn’t look any different from the place Niki had tried to cross; she wiped her mouth, then spat again.

“He’s dead, Spyder. He’s fucking dead.”

“Yeah. I thought he’d just left town. I thought maybe he’d gone to Atlanta.”

“Okay, well, then that’s all you have to tell the police when they ask.”

“We’re not calling the cops, Niki,” so final there was no way to argue, not now, anyway; nothing to do but go to the place she’d pointed, go to Spyder and get her inside before she froze to death or caught pneumonia. The wind rattled through the trees, a dry, hungry rattle, and she realized the dogs were still barking.