Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

“It’s hard to get a black widow to bite you,” she said. “You almost have to force them, Niki. And most people don’t die, unless they’re allergic or already sick from asthma or a heart condition or something like that. Something to weaken them enough the poison does more than make them wish they were dead. He must have spent days and days down there in the dark, catching all those spiders.”

Thwump, and this time she looked at the wall and glanced back to Niki. “You’re not hearing things,” she said. “Unless we’re both hearing things. I shouldn’t be telling you this.”

“It’s probably just a dog,” pretend certain, pretend composure, but Niki didn’t look at the kitchen window, “or the wind.”

“The wind,” Spyder whispered and held out her arms, skin and ink, permanent, forever; turned them over to show her naked palms, unstained space but lines there, too, and she knotted her fingers together, lace of fingers, cup of flesh back behind her head, teeth gritted.

“They didn’t bite me, Niki,” almost a growl, throaty grinding up and out, leaking. “They’ve never bitten me.”

“Maybe they protected you, then,” and Niki as surprised as the look on Spyder’s face, the look that said How did you know, Niki? How did you know that?, as surprised and she knew how important it was that she’d said that, even if she was just fumbling in the dark and confusion, needing to say something reassuring, anything right and comforting.

“Like a totem animal.”

The pain from Spyder’s eyes, twisting under her skin so her forehead and eyebrows folded in like old, old mountains, so her lips trembled, and she held them open a moment before she could speak.

“But they won’t stop. They won’t ever stop. They took Robin because they thought they were protecting me. They took Byron,” and Niki didn’t look toward the thing on the table.

“You need someone to help you make them stop, Spyder.”

Thwump and the windows rattled; a coffee cup fell off the sink and shattered on the floor. Spyder covered her ears, hid her face between her knees, muffling what she said.

“Stop playing like you know what’s happening, Niki. You don’t know what’s happening. If I let you stay, they’ll just take you, too.”

“It’s my decision,” and she grabbed Spyder by the shoulders, pushed her back against the cabinet doors. “Look at me, Spyder. Look at me.”

Spyder opened her eyes, stared out through her dreads, through tears and the roil behind the tears.

“It’s my call. If I want to be here. If I want to help.”

“It doesn’t work that way,” Spyder growled. “There’s nothing in the whole fucking world you can do, even if I let you try.” She closed her eyes again and began to pound her head against the cabinets, once, twice, the back of her skull against the wood, hitting hard enough that the cabinet door split the third time, and then Niki shook her.

“Stop it, Spyder! Stop it right now, goddamnit! You’re gonna hurt yourself…”

Crack like lightning reaching for the ground and touching, splitting sound that wasn’t the cabinet door or Spyder’s skull; hungry light before Niki could shut her eyes, light that had mass and substance, cold as zero, broiling. And she couldn’t let go, couldn’t crawl away and hide in shadows that didn’t exist in the blinding-flash moment before it was over and the kitchen seemed so completely black there might never have been even the glow of a single candle in all the world. Her hands came away from Spyder’s shoulders with a sick and tearing noise, and Niki crawled to the sink, felt for the cold water knob in the dark and held her scalded hands under the tap, tasting ozone and something like dust, tasting her own blood where she’d bitten her tongue.

And there was no sound but the soothing, icy splash of water from the faucet and Spyder sobbing behind her.

“It’s still my call,” Niki said, blinking, wondering if her eyes had burned away to steam, if there was nothing now but empty red sockets in her face.

Niki found Bactine in the medicine cabinet and sprayed some on her hands, the burns crisscrossing the backs of both, striping her wrists and forearms. Made bandages from an old bedsheet and then she sat alone in the living room, nothing for the pain but four extra-strength Tylenol, watched sitcoms with the sound turned too far down to hear. Her eyes itched and watered and there were still bright purplewhite splotches that danced about the room when she blinked. But the thwumping on the walls had stopped, the brushy rustling from the basement, and she could sit on the couch and watch mindless crap and almost not think about the familiar pattern the burns had etched into her skin or about what Spyder was doing in the kitchen or the racket when she wrestled the body off the kitchen table. The sounds the dead boy’s swaddled heels made as she dragged him to the trapdoor and down. Not think about what had happened or what to do next, about the things that had happened in this house, had never stopped happening because Spyder had been scarred and so the house had scars, too. There would be time to think later, when her hands stopped hurting, when the splotches in front of her eyes faded.

The phone began to ring and Spyder let it, seventh ring before Niki got up and went to the kitchen (no boy mummy body on the table, no salt on the floor, no sign of Spyder, either) to answer it.

“Hello?” and there was sweet, faint music from the other end, the Smiths, maybe, and then Mort said, “Hey, Niki. You guys doin’ okay?”

“Yeah,” and inside, No. No, we’re not. Not even a little bit okay. “We’re fine.”

“Well, look, I’ve got some bad news,” and she thought she heard Theo in the background; Mort paused, and the music went away.

“It’s about Keith, you know, our guitar player,” and “Yeah,” she said, “Is he all right?” just as the basement door slammed closed. And then Spyder, standing between crooked paperback stacks in the next room, watching her: dirty hands, red dirt like rust or blood, dirty bare feet. A smear of dirt across her face.

“No,” Mort said, “He’s not,” and Niki listened to the details, stared helpless into Spyder’s expectant, nervous eyes and listened. When it was over, she hung up and sat at the table, just a plain table again, not a mortuary slab, and all the salt and pepper shakers and bottles of hot sauce back in place. The plastic honey bear and the sugar bowl.

“What’s wrong, Niki?” Spyder asked, cautious, sounding frightened again; Niki shook her head, no words left in her. She looked down at her ridiculous, bandaged hands, already beginning to ravel, and when she began to cry, Spyder came and held her, wrapped her in consoling smells of mold and earth and sweat and stayed with her until she could talk again.

T he real funeral and the one in her head; Daria, sitting on her bed, sitting with her back to the wall and squeezed into the corner like a gunfighter so no more of this shit could come sneaking up on her, the real shit and the shit in her head; the shit since Saturday night and her laying down the law, the sentence, for the late and never-to-be-great Mr. Keith Barry, and the other shit like a 1950s Cold War big-bug movie. That last kept for herself, her pearl, more secret than the guilt over Keith. Because she knew it was crazy, because she was too afraid to say it out loud, too scared to say words to set the nightmares loose.

Claude had gone out for more coffee thirty minutes before, only had to walk down to the Bean and back, So where the hell is he? and she watched the clock-radio and wished him home, wished herself back to Saturday night and Heaven and the time when there was still opportunity, a million other ways things might have gone down, if she’d let them, and none of the wishes came true.