Caitlin Kiernan - Silk

He shook his head, reached for his door handle, and then she screamed, screamed and was thrown into his lap as something slammed against the passenger side of the van, hit them so hard the van rocked a few inches up onto two wheels before it bounced back down again and the motor sputtered and died. A scraping, shearing sound, metal raked over metal; Theo scrambled back into her seat, reached behind Mort and pulled out Keith’s old aluminum baseball bat.

“What the hell are you doing?”

“Mort, you didn’t see it,” and he’d never heard her scared before, wasn’t sure if he’d ever heard anyone that scared. “You didn’t see that fucking thing!” and it hit them again, Mort’s side this time, and he was thrown, smacked his jaw on the nub end of the bat. Steel ping and pop, and the wall of the van bowed inward. Mort tasted blood, bitten tongue or broken tooth, and he wrestled the bat from Theo’s hands.

“Lock the doors behind me and don’t move,” and of course she said no, no and fuck you; Mort opened his door, slid out and almost lost his balance on the loose gravel under his boots, almost fell. He brought the bat around, everything he had going into the swing, but there was nothing there. Nothing at all, but the dark and the scraggly bushes and the side of the van gouged in like they’d been sideswiped by a bus.

“Come on,” he said, spitting out blood and library whispering like maybe he was afraid someone would hear, unable to look away from the dent, paint and rust scraped away to the raw metal underneath. “We’re gonna get Dar, and then we’re gonna get the hell out of here.”

“I’m right behind you,” Theo replied, shaken, but almost sounding like herself again, and together they crossed the yard to Spyder’s house.

Another bus station, this bus station again, and Walter sat by himself in the Burger King kiosk, sipping a large Pepsi that had been watery and flat and warm for thirty minutes, but he couldn’t afford another, watching the clock. Waiting for his boarding call and the bus that would carry him north, nowhere in particular, but as far away from Birmingham and Spyder as the hundred and fifty bills in his wallet, everything he had left, would carry him. Crazy, coming back here to begin with, he thought again, like anyone was gonna listen, like Spyder was gonna talk, but at least it was something. All he could do, and he’d done it, and whatever else, he wouldn’t have to feel like a goddamn coward.

He fumbled with the safety cap on the bottle of pink hearts, half empty already, spilled four of the pills out into his palm. He swallowed two, washed them down with another sip of the Pepsi, and put the other two back for later. All that later left ahead of him, all that sleep left to stave off as long as possible. Slipped the bottle back into his jacket pocket, and that’s when he saw the spider, hairy brown spider big as a silver dollar, crawling towards him across the garish wallpaper. Just a fucking house spider, but he felt his stomach roll, grabbed his backpack and slid out of the booth, trying not to draw attention on his way as he walked quickly past all those faces to the restroom, to cold porcelain, cold water. Privacy if he was lucky, and he was, no one else at the row of sinks, at the urinal, no shoes or pushed-down, rumpled pants legs showing from under the stalls. Walter splashed his face and the nausea began to recede, turning him loose, so he wouldn’t have to dry-heave again, nothing in him to puke up but the pills and Pepsi. He pulled a paper towel from the dispenser and rubbed it across his face, rough brown and the animal smell of his dirty wet hair, wet-paper smell. Looked up at the face in the mirror, hardly a face he even recognized anymore. He was starting to look sick, like he had cancer, or AIDS, maybe, like he’d been sick for a long, long time.

Walter turned off the tap, and behind him, the wiry, coarse rasp of hairs like porcupine quills drawn slow across clean white tile, labored breath, and it was there in the mirror, squatted between him and the door. Between him and escape, and he made himself look, made himself fucking stare, and one of its fang-lipped mouths moved, said his name, “Walter,” like something treasured and forgotten and just remembered.

“Walter, Walter,” and there was still enough of them to know, what might have been them once, before this wrong and hurting thing, features blurred like melted wax, a green iris set along the rows of glinting black and pupilless eyes, cupid’s bow and prettysharp nose mashed between nervous, restless chelicerae and meat-hook fangs. Three delicate and black-nailed fingers at the end of one jointed leg, and the voice, neither Robin nor Byron, but both of them.

“What do you want?” he asked, his voice so calm, like he didn’t feel the warm piss running down the inside of his leg, like he thought he was gonna walk away from the thing in the mirror sane.

So much pain in that one human eye and the lips moved, working silently a moment, and he didn’t turn around, but didn’t look away from the mirror, either, watched its reflection.

“What? What the fuck do you want from me?”

“Help,” and it coughed something up, and he had to look away, down at the sink, the spotless, safe sink, or he would have puked. “Help,” it said again.

“I can’t,” he said. “I’ve done everything I could do.”

“Please, kill her,” it said, phlegmy voice that suddenly didn’t sound like anyone he’d ever known, and that made it easier. “Please help…”

“You’re not listening. I didn’t say I won’t; I said I fucking can’t. I can’t kill anyone. There’s nothing else I can do. And I’m sorry. I’m really fucking sorry.”

And he turned the water back on, twisted both knobs all the way so the gush and splash covered up the sounds it had begun to make.

“Now leave me the fuck alone,” and he looked at it one last time, backed into its corner, quivering bristles and thick tears from that one green eye, before he put his fist through the mirror. The glass shattered, big razor shards that rained down off the wall, broke into smaller pieces all around his feet, slicing at his knuckles and fingers.

He waited almost five minutes, and when nothing happened and no one came in to see what the noise had been, Walter turned around and saw he was alone again.

Niki’s sitting with her back to the wrought-iron fence that surrounds Jackson Square like a spiked bracelet, silent, watching as the girl turns her cards over one by one. Wind in the palms, the sewer-mud smell of the river and the girl turns up the Hanged Man and there’s only one card left. She points at the man dangling by one leg from the T-shaped tree, triangle of his legs pointing toward the earth, cross of his arms and the glow around his head, saint’s nimbus. “Ah,” she says. “That one,” and “That one can be trouble.” And nothing else, no insight or prophecy before she reaches for the final card, reaches for the outcome, before the wind gusts and scatters the spread along the paving stones. The girl runs after her cards, barefoot with silver rings on her toes and the wind making bat wings of her black shawl. Niki looks at the sky, clouds so low and black, yellow-green lightning lying up there like electric serpents, and she thinks she should get inside, leaves money in the girl’s cigar box and when she stands, tries to stand, she feels the pain in her ankles, the bottoms of her feet, coursing angry and hot up her calves.

She looks down and the stones are breaking up around her, busted apart by the writhing snarl of roots, roots as smooth as the slick bellies of worms, the red of naked muscle, the blue of naked veins: the roots that grow time-lapse fast from her legs and feet, holding her to the spot, that bury themselves, herself, deeper and deeper into the soggy ground beneath the Square, rich black soil and fat white grubs. The murmuring tourists who point and stumble past with their souvenir New Orleans Jazz T-shirts and plastic beads, to-go cups of beer, daiquiris and hurricanes, and she can see the fear and the awe on their drunken, puffy faces.