Silk

by Kiernan, Caitlin R.

  “You’d have to ask my car,” Niki said. “My car must have decided this looked like a good place to drop dead.”

  The girl, whose name was Daria Parker, which made Niki think of Dorothy Parker, smiled slightly. She was taller than Niki, but hardly tall, and her face was too angular to be called pretty, much too handsome to ever be anything so simple or straightforward as pretty.

  “Shit,” she said. “I sure as hell know I could find a better place to kick off.”

  Niki sipped at her Cubano, the warmth spreading from her throat into her stomach, soothing away the road ache and exhaustion like a reward for still being alive. At least she’d found the coffeehouse, the only thing that had been open on this odd street. She’d turned the corner and at first the sight had been disorienting, almost disquieting, the gaslights and cobblestones and nothing open, planned anachronism, more of a Hollywood backlot than a street she’d have expected to find here.

  “Okay, so why were you even driving through Birmingham?” Livid pink scars crisscrossed Daria’s forearms, telltale barista tattoos, marking the careless and inevitable contact of soft flesh and the espresso machine’s steam arm.

  “Gee,” Niki said, setting her cup down on the bar. “I must have missed the quarantine signs.”

  “The Chamber of Commerce keeps taking them down.” And this time, there wasn’t even the hint of a smile.

  “Okay, I confess. I was just following directions,” and she dug a crumpled, brightly colored brochure from one pocket of her jacket, smoothed it out flat on the bar. “SEE—Ave Maria Grotto!” it commanded, in bold black typeface on glossy blue. “Little Jerusalem—AN INSPIRATION AND WONDERMENT.”

  “You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Daria said, and she picked the brochure up off the bar.

  Niki shrugged. “Nope. I’m afraid it’s the truth.”

  She’d found the brochure at the welcome station just across the state line, had grabbed a big handful from the display rack by the restrooms and read through them while she’d sipped a styrofoam cup of coffee that had been free and had tasted like it. She had discarded brochures advertising places like DeSoto Caverns (“Underground Fairyland!”) and Moundville (“Secrets of a Vanished Past!”). Ave Maria Grotto had been at the very bottom, last chance at direction, and she’d been hooked by the story of the Benedictine monk who’d spent his life creating a scale model of the holy city from bits of stone and trash.

  “You must be one weird lady, Niki Ky,” Daria said and tossed the brochure back onto the counter.

  And Niki looked at it for a moment, trying to remember why she’d made that particular choice, why it had seemed important, or even interesting, at the time. She’d driven away from Myrtle Beach with only the vaguest sense of purpose, little more than the blind need to be moving again. Had danced her last shift at the Palmetto two nights before and given herself some time to sleep before she’d settled her bill with the motel and tossed the gym bag into the back of the Vega.

  “So, you got a place to stay?”

  Niki shrugged again, shook her head.

  “I guess I haven’t really thought about it,” she said. “I guess I’m gonna have to find a room.”

  “Or you could crash at my place for a few days, if you can deal with cockroaches and noisy neighbors.”

  “Are you sure?” The offer made her uncomfortable, made her automatically wary, and she wondered just when and where she’d gotten so goddamned paranoid. “I mean, a motel would do just fine.”

  “I have an entirely better class of roaches. And besides, it’s not every day you get the chance to offer shelter to a wandering pilgrim.”

  “What?” Niki said, but then she remembered the brochure, the miniature temples pieced together from broken soft drink bottles and scrap metal, got the joke and laughed.

  “Maybe you know some kinda a blessing for doomed musicians and bands going nowhere at the speed of light,” Daria Parker said, and then someone was asking her for a steamed hazelnut soy milk and she rolled her eyes when the guy turned his back.

  “One vegan pussy drink, coming up,” she whispered to Niki and headed for the cooler.

  Niki drank the last lukewarm sip of her Cubano, stared down at the few stray espresso grounds at the bottom of her cup. The feeling that things had slipped out of her hands, that she was no longer running the show, had been growing stronger and stronger since the ride to the Texaco station with Wendel Sayer; a helpless feeling too much like the way she’d felt after Danny’s death, and it made her want to run.

  She’d gotten awfully good at running.

  Niki left the money for her drink and a tip on the bar and found an empty booth. She set her bag on the seat next to her and took out the dog-eared copy of Gravity’s Rainbow, scrunched herself into the corner, and this time she made it through four pages before she dozed off. When Daria woke her, gently shook her shoulder and whispered her name, the coffeehouse was empty and there was blue-gray dawn outside the steamfogged windows.

  CHAPTER THREE

  Spyder

  1.

  Spyder stood out of sight, almost invisible in the dust-scented shadows, and watched Daria Parker, watched her as she gazed in at something in the window display. She knew Daria well enough that they spoke, nodded, exchanged smiles whenever Daria came in to buy hair color or used records or just to prowl around the shop. And, of course, she’d seen her on stage at Dr. Jekyll’s, had sat and listened to her words and the steady hammer of her bass like a heart trapped inside the black-box speakers. When the streetlights came on, Daria looked over her shoulder, and Spyder knew that she’d seen the cop car, knew she was leaving before she even turned away.

  “What do you think she was looking at?” Byron said, and Spyder ignored him. He was still sitting on the wobbly-legged stool behind the register, chain-smoking cloves in the dark. Two hours ago, he’d stuck a New Order cassette in the tape deck and now “Bizarre Love Triangle” was coming around for the third or fourth time.

  Daria walked away with her head down, guitar case swinging in her hand like a portable monolith, and the cops followed, cruising slowly past Weird Trappings.

  “If you don’t play something else,” Spyder said, “I’m gonna make you eat that fucking tape.”

  “Like what, Spyder?” and without looking up, without having to see, she knew the sour, impatient expression on Byron’s face, the way his eyes narrowed and his lower lip pouted out like a wasp sting.

  “Anything else,” she said. She couldn’t see Daria anymore, and the police had gone, too; the cars out there now could be anyone. Spyder turned around, and the big cardboard box was still sitting unopened on the floor, waiting right where she’d left it, only a few moments ago. The streetlights bled through the glass storefront, light pared, skinned down to its bones, and the shop was not nearly as dark as before.

  Byron was rummaging through the cassettes she kept beneath the cash register, making as much noise as he could; big, pissy Byron racket just for her. Spyder sat down beside the box, drew her razor-toothed carton cutter expertly, schrunk, over and through the shiny membrane of packing tape. Inside, wrapped safe within polyurethane, were dozens of rubber snakes and lizards. Gently, she pierced the topmost bag, then used both hands to rip it open wide, and the rich smell of new car vinyl gushed up from the breach.

  A plastic clatter across the room, and Byron cursed.

  Spyder reached inside, slipped her left hand smoothly between newly slashed lips, and the air seemed much cooler, heavier, down there; she pulled something big out through the slit, molded scales and beady black eyes and a forked red tongue tasting the air.

  Byron had put in her Best of the Doors tape, and Jim Morrison crooned “Spanish Caravan” through the cheesy little off-brand speakers rigged up on the walls, one each in the four cobwebby corners of the shop. He knew she knew that he hated the Doors; he was just being snitty, pushing at buttons, pulling chains, seeing how much more she’d let him get away with. Byron was leaning over the cou
nter, looking at her.

  “God, that’s ugly,” he said. “What is it supposed to be? Some kind of alligator?”

  “No,” she replied. And Spyder read the shiny, gold paper tag to herself, gold and black tied around its neck with an elastic string. The African desert monitor, it said, Varanus griseus. She said the Latin aloud, and the syllables felt delicious on her tongue, like an incantation or eldritch password.

  “What?” Byron asked, leaning out a little farther. “What did you say?”

  Spyder set the monitor aside, hauled an identical twin from the box, one more and she had triplets. She tossed their empty bag away, deflated, transparent afterbirth, tore into the one underneath and found fifteen perfect red-eyed geckos. Digging deeper, she unearthed green iguanas with whiplash tails, a handful of coral snakes like deadly candy-striped canes and a single six-foot Indian cobra, coiled snug inside its own wicker basket. Spyder stuffed the empty bags back into the box, tossed it in the general direction of the stockroom curtain.

  “God, I hate this song,” Byron said, almost a whisper, just loud enough for her to hear.

  And she wheeled on him, no warning, threw one of the geckos hard, and it bounced cleanly off the side of his head.

  “Ow!” Byron clutched at his ear like he was really hurt. “Christ, Spyder! Be a goddamned bitch, why don’t you!”

  “Do some work, buy something, or go home,” she said.

  “Jesus, Spyder. What the fuck’s your damage?” and he smoothed at his hair by the faint reflection in the glass countertop, his face dimly superimposed on an assortment of bondage gear and bongs and clunky silver jewelry. “Did you fuckin’ forget to take your Prozac again this morning or what?”

  Byron Langly, pushing, poking, a mean little boy, always surprised when the animal in the cage finally bites his fingers. Spyder closed her eyes, prayed to herself that this time he would back off.

  “I mean it, Byron,” and her voice was still calm, but she could hear the brittle edge that hadn’t been there a minute before. “Go breathe someone else’s air.”

  A mean and thickheaded child, no regard for signs hung in plain view, the signs posted for his own protection.

  Byron took a deep drag on his cigarette, let the smoke ooze like lazy ectoplasm from his nostrils. His tweezed and painstakingly penciled eyebrows raised slightly, and he cocked his head the smallest bit to one side, twirled one finger absently into his black hair.

  Pushing.

  “I’m not kidding,” and she was slipping past brittle fast, slipping past the carefully constructed walls and brick-by-brick control, the masonry box she kept her mind in. A little more and things might start to spill out, slosh ugly and acid over the top or leak hissing between the cracks.

  And he knew that.

  Byron crushed his cigarette out in the big ceramic ashtray on the counter, the ghost of a smile wrinkling his red, rouged lips.

  “I’m sorry,” he said, purled in his silkiest honey-voice, “I shouldn’t have said that, Spyder.”

  “Please, Byron. Just go home now,” and it shouldn’t have been so easy for him to get to her like that; Spyder braced her hands flat against the floor, the smooth, cold floor, and tried to remember if maybe she had forgotten her meds that morning.

  “But you’re not mad at me?”

  “No,” she said. “Just please go.”

  “Sure, Spyder. If that’s what you want. I’ll see you tomorrow, okay?”

  She didn’t answer, stared down into her puddle of creepy crawlies until she heard his footsteps, a dramatic sigh, and then his footsteps and the cowbell over the door jangled loudly after him. And she was alone in her shop, except for the shadows and the stink of Byron’s cigarettes and the dead man singing through the stereo.

  Four blocks from Weird Trappings, Byron stopped in the shelter of an alley. He was not quite halfway home to the cramped apartment he shared with a drag queen named Billy (better known to her fans as the great Talulah Thunderpussy) and Billy’s butt-ugly Pekinese. The wind had picked up since he’d left the shop, had turned blustery and raw, and he’d forgotten his coat, the fine velveteen frock coat he’d rescued from a Southside estate sale, hanging useless on an old nail in Spyder’s stockroom.

  He cursed himself and took another step into the alley, deeper into the gloom nestled between the tall, old buildings, the walls on either side tattooed with spray paint tags and gang graffiti. He knew better, knew that he was safer if he kept to the main streets, the well lit sidewalks. And this particular alley was narrower than most, not even wide enough for a car. But he was freezing.

  By now, Spyder had probably found his coat, was probably having herself a good old belly laugh at his expense. He imagined her standing alone in the stockroom, stuffywarm, cozy in her maze of boxes and brooms and junk, and Byron hugged himself tightly, shivered in his thin cotton blouse.

  “Bitch,” he whispered to the empty street, the alley, to Spyder snickering in his head, and wiped his runny nose on the back of his hand. A little of the maroon lipstick he always wore rubbed off onto his knuckles, smudgy dull smear the color of cranberry sauce. He glanced nervously over his shoulder into the dark and realized that he couldn’t see light from the other side, that the alleyway must dead-end instead of opening back out onto Morris.

  A violent, sudden gust swept along First Avenue, air like ice-water breath, and Byron was forced even farther from the useless comfort of the streetlight pooled yellow-white on the sidewalk. The wind dragged the rustling pages of a discarded newspaper past the alley and they were gone.

  Just a couple more seconds, just until I can stop shaking so bad and get my…

  Somewhere behind him, something moved; a dry and weighty scritch, scritch, scritch over asphalt and gravel and trash, the glass tinkle of an empty bottle disturbed.

  And something else, something almost inaudible beneath the rising wail and whistle of the wind, a sound like crackling autumn leaves or the guilty whisperings of children. A murmur and a sigh and the sharp, wet wheeze of breath drawn in quickly through clenched teeth.

  Byron stepped out of the alley, three steps backwards and he was once again at the slicing mercy of the wind. But he did not run, knew at least enough to know that there was nothing to be gained by trying to run away, by wearing his fear like a gaudy gold cuff link on his sleeve.

  And there was nothing in the alley, either, nothing but the empty, lightless space between two buildings, a few bottles left behind by winos, needles left by junkies. He made himself stand still and look, never mind the cold or the way his heart was pounding, pounding like it was ready to explode in a gory spray from his chest.

  There ain’t nothing under the bed, Byron. Nothing in the closet. See?

  But he’d always told his mother, his grandmother, his big sister, that real monsters were fast, fast and much too smart to get caught when you turned on the light.

  I’m not afraid of you, and although Byron thought he’d spoken, had expected to hear the words out loud, his lips had gone numb, and there was no sound but the wind and the white noise backdrop of the city.

  And from the alley, perfect silence.

  Byron Langly turned and walked quickly away, not stopping once or even slowing down until it was to slide his key into the lock of his apartment door.

  2.

  Two-thirds up the side of Red Mountain, Spyder left the obstacle course of potholes and badly patched and repatched asphalt, pulled roughly into her narrow driveway. The turd-brown Celica coughed its oily exhaust against the cold, bald tires scrunching along the gravel furrow, haphazard excuse for a drive framed between tall, untended rows of holly and crape myrtle. Set far back from the last dim streetlight on Cullom Street, the house waited for her in its protective cocoon of dark, sheltered safe beneath the craggy limbs of water oaks and arthritic old pecans.

  Dark windows like cheap sunglasses or the eyes of birds, and the long dark front porch.

  By the time she reached the door she was shivering, stood fumb
ling with her cluttered key ring, keys to Weird Trappings and its half-dozen display cases, some that fit locks that no longer existed and a few she’d picked up at yard sales and antiques shops just because she’d liked how they looked or felt in her hands. The porch offered only the barest sanctuary from the wind; a wild, junky confusion of debris, things tossed out and pushed to the back, forgotten except when she happened to trip over something or, much more rarely, when she discovered a use for some discarded this or that and reclaimed it. Deflated bicycle wheels and unidentifiable machinery, cogs and sprockets, an ancient Maytag washing machine she’d dragged out of the house years ago, now stuffed to overflowing with rags and garbage. The old Norton she’d bought meaning to fix up, had even gotten as far as breaking down the transmission one day late last spring.

  She finally found the key that felt right, that had the right number of peaks and valleys of the proper heights and depths cut in the right order, held it tight in her trembling fingers and turned the dead bolt, opened the door and stepped into the murky warmth of the house.

  And the house accepted her, slipped itself around her like a steaming bath, and it hardly mattered that she’d closed the door; the house had its own meteorology, its own gentle system of fronts and pressure centers. Spyder stood very still as her eyes adjusted to the shadows and the darkness behind the shadows, letting the day slide off her like grime, breathing in the whispery dustiness of the little foyer. A few seconds more and she easily found the switch on the wall, the ornate iron switchplate cooler to the touch than the wallpaper skin, and flooded the room, the hall beyond, with soft white light.

  Spyder blinked, squinted, dropped the brown paper grocery bag she’d carried from the car, bump to the floor, and one of the rubber monitor lizards tumbled out. It lay helpless on its back, legs in the air and “Made in China” molded into its smooth cream-colored belly. She leaned down, set it on its feet, pointed the long snout and forever-extended tongue at the door. Then she made sure she’d reset the dead bolt and left the key ring dangling from the lock.