Silk

“I didn’t see anything,” he told her, eyes wet, rouged cheeks already redder from the cold.

“I know,” she said. “This doesn’t have anything to do with you.” And then he walked quickly away, as quickly as he could without his black patent pumps sliding on the slippery sidewalk. She watched him for a moment, wet snowflakes gathering in her hair and sticking to her face, already missing Spyder.

2.

Walter had been the last one out of the basement, the one that Spyder had gone down for herself, while Robin and Byron had sat naked and filthy in the morning-filled hall, still clutching tightly to each other. Robin had cried, had pleaded with her not to leave them alone, not to step through the protecting floor into the hungry black.

“That’s what He wants,” she said, not meaning Walter, meaning Preacher Man and His red book. Meaning the Dragon.

“Robin, I can’t just leave him down there,” and then she’d been sucked down through the gaping trapdoor hole.

“No!” Robin had wailed. “Oh please god Spyder, no,” and she’d tried to scramble across the floor after her, but Byron hadn’t let her go, had held on, held her back.

And what had seemed like a long, long time later, Spyder had brought him back to them. Walter, his pale and hairless chest, his legs, scraped and gouged, his face caked with red basement dirt and maroon-brown streaks of his own blood. Spyder had whispered something in his ear and he’d sat down next to Robin and Byron, both hands crooked like arthritis claws and cradled close to his body. Robin had wanted to pull him to her, lock him up safe in her embrace with Byron, but his eyes, unblinking, full of nothing, had scared her too much to even touch him.

“It’s go

And then something had reached up out of the dark, two jointed legs or arms raised cautious from the trapdoor, probing, testing the bright, warm air; night-bristling hairs, quills and chitin barbs. Robin screamed, had pointed at the hole as Spyder turned and stood staring. The two appendages had rasped and tapped anxiously at the floor, and then a third rose straight from the center and unfolded like a pocketknife, felt its way eagerly along the wall.

“What?” Spyder had asked her. “What is it? There’s nothing there.”

“Oh Jesus, they’re still coming,” Byron had whimpered. “They’re still coming,” and he’d pushed flat against the wall at his back as if he could squeeze through. So Robin had known that he saw it too, that Spyder must see it and was only trying not to scare them. When the tip end of the fourth leg appeared and she’d screamed again, and Byron had started screaming too, Spyder lifted the trapdoor with the toe of her boot, wood studded with a hundred nails like slanting needle teeth, rising, falling, and the thing had pulled itself back through just as the door had slammed closed. And then she had pushed the old trunk over on top of the trapdoor.

“See?” she’d said. “Now you’re safe. Nothing’s go

And then she’d led them all down the hallway to the big bathroom and its lion-footed cast-iron tub, white enamel and sparkling warm water and the calming smell of soap.

3.

Sitting in the diner, faded sunflower walls and plastic yellow booths, the stink of pork fat and waffles and other people’s cigarettes. Walter held his head in both hands as if it had grown too heavy for his shoulders, his spine. Robin across from him, sipping the sour diner coffee, close to Byron, as if they’d chosen sides; Walter the puppy loyalist, and her and Byron somehow turned traitorous, coconspirators in an accidental coup d’état.

Outside, the snow was still coming down, half an inch or more on the ground already and falling so hard that she could see no farther out the plate-glass window than the first row of cars in the parking lot.

“We should just go back,” Walter said again.

“I’m fucking tired of hearing that shit, Walter, so can it, okay?” Byron folded and unfolded a paper napkin, making and unmaking a sloppy origami bat for the umpteenth time. His own coffee sat untouched, cold and black.

“I’m just saying it still might not be too late, not if we go back now.”

“Too late for what, Wally? Huh?” Byron said, loud enough that the waitress looked up from her pencil, pad, and scribbles.

“You mean it might not be too late to watch them loading that cracker’s corpse into a body bag? Might not be too late to catch the pretty lights on top of the ambulance? Or how about this one, Wally: it might not be too goddamn late to spend a little time in the Birmingham jail, getting fucked up the ass every time you bend over?”

Robin flinched, and Walter looked at them for the first time in ten or fifteen minutes, his eyes rimmed puffy red and irises seething with onionskin layers of hurt and fear and anger, palm-print impressions framing his face like the tailfeathers of kindergarten turkeys.

“You cold-hearted son of a bitch,” he said. “You don’t even care if she’s dead or not, do you? You’re just worried about yourself. You’re just worried about having to explain this mess to the cops.”

“Frankly, Walter, I think jail’s about the last thing I should be worrying about right now, don’t you?” and Byron pulled the wings off his napkin bat and let its torso flutter to the tabletop.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You know what he means, Walter,” she said and looked back out at the snow, the candyland world without sharp edges. “You can pretend all you want, but you’re still just as much a part of this as we are, as much as Spyder.”

“She lied to us,” Byron said. “She lied to us, and the whole thing is just a trap.”

“You two just don’t get it, do you?” Walter asked. “The game is fucking over, okay? This shit is for real.”

Robin closed her eyes, feeling the X still burning inside her, her stomach and muscles tight from the strychnine and everything that had gone wrong in the last hour.

“What did you see down there, Walter?” she asked without opening her eyes. “What did you see in the basement? What did you dream about before Spyder made the dream catcher?”

“Robin, we were just fucked up. We were tripping our fucking balls off. We didn’t see anything real, nothing that wasn’t in our heads all along.”

“That’s horseshit,” Byron said, rolling his dismembered bat into a wad and sinking it in his glass of ice water. “And you know it, and you’re just too big a pussy to admit it.”

“You never believed any of the story,” Robin said, not a question, a revelation, maybe, and she opened her eyes, turned slowly away from the window to face Walter; he winced and looked quickly back down at his hands.

“I know you guys aren’t this stupid,” he said. “It was just a bad trip, and all that other stuff was just something Spyder made up to try and make us sleep better.”

“You’re a liar,” said Robin, her voice more bitter than the coffee. “You think maybe it’ll all go away if you say it never happened. That you’ll stop seeing the shadows if you say they’re not there.”

“Robin, I haven’t seen jack shit, okay? I’m telling you the truth. I haven’t seen jack-fucking-shit.”

“I don’t believe you,” Robin said.

“That’s not my goddamn problem.”

Short silence then, and Byron tapping impatient black nails against Formica. “So, you’re not even going with us?” he asked, finally. “You won’t even do that much?”