Silk

“But they were wrong, weren’t they?” Byron asked, asked like he already knew the answer, had known it all his life.

“Yeah,” she said. “They were wrong. The people that carried the things from the stone inside them disappeared from the World one by one, but some of them had children first, and their children had children, and little bits and pieces got away after all.”

They were hanging on her words, then, even Walter, salvation in these lies, waiting just beyond the last thing she’d said. And Spyder had strained to see the fetal lies in front of her, curled slippery as moss-hairy stones almost invisible under rushing water, shitty steppingstones, but the only path she had to give them.

“These bits and pieces were passed along generation to generation, getting smaller and smaller all the time, spread out farther and farther. Getting harder and harder for the angels to track down, the angels and the things that hunted for them, the things that God made especially to be able to smell out those special people that looked human, but really were part stone and part secrets and part something that had once been angel.”

“Oh,” Robin said. “Oh.” She’d almost stopped crying, her face still pressed urgent between Spyder’s breasts, her ear to Spyder’s wet drumbeat heart.

“People like us,” Byron said. “That’s what you’re saying, isn’t it, Spyder?”

But she hadn’t wanted to say that part, to take them that last deceitful step, had known that if she left just one or two seconds empty, they’d do it for themselves.

“And what we did down in the basement,” he said, catching on so fast, as if he could follow inside her head and pick her thoughts like shiny scarlet berries. “We didn’t mean to, but we got their attention, didn’t we? That thing that Robin keeps calling Preacher Man, that’s one of the angels, isn’t it? And the other things, the shadows we keep seeing, those are what it uses to hunt down the…”

A gentle, keening sound like something alive tearing itself in two, and Walter had pushed his chair back from the table then, slow and calculated movement, stood up and walked away into the house alone.

Spyder had ached to call him back, ached to take this all back, take back the nails she’d driven through the trapdoor, the damning permission she’d given that had sent Robin and Byron and Walter down there to begin with. Better if she’d just lost them then, lost them clean.

“Oh god,” each word barely a sigh, soft murmurs to her chest. “Oh god, Spyder. How do we stop them from finding us? How will we make them leave us alone?”

“They’re using our dreams to find us,” Byron said. “They’re changing our dreams.”

Robin had sat up, eyes watery-red and puffy, wiped her nose roughly on the back of her hand like a child, and she’d said, “A dream catcher. We have to make a dream catcher, Spyder. Like the Objibwas made to keep away evil spirits that caused nightmares, to trap them in the webs…”

And then she’d touched Spyder’s arm, one finger tracing the silver-blue tattoos, inkscar patterns, and Robin had begun to cry all over again, but this time there had been as much hope and relief as fear, and she’d held Spyder, and Spyder had held her, too.

5.

At the end of the road, the house waited for them, crouched way down in its blanket of snow and bare tree limbs like an alley cat. They’d left the Celica blocks away, abandoned where the bald tires had finally lost traction for the last time, and they’d slid gracefully, dream smooth loss of control and direction, into a line of sugar-coated garbage cans. Their feet ached from the melted snow that had seeped into their shoes, lungs ached almost as much from the cold air and the extra effort required not to fall on their asses every time they took a step up the icy, steep slope.

Spyder never bothered with the porch light, had always told Robin that it only attracted burglars, and past the pool of this last streetlamp there was only the glow that had gathered underneath the storm, creamy champagne light filtered so soft and kind it played with the eyes. Brighter back there away from the street than it should have been, but no comfort in the illumination.

The snow falling around them, on them, made a crisp sound, like rice paper crumpled slowly in dry hands or small and padded paws on dead leaves.

“We can’t back out,” she said, “not now,” before Byron had a chance to say that maybe Walter had been right after all, maybe they shouldn’t be here, and the cushioned world muffled her voice, magnified it at the same time, made it as wrong as the light.

“We can’t back out now.”

Lightning then, a dull and greenish flash trapped in the low clouds, unearthly, and thunder wrapped tight in velvet before the crackling boom of a transformer blowing somewhere, sympathetic chaos, echoed across the mountain. The streetlamp flickered, dimmed, and died.

Byron said nothing, stepped silently past the withered scraggle of oleander and honeysuckle that framed the crooked walk to Spyder’s front door, cracked and weed-crowded flagstones lost now beneath the equalizing snow. And she followed as silent, her boots where his had gone before, pockmarking the perfect white mantle.

Spyder’s house had never seemed anything but welcoming, the one sure sanctuary from her parents and the whole shitty world; even that first time she’d come back after the peyote and the basement horrors, even then, through all her dread, it had seemed to welcome her back, to want her inside where Spyder and the old walls could shield her safe. Tonight, it wasn’t friendly, sat gathering drifts on the tarshingle pitch of its roof, its dark windows staring straight through them with vicious indifference.

Robin counted their steps to the porch, twenty, twenty-five, counted to keep herself from thinking about what they were about to do, what they’d already done; what might be pursuing them across the yard or waiting for them inside the house, watching, hungry and pleased with itself, from any or all of the stark blind windows. Thirty-five, forty-three, and they were standing amid the garbage and porch junk. Looking back the way they’d come, the arrow-straight scar of footprints disfiguring the snow, incriminating for however long it took the storm to fill them in again.

Then there’ll be no way to tell we were ever even here, and that should have been a comfort.

“Hurry,” Byron whispered, shivering, whispered like there was someone to overhear, and she realized that he was waiting on her now; for a moment, terrifying and optimistic seconds, she thought that maybe she’d left the keys in her purse, tucked beneath the passenger seat. She reached inside a pocket of her jacket, reluctant hand, anxious fingers, and there they were, right where she’d put them before she and Byron had even left the diner. Pocket lint and prescription bottle and the familiar weight of the key ring, the gently arched bridge of vertebrae co

“What?” Byron’s voice like stickpins, and “What is it?”

She put the key ring in his hand without turning her back on the yard. The snow between the tall trees was smooth and sparkled faintly, no sign at all that there’d been anything there but her imagination, nerves and the X or a trick of the weird-ass light.

“Just open the door,” she said.

“Which key,” and she could hear the keys jingling in his hands, could hear the scratch of key metal on lock metal as he tried the wrong one. Another wrong one after that. “I don’t know which one it is,” he said, and there it was again, no fleeting, peripheral glimpse this time, the lingering impression that something was hunched down behind the trunk of the water oak, something almost narrow enough to hide itself behind the bole.