Silk

“Why’d you get those tattoos?” Claude asked Spyder, asked like a ghost from the dark backseat. “It must have hurt.”

“I don’t feel like talking,” Spyder said. “I’m getting a headache.” She turned up the stereo, and Claude was silent for a while.

And the miles rolled by, distance marked off in reflective yellow paint and the changing of cassette tapes.

They crossed the state line, welcome to Georgia and a peach on the sign that made Niki think of a big pink butt, and she was getting too close to the van again, could read “Picasso Trigger Sodomized My Honor Student” and “Five-Eight,” “WHPK Chicago” and “My Other Car Is A Penis.” She relaxed, lifted her foot off the accelerator a little and backed off.

And the miles rolled by.

A long time ago, turn of the century or before, Dante’s had been a grain mill, a place for grinding kernels of wheat and corn and barley into flour. Rough-hewn chunks of native stone, glinting mica schist, and huge pine beams. And after that, it had sat empty for years, decades, until someone had opened the club, had taken advantage of the mill’s layout, three main levels, for its theme. In the shadow of skyscrapers, shadows of a New South of steel and glass, it sprawled like a Civil War fortress, framed in asphalt and train tracks and tendrils of strangling kudzu. Divina Commedia in wrought iron hung above the doorway and loops of razor wire strung around, past the booth where IDs were checked or tickets for shows were taken, where different colored plastic bands were fastened tightly around wrists to prove whether or not you were old enough to buy booze.

Mort pulled the van into the circular drive out front, gravel pinging under the tires and red mud hardened to clay-red crust, while Niki parked the Celica in a pay lot across the street. Two dollars to the kid at the gate, and she paid it herself, locked the doors and they walked together across streetlit blacktop, the parking lot already half full, kids hanging around or heading for Dante’s to get in the line forming outside the ticket booth. Mostly punkers and goths, club kids, a few suburban casuals. Niki and Spyder reached the van and Keith was already opening the Econoline’s rear end. Claude had stopped to talk to someone that he knew. A couple of equally battered vans parked close by, one old Wi

They were all listed on the fluorescent white marquee hung high on one wall, black plastic letters from top to bottom, order of appearance reversed, of course. The headliner was a funk-punk-industrial fusion band Niki had heard on the radio once or twice, Shard, thought they might have a video out. Then Stiff Kitten, second string so third to play. The two bottom, then, TranSister, a local riot grrrl group, and last of all, something called Seven Deadlies.

“Why don’t you guys go on in,” Daria said. “There’s no sense in you standing out here freezing while we load in.”

“We could help,” and Niki felt Spyder’s impatience just fine without having to see her face; swelling, burring, silent disapproval like something solid as the old mill.

“We can handle it just fine. Just tell the guy at the box office you’re on Stiff Kitten’s guest list, and you won’t have to stand in line.”

“Well, if you’re sure…”

“Hey, girl’o, we are three buff motherfuckers,” Daria said and flexed her biceps like Mr. Charles Atlas, her hard, scrawny arms hidden underneath her coat, anyway. “We can handle this shit just fine.”

And so they went to the box office, Claude catching up with them, and a guy with three steel rings through his left eyebrow and a violet goatee checked their IDs against sheets of paper on a clipboard, checked them off one after the other: Niki, Claude, and Spyder last, and he complimented the tattoos on the backs of her hands, the webs disappearing up and inside the cuffs of her leather jacket.

“Yeah. Thanks,” Spyder said. All three got Day-Glo orange bracelets and a stamp on one hand that left behind nothing they could see. Then they bypassed the long line of shivering faces waiting for nine o’clock to come, foggy breathers, passed under the wrought-iron sign into a short passage with an uneven dirt floor; must and the same bare stone walls seemed to go up forever, the ceiling lost somewhere high overhead.

On the right, a rough arch and the sense of vast space beyond, swallowing depth and dark lit only by incandescent lightning and black-light strobes, flashes that revealed empty cages hung, lasers that stabbed crimson shafts through a roiling haze of glycerine smoke. Some of the smoke drifted out into the bright hall, hesitant tendrils out of their element. A huge gargoyle the color of shit squatted on one side of the arch, warty plaster haunches and a spiked leather dog collar around its neck, the collar fastened to a chain bolted to the wall. In there, the DJ already warming up for the night, and the smoke shimmered and the dusty floor ached with the twining, remixed passion of synthesizers and drum machines.

And above the door, of course, another heavy iron sign on its rusted chains, one word burned through the metal, meaning in the emptiness left within the raw edges of acetylene cuts. Inferno, and Claude said, “Hell,” and jabbed a thumb at a smaller archway to their left and another sign, this one a plank of dark wood, wood sculpted like muscle, straining shoulder and gritted teeth, empty eyes and Purgatorio carved there, hung on oily-looking ropes. The heavy wooden doors to Purgatory were closed and padlocked.

“They do special shit in there,” he told Niki. “Fetish night and things like that.”

At the end of the passage there was more wrought iron, a spiral staircase winding up and up and a longhaired boy, blond and Niki thought he looked like a misplaced surfer, California tan in Georgia November.

Claude presented his hand, palm down, and surfer boy ran some sort of sca

“What’s wrong, Spyder?” Niki said, soft voice, calming voice. “Is something wrong?” and surfer boy looked a

“I don’t want that on my hand,” she said. Niki looked at Spyder’s face, cheeks too pale, the cruciform scar between her eyes angry pink, and Niki understood, click, like revelation or an impossible math problem that you’ve sweated over and then it just makes sense.

“Are you going up or not, ladies?” surfer boy said and waved his glowing sca

“Just a second,” Niki said and smiled, wanted to kick him instead.

“I’ve got to wash it off,” Spyder said, but Niki took her hand and held it tightly.

“It’s just ink,” she said quietly. “That’s all. We’ll wash it off as soon we get upstairs, I swear. We’ll find a restroom and wash it off.”

And she led Spyder past the cruel, unveiling light and they followed Claude up the winding stairway, around and up and around and up, to the landing above. And the third sign set above the third arch, chisel-scarred marble and Paradiso, like the punch line to a dirty joke.

“Where’s a restroom?” Niki asked, and Claude pointed into the shadows on one side of the landing.

“Right over there,” he said, confusion and worry thickening his voice. “You go

“She’ll be fine,” Niki said, smiling, nodding, trying to sound like she believed it. “You go on in, and we’ll catch up, okay?”

Spyder had begun to dry-scrub the back of her hand hard against her jeans.