Silk

“Christ, this is crazy,” standing up, buttoning her army jacket, stomping her feet to warm up a little, to get the blood flowing again. And then she walked to the edge of the yard, crunching over the frosted ground, stood ankle deep in kudzu vines and called into the trees, “Spyder? Spyder, can you hear me?” Somewhere down the hill a dog began to bark, and then another one, farther away.

“Spyder!”

She looked back at the house, wanting to be inside, safe in its comfortable warmth and disorder, safe in bed with Spyder, then turned back to the trees, the vines like a slumping wall before the copperhead mat of leaves began farther in. Took another step, and this time her leg sunk in up to the knee and she almost lost her balance; off to her left, something rustled beneath the vines. “Jesus, Spyder, there’s no telling what’s living under all this shit.”

Nothing to be afraid of, though. Rats maybe, possums or raccoons. Stray cats. Nothing that won’t get out of your way if you just make a little racket.

“Spyder? I’m coming to look for you, okay?” and that sounded stupid, stupid as she felt wading around in dead kudzu at seven thirty in the morning.

“It’s okay,” but Niki almost screamed, actually opened her mouth to scream before she saw Spyder huddled in the shelter of some fallen logs; narrow pocket in the vines like a child’s tepee of quilts and blankets.

“I’m right here.”

No coat, short sleeves and bare feet, and Niki thought she could see the white glitter of frost on Spyder’s tattooed arms. “You’ve got to be freezing to death,” she said and took another step and went in up to her waist this time.

“You can’t get across that way. There’s a ditch there.”

“Great. Fucking wonderful,” and Niki tried to plow her way through anyway, stopped when the vines were level with her chest and began to trace her way back out again, wishing she could quit thinking about everything that might be lurking in the kudzu, watching the half of her body she couldn’t see, beady mean eyes that didn’t mind the always-dark down there, red eyes, sharp white teeth.

“So where the hell do I get across?” and when Spyder didn’t answer, Niki looked over her shoulder, caught Spyder staring up into the branches overhead, and she followed, like eyes could be a pointing finger, up, through the snarl and strangle, the draping leafless kudzu, up and there, maybe seven or eight feet off the ground, what Spyder was seeing. Niki rubbed at her eyes, rubbed them like a cartoon character to be sure it was real, those dangling arms and legs, limp and somehow stiff at the same time, sunken black sockets where his eyes had been open wide, and his mouth was open even wider than that.

“Oh,” and she felt like someone had punched her in the gut, had knocked the breath out of her. “Oh god, Spyder.”

“How are we ever go

Niki struggled, fought her way out of the kudzu and vomited in the frozen grass, puked coffee and mostly digested supper, and the mess steamed in the morning shadows.

“Fuck,” she said, over and over, and there was no way to stop seeing that face, the most frightened face she’d ever seen, no way to pretend it wasn’t a dead face, no way not to see Da

No way except straight ahead.

“Spyder,” but then she had to stop, wait until the nausea passed, and then, “I’m go

“No, Niki. You can’t do that,” a little louder now, a little urgent, “No one’s ever go

“Go to jail? Spyder, you didn’t do that!”

Spyder didn’t reply, just gazed up at the dead boy in the tree like she was waiting for him to do something besides just hang there.

“I have to call the police, Spyder. He’s dead.”

“Then calling the cops won’t make him any less dead, will it? You can come across down there,” and she pointed to a spot a few yards away. It didn’t look any different from the place Niki had tried to cross; she wiped her mouth, then spat again.

“He’s dead, Spyder. He’s fucking dead.”

“Yeah. I thought he’d just left town. I thought maybe he’d gone to Atlanta.”

“Okay, well, then that’s all you have to tell the police when they ask.”

“We’re not calling the cops, Niki,” so final there was no way to argue, not now, anyway; nothing to do but go to the place she’d pointed, go to Spyder and get her inside before she froze to death or caught pneumonia. The wind rattled through the trees, a dry, hungry rattle, and she realized the dogs were still barking.

Her feet only disappeared a little past the ankles this time, and the ground creaked beneath her shoes, tired wood creak, glimpses of weathered planks through the growth, and Niki realized she was walking on some sort of bridge, probably rotten, and she tried not to think about that, either. Tried to think about nothing but getting Spyder in out of the cold.

“Watch out,” Spyder said. “There’s a stump hole there,” and then Niki was standing next to her, standing directly under the body in the tree.

“Maybe if we just pull on the vines…”

“I think we should go inside now, Spyder. At least warm you up a little bit. Get your boots and coat.”

“…together. I tried it, but maybe if we were both pulling, the vines would come loose.”

“We shouldn’t do that,” and she caught a hint of something bad on the air, a ripe, meaty smell, and she told herself that it was too cold for the body to be rotting up there, but she knew that was total horseshit.

“You wouldn’t say that, if he’d been your friend. I can’t leave him there.”

“If he was my friend, Spyder…” and whatever she was about to say, whatever was true and wanted to be said, no need for Spyder to hear it, and instead, “If he was my friend, I’d call the police.”

Spyder stood, her feet raw, chapped pink, the palms of her hands the same color, the same painful shade across her forehead, under her eyes, around her mouth. But not a hint of frostbite gray, as far as Niki could tell; that was something, at least, something to hang on to. One way this could be worse.

Spyder grabbed on to one of the vines and pulled; Niki heard the limbs creak, the same grating sound the old boards over the ditch had made, same straining sound that might have been the last thing Da

“If I could just reach his feet,” she said.

The soles of the boy’s shoes, swaying now because of all the yanking Spyder was doing on the vines, a bit of gravel wedged between the treads, a yellow-green wad of hardened gum. The vine felt utterly alien in Niki’s hands, dried tendons from an alien corpse, the corpse of something big as the mountain, old as the world. She pulled and way up high there were popping sounds, rip-pings, and Spyder jerked so hard Niki could see where the skin on her fingers was cracking open and begi

“And what are we supposed to do with him if we ever do get him down?”

Spyder put all her weight on the vine, lifted herself off the ground a couple of inches. There was a loud crack then and bits of oak bark fell from the sky and peppered their heads.

“We put him inside, where no one’ll see.”

Niki followed her example, cringed when the body sank a little closer to them.

“What then? I mean, you don’t think you can keep him in there very long, do you? It’s a corpse, Spyder. Sooner or later…”

“He’ll have to be buried,” Spyder said, and Niki didn’t say anything else. Didn’t want to hear any more of this. She tugged until her arms ached, white clouds of breath from the exertion, the cold making her sinuses hurt. And then the vines just let go, sudden slack in her hands and the body tumbled towards them, almost landed on top of her; he lay slumped against the trunk of the tree, head lolled forward now, one arm across his lap, legs splayed like the Scarecrow from The Wizard of Oz, and now she recognized him, the boy she’d watched across the smoky cave of Dr. Jekyll’s. He’d been so wary that night, so pretty; the flesh around his eye sockets was tattered, torn and shredded by the careless beaks of hungry birds, but the face still looked wary. Scared and wary and sad.