Silk (14 page)

And she’d known that they were all, even Spyder, just a little bit afraid of what she was setting in motion, of what she would soon ask them to do. These three, who had taken her in and shown her how to fill in the emptiness, had midwifed her rebirth from that suburban zombie hell; had shown her what they knew of darkness and light and the graying shades in between, of the power to be gained by living through death without first having to die. Grave robbers and self-styled ghouls, cemetery children, daemon lovers, eaters of every opium and lotus, and now they were afraid, these three beyond fear or dread, and it gave Robin the slimmest satisfaction, that she could be so powerful, and that she could, at last, give something back.

Four days after Walter had brought the grocery bag of peyote buttons to Weird Trappings, she’d finally called them all together, had given Byron a list of things they’d need and her Visa card, Spyder’s car keys. And then she’d asked Spyder to find her something to eat, had soaked in a tub of hot, soapy water, rose-scented bath salts, while Spyder scrambled eggs and fried slices of baloney, brewed strong black coffee in her noisy old percolator.

And Walter and Spyder had watched while she ate, Robin stray-cat ravenous after days of Cheetos and candy bars, and his eyes had seemed to follow every forkful from the plate to her mouth. But she was past being annoyed by Walter’s gnawing adoration, too exhausted to object or care. When she’d finished, Spyder had rubbed her neck and shoulders, strong hands kneading away the kinks and knots, and they’d talked about other things until Byron had come back: a shipment of animal skulls that had come into the shop that morning, a documentary Walter had seen on cable about the Knights Templar.

It had been dark an hour when Byron finally returned, found them in the living room listening to Bach, and he’d sent Walter back out to the car for the bags while he’d bitched about a cashier at the supermarket who had looked at the credit card and wanted to know if
he
was Robin Elizabeth Ingalls.

“Did you get
everything
on the list?” she’d asked, and he’d rolled his eyes.

“I’m not totally fucking incompetent.”

“If I’d thought that you were, Byron, I’d have gone myself.”

Revived by her bath and the food, by Spyder’s gentle ministrations, she’d finally felt the first twinges of excitement, adrenaline promises and a tightness deep in her belly. When Walter came back in with the bags, she had him set them down on the floor, and she prowled through them, one by one, checking their contents against the list in her head. And yes, Byron had found everything she’d asked for, the spices and salt, the paints and olive oil and two dozen white candles.

“Okay, Walter, if you’d please take this all down to the basement now…” But then Spyder’s eyes had gone wide, lightning swift passage of dread across her face before she’d turned suddenly away, and Robin had known that look, that special silver panic that rode piggyback on her madness, that flashed itself like a warning display. She’d glanced at Byron and known that he’d seen it, too. Spyder walked away from them, stood by a window and stared out at the dark between them and the house next door.

“Spyder? What’s wrong? Did I say something wrong?”

Nothing for a second, hearts beating and sluggish time, and then, “I don’t want you to do this in the basement. Anywhere else is okay, Robin, but not the basement.”

Robin had stared at Spyder’s dim reflection in the window—Spyder reversed and so maybe that Spyder was sane—feeling her concern melting into annoyance, and anger not far enough behind.

“Why? What’s wrong with the basement?”

“I don’t want you to use it, that’s all, okay? I just don’t want you to use the basement.”

Robin had taken one step closer, still some hope of defusing this, if she didn’t get pissed, if Byron and Walter kept their mouths shut.

“It needs to be the basement, Spyder. I’ve worked this all out very precisely, and your basement is the only place I know that’s even close to what we need.”

In the window glass, Spyder’s eyes were just shadows beneath the ridge of her brow, her dark eyebrows, unreadable smudges, and she didn’t say anything.

“Come on. At least tell me
why
you don’t want us to use the basement for the ceremony—”

“I don’t want you to use the basement. You can do whatever you want in any other part of the house, okay? But I don’t want you to do this in the basement.”

“You said that already,” Byron mumbled, then, and Robin had glared at him, dry ice and razors, had given him a rough shove and silently mouthed
Shut the hell up
; he’d sneered and given her his middle finger in return.

“Just tell me
why,
Spyder, and maybe we can figure something out—”

“No, Robin. There’s nothing to figure out. I don’t want to do this in the basement. You’ll have to think of some other place.”

The finality in Spyder’s voice, the mulish resolution, and to her fleeting surprise, Robin had discovered that this time she didn’t really care if it was because Spyder was sick, if she couldn’t help these unpredictable barriers and taboos. She loved Spyder and had always walked on eggshells and china plates for her, had always been so careful, so mindful of the places and things and words that you could never know were off-limits until you’d already stepped across the line.

“
Goddamn it,
Spyder!
Shit!
” Robin wheeled around and Byron had flinched, maybe thinking she was going to hit him that time. Instead, she’d stomped across the floor and stood in the basket-handle archway separating the living room from the dining room that Spyder used as a dumping ground for her hundreds or thousands of books.

“There is no ‘why’ because there’s no reason for us not to perform the ceremony down there and you
know
it. You’re just freaking out over something, and you could at least tell me what the hell it is.”

Spyder had not turned around, still stared through herself and the window, vacant and intent, but Robin noticed the way she’d begun rubbing her left hand against her hip, her callused palm across ancient, ragged denim. As if her fingers had started to itch, as if there was a stain on her hand or her jeans, and Robin had known that Spyder wasn’t even aware that she was doing it.

“It’s my house, Robin.”

“Oh
please,
don’t give me that shit. Just tell me why the hell we shouldn’t use the basement and I’ll shut up about it. But I want a reason, Spyder.”

Robin had glanced at Byron, at Walter still standing there holding the bulging brown bags in his arms; both of them nervous, frightened, caught in the middle, and as if she could read their minds, scrape the thoughts off the gray folds of their brains:
This is not the way it works, Robin,
and
Don’t push,
and
It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t matter near enough for this.

“Please, Spyder,” she said. “All I want is a reason.”

Then Walter had set the bags down again, both of them on the coffee table, and rammed his hands deep in his pockets.

“Maybe we should just forget about it, Robin,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be better if we just forgot about it? I didn’t really care that much any—”

“Shut up, Walter,” and Spyder had sounded like the still and quiet before a summer storm, the voiceless threat in the eyes of something wild. And she’d turned away from the window and crossed the room to stand in front of Robin; her left hand rubbing furiously at her jeans and the fingers of her right kneading the puckered cross between her eyes, the scarred flesh that turned scarlet when she was upset or angry.

“You do whatever you want,” she’d said, poisonous calm between each word, “if it’s so important to you. Do it and get it over with and then get out of my house.”

“Christ, Spyder. Jesus. Won’t you even
try
to tell me why you’re afraid?”

But Spyder had already stepped past her, had kicked over a towering stack of paperbacks on her way to the darkened hall, scattering dust and silverfish and brittle, yellowed pages. Robin had stared down at the jumbled collage of faded covers, a painting by Frazetta of a sword-wielding woman with impossible breasts, something dead and scaly at her feet, Stephen King and Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Knowing how badly she’d fucked this up, knowing that Spyder might never let her take back these things she’d said. And knowing that without her, the ceremony would be flawed, not hollow, but not whole, either.

“Well?” Byron had asked, some time later, long enough that her legs had begun to ache from standing in the same position. She’d kept her eyes on the floor, the heap of tumbledown fantasies.

“Take the bags down to the basement, now, Walter,” she’d said, and he hadn’t waited for her to tell him a third time.

6.

Later, what Robin had remembered of the ceremony and the basement was like pages torn apart and hastily Scotch-taped together again by a blind woman, pages illuminated with needles and metallic inks and black words that she was glad had all but lost their meanings.

She’d remembered the preparations, Walter hefting open the trapdoor in the hallway floor and the cool air rising from the darkness, acrid-sweet stench of dust and earth and mildew. No light but their candles, and her feet uncertain on the steep and narrow stairs down, wood that creaked, cried, beneath her bare feet and the dust against her skin had felt like velvet. Velvet that clung to the soles of her feet, and her lungs had filled up with the basement air like drowning waters. And Walter had closed the trapdoor behind them.

While she’d traced her lines on the red dirt, Walter had dug a very small pit in the center of the floor, rusty garden spade breaking through the stubborn crust packed down by almost a century. Byron had stood quiet and alone, smoking his cloves, throwing candlelight shadows like shifting, craggy people. Everyone trying not to think about Spyder and thinking of absolutely nothing else.

She had laid the signs in Morton’s salt and Crayola tempera, had driven the twenty-four white candles into the hard ground, markers of wax and fire in places that mattered.

And when she’d finished and the basement glowed soft and flickering orange, the dark driven back into cracks and corners and the spaces between floorboards overhead, she popped the lid off the little can of Sterno from one of Byron’s bags, struck a kitchen match and set the flaming can at the bottom of Walter’s shallow pit.

“Take off your clothes.” She remembered having said that, and the looks on their faces, and Byron’s exasperation and Walter trying not to look at her while he’d stripped. And then they’d sat in a circle around the Sterno fire, faint chemical heat against their faces and the circle incomplete, missing one, the one that mattered most of all. Walter had handed her the crumpled bag of peyote buttons, and she’d taken the first one, had bitten into the bitter, rubbery flesh and gagged. But she had swallowed, and then swallowed another bite, and there’d been lukewarm bottles of mineral water to calm her stomach. They’d passed the bag around, counterclockwise, each of them taking their turn again and again, chewing slowly and drinking water and not talking, until the nausea had found them and Robin had set the bag aside.

She had sprinkled salt and rosemary, nutmeg and mace, above the fire.

“I’m going to puke,” Walter said, his rolling, seasick voice and,
“No,”
she’d said firmly, “Not yet. Hang on as long as you can.” And he had, but that hadn’t been much longer. “Please,” he’d whispered, sweat on all their faces, slack eyes, sweat on their naked bodies, and she’d only nodded. He’d crawled quickly away and emptied his stomach somewhere in the maze she’d drawn. Byron had gone next, before Walter had even finished his loud retching; and Robin last; had waited so long that she’d only made it three or four feet away from the fire before she’d thrown up the pulpy stew of chewed peyote, bile, and Perrier, the half-digested meal Spyder had cooked for her, and sat coughing, staring through watering eyes at the candle she’d drowned in vomit.

One at a time, they’d gone back to sit around the scrape in the earth and the Sterno, and Robin had taken Walter’s hand on her right, Byron’s on her left, held on tight, little-girl-on-a-carnival-ride grip. And Byron had taken Walter’s hand, and the warmth that had settled over her, peace inside and deeper peace than she’d ever known or imagined. And then she’d begun to speak, knowing that it was time, had clutched at the strict words she’d laid out as scrupulously as the designs drawn on the floor, the candles, the pinches of spice and salt. But the world was raveling, taking itself apart, and the words had run from her like scurrying black beetles. She’d squeezed their hands harder, so terrified and so completely beyond fear that she’d thought she would never be afraid again.

Later, she had remembered that Byron had begun to cry, joy and sadness, and that the wings of the angels that rose from the candle flames blazed and trailed razor night, obsidian shards that sliced her eyes, that cut her lips.

And that when the dry and whispering things had begun to dig themselves from the earthen walls—claws like Walter’s spade and the scrambling legs that glistened and drew blood from the shimmering air—she’d finally closed her eyes.

And the sound of thunder, and Spyder laughing, far away.