Silk (2 page)

The section headings have been taken from the successive stages of the arachnid molting process. To quote Dr. Rainer F. Foelix (
Biology of Spiders,
1982): “In a strict sense molting comprises two different processes: (1)
apolysis,
the separation of the old cuticle from the hypodermal cells, and (2)
ecdysis,
the shedding of the entire old skin (exuvium), which corresponds to what most people think of as molting. Apolysis precedes ecdysis by about one week.”

I would also like to acknowledge the works of Drs. Joseph Campbell and Carl G. Jung (and in particular
Synchronicity,
1960) as indispensable resources during the writing of this book.

Silk
was written between October 1993 and January 1996, and during the writing and since its original publication in 1998, very many people lent their assistance in very many ways. In particular, I would like to thank (in no particular order) Jada Walker and Katharine Stewart, David Ferguson, Poppy Z. Brite, Peter Straub, Neil Gaiman, the late Kathy Acker, Clive Barker, Joe Daley, Harlan Ellison, Brian Hodge, Charles de Lint, Douglas E. Winter, William Schafer, Liz Scheier, Laura Anne Gilman, Merrilee Heifetz, Laura Tucker, Richard Curtis, Kelly Hall, Paula Guran, Darren McKeeman, Ed Bryant, Victor Stabin, Christa Faust, Barry Hoffman, Tamara Babyock-Zannis, Matthew Grasse, Scott Crumpton, and Kathryn Pollnac. Also, I would like to note that the Birmingham, Alabama, appearing in this novel is a fictional, wishful fusion of Athens, Georgia, in the early 1990s and Birmingham in the late 1980s and, as such, has never existed outside the pages of
Silk
. Don’t go looking for it anywhere else.

Parlor Game, And Flies With Faces

T
wo nights before Halloween, as if it matters to anyone in the house, as if every day in this house isn’t Halloween. As if every moment they live isn’t the strain and stretch, the hand reaching back, groping through bottomless candy bags down to where front porches glow with orange-flicker grins and skeletons dance hopscotch sidewalks and ring doorbells. And they are all here, here around her where they belong.

When someone passes Spyder the little pipe and the plastic lighter, she pushes her bone-bleached dreadlocks from her face, matted as close to dreads as her stringy, white-girl hair allows, virgin black showing at the roots. She sucks, pulls the delicious, spicy smoke into her mouth, and the embers in the bowl glow warm and safe as jack-o’-lantern light.

She holds the smoke inside until it seems she might never have to breathe simple air again, and then releases it slow through her nostrils, passes the pipe to Robin. Robin sprawled on the floor at her feet, almost naked, black panties and black lace wrapped loose around her shoulders, hair dyed the color of absinthe.

“Ummm,” Robin murmurs, accepts the pipe, but her wide, acid-bright eyes never waver from the television screen, from the silent gore and splatter of a pirated second-generation Italian zombie flick, sound all the way down so that everything becomes an impromptu video for the Skinny Puppy or Marilyn Manson pounding from the stereo. But Robin knows where all the shrieks and moans belong and on cue she opens her mouth wide, perfect teeth and pink tongue, and Spyder shuts her eyes, feels the scream tear itself from Robin’s throat and wash over her, filling up the room until the jealous music pulls it apart.

Someone claps loudly, and Byron glares from the sofa where he’s still making out with the pretty black boy from Chicago, the boy who brought the sheets of blotter. Spyder smiles at him, runs her fingers through Robin’s improbable hair, dares him to say a word. Then Robin laughs and spills gray smoke from her lips, gives the pipe to someone else before she nestles snug into Spyder’s lap. And Byron turns away and hides his face deep in the boy’s neck.

Spyder squints through the gauze of marijuana and cigarette smoke hanging a few feet above the hardwood floor, through the strange half light, salt-and-pepper TV glare blending into the gentler glimmer from the candles scattered around the room. She lingers, admires the tattoos that cover both her arms from shoulder to knuckle, dark sleeves, tapestry of webs rendered in silvery blues and iridescent highlights against a field of deepest black and indigo.

On the screen, another latex disembowelment and the sudden seethe of maggots like boiling rice.

“Oh,” and Robin flinches like she hasn’t seen this tape fifteen times before, like there’s anything left to shock. Spyder closes her eyes again, tight, savoring the smoky aftertaste and the industrial throb and crash from the speakers, the soft snarl of Robin’s hair.

This moment,
she thinks, and her head is clear, no acid or X and certainly none of Walter’s ugly little mushrooms. Only enough of the rich Mississippi pot to deal with the distractions, the blurry edges of her attention.
This one moment,
and behind her eyes, she imagines bottling the seconds, one whole minute, in antique green glass or amber vials, drives the cork in deep before it goes to past like vinegar or slips away.

Everything,
she thinks,
and everyone here around me.

“Ohhhh,” Robin says, almost whispers, “Oh fuck, oh fuck, that’s so
beautiful
.”

Later, the last precious hour before dawn, and the sable-skinned boy from Chicago has gone, and the hangers-on have gone, the girl from Atlanta with her tarot deck and the nameless child treading on her shadow, both so skinny it hurt to see. The two drag queens who dropped by looking for Walter, looking to score a quarter bag after their last show of the evening.

Just Spyder and Robin all but asleep in her lap, still tripping deep and hard on her three hits, three tiny white tabs stamped with prancing blue unicorns and dissolved like sugar on her tongue. Byron sits alone on the sofa now, staring at the television, Murnau’s original
Nosferatu
in scratchy blacks and whites like celluloid watercolors, and his eyes are somehow vacant and expectant at the same time.

And Walter, squatted like a ragged gargoyle before the stereo, digging noisily through her CDs and cassettes, singing or mumbling to himself. He settles on something, slips it into the deck and the Cure’s “Plainsong” pours like honey and raindrops from the speakers.

The girl rises from her bed like a living ghost and sleepwalks along the edge of a balcony; her bare feet, jerky tiptoe stride, barely seem to touch the stone balustrade. Byron picks up the remote, presses Pause, and she freezes in midstep. He holds her that way until the song’s overture is done and Robert Smith releases them both.

“Spyder?” and Robin’s voice slips from her like an echo of itself, something shouted far away and faded thin and hollow by the time it finally crosses her lips.

“I’m here,” Spyder answers.

“Talk to me, Spyder. Tell me the story.”

“You already know the story, Robin.”

But Robin squeezes her hand hard, sudden, unexpected pressure, and her eyes flutter open.

“Please, Spyder?” she asks. “Please? I need to hear it again. I need to hear
you
tell it.”

Byron has set the remote down, watches them, arms crossed and waiting. Walter pretends to organize the careless scatter of jewel cases on the floor, pretends he hasn’t heard.

“It’s very late,” Spyder says, brushing Robin’s bangs from her eyes. “You look so sleepy.”

“
No
. No, I don’t want to sleep yet. Please, Spyder.”

When Spyder glances at Byron, he shifts his eyes quickly back to the television, back to the terrified solicitor and the vampire, and Walter shrugs and stacks the CDs.

“I need to hear,” Robin says, and now she sounds desperate, close to tears. “I need to hear.”

Spyder sighs and hugs Robin close.

“Yeah,” she says, nothing more, but already Byron has reached for the remote, flips the set off, and now the room is very dark, only a few guttering pools of yellow candlelight. Walter turns down the Cure until the music is just a murmur of guitars and keyboards, and he sits with his back to Spyder and Robin and Byron.

Outside the house, Spyder’s rambling, junkcluttered house where it is never anything but Halloween, the late October night is still and satisfied. No wolf-howling wind or bare branches scritching window glass, nothing but the sound of a car passing on the street outside. Spyder waits until it has gone, and then she clears her throat.

“Before the World,” she begins, “there was a war in Heaven….”

1.

D
aria sat by herself on the sidewalk, fat spiral-bound notebook open across her lap, back pressed firmly against the raw brick, pretentiously raw brick sandblasted for effect, for higher rent and the illusion of renewal, the luxury of history. The cobblestone street was lined with old warehouse and factory buildings, most dating back to the first two decades of the century or before and sacrificed years ago for office suites; sterile, track-lit spaces for architects and lawyers, design firms and advertising agencies.

The felt-tip business end of her pen hovered uselessly over the paper, over the verse she’d begun almost a week ago now. A solid hour staring stupidly at her own cursive scrawl, red ink too bright for blood, and she was no closer to finishing, and the cold—real Christmas weather—was beginning to numb her fingers, working its way in through her clothes. Daria closed the notebook, snapped the cap back on her pen, returned both to the army-surplus knapsack lying on the concrete.

This time of day, in this light, latest afternoon and the sun sliding like butterscotch from the pale November sky, she could almost make an uneasy peace with the city. Almost find a little comfort, something enough like comfort to do, in the mismatched cluster of taller buildings that passed themselves off as a downtown skyline. She ignored the stares and sidelong glances from the secretaries in their ridiculous heels and the men in suits who looked at her suspiciously; dumpy, rumpled Daria Parker growing from their sidewalk like a monstrous fungus. Thrift-store cardigan beyond baggy, the sharpei of cardigans, the unreal yellow of French’s mustard, tattered white T-shirt beneath. Black jeans worn almost straight through the knees and ass.

Her bass leaned against the wall next to her, the hulking rectangular case betraying no hint of the Fender’s sleek Coke-bottle curves. The case was almost completely covered with stickers pushing local bands, a few goth and grrrl groups, conflicting political slogans and Bob Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius. The newest addition, plastered dead front and center, confectioner’s pink and black filigree borders, was Daria’s band, Stiff Kitten. The zombified rendition of Hello Kitty had been her idea, brought to life by the band’s drummer, Mort.

Daria fished her last Marlboro from the crumpled pack in her sweater pocket. The cigarette was bent, and she frowned as she carefully straightened it with her fingertips. The smoke masked the oily smell of peanuts roasting down the street, tumbling like agate in their steel-barrel vats. Two young black men hefted burlap sacks from the open doorway of the Peanut Depot, shouldered them out onto the sidewalk and left them like greasy sandbags beside a parking meter. Above the peanuts, there were pricey apartments and she wondered how anyone could stand the smell. All the windows were empty, no curtains or blinds, and dark, so maybe no one could.

Tailpipe farts and the gentle rev of engines made in Japan and Germany, the office monkeys calling it a day, reclaiming their cars from the parking garages spaced out along the length of Morris Avenue. Daria closed her eyes, exhaling slow smoke through her nostrils, listening to the bumpity sound of wheels on the polished cobblestone unevenness of the street. Behind her, behind the offices, the sudden air-horn blat and dinosaur-herd rumble of a freight train, hurrying along one or another of the six tracks that divided downtown Birmingham into north and south.

Daria opened her eyes, squinting through the matted tangle of her hair and the soft gray veil of smoke that hung like a shapeless ghost, undisturbed in the chilly twilight air. She kept her hair long, down past her shoulders and cut no particular way, bleached clean of any trace of its natural color and dyed cherry red with Kool-Aid or, when she could afford it, the Manic Panic cream rinse she bought around the corner at Spyder Baxter’s shop.

The men brought more peanuts out to the curb. There would be a white panel truck soon to take them away.

She glanced at her wrist, at the clunky silver dreadnought of a man’s wristwatch she’d found a year or so ago, groundscore, lying in the road and obviously run over but still counting off the seconds on a liquid-crystal display the color of dirty motor oil. She’d worn it continuously ever since, when she slept or showered, every time and everywhere the band played, and it had become a sort of running joke, a bizarre contest of wills, whether Daria would eventually devise a torture that even the watch could not survive or if perhaps it might go on forever.

Beneath its scratched and pitted face, the watch read five fifteen p.m. in squarish numbers and that meant fifteen more minutes before she was late for practice, less than seven hours until her graveyard shift at the coffeehouse began. She pulled a last drag from the cigarette and crushed it out on the sidewalk, thumbed the butt halfway across the street, narrowly missing a Nissan’s tinted windshield.

“Three points,” she said out loud, smoke leaking from between her lips, and stood up, shouldering the knapsack, brushing sidewalk tracks off her jeans. The sun was almost down now, just the slimmest fireball rind silhouetting the city’s brick and steel and glass carapace. Daria hugged herself, shivered as she buttoned the sweater’s only two remaining buttons. When she was done, she slapped her hands together a couple of times to get the blood flowing again, picked up her bass, and crossed the street.

Spyder Baxter’s shop looked like something displaced, something stolen from the streets of New Orleans maybe, and wedged in tight between Steel City Pawn and First Avenue Rent-2-Own. Daria paused before the display window, fly-specked and ages of dust gathered in the corners like little dunes, parabolic drifts against the smeared glass and rusted frame and a handful of dead bugs thrown in for good measure. Weird Trappings’ handpainted sign swayed and squeaked faintly on its uneven chains, approximate Gothic in clumsy black and purple slashes across whitewashed tin.

Something new, or at least something that hadn’t been there yesterday, caught her attention. Or maybe she simply hadn’t noticed the album before,
Anthology of Tom Waits,
almost hidden in the clutter, the confusion that Spyder let pass for window dressing. Used leather jackets, tie-dyes and Guatemalan trinkets, a stack of battered art books, heaped around last year’s life-sized nativity scene, paint-chipped plastic, electrical cords snaking from the butts of wise men and camels. And dangling above the shabby manger, a holy host of rubber bats and the severed head of a concrete cherub, pilfered from some cemetery and sporting wraparound shades and fuzzy green earmuffs.

The LP was propped against the kneeling Virgin Mary, and Daria could just make out
$4.50
in Spyder’s measured, careful script, ballpoint on the dime-sized price sticker. Not bad at all, if there weren’t a lot of scratches. And she’d been good, hadn’t spent a penny on herself in weeks, everything she made at the Fidgety Bean going for bills and rent, whatever was left over going into the band. And Jesus, she needed
something
to wake her up, to jog her out of this dry spell, something that she didn’t already know by heart. The album’s front cover was a shadowy portrait, indistinct profile in black and grays, the perfect image of Waits’ voice, growl and rasp, soothing jangle.

Overhead, the streetlights buzzed to life, mammoth fireflies flickering dirty sodium white from their tall poles. Inside Weird Trappings it was very dark, and the sudden light made a mirror of the plate glass, hiding the album and everything else behind her reflection. Daria glanced at the door and the sign said closed, but she could come back for the record tomorrow evening, as soon as she got up. Would even have a few hours free to listen to it before work, since Stiff Kitten didn’t practice Friday nights.

When she looked back to the window, she saw the patrol car, cruising slowly, watchfully, along, and she turned away from Weird Trappings, her boots loud and deliberate on the deserted street.

Stiff Kitten practiced, and when rent couldn’t be paid, lived, in the empty space above Storkland. A sort of baby’s K-Mart, Storkland sold everything from disposable diapers to cribs that rocked themselves, safety pins by the gross and rolls of pink and blue wallpaper. The cloying smell of talcum powder sifted up from below through the old floorboards, and their lease strictly forbade rehearsal before five thirty p.m. every day except Sundays, but it was roomy and just barely within their budget.

This late, the store was locked tight, salespeople closing out their registers, an old woman pushing her dust mop from aisle to aisle. Outside, the sidewalk was washed in the glow of the huge neon stork perched over the doors, a neon bundle of joy hanging from its beak.

Daria walked quickly across the employees’ parking lot, past the two or three cars still waiting patiently for their drivers, tried hard not to notice the “Equal Rights for Unborn Women” and “Pro-Family, Pro-Life” bumper stickers on the rear windshield of a banged-up Chevy Nova. She squeezed herself into the narrow space between masonry and the sagging chain-link fence that separated the building from a Texaco station, barely room enough to breathe, much less walk. Back here, the streetlights and shine from passing cars couldn’t reach, and already the night was pooled like runny tar. But the door was braced open, half a brick wedged there, and she was glad that at least she wouldn’t have to stand around in the cold and the shadows digging in the knapsack for her keys.

Daria pulled the heavy steel door open, careful to leave the brick in place on the slim chance she wasn’t the last, the latest, and stepped inside. For a moment, it seemed even darker, despite the thin and yellowy incandescence from a bare bulb strung way up at the top of the stairs, 40-watt light at the end of the tunnel. She followed it up, her bass bumping once or twice against the edge of a step, her breath, her footsteps, close in the gloom. Finally, the door that Mort had painted in charcoal grays and chalky whites, hints of crimson, a ring of tiny winged skeletons, bone rattles clutched in bone fists, leering fetal grins, and “Baby Heaven” inscribed in the perfect mimic of tombstone chisel. Mort loved Edward Gorey and Gahan Wilson, Tim Burton and Mexican folk art, and it showed every time he put down the sticks and picked up a brush or pencil.

Daria pushed open the gates to Baby Heaven, and there was warmer air and real light on the other side, the steamy hiss of radiators and rows of fluorescents suspended from the high ceiling, a couple of shadeless old floor lamps like tiny suns on gooseneck stalks.

And Mort, sitting behind his drums in the middle of the mostly empty room, framed in amps and completely absorbed in the business of rolling a more than respectable joint from the Ziploc baggie of pot balanced on his knee. He looked up, saw Daria and smiled his wide, perfect smile, flashed broad teeth stained dingy with tobacco and neglect.

“Daria,”
he said, the way a chintzy magician might say “Presto-chango!” or “Abracadabra!,” and made a grand show of tipping his ratty baseball cap in her direction.

Theo, Mort’s girlfriend, latest true love of his life, was camped out in the permanently reclined La-Z-Boy chair halfway across the room, smoking and prowling through a stack of
Duplex Planet
and old
Rolling Stone
magazines. Theo had come down from Nashville late in the spring. She dressed like Buddy Holly with a stumbling hangover and claimed that she was an artist, although Daria had yet to actually see anything she’d painted or drawn or photographed. She wore her hair piled high in an oily pompadour, dyed so painfully black it sometimes seemed almost blue.

Daria closed the door behind her, shutting out the shadows and the clammy stairwell chill.

“He’s not here yet, is he,” she said, no room for question marks in her voice; Mort shrugged his bony shoulders in reply and went back to rolling his smoke. She watched as he sealed the paper with a single expert lick, twisted the ends tight between thumb and forefinger, and tucked the bomber in snug behind his left ear.

“I am so surprised,” and she set her bass on the dusty hardwood floor, sat herself down next to it and flipped up the slightly rust-scabbed latches on the big case. The inside was lined with nappy wine-colored velvet, a burgundy cradle for the black Fender Precision she’d rescued years ago from a local hockshop. From her knapsack, she pulled the shoulder strap she’d cut from an old belt, midnight leather and studs like robot teeth, and fastened it to the instrument, slipped her head through. She removed a snaky coil of cable and plugged the quarter-inch jack into the bass.

“Mort, you
are
going to tell her, aren’t you?” Theo asked, looking up from the jumble of pages in her lap. Daria froze, faint prickle of dread stroking the back of her neck, the deepest part of her gut.

“Yeah, I’m gonna tell her. Christ,” but instead, he leaned forward and began to fiddle nervously with a wing nut on the snare’s tripod stand.

“Tell me
what,
Mort?”

“I was gonna tell you that Keith’s pulled another fucking boner on us.”

The prickling inside her swelled, ballooned into raw and gnawing alarm. Keith Barry was Stiff Kitten’s guitarist, had in fact been the one who’d approached Daria the year before, shortly after the band’s original vocalist got wasted on vodka and speed and tried to play limbo with her Camaro and a moving freight train. The wreck was local legend, the sort of thing that was destined to be savored for generations, and although it had felt a little strange at first, being the replacement part for a dead girl, she’d jumped at the chance.