Part 6 (2/2)

”She didn't have insurance,” Niki says, and pulls at the bandage again, pain so she won't have to cry, pain to make her angrier. ”She didn't have a rich rock-star girlfriend to pay her therapy bills and hire some nosy a.s.shole like you to keep his eye on her. All she had was me, Marvin. At the end, that's all she had. Just me.”

”And you screwed it up, right? Whatever happened, Spyder dying, that was all your fault.”

”I think it's none of your G.o.dd.a.m.ned business.”

”Then why are you telling me?”

Niki grabs the water gla.s.s with her injured right hand, pulls it back over her shoulder, a fine and deadly missile aimed straight at Marvin's head, but he doesn't move, doesn't even flinch. And so she's sitting there like an idiot, steady trickle of cold water running down her arm and into the sleeve of her bathrobe; she drops the gla.s.s, lets it slip, useless, from her aching fingers, and it shatters loudly on the kitchen floor.

From the living room, Daria shouting, Daria sounding confused and alarmed; ”What was that? Is something wrong?” and ”No,” Marvin shouts back. ”I dropped a gla.s.s, that's all.”

And then, lowering his voice, ”Why are you telling me, Niki, if it's none of my G.o.dd.a.m.ned business?” and she doesn't answer, glances down at the slicing, crystal shards 58 scattered across the tile floor, waiting there for her bare feet.

”I'm sorry, Marvin.”

”You don't have to be sorry. You didn't hurt anyone. It was just a gla.s.s.”

”Yeah,” she says, even though she knows better, knows what it means when she comes that close to letting go, turning loose and making a hole for the violence and scalding red fury to spill through into the world. She nudges a piece of gla.s.s with one big toe, pushes it an inch or two across the floor, and then she looks up at Marvin again.

”I grew up in New Orleans,” she says, and he nods his head because he knows that already, and she nods back at him. ”Anne Rice and Marie Laveau, Dr. John, voodoo queens, all that spooky s.h.i.+t. We used to get stoned and sneak into the cemeteries, hang out in Lafayette and St.

Louis praying we'd see a ghost or a vampire. Just a glimpse would have been enough. We held seances and left flowers and bottles of wine. I even knew this one sick f.u.c.k used to sacrifice pigeons and rats to the Elder G.o.ds and the Great Old Ones.”

”So, did you?”

”Did I what? Sacrifice rats to Cthulhu?”

Marvin rolls his eyes, and for an instant, half an instant, there's the slimmest, fleeting fissure in his calm, a glint of impatience, and that makes her feel a little bit better.

”No. Did you ever see a ghost?”

”We never saw bupkes, Marvin, unless we were tripping and so f.u.c.ked up we imagined we were seeing things. But we all wanted it so bad, just that one tiny peek at something bigger and more terrible than our lives. Just a f.u.c.king peek, just so we'd know.

”But we were wrong. That's what I learned in Birmingham, what Spyder showed me-that it's better not to look, not to see, better to believe that it's all just a bunch of fairy stories and silly lies to scare children and there aren't any ghosts at all or magic or monsters or nothing.”

”What did you see, Niki?” Marvin asks her, not prying

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now, no nursemaid tricks, only asking because he wants to know. She gazes into his eyes for a moment and doesn't say anything at all. His deep eyes so brown they may as well be black, her reflection looking back out from them, and she can tell he's never seen anything he wasn't meant to see.

”Listen,” she says, whispering now, whispering so Daria won't hear, and he leans towards her. ”I have to go back.

Back to Birmingham. We started something, and it isn't over, so I have to go back and finish it. If I don't, it's going to destroy me, and then it's going to destroy Daria.”

”Oh,” he says and slumps back in his chair, rubs the palms of his hands together and glances nervously towards the clock hung on the wall above the refrigerator. And Niki doesn't say anything else, sits silently, watching him watch the clock, and thinking about the last time she saw Spyder Baxter.

Daria didn't even decorate the house herself; a friend from another band's boyfriend spending her money for her while she was off touring Europe and recording in LA, filling up the place with an incongruous heap of Victorian antiques and the sort of c.r.a.p Douglas Coupland called ”j.a.panese Minimalism.” So these rooms no more her than that painting above the bed, and she lies on a brocade-upholstered love seat in the living room and stares at a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph hanging on the wall across from her. Vulgarity for vulgarity's sake, for the shallow sake of hipness, and she thinks about tossing the hideous thing out the window, and screw the chunk it must have taken out of her bank account.

She closes her eyes, trying to relax, but her head's buzzing from all the coffee and nicotine, a wasp nest built somewhere inside her skull, squirming red wasps and yellow jackets burrowing deep between honeycombed cere-bral hemispheres. Her sour stomach is starting to cramp and she thinks about getting up, climbing the stairs, and in her overnight bag there's a bottle of the pills her doctor gives her for what he promises her isn't an ulcer. Daria's 60 still thinking about the pills, about how they don't work as well as they used to, when she falls asleep to the sound of Niki and Marvin whispering to each other in the next room.

And somewhere later, the simple, colorless nothing of unconsciousness bleeds imperceptibly into the ragged edges of an old, neglected dream, and she's standing in the weedy yard in front of Spyder Baxter's dilapidated house on the side of Red Mountain. The day after it snowed all night long, snow up to her ankles, and the lead-flat sky peeking down at her through barren pecan and oak branches. The day they found a dead and frozen girl lying in the middle of Cullom Street, the witchy little goth girl named Robin who'd slept with Spyder before Niki came along, and Daria wishes she'd thought to wear a warm hat because the wind is already making her ears ache.

There isn't time for this s.h.i.+t, she thinks, and if she doesn't hurry she'll miss her flight back east, will miss the Atlanta show, but the wind laughs at her, whips the fallen snow into swirling, pixie-drunk cyclones.

All the time is here, the wind whispers, all the time you'll ever need, and Daria looks up at the sky again, the clouds skimming low above the city like the glacier belly of Heaven coming down to grind the earth to dust. Absinthe lightning and thunder and the brittle sound of sunless, frozen worlds; the limbs above her head are trimmed with red icicles, guitar strings and loops of something that looks like wet white yarn, but isn't.

”She was afraid I would spin a web as pretty as hers,” the naked, green-haired girl standing on the front porch says, and Daria can see her skeleton outlined beneath withered, frostbite skin, blue and gray, gangrene black; a raw constel-lation of crimson and violet welts across her Auschwitz arms and face, running sores that weep pus and saccharine tears, and the girl looks over her shoulder, past all the junk crowding Spyder's porch, and she points at an open window.

”You saw, didn't you?” she asks Daria, her voice hard and crack-shear fractured as the sky. ”You saw her mercy.”

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And then a small, staccato sound like a dry twig snapping, wet bone breaking, snap, and she turns, but there are only the tall, sleeping trees and the snow-covered path leading back to the street. The air smells like cinnamon and ammonia now, and there are tracks, and Daria would rather not think about what could possibly leave tracks like that.

”The rebel Watchers, exiled fathers of the Nephilim,” the girl says. ”They have another name, but the sky would bleed if I ever said it aloud.”

”I'm cold,” Daria says, because she is, s.h.i.+vers and hugs herself; around her, the trees are waking up, have begun to sway and creak and shake the nuisance snow from their bare branches.

”You should have left her here,” the girl growls, and when Daria turns around again she isn't on the porch anymore, is standing only a few feet away, instead, and tiny, milky, translucent spiders have begun to spill in wriggling clots from the empty sockets where her eyes should be.

They gather on her hatchet cheeks, burrow into her hair, drip to the ground at her feet.

”It doesn't matter, though. He'll have her anyway, sooner or later,” the dead girl says. ”No one gets away. She has His mark and He guards all the pa.s.sages, all the exits.

Spyder knew that, even if she was too afraid to tell us. Even if she lied.”

”You stay away from Niki,” Daria says, and she knows that it isn't thunder she's hearing at all, no, the drumbeat rustle of vast and spiteful wings above the trees, and she doesn't look away from the grinning, spider-covered face.

”Do you hear me? Stay the f.u.c.k away from her,” and the girl grins wider and holds out her hands. There's a syringe and a small plastic bag of white powder in her palms, a rusted spoon, a guitar pick, and a length of rubber tubing.

”I know your h.e.l.l, too, Daria,” she says.

The house laughs, coughs up sulfur dust and bad memories, and now someone's calling Daria from someplace safe and very, very far away.

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