Part 11 (1/2)

”Never mind,” she mutters. ”I'll figure it out.” And Niki pushes the door the rest of the way open, steps inside, letting it swing quietly shut behind her. The restroom isn't as bright as the ER, the floor a chessboard of gray and white tiles, the wall too, as high as her chest, and then wallpaper the color of a sky before snow. Three stalls, a counter with three sinks, a big mirror, more fluorescence, but the light doesn't seem as harsh, as desolate, as it does in the waiting room. And there are no people here, either. She wonders if Marvin would let her stay until a doctor finally gets around to looking at her hand.

She chooses the stall nearest the door, for no particular reason, and slides the s.h.i.+ny metal bolt firmly into place, tests it by putting the weight of her left shoulder against the door to be sure it's not going to come open so anyone who happens by can see her sitting there with her pants down around her ankles.

Her urine is almost as dark as apple juice, yellow tinting towards orange, and she tries to remember how long it's been since she's had anything to drink. A sip of filtered water when she took her meds before leaving the house, but nothing since, and she realizes how dry her mouth is, her tongue like dust and ashes.

Niki wipes herself and drops the wad of paper into the toilet, is about to stand and pull her jeans up when the lights flicker and dim, and there's a faint crackling sound from somewhere on her left, from one of the other stalls, maybe. And she stops, perfectly freeze-frame still, and listens and watches the softly pulsating bulbs overhead. Another brownout, or maybe a blackout on the way, she thinks, but then the crackling sound grows louder than before and the too-clean restroom smells, and the smell of her own urine, are replaced by an odor that reminds her of burning tires; it stings her nose, and her eyes begin to tear.

94.

”Marvin!” she calls out immediately, deciding she can worry about modesty some other time, in some other restroom, one where the lights aren't fluttering like an epilep-tic's brain and the air doesn't smell like fire and melting rubber. ”Marvin! Can you hear me?”

But no one answers, and she stands up slowly, reaches back and reflexively flushes the toilet; for a few seconds the swirling sound of water, the little maelstrom trapped inside its porcelain bowl, drowns out the crackling. Niki's pretty sure that her hand hurts worse than it did only a moment or two before, and the throbbing has begun to ebb and swell in time to the unsteady lights. She gets her pants up as quickly as she can using just her left hand, fumbling with the zipper and the inconvenient b.u.t.ton at the top, as the burning-tire smell grows stronger and the fluorescents flicker.

”Marvin, if you can f.u.c.king hear me, please get your a.s.s in here right this second!”

She slides back the latch, opens the door, and in the last instant before the lights flare bright as an artificial supernova and then blink out altogether, Niki realizes that the crackling is radio static, or something very much like radio static. And now there's a darkness as profound as any she's ever known, as absolute and impenetrable, and she doesn't move, doesn't breathe, stands with her hand on the stall door listening as the crackling resolves itself into thin and papery voices, voices filtered through diodes and transistor tubes and years past counting.

”Angels. I can see angels now.”

. . . light issues forth, and at the other door . . .

”Listen, child. Listen hard enough and you'll hear their wings, like war drums on the wind. Close your eyes and listen-”

. . . darkness enters, till her hour to veil the heaven, though darkness there might well seem twilight here.

”Blood falling from the stars, blood from stones and silence, but I can hear them now, and the sky will never be quiet for me again.”

95.

Niki takes one step forward, half out of the stall, still half in, but the floor beneath her feet has begun to list and roll like the deck of a small boat caught off guard on a stormy sea, and she almost falls. Not a blackout, she thinks. Not a blackout at all. A G.o.dd.a.m.n earthquake. She calls for Marvin again, screaming, but the radio voices have grown so loud that she can hardly hear herself over them, so there's no way that he's going to hear her all the way out in the hall. No way he'll ever come to help, to pull her back out into the ugly, safe-white hospital light.

If there is still light left out there, if there's light left anywhere.

Thunder that isn't thunder rumbling, rising from someplace far below, thunder and violence born from grinding, s.h.i.+fting rock and slipping fault-line fractures; the restroom floor heaves, and Niki is thrown, sprawling, to her knees.

. . . spread out their starry wings with dreadful shade . . .

”I see them. I see them all tumbling down like smoldering, bleeding hailstones. And I see them crawling away, broken and lost.”

”Hold the line-”

And then the thunder has grown so complete, so whole and deafening, that Niki doesn't have to listen to the crackling radio voices anymore. She slumps sobbing against the cool restroom wall, and her hands desperately probe about in the darkness for something solid that she can hold on to, anything steady, anything at all.

”Take my hand, Niki. Quick,” Spyder Baxter says, and there is light now, the crimson light of an inferno to break the gloom apart and strew the shards like fallen leaves, light as hot and red as the seething blood of angels. ”I can show you the way back.”

Niki stares up at her, amazed, disbelieving, and she knows now that none of this can possibly be real after all.

No earthquake, no phantom voices, no flickering lights, just a crazy girl running scared, locked up helpless inside her own head, and she shuts her eyes tight-the way that Dr.

Dalby taught her-and ”I am here, ” she says as though 96 she's certain. ”I am here, and I am real, and I know the difference between what is and isn't. I know-”

”There's not much time,” Spyder says urgently and takes her bandaged hand.

”This isn't real,” Niki sobs. ”This can't be-”

”It doesn't matter, Niki,” Spyder replies, her soothing, velvet voice calm and clear above the thunder. ”It can kill you, either way.”

Niki opens her eyes again, and Spyder is still there, smiling down at her. That pale, hard face that she'd almost forgotten, her memories long since grown worn and unreliable, dulled by the fear and drugs and nightmares, almost forgotten because she left Birmingham without so much as a single photograph to keep the forgetting at bay. Spyder's tangled white dreadlocks, her heavy-lidded eyes that someone might mistake for Asian, and irises the clearest, ice-bound blue.

”You have to trust me,” Spyder says and glances over her left shoulder, towards the source of the brightening, ruddy light. When she looks back, the cruciform scar between her eyes has begun to glow softly, light the same cold shade as her eyes, the same light seeping thick from the intricate spiderweb tattoos covering both arms from the backs of her hands to her shoulders. ”You shouldn't have come here yet, Niki. It's too soon. You have to start at the beginning. And you sure as h.e.l.l shouldn't have come alone.”

”I don't know what's happening,” Niki whispers, and the heaving world thunders an angry reply, words from cracking, splitting stone, and she would scream again, would scream for Marvin, for Daria, but Spyder is lifting her to her feet.

”That's why it's too soon,” she says. ”That's why you can't be here yet. That's why you can't come alone.”

And Niki can see that she isn't even in the restroom anymore, that she's standing with Spyder on a black volcanic plain. The gray and white checkerboard tiles, the three stalls, the restroom walls, all of it replaced by cooling lava

97.

and black plumes of smoke that smell like acid and rotting eggs. There's no sun overhead, no moon, no stars, only the roiling smoke hanging low and poisonous, reflecting the crimson glow across its restless, sulfurous belly.

”We'll have to cross the Dog's Bridge,” Spyder says and frowns. ”There's no other way left. Not from here. Not from now. You do everything I tell you, Niki, and don't you dare look back.”

”Is this h.e.l.l?” Niki asks. ”Is that where we are?”

”Niki, you can't keep using someone else's stories like that,” Spyder replies, her frown deepening, drawing shadowed lines across her smooth, milky skin. ”You're going to have to find the truth of this for yourself.”

”I don't know anything, Spyder.”

”No. That's just what they want you to believe. That's what they need you to believe. That's the lie that will d.a.m.n you, Niki, and you have to see past it. You have to find your own eyes down here or the crows and maggots will be picking your bones before you've even begun.”

”I didn't think I would ever see you again,” Niki says, squeezing Spyder's hand tighter despite the pain, crying harder even though she's trying to stop.

”Remember what I said, Niki. Once you start across the bridge, don't you dare look back. Not for anything. No matter what you hear. And remember to count your steps, all of them.”

”I was trying to get to the airport,” Niki says, wiping at her eyes and snotty nose with the back of her left hand. ”I was trying to get back to Birmingham.”

”I know. And you will. But first we have to get you out of here, and we have to do it now.”