Part 11 (2/2)
And Spyder starts walking, towing Niki along behind her. Niki can tell that they're moving slowly towards the place where the red glow is coming from, and she's busy trying not to stumble and fall again as Spyder picks their way over and between the broken jumbles of lava, once-liquid stone frozen sharp as razors. Here and there, fissures leak a sickly yellow steam, and Niki has to cover her nose 98 and mouth with her free hand or it makes her gag. The stench from those fissures is almost enough to convince her that the earth here, the very land in this place, has died and is already quickly decomposing beneath her feet.
Overhead, something on ragged kite wings screeches and wheels on the thermals, gliding in and out of the low, smoky clouds. Niki only catches a glimpse of it from the corner of one eye, but that glimpse is enough that she knows she doesn't want a better look. All around them, small albino things scurry fast across and between the rocks, disturbed by their pa.s.sage.
”The world is very thin here,” Spyder says, having to shout now to make herself heard above the thunder still bellowing underfoot. ”It never lasts long. This is only the latest scab du jour,” and she motions at the glistening, uneven lava around them. ”But the Dog's Bridge, it's usually in the same place.”
Niki can hear the radio voices again, a barely audible murmur playing somewhere just beneath the rumbling earth, trying to distract her from the things that Spyder's saying.
Great things, and full of wonder in our ears . . .
”Mark my words, this child will be the ruin of us all. She'll have us all in the fires before she's done.”
Far differing from this World, thou hast revealed . . .
”She isn't even our child, Trisha. Mark my word. Demons leave their babies in our cribs-”
Spyder stops, because this is where the land ends, for now, falling steeply away to a seemingly endless molten sea of red-orange and blue-white lava a thousand feet below.
The light's grown so bright that Niki has to squint, and she can feel the heat beginning to blister her face. The rising heat bends the light, turning everything ahead of them into a vast, inconstant mirage; if there's an opposite sh.o.r.e, Niki can't see any sign of it.
”That way,” Spyder says, ”there,” and she points to their right. ”Right there where it's supposed to be.”
Niki looks away from the sea of fire, beyond the com-
99.
pa.s.s tip of Spyder's index finger, and the Dog's Bridge rises in a crooked, sagging arch above the inferno. Not too far away from where they're standing, over another pile of boulders, another lava flat or two. She blinks at the precar-ious jackstraw ford built not from stone or steel, but from countless bones bleached and wired together, a billion dis-a.s.sembled skeletons for its soaring piers and b.u.t.tresses.
”The bridges are eternal,” Spyder whispers, as though she's afraid someone might overhear. ”Don't let anyone or anything tell you different. The bridges will be here when the rest of this s.h.i.+t's just a G.o.dd.a.m.n burnt-out memory.”
The world shudders, and a geyser of fire, miles and miles away, rises up from the sea to scorch the black sky blacker.
”That's the way, Niki. Walk fast, and don't look back.”
Niki turns away from the ossuary bridge and the fountain of fire, turning to Spyder, the blue cross s.h.i.+ning between her eyes. ”You're coming with me,” she says.
”Not this time. This time you have to do it on your own.
The path might close-”
”I can't cross that f.u.c.king thing, not alone.”
”You can, and you will.”
”I won't let you do this to me, not again.”
But Spyder releases her hand, fresh blood showing wetly through the bandages, and takes a step backwards, away from Niki. The geyser falls back into the sea, and the scalded clouds scream and writhe.
”You left me once before, and you're not going to do it to me again, G.o.dd.a.m.n it!”
”I'm not leaving you, Niki. But there are rules here, and I can't cross the bridge with you. Not this time.”
”f.u.c.k that, Spyder. You come with me, or I don't go.”
Spyder frowns again and looks out across the sea of fire.
”Count your steps, and don't look back,” she says, and before Niki can reply, before she can tell her how far up her a.s.s she can shove all of this, Spyder Baxter dissolves in a dust-devil swirl of sparkling cinders. And Niki stands there for a long, long time, minutes or hours or days, no way to tell in this place without day or night, waiting for 100 Spyder to come back. But she doesn't come back, and when Niki's hand hurts too much to wait any longer, she turns, finally, and follows the narrow trail that winds along the edge of the cliff to the foot of the Dog's Bridge.
She counts her steps, just like Spyder told her to do, and she doesn't look back.
”Do you remember what Campbell said about schizo-phrenia?” Dr. Dalby asks her, and Niki shrugs and stares past him out the big window behind his desk, the San Francisco skyline glittering white and silver.
”You remember, the essay that I asked you and Daria to read together last month,” he says, prompting, and she shrugs again.
”Yeah,” Niki says. ”What about it?”
”You said you read it.”
”Sure, we read it,” Niki replies, nodding her head, her eyes still on the skysc.r.a.pers and a smudgy flock of pigeons lighting on a rooftop across the street. She has a vague memory of the essay, photocopied pages stapled together and sent away with her like a homework a.s.sign-ment. But she can't remember whether they ever read it or not.
”I want to read you a few lines from it now, if that's okay.
It's something you need to remember. Is it okay if I read it to you now, Nicolan?”
”Go ahead,” she tells him. ”I'm listening.”
And he clears his throat, takes a sip of water from the gla.s.s on his desk, and begins.
” 'The whole problem, it would seem, is somehow to go through it, even time and again, without s.h.i.+pwreck; the answer being not that one should not be permitted to go crazy; but that one should have been taught something already of the scenery to be entered and the powers likely to be met, given a formula of some kind by which to recognize, subdue them, and incorporate their energies.' ”
He pauses a moment then, watching her, waiting in case she wants to say something. Niki stops counting the pi- 101.
geons and looks at Dr. Dalby instead, because it's always easier if she at least pretends to listen.
”Are you still with me?” he asks her.
<script>