Part 28 (1/2)

It was the first time in his life he hadn't slept alone.

”I have to p.i.s.s now, ” she says, and Walter opens his eyes.

They still sting and burn, no matter how much he sleeps or how many bottles of Visine and Murine he empties into them.

”I'm not stopping you,” he says again.

”Just f.u.c.king take care of it, Walter.”

And he marvels that this last day should be so much like all the others leading up to it, that it isn't marked by a merciful freedom from mundane annoyances and everyday c.r.a.p. There should be something different, like a condemned man's final meal, whatever his heart desires, instead of the usual routine of bread and water, something to make this day special, besides the gas chamber or electric chair waiting at the end of that long, last walk. And then Walter gets up and goes to take care of it.

After the doctor-an apprehensive man with a black leather satchel and wire-rimmed spectacles-carefully removes the old dressing and lances the swelling on Niki's right palm, after a steaming cup of sweet black tea for the pain and an herbal poultice packed deep into the wound, then a fresh dressing, and after all this they finally let her rest. She lies beneath white cotton sheets and a quilt that only smells faintly musty and watches the orange-blue flame of an oil lamp sitting on a chest of drawers near the bed, the flame trapped safe inside its gla.s.s chimney, and she listens to Spyder and the doctor and the wind around the eaves of the house. Maybe I'm so tired I won't be able to sleep, she thinks, but then the room and the whispering voices and the wind slip away, and for a long time there's nothing else at all.

And she dreams of Esme Chattox, floating weightless in waters that will never see the sun, her crimson gills like living bellows, fish-skin robes become beautiful j.a.panese fans of spine and fin and fleshy membrane, and there are 250 yellow-green rows of bioluminescent organs on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and belly. She drifts down, past towering Atlantean ruins, past great stone doors sealed a hundred thousand years, shattered Corinthian columns and sunken temples to G.o.ds that have never been named. Esme's long legs become a sinuous tail, and she glides ever deeper, between the grotesque walls of yawning subterranean canyons, until there's no farther down left to go, only a perfectly level plain of gray-black ooze, a desolate landscape for urchins and sea cuc.u.mbers and brittle stars. And something else. Something that has lain here more ages than the minds of man can comprehend, tentacles and eyes the size of manhole covers, eyes that burn so brightly they slice the darkness and send even the blindest things scurrying for cover.

And the feverish, wordless prayers from Esme's hy-acinth lips, Mother Hydra, Father Kraken, awake and receive me, Sleeper in the Deep, Dreamer at the Bottom of the World.

Esme embraces her lover, and it spreads her wide with a dozen suction-cupped arms, as the gray ooze floor of the ocean folds and collapses beneath their weight. And for a time Niki can't see anything through the tempest of silt thundering soundlessly across the boundless azoic wastelands.

And other things, an argument between an anglerfish and an eel, a heretic crustacean counting stars in a night it's never seen, and the silt settling kindly over Niki as the storm subsides and the wish that she could lie there forever, buried and unremembered, and still other things, before she begins to rise. Rus.h.i.+ng towards the surface, falling towards the sky, as the gas in her bloodstream bubbles out of solution and her aching lungs expand until she's sure that she'll burst, but there's only the briefest, silver pain, and then she's standing on the Bay Bridge again, and the white bird is there, too, perched on the guardrail.

”She has found the philtre,” it says, and it takes Niki a moment to remember, to realize that it means ”philtre”

and not ”filter.” ”But there's so little time. It may already be too late.”

251.

”Then I died for nothing?”

”Everyone dies for nothing, Hierophant,” the bird squawks. ”Why should you be any different?”

”You know what I meant, bird.”

”The jackals would have had her. They almost did, but they're weak in that world.”

”So Daria isn't dead?” Niki asks and looks down at the water s.h.i.+mmering far, far below. The bird flaps its wings and s.h.i.+fts uneasily from foot to foot.

”Not yet,” it replies. ”But perhaps it's only a matter of time. She still has a long way to go. And there is another danger.”

”Daria's strong,” Niki says. ”She's smart.”

”You have no idea what's to come, do you?” the bird asks and hops a few inches farther away from her. ”No one is smart enough or strong enough. We fight because we will not die in shame without a fight, but we will die, nonethe-less.”

”I've already jumped,” Niki says, and the bird looks up at the low clouds sailing past overhead.

”That depends on when you mean. Some places you've already fallen. Others you haven't. Others you never will.”

”Leave me alone, bird,” she says, sick of anything it might have to say, and it vanishes in a burst of fire and mossy, sage-scented smoke.

And when Niki turns around-because this time she won't jump, this time she'll go back to the hotel on Steuart Street and wait for Daria-she's standing at the edge of a highway beneath a wide blue sky, hot asphalt on one side of her and the brown-green Kansas prairie stretching away on the other. She looks left, looks east, and the truck stop isn't far away, the one that Daria didn't remember, but then she did, she did remember, and Niki steps off the blacktop into dry weeds and cacti and over a tangle of rusted barbed wire. A few yards away, there's a young man in a straw cowboy hat and overalls, walking slowly across a place where rain and frost have worn away the soil to expose the chalky earth underneath. He walks with his eyes 252 on the ground, and every now and then he bends down and picks something up, a fossil seash.e.l.l or a bit of petrified bone, examines it closely before dropping it into the old Folgers coffee can that he's carrying.

And she understands that she's come here, to this when and where, because years later Daria won't have time to reach Kansas, because the jackals will be too close, and they may be weak, but not so weak that they can't kill, that they can't delay. The man stoops down and picks up something that looks a little like a large, wooden spool. He rolls it back and forth in his palm and then turns towards Niki. He smiles when he sees her.

”It's a fish vertebra,” he says. ”Paleontologists call this fish Xiphactinus. Big old f.u.c.ker, fifteen feet long, if you'll excuse my French.”

”What's that there?” Niki asks him, pointing at a metallic glint on the ground, picking her way along the chalk wash until she's standing beside him.

”Hi,” he says. ”My name's Joe.”

”Right there, Joe,” Niki says and picks the ball bearing up from the place where it's come to rest in the white-gray-yellow gully. ”Look. There's writing on it.”

”d.a.m.n,” he says, taking the ball bearing from her and holding it up to the sun. ”N-I-K-I,” he says, reading out the letters. ”Niki. Now what do you think that means?”

”You never can tell,” she replies, and he smiles and puts the fish vertebra and ball bearing into his coffee can.

”Don't lose that, Joe. It's more important than you think,” and then Kansas goes away, dissolves like frost on a summer day, and for a while she's nowhere and nowhen at all. It isn't dark, but there's no light, either, and she waits with the whispering ghosts of all the babies trapped in Limbo until she's finally somewhere else again.

Standing in Spyder's old house, almost dark outside and getting cold inside because Spyder never runs the gas heater, and Niki was asleep only a few minutes before.

Asleep in Spyder's bed, until she woke up alone and the bedspread was missing. She called for Spyder but no one 253.

answered. The stub of a candle flickering on the floor, so it looked even darker outside than it really was, and there was the sound of hammering coming from somewhere in the house.

I got out of bed, Niki thinks, remembering a moment ten years or only a minute before. I got up and walked from the bedroom to the living room, and I stood where I could see Spyder in the dining room, but she couldn't see me.

There's the missing bedspread, a huge white crocheted thing stretched trampoline tight and hanging in the air in the next room, the old dining room where no one ever eats, because there's no table and it's full of Spyder's paperback books. Niki can see where two corners of the bedspread have been nailed directly to the wall, big nails driven through the peeling wallpaper, and a third corner stretched over to a leaning bookshelf and held in place with stacks of 1974 World Book encyclopedias. The fourth corner is somewhere out of sight, wherever Spyder is, Spyder and her hammer- blam, blam, blam-just around the corner, and Niki knows that if she steps out into the middle of the living room she'll be able to see Spyder in there, hammering it to the wall. But she doesn't, because she knows that if Spyder sees her she'll stop what she's doing, and then, then everything would happen differently.

”Oh,” Spyder would say, ”it's nothing,” so Niki stays right where she is and watches and waits.

And then Spyder steps into view, wearing nothing but the black T-s.h.i.+rt she put on after they made love, the s.h.i.+rt she slept in a lot, but never washed, so it always smelled like sweat and patchouli. She's holding a bowling ball, a black bowling ball with scarlet swirls in it, and Niki remembers thinking that it looked like a strange little gas planet in Spyder's hand, the first time this happened, an ebony and scarlet Neptune or Ura.n.u.s. Spyder holds it out over the center of the bedspread and sets it gently in the middle.

And the bedspread sags with the weight of the bowling ball, drooping in the center until it's only about a foot or so 254 above the floor, but it doesn't pull loose from the walls or the stack of encyclopedias.

She disappears, and there are toolbox sounds, and when Niki can see her again, Spyder has a fat black marker in her left hand and a yellow yardstick in her right; she leans over the bedspread, measuring distances, drawing carefully s.p.a.ced dots, then measuring again, black on the white cotton here and there, beginning near the edge and working her way in, towards the sucking weight of the bowling ball.

When there are thirty, forty, forty-three dots, she sets the yardstick and the Sharpie down on the floor.

Spyder vanishes again, and this time she comes back with a blue plastic margarine tub filled with ball bearings of different sizes, like steel marbles. She digs around in the tub and selects one, as if only that one will do, and places it on the first black mark she drew on the bedspread. The ball bearing makes its own small depression before it begins to roll downhill; Niki hears the distinct clack of steel against epoxy when it hits the bowling ball, a very loud sound in the still, quiet house.

”You're not supposed to be here again,” the white bird says, standing on the hardwood floor near her bare feet.

”Shut up,” Niki hisses, whispering so Spyder won't hear.

”I'm the Hierophant, aren't I? I can go whenever I please.”

”No you can't, ” the bird caws indignantly. ”That's not the way it works.”

”Shut up, bird, before she hears you.”

In the dining room, Spyder selects another ball bearing and places it on the next mark- clack-and she repeats the action over and over again- clack, clack, clack-but never twice from the same mark, choosing each bearing and taking care to be sure that it starts its brief journey towards the center from the next mark in. Sometimes, she pauses between ball bearings, pauses and stares at the bedspread, then out the window, then back at the bedspread.