Silk

Prologue

Parlor Game, And Flies With Faces

Two 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…”