clutched in the fingers of her right hand, and the single feather, white as snow at the top of the highest mountain peak, caught in the stewardess" hair, and she lets the pain have her.
"Either the well was very deep, or she fell very slowly, for she had plenty of time as she went down to look about her, and to wonder what was going to happen next."
"Open your eyes, Niki," Spyder Baxter says, and she does, even though she thought they were open all along.
"You gotta watch that first step," and Spyder smiles. "It"s a b.i.t.c.h."
And she"s so beautiful that Niki doesn"t know if she"s breathless from the plunge or the sight of her. Not the Spyder she knew so many years ago, that sullen girl wrapped up in all her leather and bull-d.y.k.e defenses, and not the uncertain, unreal Spyder from her dreams and the fiery place before the Dog"s Bridge. Maybe the most beautiful woman that she"s ever seen, Spyder as some Pre-Raphaelite painter might have imagined her, Spyder reborn as something the G.o.ds would envy. She"s still holding Niki"s backpack.
"Are you okay?" she asks Niki Ky. "Say something."
"Daria"s sick," Niki says, because she"d almost forgotten, seeing Spyder like this, and the roar of falling water is so loud in her ears. She wonders how they can hear themselves over the sound of it.
"Yes, Daria"s sick. But that can"t concern you now," Spyder says. "Maybe later on, but not now."
Niki starts to take a step towards Spyder and realizes that she"s kneeling, on her knees on cold, mist-slicked stone. She blinks, then rubs her eyes, but it"s all still there, radiant Spyder with her white hair-not Spyder"s dark hair bleached white, but hair that grows as white as doves and milk and snowfall all on its own-Spyder in her gown that looks like something sewn from starlight, and the scar on her forehead has become a teardrop gem, the deepest ruby 188 red, set into her skin. The water roars all around her, and overhead the sky is dusk and tempera sunset clouds in brilliant shades of tangerine and goldenrod and violet.
"Am I dead?" Niki asks, and Spyder smiles again and helps her to her feet. Niki"s legs are weak, and her stomach rolls like she"s just had three or four rides on a roller coaster, one right after the other.
"It"s not exactly that simple."
"That"s not an answer," Niki says. "I just jumped off a bridge for you, and now I want an answer."
"You didn"t jump for me. You jumped for you."
"Whichever," Niki replies. "Am I dead or not?"
Spyder"s smile fades, and she brushes Niki"s long bangs from her eyes. "Yes, in the world where you were born, you died. They"ll find your body. You"ll have a funeral. You"ll be buried."
"Cremated," Niki corrects her.
"Same difference."
"And I can"t go back. Not ever."
"Not the way you mean," Spyder says, then turns and be - gins walking through the gathering mist, across the slippery gray-green rocks.
"So, is this Heaven?" Niki calls after her, trying to keep up and trying not to fall on her a.s.s at the same time.
"Not even close," Spyder shouts back. "Anyway, I didn"t think you believed in Heaven."
"Is it h.e.l.l, then?"
"Everywhere"s h.e.l.l, Niki, if that"s all you can manage to make of it."
"G.o.dd.a.m.n it," Niki says and stops, almost slides on a patch of mossy-looking slime, and sits down. "No more f.u.c.king riddles, Spyder. Tell me the truth or-"
"Or what?" Spyder asks her, looking over her shoulder.
"You"ll go back?" And she points an index finger towards the Technicolor sky. "I"m afraid you"re just going to have to be a little bit more patient. I"ve been here a long time, and I still don"t understand the half of it."
"Can you at least tell me where the f.u.c.k I am? I don"t 189.
think that"s asking too much. If I"m dead, and this isn"t Heaven and it"s not h.e.l.l, but I"m not on Earth anymore-"
"No, it"s certainly not Earth," Spyder agrees and then turns to face Niki again. The mist swirls eagerly, nervously, around them both, like it wants answers, too, like it"s hanging on every word they say. "This is another place."
"Another place? You mean another planet?"
"No, Niki. I mean another place."
"Like another universe?"
"Another place, Niki. I think we should just leave it at that for now."
"And right here?" Niki asks, and pats the rock with her left hand.
"We"re at the Palisades," Spyder replies. "And we really shouldn"t stay here much longer. There are safer places to be. You"ll need dry clothes, and I need to look at your hand."
My hand, Niki thinks and holds it up. The bandage is still there, dirty and coming unwound, but she didn"t lose it in the fall. It still hurts, now that Spyder"s reminded her, still burns and aches and itches, and she glances up at Spyder.
"If I"m dead, then how come my hand still hurts?"
"I said that you died, Niki. That doesn"t necessarily mean you"re dead now."
"Christ." Niki sighs and laughs, laughing because she"s scared and worried about Daria and so glad to see Spyder, everything pressing in at her in the same instant, and she doesn"t know what else to do.
"What"s funny?" Spyder asks and gives Niki the backpack. She unzips it and is surprised that everything"s still inside, and that it"s all still dry.
"Nothing," she replies. "Or lots and lots of things. I"m not sure yet. Ask me again later. So, what are the Palisades, anyway?"
Spyder peers through the mist and chews thoughtfully at her lower lip a moment before answering. And once again, Niki"s struck by the perfect, simple beauty of her. Have I changed, too? she thinks. Have I become that beautiful?
190.
"The Palisades," Spyder says. "You know back when most people still thought the world was flat, and that if you sailed too far in any direction you"d fall right off the edge?
Well, if those people had been right about the world where we were born, then the Palisades is sort of like the place they were afraid of sailing over the edge."
"That figures," Niki mutters half to herself, zipping her backpack shut again, and she slips it on over her left shoulder. "The ends of the earth."
"More or less," Spyder says. "Now come on, Niki. I wasn"t kidding when I said we shouldn"t hang around here too long."
"The jackals?" Niki asks, but Spyder shakes her head, scattering light through the mist and across the rocks, her dreads like the phosph.o.r.escent tendrils of a deep-sea creature.
"Here," she says. "you"re going to have a lot more things to worry about than the jackals. They might be the worst of it, but there are other things that can kill you just as fast."
"Is that supposed to be the good news?"
"Maybe," Spyder replies, and the tone in her voice to tell Niki she isn"t joking, that the fall from the bridge was just the start, that she"s tumbled out of the frying pan and into the fire.
"Before we leave, there"s something I want you to see,"
Spyder says. "Just so you know it"s not all monsters and wicked witches."
She helps Niki to her feet, and they walk together through the twilight mist, through the drowning roar of the Palisades, to a wide plaza carved directly from the stone.
The plaza and the bottom landing of a staircase leading up a very steep cliff face. Niki looks at the wide steps, then the cliff itself, searching in vain for the place where the stairs end somewhere far overhead. "I just came from up there,"
she says and frowns. "I hope to G.o.d I"m not about to have to walk all the way back."
"You"ll see," Spyder whispers. "You"ll see."
191.
By the time they finally reach the top of the winding granite staircase, Niki is out of breath and dizzy, and her left side hurts. Twice, she slipped on the wet stone and might have fallen, might have broken her neck or worse, if there"s anything worse than breaking your neck.
Harder things to fall on here than San Francis...o...b..y, harder things than the welcoming sea, and she leans against the low bal.u.s.trade and waits for her heart to stop pounding. Above them, the last rays of the day have been smothered by the advancing night, and stars burn bright and cold in a sky that might have been stolen from a Van Gogh painting. And she knows it"s real, because a whole boatload of crazy girls couldn"t dream up a sky like that, those brilliant, glistening colors, the wild swirl of a billion distant suns.
"I never get tired of looking at it," Spyder says, not the least bit winded by the long climb, and she"s leaning far out over the bal.u.s.trade, the wind blowing through her white hair. "I never will, because it"s always like the very first time."
The stairs have ended in a small balcony, rough-hewn half circle and a tall statue near the center that reminds Niki of a griffin, though it"s really something altogether different. She stands next to Spyder and stares up at the Van Gogh sky, and then down at the abyss stretching away beyond the ragged edges of the Palisades.
"Some people say that"s the way to Paradise," Spyder tells her. "And other people say it leads to an endless black sea filled with demons."
"What do you think?" Niki asks her, unable to look away, beginning to think she"ll never be able to look away.
"I think I don"t ever want to find out."
A mile or more beneath them, an ocean drains over the side of a world, a churning, roiling cataract as far as she can see to the left or the right, north and south perhaps, unless there aren"t directions in this place. And she can also see that the balcony is perched near the top of one of the countless barren islands scattered out along the rim of the 192 Palisades, a spire of mist-cut rock rising like a crooked, skeletal finger.
That"s enough, she thinks and shuts her eyes. Don"t look at it anymore, Niki.
"What"s wrong?" Spyder asks. "Did you see something?"
"I see that it"s terrible," Niki replies between gritted teeth, and she wants to back away from the edge but is too afraid to let go of the bal.u.s.trade. "At first, I thought it was beautiful, but it isn"t beautiful at all. It"s terrible."
"Can"t it be both?"
"No, Spyder, it can"t. It"s like dying. It"s worse than dying. It"s like being alone and knowing that you"ll never be anything else."
"Yes," Spyder says. "It is. It"s exactly like that."
"Then how the h.e.l.l can you stand there and say that it"s beautiful, you of all people?"
"I"m not who I was, that"s how. Now open your eyes, Niki. You look like a d.a.m.ned fool, standing there with them squeezed shut that way."
Niki shakes her head and doesn"t open her eyes, wishing she could drive her fingers deep into the stone so there"d be no danger of the balcony shaking her loose. "I"m afraid I"ll fall. It wants me to fall."
"That"s silly. It doesn"t want anything from you," but Spyder puts an arm around Niki and holds her close. "Turn loose, Niki. I wouldn"t let you fall. You"ve fallen enough."
"Where does it go?" Niki asks, not releasing her hold on the bal.u.s.trade. "All that water, and all the things that must live in it, all the fish and everything-"
"Over the side," Spyder tells her. "It all goes over the side," and Niki giggles and bites her tongue because it"s better than screaming. But that"s what she wants to do, wants to scream so loud and long and hard that she"ll be hoa.r.s.e for a week, and maybe then she can stop imagining what it would be like to be pulled over the Palisades. What it would be like to stare into endless night until her light-starved eyes finally surrendered and went blind. And even 193.
that would only be the beginning of it, because each and every second is the first in an eternity, and whatever"s waiting past the Palisades, she knows that it must surely be eternal.
"Help me," she whispers, sinking very slowly down until she"s crouching on the balcony, exchanging her grip on the top rail for one of the bal.u.s.ters. "I don"t think I can do this, Spyder. It"s too much for me. I thought I could, but it"s just too much."
"Yes, you can, " and now Spyder"s lips are pressed gently against her right ear, Spyder"s breath as warm as the wind and mist are cold. "I know you can do it because you"ve come this far. If you couldn"t do it, the jackals would have had you on the bridge."
"No," Niki whispers. "You"re wrong. I want to go back. I want to go home."
"Well you can"t, " Spyder snaps, her patience frayed in an instant and this anger so big, so certain of itself, it must have always been waiting there beneath the surface. "You can get up off your a.s.s, and you can stop whining, or you can stay here and die. But you can"t go back, Niki, so that"s your choice. That"s the only choice you have. And this time there"s no f.u.c.king psychologist to give you pills and cod-dle you and pretend the world gives a s.h.i.t what happens to you, and there"s no f.u.c.king Marvin to do everything for you and make you think you can"t even take care of yourself."
"Please stop," Niki begs, but Spyder shoves her, and she loses her balance, loses her grip on the bal.u.s.ter, and lands flat on her back, staring up at the mad and swirling stars.
The night sky and Spyder Baxter standing over her, and the stone between Spyder"s eyes has gone an ugly, vivid purple.
"This place was born hurting," she says, her lips throwing words like sparks to sear Niki"s skin. "It was born insane and lost, and there"s no room here for self-pity and weakness."
"I didn"t want to come here," Niki whispers. "I was 194 scared, and you said you needed me, and I didn"t know what else to do," and there are tears leaking from her eyes now, hot tears rolling down her cheeks. Spyder sneers and turns away.
"There"s so much strength in you, Niki," she says. "But if you can"t find it, if you can"t see it, then I"ve made the wrong decision and we"re all d.a.m.ned."
"I don"t know what you think I can do."
"What I think doesn"t matter. The only thing that matters now is what you think," and then Spyder starts back down the stairs alone, leaving Niki on the balcony with the statue that isn"t a griffin and the stars and the unending, unequivocal roar of the Palisades.
In a little while, Niki Ky follows her.
Not far from the base of the stairs, there"s a narrow catwalk leading up and then straight out across the swiftly flowing water and into the darkness and mist obscuring whatever lies beyond the Palisades. The wood creaks and groans underfoot and is almost as slippery as the stones were, weathered slats gone black with age and decay, sprouting small blue-gray mushrooms and moss and mold; in places, the wood has rotted completely through and Niki has to take very wide steps across the gaps. There are no handrails, just the noise of the draining ocean on either side, and she tries to keep to the center as much as possible. Spyder walks fast and stays always ten or twenty feet ahead; Niki imagines that the mist seems to part for her, seems to cringe as if it fears her touch and the clean white light that flows from her hair and gown to shine their way through the gloom.
"Are we going to walk all night?" Niki asks, finally, the first thing that she"s said to Spyder since the balcony, not asking because she"s too tired to keep going and her hand hurts, but because she can"t stand the silence wedged in between them any longer.
"No," Spyder calls back, her voice warped and m.u.f.fled by the fog so that she sounds even farther ahead of Niki 195.
than she is. "The nights are long this near the edge. You couldn"t walk until sunrise. Not many living people could."
"I"m not sure I can walk another step," Niki says, then stops to catch her breath and glances back the way they"ve come. There"s nothing there, at least nothing she can see, as though the catwalk has collapsed or disappeared in their wake. But the roar of the Palisades is growing more distant by slow degrees, each step carrying her away from the abyss. She doesn"t have any idea how long they"ve been walking, or how far they"ve come, though it seems like hours and miles. In the mist, with even the star-choked sky hidden from her eyes, she has only the diminishing roar of the cataract and her exhaustion to gauge distance and the pa.s.sage of time.
"Where are we going?" she asks. "I mean, where does this thing lead?" But if Spyder hears her, she doesn"t respond. So Niki starts walking again, moving as quickly as she dares now, trying to close the s.p.a.ce between them.