Somewhere to their right, there"s a tremendous splash, as if a gigantic body has risen from and fallen back into the sea, and then there"s laughter and a sound like thunder rolling across the water.
"You don"t want to know," Spyder says, "so don"t ask."
And the catwalk shudders slightly beneath their feet as the thunder fades away.
"Jesus," Niki whispers to herself, trying not to let her mind make too many pictures of the things that might be out there in the mist, floating or swimming just out of sight, watching their progress along the catwalk.
"Keep moving, Niki. There"s a village up ahead. It"s not much farther."
"Another island?" Niki asks hopefully, but Spyder shakes her head.
"Not exactly," she replies. "Just a little fishing village.
But there will be men with boats there who can take us to land."
"Are you still p.i.s.sed at me?"
"No. I"m still disappointed, that"s all."
196.
"Yeah, well," Niki says, keeping her eyes on her boots and the moldering boards of the catwalk. "Maybe that"s because you expected too much."
"Maybe so. Or maybe it"s because I know you"ve spent too many years looking for the answers you need in prescription bottles, listening to people who are too afraid of the truth or too stupid to even ask you the right questions."
"People tried to help me," Niki tells her, but she isn"t sure she believes it, and she can hear the doubt in her voice. She starts to say something about Dr. Dalby, then thinks better of it. "Marvin tried to help," she says, instead.
"Did he?" Spyder asks, and leaps easily across a particularly wide gap in the slats. She stops and waits for Niki to cross it.
"Yes," Niki replies, gazing at mist filling the empty s.p.a.ce left by the missing boards, wondering how far down it is to the water. "I think he did. Spyder, I don"t know if I can get across this one."
"You have to. You can"t stay here."
"If I fall-"
"-you"ll drown," Spyder says. "Or something will eat you. Or both."
"Marvin tried to help me," she says again.
"Daria paid him to take care of you. You were his job, Niki, just like that other girl he told you about, the one who saw wolves."
"How do you know about her?" Niki asks, taking off her pack and handing it across the gap to Spyder.
"It"s all about salvation," Spyder replies, and holds an arm out to Niki. "He couldn"t save that girl, so he had to try to save you. When he lost her, he lost himself. You were supposed to be his redemption."
"I can"t do it. I"ll fall. It"s too far across."
"Christ, girl. A little while ago, you were throwing yourself off f.u.c.king bridges. Now you"re afraid to hop over a little bitty hole like that?"
"It"s not the same," Niki says, and she looks up at Spy- 197.
der, at her pale blue eyes and the glowing red gem between them. "There"s nothing down there but water."
"How do you know that? You don"t, do you? For all you know, there"s another place waiting for you underneath this one. h.e.l.l, for all you know, next time it"s Heaven."
"You just told me I"d drown, or get eaten-"
"Come on, Niki. Take a deep breath, and keep your eyes on me, and jump. I can help, but I can"t do it for you."
"What makes you any better than Marvin?" Niki demands, looking back down at the hole. "You brought me here because you think I can save this place, because you can"t."
"Yeah," Spyder says. "Exactly," and when Niki looks up again, she"s smiling. "Now you"re thinking. Come on, Niki.
You could make this jump in your sleep."
In my sleep, Niki thinks. In my dreams, and she takes a deep breath, filling her lungs with the damp and salty air, and jumps.
Just over the Tennessee-Alabama state line, the rusted purple Lincoln pulls into a BP station because the girl in the backseat is awake now, and she has to pee. The big car glides smoothly across the wide parking lot, past the double row of self-serve pumps and cases of canned Coca-Cola stacked up like Mayan ruins. Archer Day lights a cigarette and points at an empty parking s.p.a.ce between an SUV and a pickup truck.
"Where the h.e.l.l are we this time?" the girl asks from the backseat and rubs her eyes.
"Just about a hundred miles north of the a.s.shole of the world," the driver replies and squints through his cheap truck-stop sungla.s.ses at the sun glinting bright off the wide and tinted plate-gla.s.s windows of the convenience store.
"So we"re almost there?"
"We"ll be in Birmingham before noon," the man tells her and slips the Lincoln in snug between the SUV and the pickup, easy as you please. There"s an NRA decal on the rear windshield of the truck and a b.u.mper sticker that 198 reads THOSE WHO LIVE BY THE SWORD GET SHOT BY THOSE WHO DON"T.
"s.h.i.t. It looks even worse than Kentucky," Theda says, and opens her door, letting in the cold.
"You ain"t seen nothing yet," Walter Ayers says and removes his sungla.s.ses. He glances at his aching, bloodshot eyes in the rearview mirror. Nothing a few drops of Visine and a couple more ephedrine tablets wouldn"t fix, but he thinks maybe he"ll let Archer drive the last leg. Maybe he"ll get lucky and sleep an hour or so before the city. "From here on, it just keeps getting better."
"I"m sure it does," Theda sneers, and gets out of the car, slamming the door loudly behind her.
"I think she"s having second thoughts," Archer says, whispering, watching the frowzy girl in her ratty black sweater and black-and-white striped leggings, her tall Doc Marten boots, the tangled poppy-red hair hiding her eyes.
"Aren"t you?"
"No," Archer Day tells him. "Not now. I know better now."
"Do you?" he asks, and slips his sungla.s.ses on again.
"Well, I gotta admit, that sure puts you one up on me."
"There"s no time left for doubt."
"I"m not talking about doubt. I"m talking about finally having the good sense to look the other way. Maybe sit this s.h.i.t out and let someone else pick up the pieces."
Archer turns her head and glares at him with her hard brown eyes. "After all you"ve seen?" she asks. "After all these years?"
He shrugs and turns the key in the ignition; the engine sputters once or twice and dies. "Sometimes I think you got a hard-on for Armageddon," he sighs.
"I know why I"m here, that"s all. I know what I have to do."
Theda is standing in front of the car, talking to a short-ish, potbellied man in a John Deere baseball cap and a faded Lynyrd Skynyrd T-shirt. She points at the Lincoln, and the fat man nods and grins, showing off a mouthful of dingy, uneven teeth, then opens the door for her.
199.
"You know, if we sit here much longer," Archer says and frowns, twirling a strand of her long yellow-brown hair around her right index finger, "there"s no telling what sort of trouble she"ll get into."
"She can take care of herself," he replies.
"Yeah, that"s exactly what I"m afraid of, Walter. We"re too close. We don"t need any delays because Theda can take care of herself."
"Maybe we"re not as close as you think, maybe we"re not even halfway-" but she"s already getting out of the car, already shutting the door, and Never mind, he thinks. Never mind, because this is all going to go down the way it has to, the way that Spyder always meant for it to go down, and, in the end, all he can do is read his lines on cue and go through the motions.
Because the story isn"t complete without the villian.
Or the hero.
And these days he"s forgotten exactly who is who and which is which, if he ever knew, if there"s really any difference. Walter shuts his eyes, because he knows that Archer can handle Theda if she gets into any trouble, because they feel like he"s rubbed them full of sand and cayenne pepper.
No sleep since somewhere back in Pennsylvania, and that seems like at least a week ago.
And the dream is right there, waiting for him the way it always is, patient and unchanging, unconcerned about the drugs he takes to stay awake or the insomnia he"s spent more than a decade nurturing. Some part of him, something small and ancient and driven more by simple instinct than intellect, tries to pull back from the slippery edge of consciousness. But it"s too late, and he"s already sliding down and back, across the years and memories, stumbling and lost in those hours or minutes or days after Robin"s peyote ceremony, before Spyder comes down to the bas.e.m.e.nt from the brilliant, burning hills to take him home, to lead him across the Dog"s Bridge and back to the World.
The familiar, smothering aloneness, the severed cord, 200 the broken chain, knowing that Robin and Byron are free, that they"ve slipped away, escaped, and he"s still cowering in the sulfur rubble on the crumbling edge of the Pit. The thing that Spyder called Preacher Man knows he"s still there, knows that he"s all alone now, and it roars so loud the heavens rumble and the Pit rips open wider, devouring more of this place that is no place at all. The powdered-gla.s.s ground beneath his feet tilts and is turning, accelerat-ing counterclockwise spiral down and down, and the Pit yawns and belches, grinding its granite teeth.
Preacher Man fills up the entire roiling floor-joist sky, opens his scrawny, hard sermon arms as wide as that, and his ebony book has become a blazing red sun bleeding out his voice. Ugly black things cling to his hands and face, biting, burrowing things, and Walter is crawling on his skinned hands and knees now, clambering for a hold, crawling as the earth shivers and goes soft. He remembers his wings, beautiful charcoal wings for a mockingbird boy, and he knows that"s why Preacher Man hates him. Walter tries to stand and spread his wings, but the fire and acid dripping from the clouds have scorched them raw and useless, and Preacher Man laughs and laughs and laughs.
"Come back with me," Spyder says, her hands tight around his wrists and Preacher Man filling up all creation behind her. "It"s gonna be all right now, Walter," but the world turns, water going down a drain, down that mouth, and the earth is shaking so violently that he can"t even stand up.
"Help me," he says, every time, and every time she smiles, soft and secret Spyder smile, nods and puts her arms around him. Preacher Man howls and claws the sagging sky belly, and the sour rain sticks to them like pine sap, turning the ground to tar. "He won"t let me leave, Spyder.
He knows what I"ve seen, what I know."
And so she turns around and stares up into the demon"s face, like there"s nothing to fear in those eyes, nothing that can pick her apart, strew her flesh to the winds and singe the bones, and she says, "He"s not part of this. You can"t 201.
have him." The spiderweb tattoos on her arms writhe electric blue, loaded-gun threat, and now Preacher Man has stopped laughing. He retreats a single, vast step, putting the Pit between himself and Spyder.
"Lila," he roars. "What you"ve done to me, you"ll burn in h.e.l.l forever." Voice of thunder and mountains splitting apart to spill molten bile. "What you"ve done to me, you"ll burn until the end of time."
The holy blue fire flows from her arms, the crackling static cage that he won"t dare touch, her magic to undo him utterly, and then she"s pulling Walter from the muck, hauling him across the shattered plains. Days and days across the foothills with Preacher Man howling curses like lightning bolts, howling their d.a.m.nation, but Spyder doesn"t look at him again. She drags Walter over pustulant caleche and stones that shriek like dying rabbits, shields him from the rubbing alcohol wind that whips up dust phantoms and hurls burning tumbleweeds.
"Close your eyes, Walter," she says again and again, and at the end he does, because the long-legged things are so close, and he knows the climb"s too steep, that he"s too tired to do it, and she"s too exhausted to fight anymore, and their jaws leak the shearing sound of harvest . . .
. . . and he wakes hard, like falling on ice, waking to the aching stiffness in his neck and shoulders and someone calling out his name over and over again. He reaches beneath the front seat for the Beretta automatic and is out of the Lincoln and through the front doors of the convenience store before the last terrible dream images have even begun to fade. His feet on black-and-white checkerboard linoleum and the fluorescent lights in his eyes, but his head still filled with red skies and the stink of brimstone.
"Well, it"s about G.o.dd.a.m.n time," Archer says, and Walter sees the man behind the counter with the shotgun, and Theda on her knees, and the guy in the Lynyrd Skynyrd Tshirt backed up against a display of beef jerky, his eyes so wide it"s almost funny. There are other people, but these 202 are the only three who matter, and he aims the 9mm at the clerk.
"Stop pointing that thing at her right now, " he growls, and thumbs off the safety.
"Just look at her," Archer says, and shakes her head.
"You gotta search long and hard to find someone that G.o.dd.a.m.n stupid."
"He called me a freak," Theda croaks and coughs up another gout of the sticky white mess puddled on the tile in front of her. There are tiny black things wriggling in the vomit, trying to pull themselves free. She wipes her mouth on the back of her hand. "So . . . I thought I"d show him," she says and smiles up at the redneck.
"I said not to point the shotgun at the girl, motherf.u.c.ker," Walter tells the clerk, his voice as cold and calm as well water, and he takes a step closer to the counter.
"What the f.u.c.k"s wrong with her?" the clerk asks and turns the gun on Walter, instead. "She got some sort of f.u.c.kin" disease or what?"
"Whatever it is, it ain"t nothing that calls for a G.o.dd.a.m.n shotgun. You put that piece of s.h.i.t down, and we"ll be out of here before you can count to three."
"I can count to three pretty G.o.dd.a.m.n fast."
"Put it down, man. I know you don"t want to die today, and I think you know it, too."
"Stupid f.u.c.king b.i.t.c.h," Archer hisses. "I"d shoot her myself if I could."
The redneck in the Lynyrd Skynyrd shirt mutters something unintelligible, and Theda snaps her teeth at him and laughs.
"She"s puking up f.u.c.kin" spiders, " the clerk says, and Walter can see the greasy beads of sweat standing out on his forehead and cheeks, sweat soaked straight through the front of his green BP smock, can almost smell the fear coming off him like smoke off a fire. "You tell me what the f.u.c.k"s wrong with her."
"Just put down the shotgun and none of this will be your problem anymore."
203.
Theda laughs and vomits again.
"She"s f.u.c.king disgusting," Archer whispers. "You know that, little girl? You"re f.u.c.king disgusting."
"He called me a freak. I asked him . . . I asked if he wanted to see . . . just how freaky it can get-"
"So you showed him."
"Yeah . . . I showed him."
"If I put down my gun you"ll shoot me," the clerk says and swallows, his eyes darting quickly from Walter to the girl on the floor to the bore of the Beretta, then right back to Walter.
"No, I won"t. I"ve got business to take care of, and if I shoot you there"ll be cops to deal with, and then I won"t be able to do my business."
"Jesus," the redneck mutters. "Those are black widows.
Those are G.o.dd.a.m.n black widows."
"Yeah," Theda coughs. "Aren"t they pretty?"
"Get up off the floor," Archer tells her. "Get up, and go out to the car."