“You do whatever you want,” she’d said, poisonous calm between each word, “if it’s so important to you. Do it and get it over with and then get out of my house.”
“Christ, Spyder. Jesus. Won’t you even try to tell me why you’re afraid?”
But Spyder had already stepped past her, had kicked over a towering stack of paperbacks on her way to the darkened hall, scattering dust and silverfish and brittle, yellowed pages. Robin had stared down at the jumbled collage of faded covers, a painting by Frazetta of a sword-wielding woman with impossible breasts, something dead and scaly at her feet, Stephen King and Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury. Knowing how badly she’d fucked this up, knowing that Spyder might never let her take back these things she’d said. And knowing that without her, the ceremony would be flawed, not hollow, but not whole, either.
“Well?” Byron had asked, some time later, long enough that her legs had begun to ache from standing in the same position. She’d kept her eyes on the floor, the heap of tumbledown fantasies.
“Take the bags down to the basement, now, Walter,” she’d said, and he hadn’t waited for her to tell him a third time.
6.
Later, what Robin had remembered of the ceremony and the basement was like pages torn apart and hastily Scotch-taped together again by a blind woman, pages illuminated with needles and metallic inks and black words that she was glad had all but lost their meanings.
She’d remembered the preparations, Walter hefting open the trapdoor in the hallway floor and the cool air rising from the darkness, acrid-sweet stench of dust and earth and mildew. No light but their candles, and her feet uncertain on the steep and narrow stairs down, wood that creaked, cried, beneath her bare feet and the dust against her skin had felt like velvet. Velvet that clung to the soles of her feet, and her lungs had filled up with the basement air like drowning waters. And Walter had closed the trapdoor behind them.
While she’d traced her lines on the red dirt, Walter had dug a very small pit in the center of the floor, rusty garden spade breaking through the stubborn crust packed down by almost a century. Byron had stood quiet and alone, smoking his cloves, throwing candlelight shadows like shifting, craggy people. Everyone trying not to think about Spyder and thinking of absolutely nothing else.
She had laid the signs in Morton’s salt and Crayola tempera, had driven the twenty-four white candles into the hard ground, markers of wax and fire in places that mattered.
And when she’d finished and the basement glowed soft and flickering orange, the dark driven back into cracks and corners and the spaces between floorboards overhead, she popped the lid off the little can of Sterno from one of Byron’s bags, struck a kitchen match and set the flaming can at the bottom of Walter’s shallow pit.
“Take off your clothes.” She remembered having said that, and the looks on their faces, and Byron’s exasperation and Walter trying not to look at her while he’d stripped. And then they’d sat in a circle around the Sterno fire, faint chemical heat against their faces and the circle incomplete, missing one, the one that mattered most of all. Walter had handed her the crumpled bag of peyote buttons, and she’d taken the first one, had bitten into the bitter, rubbery flesh and gagged. But she had swallowed, and then swallowed another bite, and there’d been lukewarm bottles of mineral water to calm her stomach. They’d passed the bag around, counterclockwise, each of them taking their turn again and again, chewing slowly and drinking water and not talking, until the nausea had found them and Robin had set the bag aside.
She had sprinkled salt and rosemary, nutmeg and mace, above the fire.
“I’m going to puke,” Walter said, his rolling, seasick voice and, “No,” she’d said firmly, “Not yet. Hang on as long as you can.” And he had, but that hadn’t been much longer. “Please,” he’d whispered, sweat on all their faces, slack eyes, sweat on their naked bodies, and she’d only nodded. He’d crawled quickly away and emptied his stomach somewhere in the maze she’d drawn. Byron had gone next, before Walter had even finished his loud retching; and Robin last; had waited so long that she’d only made it three or four feet away from the fire before she’d thrown up the pulpy stew of chewed peyote, bile, and Perrier, the half-digested meal Spyder had cooked for her, and sat coughing, staring through watering eyes at the candle she’d drowned in vomit.
One at a time, they’d gone back to sit around the scrape in the earth and the Sterno, and Robin had taken Walter’s hand on her right, Byron’s on her left, held on tight, little-girl-on-a-carnival-ride grip. And Byron had taken Walter’s hand, and the warmth that had settled over her, peace inside and deeper peace than she’d ever known or imagined. And then she’d begun to speak, knowing that it was time, had clutched at the strict words she’d laid out as scrupulously as the designs drawn on the floor, the candles, the pinches of spice and salt. But the world was raveling, taking itself apart, and the words had run from her like scurrying black beetles. She’d squeezed their hands harder, so terrified and so completely beyond fear that she’d thought she would never be afraid again.
Later, she had remembered that Byron had begun to cry, joy and sadness, and that the wings of the angels that rose from the candle flames blazed and trailed razor night, obsidian shards that sliced her eyes, that cut her lips.
And that when the dry and whispering things had begun to dig themselves from the earthen walls-claws like Walter’s spade and the scrambling legs that glistened and drew blood from the shimmering air-she’d finally closed her eyes.
And the sound of thunder, and Spyder laughing, far away.
7.
In the world above, Spyder had come out of her room and stared for a long time at the trapdoor, silently watching its paper cut edges and the tarnished brass handle, handle borrowed from a chifforobe drawer, bolted there by her father after the old pine hand grip had broken off years and years and years before. No sound rose up through the floor, no evidence that anyone was down there, no proof that they’d left her behind. She wiped at her dry eyes and walked over to stand directly on top of the trapdoor; the wood had sagged slightly beneath her weight.
She went without you, her father chattered in her ear, from inside her ear. You see that, don’t you? They all went without you, and here you thought you were the big magic…
“Shut up,” she’d whispered, whispered the way she had learned to whisper so no one else would hear, so no one would ask, Who you talkin’ to, Spyder? Who you think you’re talkin’ to? And she’d chewed at her upper lip, toying with a ragged bit of skin.
Did you think they couldn’t do this without you, Lila? Did you think that little green-haired whore of yours wasn’t wicked enough to do this witchy shit on her own?
“Shut up,” and her teeth had ground through flesh, salty, warm blood in her mouth like chocolate melting on her tongue.
They don’t need you.
“Shut up!” and she covered her ears with both hands, useless, knowing that his voice wasn’t getting in that way.
“You don’t know, you don’t know shit!”
She’s taking them away from you, Lila. I know that.
“SHUT UP!” and then she’d thrown herself hard against a wall, so hard that the plaster had dented and cracked. “SHUT UP, SHUT UP, SHUT UP!”
Dull smack of her shoulder against the wall, again and again, meat-thud tattoo, and the cracks had spread like the patterns on her arms until she’d punched a hole through and plaster dust had silted to the floor like flour snow. Dark smear of herself down the wounded white wall. And she’d known he wasn’t wrong. That her father had eyes to see through the lies she told herself, the lies that Robin had been telling her.