Spyder had gone to the kitchen and found a claw hammer and the pickle jar full of different-sized nails beneath the sink, two-penny, ten-penny, and all the time him muttering in her skull, Bible verses and his own crimson prophecies. When she’d opened her mouth to answer the questions he put to her, his voice came out, red and gristle spew of dead-man words that she couldn’t stop. She’d poured the nails out across the hall floor, rusty iron scatter, picking them up at random and sinking one after another into the hardwood, crazy angles, but enough of them piercing both the trapdoor and the floor. All the way around, stitching them in, while jumbled gospel and condemnation dribbled from her lips.
When she’d finished, Spyder pushed and dragged the big steamer trunk from her mother’s room, great-grandmother heirloom, had used it to cover the smashed and crooked nail heads, the basement door, passage down to all her hells. And then she’d climbed on top, had crouched there, predator’s huddle, and through her mouth, her father had howled his Armageddon songs.
When Spyder woke up, curled next to the trunk, there’d been watery light, dawning shades of gray and ivory, shining from the dining room and through the little window at the other end of the hall. She did not remember having fallen asleep, ached everywhere at once, and when she sat up her back and neck and shoulders had hurt so badly that she’d had to lie right back down.
There was no one but herself inside her head, and she’d lain still and thankfully alone, her cheek pressed against the cool, smooth wood, wax and varnish, left ear against the floor. And at first, the scritching sounds had meant nothing to her, the faint sobbing like lost children, another part of the house and nothing more; she’d listened, squinting as the light through the dirty window had brightened toward morning.
And then, “Spyder?” But the voice was too small and broken to have been real, to have been anything but an echo of an echo of something she’d forgotten.
“Spyder, please…”
The sun had seeped into the hall and, by slow degrees, the night washed back over her: that they had all gone down to the basement without her, Robin and the peyote and her idiot ceremony; that the voices had come, her father’s jibes and eager barbs, her father’s paranoia and zealot’s fear.
“Please…please, Spyder.”
She sat up, ignoring the pain, the tilting dizziness it tried to force on her, and stared at the trunk, the banged and dented edges of the trapdoor and stray nails scattered everywhere like vicious pick-up sticks. Something under the floor thumped twice and was quiet.
“Robin?” and her throat hurt, strep raw; she tried to swallow, but her mouth had gone cottony and dry.
No sound from beneath the trunk, beneath the basement door nailed shut, no sound anywhere but her heart and a mockingbird squawking loudly in borrowed voices somewhere outside.
She’d tried to wrestle the trunk aside, but there was no strength at all in her right arm, dislocated bones and sickening pain, the black threat of unconsciousness, and so she’d had to use her feet to push it out of the way. But then there were the nails, dozens of them, and she’d looked around desperately for the hammer, had finally found it hiding on the other side of the trunk.
“I’m opening it,” she croaked, over and over again, protective mantra against what she’d done. “I’m opening it.”
A lot of the heads were sunk too deep for the claw end of the hammer to get at, pocked, circular wounds in the floor where she’d buried them. With her good hand, Spyder pulled and wrenched loose the ones she could reach, nail after bent and crooked nail squeaking free of the wood. When she finished at least half the nails were still firmly, smugly, in place; she tugged at the chifforobe handle, and the boards creaked and buckled, made pirate-ship sounds, and she was able to get her hand under one corner of the trapdoor, able to force it open a few inches and see the blackness beneath.
When Robin’s hand scrambled out, lunged through the narrow opening, Spyder had almost screamed. Fingernails split and torn down to the bloodied quicks, blood caked maroon and the ugly color of raisins.
“Move your fingers,” she’d grunted, struggling not to let the door slip shut again, imagined her hand and Robin’s trapped together in the squeezing crack, their blood mingling and dripping down into the darkness. “Move your fingers.”
Robin strained desperately toward the light leaking into the basement.
“I said move your goddamned fingers!”
The fingers pulled themselves back slow, one-at-a-time retreat like the heads or tentacles of some frightened sea thing. When they were all gone, Spyder had eased her own hand out, let the trapdoor snap closed again, and someone on the other side had cried out, a wild and terrified animal sound, impossible to tell who it might have been. Breathless and lost in the empty space gouged by the scream, Spyder bent low, prayer bow, her mouth almost touching the drying stain where Robin’s fingers had groped only seconds before.
“Listen to me,” she said, speaking too loudly, too fast, “There’s a crowbar out on the porch. I’ve got to go and get it so I can pry this open.”
“Don’t leave me…” and that had been Robin, something shattered using Robin’s tongue, Robin’s vocal chords.
“I’m coming right back, I swear, I’m coming right the fuck back, okay?”
There was no answer, and she hadn’t waited for one.
She’d found the crowbar wedged tightly between the old washing machine and the house, and she’d had to work it back and forth for three or four minutes before it had finally pulled free, unexpected, and she’d staggered backwards, had almost lost her balance and fallen onto a heap of rusted motorcycle parts. The morning was clear and warm, bright Alabama morning, spring fading into summer, and for a moment she’d stood there, holding the crowbar out in front of her like a weapon from a martial arts movie.
Her car sat in the driveway, right where Byron had parked it the night before.
You could just go, and she’d had no idea whose ghost had said that, which lips had whispered behind her eyes, but not her father’s. He’d never tell her to leave the house, and not her mother, either. She’d let her arm drop limply to her side, the crowbar clunking against the junk at her feet.
The Celica’s keys were lying on top of her television. You could just go, the voice said again, They’d only be getting what they deserve. And this time she’d recognized it as her own, so no one to blame for these thoughts but herself.
You could drive away and just keep driving…wouldn’t ever have to come back here.
Pretending that she hadn’t heard, that she hadn’t seen the clean blue sky through the leaves of the pecans and water oaks, Spyder had lifted the crowbar again and stepped back inside the waiting house.
8.
After the sky had closed again, Robin cradled the hand the light had touched and given back against her chest, blessed thing, still glowing faintly at the lightless summit of the world where she and Byron had climbed. Mountain or tower of splinters, ladder hung above the pit and void, and he was pressed into the firmament, whispering his name again and again like it had power against the ribs of the night, like he would forget it and be no one and nothing if he ever stopped.
“Spyder…” she said, but the sky had closed and they were alone again, inside each other but outside themselves, and the wet edges of the hole wanted them back, wanted them to slide screaming back into its roiling, muddy belly. She thought that she’d given it Walter, thought that she’d seen his eyes wide at the end like frying eggs and glass slippers, dragged away, and that should have been enough.
Byron slid his arm around her again, hung around her neck like dry bones and wire, dried flowers and the ragged jewelry of martyrs. She held him close to her, his naked flesh as cold as sidewalk concrete beneath ice; her hand brushed across the gashes in his back, and he screamed again, twin and running sores from acromion to spine that wept hourglass sand and the memory of wings. Her own back burned, bled sand and regret from its own deep, unhealing wounds.