Behind them, the fire had stopped falling from Heaven, the dim red afterglow a million miles or years below, and there was nothing left in the World but the two of them and the skittering things, the bristle-haired things with their crowns of oildrop eyes. And the Preacher, the Dragon, the man with the Book and skin that fit too tightly. When He’d come for them, long strides across the earth and the skitterers dropping off his clothes, she’d begged Byron to tear her wings off, so that they would be as black as the night, as invisible. So that they would be nothing He could see or want. They’d hung their wings like trophies from the walls of razor wire, wreaths or trophies of feathers and fire and withering sinew.
And they’d left Walter, too, somewhere at the edge, on his knees, tearing madly at himself, and the World had shaken as He came.
She had reached out and touched the Dome of Heaven, tore again at its closed eyelids with her ruined hands. Behind them, the skitterers were getting braver, jabbering murmurs, and she’d heard their legs like sharpened pencils, the hairbrush scrape of their bodies against one another.
“Undo me. Swallow me,” Byron whispered. “Don’t let them take me.”
And then the sky, its single blazing eye, had ripped open wide, steel lashes tearing loose like jutting teeth, and the night had rushed back down toward the hole, catching the skitterers in its undertow rush and dragging them back to where the Dragon picked His teeth and waited. Her hand and the white serpents around Her white face, and the white nimbus of flame around Her head. Robin’s hand in Hers, and then they’d been hauled up into the light.
9.
Still three blocks from the club, Dr. Jekyll’s and its melting-pot mix of punks and slackers, queers and skins and goths, lookie-look rednecks and wannabes; Robin pulled into an empty parking lot and dug around in the glove compartment until she found the right prescription bottle. The name on the label was her mother’s, an old script for Halcion that she’d lifted from her parents’ medicine cabinet and exhausted months ago, half-filled now with the Lortab and carnation Demerol and powder-blue ten-milligram Valium that she bought from her connections. She dumped a few of the pills out in her palm, pastel scatter like Easter candy, picked out one of the Valium and dry swallowed it.
Too bad the pills never worked fast enough, or long enough, anymore, never managed to do much more than soften the edges of the things that came looking for her, the things that scampered and hummed, the things that only Spyder could send skulking back to the grayer parts of her brain.
Spyder, like a nursery rhyme or prayer, dim words from her mother’s lips when she was very small and the night-light had only seemed like a way for the monsters to see her better: From ghoulies and ghosties…
And long-leggity beasties…
Robin slumped back against the bucket seat and willed herself to relax, buying time until the Valium kicked in. She focused on the staggered pattern of bricks in a warehouse wall across the wide parking lot, a hundred rectangular shades between red and brown and black caught in the Civic’s headlights. Bricks laid before her parents had been born, when her grandparents had been children, maybe. The engine was still running, faint and soothing metal purr of fans and pistons, and Sarah McLachlan sighed like gravel and rain from the stereo.
The shadow slipped across the wall, blackened mercury, gangling arms or legs and so sudden that it was gone before she’d even jumped; she sat up straight and stared, unblinking, across the hood, the empty space between the car and the wall and the unbroken shafts of her headlights.
…and long-leggity beasties…
And then the pain between her shoulders, the shearing fire that left her breathless and wanting to puke, and she yanked the Civic out of Park, never taking her eyes off the wall, not daring to glance into the rearview mirror, as the tires squealed and she backed out into the street.
CHAPTER SIX
1.
T he sun down an hour, first long hour of cold, and Keith Barry sat on one end of the old loading platform; no trains on these tracks now, just the rotten boards and brick and concrete crumbling down to grit and dust, the barrel that the bums and junkies kept their stingy little fire inside. He sat with Anthony Jones and his banged-up Honer harmonica, and they’d been playing Tom Waits and Leadbelly for the rambling empty stretch of railyard, the dry, whispering weeds between the ties and broken glass and a stripped pickup burned to a red-brown cicada shell. Keith plucked his pawnshop twelve-string and Anthony Jones’s harp cried like all the ghost whistles of all the trains that would never rumble past this platform again.
“Almighty Christ,” Long Joey muttered, Long Joey who stood in the crunchy gravel ballast and stomped his feet like someone trying to make wine from stones. “Too damn cold for November. We all gonna have blue balls by Thanksgiving.”
The last chords of “Gun Street Girl” and then Keith laid the guitar down beside him, although Anthony let a few more notes straggle from the instrument pressed to his dark lips. Keith took a big swallow from the half-empty pint of cheap rye whiskey and handed the bottle to Long Joey.
“Maybe this’ll put a little spark back in them,” and Joey grinned his crackhead smile and accepted the bottle in his shaky hands. “Just don’t drop it, okay? Drop it, and I’ll have to kick your ass.”
Anthony finished his solo and wiped the harmonica on a flannel sleeve. “And then you give it here, L.J.”
Keith had been at the platform since late afternoon, since he’d made his connection, cooked and fixed in the men’s room of the Jack’s Hamburgers on First Avenue. He carried the twelve-string in a case so beat-up that it stayed together only by the sticky grace of a roll or two worth of duct tape and some copper wire he’d strung through the holes where the hinges used to be. He also kept his works in the case, hidden inside a compartment intended for picks and capos; Keith never used a pick, relied instead on his sure and callused fingers. He had enough stuff left for one more fix, tucked safely inside his left boot.
There were twelve or thirteen men on the platform tonight, most of them huddled around the flickering barrel, but he was the only one into junk. Most of them were winos or dirtbag crackheads, street addicts too far down the food chain to even have house fees. They bought their bits of rock from the cruisers who pushed from their cars. Every now and then he caught the caustic stink of someone’s pipe over the smell of piss and booze and burning wood.
Long Joey passed the bottle to Anthony, noticeably emptier for its time in his hands, and then he started stomping his feet again, pulling hard at his earlobes. Long Joey was a puller and sometimes his ears were raw and caked with dried blood. He liked to talk, but never talked about anything but crack and the women he either imagined or lied about having fucked.
“I told this bitch L.J. don’t put no jimmie cap on his dick, but she just kept on whining about the big A, so I finally slapped her around until she shut the hell up.”
“And you just took you some pussy, ain’t that right, L.J.?” and Anthony grinned and winked at Keith.
“Goddamn right. Goddamn right.”
Anthony passed the bottle back to Keith, just enough left for one more round; the rye felt warm burning down his throat, settling in his belly.
“You still seein’ that pretty little girl with the fire-engine hair?” Anthony asked, and for a second Keith was too busy looking through the neck of the bottle, strange and useless telescope that looked out on nowhere, to answer.