Robin flinched, and Walter looked at them for the first time in ten or fifteen minutes, his eyes rimmed puffy red and irises seething with onionskin layers of hurt and fear and anger, palm-print impressions framing his face like the tailfeathers of kindergarten turkeys.
“You cold-hearted son of a bitch,” he said. “You don’t even care if she’s dead or not, do you? You’re just worried about yourself. You’re just worried about having to explain this mess to the cops.”
“Frankly, Walter, I think jail’s about the last thing I should be worrying about right now, don’t you?” and Byron pulled the wings off his napkin bat and let its torso flutter to the tabletop.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“You know what he means, Walter,” she said and looked back out at the snow, the candyland world without sharp edges. “You can pretend all you want, but you’re still just as much a part of this as we are, as much as Spyder.”
“She lied to us,” Byron said. “She lied to us, and the whole thing is just a trap.”
“You two just don’t get it, do you?” Walter asked. “The game is fucking over, okay? This shit is for real.”
Robin closed her eyes, feeling the X still burning inside her, her stomach and muscles tight from the strychnine and everything that had gone wrong in the last hour.
“What did you see down there, Walter?” she asked without opening her eyes. “What did you see in the basement? What did you dream about before Spyder made the dream catcher?”
“Robin, we were just fucked up. We were tripping our fucking balls off. We didn’t see anything real, nothing that wasn’t in our heads all along.”
“That’s horseshit,” Byron said, rolling his dismembered bat into a wad and sinking it in his glass of ice water. “And you know it, and you’re just too big a pussy to admit it.”
“You never believed any of the story,” Robin said, not a question, a revelation, maybe, and she opened her eyes, turned slowly away from the window to face Walter; he winced and looked quickly back down at his hands.
“I know you guys aren’t this stupid,” he said. “It was just a bad trip, and all that other stuff was just something Spyder made up to try and make us sleep better.”
“You’re a liar,” said Robin, her voice more bitter than the coffee. “You think maybe it’ll all go away if you say it never happened. That you’ll stop seeing the shadows if you say they’re not there.”
“Robin, I haven’t seen jack shit, okay? I’m telling you the truth. I haven’t seen jack-fucking-shit.”
“I don’t believe you,” Robin said.
“That’s not my goddamn problem.”
Short silence then, and Byron tapping impatient black nails against Formica. “So, you’re not even going with us?” he asked, finally. “You won’t even do that much?”
“We’re in enough trouble already without breaking into Spyder’s house.”
“It wouldn’t be breaking in,” Byron said. “Robin has a key. You know she has a key, Walter,” and without asking permission, he grabbed for her purse, chrome cut and bolted into a tiny coffin with a handle and latch and a purple velvet ankh on the lid; she let him take it, let him in.
“We have to protect the dream catcher,” Byron said as he dug through the junk in her purse, dumping everything out on the table, and there was her key ring, more goth kitsch, a plastic spine and pelvis.
“I’m sorry,” Walter said and left his mouth open like there was more, but he couldn’t find the words.
“She used your hair, too,” Robin said, but now she was looking at the storm again, frantic blur, falling ice white sky, but not at Walter or the mess of her things Byron had spilled on the table. If they didn’t leave soon, they’d be spending the night in the diner or walking.
“I’m sorry,” he said again, no more meaning than the first time, a little more regret, and she could hear the bright jingle of her keys, Byron holding them up for Walter like something he’d be helpless to refuse.
“I’m going back,” he said. “Maybe I can explain-”
“Then to hell with you,” and Byron picked up one of the glasses of ice water the waitress had set down in front of them, obligatory courtesy, never mind the weather, and dashed it in Walter’s face. Walter gasped at the cold, the surprise, and Robin still looked at the snow, the softening shadows between the cars, perfect shadow canvas.
“I’m sorry,” Walter said, last time, third time the charm, and slid out of the booth, a dripping pocket-wrinkled dollar dropped on the table for his coffee. “Please be careful,” he said. “Please.”
“Fuck off,” Byron hissed, and then Walter was gone, the diner door jangling shut like a phantom cow, and they sat very alone in the booth, each waiting for the other to speak, waiting for whatever came next.
4.
“Before the World, there was a war in Heaven,” and then Spyder had stopped, had gripped Robin’s hand tighter and looked into all their eyes at once. Three pairs to her one, bright six to her pale two.
They’d all come back to her, after staying away for days and days, back to the house, with their nightmares and the lanky things they thought they saw during the day tagging along behind. Robin and Byron had sobbed out every detail, had told her all the things about the basement that at first they’d kept back, the burning things that Preacher Man had said. Walter had sat apart from them at the kitchen table, looking nervously from window to nightblack window. And Spyder, quietly watching them and listening and watching too the secret, jagged places inside herself.
She hadn’t told them the truth, or what she’d suspected might be the truth. Instead, she had held her lover’s hand hard so Robin’s fingertips had gone white, and she’d given them a lie so perfect and pretty she’d have died to make it true. Had prayed to the darkness in her head that the words would be enough to save them, to bring them all the way back to her.
The way she’d always kept herself alive.
“And after the angels had fallen,” she’d said, “there were a few who hid themselves where the World would be. And they were made into the World, stitched into the fabric so tight that it took them a million or a billion years to find their way out again. They slipped out without God seeing them, when volcanoes erupted or the rocks wore away into canyons or when caverns fell in and made sinkholes.
“But they knew that God was still looking for them, because they’d stolen things from Heaven, things they didn’t think could ever be trusted to Him again. And they’d hidden them deep inside the earth during their captivity, had found-”
“This is total bullshit,” Walter had whispered, watching the bushes that pressed themselves against screen and glass, switching twigs and restless green leaves.
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” and Robin had whirled around at him, spitting the words out between teeth clenched and lips snarled back, rabid, furious warning that she had to hear what was being said and she might hurt him if he pissed Spyder off and she quit talking.
But Spyder had only pulled her closer, Robin and the kitchen chair scrunk across the old linoleum, fresh scuff marks on the checkerboard squares, and she’d pressed Robin’s tear-slicked face against her chest, hadn’t even looked at Walter.
“They’d stolen important things,” she said. “Very important things. Treasures.
“They thought they’d put them places that even He would never find them. But they were wrong, and He sent His lieutenants and angel captains down to bring them back. And to kill the thieves.”
Outside, something had padded quickly by, hurried feet below the window’s sill, and Walter had jumped, wiped sweat from his forehead. “Goddamn dogs,” he’d said. “Doesn’t anyone around here keep their fucking dog on a leash?”