He wanted to stand, to leave the voice and the rancid smell, what all this meant or didn’t mean, and she said, “Please…” before one leg like a giant’s beetle-shelled finger reached slowly out of the dark, jointed leg and hairs more like quills, and another, then, testing the paler darkness that surrounded him. Keith wanted to close his eyes, but he watched as she came, all that was left of her and what there was now, instead. Enough of her face in there that he knew, the way he knew the pain in that one green eye, swollen and helpless contrast to the others, her new eyes, bulging, all-seeing pools of pitch and the stingy hours before dawn. The eye and the voice and the tufts of green hair.
Her lips there between the furred vise jaws, the needle-hooked fangs, lips cracked, and this was worse than anything from the dreams, worse than the thing hanging, dripping, from the rafters of Heaven.
“I want to go home,” it said, she said, too-pink lips, raw, and clumsy mandibles, and now the air was full of drifting threads, gossamer falling around him, settling everywhere like spun sugar or glass, cotton candy or angel-hair. The world growing too bright and thin around him, before the flash. The strands burned his skin, and the ground sizzled and smoked where they landed.
“It’s worse,” she said, “over here,” perfect, beautiful sadness and inched backwards into the shadows, leaving something glistening wet and sludgy behind. Keith Barry shut his eyes, as the sparkling silk rained down like Christmas, and he tried to find the memory of Daria’s face through the acid filling his veins and hold it as the world dissolved around him.
3.
From Birmingham to Nashville, Nashville to Louisville and on to Indianapolis, buses and interchangeable bus stations, and Walter had no idea where he was going, hardly why. Less money left every day and no direction, no solution but this movement that solved nothing, and nothing inside but dread and terror pushing him farther and farther from that spot on the earth where Spyder’s house sat festering in his head. Sometime Sunday morning, and he waited for the connection to Chicago, only half-awake in the molded blue plastic chair and his ass hurting, watching the faces around him, the eyes with their own simpler worries. Worries in the real world, solid world, not the insane things, what he didn’t believe and could no longer deny.
At the Greyhound counter, a greasy-looking woman in a Pennzoil windbreaker was arguing with the clerk, something he couldn’t hear, but something to watch anyway, her lips moving and the sneer on her face, white-trash contempt, the annoyed disinterest in the clerk’s eyes, and sleep moved silently up behind him…
…and it’s always the same, always Walter lost in those hours or minutes or days before Spyder comes down from the brilliant, burning hills to take him home, to lead him back to the World. And always that sudden sense of aloneness, severed cord, 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 edge of the pit. He wants to be happy, to cheer, because they’re gone, like Dorothy to the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodsman and the Cowardly Lion, they got away, they got away; Preacher Man, the Dragon, knows at once, and He roars so loud the world rumbles and the pit rips wider, devours more of this place that is no place at all. The powderglass ground beneath his feet tilts and is turning, accelerating counterclockwise spiral down and down and the pit yawns and belches, grinds its granite teeth.
And the Dragon fills up the roiling floor-joist sky, spreads His scrawny hard sermon arms wide, his dragon wings, and the book is a blazing red sun bleeding out his voice. Ugly black things cling to His hands and face, biting things and Walter is on hands and bloody knees now, clambering for any hold, crawling as the earth shivers and goes powdery. And he remembers his wings, his beautiful charcoal wings, mockingbird boy, and that’s why Preacher Man hates him, isn’t it, and he tries to stand, spreads them wide, but the raining fire has scorched them raw, ragged feather scorch, and the Dragon laughs and laughs and laughs.
“Come back with me,” Spyder says, her hands around his wrists, but Preacher Man looming over her shoulder. “It’s gonna be all right now, Walter,” but the world turns, water down a drain, down that mouth, and the earth tremoring so he can’t even stand up.
“Help,” he says, every time, and every time she smiles, soft and secret Spyder smile, nods and puts her arms around him so that Preacher Man howls and claws the sagging sky belly until it bleeds; the sour rain sticks to them like pine sap, turning the powdered ground to tar. “He won’t let me leave, Spyder. He knows what I’ve seen, what I know…”
And she turns and stares up and into His 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,” and “You can’t have him.” And the tattoos on her arms writhe electric blue loaded-gun threat, and now Preacher Man, who is also the Dragon, is not laughing. Now He takes a step backwards, puts the pit between them, His protector, and His face is a rictus of rage and pain, and He is fury.
“Lila,” He says, “what you’ve done to me, you’ll burn in Hell forever.” Voice of thunder and mountains splitting to spill molten bile. “What you’ve done to me, you’ll burn until the end of Time.”
And the blue fire flows from her, crackling static cage that He won’t touch, and she’s pulling Walter from the muck, hauling him across the shattered plains, days and days across the foothills with the Dragon howling her damnation, her sentence, but Spyder doesn’t look at Him again, ignores His promises. Drags Walter over the pus-seething caleche and stones that shriek like dying rabbits, stands between him and the rubbing-alcohol wind that whips up dust phantoms and throws 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 and she’s too exhausted, and the jaws of the skitterers drip the shearing sound of harvest…
…and he jerked awake, hard like hitting a wall, and the fat dude sitting across from him was staring. Walter wiped cold, oily sweat from his face, and the fat dude whispered, “Hey, buddy, if you need a fix, and you sure as hell look like you need a fix…” Walter shook his head, stumbled to his feet, and the basement hell was still more real than the predawn fluorescent glare of the bus station. He made it to the men’s restroom, to a sink before he puked, sprayed half-digested McDonald’s and coffee, heaved again and again until his insides cramped and ached, but his head was starting to clear and at least there was no one else in there to see.
He ran cold water in the next sink over, cold water in clean porcelain and splashed his face. Shivered and the roll of his stomach, braced himself, but it passed and he splashed more of the gurgling water across his face. Looked up into the mirror and the long, bristling legs were draped limply over the door and sides of the stall just behind him. Every detail clear in the hateful light, and something was dripping onto the filthy tile underneath. The air smelled like cleanser and vomit and rot. Walter whirled around, so fast and him still dizzy so he almost fell, but there was nothing there. Four silver stalls and no one and nothing in any of them.
“Christ!” he screamed, slammed the doors open one after the other, commodes and toilet-paper dispensers and bus-station shitter graffiti.
And the door opened and the fat man was staring at the sinkful of barfed-up cheeseburger and fries, shaking his head, “It’s good shit, man, and you are hurtin’. I ain’t no goddamn DEA man,” but Walter pushed past him and out the door, across the terminal to the Greyhound counter where the clerk glanced up at him from his receipts and claim slips. “Are you all right, Mister?” he said, reaching for the phone. “I can call you a doctor, if you need a doctor.”