Murder of Angels (30 page)

I got out of bed,
Niki thinks, remembering a moment ten years or only a minute before.
I got up and walked from the bedroom to the living room, and I stood where I could see Spyder in the dining room, but she couldn’t see me.

There’s the missing bedspread, a huge white crocheted thing stretched trampoline tight and hanging in the air in the next room, the old dining room where no one ever eats, because there’s no table and it’s full of Spyder’s paperback books. Niki can see where two corners of the bedspread have been nailed directly to the wall, big nails driven through the peeling wallpaper, and a third corner stretched over to a leaning bookshelf and held in place with stacks of 1974
World Book
encyclopedias. The fourth corner is somewhere out of sight, wherever Spyder is, Spyder and her hammer—
blam, blam, blam
—just around the corner, and Niki knows that if she steps out into the middle of the living room she’ll be able to see Spyder in there, hammering it to the wall. But she doesn’t, because she knows that if Spyder sees her she’ll stop what she’s doing, and then, then everything would happen differently.

“Oh,” Spyder would say, “it’s nothing,” so Niki stays right where she is and watches and waits.

And then Spyder steps into view, wearing nothing but the black T-shirt she put on after they made love, the shirt she slept in a lot, but never washed, so it always smelled like sweat and patchouli. She’s holding a bowling ball, a black bowling ball with scarlet swirls in it, and Niki remembers thinking that it looked like a strange little gas planet in Spyder’s hand, the
first
time this happened, an ebony and scarlet Neptune or Uranus. Spyder holds it out over the center of the bedspread and sets it gently in the middle. And the bedspread sags with the weight of the bowling ball, drooping in the center until it’s only about a foot or so above the floor, but it doesn’t pull loose from the walls or the stack of encyclopedias.

She disappears, and there are toolbox sounds, and when Niki can see her again, Spyder has a fat black marker in her left hand and a yellow yardstick in her right; she leans over the bedspread, measuring distances, drawing carefully spaced dots, then measuring again, black on the white cotton here and there, beginning near the edge and working her way in, towards the sucking weight of the bowling ball. When there are thirty, forty, forty-three dots, she sets the yardstick and the Sharpie down on the floor.

Spyder vanishes again, and this time she comes back with a blue plastic margarine tub filled with ball bearings of different sizes, like steel marbles. She digs around in the tub and selects one, as if only
that
one will do, and places it on the first black mark she drew on the bedspread. The ball bearing makes its own small depression before it begins to roll downhill; Niki hears the distinct clack of steel against epoxy when it hits the bowling ball, a very loud sound in the still, quiet house.

“You’re not supposed to be here again,” the white bird says, standing on the hardwood floor near her bare feet.

“Shut up,” Niki hisses, whispering so Spyder won’t hear. “I’m the Hierophant, aren’t I? I can go whenever I please.”

“No you
can’t,
” the bird caws indignantly. “That’s not the way it works.”

“Shut up, bird, before she hears you.”

In the dining room, Spyder selects another ball bearing and places it on the next mark—
clack
—and she repeats the action over and over again—
clack, clack, clack
—but never twice from the same mark, choosing each bearing and taking care to be sure that it starts its brief journey towards the center from the next mark in. Sometimes, she pauses between ball bearings, pauses and stares at the bedspread, then out the window, then back at the bedspread. Once or twice she stops long enough to measure the shrinking space between the floor and the bowling ball with her yellow yardstick. Spyder chews at her bottom lip, and there’s something urgent, something terrible, in her blue eyes.

Niki’s legs are getting tired, just like they did the first time, ten years ago, and she wants to sit down beside the white bird, but she’s afraid to move. And she remembers wanting to say, “What the hell are you doing, Spyder?” What anyone else
would
have said right at the start, but then she would never have seen even this much, and so what if it doesn’t make sense. That doesn’t mean it isn’t important, and if Spyder won’t tell her what’s going on—in her head, in the old house (if there was ever any difference between the two)—all she can do is be patient and watch and try to figure it all out for herself. Like a jigsaw puzzle, like a child’s connect-the-dots book. Draw the lines, and there’s the picture, Mickey Mouse or a bouquet of flowers or whatever drove Spyder insane.

“You need to leave,” the bird says, and Niki wants to kick it.

There aren’t many bearings left in the tub, and Spyder has to lean far out over the bedspread to set them on the marks now. There’s hardly any time between the instant that she lets go and the clack of metal against hard plastic. The bedspread is almost touching the floor, straining with the weight, and Niki can see where the weave is beginning to unravel. Spyder works fast, as though she’s running out of time, and now she holds the last ball bearing, and it reflects the pale November sun getting in through the dining-room window.

“Here,” Niki whispers. “Right fucking
here
.”

And there’s a slow, ripping sound. Spyder grabs something off the floor, and it takes Niki a second to realize, to
remember,
that it’s a roll of duct tape. Spyder uses her teeth to tear off a strip, and she’s reaching for the rift opening up beneath the bowling ball when the bedspread gives way, spilling everything out the bottom. The bowling ball falls three or four inches to the floor, barely missing Spyder’s fingers. Niki feels the vibration where she’s standing beside the white bird, watching as the ball bearings spill out and roll away in every direction.

“Fuck me.” Spyder sighs, and then she sits silently beneath the ruined bedspread and stares at the hole, the last ball bearing forgotten in her fingers.

One of the silver balls rolls into the living room and bumps to a stop against Niki’s foot.

“Don’t you
dare
touch that,” the bird squawks, but she’s already bending over, already picking it up. There’s a single word printed on the curved surface of the ball bearing, one word that didn’t mean anything at all to Niki then, and still doesn’t mean anything now.

“When the Weaver learns what you’ve done—” the bird says, but before it can finish, she’s somewhen else, somewhere the dead sleep, and it’s almost Lafayette No. 1 Cemetery, almost New Orleans, except that the milky sky is the color of raw liver. The ancient trees bend low over the graves and mausoleums, and things that were angels lie twisted and broken in the shadows.

“We used to get stoned and sneak into the cemeteries,” she says. “We hung out in Lafayette and St. Louis, praying that we’d see a ghost or a vampire. Just a
glimpse
would have been enough. We held séances and left flowers and bottles of wine.”

Marvin is bending over one of the fallen angels, wiping blood from its lips, and he turns and looks at her with the white bird’s red eyes.

“Did you ever think it would be like this?” he asks.

“No,” she replies, “I didn’t,” and then he leaves the angels and walks with her through the cemetery, past broken headstones and plastic pots of plastic roses and carnations. And when the rain starts, fat drops drumming softly against oak leaves and weathered marble, Niki opens her eyes, and the man named Scarborough Pentecost is sitting in a wicker chair beside the bed, and the oil lantern is still burning brightly on the chest of drawers.

Walter stands in the narrow doorway of the motel bathroom and stares at the cocoon filling up most of the tub, cocoon or nest or fucking web. He has no idea what it really is, what it should be called, and he doesn’t care. The thing that Theda makes whenever they’ve stopped to sleep, the thing she hides inside. There’s a thin sheet of sticky silver-white strands leading up the wall to the ceiling, other strands stretching all the way over to the toilet and the sink. The thing in the tub, sheathed in spider silk, is the sickly color of buttermilk, and its sides rise and fall with the steady rhythm of Theda’s sleeping breath. Walter looks back at Archer, sitting on the foot of the bed now, watching him as she lights a cigarette, and then he takes another step towards the vaguely girl-shaped thing in the tub. It looks unfinished, and Walter knows that’s exactly what it is.

I could burn it now,
he thinks.
I could burn it and be done with all this shit.
There are three full cans of kerosene in the trunk of the car—not the purple Ford, but the Chevy they stole before Birmingham, after the shitstorm at the convenience store—kerosene and the two thermite grenades he bought off a small-time arms dealer in Boston. Walter imagines the flames, Theda’s chrysalis shell turning black, her body boiling inside there until the dying husk splits apart.

And then there would be no more indecision, no more waffling and deception, because the deed would be done, and Spyder Baxter and the fucking Dragon and Archer Day would know exactly what his intentions were.
He
would know what his intentions are, finally, and with the surrogate dead, the Hierophant could spend the rest of eternity trying to open the gate, and she might as well try putting out the fires of Hell with a two-liter bottle of soda water and a pail of sand.

“I’m not fucking kidding, Walter,” Archer says. “I have to piss. Get her out of there.”

“Why haven’t we killed her?” he asks, standing at the very edge of the tub now, forcing himself not to look away from the pulsating mass of the cocoon. This close, he can see three or four female black widows, dangling from the silk like strange and deadly berries.

“She’s going to hear you,” Archer says.

“She can’t hear me.”

“You don’t
know
what she can and can’t hear when she’s like that.”

“But wouldn’t that end it, killing her, I mean? Then there’d be no point in even going to the house,” and Walter squats down beside the tub and presses the fingers of his right hand against the rough form of Theda’s left breast. Like some half-formed waxwork, this abomination sleeping in its cold, porcelain bed, and it’s never as soft to the touch as he expects it to be.

“We can’t move too soon,” Archer replies. “Everything has to be timed to the second. And you already fucking well know that, and I’m about to piss this bed, so please get her the hell
out of there
.”

“Yeah,” he says and pulls his hand back when one of the black widows crawls a little too close for comfort. “Get her out of there.”

“It’s not too late for you to screw this up,” Archer says and exhales, smoke from her lips and nostrils, and maybe
she’s
the only real dragon, he thinks. “You said you had the balls to see it through. All the way, that’s what you said. I looked into your eyes and thought I saw that much courage in you.”

Walter doesn’t take the bait, far too little time left to bother squabbling with her. He presses his fingertips hard against the smooth place where Theda’s face should be, and this time the cocoon splits, a vertical slit to reveal her right cheek, her mouth and chin, and suddenly the air in the bathroom stinks of rotting peaches.

“Come on, Sleeping Beauty,” he says, peeling back enough of the gummy, fibrous material that he can see her right eye and most of her forehead. “Wake up, Theda. It’s fucking showtime.”

And then that single eye opens wide, almost all pupil at first, empty and hungry and glaring hatefully up at him. Walter jerks his hand away again as her lips part and a trickle of alabaster fluid leaks from the corners of her mouth. He stands up and steps back from the tub, because he knows that Theda can do the rest for herself. She coughs and more of the blue-white fluid drains from her lips.

“Come on, little girl. The old woman out there has to take a leak.”

“Fuck you, asshole,” Theda gurgles and shows him her teeth, so Walter kicks the side of the bathtub as hard as he dares; Theda’s cocoon splits open a little more, and the rotten-peach smell grows even stronger than before.

“You better watch yourself, little girl,” Walter warns her. “One day you might not be so goddamned indispensable anymore.”

“Hey, fuck
both
of you,” Archer growls, and she gets up off the bed, reaching for her jeans and sweater draped across the back of a chair. “There’s a fucking gas station down the street. When I get back here, the two of you better have your shit together.”

And he wishes that she wouldn’t go, because he doesn’t want to be alone with Theda, doesn’t want to be alone in the motel room while the day winds down, and the shadows grow longer, and the girl they found in Stonington Cemetery slowly tears herself free of the tub. But he’s not about to ask Archer to stay, because she knows too much about him already, too many soft underbellies revealed, and, besides, she wouldn’t stay, anyway. He leaves the bathroom and sits on the bed, watching her dress and trying not to hear the sounds that Theda’s making.

“We’ve only got about an hour and a half until sunset,” Archer says, pulling her raveling cable-knit sweater on over her head, then fishing her long hair out of the collar. “After dark, we might not have a lot of time to spare.”

“Take your gun,” Walter tells her, and he reaches for the pack of cigarettes she’s left lying on the bed.

“Yeah. Just get her out of there, okay?”

And then their eyes meet, not something that happens as often as it once did, and for a long moment all the secrets they’ve shared and the secrets they will always keep from each other hang heavy between them.