Authors: Caitlin R. Kiernan
“I read you that story,” Chance whispers, and when she looks up again the child is standing very close by, watching her intently with its glinting green eyes.
Deacon’s eyes,
she thinks.
Watching me with Deacon’s eyes,
finally beginning to understand, even if she can’t believe.
“You’ll fight,” the child says and smiles a sad smile for her. “You’ll do everything you can, but it won’t be enough.”
“Alice will be back soon,” Chance replies and realizes there are tears running down her face. “She’ll be back any minute. Will you wait for her? Will you please let her see you, too?”
“No, Mother. Alice isn’t ever coming back. But she tried. She fought for us.”
“Can I touch you?” Chance asks, and the baby kicks again.
“But you’re touching me now,” the child replies, and something like confusion washes across its face. “You’ve always touched me.”
“Then I’m dreaming. I was listening to the stereo and fell asleep, and this is only a dream. Alice will be back soon, and she’ll wake me up. I’ll tell her that I dreamed about you, and you were so beautiful.”
“She’s coming,” the child says urgently. “She’s almost here.”
Chance reaches out for the child, imagines her fingertips brushing gently across its smooth white skin, but it pulls away from her and shakes its head.
“There’s no more time left. Are you deaf? Can’t you
hear
her coming? Can’t you hear her teeth?”
“No,” Chance replies. “I can’t,” and then there’s another blinding flash of lightning, and the thunder comes right behind it—a mindless, booming creature made from clouds and discord, chasing down the fleeing light, nipping at its crackling heels, tumbling at last into the empty place it’s left behind. Chance blinks once, blinking back her tears and the electric afterimage, but now the child is gone, and she’s alone in the living room with the unconsoling sound of the wind and the rain.
Soaked to the skin and shivering from the short dash across the yard, Deacon is crouched on one side of the front door of the spider-girl house, feeling idiotic and terrified at the same time, feeling surprised that he’s still alive. Scarborough’s crouched on the other side, one ear pressed against the wall, his eyes shut, and Deacon thinks again about just shooting him and going home.
“I can’t hear her,” Scarborough whispers and frowns. “I can’t
feel
her anywhere.”
“I told you,” Deacon whispers back.
“No, she’s here. She has to be here somewhere. It’s just a trick.”
Lightning and the wind blows the rain about like a chilly, invisible veil, driving it up under the cover of the wide porch.
“This is bullshit,” Deacon hisses, and Scarborough opens his eyes and glares at him.
“You just do like I do and maybe you’ll live to see the other side of this thing.”
“I’m fucking freezing to death. And my wife is alone in—”
“Your wife isn’t alone, Mr. Silvey. Not yet. Now stop worrying about her, and keep your mind on the here and now.”
“Fuck you,” Deacon grumbles as Scarborough stands up quickly and tries the cut-glass knob; it isn’t locked and he turns it, moving so slowly, with such confidence and a hint of a smile on his face, that Deacon can almost believe he knows what he’s doing. Whatever he’s getting them both into, and the door swings smoothly, silently open onto total darkness. Another surprise, because in Deacon’s head the hinges should have creaked very loudly, haunted-house cliché to complete the scene, and he glances down at the pistol in his hands as Scarborough slips inside.
“This is crazy,” he whispers and wonders why they’re whispering and sneaking about if Narcissa Snow already knows they’re here.
Just keep moving,
he thinks and, before he can talk himself out of it, follows Scarborough into the house.
“Stay close,” Scarborough says from someplace near, though Deacon can’t see him, the darkness beyond the porch that complete, and he turns his head to see why there’s no light at all coming in from the open door.
“Don’t let it spook you,” Scarborough says. “It’s only a fascination she’s put on this spot. Just light and shadows. The door’s still right there behind you.”
Deacon takes a couple of steps backwards, and he’s standing on the porch again, the dim light of the stormy night and the shaded porch about him, and a solid wall of blackness held tight inside the doorframe. He puts his right hand into the black and then pulls it quickly out again when it vanishes up to the wrist.
“We don’t have time to play Mr. Wizard,” Scarborough whispers from the inky nothing, and Deacon takes a deep breath and steps through the door again. The blackness closes back around him like frigid, thick water.
“She’s using the house,” Scarborough says. “Using its bad memories against us. All you have to remember is these things are only illusions. She can hurt you. They can’t. They can only cause you to hurt yourself.”
“How are we supposed to find her if we can’t even fucking see
each other?
”
“‘Chance favors the prepared mind,’ Mr. Silvey,” Scarborough replies. “Louis Pasteur said that.” And then the blackness isn’t quite so black anymore, its perfection marred by a faint bluish glow somewhere in front of Deacon. “That’s sort of appropriate, don’t you think?” but Deacon doesn’t reply, not even sure what he’s being asked, and, besides, he’s much too busy watching the bluish glow ebb and swell, pushing back the edges of the gloom until he can see Scarborough again, his pale face and the small pulsing sphere of light floating just a few inches above his left palm. Vivid powder-blue light that streams towards the ceiling and seems to make the black cringe and flinch, pulling itself back like something scalded, and Deacon laughs in spite of himself. Things too awful and wonderful to be real, but here they are, anyway.
“Can I touch it?” he whispers. “Can I hold it?”
“That would be a very bad idea,” Scarborough says, and then lifts the light higher so Deacon can see something scrawled on the wall in what looks like drying paint, but he’s pretty sure is actually drying blood.
“Silly quim,” Scarborough smirks and shakes his head, holding the light in his hand closer to the writing on the wall. “I’ve had about enough of your drama.”
The letters two or three feet tall, smeared neatly across the plaster, and Deacon recognizes the writing from the wall of Soda’s apartment, the exact same alphabet that surrounded the circle drawn above the bed. Nothing he can read, but then it’s really nothing he
wants
to read.
“Is that the spell?” he asks.
“Not a spell,” Scarborough replies. “Just a fascination—”
“Yeah, whatever. Is
that
it?”
“No, it’s not. It’s just a sick little love note for you and me, something to waste our time.”
Deacon thinks briefly about asking Scarborough to read it out to him, to translate the strange, flowing letters. “What’s that language supposed to be?” he asks, instead.
“It doesn’t have a proper name. It’s a tongue of the dead, that’s all. She’s showing off.”
Deacon nods his head slowly, as if he even begins to understand what Scarborough’s talking about, and his eyes follow the scabby and meandering trails of blood down towards the baseboard and the floor. There’s a pile of dead birds and chipmunks there, illuminated by the blue light, and he looks quickly away.
“So, what’s next?” Deacon asks, trying not to think about those small bodies heaped together on the floor, matted fur and feathers, dry and gaping wounds.
“We keep looking for Narcissa. She isn’t trying to hide. She just wants to disorient us. She’s looking for an edge.”
“Well, she’s about got me ready to shit myself,” Deacon says. “I don’t mind telling you that.”
“Keep your fear to yourself, Mr. Silvey. I don’t need it cluttering up my head, and neither do you.” Scarborough turns away from the wall, and now Deacon can make out a closed door on their right, and a doorway on their left. Then he catches a faint, greasy smell, like a pork roast simmering in an oven, something out of place in among the musty old house odors, and Deacon notices the blistered spot on Scarborough’s hand, just beneath the blue ball of light.
“Doesn’t that hurt?” he asks and points.
“Like a motherfucker in heat,” Scarborough replies. “But that’s the way it goes. Now, stop asking stupid questions and pick a door, Mr. Silvey. Left or right?”
“What? How the hell should I know?”
“’Cause you’re the dude with the million-dollar eyes, that’s why. You’re the man with a hot line to the past stuck in his head. You don’t think I just brought you along for shits and giggles, do you? Now pick one.”
“This is bullshit,” Deacon says again.
“Almost everything is,” Scarborough chuckles. “Everything under Heaven, anyway. Do we go left, or do we go right?”
“Jesus,” Deacon mumbles to himself and tucks the pistol into the crook of his left arm, his hand too stiff and bandaged to hold it, then presses his right hand flat against the closed door. But it only feels like any door should, smooth wood grain underneath the white paint, neither particularly warm nor particularly cold—just a door.
“We don’t have all night,” Scarborough says.
“I don’t even know what I’m looking for here.”
“Traps, Mr. Silvey. The kind most people never see until it’s too late to avoid them.”
Deacon takes his hand away from the door and stares down at his palm and fingers for a moment, which makes him think of Scarborough’s scorching flesh again.
“Look man,” he says. “All I can tell you is that’s a fucking door. I’m not getting anything at all.”
“Then what about that way there?” and Scarborough motions towards the open doorway on the right with the muzzle of his gun. “Put your hand on the wall there and tell me if you get anything.”
“You’re starting to sound a lot like the cops, you know that?”
“Just do it,” and so Deacon does, does as he’s told because he only wants this to be over, only wants to get out of this terrible house and back to Chance. He presses his reluctant fingertips to the doorjamb, shuts his eyes, and waits, for the pain and the vision, or for nothing at all. Outside the thunderstorm seems to be building rapidly towards some crescendo, some frenzied epiphany of lightning and rain, pricking at his senses, getting in the way. Five seconds, ten, fifteen, and Deacon opens his eyes to Scarborough’s pulsing blue light and the mangy edges of Narcissa Snow’s darkness.
“Nothing,” he says, not caring if Scarborough hears the relief in his voice. “Nothing there at all.”
“You’re absolutely sure about that?”
“I’ve never been
sure
of anything in my whole goddamned life, so don’t you expect me to start now,” and he takes the pistol in his good hand again and is surprised to find some faint solace in the weight and solidity of it.
Scarborough glances uncertainly from one side of the tiny foyer to the other, left to right and back again, and mutters something hard and angry through his gritted teeth that Deacon can’t make out.
“Hell, maybe we should flip a coin,” he says. Scarborough glares at him.
“I can’t hold on to this thing forever, Mr. Silvey,” and he nods at the ball of light hovering above his hand. The blistered spot on his palm has grown much larger, seared almost black at the center. “I’m not much of a magician. I’ll have to release this soon or it may be beyond my control.” Deacon can see that there are beads of sweat standing out on his forehead now, or it’s only the rainwater leaking from his wet hair and trickling down his brow, crystal droplets to catch the blue light and flash it back more brightly.
“Tell me the truth, Scarborough,” Deacon says, looking back to the high and bloody letters scrawled on the wall, the mound of empty, dead things lying underneath. “This isn’t exactly what you expected, is it?”
“Not exactly,” Scarborough replies, and his hand trembles beneath the light.
“And we’re in some very deep doo-doo, aren’t we?”
For an answer, Scarborough raises his pistol and points it at the open doorway on the left; Deacon wonders if he’s going to pull the trigger, as though the darkness clotted there was something he could drive away with bullets and gunpowder.
“You just stay real close,” he says and steps through the doorway, the blue light parting Narcissa Snow’s blackness like a living curtain of latex and India ink. Deacon hesitates only a second or two, the brief space squeezed in between heartbeats that it takes for the murk to begin to reclaim the foyer, for the cold to sink its teeth into him, and then he follows Scarborough and the fading blue glow. He steps quickly across the threshold, trading one room for the next, falling farther in, but Scarborough’s impossible beacon gutters and grows dimmer instead of growing brighter.
“I can’t see you,” Deacon calls out, shouting and to hell with the whispering if she knows they’re there anyway.
“Over here,” Scarborough calls back, and his voice seems stifled and very far away. And then something soft and damp brushes across Deacon’s cheek, and he winces, but doesn’t cry out. The incongruous salty sweet smells of the ocean and rotting meat washing suddenly over him like a poison breathed out by the darkness, and the woman’s voice behind him so close that he can feel her hot breath against the back of his neck.