It was the first time in his life he hadn't slept alone.

"I have to p.i.s.s now, " she says, and Walter opens his eyes.

They still sting and burn, no matter how much he sleeps or how many bottles of Visine and Murine he empties into them.

"I'm not stopping you," he says again.

"Just f.u.c.king take care of it, Walter."

And he marvels that this last day should be so much like all the others leading up to it, that it isn't marked by a merciful freedom from mundane annoyances and everyday c.r.a.p. There should be something different, like a condemned man's final meal, whatever his heart desires, instead of the usual routine of bread and water, something to make this day special, besides the gas chamber or electric chair waiting at the end of that long, last walk. And then Walter gets up and goes to take care of it.

After the doctor-an apprehensive man with a black leather satchel and wire-rimmed spectacles-carefully removes the old dressing and lances the swelling on Niki's right palm, after a steaming cup of sweet black tea for the pain and an herbal poultice packed deep into the wound, then a fresh dressing, and after all this they finally let her rest. She lies beneath white cotton sheets and a quilt that only smells faintly musty and watches the orange-blue flame of an oil lamp sitting on a chest of drawers near the bed, the flame trapped safe inside its gla.s.s chimney, and she listens to Spyder and the doctor and the wind around the eaves of the house. Maybe I'm so tired I won't be able to sleep, she thinks, but then the room and the whispering voices and the wind slip away, and for a long time there's nothing else at all.

And she dreams of Esme Chattox, floating weightless in waters that will never see the sun, her crimson gills like living bellows, fish-skin robes become beautiful j.a.panese fans of spine and fin and fleshy membrane, and there are 250 yellow-green rows of bioluminescent organs on her b.r.e.a.s.t.s and belly. She drifts down, past towering Atlantean ruins, past great stone doors sealed a hundred thousand years, shattered Corinthian columns and sunken temples to G.o.ds that have never been named. Esme's long legs become a sinuous tail, and she glides ever deeper, between the grotesque walls of yawning subterranean canyons, until there's no farther down left to go, only a perfectly level plain of gray-black ooze, a desolate landscape for urchins and sea cuc.u.mbers and brittle stars. And something else. Something that has lain here more ages than the minds of man can comprehend, tentacles and eyes the size of manhole covers, eyes that burn so brightly they slice the darkness and send even the blindest things scurrying for cover.

And the feverish, wordless prayers from Esme's hy-acinth lips, Mother Hydra, Father Kraken, awake and receive me, Sleeper in the Deep, Dreamer at the Bottom of the World.

Esme embraces her lover, and it spreads her wide with a dozen suction-cupped arms, as the gray ooze floor of the ocean folds and collapses beneath their weight. And for a time Niki can't see anything through the tempest of silt thundering soundlessly across the boundless azoic wastelands.

And other things, an argument between an anglerfish and an eel, a heretic crustacean counting stars in a night it's never seen, and the silt settling kindly over Niki as the storm subsides and the wish that she could lie there forever, buried and unremembered, and still other things, before she begins to rise. Rushing towards the surface, falling towards the sky, as the gas in her bloodstream bubbles out of solution and her aching lungs expand until she's sure that she'll burst, but there's only the briefest, silver pain, and then she's standing on the Bay Bridge again, and the white bird is there, too, perched on the guardrail.

"She has found the philtre," it says, and it takes Niki a moment to remember, to realize that it means "philtre"

and not "filter." "But there's so little time. It may already be too late."

251.

"Then I died for nothing?"

"Everyone dies for nothing, Hierophant," the bird squawks. "Why should you be any different?"

"You know what I meant, bird."

"The jackals would have had her. They almost did, but they're weak in that world."

"So Daria isn't dead?" Niki asks and looks down at the water shimmering far, far below. The bird flaps its wings and shifts uneasily from foot to foot.

"Not yet," it replies. "But perhaps it's only a matter of time. She still has a long way to go. And there is another danger."

"Daria's strong," Niki says. "She's smart."

"You have no idea what's to come, do you?" the bird asks and hops a few inches farther away from her. "No one is smart enough or strong enough. We fight because we will not die in shame without a fight, but we will die, nonethe-less."

"I've already jumped," Niki says, and the bird looks up at the low clouds sailing past overhead.

"That depends on when you mean. Some places you've already fallen. Others you haven't. Others you never will."

"Leave me alone, bird," she says, sick of anything it might have to say, and it vanishes in a burst of fire and mossy, sage-scented smoke.

And when Niki turns around-because this time she won't jump, this time she'll go back to the hotel on Steuart Street and wait for Daria-she's standing at the edge of a highway beneath a wide blue sky, hot asphalt on one side of her and the brown-green Kansas prairie stretching away on the other. She looks left, looks east, and the truck stop isn't far away, the one that Daria didn't remember, but then she did, she did remember, and Niki steps off the blacktop into dry weeds and cacti and over a tangle of rusted barbed wire. A few yards away, there's a young man in a straw cowboy hat and overalls, walking slowly across a place where rain and frost have worn away the soil to expose the chalky earth underneath. He walks with his eyes 252 on the ground, and every now and then he bends down and picks something up, a fossil seash.e.l.l or a bit of petrified bone, examines it closely before dropping it into the old Folgers coffee can that he's carrying.

And she understands that she's come here, to this when and where, because years later Daria won't have time to reach Kansas, because the jackals will be too close, and they may be weak, but not so weak that they can't kill, that they can't delay. The man stoops down and picks up something that looks a little like a large, wooden spool. He rolls it back and forth in his palm and then turns towards Niki. He smiles when he sees her.

"It's a fish vertebra," he says. "Paleontologists call this fish Xiphactinus. Big old f.u.c.ker, fifteen feet long, if you'll excuse my French."

"What's that there?" Niki asks him, pointing at a metallic glint on the ground, picking her way along the chalk wash until she's standing beside him.

"Hi," he says. "My name's Joe."

"Right there, Joe," Niki says and picks the ball bearing up from the place where it's come to rest in the white-gray-yellow gully. "Look. There's writing on it."

"d.a.m.n," he says, taking the ball bearing from her and holding it up to the sun. "N-I-K-I," he says, reading out the letters. "Niki. Now what do you think that means?"

"You never can tell," she replies, and he smiles and puts the fish vertebra and ball bearing into his coffee can.

"Don't lose that, Joe. It's more important than you think," and then Kansas goes away, dissolves like frost on a summer day, and for a while she's nowhere and nowhen at all. It isn't dark, but there's no light, either, and she waits with the whispering ghosts of all the babies trapped in Limbo until she's finally somewhere else again.

Standing in Spyder's old house, almost dark outside and getting cold inside because Spyder never runs the gas heater, and Niki was asleep only a few minutes before.

Asleep in Spyder's bed, until she woke up alone and the bedspread was missing. She called for Spyder but no one 253.

answered. The stub of a candle flickering on the floor, so it looked even darker outside than it really was, and there was the sound of hammering coming from somewhere in the house.

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 Ura.n.u.s. 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 254 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 s.p.a.ced 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 s.p.a.ce between the floor and the bowling ball with her yellow yardstick. Spyder chews at her bottom lip, 255.

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 h.e.l.l 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 f.u.c.king 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.

256.

"f.u.c.k 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 b.a.l.l.s rolls into the living room and b.u.mps 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 seances 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 coc.o.o.n filling up most of the tub, coc.o.o.n or nest or f.u.c.king web. He has no idea what it 257.

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 b.u.t.termilk, 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 s.h.i.t. 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 s.h.i.tstorm 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 sh.e.l.l 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 f.u.c.king 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 h.e.l.l with a two-liter bottle of soda water and a pail of sand.

"I'm not f.u.c.king kidding, Walter," Archer says. "I have to p.i.s.s. 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 ma.s.s of the coc.o.o.n. This close, he can see three or four female black widows, dangling from the silk like strange and deadly berries.

258.

"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 f.u.c.king well know that, and I'm about to p.i.s.s this bed, so please get her the h.e.l.l 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 b.a.l.l.s 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 coc.o.o.n 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 f.u.c.king 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 259.

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."

"f.u.c.k you, a.s.shole," Theda gurgles and shows him her teeth, so Walter kicks the side of the bathtub as hard as he dares; Theda's coc.o.o.n 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned indispensable anymore."

"Hey, f.u.c.k 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 f.u.c.king gas station down the street. When I get back here, the two of you better have your s.h.i.t 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."