“I’m here,” Spyder answers.
“Talk to me, Spyder. Tell me the story.”
“You already know the story, Robin.”
But Robin squeezes her hand hard, sudden, unexpected pressure, and her eyes flutter open.
“Please, Spyder?” she asks. “Please? I need to hear it again. I need to hear you tell it.”
Byron has set the remote down, watches them, arms crossed and waiting. Walter pretends to organize the careless scatter of jewel cases on the floor, pretends he hasn’t heard.
“It’s very late,” Spyder says, brushing Robin’s bangs from her eyes. “You look so sleepy.”
“No. No, I don’t want to sleep yet. Please, Spyder.”
When Spyder glances at Byron, he shifts his eyes quickly back to the television, back to the terrified solicitor and the vampire, and Walter shrugs and stacks the CDs.
“I need to hear,” Robin says, and now she sounds desperate, close to tears. “I need to hear.”
Spyder sighs and hugs Robin close.
“Yeah,” she says, nothing more, but already Byron has reached for the remote, flips the set off, and now the room is very dark, only a few guttering pools of yellow candlelight. Walter turns down the Cure until the music is just a murmur of guitars and keyboards, and he sits with his back to Spyder and Robin and Byron.
Outside the house, Spyder’s rambling, junkcluttered house where it is never anything but Halloween, the late October night is still and satisfied. No wolf-howling wind or bare branches scritching window glass, nothing but the sound of a car passing on the street outside. Spyder waits until it has gone, and then she clears her throat.
“Before the World,” she begins, “there was a war in Heaven…”
PART I
“There’s this thin place behind my ear Where time is getting heavy and as you say ‘I always meant, I always meant to open up’
My skin starts to tear.”