“It’s me,” I said quickly. If I hadn’t, she might’ve torn me apart thinking I was Winter.
“What’s goin’ on?” she asked.
I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe Winter had ended up in the midst of all those black widows I’d seen the other day. My skin crawled at the thought. I imagined them all around, gathering—except that they would be thickest near the latticework where flies came in, not this far under the house. Or so I hoped.
Winter was still screaming, smashing into things, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t about to pick up that goddamn foil and come after us at any moment.
“Go,” I said. “That way.” I shoved Jeri back the way she’d come, toward what I thought was the front of the house.
We caught up with Kayla. The three of us crawled across dank earth that hadn’t been disturbed in decades. Winter’s voice became a eerie sobbing moan, rising and falling. In that sound was madness, despair, bubbling horror. I heard her thud against wood, not as loud as before.
Our way was blocked by horizontal wooden planks, visible only as faint strips of light that came through hairline cracks between the slats. I coughed, felt blood swirl into my mouth. Not good, but now didn’t seem the time to mention it to Jeri or Kayla.
Something pounded on wood, a solid, crashing noise, loud like a sledgehammer. And again. Then more of it, splintery sounds. Suddenly light spilled through in a broad band. My vision began to dim. I toppled to one side, feeling faint, too weak to kneel.
Another crash. Jeri was on her back, one bare foot slamming into the clapboards like a battering ram. One was gone; another was loose, flapping at one end. Then a third. Kayla helped her. Winter screamed one more time, weakly. Jeri disappeared through the opening she’d made. More boards were ripped away, torn loose from outside.
Jeri’s hand reached in and grabbed mine, and I was dragged out onto Edna Woolley’s front lawn on my back, into a crowd of goggling strangers, ten or fifteen of them, more of them coming, jogging across the street from the Golden Goose, drawn by Winter’s screams, or maybe by the splintering of clapboards at the front of the house.
Kayla’s face appeared above me, crying. Then Jeri’s, but she wasn’t crying. “Mort,” she said. “Oh, Jesus, Mort.” She put her hand against my chest and pressed, hard, into my blood. I tried to tell her it probably wasn’t doing any good, but I couldn’t say anything. I felt blood spill from the corner of my mouth.
Beyond Kayla and Jeri, hot pink wisps stood motionless against a field of sweet, luminous blue. I stared at it, entranced by the sight.
The sky. Clouds at sunset.
The colors slowly faded to gray. Peace settled over me. Nothing hurt.
“They’re all like naked!” a woman said, a dumb, young-sounding half-giggly voice, and Jeri screamed, “Call 911! Get an ambulance!” her cry coming from far away, the echo of it growing fainter and fainter until it disappeared into a soft eternity of darkness that lay far beyond the clouds, beyond the sky, beyond sight or understanding.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
THE HOSPITAL WAS alternately cold, warm, then cold again, incomprehensible, visionary. A place of blurred fluorescent lighting, unintelligible urgent voices, scurrying people, hallucinatory half-remembered images and smells. Then they put me under. I remember that—being terrified that Winter would find me and kill me if I lost consciousness.
I awoke sometime during the night, either hours later or days, I had no way of knowing. I didn’t say anything, though I tried. My mouth wouldn’t work. My body felt unresponsive, a breathing, inanimate thing that was me, but not me, something I lay inside. It was a cocoon of me, not hot or cold, a numbed wrapping out of which I saw Kayla in a chair, staring at nothing. A moment before I drifted off again, I caught a glimpse of Dallas, or thought I did.
* * *
In time, the dreamworld came to an end. As I’d feared, Mortimer Angel, gumshoe extraordinaire, was once again a household name—and Dallas, Kayla, Jeri, Victoria, Winter, the whole damn circus—but I’ll get to that in a while.
Sometime before midnight, Winter died. I heard about it the following day, or maybe the day after. She’d been bitten twenty-three times by black widow spiders, possibly a North American record. It was determined that she had rolled and thrashed along that lattice, gathering some, crushing others, pissing them off thoroughly, which is never a good idea. When she arrived at the hospital she had a few smashed and dead in her hair and one missing legs but still gnawing. Black widow envenomation. Technically, it’s called latrodectism—the kind of word I’m inclined to forget within minutes, but I would remember this one, and fondly, because it had rid the world of a monster. They gave her calcium gluconate and antivenin among other things, but she didn’t make it. Maybe she’d been brought in too late, but I’m inclined to think that at barely a hundred pounds she wouldn’t have stood much of a chance if she’d been brought in sooner. She had one bite for every four-and-a-half pounds of girl. It’s hard to bounce back from something like that.
She was under the house for over an hour before the paramedics found her and pulled her out—unconscious, breathing with difficulty, cramped, covered in oily sweat. Kayla and Jeri hadn’t known what had happened to her, and I couldn’t tell anyone. Winter had a broken arm and numerous contusions, all of them self-inflicted except for an enormous bruise where I’d kicked her belly, managing to break two ribs. I was happy about that. May she rest in pieces.
Victoria was found in the basement with a broken neck, broken jaw, ruptured windpipe, teeth shattered. Russell Fairchild told me she was dead before she hit the floor. As far as I was concerned, Jeri had the best damn kick in all of North America, bar none.
Mine
