Landslayer's Law (30 page)

Three hours passed before Sandy could see well enough to drive. They passed that time in Aikin’s cabin putting an end to all that fasting.

(Sullivan Cove, Georgia—Tuesday, June 24—sunset)

Dale looked pretty damned funny, LaWanda reckoned, with all those cobwebs in his hair. Shoot, the old guy looked kinda like a spider himself, thin and kinked and knobby as he was, and with his shoulders all humped over like a spider’s little head hung in front of that great big lumpy body. He even had the eyes—spiders had lots of ’em, eight sometimes, or more. Except these were just round designs in the bandanna he’d bound around all that nice white hair.

Not that she looked one whit better, except she supposed she oughta be a black widow, what with her black jeans and black leather jacket and the screaming red tanktop she wore beneath ’em; with her hair all done up in tight braids just like a big mamma webster sittin’ right up there on top. Or maybe, she amended, like the scared little mate the big mama ’widows were supposed to chow down on when they finished fuckin’.

“If I’d known I’d be spendin’ half the day slippin’ ’round under buildin’s,” the old man chuckled wryly, “I’d have wore me a hat.”

He wiped at his hair for emphasis, then, for good measure, slapped gloved hands against the sodden gray walls of his derelict woodshed. Dust flew, absorbed instantly into air and soil that could scarcely become any wetter. The ground squished in the space between them: as much mud there as grass.

She supposed she shouldn’t complain, as she joined Dale in a mad dash to the superior shelter of the nearby smokehouse. They needed rain, after all, and Cal had made it rain, and now it was her turn. Besides, rain was a tribute to Piper. She wondered how he was doing, never mind where he was doing it. The point was, he’d gotten himself all caught up in magic, and she knew he hated that stuff. It was a tribute to
him
that he endured it anyway. But Piper would do a lot for a friend—or a young, good-lookin’, south Georgia JuJu woman—who was the grandchild of a JuJu woman ten times over.

As Granny had reminded her on the phone, before she’d told LaWanda what she needed.

“Get any?” LaWanda demanded, forced to talk louder than she liked in order to be heard above the raindrop-rattle on the roof. It made her voice go harsh and shrill: irritating when she cultivated a low smooth rumble, half molasses and half river grit.

Dale lifted a brow mysteriously, then smiled like a worn gate creaking open and reached under his shapeless khaki jacket to remove a large dusty jar with a screw-on lid. Something moved in there:
many
somethings. Dark ones, too.

It was full of spiders.

Hundreds and hundreds of spiders.

”Reckon that’ll be enough?” Dale beamed, fumbling around in his pockets—which produced an odd-looking, extravagantly curved bowl-pipe and attendant matches. “If not, I reckon we can go on up to Bill and JoAnne’s.”

LaWanda accepted the jar and inspected it critically. Legs danced across the glass. The patterns they made in the dust there reminded her of those Celtic interlaces she’d seen so many of up at Lugh’s. Tiny eyes gleamed like evil beads. Watching.

“Where’d you get all these?” she gasped. “Widows, too! Lots of ’em.” She regarded him skeptically. “You didn’t get
bit,
did you?”

Dale laughed: a sound like wood splintering. “Too smart for that—or my skin’s too thick, one. Or maybe I ain’t got enough juice in me to go to the trouble of suckin’ it out.”

“More like they could smell all that ’shine in you and didn’t wanta get pre-pickled.”

Dale eyed her warily. “What you gonna do with all these?”

LaWanda shook her head. “Can’t say. That’s part of the mojo. Granny says I can’t tell.”

“Guess it’s what happens that matters,” Dale mused. “Not the way you get there.”

“I’ll tell you if it works,” LaWanda conceded, looking speculatively at the door. The rain had slackened. She thought she even saw a sunbeam out there. That would make Scott as happy as it would’ve dismayed Piper all to hell. Because that was one point nobody—including Scott, she was proud to note—had bothered making: that Scott thoroughly detested bad weather. Still, he was doing his part—or so he said. “Best way I know to make it rain,” he’d confided last time they’d got together, which was that morning, “is for me to go campin’ in a tent.”

That’s where he was now: scrunched up in that two-man out on the point south of the Sullivan Cove turnaround, watching the lake waters rise up above the naked rocky shelves that lined the shore.

Poor Scott.

Dale lit his pipe. “You don’t need me, I’d best be goin’.
Gotta check up on the rest of you younguns. See what Aikin’s learned on the Internet.”

“What was he tryin’ to learn?”

“Anything he can ’bout Ralph Mims and Mystic Mountain Properties. And I think he was lookin’ for something called
The Anarchist Cookbook
.”

“God,” LaWanda snorted, “that boy really
is
serious.”

“Rain’s let up,” Dale observed. “Don’t know about you, but I’m ready to get outta here.”

LaWanda slapped her hand down on a rickety shelf beside her, but cupped it in lieu of laying it flat, then curled her fingers around something that moved. “Got another one!” she grinned. Then: “You do what you gotta do; I gotta do my thing too!”

“No you don’t, you little eight-legged motherfucker!” LaWanda warned thirty minutes later. She swatted at the inky mess of angles and baggy body that had just sent one of those legs probing toward the rim of the cast-iron bathtub in Dale’s abandoned house, and knocked it back down inside.

And sighed.

Was she really ready for this? She’d put up the front, but now was time to pay the…the piper, she finished with a lump in her throat, as tears unbidden burned into her eyes.

Fuck this!
she chided herself right back, and set the last of the half-dozen Mason jars on what remained of the linoleum floor.

Took another deep breath, and peered into the tub.

The bottom was alive: crawling with arachnids of every shape and size, from tiny little guys not as big as the end of her pinky finger to those godawful big wood spiders that looked like they could saunter right out of the kindlin’-pile and carry you off for dinner. There were black widows, too: lots of ’em ,most of which had lived under this very house, and which all the others seemed to be respecting, to judge by the distance they kept from those hard, glossy legs and those evilly gleaming bodies, black as her brother’s new Camaro.

There were flat spiders, too, and leggy ones, and spiders that were all round abdomen; spiders that were naked, spiders that were furry, and spiders in between. There were garden spiders in black and yellow livery, and fiddle-blacks in sensible brown and gray. She’d even—wonder of wonders—found a comatose tarantula, which Dale opined was one Little Billy claimed to have lost, that he knew JoAnne had flushed down the john. Some of these fuckers could sure hold their breath!

Rain rattled the roof again, and a leak jingled into the corner, to establish a new puddle there.

Which reminded LaWanda of what she was about, which was also what she’d been dreading. But Granny had told her this was how it had to be. And Granny was always right when it came to mojo.

Taking a deep breath, and muttering a short prayer to a God whose attentions she generally preferred to avoid, LaWanda Gilmore took off her muddy black shoes and grimy white socks, rolled up her soggy britches to the knee—and stuck her neat brown feet into that squirming tub.

“Step on a spider, make it rain,” she chanted, gazing at nothing save her own grim reflection in a grimy mirror, even as she felt things crunch and squish beneath her heels and toes. “Step on a spider, make it rain,” she repeated over and over, still not looking down. Still trying, very hard, to convince herself that this wasn’t much different than stomping grapes, save that these oozed the wine of mojo out of their shattered shells.

Pain stabbed into her once or twice (but there was no power without pain, Granny had advised); and she felt her stomach give a nasty heave as her heel came down on what had to be the panicked tarantula.

But it was already raining harder. And in honor of Piper, LaWanda Gilmore smiled.

Chapter XVI: Moebius Ship

(the Seas Between—no time)

David was getting royally sick of bagpipes.

He hadn’t the vaguest notion how much time had elapsed since they’d hoodooed Lugh’s vessels—six hours perhaps, or six dozen—but he hadn’t expected to have practically every single spare instant since then soundtracked by caterwauling. He really
didn’t
know how long that performance had lasted, either, because there was either no sun by which to determine such things, or the sun was
wrong:
too large, too small, or an odd color—like lime green. And while he knew it was all
one
sun viewed from the diverse Worlds that layered around the Track, still, the effect was damned disturbing. Never mind what those screwy light-dark alterations did to his circadian rhythms, which were clearly plotting serious rebellion.

He was pondering mutiny of his own. It wasn’t that the music was bad—normally he loved the pipes, highland or Uillean either. But normally he wasn’t stuck on the deck of a boat with a set being played nonstop—and a hundred feet was actually far too close when Piper really started wailing, nevermind that the relentless fog that shrouded every sight save sky, Track, and (close in) water seemed to amplify rather than inhibit. Shoot, he wouldn’t have been surprised to see some vast leviathan rise out of the deep, drawn to what it mistook for a mating call. Hadn’t Bradbury written a story like that, involving a lighthouse and a dinosaur? And hadn’t the lighthouse suffered dire consequences when it failed to respond to that Jurassic hormonal urge? Or was he confusing the story with the movie based on it:
Beast From 20,000 Fathoms,
or whatever?

Misery, however, appeared to be loving company; certainly everyone else seemed to have sought the same solution he had, which was to cram into the stern and pray the sail screened out the worst of the noise.

Noise….

Actually, it was pretty decent music, if you didn’t have to hear it all the time. At least Liz and Myra had distractions: they liked to draw—which they were doing. Brock could evidently sleep through a Who concert. Alec had Aife—and cotton stuffed into his ears. Fionchadd was forward, listening raptly to Piper’s playing. Which left David to sit and stew.

Dammit!

Eventually he could stand it no longer. He reached over to stop Liz’s pencil in mid-line. “Remind me,” he muttered, “to make Piper vet his promises through me next time.”

Liz looked up from her drawing: Brock’s bare feet rendered in excruciating detail. And scowled. “Thought you liked the pipes.”

“I do! It’s just…I dunno. It’s like too much chocolate, or something. I think I’ve OD’d on it.”

Whereupon the music ceased abruptly.

Liz started, then twisted her head down at an awkward angle, to peer beneath the sail Fionchadd had unfurled a short while back—mostly for appearances he said. It was red and wrought of a canvaslike material far coarser than most Faery sails. A silver chameleon was limned upon it in thick silver cord: an homage to the name Fionchadd had received in Galunlati:
Dagantu,
in reference to the way the Faery moved, all quick and deft and flickery—like a lizard.

“Oh, Christ!” Liz moaned. “He’s passing the pipes to Finno. Please tell me he knows how to play.”

David rolled his eyes. “I hope so, but I fear not. I think it’s that art thing again: the one thing we’re better at than they are.”

Liz regarded him askance. “What about the so-called Faery musicians that are always enchanting us poor mortals?”

“Stolen humans, I reckon. Hey, maybe that’s what happened to Hendrix and Morrison. They’re not really dead, and those were just sticks of wood left in their place.”

Myra’s eyebrowns lifted delicately. “Interesting theory, anyway.”

Liz nibbled her pencil. “All that stuff Pipe’s been playing is
safe
, right? It’s not supposed to do anything weird, like pierce the World Walls, or sort through Tracks, or anything.”

David traced designs on the deck with his fingers. “Finno promised him songs. I assume he meant songs he could actually use and enjoy. Therefore, safe songs.”

“He’ll be the hit of the 40 Watt if he ever gets back to Athens,” Myra drawled.
“If.”

David pinched her leg. “I thought you were the eternal optimist—and here we are at the bare ragged start of what Finno says oughta take three days Faery time this time of year, and already you’re complainin’.”

“You were too,” Liz protested. “I—”

The rest of her words were drowned out by the most godawful screeching David had ever heard.

“Jesus Lord-and-Savior!” David yelped, gazing around imploringly.

Brock still slept—though he
had
flopped over and folded his arms around his head. Alec grinned and forced the cotton further into his ears. Myra calmly reached into Alec’s fannypack, secured the remainder of the wad, and proceeded to mirror his precaution.

David and Liz exchanged resigned glances. David had a sudden idea.

“C’mon,” he hissed, grabbing Liz’s hand. “Something I’ve been meanin’ to ask you—”

Liz grimaced irritably. “Now?”

David gestured down the deck. “Would you rather listen to that?”

“I…see what you mean.” Fionchadd was clearly not a very quick study.

“Don’t do anything I wouldn’t,” Alec called too loudly, as David and Liz sprinted for the tiny cabin that projected waist-high amidships, just behind the mast. The cabin-of-many-wonders, they’d termed it, for its ability to produce anything needed, from food, to clothing, to drawing materials, to—well, not sunblock, if Alec’s fresh new burn were any indication.

David led the way down the short flight of steps and pushed through the thick carved door into the lushly carpeted space beyond. Silence enfolded them there, as complete as any tomb.

“Thank God!” David sighed, as he sank down against the nearest of the dark wooden cabinets that framed the low-ceilinged chamber. Liz joined him there, sitting opposite in lieu of beside. Which generally meant she was pissed but indulging him.