“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…”

D aria sat by herself on the sidewalk, fat spiral-bound notebook open across her lap, back pressed firmly against the raw brick, pretentiously raw brick sandblasted for effect, for higher rent and the illusion of renewal, the luxury of history. The cobblestone street was lined with old warehouse and factory buildings, most dating back to the first two decades of the century or before and sacrificed years ago for office suites; sterile, track-lit spaces for architects and lawyers, design firms and advertising agencies.

The felt-tip business end of her pen hovered uselessly over the paper, over the verse she’d begun almost a week ago now. A solid hour staring stupidly at her own cursive scrawl, red ink too bright for blood, and she was no closer to finishing, and the cold-real Christmas weather-was beginning to numb her fingers, working its way in through her clothes. Daria closed the notebook, snapped the cap back on her pen, returned both to the army-surplus knapsack lying on the concrete.

This time of day, in this light, latest afternoon and the sun sliding like butterscotch from the pale November sky, she could almost make an uneasy peace with the city. Almost find a little comfort, something enough like comfort to do, in the mismatched cluster of taller buildings that passed themselves off as a downtown skyline. She ignored the stares and sidelong glances from the secretaries in their ridiculous heels and the men in suits who looked at her suspiciously; dumpy, rumpled Daria Parker growing from their sidewalk like a monstrous fungus. Thrift-store cardigan beyond baggy, the sharpei of cardigans, the unreal yellow of French’s mustard, tattered white T-shirt beneath. Black jeans worn almost straight through the knees and ass.

Her bass leaned against the wall next to her, the hulking rectangular case betraying no hint of the Fender’s sleek Coke-bottle curves. The case was almost completely covered with stickers pushing local bands, a few goth and grrrl groups, conflicting political slogans and Bob Dobbs and the Church of the Subgenius. The newest addition, plastered dead front and center, confectioner’s pink and black filigree borders, was Daria’s band, Stiff Kitten. The zombified rendition of Hello Kitty had been her idea, brought to life by the band’s drummer, Mort.

Daria fished her last Marlboro from the crumpled pack in her sweater pocket. The cigarette was bent, and she frowned as she carefully straightened it with her fingertips. The smoke masked the oily smell of peanuts roasting down the street, tumbling like agate in their steel-barrel vats. Two young black men hefted burlap sacks from the open doorway of the Peanut Depot, shouldered them out onto the sidewalk and left them like greasy sandbags beside a parking meter. Above the peanuts, there were pricey apartments and she wondered how anyone could stand the smell. All the windows were empty, no curtains or blinds, and dark, so maybe no one could.

Tailpipe farts and the gentle rev of engines made in Japan and Germany, the office monkeys calling it a day, reclaiming their cars from the parking garages spaced out along the length of Morris Avenue. Daria closed her eyes, exhaling slow smoke through her nostrils, listening to the bumpity sound of wheels on the polished cobblestone unevenness of the street. Behind her, behind the offices, the sudden air-horn blat and dinosaur-herd rumble of a freight train, hurrying along one or another of the six tracks that divided downtown Birmingham into north and south.

Daria opened her eyes, squinting through the matted tangle of her hair and the soft gray veil of smoke that hung like a shapeless ghost, undisturbed in the chilly twilight air. She kept her hair long, down past her shoulders and cut no particular way, bleached clean of any trace of its natural color and dyed cherry red with Kool-Aid or, when she could afford it, the Manic Panic cream rinse she bought around the corner at Spyder Baxter’s shop.

The men brought more peanuts out to the curb. There would be a white panel truck soon to take them away.

She glanced at her wrist, at the clunky silver dreadnought of a man’s wristwatch she’d found a year or so ago, groundscore, lying in the road and obviously run over but still counting off the seconds on a liquid-crystal display the color of dirty motor oil. She’d worn it continuously ever since, when she slept or showered, every time and everywhere the band played, and it had become a sort of running joke, a bizarre contest of wills, whether Daria would eventually devise a torture that even the watch could not survive or if perhaps it might go on forever.

Beneath its scratched and pitted face, the watch read five fifteen p.m. in squarish numbers and that meant fifteen more minutes before she was late for practice, less than seven hours until her graveyard shift at the coffeehouse began. She pulled a last drag from the cigarette and crushed it out on the sidewalk, thumbed the butt halfway across the street, narrowly missing a Nissan’s tinted windshield.

“Three points,” she said out loud, smoke leaking from between her lips, and stood up, shouldering the knapsack, brushing sidewalk tracks off her jeans. The sun was almost down now, just the slimmest fireball rind silhouetting the city’s brick and steel and glass carapace. Daria hugged herself, shivered as she buttoned the sweater’s only two remaining buttons. When she was done, she slapped her hands together a couple of times to get the blood flowing again, picked up her bass, and crossed the street.

Spyder Baxter’s shop looked like something displaced, something stolen from the streets of New Orleans maybe, and wedged in tight between Steel City Pawn and First Avenue Rent-2-Own. Daria paused before the display window, fly-specked and ages of dust gathered in the corners like little dunes, parabolic drifts against the smeared glass and rusted frame and a handful of dead bugs thrown in for good measure. Weird Trappings’ handpainted sign swayed and squeaked faintly on its uneven chains, approximate Gothic in clumsy black and purple slashes across whitewashed tin.