by S. A. Hunt
And he was standing right next to the bed.
This was the closest she’d ever been to the creature. Every time she’d tried to get close to it, the Red Lord would disappear, leaving her empty-handed and frustrated, but now, this time, here it was, big as life, standing in Kenway’s apartment, close enough to touch, but she couldn’t move, she couldn’t let go of the curtain, her hand wouldn’t respond to her brain, she couldn’t let go and run, run screaming out of the room and down the stairs into the street, but it was reaching up to touch her with one of those long shaggy stinking arms, stinking of the hidden grave, of wet moldy earth, and it had too many fingers and the fingers had too many joints,
whispering
and as it moved, the Red Lord creaked like old leather, like a wicker basket,
and that hand crept closer to hers,
whispering
and those fingers were tipped in hornlike claws, curving spikes, reaching for her, reaching past her trembling hand, reaching for her face
claws brushed her cheek
whispering
(w e l c o m e h o m e)
(w e l c o m e b a c k h o m e)
The floor lamp next to the couch came on with a click. “Jesus what the shit are you screaming ab—” Kenway started to ask.
His voice inserted a key into Robin’s brain and her body unlocked.
As she regained control of herself, the Red Lord fell toward her, collapsed across the bed and across her body, and disintegrated over her like a column of red smoke, or perhaps the thing had never been there at all—and where it had fallen was now a mountain of knotted hair—no, not hair, spiders, five thousand of them, ten thousand of them, tiny venomous-looking crawlers with banded brown legs and peanut-shaped bodies.
The bed and Robin herself were covered in them, crawling all over each other, creating the
whispering
sound like fine wax paper, or perhaps Bible pages, being rubbed together. Robin scrambled up out of the bed, kicking out from under the sheets. “Jesus! Jesus fuck!” she cried, worming out onto the floor in a tumble of spiders, toppling onto her shoulder with a bang, dragging the alarm clock with her.
Arachnids crawled all over her, delicate legs tickling up her shoulders, across her chest, over her face. Bristly gossamer feelers on her lips, on her eyelids.
“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT!” Kenway sat straight up on the couch.
“MUH,” Robin bellowed, in the throes of a crazed fit, flailing and kicking on the floor, tangled in sheets. “UUGGGH!”
Hobbling into the bathroom with the cane, Kenway came back with a can of hairspray and pulled a lighter from his pocket. He aimed both at the bed, snik! snik! snik!, ejecting a cone of roaring flame, sweeping it back and forth, roasting as many spiders as possible. The cane fell over and the veteran stood there on one foot like some crazed combination of a dragon and a flamingo.
“Please let this be an illusion,” Robin pleaded, as she got to her feet. The duvet, sheets, pillow, and all burst into flame.
Some of the spiders—looking very much like brown recluses, or what she supposed brown recluses looked like—came tumbling over the side of the flaming mattress and scuttled across the floor. She squished them with her bare feet, grinding them into the hardwood floor, slick goo and angular toothpicks between her toes. The air stank of burning arachnids and burning mattress, a thin high chemical smoke that somehow smelled like cooked lobster and burnt leaves and singed hair and roasting latex. And to Robin’s surprised disgust, a hint of caramel.
The big veteran kept roasting them with the hairspray flamethrower, blowing a column of fire up and down and back and forth across the bed, swearing the entire time. Robin found the switch for the ventilation, starting a fan in the ceiling, trying to suck out the reek.
“’Stinguisher under the kitchen sink!” shouted Kenway. The bed had become a roaring inferno, filling the apartment with an eye-burning fog.
Robin ran into the kitchen and opened the cabinet under the sink. A cherry-red tank stood behind a collection of cleaning supplies. She raked them out of the way and dragged the fire extinguisher out, ripped the pin out of the handle, and lugged it over to the bed to spray the fire with foam.
* * *
Eventually, between the two of them, they had burned or stomped as many spiders as they could manage, and the fire had been put out. The bed was a charred mess, and the floor was slimed with spider-pulp. Both of them backed into the kitchen to recuperate, sitting on the floor, shaking with adrenaline. Robin’s feet were caked in guts. Kenway sat hunched over, his one remaining leg coiled under him like a cobra ready to strike or bolt, his arms tensed, still gripping the lighter and hairspray.
“What the actual fuck,” he hissed. “Why is my apartment full of spiders, Robin?” His head turned, and his brilliant blue eyes burned into her own. “What was that green-eyed thing standing by the bed?”
Goosebumps thrilled up and down Robin’s arms.
“You saw it?” she asked, astonished. “You saw the Red Lord?”
“Hell yeah, I saw the, ‘the Red Lord.’” He coughed, making a sour face. “Or, at least, I saw something, it was lighting up the room like a goddamn Christmas tree.” He eyed their reflections in the window, as if he expected the glass to explode. “Why did it turn into spiders? What the hell is it?”
“You asking me?”
“It’s your bullshit,” he said, his tone veering into accusatory. “You telling me you don’t know anything about it?” He crabwalked backward a few feet to the end of the kitchen island and reached over his head for a pack of cigarettes. He tapped one out and lit it with the lighter, and sat there leaning against the cabinet, smoking it, his hands shaking. “Freakiest shit I have ever seen. What the fuck did you bring here?”
“Hell, I don’t know! I thought it was a hallucination!”
“That’s why you were taking those pills?” His face had turned legit white, making his ginger-blond beard look almost ashen-brown. “Jesus Christ whole-wheat toast, maybe I should be taking them too.”
After a while, somehow, some way, Robin’s heartbeat started to slow down, and she could feel her muscles relaxing. She got up and climbed onto the kitchen island, washing her spider-encrusted feet in the sink. Kenway didn’t get up. When she finished, she got back down on the floor and sat next to him. The cigarette smoke bothered her a bit, but she didn’t mind.
“Sorry I was an asshole about that—” Kenway gestured toward the remains of the mattress. “Whatever that was.”
“It’s cool. I understand.”
“You deal with this kind of shit on the regular?” he asked, digging an empty Sprite can out of a nearby trash bin and ashing the cigarette into it.
A lone spider wandered across the hardwood floor in front of them. Robin grabbed an issue of Field and Stream off the island counter, rolled it into a tube, and smashed the spider with it.
“You know, I was going to read that,” said Kenway. “Eventually.”
Robin unrolled the magazine and held it up to look at the flattened spider. “Sorry.” She offered it to him. When he made a face, she rolled it up and pushed it into the garbage. “Anyway, you keep askin’ me that. Sounds like you’re slowly starting to believe.”
“I’m getting there. How do you do it?” he finished the cigarette and dropped it into the can. “I’d be fit for the loony bin in a week.”
“They say if you eat a live frog first thing in the morning, nothin’ worse can happen to you for the rest of the day. Well, I started off in the loony bin, so what in the world is bad enough to send me back?” Robin scoffed. “This ain’t nothing. At least it wasn’t snakes.”
“I’ll take snakes over spiders.”
The two of them sat for a while, watching the mattress smolder, trying to will their hands to stop shaking. The stink of burnt spiders and melted memory foam still hung in the air.
Welcome home.
17
“Ugh.” Joel opened his grainy eyes to
find himself in some kind of basement, or a garage or something, a grungy space full of junk.
For some reason, the room was upside down. Water dripped somewhere.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
Everything was cloaked in shadow, except for a piss-yellow fluorescent bulb inside the upper half of a workbench. Tools and engine parts lined the walls and scattered across the floor, and at the far end of the room was a giant wooden cutout, a spray-painted portrait of the Creature from the Black Lagoon.
A long plastic marquee leaned sideways against the wall, a dingy white antique. ARE YOU TOO COOL FOR SCHOOL?, it asked cheerfully, next to a cartoon coyote holding a glass with flames licking up out of it. DRINK FIREWATER SARSAPARILLA!
“Whhfffk.”
Joel’s head was pounding and drool ran up his cheeks, collecting on his forehead. When he tried to rub his face, he found his hands were cuffed together, and the cuffs were chained to the floor.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
“Mmmmff.”
Cotton pressed against his tongue, and something tight was bound around his face and the back of his neck. He was wearing a gag.
Looking down (or up, as the case may be) he saw he was hanging from the ceiling by chains around his ankles. All his clothes were gone except for his underwear, a blue cotton banana-hammock. Subterranean chill raised goosebumps on his naked thighs.
Jesus Christ, his worst sensationalist fears had come true—somebody he met on the Internet for sex had abducted him.
Was Red a cannibal?
Oh God, your cheap ass gonna get ate up, just cause you don’t wanna buy your own steak. He twisted and jerked, trying to see more of the room, trying to ignore the dripping water. Revolving slowly to the left, he saw he wasn’t the only person hanging out, so to speak. A white guy, also dressed only in his Hanes, ankles chained to the ceiling. He was facing the wall, bruises all over his shoulders as if he’d been beaten unconscious.
“Hey,” said Joel through the gag, hhnnngh. Swaying his head from side to side, he swung his center of gravity back and forth, pulling on the chain around his cuffs. He managed to bump the guy with his shoulder, causing him to wobble and turn slowly on his chain.
When his fellow abductee-in-arms turned all the way around, Joel almost pissed his hammock.
The man was dead—very dead, his throat cut, his neck a slack grin stringy with red-black fibers, the crag of his larynx glinting in the worktable’s light, framed by yellow fat like scrambled eggs. A sheet of dried blood ran up his purple face, collecting on the top of his head, where it was dripping on the dark floor.
He’d been bled dry like a pig.
Drip. Drip. Drip.
“Aww, awww, no,” said Joel. Where you at, Robin Martine? Where you at, sis? Oh God, please come find me. Your brother from another mother has royally fucked up this time.
18
He remembered the sound of evening cicadas, that eternal electric drone.
He remembered slashes of orange and red sunset blazing through the treetops, shattered fire in the air. He remembered the ice of the cool evening breeze on his fevered face, his swollen skin. He remembered the sound and the weight of footsteps that were not his own—ponderous, heavy, pounding the earth like a blacksmith’s hammer, slow and steady wins the race.
But most of all, he remembered being carried by a monster.
Clutching his burning body were these impossibly strong arms, thick and hard and veiny, smooth, cold, so like the stony arms of an ogre. Wayne expected to hear the battle-chant of Sauron’s army of Uruk-hai all around him, and the clank and clash of iron swords, and battle cries in unintelligible tongues. But the face looming so close to his own, gargantuan though it seemed, was not a cruel beast from Lord of the Rings. No, it was the face of an old woman.
Spirals of black hair framed her face, shot through with darts of steel-gray. Her cheeks were round, her chin and nose and forehead wide, her mouth a thin, miserly whip-slash. “You been bitten by a snake,” said the ogre-woman, in a grunty Cajun accent. Her teeth were the mottled yellow keys of an abandoned piano in a haunted house. “We gon’ get you some help, boy, just you see.”
Someone slathered ice on his leg. Wayne flinched.
“Now, calm yourself, wiggle-worm,” another voice, a pinched, wizened crow-voice. “I’m puttin’ something on that snakebite that’ll do you real good, arright? It’ll draw out the poisons, so you can—”
And then he was on a gurney, yellow lights flashing in his face. “I think he’s having an allergic reaction,” said a voice to his left: a woman, but this one young.
Ambulance.
The room shook. A siren rang out somewhere outside, rising, falling, yodeling. “Can you hear me?” a man asked. White, dressed in a blue polo shirt, with an ink pen behind his ear.
“Yeah.” Wayne coughed weakly. His throat whistled as he spoke.
“What color was it?”
“Color?” he asked, confused. The lights were so bright.
“The snake that bit you, son. The snake, what did it look like? Did it make a noise like a rattle?”
“Copperhead,” said the woman. “One of the other boys killed it. We have it.”
When he opened his eyes again, he found himself in a cold, dark room under a too-thin blanket that felt to his leg as if it were made of barbed wire. The only light came from a nearby door, seeping in around the bottom, giving shape to dark angles. After a moment of disoriented, delirious eyerolling, he concluded he was in a hospital room.
Someone was asleep in the chair next to the bed. Wayne shifted to that side and discovered Leon, his rumpled army-surplus jacket folded up under his cheek.
As soon as he saw his father, something inside Wayne broke, a brittle eggshell crumpling deep inside of him, and tears sprang to his eyes. His throat burned with shame and embarrassment. I bet I scared you so bad, he thought, grimacing. I am so sorry. I am so sorry I asked you to let me walk home.
“Daddy,” he said to the dim figure, but all that came out was a breathy squeal.
Leon snored.
Discouraged, Wayne lifted the covers and examined his left foot, the soft cotton sliding across his sensitive knee like the roughest burlap. At least a tiny part of his mind expected it to simply be gone—hacked off with a bonesaw and stapled shut, wound about with a bloodstained bandage. But other than tenderness and mild swelling, the extremity was present and accounted for. The bandage around his calf was tight but clean.
Too many horror movies.
He lay back down and again considered trying to rouse his father, but in the end he decided it would be better to let him sleep. The ol’ man probably had a hard night, and without his patent-pending liquid courage, it must have been twice as difficult.
A clamp on his finger radiated a feverish red light, and a wire ran from it to an outlet in the wall over his head. A pair of flatscreens mounted to the wall next to the bed displayed a whole litany of inscrutable numbers and the ever-familiar heartbeat line of an ECG. The lightning-bolt of his heart beeped slow and stately. At first he was afraid taking it off would set off some kind of chirping alarm, wake up the whole hospital and summon a nurse. But when he screwed up his nerve and pulled it from his finger, nothing happened except the glowing blue seismograph turned to a flat line and all the numbers disappeared.
A Styrofoam container lay on a table by the bathroom door. Probably something to eat in there. Cold or hot, he didn’t care. He glanced at his sleeping father again and slid out of the bed. Under his left foot, the floor was searingly cold. Limping across the room, the boy found a dispenser on the wall and managed to squirt some sanitizer foam into his hands. As he rubbed them together, his stomach gnarled up and growled, and he wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten lunch the day before. He was starving.
In a chair underneath the TV were his shoes, and in one of his shoes was his mother’s wedding band. He slipped the cold chain around his neck.
Underneath the chair was a black gym bag. Wayne
opened it and rooted around in it. Fresh clothes. Probably his own.
He thought about putting something on, but the idea he might need to stay in his gown for some reason or another made him reluctant, so he left it alone. He took the Styrofoam container—half a club sandwich, three soggy onion rings—and stood at the foot of his bed and watched his father sleep, still racked with shame.
I just know you been scared as hell all night. I’m so sorry. I had no idea there would be a snake in there.
Really, though, he was lying to himself.
Of course he’d been afraid of stumbling across a snake. It was why he’d hustled to get away from the weedy clown car, wasn’t it, all full of snaky-looking brush and sticks. But he’d just walked right on into that Gravitron, hadn’t he, without a care in the world.
And God in heaven! The bills would be astronomical, he just knew it.
On top of everything else, his dad was going to have to pay the hospital a kajillion dollars because Wayne was so stupid. He remembered reading about antivenin in Science class. The exotic names of the drugs had sounded so expensive.
This was my fault. His hand instinctively went to the ring dangling against his chest. He felt puny, unworthy. Raising the ring to his eye, he studied his father through the ring, looking for the familiar comfort of the protective metal hoop. I knew it was dangerous and I did it anyway. I am so stupid. I’m a stupid kid. A stupid baby. I deserve to be grounded. I deserve to be locked up in my tower and never let out.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” he squeaked.
Leon just snored. A wooden door, like the kind you’d see in an old house, stood behind Leon’s chair, leading out of the room. Paint flaked from its surface.
Wayne blinked.
Three-oh-six.
The ring dropped from his eye and the rusty door vanished.
Astonished, he shuffled over to where he’d seen it and put his hand against the wall. Cold cinder block, painted gray, nothing else. Gently feeling the wall with both hands, Wayne searched for the door he’d seen, but there was no indication it’d been there at all—no doorframe, no knob, no nothin’.
