“You were drunk. It was a Friday and a payday, it had just started to rain and you two shimmied outside. The bathroom line was too long and I was there too. Taking a piss on the dumpster. She was hot then. You’re right, she’s just a skeleton now. But she’s not buried.”
“I didn’t.” He said and drank long. “Christ, I threw her in a ditch and that was that. I checked at all the papers and radio. I still do. I keep thinking she’ll turn up when they do roadwork. But I can’t go back there. I’m just done with it. I’ve lived a better life. I’ve tried to make up for it. But I know if there is a Christ, he’ll get me.”
“It stinks in here.” I admitted.
“Yeah, man, it does.” He stood up. “I probably should go, right?”
“You can.”
“We’re cool?”
I thought of the needle, I could feel my own in my hand. Only mine couldn’t play records. I turned it to my friend and I could hear the start of the next track. It was Vanilla Queen. And there was that girl, standing in my doorway. My friend stared up from the floor and saw her, too. Her body was as he had told me it would be. She could never hold onto her meat.
“Is that her?” He said.
“Well in simple English: Yes.”
THE END
Spider House by Bill Pace
North Church Hill
Her hat had feathers, and the frilly dress came up to her chin. Theodora Wright didn’t see any spiders. It was a nice brick house at a great price.
“How come they call it Spider House, again?”
The agent retold how the original owner thought his wife came back as a spider, never killed spiders in the house. He assured Theodora they had all been eliminated, it was clean as a whistle.
He hadn't had a sale all week, and “Miss Do” needed a place for her troubled family. But she had been the agent’s childhood Sunday School teacher, he didn't even think about a sales pitch.
“Miss Do,” the young agent said, wiping his sweat. He looked tired and stressed. “Are you really looking for a house?”
“Yes, young man,” she answered. “And I’ll buy this one if you tells me the truth.”
The agent was beyond trying to make a sale, and he could never fool Miss Do. He told her the “truth.”
Barnaby Stokely and his wife never had children. Then she died before her fortieth birthday. A smoker all her life, the cancer got her. Barnaby smoked, figured he’d get the cancer, too. Started drinking. No kids, no wife, nothing to do when he got off work but drink and smoke cigarettes.
He set his glass down on the table and noticed the spider. Just an ordinary brown spider. Seemed to be looking up at old Barnaby.
“Well, hello.”
Barnaby didn’t kill it. Liked the company and the thing wasn’t scared of him. Suddenly it blurred. Just zinged away somewhere out of sight. At the edge of the table, the spider had another spider. A shiny little black one. Barnaby’s eyes got big and he caught his breath. The brown spider was stinging the black one. Killing it, fiercely.
“Yes, suh, now that’s a badass spider there.”
When it was over, the black spider was on its side. Barnaby looked at the belly and his skin crawled. Saw the red hourglass of a dead black widow.
The brown spider stood before Barnaby on the table again. The man exhaled and picked up his drink, changed his mind and put it back down. Didn’t think he was drunk, but wasn’t sure. He leaned forward and stared right at the brown spider.
“Who is you?”
The spider didn’t back down. Barnaby Stokely didn’t drink or smoke again for months.
“Yo’ Daddy told you that, young man?” Miss Do demanded. The real estate agent nodded. His father had dabbled in real estate, among other things. Sold Spider House twice. Miss Do already knew all that.
“Yo’ Daddy was a good man.”
“Yes, m’ame, he was.”
She studied the perspiring young man, a nice man. Dressed like a married man, smelled married. Looked like his mama. He wasn’t trying to make a sale, looked like he was scared of Miss Do. She resisted a smile.
“What else yo’ Daddy tell you, young man?”
Soon after the brown spider appeared, Barnaby dreamed of June-bug, his good-looking wife, before her illness. Woke up and there she was. Right next to him, soft brown skin shining in the moonlight. Without question, he took her in his arms and cried for joy. Made love as he’d longed to for so long.
The next morning, June-bug wasn’t there. Her place by him was empty…except for a brown spot. Barnaby looked closer, saw the brown spider. And he just laughed and laughed.
Winter came, and the spider disappeared for the season, to show back up at the break of spring. With baby spiders. Barnaby’s heart leapt: he’d never sired children. He and June-bug had been so busy, and then she died. The baby spiders grew into brown spiders like the mother, but she never left his side. And at night, he awoke to pretty June-bug, the love of his life. And they had passion until he woke up to the brown spider by the pillow.
“Heh, heh,” the real estate agent nervously laughed. “Some people believe it.”
“’Course they do!” Miss Do scolded. “Yo’ Daddy never talked no smack. A good man yo’ Daddy was.”
“Oh, yes,” the young man stammered. He had no clue. Had the symbol of the spider sewn on his sweater, and a spider bumper sticker on his fine Mercedes-Benz. The spider was the mascot of the young man’s alma mater: the University of Richmond Spiders.
Miss Do looked at the nice young man selling real estate with his college degree from U. of R. A piece of paper he had. Sold pieces of paper, Miss Do always thought it was funny how people thought they could own land. Especially in her neighborhood. Nobody owned Church Hill, they owned pieces of paper. Only thing she believed about that world was the white paper it was written on, everything else was voodoo.
“What else yo’ Daddy say ‘bout Spider House, young man?”
He figured out Miss Do already knew.
Barnaby cheated. The normally faithful man went out with the guys after work, got to drinking, brought home a pretty young girl. She died of spider bites.
The rescue workers came too late, she lay there in his bed, nude body covered in welts. The old man was distraught, told paramedics he'd cheated on his wife in their bed, where the girl was bitten viciously. The staff was shocked to learn Barnaby was a widower.
He started smoking again, got the cancer. Friends and family remarked how happy he was with the brown spider sitting in June-bug’s old seat. In fact, they called her "June-bug."
The brown spiders disappeared after Barnaby Stokely’s jubilee. For a while.
“Crazy, huh?” the young man tried to laugh. Miss Do narrowed her eyes at him. He could almost hear her thoughts:
Just ’cause you swallowed some white paper world, don’t mean you can call the real world “crazy.”
When a dark brown spider appeared with the light brown one, the heirs were scared of "Barnaby and June-bug." The young man’s father first sold Spider House on the family's behalf. A young white couple reverse-integrated into the neighborhood, buying the solid brick house for less than a trailer. The couple scoffed at the name “Spider House,” thought the nice black neighbors were playing with them. Or were superstitious.
The brown spiders came out with the spring. Just looked at the woman as she smoked weed and drank. They made her feel bad, like they worried about her. Like her own family did.
Feeling tipsy, the young woman thought she’d try something. They were just spiders, right? She stepped on one. They froze, looking up at her. She stepped on another. More appeared, looking shocked. The girl thought they were hilarious, wondered if the cheap whiskey made them so interesting. She stepped on another, then another. They disappeared.
The stoned girl laughed.
When she told her husband she killed them because they were watching her, he was upset. They were living things, he explained. The spiders were there before they were.
“They’re just spiders,” she teased. She wanted to call the exterminator.
“I don’t like killing things. Not if you don’t have to.”
She laughed and took another drink, lit up a joint. He went to bed.
He woke up from a restless dream he couldn’t remember. The wall was moving. Shook his head, the wall was crawling. The young husband went ice cold under the warm sheets: something tickled his chin. Slowly, he looked down and saw a brown spider crawling up his face. The bed sheets were covered. The room came to life with a huge stream of brown spiders, as he brushed the spider off his face and screamed. In horror, he saw his young wife stung by countless spiders, covering her whole body. He grabbed her arm, to no response. Spiders were crawling on him now, starting to bite.
He dialed 911 running outside. Reported spiders in Church Hill. They were killing his wife, he screamed. Threw his clothes off, brushing them off his body. Naked, he waited in the cool spring night, shivering in his car.
A policeman politely asked the stark naked white man in a black neighborhood for his ID. Then chuckled. Another cop joined and whispered, “Spider House.”
The cop lost his chuckle.
They pulled out their pistols as a paramedic studied welts on the man’s body. Firemen grimly joked the cops: how were they going to fight a million spiders with pistols? The firemen went in, warily layered from head to toe.
There were no spiders in the house. Only a dead woman, covered in bites.
“Miss Do,” the agent asked in exasperation. “Are you really going to buy this house?”
She smiled. The spiders were there. They’d make proper Christians of her gangsta, foul-mouthed children and children’s children. Miss Do didn’t mind Spider House one bit.
The fine brick structure became a “safe house,” a haven for drug dealers, pimps, and thieves. The cops dared not go there.
A young girl was drugged, taken against her will, tortured into submission, then raped. The thugs ran “the train” on her, left her crying for help. The spiders heard.
They had had enough.
As the gangstas smoked their stuff and drank, talking trash, the walls came to life. Couldn’t believe their eyes, just sat there cursing and screaming obscenities. A stream of brown spiders poured into them from every direction. They tried to run, covered in arachnids, but not one made it to the door.
The papers reported a gang slaying, in retaliation for abusing the teen-aged girl. The police never told, but the girl and neighbors saw mutilated corpses, sting marks covering every thug. The legendary house stayed vacant.
Spider House was fumigated to exterminate the creatures. No dead spiders were found.
“Isn’t that funny?” Miss Do asked her agent. “No dead spiders.”
“Maybe it’s just a myth,” he replied, voice embarrassingly shaky.
“Oh, yes, I s’pose so,” she hummed. “Or, maybe they went outside…wouldn’t you?”
“Yes, m’ame,” the agent desperately tried not to insult her. He knew she believed the legend, and all the urban legends of her neighborhood. Just as his parents had believed. “Uh, why would spiders go outside for the exterminator?”
“Young man,” she crowed. “That’s the smartest thing you said all day.”
He was relieved. For a moment. She went on:
“Now s’pose those spiders don’t know he’s a ‘sterminator, what they gonna do? Why, they gonna set there and die.”
“They’re just spiders, right?” the young man tried to laugh, then regretted. Miss Do looked at him with disdain.
“But s’pose they knows he’s the ‘sterminator,” she demanded. He was trying to be polite at the suggestion a spider could know an exterminator. Miss Do said, “Then they’s gonna slip on outside. See? They wasn’t no dead spiders, so you decide, young man.”
She read it on his face. He was in the white paper world; new voodoo.
“So, where yo’ papers, young man?”
“Papers, Miss Do?”
“Is you gonna sell me a house, or no?”
The grin on his face told the story: he had his piece of paper.
They left for his office in the West End. But as they left, Miss Do turned and saw two brown spots on the floor. Two brown spiders, a male and female, side-by-side.
The old lady winked and whispered,
“Chilluns fine? I’ll see ya’ll later, June-bug!”
THE END
Rain & Iron by Benjamin Sperduto
Zlygost woke to the touch of cold rain and the sound of creaking iron.
He opened his eyes slowly.
The cage was suspended by a chain some six or seven feet off the ground. It was only an arm’s length wide and just high enough for a tall man to stand upright. The iron bars were caked with rust. Jammed into a crouching position at the bottom of the cage, Zlygost found it difficult to move. After fending off an initial surge of panic, he managed to pull his aching body to its feet. The cage swung back and forth as he worked his limbs free and the iron chain above him groaned with every movement.
He glanced around to find himself in the center of a village square. Most of the old buildings were fashioned from crudely hewn blocks, their crumbling foundations set in thick, soggy mud. Wooden shutters covered some of the windows, but they were scarred with weathered cracks and rotting away at the corners. The rain-swollen clouds hanging overhead blotted out the sun and the gloom seemed to suck the color out of everything, leaving behind only a gray, lifeless haze. Aside from the pattering of the rain and the creaking chain above the cage, the village was silent.
There were a few bodies lying in the muddy streets. Zlygost pressed his face against the bars of the cage to get a better look at the closest one, a man dressed in simple, woolen clothing. His body was covered with black sores, some of which were as big as a man’s fist.
Plague, he thought. It had been spreading fast as the refugees from the fighting in Livonia poured into western Muscovy. Along with the famine, it was a fitting consequence of Tsar Ivan’s pointlessly vain war.
Zlygost pulled back from the bars and looked over the rest of the bodies he could see. All of them bore similar marks. It seemed likely that disease had claimed the entire village.
“Who are you?”
The voice came from behind him and startled him so badly that he lurched forward to slam his face into the rusty bars. He managed to regain his balance as the cage swayed back and forth, and he turned around to find two children, a boy and a girl, standing there. The boy looked to be about ten or eleven years old, the girl somewhere closer to fifteen. Their hair was long, tangled, and black. They were dressed in ragged clothing and wore no shoes. Although it was difficult to make out through the rain and the dim light, their eyes appeared to be black.
“Who are you?” the boy asked.
The children stood completely still as they stared at him.
His first attempt to respond left him coughing up bits of grayish phlegm. After taking a moment to clear his throat, he managed to croak out an answer.
“Zlygost.”
“Why are you in there?” the boy asked.
Zlygost had no answer. The last thing he remembered was leaving the city of Novgorod, but he could not say how long ago that had been or how it had led to his present situation.
“I’m not sure,” he said.
The boy giggled and leaned over to the girl.
“He’s not sure!”
The girl did not laugh.
“He’s been touched,” she said. “The nechist stink is all over him.”
The word chilled him. Zlygost’s grandmother used to terrify him with stories of the nechistaya sila, the unclean force that had lurked in the shadows of old Russia long before God’s church arrived there.
“Is he going to die soon?” the boy asked.
“Not yet,” the girl said.
“What do we do with him, then?”
The girl stepped closer to the cage, but stopped just shor
t of where Zlygost’s reach likely ended.
“Leave him. We can come back for him later.”
The boy smiled.
“Okay!”
Without another word, the children walked past the cage and approached the nearest body. They knelt beside it and carefully peeled away the clothing.
Once the corpse was naked, the children ate it.
Their mouths opened wide enough to swallow a large man’s fist, revealing row upon row of serrated teeth that shredded through the dead man’s flesh with minimal effort. They tore away chunks of muscle and fat to be gulped down with a single swallow.
Zlygost tried to look away, but he could not pull his gaze away from the loathsome spectacle. His empty stomach heaved painfully and he fell back against the iron bars as he tried to keep his throat clear. The sound of tiny, gnashing teeth grinding against the corpse’s bones carried above the splattering rainfall and Zlygost’s skin prickled as the children scoured every bit of flesh away from the body.
There seemed to be no limit to their appetite. They moved on to the next body when they had finished the first, and then on to another after that. Trapped in his iron prison, Zlygost could do nothing but watch their abominable feast with a growing, bitter sense of dread. Within a few minutes, they had consumed every body in the village square, leaving only scattered piles of bones behind.
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