by Todd Miller
Chapter 2
It was my idea to go to the tower and get us all killed.
Well, no, that’s not totally true.
It was hers.
The Spider Lady.
But, I’m getting ahead of myself.
Kristin was obsessed with the Ouija board. We started fooling around with it in her basement. That was the first time I saw one, with the medieval-looking letters and numbers, the Yes and No answers, the moons, stars and wizards in pointy hats. It looked creepy, a thing you didn’t want to mess around with, like a loaded gun. Still, they sold it at the toy store, so how bad could it be?
The first time, in her parent’s basement, the four of us sat in the dark with just a single black candle to see by. Kristin and Eddie put their fingers on this little wooden triangle, with a bubble of plastic in the center, something the instructions called a planchette. Both of them had painted their fingernails black for the occasion.
I remember wishing it was me doing that, my fingers close to her fingers, but at the same time, I really didn’t want to get near that weirdo Ouija board.
“Hear us, o spirits,” she said, and Curtis cracked up.
“Shhh!”
Curtis grinned at me, and I smiled back weakly.
“Hear us, o spirits,” she said again. “We seek answers to our questions. Is there a spirit here who will communicate with us?”
Eddie was grinning now, too, and Kristin slapped him on the hand.
“Be serious!” she said.
Eddie sucked in his cheeks to keep from laughing. I watched the board, staring at the planchette, afraid that it might move.
“Is there a spirit here who will communicate with us?” she asked again.
The candlelight flickered across her lightning-bolt earrings.
Slowly, very slowly, the planchette moved over to Yes.
“Whoa!” said Curtis. “You’re moving it! You’re totally moving it!”
“I’m not!” said Eddie, who seemed genuinely surprised.
“Kristin, you’re moving that thing,” said Curtis.
“Quiet, you guys!” she said. “Somebody ask it a question.”
“Does Charlie like Kristin?” asked Eddie.
Kristin giggled and Curtis snorted. I felt my face burn and was grateful for the dark.
In horror I watched as the planchette moved around and around on the board, then back over to Yes.
Everyone laughed but me. I think Kristin shot me a smile, but I was already looking down at my boots.
“I got a question,” said Curtis. “Which one of us is going to be the first to die?”
Everyone fell silent.
The planchette moved around and around, finally landing on the letter C. Next the letter U, then over to R...
“Screw you guys!” said Curtis, and he flipped the Ouija board off the table and that was that. The first time.
After that Kristin and Eddie made us take the Ouija board to the pet cemetery, which was totally stupid, and then to a real cemetery. At midnight, of course. We sat in the grass of the old section, among the crumbling, old tombstones. At first, they wanted to put the Ouija board on top of someone’s grave, but I convinced them that was a bad idea. So Kristin and Eddie sat on the ground and put the board between their laps.
I noticed that their knees were touching. Some friend Eddie was. Still, if I was too chicken, then maybe I didn’t deserve to be with her after all.
She said the same corny mumbo jumbo as before, while I kept looking over my shoulder for a policeman, ready to chase us away.
“Is there a spirit here who will communicate with us?” asked Kristin.
The planchette moved around and around, slowly, carefully. First stopping on S, then P, then I, on to D, then E and finally R. SPIDER.
“Spider?” said Curtis.
The planchette began moving over to L...
Kristin and Eddie freaked, both of them flipping the board off their legs, and then we were all running back to the car as fast as we could. We climbed inside and slammed the doors, peering out the windows for any sign of trouble.
Eddie turned to me.
“Dude, it spelled ‘spider’!”
“That was freaking weird,” said Curtis.
“You guys! We left my board back there!” said Kristin.
We all looked at each other.
“Eddie, get my board for me? Please?”
“No way,” said Eddie.
“I’m not going back out there,” said Curtis.
Kristin turned to me. I hesitated.
“I’ll get it,” I said, and opened the car door.
“So long, Charlie,” said Curtis.
“Time to die, bro!” said Eddie.
Kristin smiled at me.
I slammed the car door and walked back into the cemetery. I kept my flashlight pointed to the ground. Its beam was weak, and I couldn’t see much beyond a few feet in front of me. But that was okay. There was nothing to be scared of out here. Just a bunch of old trees and old tombstones and old bones buried underground.
As I headed back to the spot where we dropped the Ouija board, I convinced myself that Eddie and Kristin were playing a trick on me. Probably Eddie’s idea. The more I got to know him, the more I realized he was kind of a jerk.
I made the mistake of telling them about the Spider Lady the first few months after we became friends. They all knew the basic story; that me and this kid Jason Morgan were fooling around at the tower; that he tried to climb through a window to get inside; that there was horrible accident and he died.
I guess I trusted them, so I told them about my mental breakdown.
See, I was so traumatized by what happened, I convinced myself I saw the Spider Lady in the tower with Jason and that she killed him. I remember thinking I saw her up in the window with blood on her lips and that she whispered something and smiled.
She whispered, Thank you.
For what, I don’t know.
Pretty goofy, huh?
The Spider Lady is our own local legend here in Elmwood. Our version of the Jersey Devil, or the Chupacabra. Every time something weird happens around here, somebody blames the Spider Lady.
Like every time some dog or cat goes missing.
Like when that little girl Susan Taylor disappeared three years ago on Halloween after trick-or-treating with her friends.
Or last year when this senior at my high school named David Lopez killed himself with a shotgun in the woods near the tower. In his pocket they even found a crumpled drawing of a spider with a woman’s face.
I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of her. People around here don’t really like to talk about the Spider Lady much, and when they do, it’s mostly in whispers and nods.
I guess it’s because maybe they’re embarrassed?
Who knows?
Anyway, Eddie and Kristin were jerking me around. I was positive of that. It infuriated me. This was my private stuff they were messing with.
I was so angry I hardly realized that I had reached the Ouija board. I snatched it up off the ground and felt something sticky on my fingers. I shined my flashlight on them and saw they were covered with thick, gooey, grayish strands of spider webs. I dropped the board and wiped my hands on my jeans. The webs wouldn’t come off.
In the darkness I heard a woman’s voice.
“Charlieeeeeee...” she whispered.
Like snow and glass.
I froze. Goosebumps ran up and down my arms.
“I’ve missed you, Charlie...”
The voice was coming from above me. I lifted up my flashlight and shone it into the trees. Dark leaves stirred in the wind, twisting and turning.
“Come to the Tower, Charlie,” said the familiar voice. “And bring me fresh blood.”
I heard a branch creaking and turned my flashlight on the source of the noise.
It was her.
She was pale, white, old, wrapped in a battered, faded black
cloak, all those black furry limbs sticking out to grip the branch beneath her. She was hideous, and yet, there seemed to be something wrong with her as well, like she was sick. Her bulging red eyes held me in her gaze, and then, an instant later the Spider Lady was gone.
I cringed, expecting to be attacked, bitten, mutilated, but nothing happened. All was quiet except for the loud thumping of my heart. My hands shook. I felt like I was going to swallow my tongue. I took a few steps backward, staring at the branch she had just been perched on.
“Help me...” the Spider Lady whispered.
Then I ran back to the car.
I threw the door open and flung myself onto the seat next to Curtis. He was staring down at his iPod, thumbing through songs, looking sheepish. In the front seat, Eddie and Kristin were kissing. Like, really kissing. With tongues.
They stopped a moment later, Eddie with a stupid grin plastered on his stupid face.
“Uh, hey, Charlie...,” said Kristin. “Did you get my Ouija board?”
The air inside the car felt hot and the windows were fogging over. I said nothing.
“Charlie?” she said. She looked at me, made eye contact, then looked quickly away.
“Take me home,” I managed to say.
“Dude, we’re going to IHOP,” said Eddie.
“I thought we were getting eggrolls,” said Curtis.
“Just take me home, all right?”
Curtis squirmed, and said nothing.
“Charlie...” said Kristin.
“Did you get her Ouija board or not, retard?” said Eddie.
I opened the car door and climbed out.
“You guys are real jerks, you know that?”
I left the door open and walked away.
“Yo, Charlie,” called Curtis. “Come on, don’t be like that.”
I didn’t turn around, but I was fighting the urge to run, to cry, to throw myself on the ground like a little kid and scream my guts out.
“Charlie?” I heard Kristin say.
“Screw him, big baby,” said Eddie. “Berger baby!”
I heard the door close behind me, and the car start. And then they drove off without me. To get their precious pancakes.
It was a long walk home, but I don’t remember any of it. My thoughts were churning and whirling, the same words repeating themselves in my brain over and over.
The Spider Lady is real.
She’s actually real.
I wasn’t traumatized. What I saw that day actually happened.
She really did kill Jason.
Suddenly my knees turned to jelly and I stumbled to the pavement.
Who else did she kill?
That little girl? The kid with the shotgun?
Why didn’t she kill me back there in the cemetery?
Because she needs my help.
For what?
Fresh blood.
It was odd, but in my imagination I always pictured the Spider Lady as a beautiful woman. But she looked old. Like, really old. And what was she really? A witch? Some kind of mutant?
One thing I knew for sure, I wasn’t going to set foot anywhere near that stone tower if my life depended on it.
I was definitely not going to bring her fresh blood.
No way.
At first I wanted to tell my Aunt Rose what I had seen, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized she would never believe me. What proof did I have that the Spider Lady was real?
None.
Aunt Rose would think that I’d gone crazy again and then we’d be packing my bags for the bughouse. More headshrinkers, more pills, more group therapy.
No thanks.
I know what you’re thinking. If this was a movie, like, an action movie, I would get a bunch of guns and some grenades and go back to the tower and blow it up. Kill the Spider Lady, save the day.
Well, sorry. But, no. I’m not that guy.
Anyway, after that night at the cemetery, I did my best to ignore Kristin and Eddie, not sitting with them during lunch, or talking to them or whatever. I did hang out with Curtis a few times. Once, we snuck into one of the girl’s bathrooms at school and I noticed someone wrote KRISTIN McDERMOTT IS A SLUT on the one of the walls. I crossed it out furiously with my pen, leaving a big, black smudge.
Another time I went over to Curtis’s house and up in his room he showed me his grandmother’s gun. It was a little handgun, something she kept in her dresser drawer in case the boogeyman showed up.
His grandma was at work, so we set up a bunch of Pepsi cans on a cardboard box in the woods behind his house and took turns shooting at them. We popped them full of holes, and it felt pretty good. Curtis thought it would be funny to take a few shots at the squirrels, so we tried to nail them but they were too fast.
Then he put the gun to his head and pretended to pull the trigger. He grinned his lop-sided grin and I laughed, but it was a fake laugh. Sometimes Curtis freaks me out.
My drawings were all the same. One stone tower after another. Big and small, on my notebooks, in the margins of my homework assignments. Black ink, red ink, blood, no blood, more blood—a woman inside, looking out the window.
Looking at me.
Sometimes I would find myself in the woods behind school, walking toward the tower and I would have no idea how I got there.
My eyes hurt. I got headaches a lot. In school I would stare out the window and think about bringing Kristin to the tower and kissing her.
No, wait…I wasn’t going back there. For real.
I had nightmares all the time, the same dream again and again. Jason and I were standing in front of the tower. Only this time, he was nothing but a hideous slab of dried-up skin with empty eye sockets and a gaping mouth. Nearby was a little girl wearing a witch costume, with a black cape and a pointy hat. She looked pale, bloodless. Beside her stood David Lopez, half his face blown off, clutching his shotgun.
“Bring her fresh blood, Charlie,” said the thing that was Jason. “Fresh blood.”
“I won’t.”
“More will die,” said Jason. “Your friends will die. You will die. Die, Charlie! Die!”
Then they surrounded me, grabbing my arms, my throat, pushing me to the ground, the ground cold and wet, cold and clammy hands crushing my windpipe, everything going black...
And then I woke up.
When I wasn’t having a nervous breakdown, I spent most of my time at the Elmwood Public Library, searching through old microfiche for any information on the stone tower and the Spider Lady.
Before my high school existed, all that land belonged to a guy named Lionel Elmwood. He was some 19th century millionaire, made all his money in timber and newspapers. His mansion was located where the track is now. It burned down about sixty years ago.
Elmwood was a world-traveler and a man with interesting hobbies. He liked to collect exotic flowers, masks, tribal artwork, primitive objects of superstition. Apparently, in 1895, he was attacked by a man with a machete in South America while searching for rare orchids. He cited as proof the jagged scar across his right forearm.
The tycoon took his large family on a trip to Africa in 1906, but came home early after his youngest daughter, Elvira, came down with some sort of strange, tropical disease. I found an obituary for her from February, 1907. There was a photograph of her, and I had to admit she was pretty.
Soon after her death, Elmwood reportedly became obsessed with Astronomy, and built the stone tower to be his observatory. He threw a lavish party when its construction was finished, but after that, he continually declined requests for people to come and visit it. It was whispered that he didn’t even own a telescope.
Elmwood vanished in Australia in 1911 while investigating some of the native rock formations. His eldest son Robert struggled to keep the various family businesses afloat, but he didn’t have the head for it. They lost a great deal of money during the depression, and retreated back into their mans
ion, seldom to be heard from again.
The fire was in 1949. The cause was undisclosed. The mansion was lost, the ruins unsound and unsalvageable. The family finally sold the entire property to the township in 1954, and Elmwood High School was completed in 1955. The stone tower became a historic landmark, but truth be told no one in the town really cared for it. Over the years they let it fall into decay, citing a lack of funds to pay for the necessary repairs.
The rest of the Elmwoods drifted away, although I heard one of them lives way upstate in Sloatsville. An elderly woman named Victoria Elmwood-Ravensburg. She was described in the newspapers as a bit of an eccentric, with more than a few unconventional ideas about how the world worked.
One day I got up the courage to call Mrs. Elmwood-Ravensburg on the phone, but her number was unlisted. So, I wrote her a letter instead. It felt kind of goofy, and old-fashioned. Maybe she would appreciate that. Anyway, I kept it real simple; Hello, my name’s Charlie Berger, I have some questions about the stone tower, thanks for your time, sincerely, etcetera, and so on.
I’m still waiting for her to reply.
One afternoon I was cutting Chemistry class, hanging out in front of the pizza place at the strip mall near our school, and doodling pictures of girls in my sketchbook. I saw Kristin and Eddie pull up in his car, and with nowhere to run, I stood there waiting for them. Waiting for what they might say. It had better be good.
I could see through the windshield they were arguing. I couldn’t hear what they were saying, but their hands were chopping the air between them. Then Kristin got out, her arms folded across her chest, and walked straight toward me.
“Hey, Charlie, can we talk?”
“About what?” I asked.
“Why are you being so mean to me?”
Could she really have no idea, I wondered.
But all I could say was, “I don’t know.”
“I wasn’t faking the Spider Lady thing,” she said. “Neither was Eddie. It really happened. We didn’t make it up.”
“All right,” I said.
“Can you believe it?” she said. “It kind of freaks me out.”
“Me, too.”
Eddie came out of the car and stood next to us.
“Hey,” he said.
“Hey,” I replied.
The wind kicked up and Kristin bowed her head. Eddie looked away. I looked at the ground, the worn brown spots on the tops of my Doc Marten’s. I could feel another headache coming on, and my eyesight got a little blurry.
“You want a slice?” Eddie asked.
“What?”
“A slice.”
“Yeah. Okay.”
So we went inside and ate our pizza; Sicilian, pepperoni, black olives. Nobody really said anything for awhile, and Eddie was chewing the ice from his Coke when Kristin finally spoke.
“Check out what I drew in Study Hall today.”
She pulled out a piece of notebook paper from her purse and unfolded it on the table, gently smoothing out the wrinkles.
“See, that’s me, the princess with the little crown and the pretty dress. And there’s you next to me, the knight with the mighty sword and the roaring lion on his shield.”
“That supposed to be me?” said Eddie.
He pointed to a vampire skulking behind the princess, with long hair all dressed in black and baring his fangs.
“Looks just like you,” I said, which was true more or less.
“What?” said Kristin. “I thought you would like it.”
“Hmph,” said Eddie.
“What do you think, Charlie?” she asked.
I thought everybody’s eyes were too big, but that was probably on purpose like in those weird Japanese comic books. Then I noticed that Curtis was in the drawing too, wearing those crazy Shaolin monk kung fu pajamas and swinging a pair of nunchakus.
“It’s awesome,” I said. “It’s really good.”
Kristin smiled.
“You can have it,” she said.
“Really?”
“Uh-huh. Don’t forget to frame it.”
I studied the drawing for a few moments, aware that she was watching me.
“So what are we doing here,” I said, gesturing to the drawing.
“Oh, we’re getting ready to fight the evil, turtle-throwing dragon,” said Kristin.
“And do we win?”
“We do, but I’m afraid the noble knight sacrifices himself to save the life of his lady fair.”
“Anything for true love,” I replied.
There was an awkward pause for a moment, and I wished I hadn’t said anything. My headache was getting worse, and I swear it was like everything I saw started turning red.
Then Eddie snorted.
“Don’t be such a tool, Berger,” he said, grabbing the drawing out of my hands. “This drawing looks like crap. We look like a bunch of freaks!”
Kristin punched him on the arm.
Eddie smiled then, sloshing the melting ice around in his cup.
“Tell him our idea, Kris.”
She hesitated for a moment.
“What?” I asked.
“You know what would be really awesome, Charlie?”
Her hazel eyes twinkling.
“What if we brought the Ouija board to that spot down by the railroad tracks where that woman jumped in front of a train, and tried to contact her spirit?”
The pizza turned to rubber in my mouth. I started to feel sick.
She didn’t know what really happened. None of them did. I kept that part secret. A secret nobody was supposed to know. I only told the doctors at the mental hospital. Nobody else.
Kristin was just talking. Just stupid talking.
“I heard her body, like, exploded,” said Eddie. “Arms and legs in the bushes.”
There was a roaring sound in my ears. Puffy red was everywhere.
I took a big gulp of my Dr. Pepper and closed my eyes.
“You know what would be cool?” I said.
Eddie shrugged, but Kristin leaned forward. I could see her neck, her collarbone, all sharp and smooth.
“We should go to the stone tower,” I said. “We could contact Jason Morgan’s spirit, and that other dead kid, too, the one who shot himself. We could find out what really happened to them. Maybe even talk to the Spider Lady herself.”
Eddie crunched his ice, watching me.
“You’re crazy,” he finally said.
“Fine then,” I said, smiling at Kristin. “We’ll just go without you.”
“Like hell,” said Eddie.
“Are you serious, Charlie?” asked Kristin.
I shrugged.
“You know, I heard kids used to do it there,” said Eddie.
“God, you are so immature,” said Kristin.
But she was trying not to smile when she said it.
“I’ll go,” said Eddie. “I’m no chicken.”
“We should all go,” I said. “Curtis, too. As a group. In case something happens.”
“Are you sure?” said Kristin, trying not to sound too excited.
A small part of my brain squirmed. Why was I suggesting this? Why couldn’t I shut up?
“You bet,” I said.
“Aren’t you afraid the Spider Lady’s gonna get us?” asked Eddie.
I wanted to say yes.
“No,” I said. “That’s stupid.”
