by Todd Miller
Chapter 4
Eddie and Kristin dropped me off at my house. It was almost three in the morning. I opened the door as quietly as I could, then slipped inside. It was only dark for a moment before Aunt Rose turned on the lights. She was wearing her robe, sleepy-eyed, with a look on her face that was both angry and worried.
“Mind telling me where you’ve been?” she asked.
Then she saw the blood spattered on my clothes.
“What happened?”
“Eddie was on his skateboard,” I said, thinking quickly. “He was fooling around and he went down some steps and cut his head.”
“Is he okay?”
“Oh, yeah, but he got some blood on me, too.”
Aunt Rose looked me over.
“I don’t remember Eddie having a skateboard,” she said.
“Well, he does,” I replied, trying to sound like I wasn’t lying.
“Did you take Eddie to the hospital?”
“Kristin’s taking him,” I said.
“I would appreciate a phone call,” she said.
“I know.”
“You were out a long time.”
“I guess.”
“I can’t stay up half the night worrying about you.”
“Okay,” I said.
“That boy Eddie is nothing but trouble. And you know how I feel about that Kristin, too,”
“Yeah, I know,” I said, already tired of the conversation.
Aunt Rose folded her arms and gave me a hard look.
“Dean Carter called today. He told me you’ve been cutting class again and that your grades are slipping. He said you might even fail Trigonometry this semester. What do you have to say about that?”
I looked down and shrugged.
“I’m doing pretty good in Art,” I said.
“Art? Do you know what Art gets you? A job at Burger King!”
The blood on my arms was starting to dry. It felt pasty and weird and I shivered.
“Charlie, do you remember we talked about this? If you’re feeling too much stress, too much pressure, arrangements can be made. The Dean knows all about your history. You could be moved to a special class.”
“I’ll—I’ll do better,” I said. “I promise. Can I go now? There’s all this blood on me.”
She nodded curtly and I bolted upstairs to the bathroom. I sent Eddie a text message so he could back up my story if Aunt Rose ever asked. Then I threw off my jeans and my shirt and turned on the shower. I checked my boots for blood, checked them real close, but I didn’t find any so that was a relief.
The hot water couldn’t calm my nerves. My thoughts were a jangled, jumbled mess. She made me lead my friends to the tower. She hypnotized me.
Fresh blood, fresh blood.
For what?
Curtis was dead. She was dead. It didn’t make any sense.
We should have left the Spider Lady’s body alone. Kristin got that grey ash stuff all over her, she said it was even in her mouth, so that can’t be good. And where did all those poisonous little spiders go?
Then I realized that faking Curtis’s suicide was actually a really stupid thing to do, but it was too late now, and if I confessed I’d probably go to jail. So it would be my secret, our secret, me, Eddie and Kristin.
I went to bed, and pulled the covers up to my nose. Tears started rolling out of my eyes.
I killed my best friend.
But I had to.
Right?
That night I dreamed I was in Kristin’s house, in the hallway upstairs, standing outside her bedroom door. Her house was dark, but there was a faint green light coming from under her door. And there were sounds, too, Kristin moaning and talking softly, saying words I couldn’t hear.
I turned the knob, but the door was locked.
I knocked lightly, because I didn’t want to wake up her parents.
“Kristin?” I whispered.
I put my ear to the door and listened.
“Please,” she said and that was all.
A moment later I felt something crawling up my leg and looked down to see spiders pouring out from under the door, skittering up the wall and down the hall. I grabbed one and held it by the legs between my fingers.
It was black and furry, with little white marks on its back that sort of looked like a face. And then the spider bit me on the thumb.
And I woke up.
Kristin wasn’t in school the next day. Eddie came up to me after third period and asked if I had seen her. I said no.
“She call you?” he asked.
“Nah, you?”
He shook his head, no.
“Think she’s all right?” I asked.
“I don’t know. She was pretty freaked out last night.”
I nodded. Eddie looked down for a moment.
“So, uh, maybe I’ll try to call her again later,” he said.
“Okay.”
Nobody noticed that Curtis wasn’t in school. Just me. I had to look at his empty desk in Spanish class, and later in Social Studies as well. Nobody suspected he was out there in the woods, dead as can be, and if they did know they probably wouldn’t care. Well, that wasn’t totally true. It would be an exciting story for awhile, and then everybody would forget.
The Dean came and found me in the cafeteria.
“Mr. Berger, a word in my office, please,” he said.
We didn’t speak during our little stroll. Dean Carter talked to a few teachers as we passed, told a few kids to quit fooling around and get to class.
We reached his office and he told me to sit down.
“Have you seen Curtis Johnson today?” he asked.
“No.”
“His grandmother said he didn’t come home last night. Were you with him last night?”
“For awhile. But we dropped him off at his house around one.”
“Who’s ‘we’?” he asked.
“Me and Eddie and Kristin.”
“Uh-huh,” he said and seemed to chew that over.
“His grandmother’s really worried,” said the Dean. “You sure you haven’t seen him?”
I shook my head, no
“Curtis shows his face around here, you tell him to give her a call, understand?”
I shook my head, yes. And then he let me go.
I bumped into Eddie later, and he told me he talked to Kristin but only for a little bit and that she didn’t sound too good. I asked him if he was going to go to her house after school and he said no, he had to go help at his dad’s store.
So I skipped eighth period and walked to Kristin’s house. I debated calling her first, but I thought maybe she’d like to be surprised. Also, I was afraid she’d tell me not to come, and I really wanted to see how she was doing. I looked around for a flower store, but then I thought flowers might be kind of weird so I picked up a bag of her favorite cookies, Pepperidge Farm Chocolate Raspberry Milanos.
Her parent’s cars weren’t in the driveway, so that was a good sign. I rang the doorbell a few times, but no one answered, so I went around back and unlocked the gate. I could see through the porch window that Kristin was on the sofa, a blanket pulled over her. Maybe sleeping. Maybe watching television.
I knocked on the window real loud until she got up. She shuffled over and looked at me, a frown forming on her lips.
“Hey,” I said. Then I held up the cookies.
She unlocked the back door and let me in. The inside of her house was real dark. All the window shades were down, the lights off. She was wearing sweat pants and a baggy T-shirt. Her hair was all messed up, frazzled black and pink strands going every which way.
I opened up the bag of cookies and handed her one. She waved it off, turned and skulked back into the living room.
“How you feeling?” I asked.
She sat down on the sofa and looked like she was about to cry.
“I had some really weird dreams last night, Charlie,” she said.
“Me too.”
“You were in them,” she said.
“What was I doing?” I asked.
She didn’t say anything. I thought about telling her my dream, but realized it might be a bit too creepy.
“Promise you won’t get angry?” she asked.
“Okay,” I said.
“In my dream you were holding me down on the floor. You were on top of me, grabbing my wrists. Pushing them down. Hard. And then...one of those spiders from last night that...that popped out of that...thing...crawled across my body, up the side of my face and jumped into my mouth.”
“Ugh,” I said.
“I could feel its hairy little feet walking over my tongue, down into my throat. I wanted to throw up but you put your hands over my mouth and made me swallow it.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. It seemed like the right thing to say.
“A lot of other weird things happened, too,” she said. “There was a group of lions, and a man in a spooky mask, like a...like a witch doctor or something.”
Something moved around in my brain when she said that, but it was fuzzy and I couldn’t get a handle on it. And besides, I had noticed Kristin wasn’t wearing a bra. I tried to look away.
“You sure you don’t want some of these cookies?” I asked.
She wrinkled her nose.
“Maybe some soup?” I said.
“Soup?”
I shrugged.
“Charlie,” she said, tears suddenly welling up in her eyes. “What happened last night?”
“Which part?”
“Everything. It all seems so crazy, but it really happened, didn’t it?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Poor Curtis,” she said, her eyes welling up with tears.
Seeing her about to cry got my own eyes all watery, so I turned away and stared down at the floor. But the floor was an ocean and I was sinking fast.
I sat there wondering if I should tell her it was all my fault, wondering if she would believe me, if she would believe I was hypnotized, when she poked me with her bare foot.
“Do you think the Spider Lady’s really dead?” she asked.
“Yes,” I said. “We saw her body fall apart. There’s nothing left.”
“What about her ghost?” she asked.
I had no answer for that.
“She’s a witch, right?” she asked.
I nodded.
“So maybe she’s not really dead. Maybe her spirit is out there, somewhere.”
“It’s possible,” I said.
“And what about all those little spiders?” she asked. “Are they, like, her babies?”
“Maybe,” I finally said.
“There must be a thousand of them out there now,” she said.
“I guess.”
“That can’t be good, right?”
“Probably not.”
“She told us to go to the roof. With the Ouija board. She wanted us to find her up there.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
“The Spider Lady wanted us to die up there,” she said. “She wanted her little spider babies to kill us and eat us.”
Is that why she had me bring my friends to the tower? To be food for her spider babies?
“Fresh blood,” I said.
“What?”
I shook my head.
“Kristin, I…this is…all of this is…”
I felt my eyes tearing up and quickly looked down at the floor.
I couldn’t tell her. She would hate me. Hate me forever. And then I’d be all alone…
“Charlie?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Forget it.”
She looked at me and I turned away.
“I mean…the important thing is…nobody else got bit, so I guess we’re okay,” I said.
“Do you feel okay?”
I didn’t say anything.
“Hand over those cookies,” she said.
I gave her the bag and she tore it open. We each took a handful of Milanos.
“These cookies are really girly,” I said, half-smiling.
“They’re sophisticated,” she said, resting her head nonchalantly on my shoulder. “You’re just threatened by any cookie that doesn’t have a picture of an animal on it.”
She looked up at me and grinned. I put my arm around her and felt her hair brushing the skin on my neck, my chin. I did everything I could to resist kissing the top of her head.
We sat there for awhile, not talking, just eating cookies and watching the lights fade as the sun went down. The room grew dimmer and everything got sort of grey and hazy. I could hear Kristin breathing. I checked to see if she fell asleep, but her eyes were open.
“It took forever to get that stuff out of my hair,” she finally said.
I turned my head and kissed her. Our lips touched, but her tongue tasted strange, like dirt, or worse, like fur, and it made me a little sick. Then she moved away.
“Stop,” she said.
“Sorry,” I said. “Sorry.”
We looked at each other and she looked away. I stood up and fumbled with the zipper on my jacket.
“I should go,” I said.
She didn’t say anything.
“See you tomorrow, in school?” I asked.
She shrugged.
“Okay, then,” I said. “Bye.”
It was a long walk home.
Aunt Rose had picked up some fried chicken, but I wasn’t really hungry. We ate together and she asked me the usual stupid questions about my day. I wanted to ask her if she had washed the bloody clothes, but I didn’t want to seem too worried about them either, so I kept my mouth shut.
She was talking about some boring thing or another when the phone rang. Aunt Rose got up and answered it.
“Oh, hello Mrs. Carter. No, I haven’t seen Curtis. I’m sorry to hear that. Yes, just a moment, hold on...”
Aunt Rose handed me the phone. My stomach clenched.
“Hello, Mrs. Carter,” I said.
“Charlie,” she said, in her old lady, Southern drawl. “Have you seen Curtis around?”
“We hung out last night,” I said. “But we dropped him off at home around one.”
“Well, he wasn’t here this morning, and they told me he wasn’t in school today. He’s not answering his cell phone and so I thought maybe he was at your house.”
“Sorry, Mrs. Carter,” I said. “I haven’t seen him all day.”
“Now, Charlie, you tell me the truth,” she said. “Is Curtis in some kind of trouble?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He took my gun, Charlie,” she said.
“Gun?”
“Don’t act so surprised,” she said. “I know you two were fooling with it.”
“He showed it to me a few times,” I said.
“Uh-huh,” she said. “Look, you see that boy, you tell him to get himself home in a hurry, understand?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You sure he’s not in trouble?” she asked, a little more worry in her voice.
“I really don’t know,” I said.
“Lord, the things that boy puts me through,” she said.
I didn’t know what to say to that.
“Goodnight, Charlie,” she said.
“Goodnight, Mrs. Carter.”
I hung up the phone and turned to face Aunt Rose.
“What was all that about?” she asked.
“Curtis didn’t come home last night,” I said.
I wanted to stop talking about Curtis already.
“What’s this I heard about a gun?” she asked.
“Uh, yeah,” I said. “She had one and Curtis took it.”
“Why would he do that?”
I looked down, unable to meet her eyes.
“He’s probably just screwing around,” I said. “Curtis is a really weird guy.”
“Mrs. Carter should call the police,” said Aunt Rose.
“I t
hink she already did,” I said.
“I feel just terrible for his grandmother,” said Aunt Rose. “Can you imagine how worried she must be?”
I nodded, yes.
“Do you know where he is?” she said.
“No.”
She looked at me and cocked her head to the side.
“I don’t. Really. I mean, I’m worried, too.”
“That poor woman,” she said.
That night I burned the blood-spattered clothes in the fireplace, after Aunt Rose had gone to bed. As I watched the flames I thought about how it might all go down. The police would be called eventually. Mrs. Carter would file a missing-persons report. How long would it take them to find the body? How long until I got busted, somehow, either through my own stupidity or some microscopic clue I had overlooked?
Then I thought about what Kristin had said earlier, about the Spider Lady’s spirit still being out there in the woods. Maybe her spider babies ate Curtis and he would never be found. Or maybe her spirit swallowed his soul. I imagined her ghostly form, mouth open wide, shoving Curtis’s spirit down between her pointed teeth and I shuddered.
When the fire had gone out, I scooped up the ashes in a dustpan and flushed them down the toilet. The black ashes swirled around and around, and I couldn’t help but think of Kristin’s tongue, that weird, funny taste that seemed even more unnatural the more I thought about it. I figured it must have been some faint trace of the grey ashes that got into her mouth when the Spider Lady exploded, and I brushed my teeth about twenty times.
The next day I decided to cut school altogether. There was going to be a test in English, and another in Chemistry that I hadn’t bothered to study for, so it seemed better to just skip them. After the bus dropped me off, I wandered down to the running trail, and when I was sure nobody was looking, I slipped off into the woods.
It was a warm day, and the sun was bright. I walked for a long time, being careful to make as little noise as possible. I was going back to where we left Curtis. I wanted to clean the gun off again, really good this time. And I figured there were probably a bunch of other things I had forgotten about that I could deal with now that my head was clear.
The forest was quiet. I didn’t hear any birds or squirrels. I came across a spider’s spindly web in the crook of an old tree stump, but the spider wasn’t home. After that, I made it a point to study the ground as I walked, in case I stumbled upon any more of those weird spiders from the other night. The Spider Lady’s babies, as Kristin had called them.
Finally, I reached the spot where Eddie and I had dragged Curtis’s body.
It was gone.
There was dried blood and brains on the ground where he was supposed to be.
I cursed. They had found him already. My mind trembled with fear, the fear of getting caught. I couldn’t believe it had happened so fast. Did Eddie tell? Or Kristin?
Then I noticed the gun. It was lying on the ground nearby, bright and shiny, plain as day. I struggled to make sense of this. Who would take the body but not the gun? I looked around for other footprints, or signs that someone had dragged Curtis’s body away. There were none.
Slowly I picked up the gun. It was cold and wet in my hand. I couldn’t tell if it had been fired recently. Really, I had no idea what I was doing. With Curtis gone it seemed dumb to just leave the gun, so I put it in my waistband and tucked my shirt over it. It felt strange there, like a cold fish. So I put the gun in my knapsack instead.
I fought the urge to call Eddie or Kristin and totally freak out. Somebody must have removed the body. I could go home and just wait for the police to knock on my door.
No, not the police. There’d be cops everywhere right now. Lots of yellow tape.
Maybe the spiders did eat him, like Kristin said. But there were no bones, no scraps of clothing, no sneakers. Could the spiders eat those, too? Maybe if they were magic spiders.
Black magic. Bad stuff.
Maybe Curtis got up and walked away. I laughed nervously at that. He wouldn’t get too far with a big hole in his head, right? Ha ha.
I looked around, thinking maybe he was hiding behind a tree, waiting to jump out and get me. Rip off my limbs and tear me apart.
“Curtis?” I said.
The forest was quiet.
The little hairs on my arms stood up.
Something was moving on the ground. Black, furry, the size of a squirrel, but not a squirrel. A spider. The white marks on its back. One leg after another, crawling, crawling...
I jumped back. It moved toward me, curious, threatening.
How did it get so big?
Then another spider was crawling towards me, and another, all of them large and purposeful. I could see their eyes, shiny red globes, focused on me. When the first spider got too close I stomped it into a green paste, and I could feel its body reluctantly squashing under my boot, like I was stepping on a tennis ball.
The other spiders came at me and I stomped them all to hell.
My boots were covered with spider guts. I scraped them on the ground, on a rock, dark green goo everywhere. I quickly untied the laces and pulled my boots off. I pulled off my socks, too, and threw them all away.
Then I sprinted back to the running trail.
My mind whirled. Where did Curtis go? Could he really get up and walk? It seemed impossible, but a lot of weird stuff had happened already.
Would Curtis go back to the stone tower and haunt it, like a ghost? Drag little kids there and devour them?
Or would he come over to my house and strangle me in my sleep?
Maybe he would just go home.
Maybe I’m really losing my mind.
I headed over to Central Ave and waited for the bus. The driver wouldn’t let me on because of my bare feet and I had to walk back to my house.
Eddie called my cell a few times but I ignored him. I wondered if he knew about my kiss with Kristin. It occurred to me he could be driving around town, right now, looking to kick my butt. I cringed every time I heard a car behind me.
Finally I got up the nerve to call Kristin. Her voice mail picked up.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said. “So, uh, give me call. Bye.”
When I got home I saw there were no cars parked in the driveway and breathed a little easier. Once I got inside, I unzipped my knapsack and pulled out the gun. It still felt cold, and heavy. I put the gun in a plastic zip-lock bag and put the bag inside the toilet tank in the upstairs bathroom. It would have to stay there until I thought of a better hiding place.
Then I went into the kitchen and grabbed the biggest knife I could find. I checked all the closets, starting with the one in my room and working my way systematically through the house.
They were empty.
So was the attic.
And the basement.
Then sun was setting and Aunt Rose was going to be home any minute.
I checked the garage, but Curtis wasn’t hiding in there, either.
I called Kristin again.
“Hey, it’s me,” I said. “Lock all your doors and windows tonight, okay?”
She’d have to call me back after hearing that message.
Aunt Rose came home and we ate dinner and she said I looked a little sick, so I just nodded. Later I sat in front of the television, but not really watching, staring at the phone in my hand and willing it to ring, willing Kristin to call me back.
I fell asleep on the sofa.
No nightmares, just the usual dreams. I woke up feeling frustrated and tired.
