by Todd Miller
Chapter 10
Somewhere in the house, a clock chimed midnight. The living room was full of candles, but somehow, the darkness seemed to be swallowing up their light. Kristin was sitting cross-legged in a pentagram drawn on the floor with white chalk. Next to her was another pentagram with the wooden doll in the center.
Both pentagrams had a metal coin placed at each of the five points. Kristin’s coins were all heads, the doll’s were tails. Just outside of the pentagrams was Victoria, wearing the African mask and a strange, black robe made of feathers and cloth. She was slashing the air between the two pentagrams with the stick, chanting and wiggling in her wheelchair like a sinister jack-in-the-box.
I had no idea Victoria was capable of this. I mean, the woman was ancient. But here she was, singing in some old forgotten language, trying to send her sister’s spirit into the body of a little wooden doll.
Kristin kept her hands clutched together, sometimes watching Victoria, sometimes staring at the floor. The old woman had painted a bunch of elaborate designs on Kristin’s face and body. In the flickering light of the candles, the designs seemed to writhe and swirl.
I sat in a cushy chair feeling completely useless. I didn’t know magic, I couldn’t hold Kristin’s hand. So in my head I just kept thinking, Please Work, over and over, as if somehow that would help.
Kristin and I didn’t talk about what happened out in the garden, and I thought that was probably for the best.
As Victoria howled and chanted and waved the stick, Kristin began to tremble. She started scratching at her arms, pulling on her hair, and then suddenly she jerked backward and collapsed into a ball.
“Kristin!” I said.
Victoria was chanting louder now, stabbing the air with her stick.
Kristin sat bolt upright, tilted her head back and screamed.
Suddenly this whole magic spell thing seemed like a bad idea. The candles were flickering like crazy, the old woman was possessed, hissing and spitting, and I saw blood running down the sides of Kristin’s legs.
From out of her mouth came some sort of white, puffy ooze, floating upward, swirling and growing in size. Kristin’s eyes rolled back into her head and she shook as if she was throwing up. The white ooze was beginning to take shape. I could see hands, a woman’s torso, a neck.
Then the ooze formed a head, the face blank, slowly becoming defined. It was Elvira. She looked like she did in the old photograph, young and beautiful, but her eyes were cold and full of hate. And then she opened her mouth and screamed.
“Nooooooooooooo!!!!!!”
The candles fluttered like crazy and I swear I felt the house shake. Elvira twisted and turned, being dragged by an unseen force toward the wooden doll in the other pentagram. She howled and raged, and the sound of her screams kept me frozen in terror.
Then I heard a window break, and something hard go bouncing across the floor. I turned to look and saw a tear gas canister spinning around on the ground, and then suddenly there was a popping sound and a thick, greenish smoke came billowing out.
“Look out!” I screamed.
Something battered down the front door, smashing it right off its hinges. A group of SWAT police came storming into the house, wearing gas masks and carrying machine guns. Already I could feel the gas burning my eyes, and I tried to duck down under the fumes but they were everywhere.
I looked over at Kristin and saw the ooze form of Elvira that had been pouring out of her mouth was gone. Kristin was standing now, her eyes red and glinting. Victoria had been thrown from her wheelchair to the floor, and she was not moving. The magic stick was broken in two.
A pair of cops grabbed me roughly by the arms and pushed me down to the floor. I tried to fight them off, but I could barely see and they were grinding my face into the carpet. I could hear the others trying to grab Kristin, shouting and suddenly screaming.
“What the hell is this?” I heard one of them say.
“Get ’em off me! Get ’em off me!” shouted another.
“They’re everywhere!”
“My leg!!!”
The hands holding me down let go and I lifted my head off the floor, trying to figure out what was going on. I saw blurry black dots everywhere, some little, some frighteningly big, moving everywhere, swiftly covering the jerking bodies of the SWAT team.
The black dots were spiders.
The policemen were on the floor now, shaking and screaming, swatting their bodies over and over. There were a few larger spiders roaming about, spiders the size of cats, and they would jump on the policemen and bite them.
The room was full of tear gas now, and my throat was swelling shut. I crawled around on all fours, croaking out for Kristin. I found her bare feet, covered with blood and tiny spiders. She loomed above me, her face calm and cold.
“K-Kristin?” I choked.
She shook her head, no.
“Help me,” I said.
Kristin slowly smiled. Then she bent down and took my chin in her hands. I looked into her eyes, and I knew Kristin was really gone. Fear stabbed me through the heart.
“I’m going now,” she said. “Would you like to come with me, Charlie?”
My body trembled. My throat got tighter and tighter.
“No—no thanks,” I finally said.
She frowned for a moment. We looked at each other for what seemed like forever, her eyes searching mine. I wondered if she was going to kill me. But instead she smiled again, and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
The spot where she kissed me tingled.
Then she stood up and seemed to glide across the room, into the green smoky haze, the clouds of tear gas parting for her like waves on the ocean. She floated out the door and I heard more screams and gunshots coming from outside.
There must be an army of police out there. How did they know we were here?
Consuela must have tipped them off.
Didn’t matter now. There were spiders crawling over my legs and hands as I crawled on my belly toward Victoria. She wasn’t moving at all, not even choking on the tear gas fumes, and I panicked with the thought that she was dead.
“Victoria,” I said, shaking her by the shoulder. “We have to get out of here!”
She didn’t budge.
I crawled closer, putting my ear down to her mouth, hoping to hear her breathing.
I heard nothing.
Cursing, I starting crawling away toward the kitchen. Then I felt a bony hand grab me by the ankle. I turned to look and it was Victoria, her eyes completely black like tar and her mouth open in a silent scream. Frantically I tried to kick her off, as she clawed her way up my body, shoving her face next to mine.
The air crackled and I saw more of that puffy white ooze come pouring out of her mouth. Then it was going up my nostrils, into my ears and past my lips. The ooze slid through my fingers as I tried to pull it away. I could feel it, cold, wet and slimy, like sour milk sliding down my throat, pushing against my eyes and slithering into my tear ducts, filling me up with her, her spirit.
I fell backward, unable to see, unable to talk, my brain screaming.
No!
Get out! Leave me alone!
My head felt like it was going to explode, the blood pounding in my ears, everything going black—
And then I saw a picture in my mind. It was an old apartment building in Manhattan. The street signs read Thirty-eighth and Eighth Avenue. The number 312 was painted on the front door.
There’s a board listing the names of all the tenants and their apartment numbers.
My eyes are drawn to one name in particular.
Joseph Cat. Number sixty-six.
Up the stairs and into a dark, dim hallway. A beige door with a little peephole and the number sixty-six below it. The door opens into an even darker room, a feeble lamp, a well-dressed man sitting behind a desk.
No, not a man, a dwarf. Bald, but with a neatly-trimmed beard. He looks up from some obscure object bef
ore him and stares right at me.
The dwarf smiles, I get a glimpse of crooked, yellow teeth.
“I’ll be expecting you,” he says.
And then everything is rushing away, total blackness at the edges, gasping for breath, balls of light dancing in my eyes, the white ooze flowing out of me and dispersing into the air above me like a floating puddle of spilled milk.
And then Victoria’s spirit was gone, dissolving into thin air. I found the little silver bell she wore and rang it three times.
Maybe that was dumb, but it seemed like the right thing to do.
Dead policemen were all over the place, spiders covering them with webs. There was a terrible taste in my mouth and I was dying for a drink of water. It was strangely quiet as I stumbled into the kitchen, and grabbed Victoria’s car keys off the kitty. Then I slipped into the garden. Through the trees I could see the flashing red lights of squad cars parked just outside the property.
The air outside was clean, the sky full of stars. I staggered over to a rusty tin watering can, and eagerly lifted it to my lips. A small trickle of water went down my throat, and I shook the can for every last drop.
The garden was deserted, except for a little frog, squatting on the bench where Kristin had bit me. It croaked a few times and blinked at me, then hopped off the bench and disappeared.
Suddenly a policeman in a bullet-proof vest came charging out of the bushes pointing a gun at me.
“Don’t move, Charlie!” he said.
There was something familiar about his voice.
“Hands up in the air. Knees on the ground, now!”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Come on, Charlie,” he said. “Don’t make this difficult, okay?”
Now I recognized the cop. It was Detective Powell.
“I have to go,” I said.
“Hands in the air,” the detective said.
I glanced at the gun in his hand and took a step backward.
“No funny business,” he said. “On your knees.”
“But—”
“I want to help you, Charlie,” the detective said. “Really, I do. But you got to put your damn hands in the air and get down on the ground right freaking now.”
One thing is for sure, the barrel of a gun looks a lot bigger when it’s pointed at you. So I did what the man with the gun said and planted my knees down on the ground. Detective Powell quickly put my hands behind my back and slapped a pair of handcuffs on my wrists.
Then he frisked me and took my gun away.
“Where’s the girl?” he asked.
“What girl?”
“Don’t be stupid, Charlie. Kristin McDermott. Where is she?”
“She turned into the Spider Lady and floated out the door.”
“How’d she manage to do that?”
“Long story,” I said.
“Can you stop her?”
“I…I don’t know anymore…”
I could see the wrinkles in his forehead, his eyes squinting, not hard but actually sympathetic.
“You know how hard it is to kill a witch, kid? First, you got to find her. Sneak up on her lair without being detected. Because she can always see you coming in the vapors of her cauldron or whatever, and then she turns into a panther or a cloud of shimmering mist, and flies away. Leaving you with your shorts blowing in the wind. But, if you do manage to catch a witch, you can’t just shoot her. No. No, you got to chop off her head, or burn her at the stake, get out the giant dunking stool, whatever, all this crazy medieval stuff. Because that’s the rules. I don’t make this stuff up. Seriously, it’s a drag.”
“Detective—are you messing with me?”
“I wish I was, Charlie. But that Elvira Elmwood—the Spider Lady—she’s been messing with our town for almost a hundred years. And trying to stop her? It gets tiring. Costs a lot of overtime. A lot of good men dead. And for what? Nothing’s changed. Believe me, she doesn’t like being hassled either. That’s why she agreed to stay in the lines if we threw her a bone every once and awhile.”
“A bone?”
“You’re one of her kids, right?”
“I guess so.”
“See, that kind of voodoo we did not permit. And now, look at the sugar storm we find ourselves in. Unacceptable, Mr. Berger.”
“But, you can’t just kill her,” I said.
“Who said anything about killing her? I’m just here to clean up the mess. Pick up the pieces and make it all disappear. And then everything can go back to normal.”
“I don’t understand.”
“The old spinster dead? Victoria Blah Blah Blah?”
“Yes.”
“What about your friends? Edward and Curtis?
“They’re dead, too. But, uh, Curtis is a zombie now.”
“A zombie, huh? That’s too bad. He seemed like a nice kid. Still, a zombie I can kill. Guess that leaves just you, kid.”
“Leaves me what?”
The Detective raised his gun and pointed it at my head.
“I’m sorry, Charlie. It’s nothing personal. It’s just bad luck. Maybe in the next life you can get a rabbit’s foot or something.”
Suddenly Curtis appeared, snarling, dead eyes focused on Detective Powell and blazing with hate. The spider living in the top of his skull seemed to wobble with glee as he reached out to mangle him.
Detective Powell screamed as he opened fire, blasting Curtis right in the stomach. Curtis grabbed him by the collar of his bullet-proof vest.
“Curtis, no!” I said.
But it was already too late.
Detective Powell started screaming. I saw a huge splash of blood, I saw Curtis holding the detective’s severed head in the air, and then he turned toward me and growled.
That’s when I took off, sprinting over to the garage. Inside was the old lady’s car, a Chevy Malibu. It was fat, big and ugly, painted brown with a pine tree-shaped air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror.
From the look of the cobwebs and dust on the thing, it hadn’t been driven in awhile. I turned around, trying to open the door with my hands still cuffed behind my back.
“Please be open, please be open...”
After a quick struggle, the door slowly popped open and I went to the glove box. It was difficult to search inside, I had to guess what I was going through just by touch since my back was still turned. Felt like papers, mostly, some kind of bag of candy, loose change, pencils.
Then I felt the smooth curves of a hairpin and grinned.
Working as fast as I could, I stuck the hairpin into the tiny lock on the cuffs and wiggled it toward the locking mechanism. Good thing I watched all those escape artist videos on YouTube, huh?
Still, it proved to be trickier than I thought. Finally the cuff on my right wrist popped off, and I brought my hands back out in front of me. My wrists were already kind of numb and bleeding, but I hardly noticed as I stuck the hairpin into the other cuff on my left wrist and picked the lock.
Curtis came charging into the tiny garage, covered in blood.
“Die!” he howled. “Die!!”
There was a shovel nearby and I grabbed it just in time. As Curtis came scrambling toward me I swung as hard as I could. The shovel connected with his head with a loud thwack, and it went flying out of the garage and somewhere into the bushes. Curtis’s headless body stumbled around, waving its arms frantically.
“Over here!” shouted Curtis’s head.
The body turned toward the sound of its voice, so I banged it on the knee with the shovel and it fell down.
“Here!” shouted Curtis’s head.
I found it resting near the rose bushes. He looked up at me, still angry but sort of pathetic. I thought about bringing the shovel down on his head, smashing it into pulp, but I couldn’t do it.
“Sorry, Curtis,” I said.
“We had a deal!”
“I’m really sorry.”
“Kill you!” he said.
&nb
sp; His body came crashing out of the garage. Quickly, I kicked his head away, and it went rolling toward the gate. His body went stumbling after it. I watched them for a moment, then got into the car, put the key in the ignition and heard the engine cough in protest. Finally it started, and I rolled the car out of the garage slowly with the lights off, hoping the police wouldn’t spot me.
As I went down the driveway I saw a figure running toward me at full speed, waving its fist. It was Curtis, carrying his head under his arm, screaming and shouting. I hesitated for a moment, then stomped on the accelerator and slammed into him doing forty. He bounced off the car and landed several feet away from the driveway.
A quick glance in the rearview showed me the body was beginning to stand up again. I thought for a moment about turning back to run over him again, but I figured he was an indestructible, revenge-driven zombie from Hell and I’d just be wasting my time.
Then I noticed the front gates were padlocked. I had just enough time to put my head down as the car crashed into them, ripping the gates off their hinges and flinging them into the street. There were police cars everywhere, men on the ground, huge freaking spiders all over the place, and then I was gone, racing up the street, trying to remember how to get on the interstate, waiting with my guts churning for the sound of a police siren behind me.
But the only thing pursuing me now was Curtis, getting farther and farther away in the rearview mirror, waving his arm in fury and shouting something I couldn’t hear.
The gas tank was only about a third full. I was covered with dirt and blood, my shirt was in tatters. My jeans were ripped open at the knees. Tiny shards of glass were stuck in the soles on my boots. My eyes burned, my throat ached. I was breathing hard and my hands trembled.
And Kristin was gone.
The Spider Lady got her. Elvira. She took over—what? Kristin’s mind? Her body? Her soul? She took over everything.
Kristin was gone. Like, dead gone.
Hot tears flowed down my cheeks. This was the bottom of the pit. Everything was dark and I was lost.
I drove and drove until I caught myself falling asleep at the wheel. Would that be such a bad way to die? Probably fast and painful. Probably what I deserved.
But eventually I pulled into a truck stop, and debated for a moment where to the park the car. I should probably hide it, but I didn’t care. Let the cops catch me. It’s over.
So I sat there, staring out the window at the traffic rushing by. Even at this crazy hour in the night, people were moving around. My stomach grumbled and I searched for that bag of candy in the glove compartment. It turned out to be a half-eaten package of black licorice. I ate a few pieces, but they tasted terrible. Why do old people like such nasty candy?
My eyelids got heavy, and as I drowsed off to sleep, I wondered if it would be the cops waking me up in the morning. Shove a pistol in my face, slap on the handcuffs, and haul me off to jail.
I shoved the black licorice back into the glove compartment and when I looked up there was Kristin standing a few feet away from the car.
She stood perfectly still, her hands clasped together. Her eyes were red with tears. She said something that I couldn’t hear. Quickly, I rolled down the car window.
“What?” I said.
“Help me, Charlie,” she said.
“You’re not dead?”
“Help me,” she said again.
And then she vanished, like turning off a light.
I turned around and I was sitting next to Eddie. He was decomposing, all blood, gore, and skull. His teeth were all sharpened into points.
“Berger Butt!” he said.
Then he lunged forward and bit me on the throat.
I woke up screaming.
It was dawn. I had barley slept at all, but I needed to get a move on. At the gas station supermarket I bought a new shirt, sunglasses and a baseball cap. My stomach was really rumbling now, so I splurged on a super-breakfast burrito, hoping it would fill me up all day. That left me only ten bucks to put in the tank, which turned out to be not enough.
I ran out of gas near New Windsor, so I ditched the Malibu and decided to hitch-hike. A couple hours later this big rig pulled up next to me and this trucker guy with a grizzly, white beard and mirrored sunglasses leaned out the window.
“Brother,” he said to me. “Do you believe in the Apocalypse?”
“I do if you’ll give me a ride to New York,” I said.
I guess that answer was good enough for him. He popped open the door and I got inside. The passenger seat of his cab was full of empty soda cans that he brushed onto the floor with one of his meaty hands. Then we were on the road again.
“Apocalypses come in all shapes and sizes, Brother. Not just your average, run-of-the-mill Revelations-Ragnarok-Twilight of the Gods-Mayan Mothership-Nuclear Armageddon-type apocalypses, but personal ones, too. The cancer of evil deeds. I’m talking about the End of the Soul. Can you dig it, brother?”
“I can dig it,” I said.
He was hauling a whole trailer full of live chickens, stinking things with their feathers going everywhere. He talked the entire time, and I tried not to fall asleep, part of me feeling like maybe he was saying something important, and part of me thinking he was nuts.
A few hours later we were through the Holland Tunnel and he dropped me off on the corner of Thirty-eighth street and we said goodbye. It was almost midnight.
“This the place you want to be kid?”
I nodded.
“Even if you’re thirsty, do not drink from the well of darkness, my friend.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“I think you already know,” he said.
And then he drove off, the engine of his truck rumbling and roaring like some gigantic beast.
The city was bright and dirty. Neon lights and people everywhere. Cars honked and tires squealed. The air was hot and sticky, and I could feel myself sweating, drops of sweat rolling down my forehead and into my eyes.
I walked quickly, getting bumped for my efforts by the other pedestrians, until I reached my destination. 312 Thirty-eighth Street. It was a tall, drab building, with a big pile of trash bags out front. The light was out in the foyer, but I could still read the names above the buzzers, and I pushed J. Cat, apartment 66.
A second later the intercom crackled, and I could hear a man’s voice, but it was too garbled to understand.
“What?” I shouted into the intercom. “I can’t hear you.”
It crackled again, and then there was a buzzing sound and the front door unlocked. I pushed it open and stepped inside. Inside the small lobby there was an elevator, and I tapped the UP button a few times, but nothing happened. As I looked up the staircase and saw it wind upwards and beyond, I heard a noise behind me.
Peeking out from behind a door was an old man, his one pale, bright blue eye fixed on me.
“Out of order,” he croaked.
“Excuse me?” I said.
“The elevator. Out of order.”
“Thanks,” I said.
And then the door slammed shut.
I plodded up the steps, slowly, sweating a lot. Some of the lights in the halls were out, others just flickering. The whole place reeked and there was strange graffiti scribbled on the walls, odd phrases scribbled in shaky hands.
ALL OF SATAN’S APPLES HAVE WORMS
And other goofy things like that.
The building was quiet. Sure, I heard the hum of a few televisions, ghostly voices talking about nothing very important. But they sounded far away. Muted. Underwater or underground.
I found apartment 66. It was a beige door with a little peephole and the number 66 below it, just like in my vision at Victoria’s house. There was a different smell there, like something burning, but also sweet.
I knocked three times.
The door opened and there before me stood the bald dwarf with the fancy beard
.
“Come inside,” he said. “Welcome, welcome.”
I walked into this apartment and the door closed behind me with a thud. The inside was dark. I saw the same feeble lamp that I had seen in my vision. The desk was there, too, a few plump, drab chairs, and a massive bookcase that took up an entire wall.
There were two other doors, both shut, one I presumed for the bathroom, the other his bedroom. The window was covered with a set of lush, dark red curtains.
“How was your trip?” asked the dwarf.
“Okay,” I said.
“Something to drink?” he asked.
I nodded.
The dwarf took a pair of goblets from a small table and poured some water into them from a pitcher. He offered one to me and I took it, staring down into the goblet and imagining that I couldn’t see the bottom.
“Interesting goblet, is it not?” asked the dwarf.
I nodded again.
“A family heirloom. From the old country, you might say.”
I hesitated for a moment, then took a drink. The water was cold.
“Joseph Cat at your service, young man. Sit down, please. What can I do for you today?”
“I, uh, I don’t know where to start,” I said.
“Is it love?” asked Joseph Cat, smiling
I was about to answer him when I thought I heard someone softly sob from behind one of the doors. I looked at Joseph and he smiled again, a thin, happy smile.
I listened again but heard no other sound.
“Yeah,” I said. “I guess so. That’s right.”
“With the young people, it is always love,” he said.
I explained to Mr. Cat everything that had happened and as I talked, his smile slowly turned into a frown. When I was done, he looked at me for a moment, his eyes glinting.
“This is very bad magic you are mixed up with. Very bad.”
I nodded.
“Why don’t you leave this girl to her fate? Go, run away. Find another girl and start a new life somewhere else. Mexico, perhaps? Canada is lovely this time of year.”
“I can’t,” I said.
“Why?”
“Well, it’s like you said. I love her.”
“Of course you do. For now. But sometimes love is a fleeting moment. Tomorrow, you may love someone else.”
“No. I love Kristin. I love her and I always will.”
“How strong is your love? Hmm? Would you kill for her?”
“I already have,” I said.
“And would you kill your Kristin if it was the only way to release her from the spell?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Would you? Would you kill her to set her free?”
“I don’t understand,” I said.
He turned abruptly and waddled over to the bookcase. Then he quickly scampered up a small ladder on rollers and pulled something down from one of the top shelves.
It was a knife.
A long, gleaming knife, made of silver. The blade was twisted like a corkscrew and the handle was carved to resemble some kind of goat or ram, with a pair of giant horns. He stabbed the knife into his desk and it stood there, leering at me.
“This is the only solution,” said Mr. Cat.
“No, I mean, Victoria said we could move Elvira’s spirit into the wooden doll—”
“Maybe that would have worked before, but now, the Spider Lady, she is too powerful.”
“Well, then we can try to break the curse again.”
“Impossible. The curse, it is personal magic. Very strong. The only person who could release the Spider Lady from her curse is dead.”
“Maybe we could pull Kristin out of her body...and...and...put her into somebody else.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Anybody.”
“Time is not on your side, my friend. A spell like that takes years to learn, longer to master. Trust me, by then your friend will be long gone, her soul devoured.”
“You could cast the spell,” I said.
“I don’t make house calls,” said the dwarf, folding his arms.
I thought I heard that weird, soft whimpering in the other room again. I turned to look at the door and it stopped. Then my gaze fell upon the knife.
“How does it work,” I asked.
“A very magical knife. One of a kind, you understand. It has the power to cut spells in two, destroying them completely. First, you find the person who is under the spell you wish to break. In this case, your friend Kristin. Then, you stab her in the heart three times. Once for the girl, once for the witch, and one more time for the spider. The knife, it needs blood to work. Lots and lots of blood.”
“Then what happens?” I asked.
“The spell is broken, the person is released from its power.”
“And the person?”
“They usually die. Not all the times, but most times. Many times,” he added, smiling.
“So I stab Kristin with this thing, and the Spider Lady and her curse go away forever.”
“Yes,” said the dwarf.
“And there’s a chance Kristin still might live after...?”
“I suppose there is a slim chance,” said Mr. Cat.
I grabbed the knife and tried to pull it out of the table. It wouldn’t budge.
“Whoa, whoa, what are you doing?” said Mr. Cat.
“What does it look like?”
“You can’t just take the knife, young man. It’s not a gift. But I will sell it to you.”
“I don’t have any money,” I said.
“Please, I do not dirty my hands with money,” said the dwarf.
“Then what?”
Mr. Cat looked me up and down.
“One-fifth of your soul,” he said.
“One-fifth? Why not just the whole thing?”
“Because the rest of it is damaged. Look at you. Oh, yes, I can see all your secrets, Charles Berger. Lust. Jealousy. Murder. My goodness. They have left their mark, oh yes, they have indeed. So you see, I prefer to take the cream off the top. The cat, he always prefers the cream. One-fifth.”
“The other four-fifths of my soul are damaged?” I asked.
He nodded, then shrugged.
I felt kind of sick, but also giddy. Was this dwarf for real? Was this some kind of joke?
“Don’t I need, you know, all of my soul to stay alive?”
“Oh no, not at all,” said Mr. Cat. “You will hardly even notice it’s gone.”
I imagined Kristin somewhere in a dark room, the claws of the Spider Lady closing in on her. Kristin trembling with fear. Kristin being eaten.
“Let’s do it,” I said.
Mr. Cat pulled a contract out of his desk drawer and slid it over to me. I read it over and it was very clear. One-fifth of my soul for the magic knife. It should have disturbed me that the contract was already drawn up, but I was too eager to get moving, to rescue my girl.
“I guess I’m supposed to sign in blood?” I asked, kind of grinning.
“No, no, no, we don’t do any of that melodramatic stuff here. Ink will be fine, if you please.”
He handed me an old-fashioned black pen and I signed my name to the bottom of the document. I was expecting maybe a flash of lightning and a thunderclap, but nothing happened. I didn’t even feel any different. The dwarf pulled the knife out of the desk and handed it to me.
“Thanks,” I said, taking the knife from him. It felt good in my hand. “What’s it called?”
“It’s not called anything,” said Mr. Cat. “It’s just a knife.”
“No, no,” I said. “All bad things got to have name. Something spooky.”
“Very well. What do you want to call it?”
I thought this over for a few moments.
“How about the ‘Dagger of Sorrows’?”
“Very appropriate,” smiled Mr. Cat. “Are you happy now?”
I nodded.
&nb
sp; “Remember,” he said. “You must stab her in the heart. Three times.”
“Yeah, yeah. Three times,” I said.
I put the knife into my waistband and turned to leave.
“No offense, but I hope I never see you again,” I said to the little dwarf.
Then I stalked out of the room.
I was going to kill that goddamn Spider Lady and save Kristin, and nobody better get in my way or I would kill them, too.
I could hear the soft whimpering behind me and as I turned to close the door the dwarf waved at me.
“Good luck, my friend,” said Mr. Cat, smiling.
“Get bent,” I replied.
