Tales from The Lake 5

by Tales from The Lake

  Maisie entered the room in time to see the former Miss Erato Householder walk in, white skirts wide, a few steps behind her smirking husband. It wasn’t a fair comparison, but neither of them showed the elation she had seen on Allen’s face and felt animating her own. Trey cast a defiant “See? Told you I’d do it” look at his parents. Erato’s eyes were bright with excitement, but the determined set to her jaw made her look grim. Perhaps parties weren’t her thing.

  This party didn’t look to be much of anybody’s thing. The older Blairs stood with sour, make-the-best-of-it expressions, as if someone were making a speech about them that aired too much dirty laundry. The guests clustered around the groom’s parents, not the newlyweds; it was clear whom they wanted to honor and impress. The bride’s family was not apparent.

  The guests walked a short, strained receiving line to the syrupy strains of “My Heart Will Go On.” The song faded out a little too quickly, as if the DJ couldn’t take another moment. “And now . . . the cutting of the cake!”

  Mindful of the former Miss Householder’s admonitions, Maisie positioned the knife at a gap in the decoration before stepping aside. Trey’s hand pressed down on his bride’s, driving the knife through the cake at an angle. Maisie served out the sloppy slice and handed it to them with a forced smile.

  Trey rammed half the slice into his bride’s mouth and smeared frosting on her face. The new Mrs. Blair scraped the frosting from the remainder onto a fork and quirked an eyebrow at him, as if in challenge. A low rumble of laughter went through the small crowd, who expected a messy comeuppance.

  But Erato delicately popped the frosting into Trey’s open mouth. “Let it melt on your tongue,” she murmured sweetly. She squeezed his arm, then cleaned her face with a proffered napkin.

  Maisie cut the rest of the slices herself. The meticulous work of setting the pattern paid off; the cuts were easy to gauge. The trays next to the cake quickly filled with slices of snowy white and deep brown, the berry filling jewel-bright against the fine porcelain plates.

  “Oh, let me help pass them out.” Jacqueline swooped in. “I picked the wrong time to let everybody go on break.”

  As Maisie set a slice of devil’s food down in front of what she thought was the last guest, three figures glided into the parlor. She did a double-take at what could only be the remaining Misses Householder: tiny-waisted figures in full-skirted, possibly hooped, gray dresses with high necklines and long sleeves that mocked the season. The younger sisters rarely appeared in public, and Maisie had never seen them all together. Their eyes were large and dark, their hair rough and wild. They had not taken their sister’s pains to look polished, and Maisie found them disquieting, like wild animals in an ill-secured private zoo.

  To Maisie’s surprise, the new Mrs. Blair clinked a knife against a glass. She had expected Trey to do all the talking.

  “Now that my sisters have arrived, I would like to thank you all for coming to our home to celebrate with us. It has been several years since the influence of the Blairs has extended into these walls, and this is the happiest of occasions.”

  Guests shifted uncomfortably as Charles Junior’s expression grew stony. The house had been abandoned for decades, since right around the time the Blairs hit on the perfect formula for killing everything on six or eight legs. If a Blair had ever entered the house before, it would have been as an exterminator, in the days before they had workers like Allen to spread the poisons on their behalf. Maisie moved the top tier of the cake to a waiting box, ready to exit the room looking busy if the mood got more uncomfortable.

  “You are all Blairs, or friends or supporters of Blairs, and I am thrilled to share this day with you.” Erato turned to Trey in a rustle of silk. “I always said I wanted to have several children with you. Really, though, several hundred will make a more stable population. I propose a toast to the Householder children.”

  Anger flickered across Trey’s face, but he tamed it into a confused scowl. His bride tilted her champagne flute toward him, then took a sip. Trey lifted his own glass awkwardly and opened his mouth as if to speak, but no words issued from between his lips.

  Instead, a tiny spider climbed out of Trey’s mouth, followed by a trickle of blood.

  “Blurrgggh,” he said before vomiting up the remains of Maisie’s cake and several intact spiders.

  No longer a Blair, Erato Householder shimmered in the candlelight. A spell was breaking, Maisie realized. She should have trusted her own eyes. This was what she saw when she looked across her house’s threshold, across the line of salt.

  Miss Householder’s pale silk skirt peeled away, then vanished, showing six long, chitinous legs covered with stiff, spiky hairs. The long gloves, the high collar, all rolled away as mist, leaving her last two legs and her segmented torso open to the air. Her face was now adorned with a circlet of gleaming black eyes, and long, hairy palps framed her large, red mouth.

  Screams broke out as spiders burst forth from Charles Junior’s mouth. Mrs. Charles Junior fainted to the floor, brown-black shapes streaming away from her ashen face. Some guests fell, and others shoved each other out of the way as they ran for the parlor doors, but the other Misses Householder dropped to all eights and blocked them with wide-legged stances.

  Jacqueline tugged Maisie’s sleeve, careful not to upset the cake box Maisie carried. “Through the kitchen.”

  A Householder scuttled before the kitchen door, snapping her palps menacingly. Maisie’s stomach plummeted, and she held out the box full of cake as a surely ineffective shield. But the spider stared at them for a moment, examining the two of them with all her eyes, and stepped aside. Apparently, the help was allowed to leave. The anguished noises Maisie heard after the door slammed behind her suggested not everyone was afforded safe passage.

  The two of them were already in the driveway, startling one of Jacqueline’s servers out of a cigarette reverie, when Maisie realized no one had followed them. “Where is everybody?” The screams had died down, replaced by a crackling sound.

  “You didn’t think Blairs and their kind would step into a kitchen, did you?” Jacqueline’s eyes twinkled, but her smile was close-lipped and hard. “Just like they wouldn’t use the sprays themselves. Not when they had good, uncomplaining people like Allen to do things for them.” She cast a look at her employee, who was staring at the house, and dropped her voice to add, “That’s the story we should stick with.”

  Maisie’s vision swam. She set the cake box on the boot of her car with shaking hands, then slid to a sit on the bumper and stared down at the ground. A trail of wobbly baby house spiders trickled past her and headed down the block. Four larger ones herded them, like teachers taking a crowd of preschoolers on a field trip. Even for the species called “giant house spiders” in British Columbia, those four were remarkable specimens. Not woman-sized—more like cat-sized—but clearly out of the ordinary. The spider magic could conceal and redirect, but it was always at least a little bit visible.

  Maisie realized that her vision was flickering because the light was irregular. “The house is on fire.”

  “Oh!” Jacqueline’s eyebrows went up, but her eyes didn’t look surprised. “We’d better call it in, then, hadn’t we?”

  The fire department arrived quickly, but the wood of the once-beautiful house was old and dry, and the building had not been retrofitted for modern fire codes. What was the couple thinking, using real candles? No one expected to find survivors.

  At home that evening, Maisie set the top tier of the cake on her porch swing. Maybe someone would come for it. Maybe it would be eaten by ants. Either way, she was done with it. She wasn’t sorry that Allen had been avenged, but she didn’t like being an unwitting part of someone else’s vendetta. She wouldn’t work with Jacqueline again.

  When she rose in the morning, Maisie peeked at the cake box through the doorway. She kept her eyes on it as she crossed the line of salt. It did not change.

  Maisie flipped open the box to see that one slice
was missing. An envelope with her name written in lacy, old-fashioned handwriting contained somewhat more cash than the balance due, and there was a note on the inside of the box lid in the same hand. The red-brown letters spelled out, “Thank you, and good-bye for now. You have a friend here, if you want one. Sincerely, The Eratigena Atrica Householders.”

  Stuck to the inside of the lid was one intact spider egg. Although it looked as random as a stray nonpareil, Maisie was certain it was not there by accident. The egg was an ordinary sort, one that would hatch a perfectly normal giant house spider.

  Maisie picked it up gently. “Come on in, then,” she said to it. “I could use some company around the place, and I know you’ll help me keep a wholesome kitchen.”

  All the same, Maisie freshened up the salt before she closed the door.

  ALWAYS AFTER THREE

  GEMMA FILES

  The last time you lived alone was in another condominium, five blocks from where you and Kyle live now. One room and a kitchenette, bathroom attached—you slept in pretty much the same place you ate, if not exactly the same place you performed every other bodily function. Ten years in the same apartment, and you barely ever remember passing your neighbours in the halls, let alone knowing any of their names. As far as you were concerned, they might as well not have existed.

  That’s how it always is, you eventually came to realize, here in the city’s heart: you know nothing and you’re basically happy to, as if you think your own shell of semi-wilful ignorance protects you from having to worry about the bugs in the walls as opposed to the ones which occasionally crawl out of the drain, the man who might be slowly losing his mind behind that door across the way as opposed to the very obviously crazy guy who capers each morning on the corner of your street. Not to mention whether or not that cheerfully drunk lady in the unit to your right, who you see fumble with her keys every evening, will doze off one night with a lit cigarette in her hand and burn the whole fucking building down.

  Best not to buy trouble, like old Aunt Ida used to say, the one you were named after: don’t look too close, don’t question; you might not like the answer. There’s always a story if you stop to listen, always a thread winding around things if you stoop down to look more closely, trailing off into the distance, ready for you to follow. Always a hand just waiting to take yours whenever you reach out in darkness, to grab on fast and hold on tight, never letting go. To yank you headlong out of your comfort zone and strand you somewhere else entirely, forever.

  It’s the same way here, too, of course. You walk by quickly with your eyes politely averted even as you check the corners for potential trouble, gaze carefully kept ever so slightly out of focus: see nothing, know nothing, business as usual. Until, one day . . .

  . . . it isn’t.

  ***

  The night it starts, you find yourself snapping awake all of a sudden, nose wrinkling, thinking: What the hell is that? Beside you, Kyle’s asleep and snoring; the clock on the bedside table says 3:04 a.m., then 3:05. The smell seems to come out of nowhere, pungent and penetrating, an invisible stranger’s hot breath, right in your face. You can’t immediately place why it’s so disgusting, and yet.

  Rotten mushrooms, you think, as you lever yourself up and bumble around in the streetlamp-lit half-dark, trying to figure out where it’s coming from. Asparagus piss, drunk psycho sweat, dead skunk. Marijuana’s legal in Canada now, especially for home consumption—there’s two dispensaries within each walking distance, one to the north, the other to the west, but this isn’t that. You’ve smelled enough weed in your time to know that weed would be pleasant by comparison.

  Granted, the apartment reeks in general these days, just like the rest of the building. Maybe half a year ago the condo board voted to renovate; this just happens to be the month they finally decided to strip and replace the old wallpaper, switch out the hall carpets, re-paint all the trim and every unit door. The stench of glue and paint’s so constant you barely even notice it anymore, which means this new smell must really be something.

  “So I search and I search, and eventually I narrow it down,” you tell Kyle, in the morning. “Know where the worst of it was? The baby’s room.”

  He frowns. “In it, or coming through the wall?”

  “The wall.”

  “That’s unit #770, right?” You nod. “Okay, well—what do you want me to do about it? Talk to the concierge?”

  You sigh. “Ugh, maybe not . . . I mean, it’s gone now. Of fucking course.”

  “I’m sorry, hon.”

  “Not your fault.”

  He shoots you that same look he’s been giving you almost every morning since you finally watched your usual weekly pregnancy test turn blue, the one that says: You look like hell, Ida, how much sleep did you even get, exactly? Maybe that’s all you really need. Because while other people spend their first trimester battling morning sickness, what you’ve ended up with is more like morning, afternoon and evening sickness cut with a lovely side order of insomnia, nauseated exhaustion during the day and a grinding inability to do much more but doze fitfully at night. You’re not really showing yet, but your anxiety is up because you had to go off your meds the minute you made the decision to stay pregnant. And since Dr. Spring confirms there’s no other real option but to stick it out, that’s what you’re doing—suck it up, smile, keep yourself occupied. Imitate a good attitude, if nothing else.

  Maybe this isn’t the greatest ever time to have a kid, either, given the state of the world—that avalanche of bad news you’re trying your best to block out and mainly succeeding, especially since you deleted your Facebook app. But then again, when would it be? Babies make their own luck, your mother-in-law likes to say, comfortably; guess we’ll see, you all too often find yourself thinking in return, trying to keep your breathing steady.

  Shit like this truly doesn’t help, though. For Christ’s sake, you can’t even drink coffee anymore.

  Kyle’s checking his phone now, swallowing the last of his oatmeal; you’re holding him up, and you know it. “Oh man, gotta go. You sure it wasn’t just the chemicals they’re using outside, to strip the floors? The ones that melt the glue from the old carpet?”

  “I kind of think I know what carpet-glue smells like, Kyle, at this point.”

  “All right, sure—so we’ll wait, see if it happens again, all right? And then, we’ll . . . figure something out. Okay?”

  Nothing to do but nod, so you do, attempting some bad version of a smile. “Yeah, thanks for listening, have a great day at work. Love you.”

  “You too.”

  So you pull the blackout shades and fall back into bed, trying to block out the duelling noise of construction from the street and renovation from the hall while this oh-so-elaborate process going on inside your body sucks you down yet again, mind blanking by degrees, a wiped Etch-a-Sketch screen. Then it’s evening and Kyle’s home, enabling you gently through your routine: dinner, bath, pre-natal vitamins, TV, an hour or so of lying in bed with the lights down, hugging. He drifts off to sleep, you don’t.

  Eventually, it’s just after three in the morning again, and . . . there it is, right on time, that smell, just as strong. Just as bad.

  Worse.

  You shake Kyle, who surfaces quickly (thank Christ), arms and legs flexing like he’s ready for a fight: “Uh, um—I’m up, I’m here. Is it back?”

  You gulp in a swallow of air, resisting the urge to spit. “God, yes.”

  He does the same, then grimaces. “Ugh, okay, I see what you mean. Jesus! Coming through in the same place?”

  “I haven’t looked yet. Maybe.”

  “All right, you stay here. Leave it to me.”

  You trail along behind him, all the same, as he heads over to what used to be “the nook,” a catch-all office space next to the front door; you’ve walled it in and stuck that crib his parents gave you inside, ready for when the clutch of cells you’re nurturing turns into a squishy larval human being viable enough to survive outsid
e your womb. Once inside, he sticks his face as close to the wall as he can and takes a long, deep sniff. “I don’t . . . no, it’s not in here, not anymore. That’s weird.”

  Of course it isn’t in here now, you think, but don’t say. After all, he’s up, isn’t he? He’s a good guy, that way; believes you even when it sounds crazy, the way a thousand others wouldn’t. Which alone makes him better than you, by far.

  Don’t say stuff like that, Ida, he’d reply, if you let it slip. Unmedicated or not, you’re my wife, right? Light of my life, mother of mychild . . .

  Excuse me, our child.

  Same difference.

  Kyle follows his nose back out into the living room and makes a careful circuit, eventually homing in on the air conditioning vent above the television screen. “I never knew this connected with #770,” he says. “But—yeah, this is where the smell’s strongest, so it must. Take a whiff.”

  You swallow again, stomach rumbling. “Pass,” you manage. “Is that enough to go downstairs?”

  “One more night, maybe, or two—three at the most. We really do need a clear pattern, if we’re going to sell the building on doing something about it.” As you groan: “Look, just sit down for now, okay? It’ll be all right, I swear. I’ll make you some ginger tea.”

  So it goes: always after three in the morning, and not exactly like clockwork—sometimes it’s 3:08, sometimes 3:10, sometimes even as late as 3:18. But not every night in a row, annoyingly, and never after three-thirty. Once you twig to the pattern, however, it’s impossible to un-see it; you find yourself sitting up rather than lying awake in the dark, waiting, head cocked like a pointer’s. The smell ebbs and flows, sometimes higher, sometimes lower. Sometimes it comes through another wall entirely: the kitchen, the bathroom, down from the ceiling. The Saturday after you and Kyle start trying to keep a record it rises straight up like it’s welling out of every inch of the floor, fresh roadkill-reeking until finally it converges with your condition, driving you headlong to retch your guts out into the toilet.