Haunted Houses

by Robert D. San Souci

  What super grossed him out was that the book indicated Marc was right, in a way. You could eat what amounted to eight spiders a year. They wouldn’t be live spiders—just parts of spiders mixed in with other stuff. But whole or pieces, alive or dead, the thought of consuming that many spiders a year totally turned Danny’s stomach.

  Unbelievably, the book said that there were even people who deliberately ate spiders. In Thailand, people ate big, hairy, poisonous tarantulas. They roasted them and served them in coconut cream with lime leaves.

  Yuck! Danny thought. Too much information.

  He closed the book, not sure if reading in the moving car or the winding mountain road was giving him the start of a headache. At least Marissa, his little sister, continued sleeping. She’d been alternately fussing and singing a song that she had learned in day care (and quickly discovered annoyed her big brother):

  There was an old woman

  Who swallowed a spider

  That wriggled and jiggled

  And tickled inside her. . . .

  For the time being, with her singsong voice still and the book shut, Danny turned his mind away from spiders. He focused on the scenery instead.

  To the right of the car was an unbroken green wall of piney wood; on the left was a sharp drop-off to the water far below. If Danny craned his neck, he could see sunlight flash off its ripples. The road had been following the stream for nearly half an hour. But after ten more minutes, his father turned off to the right on a side road and they left the creek behind.

  Another ten minutes, and his dad slowed, then parked the car on a patch of gravel in front of the big, gray house that was their summer rental. Even before he climbed out of the car, Danny sensed something creepy about the place, though he couldn’t say why, exactly. It was old: The gray paint and white trim were peeling in strips. The roof and porch and steps had a thick covering of pine needles and dried leaves from the woods that were primarily pines and oaks. The trees grew all around and actually seemed to shoulder right up to the back of the building, so it was half in sunlight, half in shadow. The place gave the impression that it hadn’t been lived in, or even looked after, for years. Perfect place for a haunting, the boy thought sourly, surprised at how deep his instant dislike was running.

  It was early afternoon on a warm July day. The trip from Raleigh, North Carolina, had been pleasant (when not intruded on by spider songs or factoids). Marissa had remained asleep in her car seat as things were unpacked. Danny guessed she had worn herself out crying through the night in the too-warm hotel room near the airport—flight delays had trapped them overnight. At last they were at the house that would be theirs for the next two months while Professor Andrew Parker, his dad, finished his book on economics and Carolyn, Danny’s mother, painted landscapes that would eventually be displayed in several galleries where her work was well known.

  Danny wasn’t too sure about this adventure, but at the age of nine, he was in no position to argue his parents out of a summer away from his friends, the community pool, barbecues, and baseball in the park. And it was no use pointing out to them some of the disturbing things he’d learned about the place. They were in New Hebron Valley, which had twice been the scene of unusual spider infestations in years past. He’d Googled the place out of curiosity and learned more than he wanted to know. Several of the Web sites he visited spoke of an extinct Indian tribe—the name apparently forgotten—which had “worshipped a goddess not unlike Spider Woman or Spider Grandmother, figures well known in the American Southwest.”

  When white men had first come to the area, the boy discovered, they had quickly wiped out the natives with bullets and smallpox. The last medicine woman of the lost people, it was said, had put a curse on the valley, promising that spiders would continue to make life a misery for anyone who settled there.

  Comparing the Internet accounts, Danny decided that, while many of the background stories were doubtful, the spiders were the real thing. He read enough archived news reports to know that infestations of spiders, as well as occasional deaths due to the bites of toxic species, were all higher here than in any other part of the state. And, according to his online resources, they were going to be vacationing in the worst part of the valley.

  The one time he did mention it to his father, Professor Parker had simply murmured, “That’s interesting,” and the discussion had died.

  Trying another tactic, he asked his mother, “What am I supposed to do all summer?”

  “You’ll find plenty to do, trust me,” Carolyn assured him.

  Now this first sight of the house was anything but reassuring for no reason he could put a finger on. The generous porch ran all the way across the front of the house and extended down both sides. Above, a narrow balcony with a waist-high railing circled the second story. Two doors, one on either end of the building, gave access to the balcony. But there was something about the place that gave Danny the uncanny feeling that he was being watched by several sets of eyes. Yet the windows were empty of anything except half-drawn shades or the hint of yellowing lace curtains; nothing stirred but a few wind-riffled leaves on the porch steps.

  “The Mertons told me they’d leave a key under the flowerpot to the right of the door,” Danny’s father said. The boy had overheard him talking a month earlier with the couple who owned the house. They had left nearly a week ago for a summer-long vacation in Europe but didn’t want the house to stand empty. Making it a summer rental had worked out fine for both parties. The Parkers had never actually met the owners; all business had been done over the phone and computer. The first real meeting would take place after the Mertons returned to reclaim their home at summer’s end.

  With a grunt, Andrew Parker tilted back the heavy pot filled with dusty, faded geraniums and spoke to Danny, who had followed him onto the porch. “Grab the key, will you?”

  Danny handed over the key as soon as Andrew set the pot back in place. Walking a little way down the porch, Danny peered through a window into a living room filled with odd pieces of furniture that didn’t match very well. Everything suggested no one had lived in the place for years. But Danny knew, from something his parents said, that the Mertons were pretty old. And he understood, from visiting his grandmother’s house, that old people sometimes let stuff slide—often because they didn’t see too clearly how messy a place was getting.

  For just a minute, Danny thought he saw something dark move near a picture on the far wall. But it was hard to see through the streaked, grimy glass. The air underneath the porch roof was hot and dusty. There was a stillness and a staleness that made Danny feel as though the house was caught in some kind of invisible box, like one of the glass cages in the reptile room at the zoo where they put snakes and the oversized spiders that totally creeped him out.

  Once they’d unpacked the car and he’d put his junk in the upstairs room he’d chosen as his bedroom, he was startled by a shriek and then a prolonged wail from Marissa, who had gone down the hall to look at her new room. By the time he got to her bedroom, his sister was being comforted by their mother while their father looked at the girl’s wrist. “That’s a pretty big welt,” Andrew said. “I’d better get some antiseptic.” This started Marissa crying again.

  “What happened?” Danny asked.

  “She says she was bitten by a spider,” his mother said. Mom was seated on the bed, hugging Marissa, who was making sounds somewhere between sniffles and hiccups. While their father doctored the wound, their mother tried to get Marissa to give her details of what had happened. But all the girl could say was that it was big, it had jumped at her from a corner of the closet, bit her, and scurried away when she screamed and shook her arm. Andrew Parker got a flashlight and checked the closet and everywhere a spider might be hiding, but he found nothing. Even watching from across the room, Danny could see that there was a puffy pink swelling about the size of a quarter on his sister’s wrist. “Spider bites can be dangerous, Carolyn. I think we need to go into town and have someone look
at it.”

  Danny felt like saying “I warned you,” but he knew now wasn’t the time.

  His parents wanted him to come along, but Danny said he wasn’t feeling well and just wanted to lie down. That was partly true: Traces of his headache and stomach upset had lingered. Mostly, he wasn’t eager to get back in the car. Anxious to get Marissa’s wound checked out, his parents agreed, though they made him promise to stay put and not go exploring or take any chances.

  When they were gone, Danny began wandering through the house. Feeling thoroughly bored, he recalled that his father said the old couple kept rabbits as pets. Signing the rental agreement, the Parkers had agreed to be responsible for taking care of them while the Mertons were away. Well, this at least sounded interesting. Danny went to look for the rabbits. At the back of the house, he found a large wire-mesh cage on wooden legs that he guessed was the rabbit hutch. But it was swathed in spider silk.

  He snapped off a bit of pine branch from an overhanging tree and began swiping it back and forth across the wire sides of the hutch, brushing away the veiling webs, alert for spiders. Thankfully, he didn’t see any.

  There were no rabbits. Although the water dish was empty, the food dish was filled with dry pellets. Then Danny saw two web-encased bundles in the back corner of the enclosure. Each was about the size of a silk-wrapped doll. The webbing had woven them together into something like Siamese twin cocoons. He unlatched and lifted the lid of the hutch. On impulse, still holding the pine branch, he turned it around and poked at one bundle with the stick end. The jagged point slipped through the webbing, then hit something solid. Feeling both should and shouldn’t impulses, he let his curiosity win—though he was half afraid that it might be a spider’s egg sac that would suddenly release a flood of tiny, crawly horrors. (Boy, was he regretting that nature show he’d watched a month before!) He snagged a clot of the web and pulled back, ready to drop the stick and hightail it to the house if he unleashed a torrent of baby spiders.

  But all that was revealed, when he’d pulled the bit of web free, was a patch of dusty-gray, very stiff fur. Distressed, but determined to follow through, he continued to unwrap the bundle with the stick. What was there was pretty much what he’d expected: the mummified remains of a rabbit. The small carcass was thin—it seemed mostly fur and bones—and regarded him with an eye that had dried up and was really just an indent. It looked like it had been drained dry, like the papery remains of flies and moths he’d sometimes find stuck in a web in some corner of the garage at home. As far as he was concerned, one of the worst things about spiders was how they ate, suffocating their victims in silk and sucking the juice out of them.

  The thought made him nervous. He pulled back and let the lid drop into place with a crash. Poor things, he thought. They’d fallen victim to what must be some really big spiders, whose handiwork—their webs—was everywhere, even though none of them was willing to show itself.

  The breeze strengthened. It set the pine needles overhead and around him rustling. It wasn’t much of a stretch—especially after discovering the hutch and its contents—to imagine the trees swarming with spiders, each of them rubbing pairs of legs together, anticipating something far more generous and juicy than two rabbit carcasses. His always overactive imagination envisioned hundreds—thousands—of eight-legged horrors positioning themselves to drop like a living, squirming net on his head.

  Having totally freaked himself out, he retreated from the backyard and the shivering trees. Since he still wasn’t ready to go back inside the house, he went around to the front. To his disgust, he now realized there were webs everywhere between the porch railings and clustered wherever support posts met roof. Time for Bugbusters spray. He hoped his mom had packed plenty.

  But he wasn’t prepared to go spider hunting this afternoon. He’d had enough of spiders. Since there was no sign of his parents, he hoped Marissa was all right. She could be a royal pest, but she was only a little kid—and the spider bite looked nasty. What a heckuva start to this vacation. But then, all the spider alerts had been pretty much a turnoff to him from the get-go.

  Forgetting his parents’ warning, he decided to follow the twisty access back to the main road. If he was lucky, he might find a way down to the stream below. It was the sort of adventure his parents wouldn’t approve of—but, for the moment, he was free of their input.

  He ambled along the road, enjoying the light and warmth, and feeling, for the first time since they’d arrived, that he really was on vacation. When he reached the bend in the road where the stream reappeared, he paused, picked up a handful of small stones, and began tossing them into the water. The road was so high above the creek bed, he could barely hear the pleuf, pleuf, pleuf of the stones hitting the water and sinking.

  He looked around but couldn’t find a path down the slope that looked even faintly safe.

  He continued along the road.

  Crickets sang, birds twittered, things—lizards probably—whisked through the underbrush. He could hear clearly now the gurgle of the stream below. The road curved back and forth on itself in easy bends at first. Then he came to the series of hairpin turns that had worried his dad earlier. Below the road edge, the slope was a ferocious drop-off, almost a sheer plunge to the water below. The creek bed was narrower; the water flowed more rapidly, raising impressive ripples and lots of foam. The water looked deeper and darker than it had higher up.

  It was at the third switchback that he discovered a disturbance in the shrubbery. Some broken branches and scattered dirt and stones suggested something—probably a car—had plowed through the underbrush. But most of the greenery was of the rubbery and resilient kind that would spring back into place after a vehicle had rolled over it. Little growth seemed to have been permanently damaged by whatever had passed through. If a person hadn’t been as close as Danny was, or wasn’t actually looking for signs of a mishap, they’d be easy to miss.

  Stepping carefully off the asphalt, the boy pushed apart springy boughs, following a faint trail that grew more obvious when he got farther from the road edge. Where the growth seemed older and sturdier, he found several spots where thicker branches had been snapped off bushes and lay dead and brown. The trunk of one hardy pine showed a gash where it had clearly been sideswiped by a car or whatever it was that had left flecks of blue paint embedded in the bark.

  Danny was so busy searching for clues that he almost walked off the edge of the gorge, which dropped some hundred feet to the stream below. The water, trapped between facing cliffs, looked to be its swiftest and deepest here.

  Peering down, one arm hooked around a sturdy young tree, Danny studied the space below him. It looked like a narrow footpath ran alongside the churning water, though he could spot no way to get down.

  The longer he looked, the surer he was that there was something just below the rippling, foaming water. He was certain he could make out a swatch of blue and a crimson oval. Was it the red plastic taillight of a blue car? He wondered. Had he been checking out the site of an accident, where a car had missed the turn, whipped through the undergrowth, and then plunged into the rapids? What he’d found so far made that easy to believe.

  He had to get down for a closer look, he decided.

  He returned to the road, noting with satisfaction that, beyond the dangerous curve, his way was now a steep descent. He wished he’d paid closer attention on the drive up, but he had been impatient to see where most of their summer would be spent—and had been tired of sitting quietly, trying to keep from waking up his sister. Now he vaguely wondered how she and their parents were faring. They’d been gone an awfully long time. Still, it looked like he might just have a chance to check out what he believed was the scene of some accident.

  What if there’s a body in the car? he wondered. The idea excited and repelled him at the same time. When he thought about it the notion seemed unlikely. People would have noticed if someone was missing—someone local—because who else would be using a private road? Of course, he
had heard on the news about cars and people that had not been found for weeks or months, even, after they were reported missing. And those kinds of stories usually involved some kind of wilderness area—like the place he was in now.

  Well, it didn’t matter until he got a better look.

  The road continued to dip. He kept an ear out for the return of the family van, but the day was silent except for the buzz-hum-chirp of the natural world. At the bottom of the hill, he found a dirt trail leading into the woods in the direction of the stream. A short way into the thicket, he began to hear the rushing waters.

  When he pushed past a couple of trees, he found himself in luck: The path from the road ran into a trail that veered to his right and left, following the edge of the creek. Without pausing, he started off on the right-hand branch—the one that would take him back to the spot he wanted to check out.

  He went slowly. The path was wet and slippery from mist thrown off by the rapids. But soon enough he was almost to the point where the stream flowed fastest and deepest. The trail seemed even slicker and narrower here. He edged along it with his back to the damp rock wall, his arms spread-eagled.

  From far above, he thought he heard shifting gears as a car made its way up the hill. He guessed his parents were returning. They’d probably be freaked out to find him gone, but there was no way he could hurry. And he was so close—he had to find out what was in the water. He just hoped they wouldn’t get too mad. He’d tell them he got lost in the woods. They couldn’t blame him (too much) for that, he reasoned. Of course, he remembered, they told me not to go wandering off. Yeah, there will probably be trouble. Oh, well. Too late now to turn back.

  The path widened a tad above the churning water in the pool, where the stream gushed into the roughly circular basin, swirled around, then raced out a narrow spout of rock to continue its journey downhill. Dropping to his hands and knees, he peered over the trail edge into the water below.