A Web of Black Widows

by Scott William Carter

  Daniel tried to get his mind back into the movie, but he couldn't wrestle his attention away from the old man. He watched him closely for the rest of the film, and saw how he reacted strangely at other times too. He jerked back when nothing had happened. He laughed into his arm when Harry’s friend Ron was clobbered. His body sagged in boredom during the most riveting action sequence of the movie.

  Senility, dementia, it could have been anything, and Daniel would have dismissed the old man and his odd behavior if it hadn't been for the affinity he felt for him because of the loneliness he imagined they shared. So when the credits rolled and the lights came up, Daniel continued to watch him. They filed into the aisle, Daniel ahead. Out in the lobby, Daniel waited on the far wall. He glanced at his watch nonchalantly as the rest of the audience poured out, until it became a trickle, and then no one at all.

  When two boys with brooms, dustbins, and trash bags headed inside, the old man still hadn't shown.

  When he went inside, he found only the two kids, whose snickering fell silent when he entered. Daniel mumbled that he lost his wallet and walked to the first row, glancing down all the aisles. He crouched where the old man had been sitting, saw nothing unusual, then pulled out his wallet and said, loudly, "Ah, found it!"

  He went to another movie the next night, a Tom Cruise flick whose title he forgot once inside, and found what he had experienced the previous night happened again. The more riveted his attention to the film, the more the starfish retreated, and the more his depression was forgotten in his suspension of disbelief.

  From then on, he was hooked. He went to a film every night, and then it was two a night, and then it was canceling his classes to see matinees during the day. Some men drowned their grief in alcohol and narcotics. Daniel suffocated his own sorrow in celluloid.

  He still felt embarrassed at being alone, but when he wasn't in the theatre, he was irritable. He snapped at colleagues. He frequently trailed off in front of students, hand poised on the chalkboard in mid equation, his train of thought lost as he mused about what movie he would see that night.

  He was at his third showing of The Lord of the Rings when he saw the old man again. As before, the film seized up during the trailers, and when it started there was the old man shuffling down the aisle. And once again, during the film his reactions were all wrong.

  Daniel decided to follow him.

  When the lights went up, he stayed seated. He pretended to fiddle with his watch until the old man, in a thicket of people, moved past. Daniel folded into the crowd, keeping his attention riveted on the old man’s wrinkled neck. Until that moment, it was all for curiosity’s sake. But then the man’s head turned to the side, and Daniel got a good look at his face.

  There was a starfish.

  The dusky shadow of a five-armed starfish gripped the old man's face like the fingers of an outstretched glove. The starfish flashed quickly and disappeared, but it was there long enough that Daniel knew it was not a play of light. It was same thing he saw when he looked in the mirror long enough, when the pain was bad, and if he let his eyes go askance.

  He jostled forward. A woman he bumped made a noise of disgust. A kid yelled "Hey!" He saw the old man's overcoat appear. He reached for it and felt his fingers brush up against the course fabric — and then the crowd collapsed inward and his fingers touched empty air.

  When the crowd parted again, the old man was gone.

  This time he made no attempt to hide his desperation. He bobbed on his tiptoes, searching for the bald head. He bumped and banged his way to the front of crowd. When he didn't find him, he turned and headed back into the crowd, like a fish swimming upstream. He searched all the rows, scanned the lobby, and looked under the stall doors in the restrooms. He bolted outside, where falling snow looked blood-stained in the light of the setting sun.

  Now Daniel had another reason to go to the movies, and it overrode all other reasons he had to do anything else. He took a leave of absence from the university, leaving in the middle of Winter term, not caring that he disgusted his dean.

  For the next month, he went to art house flicks, big budget blockbusters, the dollar theatre, even the community college Tuesday Silent Movie night where they were making their way through Charlie Chaplin. He never stayed for long, only long enough to see that the old man wasn’t there.

  Finally, his complexion as pale as ivory, his eyes stinging every time he walked in the sun, the starfish biting down on his skull the way a wolf's jaw closes on a squirming rabbit, Daniel saw the old man again. It was a Sunday matinee, a new Disney animation. Thinking that the old man wasn't coming, Daniel rose and was heading up the aisle when the film stopped and clutched the room in darkness. When it started again, there was the old man coming straight at him.

  He had his head down. He started to weave around Daniel, then glanced up, locked eyes, and pulled up short.

  The starfish fluttered across Daniel's vision, and he saw that the starfish appeared on the old man's face as well.

  The old man's eyes widened.

  "Oh, no, no," he said. "Not yet. Not now."

  He turned and headed back up the aisle. Daniel quickly caught up to him, grabbing him by the arm of his rumpled plaid shirt. It was no wider around than a broomstick.

  "You know what it is, don't you?" Daniel said.

  The old man's mouth opened and closed.

  "Don't you?" Daniel repeated.

  "Yes," the old man said.

  "You can help me?"

  "Yes." The old man bowed his head. "I just wanted more time."

  The old man looked at Daniel, his face full of deep shadows. Behind them, gunfire and shouting blared from the speakers, a trailer for a new Western.

  "Come with me," the old man said.

  Daniel followed him into the lobby. They didn't speak, but pushed through the double glass doors out into the night. The back pocket of the old man's plaid wrinkled slacks was turned inside out so that it looked like the tip of a handkerchief.

  Daniel felt the frosty air lap up against his skin. They walked a block, still not looking at one another, like two pall bearers holding a heavy burden between them. The old man angled into a bar and Daniel followed.

  It was a deserted, smoky place, tinny piano music piped in through speakers too small for the room. They settled into a booth at the back, the tabletop a decoupage of newspapers from the fifties. In the middle of the table was a candle in red opaque glass.

  "My name is Ned Brindle," the old man said.

  Daniel said his own name.

  Ned Brindle nodded and looked down at the melting wax. When he opened his mouth to speak, a waitress in a black apron was there at the table, a pad in her hand, but he didn't look at her.

  "I am nothing much," he said. "A plain and simple man who has suffered, just as you. This thing, this thing that haunts us, I don't know much about it, only what I was told and what I will tell you. It seeks out those who suffer and feeds on that suffering. It stays with a person for a time, until they can suffer no more, and then it moves on to someone else. That's what's happening. It's moving. It's moving from me to you. But it doesn't only take, it also gives."

  The waitress mumbled something about coming back later and retreated to the front of the bar. Neither Daniel or the old man looked at her.

  "What was her name?" Ned said.

  Daniel knew the old man wasn't talking about the waitress, but his pain leaped out and seized him, made him cautious.

  "Who?"

  "Don't be coy," Ned said. "You know who."

  "No really, I—"

  "Tell me! Tell or I'll get up right now and take all the hope you have!"

  "Debra," Daniel said. "Her name was Debra. She was my wife."

  "And you loved her?"

  Daniel nodded.

  "Tell me about her," Ned said.

  So Daniel did. Though he had refused to talk about her these past six months with anyone, he told Ned how she sang off-key in the shower when she would never s
ing in front of anyone — how she thought he couldn't hear because he had already gone to work, but once in a while he would come back in the bedroom and stand by the bathroom door, breathing quietly, listening to her voice.

  "She usually sung nursery rhymes," Daniel said. "We were waiting — I was waiting — until things settled down. There was the doctorate and then tenure, and then we were going to buy a house. I always thought . . . Who gets breast cancer at twenty-nine?"

  Ned listened until Daniel finished, then ordered two glasses of a red wine.

  "My wife's name was Alice," he said. "I was a pilot and overtime paid well. Alice, she was a painter — taught children at the local community center. I think she liked the teaching more than the painting itself. Once, when I happened to get home a day early, I went to surprise her at the community center. Before going in, I stood outside and watched through the window, watched her helping those children, the utter joy on her face . . . I seldom saw that face. It belonged to the children, that face, not to me."

  The wine came. They drank. They listened to the music and leaned back in their booths.

  "You said it also gives?" Daniel said, feeling the light-headedness that came from drinking on an empty stomach.

  He nodded. "Your wife, she liked going to the movies, didn't she?"

  "That's right. How . . .?"

  "I know because it seeks out people who lost someone who loved the movies. Why? I don't know. Maybe it's the escape. It feeds on the rush the grieving get from an escape . . . Alice loved the movies — Bambi, Rambo, it made little difference. Since I was often gone, she went without me. But we did go a few times, and those are the ones I remember. Those are the ones I see. I see movies that no one else sees, the movies the thing allows me to see, because it wants me to see them. I have spent the last five years in the theatre of my mind. I have stepped from one theatre to another as if nothing else exists."

  Ned put his clenched fist on the table. Slowly, he opened his fingers, and a tiny purple rectangle wafted to the table.

  "Pick it up," he said.

  Daniel did. It was a ticket stub, so worn and wrinkled it felt like cotton. The text had faded so that it was unreadable.

  "I don't know if it is part of the thing that haunts us," Ned said, "or if it came later. But it has kept the pain at bay, and it has allowed me these few years of indulgence. Now I offer it to you, just as it was offered to me. Not because I want to, but because when I saw the thing on your face, I knew it was time."

  Daniel looked at the ticket. It didn't look like anything special — hardly more than a piece of lint pulled out of the dryer.

  "This allows you to watch these other movies," he said, "movies that aren't the ones playing?"

  "I never said I was watching them," Ned snapped.

  He guzzled the rest of his wine, stood, and snatched the ticket out of Daniel's fingers.

  "I can't explain this gift to you," Ned said. "You have to accept it on faith."

  Ned dropped a twenty on the table and shuffled out the front door. Henry hesitated, then decided that if it could make the pain stop, even for a little while, he had to try.

  He found Ned waiting for him outside under the awning. It was snowing.

  "You want it, then?" he said.

  "Yes," Daniel said.

  Ned winced as if he had been pricked with a needle, then extended his hand. Not to shake it, but as if to lead him.

  "Take it," he said.

  "What?"

  "Take my hand."

  "Why?"

  "Don't worry about your manhood! It's the only way we can do this."

  Henry glanced around uncomfortably, hating for people to see them, two men, one older, both lost and pathetic, standing hand-in-hand in the cold. The snowflakes, big as cotton balls, stuck to the old man's bald head the way they might stick to a statue.

  Henry took the old man's hand.

  Ned turned, took a step, and when their feet came down they did so on soft carpet with a slight downward grade. The room was dark. He heard people breathing, chairs squeaking, a baby crying. The film kicked on and Ned released his hand.

  They sat in the front row, empty chairs on both sides. Ned sat still until a few trailers had played, then said, in a whisper, "Open your hand."

  Daniel placed his hand on the arm rest, fingers open as if to catch a ball. He felt the worn ticket tickle his palm, and he closed his hand around it.

  "I pass it onto you," Ned said. "When you get what you need, you must pass it on to the next person. You will know them when you see them. You will know them when you are ready to go back to your life."

  He stood. Daniel looked up at him, and saw the starfish appear on the old man's face, then break apart and dissolve.

  "Goodbye," Ned said, his voice choking. He turned swiftly and headed up the aisle. This time he did not vanish, but simply walked through the door and was gone.

  Daniel turned back to the screen. Jodi Foster as an FBI Agent . . . Oh, why did it have to be Silence of the Lambs? He hated this movie. He never liked the scary ones — but, yes, it had been one of the first he had seen with Debra. She never minded being scared — at least, when it was only a movie.

  It was then that he felt warm and nimble fingers close in around his free hand.

  There had been no one sitting in the seat next to him. Of this he was absolutely sure. But the tension in the fingers, the long nails biting into his hand, the lip of the ring chaffing his index finger, these sensations were known to him. He knew who it was. And he was afraid that if he turned and looked, the feeling would go away. Now he understood what the old man meant.

  I never said I was watching them.

  He settled into his chair, feeling the pressure on his hand increase. If he strained, he could just make out her shallow breathing, a gasp. He was still afraid to look, but there were many more movies. They had seen quite a few over the years and he would see them all again. During one he might risk a glance.

  And then he knew — knew that the old man's parting word of farewell had not been meant for Daniel at all.

  Static in a Still House

  MARTIN FOUND THE BABY MONITOR at the bottom of a box of Barbie dolls. It was at one of those nutty estate sales where everybody rushes in at the same time and you have to grab whatever you can get your hands on before it's devoured by the swarm. Martin hated those kinds. He much preferred the ones run by the professionals, where you got a number, and then people were let in a little at a time.

  Still, he knew that even Barbies in bad shape often had accessories that could fetch a pretty penny. So that had been his grab, ten bucks for the box. After racing around the rest of that drizzly Saturday to an assortment of other sales, he returned to the two-bedroom condo where he had lived alone since his mother died. The order of the day was an hour or two of sorting out the wheat from the chaff in the garage, some posting on eBay and his other sites, followed by a leisurely afternoon of watching baseball.

  It was the order of the day most days, and it was the way he liked it. No stress. No worries.

  Rain ran in rivulets down the mud-streaked window to his left, gray sky visible just above the arbor vitae that separated his house from his neighbor's. The window was cracked just a hair, something his mother would never allow him to do when she was alive because she claimed it sapped the house of heat; he felt the cool air tickling the back of his neck. He set the box on the cluttered workbench and flicked on the fluorescent lamp. He began pulling out the Barbies, setting them on the workbench in nice rows, and it wasn't until the box was nearly empty that he saw the white plastic receiver with the blue antenna.

  His heart did a little skip. He didn't know what it was at first, but it looked like electronics, and electronics always got his juices going.

  His enthusiasm was short-lived. As soon as he pulled it out, he knew what it was. The logo in blocky red letters was enough: BabyZone. The receiver was powered by two AA batteries, the cover for the compartment missing. He found the tran
smitter under the three remaining Barbies. He took it out and set them both on the workbench, surrounded on all sides by the blond dolls, many missing arms, legs, and even heads. The transmitter was powered by an AC/DC adapter, but the adapter was missing, too, making the whole thing useless.

  Ah, well. He dropped both parts into the plywood junk box he kept at the end of the workbench. They thudded against the romance paperbacks he had tossed in there the day before. Later, he would be glad he had the books in there. If the device had struck the wooden bottom, there was no telling if they would have still worked.

  Her first words were a whisper—not a word, by a sibilant shhhhhh . . .

  He froze, naked Barbie dolls in both hands. There was no mistaking that the sound had come from the box. Then she spoke again.

  "Shhhh . . . It's all right, honey. Momma's here now . . . "

  It was eight months later, in December, when he finally met her. Four inches of new-fallen snow coated the roads, bright and puffy like whip cream on dark chocolate. Cars spun and zigzagged in the intersections, the damn, fair-weather drivers causing accidents everywhere. Didn't matter to Martin. It was a Tuesday, the day they put out the new stuff at Goodwill, and he hadn't missed a dole-out day at Goodwill since he began scouting. Their prices were higher than the other thrift shops, but the clerks were just as ignorant about the really good stuff.

  From the moment he walked through the double doors, the smell intoxicated him. There was no other smell quite like what you smell in a thrift shop—a combination of dust, old books, mothballs, and other fainter, more exotic odors. Goodwill had made an effort to look like a department store, with bright fluorescent lighting, merchandise organized in new-looking clothing racks and metal shelving, but nothing could quite get rid of that smell. They could have put the merchandise in Nordstrom's and blindfolded him, he'd still know he was in a thrift shop.

  When Martin was starting out, an old scout told him that after a while the common things "have a certain look to them and you just don't see them no more." He hadn't understood what the old man had meant at the time, but it certainly became clear later. He was in and out of the shelves in minutes, his trained eyes locating a single prized possession among the common junk—an Ornette Coleman vinyl in slightly worn condition. It would cost him five bucks, but he was sure it would get him at least twenty online.