Spinny? What the hell is that? She shook the thought away, again taken by an irrational irritation over his refusal to act like a normal person. “Are you looking at these legs? I’m a goddamn walking arachnophobia trigger! What could you possibly have seen that trumps this?”
He chuckled. “You might have had a case were you not so cute.”
“Cute?” She became aware of an uncomfortable burning in her cheeks. “At the very least don’t mock me.”
“I’m not.”
It was suddenly far too hot for how late it was. She shook her head and just looked at the small neighborhood emerging from the trees. “Whatever. Talking to you is pointless.”
They soon approached a white ranch house. As Spinneretta walked to the door, Mark stopped halfway across the lawn. “Well,” he said, “I suppose I shall take my leave of you here. Goodnight, Spinny.”
The use of the nickname again disarmed her. She was about to knock but then hesitated. She turned around and caught his eye just as he made to leave. “Hey, before you go, could I ask a favor?”
He raised his eyebrows. “What would you ask?”
She bit her lip. “I’ve never told anyone about Will before. Or about what happened that night. Do you think you could keep that to yourself?”
“To the extent that I’m able. But should your experience become important . . . ”
She nodded just a little. “That’s fine. Thank you.” She rapped on the door and took a deep breath. Now she felt a little better, less like she was going to be eaten by her guilt. Now it was the curiosity and worldview-destroying thoughts of Raxxinoth and the Yellow King that threatened her peace of mind. God, you’re losing it Spins, she thought. Are you really that gullible?
The door swung open, and Chelsea’s silhouette emerged. “You are so damn late!” the girl yelled. “Get in here, we’ve got leftover pizza.”
Spinneretta noticed Chelsea shift her gaze over her shoulder. She turned about, and saw Mark raise his hand once more in farewell before starting back down the path they’d come. When he’d made it past the mailbox, Chelsea again beckoned her inside. The door clattered shut, and Chelsea gave Spinneretta a curious look. “Who was that guy?”
“Oh, that’s Mark. He’s a distant relative who’s staying with us for a while.”
Chelsea blinked at the door. “He’s pretty cute.”
Spinneretta scoffed. “Are you, like, exclusively attracted to people I’m related to?”
She jumped at the accusation. “What? Of course not, where do you even get that kind of idea from?”
“You’re joking.” It wasn’t like Chelsea was subtle about how badly she wanted to get into Arthr’s pants. But at the same time, it seemed ridiculous to throw Mark under that same umbrella. Though they were related, there were eleven generations separating them; it was a miracle that they even shared the same surname at this point. Could she even really call him family?
“Well, anyway,” Chelsea said, face burning red, “if you want pizza, you’d better get to it before Chad does.”
On the way back to the Warren residence, Mark considered the situation. As the stars grew brighter and night fell, he mulled over his options, thoughts drawn once more to the strange sigil that Spinneretta had penned in the margin of her homework. An icy shiver rattled his arms as his fingers played vacantly at the fine chain in his pocket. He’d downplayed his concern. There was no escaping it. This was far beyond the domain of happenstance. Finally, he fished his phone from his other pocket. He gave a small sigh of relief when he saw it still held a charge. He flipped through his short list of contacts and depressed the call button.
A few rings later, a groggy-sounding woman answered. “Hello?”
“Forgive me for the late call,” he said. “I hope I haven’t awoken you.”
At once, the woman seemed awake. “Marky! I’ve been waiting for you to call me for almost a month!”
“I know. Listen, Annika. Something weird is going on in this town. And I think it could be big. I really hate to do this, but I need your help.”
Chapter 8
Down to Business
Spinneretta spent Saturday night at Chelsea’s as well. While she had initially escaped to avoid being confronted by those unwelcome memories of Will and the man in the yellow jacket, she now found herself dwelling on far more confusing thoughts. The more she considered what Mark had told her about the legend of the Yellow King and the spider god, Raxxinoth, the more she felt that odd resonance from deep in her mind. It was double-think; she could neither accept such a fanciful story nor deny the evidence of its reality. Nor could she explain or banish the ghost of vague recognition.
When her curiosity reached critical mass, she commandeered Chelsea’s computer for some preliminary research. Her internet searches for the Repton Scriptures, in a variety of spellings, turned up nothing. Even when allowing for fuzzy search interpretation, not a single hit was returned. It was too empty; it felt like the dead silence of a forest right before guerrilla fighters launched their ambush. She even broadened her search terms, including phrases such as human-spider hybrid and yellow king, but those likewise returned precisely zero results. Nowhere, on the whole of the internet, had those words even appeared within the same sentence. She should have felt relieved, but it just unnerved her even more.
Spinneretta returned home Sunday morning exhausted and with the guilt from her selfish departure weighing her. When she’d deposited her messenger bag next to her bed, she headed down the hall to Kara’s room. With a deep breath, she knocked on the door.
“Come in,” Kara said after a brief delay, and Spinneretta pushed the door open.
Kara had constructed a silken web in the center of her room that stretched between three walls and entwined her bedposts. The web, crafted from fibers of unbelievable tensile tenacity, bent from the ceiling to a height of five feet at the center, where it bore the greatest portion of the girl’s weight. Reclining in a leisurely and nearly horizontal pose, Kara clung to the underside of that web with two sets of her spider legs, her body conformed to the web’s convexity. The remaining two pairs manipulated a book in front of her. Between her hands, which could not be bothered to handle literature, scuttled a small calisoga spider covered in fine, brown hair.
Spinneretta breathed a small sigh of relief to find her sister in her usual spirits. “Why do you keep bringing those home?” she asked, pointing at the calisoga.
“Because they’re cute!” Kara continued placing one hand in front of the other as the imposter tarantula crawled over them in sequence.
“Mom’s going to kill you if she finds that thing inside, you know.”
“Don’t worry, she won’t find it.” Kara giggled, then finally looked away from her book. “So what’s up?”
Spinneretta’s stomach rolled a little. She sat down on the floor and crossed her legs. “I uhh . . . I just wanted to say I’m sorry. For running off like that on Friday. I know it must have been really terrible for you, and it was messed up for me to just leave without staying and making sure you were okay.”
To her surprise, Kara’s face twitched in clear irritation. “I’m fine, jeez. I can take care of myself. Wish everyone wouldn’t act like I’m dying because of it.”
I guess it’s good that she’s taking this well, Spinneretta thought. Maybe it would be best to not make a big deal out of it, if only to make Kara feel better. Still, it didn’t seem right to just leave it at that. Even if she were to disregard the myths she’d been pondering, the incident was clearly no coincidence. Cult or not, somebody was a little too interested in the Warren brood. Though if Kara was loath to discuss it, then she’d have to wait for another time. With a small sigh, she decided to drop the subject, and instead eyed the plain, blue cover of the book Kara held in her outstretched legs. “What are you reading these days, anyway?”
“Unicorns.”
“Ahh.” Spinneretta’s knowledge of the Whispering Unicorns franchise extended only so far as being able
to recognize the prodigiously hideous main character, Starshine Butterwinkle, whose potato-shaped face decorated the sole poster in Kara’s room. A year and a half earlier, Kara’d had no interest in any form of literature. Now that she’d discovered Whispering Unicorns, her formerly decorative bookshelf was crammed full of books, including some perhaps inadvisable for a ten-year-old girl.
“Forgive me for the intrusion,” came a voice from behind. Spinneretta twisted around. Mark stood in the hall just outside the door. Nervous rime began to creep up from her stomach.
“Hey, Mark,” Kara said with a smile.
“Good morning,” he replied, though he was looking only at Spinneretta. “I thought I heard you come home. I had something I wanted to discuss with you. I do hope I have not caught you at an inopportune time.”
She’d hoped for some reprieve from her roiling thoughts and anxieties, but Mark’s tone left little possibility of that. “Nay,” she said, “thou hast not caught me in the midst of mine duties.”
He gave her a queer look. “Are you making fun of me?”
“Yes. Obviously.” She slipped to her feet with the help of her extra appendages. “What did you want?”
He glanced down the hall away from her. “Perhaps you would like to discuss this somewhere more private?”
The chill in her gut deepened, and she nodded. She led him down the hall to her own room and pushed the door open. Her eyes darted about the room, checking for anything out of place or embarrassing. It was too late to bother trying to hide any of her band posters, which she figured were the only incriminating items inside. The miscellaneous trinkets scattered here and there were innocuous enough. Satisfied, she beckoned for him to enter behind her.
The door creaked partway closed, and Spinneretta flopped onto her bed. “So, what’s up?” When Mark didn’t say anything, she rolled about until her head hung off the edge. He was staring at her bookshelf. A sharp embarrassment cut through the haze in her mind.
Mark smiled a little. “I see you like mythology.”
With a sigh, she righted herself. “Mythology, world religion, it’s all great.”
He continued to glance at the spines of the collection, and then his eyes lit up. “Someone Saw a Spider: Spider Facts and Folktales,” he read. “I see. I suppose if I were like you, I’d consider even folkloric answers to the question of my origin. I don’t suppose this is why you were so quick to believe my tale the other night?”
Spinneretta started, feeling the familiar, illogical sting of embarrassment mixing with annoyance. “Look, my spideriness may have something to do with my interest in mythology, but not everyone believes answers exist in old stories. I accepted long ago that the reason we exist couldn’t be found in some legend, alright? Don’t patronize me by pretending it’s logical to think that crap.”
Mark was quiet. When she saw his disarmed expression, Spinneretta covered her face with her hands and fell back onto her bed with a small groan. “If you call me mercurial again I’m throwing you out of my room.”
“Then I’ll just say that I seem to have a penchant for upsetting you.”
“Well, forgive me. I’ve just been in a crappy mood this weekend.” She hugged her knees to her chest with her spider legs and pressed her face into the side of her pillow. “I’m not usually so jumpy about everything.” She sat up and reached for the brush on her nightstand and began whipping it through her hair, if only to distract herself from her increasingly embarrassing outbursts. Come on, get a hold of yourself, Spins. Stop acting like a crazy person. “What did you want to talk about, anyway?”
Mark took a deep breath and turned his gaze to the posters on the wall. His eyes settled upon a framed watercolor—her freshman art final. She swallowed hard when she noticed the muscles in his neck tighten. Awash in twilight hues, the image depicted the Sigil—the symbol she so often beheld in her dreams—shining from atop a crudely depicted pyramid. The only reason she’d kept it around for so long was because every other time she sketched or drew the symbol she failed to capture the supple curves that shaped even the straightest lines in its hieroglyphic-esque form. She hadn’t expected a crappy art project to be the weirdest thing in her room. Her whole body tensed as she remembered Mark’s bizarre reaction to seeing her margin-sketch on Friday.
But to her relief, Mark snapped from his trance, though a grim pallor remained on his face. “Right. Forgive me. In any case, I believe it’s all but certain these two yellow coat kidnapping incidents are connected. Given this attention toward your family, it stands to reason that Arthr may also have had a similar experience.”
She stopped brushing. She’d never considered that possibility before, but now that Mark brought it up it seemed an obvious conclusion. “I’ve never heard him mention anything like that, but I guess I didn’t say anything either, so . . . It’s possible. Nonzero, even.”
He glanced again at her bookshelf, and then averted his gaze as though to avoid offending her. “At any rate, as I have scarcely spoken with him since my arrival, I was hoping you would invite him to discuss the matter on my behalf. And Kara as well. Obviously, this is quite important.”
“I know it’s a big deal,” she said, growing uneasy, “but doesn’t it make more sense to leave this whole thing to the police? I mean, no offense, but their job is taking care of stuff like this, you know.”
Mark breathed out a sigh. “Let me ask you something. Why do you think it is that nobody has ever heard about you here?”
“What do you mean?”
He looked down and began to tap his foot against the carpet. “Have you ever heard of Ambras syndrome?”
Confused, she shook her head. “Doesn’t sound familiar.”
“It’s a genetic condition which causes abnormal hair growth. Some of the people born with it have been called werewolves, among other things.”
The light bulb went on in her brain. “Oh! Okay, yeah. I know about that, just not by name.”
Mark leaned toward her. “Why do you know about it? Do you know someone with it?”
She blinked at him. “What? Of course not, it’s just a really well-known disorder.”
“Precisely. A disease that merely causes some extra hair growth is world famous. So why is it that you half-spiders have gone unmolested for so long? Hair is hair. You, on the other hand, have perfectly functioning extra limbs. If this truly is a genetic disorder, then it flies in the face of evolutionary theory. It stands to reason that science would have some interest in you and your family, so how is it that you have remained unknown?”
Her mind stumbled over the question. “I . . . don’t know. I’ve never thought about it before.”
Mark’s face went blank. “You have spider legs. You have fangs and venom. And you’ve never thought your own obscurity odd?”
She shook her head, dangerously aware of the implications lurking behind his words. “I just, I don’t know, I thought it was enough that people around here got all weirded out by it, and I just . . . It didn’t occur to me, I guess. That’s all.”
He stared at her for a long moment, forehead puckered. “In any case, if your family has gone so long without attracting the eyes of science, then there must be a reason. As sure as the moon rises, somebody has a vested interest in keeping your presence unknown.”
She mouthed those words, still trying to make sense of the now obvious contradiction in her worldview. The logical progression made sense; a genetic deformation that was so perfectly formed, as though evolved to some unknown purpose, should have been a much bigger deal than it was. She’d grown up distracted by, and adapted to, the curious and repulsed reactions from the people in town as they struggled to get used to the Warrens. Now that the splinter had lodged itself between the gaps in her mental barrier, she couldn’t help remembering the complete lack of results of her earlier search for human-spider hybrids.
“If someone is trying to keep your family’s existence a secret,” Mark continued, “then the police are of no use to us. Anyone with
enough influence to suppress something so scientifically miraculous would have more than enough power to keep law enforcement in their pockets.”
Spinneretta nodded, growing convinced that his theory was dead on. “And you think that there’s some spider-worshiping cult that’s responsible?” It was almost too absurd to consider; it was a puzzle piece made of sand.
“It is too early to tell. I hope to find out soon enough. Now, as we have become quite sidetracked, may we perhaps return to the matter at hand? I would very much like to speak with your siblings.”
Startled by the return to the original topic, and still haunted by the looming specter of unreality, she nodded.
“So, what’s this about?” Arthr asked as he followed Kara into Spinneretta’s room.
Leaning against the wall, Spinneretta just gestured to Mark with a pair of her legs and bade him speak.
“Well, Arthr,” Mark said from where he sat on the bed, “I shall be blunt with this. As we all learned, Kara had a run-in with a kidnapper the other day.” He gestured at the young girl now leaning beside Spinneretta. “The culprit was a man in a dirty yellow coat, if May’s story is accurate.”
Mark was quiet for a moment. He glanced up at Spinneretta, and a chill raced across the skin of her arms. His pale eyes seemed to be entreating permission to speak of her own encounter, and she gave her head a firm shake of dismissal.
With a small sigh, Mark nodded. “Mayhap this shall sound odd, but this is very important. Have you yourself ever had such an encounter with men in yellow coats?”
Arthr’s expression was blank. After a moment he shook his head. “No, I’ve never had anything like that happen.”
Mark leaned toward him, his hands clenched atop his knees. “Are you certain? I do not mean only being kidnapped. Have you ever even seen these yellow coats?”
Arthr folded his arms and cocked his head to the side. “Can’t say if I’ve ever seen anyone or not. Yellow coat really isn’t that detailed a description. What kind of yellow? What kind of coat? I don’t think I’ve—”
The Spider Children (The Warren Brood Book 1) Page 13
