Hangman's Curse

by Frank Peretti

  He took his cue and hurried down off the ladder.

  Elisha spoke into her radio. “Mom, we have an emergency. I have to go in. Call me when you can.” She clambered up to the opening, clicked on her head-mounted lamp, and crawled through.

  Elijah and Mr. Maxwell arrived at the school just as the buses were pulling up. This was going to complicate things a little. Everyone was going to wonder what he was doing with a dog in school.

  Just then, Trevor and Carl, Elijah’s two buddies from calculus, got off a bus.

  “Hey! Nice dog!”

  “Is that yours?”

  Elijah was trying to figure out how he would explain even as he answered, “Yeah, sure is.”

  They looked at him strangely, then exchanged a glance with each other. Carl said, “Elijah, is there something going on here? I mean, first you hang out with Ian Snyder, and now you bring a dog to school.”

  Elijah looked them both in the eye and admitted, “Yeah. There’s something going on. Could you kind of . . . play along for a while? I’ll tell you all about it when it’s over.”

  They looked at each other, made faces that meant they were impressed, then hurried into the building.

  “Okay, Max,” Elijah said, leading Max up the stairs toward the main door, “it’s now or never.”

  Elisha made a decision. She dropped the building plans on the floor, then put on her protective hood and headlamp. “Excuse me, Mr. Loman.”

  Algernon was a bundle of nervous energy as he waited for Dr. Stuart to return to the phone. Pressing the receiver to his ear with his shoulder, he swiveled in his chair and began tapping the keys on his computer. “The, uh, the brown recluse has a distant cousin in East Africa, the African spotted wolf—that’s not a dog, it’s the name of a poisonous spider. The poison works slowly, causing paranoia, then hallucinations, then dementia—you know, the victim goes crazy, babbling nonsense, fleeing from everything, being generally out of his mind, just like the victims in this case—are you with me, Sarah?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “Some of the primitive tribes in Africa found a way to use the poison against their enemies. The poison could eventually kill them, but not before they went crazy and killed each other. It was a perfect weapon.”

  He tapped one final key, and an image formed on the computer screen. “The African spotted wolf. Not big as spiders go, less than half a centimeter. The bite hardly leaves a mark—but you’ve seen what it can do.”

  Sarah stared at the greatly magnified image with loathing. It was a thin, spindly thing, brownish-red with black spots, slick in appearance.

  Algernon responded to a voice on the telephone. “Yes, hello.” He listened, then sighed, his shoulders dropping. “Yes, sir. Thank you. That’s good news and bad news. We’ll get right back to you. Yes, as soon as we have something. Thank you, doctor.” He handed the receiver to Sarah, who hung it up. He pointed to his computer screen. “We’ve found the culprit.”

  The old airshaft was dusty and filled with decades of spider webs. Sure. Just as Norman had replied, there were spiders in here. There had always been spiders in here. Suddenly the whole question of finding spiders in this place seemed a bit silly, like going to an ocean beach to find out if there was any sand.

  The shaft was like a square box, framed from aging two-by-fours and plywood, and only a few feet across. It was difficult for Elisha to move her body, to bend, reach, or turn. Hanging by one hand from the lip of the vent opening, she raised the face shield of her hood for a better view downward, tilting her head to direct the beam of her headlamp. It was like looking down a square, bottomless well. The dirty, cobwebbed walls dropped away into inky blackness. Tiny flecks of dust drifted upward through the beam of her light, riding on a slow, warm updraft that reeked of dust, mortar, and rat droppings.

  “Norman?”

  No answer.

  Her right foot had already found a horizontal framing member. There were plenty, spaced about two feet apart, perfect footholds for climbing down. Norman’s footprints and hand-prints had already gone before her.

  “Mr. Loman, I’m going to go down and find him. Maybe you should get us some help.”

  “Maybe you should wait!” he said, sounding quite nervous.

  “Maybe he’s hurt. Maybe he isn’t breathing. There isn’t time.”

  She saw his face disappear from the vent opening and turned away, lowering one foot, then the other, easing and sliding down the shaft from foothold to foothold. She still couldn’t see the bottom.

  “The culprit is an African spotted wolf?” Sarah asked, studying the image on Algernon’s computer screen.

  Algernon fidgeted in his chair, drummed his knee, swiveled from side to side. “A male spotted wolf, to be exact.” He shook his finger in Sarah’s direction. “Every soda straw but one was occupied by a male. It’s an old war tactic used in Africa, particularly Kenya: plant female pheromone on your enemy—give them a gift, an article of clothing, anything, but first confine it with some females to get the scent planted on it. Then put a male spider nearby so he’s attracted by the pheromone. He crawls onto the victim, doesn’t find the female he thought he’d find, he gets upset, he bites the victim. Victim goes crazy and eventually dies, and no one even knows it was the act of an enemy.”

  Sarah was stunned. “So somebody planted the spiders in the lockers, and the duffel bags, and the jacket, trapped in soda straws.”

  “And planted the pheromone on the victim. The male smells it, eats and claws his way out of the straw . . .”

  “It’s too perfect.”

  “Exactly. That’s why we have such a terrible mistake here.”

  “The female.”

  “Exactly, exactly!” Now Algernon jumped up and pointed to the straw he’d dissected. “This straw had a female inside. The female doesn’t get as upset as the male, so she usually doesn’t bite, and that’s why Blake Hornsby never showed any symptoms. BUT!” Algernon was too upset to stand still, so he paced, spun on his heels, paced some more. “Never, never, never turn a female spotted wolf loose in North America! She might mate with a brown recluse, and while the venom of the African spotted wolf is poisonous, it’s nothing compared to the venom of the hybrid! Remember? The last two victims died within twenty-four hours, not several weeks! It’s fair to say they were probably bitten by hybrids.”

  “Oh, Lord help us!”

  “It gets worse, Sarah! Are you with me?”

  “I’m with you.”

  “The hybrid breeds like crazy! It’s like a cancer, like an invasion from another planet, it’s, it’s unreal! Once a brown recluse and an African spotted wolf find each other, you could have hundreds— NO! You’d have thousands of hybrids in a matter of days! Thousands of brown wolf hybrids! The Kenyan disaster!”

  “Elisha . . . !” Sarah raced for the kitchen and found her handheld radio. “NO! Oh, no!”

  Algernon raced after her. “What, what, what?”

  “This thing’s been turned off all this time! Elisha may have tried to call me.” She switched it on and called, “Elisha!” No answer. “Elisha, come in!”

  Elisha had reached the bottom of the shaft. It had emptied into a long, narrow space between a wall of the new building and a remaining wall of the old building, and her theory was right. There was space enough for her to crawl from behind Blake Hornsby’s locker to behind Amy Warren and Crystal Sparks’ lockers upstairs. If she could do it, obviously a tiny spider could do it.

  And there were plenty in here. She could see their tiny dark shapes moving along the walls, scampering through the cracks, hanging from their webs. In fact, as she continued to look below, ahead, and above her, it became frighteningly clear that there were far too many. They were everywhere. The boards, the masonry, the dusty walls seemed alive with them.

  She made sure her face shield was snapped securely shut. This was weird, so weird it was getting scary.

  “Norman?” she called.

  “Elisha!” her radio squawke
d.

  The sound was so loud and sudden it made her jump. “Hello? Mom?”

  “Where are you, honey?”

  Elisha swallowed. “We might have an emergency, Mom. Norman went down the shaft first and disappeared. I’m in the shaft now, looking for him.”

  Apparently her mother had pressed the talk button but then paused to listen to someone else. Elisha could hear another voice in the background—it had to be Professor Wheeling—going absolutely nuts. “—near Blake’s locker! The female has a nest back there. Get her out of there right now! She’s going to . . .” She couldn’t understand the rest. Finally her mother’s voice came on. “Elisha? Listen to me. You’re in serious danger where you are. You have to get out of there!”

  “But what about Norman?”

  “We’ll get some help, don’t worry. Just get out of there right now, do you hear me?”

  Just looking around, Elisha was quite convinced. “Okay. I’m going back the way I came.”

  “Call me when you get out.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned quickly. A board snapped under her foot, she went off balance, put out the other foot to catch herself—

  It broke open a hatchway and she fell through it, her skull smacking against the hatch frame. Stunned and limp, she tumbled through empty, black space, landed belly-down on a large, metal heating duct, slid off, fell, landed on another duct, rolled off, then tumbled down a slope of rubble to an old concrete floor where she finally came to rest, still and unconscious.

  Her radio remained attached to her belt, but the line to her headset had pulled loose, so it was silent. The radio’s tiny red power indicator light was the only thing visible in the total darkness— until something covered it.

  11

  dollars and

  scents

  Algernon was packing up his gear, throwing everything back in the cases. “We’ve got to get down to the school right now. They have to close that place! They have to get everybody out!”

  Sarah warned, “That may not be easy.”

  He looked at her, his crooked eyes now crazy with alarm. “Oh, there is no choice in this matter! What happened in Kenya could happen here!”

  She grabbed his arm. “Algernon! What happened in Kenya?”

  “You don’t know?” Then he wagged his head and began correcting himself. “No, of course, she doesn’t know, you dummy! You think everybody cares about bugs the way you do?”

  She still had hold of his arm, and now she jerked it violently. “Algernon! What happened in Kenya?”

  He scrambled to the Springfields’ computer. “Do you have Internet access?”

  “Answer my question!”

  “I AM answering your question! Internet access, Sarah—oh, and pardon me for raising my voice!”

  She tapped out the steps for going on-line.

  While the computer chirped and warbled over the phone lines, Algernon looked at Sarah as directly as he could, his eyes wild, and gasped it out. “It happened in 1932. An American vessel loaded goods and fruit in Kenya, then sailed for America. Perfectly normal commerce. Happens all the time. But some spotted wolves got on board, hiding in the fruit, and . . .” He looked off into space as if viewing the whole story on an invisible movie screen. “And there were brown recluses aboard the ship. No one knows how many.” He sniffed a little laugh and added, “Of course, all you’d need is one.”

  The computer was on-line. He tapped out a Web site and hit the enter key.

  As the first image downloaded, he continued, “The ship went off course, then totally adrift. It was missing for weeks, and wouldn’t answer any radio calls. A Japanese freighter finally sighted it out in the middle of the Indian Ocean and pulled alongside.” He looked into space again, staring at the images racing through his brain. “All the crew were dead—horribly dead. They’d torn the ship apart, destroyed every room, smashed all the equipment, savagely beaten and stabbed each other—and the ship was crawling with spiders.”

  The Web page was on-screen, some kind of technical page with links to various insects and their habitats. Algernon clicked a link, banged some keys, and found another image. “With this spider! The brown wolf hybrid.”

  Sarah thought the other images were gruesome, but they were tame compared to this one. This spider was large, covered with bristles, coal black with yellow stripes along its belly, with glistening rat’s eyes—at least seven—and what looked like silvery tusks.

  Algernon shook his head in wonder. “Just look at the fangs on that thing.”

  Elijah took Mr. Maxwell through the front door and through the metal detector, and by now he was drawing enough stares from the students filling the halls that he felt stark naked. He could only hope this had all been cleared with Ms. Wyrthen and Officer Carrillo.

  Plenty of kids wanted to greet Max and give him some pets, and of course, Max was more than happy to receive them.

  But that’s when it started. A girl came up, her hand extended. “Hi, nice doggie! How you doin’?”

  Max didn’t mind getting a pet, but he smelled something on her hand. Alerted, he looked at Elijah, fidgeting, whimpering.

  The girl jerked her hand away. “Oh, does he bite?”

  “No, not at all,” Elijah answered. “But—”

  A boy saw what happened and told the girl, “Hey, that’s a drug-sniffing dog!”

  That scared her. “Is he?”

  Elijah tried to answer, “Well, yeah, but—”

  “Good-bye.” She turned away.

  Max tried to follow her. Elijah held him back on his leash.

  Then he sniffed a tall senior walking by and alerted again, sniffing at the young man’s carry bag and whimpering.

  The young man jerked his bag away. “Hey, what is this?”

  Elijah was just as startled. “Uh, nothing. Max, are you—”

  The guy was mad. “Well, I’m not carrying any drugs, so keep that dog away from me!”

  The talk was spreading. Elijah could hear it as he and Max moved down the hall. “Drug dog!” “It’s a drug-sniffing dog!” “Springfield’s a narc?”

  Talk about the Red Sea parting before Moses! The bodies in the hallway moved aside, ran ahead, made room, as if Max had an invisible bumper ten feet all around him.

  But Max was acting crazy, whimpering, racing one direction and then another, his nose along the wall, then up against the lockers, then up against anyone who still came close enough. A cute little freshman girl walked by, smiled at Max, and said hello. He sniffed her handbag and alerted, looking at Elijah excitedly.

  But Max was acting crazy, whimpering, racing one direction and then another, his nose along the wall, then up against the lockers, then up against anyone who still came close enough.

  “Max, are you sure?” Elijah asked.

  Max only whimpered and nudged the girl’s handbag again.

  Someone called, “Look out! That’s a drug-sniffing dog!”

  The little girl was perplexed. “But . . . I don’t use drugs.”

  Elijah gave Max a pet to calm him down. “Uh, sorry, I think he’s a little confused.”

  She gave Max a friendly wave and walked on.

  Max smelled something across the hall and tugged at his leash again. Then another student passed by and he lurched nose-first in that direction. He was getting too upset to handle.

  Elijah had a terrible thought: What if he isn’t confused?

  Marquardt was getting brash, as if he enjoyed upsetting this stranger in his office.

  “You have to realize, kids like Norman Bloom attract this kind of treatment. Maybe it’s nature’s way of bringing us all up to par. Tod Kramer picked on him, Jim Boltz picked on him, Blake Hornsby picked on him . . .”

  Nate glanced at the clock on the wall just above Marquardt’s head. Soon the bell would ring and classes would start. The school would be filled with kids. Elijah had no doubt arrived with Max, and Nate hadn’t even asked if Max could sniff out the locker room.

  He sa
w something.

  Marquardt was still talking. “There was Doug Anderson and—who was that other kid?—Baynes. Yeah, Leonard Baynes. Craig Forbes, a few others. Hey, even I picked on him, if that’s what you want to call it.” He laughed to himself. “I’ve chewed him out quite a few times, but believe me, he’ll live.”

  If the tiny dot had not descended across the white face of the wall clock, Nate probably would not have seen it. But Nate only needed a second look to discern the oval-shaped body and the outstretched, groping legs, the silvery, vertical web line, thinner than human hair, by which the spider was lowering itself directly toward Marquardt’s head.

  “So if you ask me—” Marquardt was saying.

  “Excuse me,” Nate said as he grabbed Marquardt by the arm and yanked him forward.

  Marquardt cursed and jerked his arm loose, ready for a fight.

  “I’m very sorry,” Nate said, looking into Marquardt’s face. Marquardt could see no fight in Nate’s eyes and relaxed a little. Nate pointed. “Take a look.”

  Marquardt followed Nate’s gaze just in time to see a thin, spindly, brownish-red spider alight on Marquardt’s chair. It began scurrying around the chair in circles as if searching for something.

  Nate spotted an empty water glass sitting on Marquardt’s desk. He reached over, grabbed it, and placed it upside down over the spider, trapping it.

  Marquardt sneered. “Oh, brother, you’re going to get all upset over a little spider?”

  “Just bear with me a second.”

  “Why, what’s the matter?”

  Nate looked up at the flat, rectangular light fixture above Marquardt’s chair. A broken strand of web line still dangled from it, waving in the moving air. The spider had come from up there. Nate climbed up on the desk.

  “Hey!” Marquardt exclaimed, and then, seeing the serious, intense expression on Nate’s face, said nothing more.

  Nate peered into the narrow space between the fixture and the ceiling. There, amid the dust and dead bugs, lay a soda straw, the sugar plug half chewed and lying just to one side. He came within inches of touching it—