by Linda Ladd
The emergency room collapsed into pandemonium as more spiders escaped and fell off the table onto the floor. The doctors and nurses tried to kill as many as they could. Bud was behind me, watching in mute revulsion, until a big spider darted at him. He smashed it under his boot, but my skin crawled with abject horror at what Simon Classon must have suffered, bound alive in a sleeping bag with dozens of poisonous spiders.
When all the spiders were dead, the shaken medical team returned to the patient. Shaggy had arrived with his camera and was filming the terrible sight. He moved around Simon Classon’s body, documenting the white stuff clinging to his skin. A couple of nurses were crying, but others were quickly cutting through the sticky webs with trembling hands, working desperately to save the horribly tortured man.
As the webs were cut away and scrubbed off with alcohol, the gaping wounds in Classon’s legs became visible. I knew instantly what they were. Brown recluse bites injected a kind of poison that rotted the skin away, like flesh-eating viruses, and left gaping deep holes in skin and muscle tissue. I counted six open, oozing wounds on his legs, a horribly deep one on his belly, and several more on his chest. I shut my eyes and forced myself not to run away. When I looked at Bud, his face was so white and bloodless I thought he might pass out.
Dr. Bingham had gotten over the initial shock, however, and had Classon connected to a heart monitor. I watched the slow, barely visible blip run across the screen. The nurses were still attempting to scrub the web off Simon’s bare skin.
Unable to watch any longer, I moved across the room to where Buckeye was examining the down sleeping bag where it had been tossed onto the floor, along with its deadly inhabitants. Even with my extensive homicide experience, I couldn’t believe my eyes, couldn’t believe anybody could savagely torture another human being in such a way.
Buckeye looked at me. “This is the most horrible way to die I can ever imagine. For his wounds to be this deep and infected, he had to be trapped in that bag with those spiders for a long, long time.”
Bud groaned. “Oh my God, this is gonna give me nightmares forever.” He still wore that sick look on his face.
Buckeye said, “The perp’s got battery-heated socks inside the sleeping bag. Just enough warmth to keep the spiders alive and biting. Jesus Christ, they must’ve been crawling all over him for days.”
I said, “Three days. We think he was assaulted at his house three days ago.”
I looked back at the table where the trauma team was cutting off the silver duct tape binding Classon’s wrists together. I could see the imprint where the tape I’d removed from his mouth had kept his screams of terror and agony silent.
I said, “Whoever did this to him cannot be human.”
Nobody answered because Simon Classon’s abused body chose that moment to give up the fight. He flatlined, and the shrill, insistent buzz of the machine sent the trauma team into frenzied action. They got out the heart paddles, called clear, and shocked his chest. The pulse line remained flat. They did it again, then twice more, before the doctor stopped. He looked at us. “It’s no use. He’s gone.”
Nobody said a word for a few seconds, then a young nurse sobbed. When she ran from the room, Bud said, “Goddamn it to hell.”
I looked down at Buckeye, where he still knelt by the sleeping bag and realized my hands were trembling. I was shaking, too, just like everyone else in the ER. I knew one thing then. The man or woman who’d committed this was not the run-of-the-mill murderer. He was a monster, someone without heart or soul or conscience. And he was out there somewhere, probably still in our own vicinity, with more spiders and more sleeping bags, and other victims ordained to die unimaginably horrific deaths.
The Angel Gabriel
“Okay, Uriel, now for the secret part. Follow me, but watch where you step, in case any of my snakes got loose.”
Gabriel led him to the far end of the old hunting lodge, into a small room that had a beat-up, rusted water heater. Gabriel pushed away a bunch of bottles and trash, then shoved the water heater to one side. There was a trapdoor underneath.
“Watch this, Uriel.” Gabriel pulled up on a metal ring and when the door was up, he sat down and dangled his legs over the edge. He jumped down and disappeared, and when Uriel looked down into the dark hole, he saw Gabriel standing about ten feet below.
“Sit on the edge, Uriel, and I’ll lift you down.”
When they stood together in the dark tunnel, Gabriel picked up an old oil lantern and lit the wick with a match. He started off down the slanted dirt passage holding the lamp out in front to illuminate their way. “There’s a natural cave under the hunting lodge. I found it one day when I caught a mouse under the water heater. I think they used it to keep the rooms cool in the summer, ’cause I found vents in each room that lead down here. There’s even a hot spring out in the center that they used for hot water, I bet.”
The fairly steep descent ended up in a large, domed cavern. It smelled funny, unpleasant like match sulfur and old, moldy leaves, maybe. A faint ribbon of sunlight poured through a narrow fissure in the rock high above their heads and made the cave dim and smoky. There were metal cages and glass aquarium tanks sitting around everywhere.
Gabriel said, “I got all these old fish tanks at this big flea market downtown to keep my animals in. Some of them are cracked and don’t hold water but that don’t matter for my spiders and stuff.” He put the caged snake on the ground and hunkered down beside a large glass aquarium. “Hey, Uriel, look here. You know what this is?”
Uriel knelt beside him and peered through the dirty glass. Clumps of dried grass and creek pebbles lay thick on the bottom, and a big tree branch was wedged between the sides with some cardboard covering the top. Spiderwebs clung to everything, and Uriel noticed a big lump about the size of a tennis ball lying on the bottom, all wrapped in the grayish-white webs. A big, shiny black spider was sitting in the middle of the web. It looked about an inch long.
“Don’t ever put your hand down in there, Uriel,” Gabriel warned. “You remember that, okay?” He waited for Uriel to nod, then he said, “That there’s a black widow spider, and she’s got venom in ’er that’s about fifteen times deadlier than a prairie rattlesnake. That’s how they kill their prey.”
Uriel stared at the awful, ugly spider, instinctively leaning back a little.
“That’s right, don’t you get too close. They’re our friends and stuff, because I raise them down here and everything, but you gotta be real careful. See that red thing on its belly that looks like an hourglass? That’s how you tell if she’s a widow. She has lots of babies, but she eats them so I have a bunch of little cages to put them in. You can’t put spiders together in the same cage or the big ones will usually eat the little ones. I like poisonous things, don’t you? But I mean it, you gotta know what you can and can’t do with ’em. I got a bunch of books I stole outta the library about all kinds of bugs and spiders.”
Gabriel gestured around the cave. “Oh, yeah, I got wolf spiders and some big hairy tarantulas that live around here in the woods and lots and lots of brown recluse spiders, too. Some people calls ’em fiddleback spiders cause they got this thing that looks like a violin on their backs. Talk about something that makes ugly bites. People’s flesh just rots away where the recluses bite them, did you know that? I mean, it makes huge open holes in arms or legs, or anywhere on the body, really, some sores get as big as a grapefruit and raise up like volcanoes around the bite. I’ve seen it myself in pictures I found at the library.”
Uriel felt a little sick. “How come it makes holes in people?”
“’Cause of it’s real deadly poison. They call it necrosis when the skin rots away, I think. It just rots out tissue around the bite and keeps getting bigger and bigger. Every bite doesn’t do that, but lots of times it does. This black widow here has another kind of venom called a neurotoxin that sort of paralyzes stuff, then the poison liquefies the flesh of its prey so it can eat it easier. See, how it works, Uriel, is
this: the widow catches prey in its web, like flies and mosquitoes, stuff like that, then she pokes little holes in ’em and sucks out the body fluids. And the female one always eats the male, too, after they mate. You know how girls are.” He laughed.
“What’s mate?” Uriel asked, not sure he’d ever want to mate, whatever it was.
“Oh, c’mon, you know, mate, so they can have baby spiders. They call them spiderlings, bet you didn’t know that, either, did ya? I’m breeding spiders. See all those cages over there? They’re full of spiderlings. You can help me keep them in food and water.”
Uriel shivered at that idea but pretended he was just cold. “Why do you want so many around?”
“I just like them, is all. And sometimes I use them to scare people. “
“You do?”
“Yeah. At the last church picnic, I sneaked one on top of your grandma’s mashed potatoes when she was talking to one of the ladies, and you should’ve seen her throw that plate. She fell out of her wheelchair trying to get it off her and scraped up her knees real bad.” Gabriel laughed at the memory and ruffled Uriel’s hair. “I told you I ain’t no angel. Hey, man, I gotta idea. How about scaring Freddy with some of my spiders? He deserves it after what he did to you.”
Uriel wasn’t so sure what to think about Gabriel making his grandma fall out of her wheelchair, she was so old and all. She seemed so frail and breakable. “I don’t know. All that sounds sort of mean to me.”
Gabriel frowned. “Well, Freddy scared you just about to death, didn’t he?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Didn’t you think they was burying you alive? I heard you screaming like you was scared as hell.”
“Yeah. I was real afraid ’til you came and got me out.”
“Then we need to pay him back. We’ll use a snake, if you don’t like the spider idea. You know what, though? Most people is more afraid of little bitty spiders than of great big snakes. I just don’t understand it. Spiders are so little and really beautiful with all those long legs, and the way they spin those beautiful webs. Webs are made out of silk, you know, and the designs look almost like your grandma’s lace curtains.”
“It’s sort of pretty, all right,” Uriel admitted, looking at the webs tangled around inside the aquariums. “But what’s that big lumpy thing on the bottom?”
“That’s a chipmunk. I put it in there with the widow to see what would happen. The widow killed it and wrapped it all up in those webs. It took her a long time but I guess she wants to keep it fresh to snack on later.” Gabriel grinned. “Ain’t that something? They eat lots of different kinds of insects and even some small animals like frogs and lizards, too. They can’t kill a human being, but they might be able to kill a little baby, I bet. Especially if lots of them bit it.”
Uriel nodded and tried to see the chipmunk through the fuzzy white cocoon. As far as he could tell, there wasn’t much left of the poor little thing.
That night after dinner, Uriel listened to a strange old radio almost as big as a television set. Grandma called it a Motorola console and said she liked to listen to gospel music and St. Louis Cardinal games. He said he liked Pittsburgh Pirates the best, and she said that he’d get to hear Pirate games when they came to play at Busch stadium.
Just before bedtime, she gave him a glass of milk and some homemade oatmeal cookies with raisins. They were good, and he liked the supper she made, too—ham and sweet potatoes and green beans from the big garden she tended in her backyard. She said he could help her pull weeds, and they’d can tomatoes and corn to eat in the winter. She kissed him good night and turned down the wick until the room went dark and he was afraid.
Hiding his head under the quilts, he started to cry because he missed his momma and daddy and Katie. He thought about Gabriel and his hidden cave under the hunting lodge and wondered if Gabriel had gone back there after they’d sat on the porch with his grandma and eaten slices of her cinnamon apple pie. His grandma told him that Gabriel was a good, Christian boy and would be a good influence on Uriel.
Uriel stiffened when he heard soft scratching sounds. He thought of the creepy spiders and stuff down in Gabriel’s cave. Goose bumps rose on his arms and made him shiver, but when the scratching didn’t stop, he finally peeked out. Somebody was outside his window. Then he saw it was Gabriel, shining a flashlight up on his face. Uriel scrambled out of bed and tiptoed across the floor and tugged open the old sash window.
“Hurry, get dressed, Uriel, we’re gonna have some fun!”
“But what about grandma? What if she finds out?”
“She ain’t gonna find out nothin’. I heard her telling some church ladies at prayer meeting that she takes some medicine every night to make her sleep good. Hurry up now, we don’t got all night!”
Hurrying as fast as he could, Uriel pulled on some cutoff jeans, his old Reeboks, and a black Pirates T-shirt. He peeked out into the hall but the house was quiet and dark, and his grandma was snoring down in her room. Getting pretty excited now, he climbed out the window. Gabriel was holding a burlap bag. Something inside was buzzing loudly and moving around.
“What’s in there, Gabriel?”
“A hornet’s nest. We’re gonna do a little payback on Freddy for what he did to you. Let’s go.”
In the woods it was dark as pitch, with frogs croaking, locusts screeching, and other things rustling in the bushes. Uriel was scared, so he kept close behind Gabriel until they came out on a blacktop road. Gabriel’s motor scooter was there, and he hung the bag on the handlebars then helped Uriel climb on back.
Uriel was elated when they took off, the cool night wind blowing his hair over the top of his bandage. He held on tightly around Gabriel’s waist. He’d never ridden on a motor scooter, but he wasn’t afraid, not with Gabriel around. After about ten minutes, Gabriel found the right mailbox and pulled up under a bunch of walnut trees. They climbed off, and Gabriel whispered close to Uriel’s ear, “You gotta be real quiet, got it? They don’t got a dog that I know of, but his dad’s a big duck hunter so he’s got a shotgun that he might shoot if they see us sneaking around.”
That sounded pretty scary to Uriel, too, but he said okay.
Gabriel took the bag full of hornets and headed through some woods that edged the long graveled road up to the house. Freddy’s house was a one-story farmhouse a lot like Uriel’s grandma’s, and a light or two shone from the front windows. They crept through some lilac bushes hugging the side of the house. Somewhere inside, they heard a late-night television show and a man laughing.
“That’s his daddy,” Gabriel whispered. “Freddy’s room’s in the back, and look what a baby he is. He’s got a night-light on.”
When they were underneath Freddy’s bedroom window, Gabriel lifted Uriel so he could see the Superman night-light on top of the dresser. Freddy was asleep on a bed right under the window. The window was open so the cool air could get in, and Gabriel lowered Uriel back down, then smiled and put a forefinger to his lips. He took out a pocketknife and cut some slits in the screen, then wedged the top of the bag through the hole. Hornets flew in an angry brown wave out into Freddy’s room. Gabriel dumped the nest on the ground under the window and dragged Uriel a safe distance away, where they hunkered down and listened. He smiled when Freddy screamed louder than anything Uriel had ever heard before. His terrified shrieks echoed out into the quiet night until Freddy’s mom ran into the room and flipped on the overhead light. When she screamed, too, Gabriel grabbed Uriel’s hand and they ran like deer through the darkness, laughing and breathless when they reached the motor scooter.
EIGHT
By the time we got Classon’s tortured body bagged and on the way to Buckeye’s office, the young students at the academy were up and outside their dorms building snowmen and throwing snowballs at each other. Fun in the snow, not exactly mourning central. Inside, however, where instructors roamed the halls, there was lots of whispering and watching us. We stopped somebody and asked where we could find the dire
ctor and were led down to the far end of a wide corridor where we met the director’s young, built private secretary, Christie, who kindly offered to bring us breakfast trays from the school cafeteria. Bud and I weren’t particularly hungry after what we’d just let out of that black plastic bag in the ER but did accept an offer of hot coffee.
Yes, indeedy, Christie Foxworthy was the absolute epitome of the kind of woman wives did not want their husbands hiring to take dictation, to fetch coffee, or do anything else within one hundred feet of their husbands. Her name was worthy of her looks, a fox she was, you betcha, and she couldn’t be much past the obligatory eighteen as she clicked hither and fro on spike heels quite similar to the ones I wore while pretending to be the town slut. Christie’s were lime green, however, her version of Christmas cheer, I suppose. All I knew for sure was that Bud liked the looks of her. I could tell by his round, bulging eyeballs as she left us waiting in her office to summon the big man.
“Whoa, didn’t know they made ’em like that anymore. Johnstone’s got excellent taste in Girl Fridays.”
“Yeah, Bud, Bond girls with transcription skills are hard to find around here.”
Then Christie was back from her foray into boss territory with sad news from the director. She even frowned with pouty, glistening, cinnamony lips as she gave it to us.
“I’m so sorry but Dr. Johnstone’s involved in an important overseas call. It’s taking longer than he expected. Would you mind too much waiting across the hall in our conference room?”
Her accent was as Brooklyn as Bud’s was Atlantan.
Bud said, “Not at all, Miss Foxworthy. Or is it Mrs.?”
“It’s Miss.” She gave him a sultry look and swung shoulderlength, sun-streaked blond hair with a headtoss worthy of Christina Aguilera. I hoped Bud could put the brakes on his drool long enough to interview the woman.
