Skitter

by Ezekiel Boone

  Pozloski had mostly stopped smoking pot at home. Jenny didn’t disapprove of him getting high, exactly, but she didn’t seem to approve of it either, and, well, sometimes a man is in love. Getting high at work was a different matter, however. Technically, he could have been fired for smoking pot while he was working. The employee manual for the hotel was unambiguous: no drugs or booze, legal or otherwise, while you’re on duty. And maybe at a different time it wouldn’t have just been a technicality, and Pozloski might have actually been fired for smoking pot on duty, but since he’d gotten the joints from the manager, he didn’t think his position as assistant manager was in too much jeopardy. He supposed he could have just eaten some pot-laced candy or chocolate like a lot of the women on staff did, or used a vape like most of the guys did, but for him, smoking pot was as much about the ritual of smoking pot as it was the getting high. Call him old-fashioned, but he liked joints. Liked the paper and the crinkling sound that came with pulling a hit into his lungs. Liked the glow and the smell of the lighter. He liked standing around and drawing the joint down to a nub. But being the assistant manager and smoking pot meant, however, that he couldn’t just step out onto the loading dock. He had to try, at least a little bit, to be discreet. Normally, it would have been enough to go into the laundry room and stand near the vent, but with the painting from the Royal Suite to replace, the subbasement made sense.

  The elevator went only as far as the basement, so he had to carry the painting from Mr. Kosgrove’s suite down a flight of crumbly concrete steps. The bulb was an old pull-chain, clear-glass filament that swung overhead, and the glow pooled at the bottom of the stairs so that the space beyond was a dark pit. There was just enough light to see the cord dangling from the next pull-chain light. A cobweb brushed against his face as he stepped forward and turned the light on. He wiped the sticky silk off his face, rolling it between his fingers and flicking it to the side. What with all that had been happening, a web should have freaked him out, but he’d never been scared of creepy crawlies.

  The subbasement didn’t run the whole length of the hotel, but it was still very large. If the ceiling was higher and all the decades of detritus were cleared out, the staff could play basketball down here. Pozloski raised his hand and made a shooting motion. “Swish,” he said. He couldn’t have told you why he never imagined himself as Chicago Bulls legend Michael Jordan. It was always Steve Kerr, awkward white boy shooter. That was whom Pozloski liked to pretend to be whenever he played basketball. To most people, Kerr was probably better known now as a coach than he was as a player, but when Pozloski was a little kid, he remembered Kerr as a boss on the court. Ice cold. Not that Pozloski could shoot in real life, but in his imagination? He tracked the flight of his invisible basketball, over the two couches stacked one on the other, past the cemetery of broken lamps from the 1970s, past the dust-shrouded pile of indeterminate items, and through the net that was hidden somewhere in the dark. Swoosh! Game! Buzzer beater! Subbasement champion of the world! And why, he wondered, as he pulled one of the joints from the inside breast pocket of his uniform’s blazer, was it called a subbasement? Didn’t that just mean under basement? Wasn’t that, you know, a basement?

  He took another look at the painting from Mr. Kosgrove’s suite and then leaned it against a dresser that was pushed hard against the wall. Next to the dresser, he saw a haphazard pile of Regency chairs. He carefully lifted one of the chairs off, centered it under the lightbulb, and plopped himself on it. He’d get a little dusty, but he could brush that off. The joint was between his lips, the plastic lighter in his hand, and the two things together made him very happy.

  He sat for a while, smoking the joint and wondering what manner of treasures might be buried down here among the trash. He didn’t come down to the subbasement very often, maybe once or twice a year. The last time he’d been down here, he’d found forty or fifty paintings neatly shelved and covered with a drop cloth near the back of the room. One of those, he was sure, would be free of pink for Mr. Kosgrove. But what else was down here? It was like some crazy aunt’s basement, full of junk that should have been tossed—chairs with only three legs, lamps with no plugs, old rotary phones from the 1950s—mixed with furniture that could maybe fetch a pretty penny at an antique sale. If Pozloski had been the larcenous type, or, he was willing to admit, less lazy, he might have made some money.

  He finished the joint, dropping the unsmoked nub on the floor in front of him and rubbing it with the sole of his shoe until it disintegrated into wisps of paper. Then he pushed himself up out of the chair. Whew. He was surprised at how stoned he felt. He used to be a once a day guy, but with that little look Jenny gave him any time he said he was going to get high, it had become more like once a week, once every other week. Damn. The joints the manager had given him must have had some seriously strong pot in them. Feeling good even if he was down here for the most ridiculous of reasons: Mr. Kosgrove was clearly insane. Who demands that everything pink be removed from a hotel room? But Mr. Kosgrove seemed to have very healthy credit limits on his plastic and carried a roll of $50 bills for tipping. And for $50, Pozloski was more than happy to wander around in the cobwebbed darkness of the subbasement looking for a different painting for Mr. Kosgrove’s room.

  He started heading back toward where he’d remembered seeing the old paintings, but when he pulled the cord on the next light, nothing happened.

  “Chicken biscuits,” Pozloski said. Jenny wasn’t a fan of swearing either, so he’d worked hard to get out of the habit. His go-to phrase, “chicken biscuits,” was, he had to admit, a deeply satisfying substitute epithet. Just listen to the way it sounded: “chicken biscuits.” It had its own sort of rhythm that could hang with any curse word on the market. “Chicken biscuits,” he said again. Oh, man. Chicken biscuits. He could go for some chicken biscuits.

  Okay. Yeah. He was pretty high.

  He pulled the blue plastic lighter back out of his pocket and rolled the flint. He held it up in front of him, the flame true and bright, a beacon of warmth. He took a step. There were little motes of dust floating everywhere, and Pozloski decided he’d talk to the general manager about getting the subbasement cleaned out. It had to be a fire hazard. He took another step forward, and then another, and then he stopped, because he was starting to feel uneasy. The farther he got away from the last working light, the less impressive the lighter’s flame seemed. Three steps ago it had seemed like a torch, like it could light up the whole night, but now it seemed sort of pitiful. And hot. Really hot. Chicken biscuits! His thumb. He let the flame die and shoved his thumb into his mouth. Ouch. Good thing he was high. He gave the plastic lighter a minute to cool down, standing in the darkness. The lights behind him served as waypoints of a sort, but they weren’t particularly comforting. Once it was cool enough to give it a try, he flicked the flint of the lighter with his left thumb. It took him three tries, and he thought of that creepy Roald Dahl story he’d read in high school, where the dude’s wife was missing her fingers or something because they’d been betting fingers on who could light a lighter a certain number of times in a row, and then he realized he was giggling. He was giggling, and there was a weird echo down here, so his giggling sounded an awful lot like somebody moaning.

  Wait. He held the lighter as far forward as he could without actually moving. What was . . .

  Oh. Chicken biscuits.

  Whatever thought he’d had of replacing Mr. Kosgrove’s painting and getting a nice tip in return was wiped away by the sight of the young man lying on the floor in front of him. Pozloski stepped forward and held the lighter over the man’s body. Latino and young, younger than Pozloski. Early twenties, and looking like shit. For a second, Pozloski figured the guy for a junkie. It wasn’t unheard of for junkies to sneak into the hotel and hole up in nooks and crannies wherever they could, nodding out until somebody stumbled across them and had them thrown out. Their security was pretty good, but it happened a couple of times a year. This guy was sweating and pale and
shaking, but he didn’t look like a junkie. For one, he was wearing decent clothes. Dirty, but it wasn’t the sort of hard-packed dirt you found on the truly down and out. This was the dirty from lying on the floor of the subbasement of the King Royal Hotel kind of dirty, not the dirty of living on the streets kind of dirty. The guy was wearing jeans and a T-shirt, sure, but the shoes were a giveaway. Pozloski never actually bought anything fancy, but he read GQ and Esquire and, even completely high, he could recognize an $800 pair of loafers, even on the feet of a sweating, moaning, shivering dude lying on the floor of the subbasement of the King Royal Hotel and illuminated only by the hot, hot flame of a lighter. Hot, hot!

  Chicken biscuits.

  He swapped thumbs, sticking his left one into his mouth now, giving the lighter a few seconds to calm down.

  It was not a good few seconds.

  Pozloski figured the man must not have been moaning before. He would have heard him. But now? Now that the man was moaning, it was like he couldn’t stop. A long, low groan of pain and despair. The sound reminded him of his fishing vacations up in Wisconsin, the way the screen doors would screech on their hinges in the mornings, but this screen door didn’t seem like it would ever close, and as soon as the lighter had cooled down long enough for him to light it again, he rolled the flint with his sore right thumb.

  Dude did not look particularly terrific.

  “You can’t be down here,” Pozloski said. His voice sounded both too loud and too soft at the same time. The words came out of his mouth almost like he was yelling, but the subbasement swallowed them whole, muffling everything. He tried again. “Do you need help?”

  “Oh, oh, oh,” the man said, convulsing, and then arching his back with a spasm as he dug his heels into the floor.

  “Okay,” Pozloski said. He felt like he had cotton wadded up behind his eyes and cobwebs in his mouth. He really should have smoked only half the joint. That was some really strong pot. “Are you hiding from someone? You really shouldn’t be down here.”

  “Please,” the man said. Begged, really. “Please. Oh, please. They’re in me.” And then he screamed.

  That didn’t seem good.

  Pozloski was high, but he wasn’t a moron, and he knew he should run. He knew he should race for the stairs, should get the heck out of the subbasement, get the heck out of the King Royal Hotel altogether. He knew he should steal the keys to Mr. Kosgrove’s cherry-red Ferrari and make the car scream rubber all the way to his apartment, calling Jenny while he drove so she’d be waiting for him on the sidewalk, and together they’d take that cherry-red Ferrari as far north as they could get, so that by the time dawn hit they’d be well into Wisconsin, blowing past the fishing cottage he and his buddies rented, leaving Chicago and this moaning man a distant memory in the car’s mirror. That’s what he should have done.

  But he couldn’t. Even if the army wasn’t out there blowing up highways like chicken biscuits, even if travel was a real possibility, Pozloski couldn’t make himself move.

  The heels of the man’s $800 loafers were scraping against the floor, twitching and dancing, but Pozloski’s $60 shoes were rooted in place.

  It wasn’t anything like the videos he’d seen of Los Angeles and India, nothing like the grainy footage on the Internet, where people had popped open like hot dogs on grills that were cranked too high. There was no explosion of spiders, no sudden moment where Pozloski was enveloped by black death. It happened slowly. So much more slowly than Pozloski had expected.

  First, the man stopped twitching. His eyes rolled back and his moaning turned into a rough rattle that then turned into nothing. It wasn’t hard to figure out that the guy had given up the ghost. Underneath the guy’s T-shirt, Pozloski could see a gentle rolling movement, like a tennis ball inching its way from the man’s stomach, up his chest, across from one side to the other, and then back down again. And then, where the T-shirt had lifted up so Pozloski could see the soft flesh of the guy’s belly, a bulge turned into a line turned into a thin release of blood that turned into . . .

  Chicken biscuits. He jammed his right thumb back into his mouth. It was going to be a hell of a burn, he thought. His thumb was going to be blistered for days.

  The darkness was terrifying, of course, but also a sort of relief. Toward the entrance, the light of the pull-chain bulbs was a clear pathway out, but where he was standing, the darkness felt absolute. But the darkness was almost preferable to seeing whatever it was that was going to come out of that guy’s belly. Pozloski had a pretty good idea of what he was about to see, but he also knew that actually seeing it would make it real. If he left the lighter unlit, if he simply kept his right thumb in his mouth, the lighter dark in his left hand, he could pretend there was nothing to see. Pretend that the soft skittering sounds that were now all around him were unrelated to anything he’d seen on the news, were unrelated to the reason why Mr. Kosgrove had been camping out in the Royal Suite in a fearful retreat from Las Vegas, unrelated to what was a certain death awaiting him.

  Chicken biscuits.

  He flicked the rolling flint. And, of course, it didn’t catch. Left thumb. There was just a quick spark, enough for him to imagine something moving, and then pure darkness. Flick. Spark. Movement. Darkness. Flick. Spark. Movement. Darkness. And again, he was thinking of that stupid story about the man who gambled on getting a lighter to catch, the man’s wife fingerless, the way he’d had nightmares for a week of his high school life after reading that story. It was enough to make him giggle again.

  Oh, for goodness’ sake. He really wished he hadn’t smoked that joint.

  This time, the flame caught.

  It was anticlimactic. Pozloski had assumed that once the lighter flared and caught, he’d enjoy a second of light, the spiders would attack him, and then he’d be dead. The end. But nothing of the sort happened. The spiders seemed wholly uninterested in him.

  They were big. Bigger than he’d expected. Heavy looking. On television and in the photos he’d seen online, they’d been all black, but these ones had a red stripe bisecting their backs. Twenty or thirty of them were moving over the body of the dead man. He should have been disgusted, should have been puking at the sight of the man laid open, but it wasn’t gory. There was a shellac of white silk holding everything in, a bloodless human fillet.

  As far as he could tell, there was no urgency in the way the spiders were skittering around. There was no pattern to the little buggers’ movement either. If he had been pressed to describe their movement, he would have come up with a single word: aimless.

  Chicken biscuits!

  He shook his hand and the blue plastic lighter slipped out of his fingers and bounced off his knee. He heard it hit the floor and bounce away from him. He jammed both thumbs together into his mouth. He’d thought about buying a Zippo once, but he’d never been a smoker smoker, just a pot smoker, and having a Zippo, no matter how solid and cool he thought they looked, seemed weirdly ambitious. Like he was making smoking pot a priority or something. But right now he would have been pretty darn pleased to have a solid lighter that he could hold without burning the bejeebers out of his thumbs. Or, you know, a flashlight. Actually, a flashlight would have been better than a lighter.

  He considered his situation for a minute. The thing to do, really, was to phone the authorities.

  Oh, for flippity-flap’s sake. His phone. Jenny was right. He really needed to quit smoking pot. He pulled his phone out, unlocked the screen, and used the glow as a light.

  The spiders were still uninterested in him. They were crawling over the body and across the floor, but slowly. Like they were waiting for something to happen. One of them moved off the man’s $800 loafer and drifted across the floor in front of Pozloski. Tentatively, hesitantly, almost experimentally, Pozloski lifted his foot in the air. The spider was truly pretty big. Sporting equipment comparisons went through his mind in a quick arc, from Ping-Pong balls to pool balls before settling on softballs. He and Jenny were in a slow pitch league, and
aside from the color and, well, the fact that it had eight legs dripping off the sides of its creepy, hairy body, the spider on the floor in front of him would have done an admirable job of substituting for the bright yellow softballs they used in the league.

  He brought his foot down. He had to press a lot harder than he expected.

  He heard a potato chip crackle and a gushing yogurt sound. It was really, really gross. He was careful to make sure he ground the sole of his shoe into the mush of the spider, finishing the job.

  Huh. He’d sort of thought he might get swarmed, but the other spiders didn’t react at all. They completely ignored him. He scraped his shoe clean against the floor, holding up his phone so that the electronic glow showed him the other spiders still skittering over the dead body.

  Okay. He really needed to call this in. He flipped the phone around so he could dial the front desk. Or maybe 911? Or . . . the army? Who was he supposed to call?

  No signal. Not a single bar. Figured. There wasn’t even Wi-Fi down here. His phone was useless. How was it that he could stumble across scary monster spiders hatching from a man’s body while he was at work but his crummy cell phone provider couldn’t ensure proper service?

  Pozloski carefully backed away from the dead body and the spiders, using his phone as a flashlight until he had once again reached the island of light from the first pull-chain bulb.

  He stopped and looked back at the subbasement. He stood quietly, holding his breath, listening. He could hear the skitter of the spiders moving lazily around the room.

  And then, at last, he didn’t feel quite as high. And now that he wasn’t quite so high, he realized that a logical reaction might be to run like hell up the stairs.