by Sam Witt
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you,” Trevor said. He rested the book on Joe’s lap and went back to his bed to retrieve the stone. “I said there was something in here, but I don’t think that’s it exactly.”
With a flourish, Trevor whipped away the rags that Joe had used to hide the stone and revealed the milky quartz. He held it between his fingertips and raised it in front of the TV. “Don’t worry; I got this,” Trevor said, trying to calm Joe. “See this line here, I don’t think that’s inside the cone, I think it’s a seam.”
Joe closed the book then stood and reached for the cone. “Goddammit, kid,” he said. “You have no idea what you’re doing touching that thing.”
Trevor took a half step back, raising the cone to keep it out of Joe’s grasp. He twisted his grip on the cone then ran his thumbnail along it from point to base.
The room filled with a faint hissing sound, like the voice of a distant off-air AM radio station deep in the night. “Give me that thing,” Joe growled. “Before you get us all killed.”
Trevor grinned, the thrill of discovery evident on his face. He whipped the hand holding the stone down, snapping his wrist at the last second.
Joe watched in horror as the cone expanded, rolling out from the point Trevor was holding. He wished he hadn’t left his shotgun in the truck because he was sure that something was going to come bursting out of the rock. He glanced at Al and was relieved to see his son already on his feet as well.
Trevor raised his hands to show Joe what he’d done. He was holding two corners of a large sheet of translucent material. “I’ll be damned,” Joe muttered. “Looks like you were right.”
“Thanks for the confidence,” Trevor groused. He released one corner of the sheet and fished around in the junk next to his TV. He came up with a yellowed role of cellophane tape, which he used to affix the translucent sheet over the flatscreen.
Unrolled, the stele was even more impressive than it had been as a cone. What Joe had taken for natural striations in the quartz were actually very delicate symbols running the length and width of the sheet. The center was dominated by a pair of triangles, their points facing one another, with eight segmented lines radiating from the space between their tips.
Joe wasn’t an expert on foreign languages, but the central image was clear to him. “I’m guessing that’s some sort of spider?”
Trevor didn’t answer then went back to his books. He flipped through one after another, lining them up on his bed so he could look at them while standing in front of his television. He grabbed a small notepad and the nub of a pencil from the entertainment center his television rested on and began quickly scratching notes on the paper.
Al shrugged at Joe, who nodded in return. He had to admit, the kid was getting results. He was going to owe Al an apology when they got back to the truck.
After a few minutes of watching Trevor taking notes, Joe was relieved when an ear-to-ear grin split the kid’s face. “I think I got it.”
But when he read over his notes another time, his grin faltered. “But I don’t believe you’re going to like it.”
Joe motioned for the kid to get a move on. He didn’t have all day to wait for Trevor to spit it out.
Trevor swallowed then looked back at his notes. “From what I can gather, there’s kind of a mixture of symbols here. Some of it looks, I don’t know, sort of Egyptian, and then I see a few Osage pictographs scattered in here, but mostly this is written in Enochian. It’s—”
Joe didn’t need to be told what it was. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. The language of angels.”
The last time he’d seen something written in that script, he’d had to deal with the half-made girls. It was an experience he didn’t want to repeat.
Trevor nodded and looked back at his notes. “Anyway, from what I can tell, it’s a kind of boundary marker.”
Joe wanted to punch something. He didn’t know what was so special about Pitchfork, but clearly something here attracted supernatural poachers. First, the Haunter in Darkness, then Amogen, and now some kind of giant spider had all tried to lay claim to Pitchfork. “Whoever did this is trying to grab a chunk of our county?”
“That’s the part you’re not going to like.” Trevor took a deep breath then dove into his explanation. “Whoever left this isn’t trying to grab anything. This is to remind folks that they already own Pitchfork and everything in it. And they’re really not happy that everyone seems to have forgotten that fact.”
10
Joe pointed at Trevor’s notepad. “That has everything you just told me on it?”
The kid reviewed his notes, nodded, and hastily handed the pad to Joe. He also removed the cellophane tape and rolled the stele back into an approximation of its original shape. “Here, take this, too.”
Joe snatched the stele away from Trevor and tucked it under his arm. It felt strange, as if it were trying to restore its original shape. Joe ignored that for the moment and jabbed a finger in Trevor’s direction. “Keep this to yourself. You go blabbing your mouth about what we talked about here today, and something’s probably going to get pissed. I don’t think you want whatever made this coming to shut your lippy mouth.”
Trevor nodded and slumped onto his bed. His hand moved toward the bong next to his TV, like a baby seeking its security blanket. “Yeah. I mean, who would I tell?”
“Thanks, kid,” Joe said. He fumbled for his wallet, not sure how to tip someone who had just decoded a supernatural threat for him. In the end, he settled on a trio of twenties, which he tossed onto the bed next to Trevor. He didn’t wait to see if the boy would pick up the money.
He was halfway across the street when Al caught up with him. “Well, we scared the fuck out of him,” Al groaned.
“I asked you if he was up for it,” Joe said. “I guess now we know.”
Once in the truck, Joe slipped the stele back into his satchel. He looked at Trevor’s notepad and didn’t feel good about what he saw there. “We gotta get out of this county. Every two-bit monster in the area calls itself a god.”
Al took the notepad from his father, read what he found there, then grunted and threw the pad onto the truck’s dashboard. “At least this one’s local. Itsike’s some sort of Osage spider goddess.”
“I don’t give a shit what it is. It’s just one more pain in the ass we’re going to have to deal with. My guess is this thing is going to keep killing people and hanging them from trees until we blow its damned head off.”
Joe cranked the truck’s starter and frowned when it didn’t even cough. He pumped the gas pedal then twisted the key once again. Still nothing. “If my battery’s dead, I’m going to shoot this stupid truck and put it out of my misery.”
He yanked on the door’s handle, but the door didn’t budge. He checked the lock, but the knob was up. “Al, is your door locked?”
Joe heard his son check his door, but his attention was drawn to the dashboard. Black, hairy legs jutted from the heater vents. Spiders, hundreds of them, crawled out of the vents and covered the dash. As Joe watched, more pushed their way up through every crack in the truck’s console, covering the speedometer and radio in the span of a heartbeat. They stank of old copper and rotting meat, and their oversized fangs dripped with a pale venom.
As Al struggled with his door, Joe snatched his satchel off the seat between them and smashed it down on the dashboard. He lifted it and smash it down again and again, squashing the spiders into a greasy smear. But for every one he smashed, two more crawled onto the dashboard. If he and Al stayed in the truck’s cab, they’d be swarmed by the damned things in the next few seconds. Joe wasn’t sure what kind of poison the little fuckers were packing, but he imagined getting bitten would not be fun.
He yanked the door handle again, and when it wouldn’t give, he turned his attention to the window. He spun the handle as fast he could, and was relieved it actually worked. The spiders were filling up the dashboard in a hurry, and they were making it down to the steering wheel by
the time he got his window all the way down. Joe tossed then satchel out then scrambled out the window after it.
Joe banged the shit out of his hip and raked layers of skin off his ribs as he exited the truck, but it was a hell of a lot better than staying in the cab with all of those spiders. Standing beside the truck, watching Al scramble out his own window, Joe realized he’d left his shotgun in its rack in the back of the truck’s cab. He shoved his hand through the open window and snatched the gun.
Something squirmed under his hand, and Joe smashed it against the gun’s wooden stock. He didn’t feel pain and hoped that meant he hadn’t been bitten.
He didn’t have time to worry about a little bite, as a new threat came swarming out of the trees alongside the road. More spiders joined the fray, and these were a lot bigger than the ones in the truck. They were the size of small dogs, with fangs like curved daggers and legs that propelled them through the air in sweeping leaps. Two of them landed near Joe, one on either side of him, and they immediately began snapping at him with their dripping fangs.
Joe kicked the one to his right, a solid blow to the head that sent it screeching back from him. The one on his left darted forward, and Joe spun toward it with both hands wrapped around his shotgun’s twin barrels.
The wooden stock slammed into the spider’s thorax, flipping it over and sending it crashing back into the tree it had leapt from. It burst and flopped to the ground with a gray-green slime oozing from between its fangs. Its eight eyes faded to a milky white, and Joe was sure it was out of the fight.
But, like the spiders in his truck, these monsters had reserves. More of the things were pouring out of the trees, a whole herd of giant spiders, all of them leaping through the air and spinning webs around Joe’s truck.
“Oh no, not today you fucking don’t,” Joe snarled and fired his shotgun at the nearest cluster of spiders. Green flame and thick smoke belched from the weapon, and the spiders shrieked as burning shot tore through their bodies. A few of them flopped onto their backs as their enormous legs curled in to their abdomens, but more of them just seem pissed at their new injuries. The spiders hurled themselves past Joe, trailing thick webs as they danced around him
Joe tried to jump clear of the trap he could see forming, but he wasn’t fast enough to escape all of the spiders. A sticky noose tightened around his ankle, nearly dumping him onto his ass.
Al scrambled over the truck, landing next to Joe. He had a long hunting knife in his right hand and used it to slice through the web around his father’s ankle. Another spider jumped at Al, who lunged forward to meet its attack with his knife extended before him. He pivoted at the last second and swung the blade in a vicious arc that sliced open the spider’s bloated belly. It landed in the truck’s bed, guts splattering out in a frothy spray.
Joe leaned back against the pickup then fired the shotgun’s second barrel into an onrushing trio of spiders. The blast pitched them back into the trees, filling the air with sticky green ichor. “Now might be a good time for you to change,” Joe said to Al. “There are too many of these damned things for me to shoot them all.”
Al responded by driving his knife into the face of another spider then kicking it into the woods. He chopped at the webs around them with his knife, clearing away more of the sticky strands. “We got this; we just have to keep moving.”
With that, Al leapt away from his father, jumping between two spiders and sliding beneath a third. The leaping spiders tangled in their own webs and crashed to the ground.
Joe took advantage of the space between the downed spiders and stomped two of them to death with his hobnailed boots. He raised his foot to crush the third spider’s head, but a spear of pain lanced through his brain and dropped Joe to his knees.
The Long Man twisted the power in Joe’s head like a noose of barbed wire. The old bastard pulled at the bond between them, trying to rip his power out of Joe. It took all of Joe’s effort to hang onto his consciousness. The pain was like grabbing a bandsaw blade with his bare hands, though, and the effort was draining him dry. Even worse, as he struggled with his boss, Joe couldn’t fight the spiders. He might win his internal battle only to find himself and his son dead.
Joe knew he couldn’t win this fight through brute strength. He was going to have to outsmart the Long Man, which would be a nifty trick considering the monster lived inside Joe’s head.
He fell back on an old schoolyard trick. For one moment, Joe put all of his strength into yanking the power out of the Long Man and into himself. He felt the monster’s surprise at the sudden assault and grinned. When the Long Man responded and tugged back, Joe released his mental grip on the bond between them.
All the power that he had snatched away suddenly rebounded into the Long Man. It wasn’t much, but the moment of surprise gave Joe the edge he needed to clamp down on the Long Man’s attack. He used their bond to pin his boss in place. The Long Man cursed and struggled, but Joe wouldn’t relent. He kept up the pressure as long as he dared then let the Long Man retreat with his tail between his legs. He just hoped he hadn’t lost too much time fucking around with the old monster.
As Joe’s attention returned to the outside world, he realized he was in deep, deep shit. The webs were wrapped tight around his shoulders, pinning him to his truck. He couldn’t move his arms, much less fight. A spider lunged at Joe’s face, and the Night Marshal knew he was done for.
Then something flashed between Joe and the spider.
Al wrestled the thing back and pinned it to the ground. The spider’s legs beat at his back as it tried to right itself, but Al didn’t give it a chance to get free. He speared it with his knife, a vicious series of short jabs that punched into its thorax again and again. Milky green blood oozed from the wounds, and the spider’s legs went limp.
“Thanks for the help, old man,” Al smirked as he wiped his knife clean on the spider’s furry belly. “Need me to cut you loose?”
“If you could do it without the smartass comments, that’d be great.”
Al sawed the webs away from his father and shoved his knife back in its sheath. “There you go, all better.”
Joe rolled his eyes and retrieved his shotgun from the gravel where it had fallen. He cracked the weapon open and shook the empty shells into his hand. He threw them into the back of the truck and wrinkled his nose at the dead spider he saw back there. “That is going to be a serious problem if these things keep showing up.”
Al nodded and walked around to his side of the truck. He started to open the passenger door then froze. “Uh, you’re going to want to see this.”
Joe looked into the cab, and a cold chill wrapped around his heart. The little spiders had been busy spinning an intricate web inside the truck. The strands of silk were loaded down with the bodies of shiny black crickets. As Joe watched, the little bodies shook, and their legs rubbed together with fevered intensity. A raspy, high-pitched keening filled the air, its tone warbling up and down the scales. The sound was eerie enough to make Joe want to fill the interior of the cab with gasoline and toss in a match to make it stop.
“You have something that belongs to the goddess.” The words formed from the crickets’ racket. “We are coming for it.”
The crickets’ legs continued sawing against one another, the unholy noise rising to an unbearable crescendo. One by one, the insects popped and cracked, the friction of their legs setting fire to their chitinous bodies. The cab stank of burning hair, and Joe and Al leaned back to let a thick cloud of smoke escape from the open windows.
“What was that all about?” Al asked.
“Just another motherfucker getting mouthy,” Joe replied.
But as Joe watched the remnants of the message float away on a spring breeze, he had to wonder just how much trouble was headed his way.
11
The black-and-white’s bubblegum lights caught Joe by surprise. He’d been so caught up in the choir of dead crickets he hadn’t even noticed the sheriff pulling in behind him. He w
as getting slow.
Laralaine wasn’t tall, but her lean frame, starched uniform, and tall trooper’s hat made her an imposing presence. She gave Joe a shark’s grin as she stepped out of the cruiser and rested her hand on her pistol. “Discharging firearms inside city limits, Mr. Hark? I do believe that’s against the law.”
Joe weighed his options. He didn’t much care for the sheriff, but to do his job he needed her to get off his balls. He gestured at the bodies of the monstrous spiders scattered around. They were already dissolving into formless goo, but there was no denying something nasty had happened. “Just dealing with some varmints.”
The sheriff’s mirror shades hide her eyes, but Joe could feel the hate boiling out of them. “Does this have anything to do with the crime scenes you just can’t seem to stay away from?”
Joe put his hands on the side of the truck and kept them where the sheriff could see them. He didn’t want to give her an excuse to take a shot at him. “That part might be a little complicated.”
“En-fucking-lighten me.” The sheriff stepped forward until she was even with the tailgate of Joe’s truck. “And this had better be really good.”
Joe chewed on the inside of his cheek, trying to figure out what he could say that wouldn’t put him and Al behind bars. “Some folks,” he said, “ think I’m the best bet for certain kinds of problems.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’ve heard this part of the story before.”
“Look, I’m trying to give you space to do your thing.” Joe gave the sheriff his sincerest smile. “What’s it going to hurt if you show me the same courtesy?”
The sheriff snapped her sunglasses away from her face and gave Joe a hard stare. She locked eyes with him and wouldn’t let go. “Because no one needs your thing poking around, got it?”
Joe’s frustration threatened to make him do something stupid. He needed to work with this woman. Pitchfork needed a sheriff and a Night Marshal; the county needed that balance to make things work. But every time he was around Laralaine, it turned into a fight. “Look, I don’t want any trouble. I’m doing my best to stay out of your way; sorry if it doesn’t seem that way.”
