by Sam Witt
She raised her head, and her mouth hung open. The blue light from her eyes seemed to throw deeper shadows than the midday sun and cast everything with hard edges. Al could smell freshly turned earth and hear a faint chorus of voices rising from his sister's throat.
The dead had arrived.
"You know not what you seek," a creaking voice echoed from Elsa's tiny frame. "It steals the dead, to where we do not know."
Al reached for his sister, ready to wake her. The spirits didn't look like they were going to be much help today and didn't always know when it was time to leave. But his mother stopped him with a sharp shake of her head.
Stevie leaned in close to Elsa and asked, "What is it, that even the dead fear?"
Elsa tilted her head like a dog trying to pick up some far off noise. "It seeks the blood of the first," the ancient voice grated from within Elsa. "It comes to take back what was once freely given."
Stevie frowned. Al knew she didn't have much patience with cryptic messages from beyond. She'd once bent untold numbers of spirits to her will, back when she'd worked the Left-Hand Path, and didn't appreciate their sass now that she was on the other side of the fence. "Bring me Jimmy Ginlet."
All of the muscles in Elsa's face went slack. Her jaw drooped even farther, seeming to fall open flat against her throat. A droning rumbled in her chest, like a thousand locusts rising into flight. The sound grew more intense with each passing moment until the plates on the table rattled against the wood.
Al didn't wait for his mother's permission. He reached out for Elsa and gave her a sharp shake, hoping to snap her out of her trance. Her head whipped toward him, and the power of her droning voice made Al yank his hands off of her to cover his sensitive ears.
"He is not here," she roared. "He was never here."
Stevie responded to the spirits’ aggression with all the power she had claimed as the Bog Witch. A dark aura flickered around her, driving back the blue glow from Elsa's eyes. When she spoke, her voice was louder even than the droning buzz emanating from her daughter. "Where has he gone?"
The question angered the spirits. Al could only watch helplessly as the dead rattled Elsa's body, her head jerking back and forth as convulsions rippled through her. "It tears up the roots. It tears up the roots. It. Tears. Up. The. Roots."
The words became a rumbling thunder, merging into one another as they tumbled from Elsa's lips. Her muscles jumped beneath the skin, standing up in stark relief as they strained against the force of the dead. She craned her head back, tendons standing out like cables from her neck, and ground her teeth together.
The light went out of her eyes without a sound. Elsa's head snapped back down, and her goofy, little girl grin reappeared. “That was different."
Al stood on shaking legs and went to the sink. He pulled a washrag from the drawer under the counter and soaked it with cold water from the tap. He tried to look out the window, but there was a silvery haze blocking his view. Al leaned closer to the window, and his breath caught in his throat.
Overlapping spiderwebs covered the window in a hazy shroud of silk. "I think," he said, "it knows we’re looking for it."
14
Mary Ranson didn’t trust anyone. Since her daddy had died more than a decade ago, she’d done her best to shut out the world. She lived in her big house on the hill, the house her daddy had earned by working himself to death first for the Blackbriars’ mines and then as a freelance trapper, and rarely saw another soul.
Well, that wasn’t entirely correct. She was an avid TV watcher, consuming everything from soap operas to game shows to the endless permutations of police and forensics dramas that littered the cable bandwidth. But that was it. If a person didn’t cross her big-screen television, then she didn’t want to see them.
Which is how she came to be holed up in her upstairs bathroom in the middle of the afternoon. She was irritated that that was the only time she could get a repairman out to look at the leaking roof because it meant she had to watch her favorite soap opera on the bathroom’s little television instead of the enormous flatscreen in the downstairs theater room. But that was better than the alternative, which put her at risk of running into a stranger. “No,” she mumbled to herself, “that wouldn’t do at all.”
She could hear the repairman on the roof. He was stomping around like some sort of wild animal, his heavy boots pounding against the shingles so hard, Mary was sure he was doing more damage than he was fixing.
She turned the TV up louder and pulled it closer to where she sat on the toilet. Trying to drown out the man on the roof made the voices of her favorite characters tinny and crackly; the little television just couldn’t handle the volume she demanded from it. After years of enjoying high-definition video and surround sound, being forced to watch her shows on the crappy little TV made her want to throw the monitor across the room. “I’ll get the headphones,” she said, excited at discovering the solution of her problem. “Can’t hear anything with them on.”
She stood up from the toilet and pushed the TV back, rolling its wheel stand into its resting spot beside the sink. She reached for the door but froze with her hand inches from the knob. From the corner of her eye, Mary could see a seam in the bathroom’s wallpaper. It was bubbled up, peeling back from the wall to reveal a dark, shadowed pocket.
The wallpaper was almost brand new. Wally had never cared for how the place looked, so after he died, Mary had gone through room by room and redecorated the whole place. The upstairs bathroom was one of the last to get the treatment, and the wallpaper had gone up less than six months ago. “I’m going to call that dirty turd head of a contractor and give him a piece of my mind.”
But that meant more people in her home, more strange men pawing over the only place Mary felt safe. Maybe she could fix it herself. Maybe she could just push it back down, and it would stay there. She pressed her palm flat against the lifted section of wallpaper, leaning her slight weight into the wall. “One Mississippi, two Mississippi, three Mississippi,” she counted, sure that five seconds would be plenty to secure the paper.
Before she could continue her countdown, something writhed against her hand. She jerked her arm away and stared at the space, watching as the wallpaper lifted farther and farther away from the wall. Black shadows leaked from the separated seam, night-dark limbs stretching out and probing the wall.
A one-inch gap became two, then four, then eight. The shadows gained more substance, emerging into the light with brazen confidence.
“Spiders,” she whispered to herself, “and I just had the exterminator here.”
More than anything, Mary wished the repair man would come down off the roof and help her deal with this mess. She was paralyzed with terror, unable to do anything but watch as the spiders poured from under the wallpaper. Her breath rasped in and out of her nose in high-pitched wheezes, a sawing rhythm that she found almost alarming as the spiders themselves.
She couldn’t get enough air; her lungs felt constricted as if someone had wrapped a tight band of leather around her chest. “Asthma,” she gasped, “gotta get my inhaler.”
But the inhaler was outside the bathroom. She didn’t generally need it during the day and left it on the nightstand next to her bed.
The spiders flooding out from under the wallpaper had covered the door, forming a twitching black blanket that blocked Mary’s exit. She could just make out the gleam of the chrome handle through the writhing nest of arachnid legs, but the idea of reaching for it, much less turning it, made it even harder for her to breathe.
Mary tried to focus only on the handle. She just had to reach out, grab it, give it a twist and then rush on through. “You can do this,” she told herself. “Don’t be a crybaby potty pants.”
She thrust her hand forward and slapped as many of the spiders as possible away from the door’s handle. Before they had a chance to regroup, she twisted the knob to the left and yanked the door open.
There were spiders everywhere. As she pulled the d
oor toward her, they leapt free and sailed through the air to land in her hair and on her clothes. Some even fell down the open neck of her blouse to crawl across her chest and shoulders.
She screamed out of the bathroom, eyes half-closed, slapping at her body and hair. Mary was lost to a full-blown panic attack, driven to hysterics by her asthma and the legion of spiders skittering over her flesh. She could hear the faint, almost mechanical sound of the spiders moving, and it mixed with her own ragged breaths to make a terrifying soundtrack.
The webs were waiting for her around the corner from the bathroom. Mary slammed into them, and the sticky silk wrapped itself around her head and chest. She struggled to move her arms, but her struggles only entangled her in more webs. She stumbled and fell forward, colliding with layer after layer of woven silk on her way to the floor. By the time her knees touched the carpet, her entire body was wrapped tightly in strands of spider silk.
The repair man will come, she thought. He’ll find me and get me out of this.
Moments passed, and Mary was having more and more trouble breathing. The spiders were still crawling across her skin, finding their way under her clothes and into all of the warm creases and crevices of her body. She could feel their fangs dragging across her skin as if they were teasing her, taunting her with the threat of pain to come.
Every gasped breath took more effort. Her nostrils were completely plugged with spider silk. A thick veil of the material had stretched across her mouth, and every inhalation drew in more. If someone didn’t come soon, Mary knew she was going to die.
She had no idea how much time passed when someone came for her. Mary’s arms and legs were too weak from fighting the web to even try to help her rescuer. She was swaddled in silk like a baby in a blanket and wrapped so tightly she couldn’t even open eyes.
Tears of relief slithered out from the corners of her eyes and soaked into the silk as strong hands lifted her from the floor. She tried to thank her savior, but Mary could no longer open her mouth.
Whoever had freed her carried Mary down the hall, toward the steps to the first floor. Mary couldn’t see, but she knew her home so well she could imagine exactly where she was. They were on the landing looking down on the entryway, next to where the chandelier hung from the high ceiling. She couldn’t imagine why her rescuer had stopped here when he could just carry her down to the first floor and get the webs off of her there.
Something wrapped itself around her feet. She moaned in protest as the thick cord looped around her ankles and pulled them together so tightly she could feel the bones grinding against one another. Her moans became louder, turning to muffled shouts as the pressure increased and moved up to her calves.
By the time it reached her knees, she was screaming. It felt as if all the bones in her knees were being pushed together with such force that her skin was tearing over them. She couldn’t breathe, her screams were choking her, and the webs were drawn deeper and deeper into her mouth with every tortured gasp.
The world spun around Mary until she was hanging upside down. She heard the chandelier jangling, the crystals banging against one another. And then she was falling.
Her plummet was halted with a crunching snap. The bones in her calves burst through the skin, and her ankles popped loose from the rest of her legs. Mary’s eyes rolled back into her head under her glued-together eyelids, and she drifted away.
Mary was getting out of oblivion as quickly as she had fallen into it. The pain pushed her through the darkness, and she emerged into a world of blistering white agony. From her hips to her toes, her body had been transformed into a mass of jagged bone and raw nerve endings. Her throat was bloody from screaming and clogged with the webs she sucked in trying to draw air.
Her asthma threatened to strip away her consciousness once again. She had nothing left in her but sharp hiccups, barely enough air to keep her alive. She could feel the pain receding, sinking into the anoxic gray cloud that threatened to consume her thoughts.
“It will not be so easy,” a distorted voice hissed.
Something sharp sliced at the webs around Mary’s mouth. The silk disappeared, taking with it most of her upper lip. She could taste her blood slicking her teeth, but the pain of her injuries was worth it for the sudden flood of cool air pouring into her lungs. She gulped again and again, sucking in one life-sustaining breath after another.
Her reward was a fresh wash of pain. Oxygen flooded back into her body, igniting her damaged flesh with a firestorm of pure agony. A scream tore loose from her throat like a fresh scab peeled from a wound.
The pressure returned, working its way up over her belly toward her ribs. The voice returned, as well, close to Mary’s ear. “You had everything,” the words came to her, freshly dripping with hate. “All you had to do was tithe and obey. But those small things were too much for your simple mind.”
The crushing force squeezed all of Mary’s blood out of her legs and torso and into her head. Her heart thundered in her ears as it struggled to move the blood through crushed vessels. A high-pitched whining filled her head, and she knew she would soon be with her daddy.
Worse than the pain was the guilt. She did not recognize the voice, but she knew what she heard. She and the others like her had forgotten. They had failed to honor an ancient pledge, and now all would pay the price. She opened her mouth to beg forgiveness, to release the guilt crushing her heart, but no words came out.
The mass of viscera and pulled organs, driven upward by the pressure, oozed from between her bloody lips and splashed onto the floor.
As the blessed darkness claimed her; the last sound Mary heard was frenzied, ravenous chewing.
15
The distant ringing of the downstairs phone dragged Joe back to the world of the living. He cracked open one eye to glare at the alarm clock’s red digits and ground his teeth in anger. Despite his sobriety, he was never going to be a morning person.
Especially not after the night he’d had. Joe had spent more hours in the basement rooting through his father’s old journals and papers. Unlike Joe, the old man had maintained meticulous accounts of his battles with the supernatural. Joe had read and reread everything he could find that his father had left behind, but he was no closer to knowing what was behind the attacks now than he had been before he’d begun his research. If Itsike had been hanging around Pitchfork, his father had never run into her.
The phone kept ringing, and Joe kept trying to ignore it. Even after he’d come to bed, he hadn’t been able to sleep. His mind was full of old stories, memories of times he thought he’d left behind forever. His head was still swimming with all the stories his father had written about the families of Pitchfork and their various dealings. It was stuff he should’ve read long ago, things that might have helped him police the county’s supernatural element. He should have been more like his father. Everyone would have been better off.
The phone rang again. And again.
Elsa and Stevie were no doubt digging up roots and rare winter herbs down by the creek behind the house, and whoever was calling clearly wasn’t going to give up.
“Fuck,” Joe growled.
He lurched out of bed and stomped down the stairs, hoping that whoever was on the other end would give up and let him go back to sleep. The phone just kept ringing, though, and its bleating urgency had Joe rushing to answer it. “What?” he barked into the handset.
There was a moment of silence at the other end of the line, as if whoever had been calling Joe suddenly thought better of waking him at this time of the day. Joe looked out the windows and could still see faint traces of the spiderwebs that had coated them the night before, an ugly reminder of his family’s impromptu seance.
Joe’d warned them about messing around in this, but he knew they were just trying to help. There hadn’t been another attack last night, but the webs were certainly a warning that the head spider asshole knew where to find them. None of them slept very well after they spent a few hours clearing the warning
off their windows.
The caller took a deep breath then rushed into what they had to say. “Mr. Hark? This is Aaron Beaudry.”
Hearing that name made Joe want to smash the plastic phone receiver against the wall. The kid was the new preacher over at the Red Oak Baptist Church, and he wasn’t going to let Joe forget a promise that had been made to the now-dead pastor that had preceded him. “Look, kid, I’ve got a lot going on right now. If this is about coming to your service—”
When the boy spoke again, he no longer sounded nervous. There was an undercurrent of anger in his words, a tone that made Joe pay attention even as he bristled at its presumed authority. “I’m not trying to remind you of your oath, though that should weigh heavily on your conscience. There is something more urgent that needs your attention.”
“Spit it out, kid.”
A sullen silence answered Joe. Like the preacher before him, Aaron believed he was one short step away from the God he served. He didn’t like being called kid, which was one of the reasons Joe kept doing it. “One of my flock was murdered.”
Joe snatched the notepad and pencil off the top of the refrigerator next to the phone and scribbled down the address as Aaron rattled it off. He knew the place: an aging mansion that overlooked Pitchfork from the top of the hillside it squatted upon.
“I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
He knew he had to hurry because it wouldn’t be long before the sheriff learned of the murder as well. If Joe could get a look at the scene before Laralaine showed up to arrest him, maybe he’d uncover a clue to help him wrap this shit up before anyone else died.
