The girls peeked outside into the dark end of the hallway.
“Oh my God,” whispered Rina. “She’s inside.”
“Who?” Noah asked.
“Just let us in—she’s on the stairs!”
“Who is she?”
Rina stuttered—there was no one-word answer. But they did not need it: in the next blank second, all four could distinctly hear the familiar creaking of a step in the stairs.
They all listened, and a second step creaked, and a third. Virtually at the same time.
The boys looked at the girls, wondering. The girls looked at the boys, knowing.
Then three steps creaked at the same time.
Sam, crystal-blue eyes striking the perfect balance between supplication and threat, whispered, “Let us in.”
“Okay, I got you, I got you! Hold me,” Ian instructed Noah while he picked up the flashlight again. With his free hand, he clung to the upper bed, then tiptoed on the edge of the lower one, his noodle figure hanging out like a pirate on a ship’s rigging. With Noah clutching his waist, he craned the flashlight overhead and spotlit the floor in front of the girls.
“Quick, step in.”
Sam strode into the light disk. The soles of her feet tingled with the remnants of positrons lingering on the tuft like static electricity. Rina joined her, clinging to Sam’s shoulders, and with her foot she slammed the door shut.
The steps outside fell silent.
The almost-imperceptible shake in Ian’s hand translated into an unsettling quiver of the spotlight. He took a deep breath, commanding his pulse to steady.
“Okay, just walk slowly—I’m gonna light your way to the corner of the desk.” He felt Noah tightening his grip on him, reassuring him. “I’m starting . . . now.”
He slowly tilted the light toward the left—as slowly as the turning cogs inside a wristwatch guiding the second hand. The light islet on the floor slid gently toward the desk. Sam and Rina paced along in slow motion, each naked foot landing on the foremost edge of the disk and rising again just a split second before the encircling shadow caught up with them.
“You’re good,” Ian encouraged them. “Careful with the chair. You’re fine.”
Something banged on the door.
The door, the room, the universe jolted. Noah jolted and shrieked. Ian shrieked, dropped the flashlight. The girls shrieked and sprang off the carpet in the nanosecond before the shadows flushed over it, Sam clambering onto the desk to the left, Rina mounting the office chair in the middle of the room, her impetus pushing it a few inches closer to the bed.
“Who’s out there?!” Noah shouted.
“It’s her!” Sam said.
“Who the hell is her?!”
“Who do you think cut the power?!”
Ian wasn’t part of the argument as he was still leaning out, busy searching for the lost flashlight. It had rolled halfway between the desk and the bed, on the very edge of the moonlight pool.
And it wasn’t working.
Something banged on the door again. Not banged—rather bumped. Harder than a knock but softer than a slam.
Sam turned back to Noah, eyes now fully melted into supplication: “Please let us on your bunk.”
“Okay,” said Noah. “Can you jump from there?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Wait, I got a better idea,” Ian offered, shimmying toward the foot of the bed to try to lift the bunk ladder with his one free arm. He drove it toward the head of the bed and offered the lower end to Sam.
There was a new bump on the door.
“What is she banging with?” Noah dared ask.
Rina answered, “Her head.”
Ian tried not to listen as he wedged the ladder’s hooks into the bed frame above. It was only six rungs long—just enough to bridge the gap between the desk and the upper bunk.
“Okay, just come this way,” he invited Sam, “and . . . can you try and retrieve the flashlight while you’re at it?”
Bump. And a sort of crunch added that made everybody wince.
Sam swallowed a lump in her throat, gripped the first rung, and shifted her weight on it.
“Doesn’t she hurt herself?” Noah whimpered, eyes fixed on the door.
Rina, clinging to the back of the office chair, scowled at him. “Want to open the door and offer her a Band-Aid?”
Sam was now on the middle of the bridge. She could see the flashlight down there, between the third and fourth rungs.
Bump.
She swung off the side of the bridge and hung upside down underneath. Everybody held their breath as she curled her legs around the third rung and her hands released the rails. Her long hair hung rocking half an inch away from the floor. She stretched a hand and fished up the flashlight.
And then she happened to look into the crawl space under the bed.
Bump.
“Oh my God—what is that thing?”
“Come up!” Noah ordered. “Come up!”
“Who the hell put that spider in there?” she cursed as she held on to the rungs again and speed-monkey-barred onto the bunk with the boys. “Who the hell—are you two nuts?!”
Ian turned to Rina now. She was still on the chair, on her knees, safely lit by the full moon, but way too close to the bed for comfort.
“Rina, whatever you do, don’t put a toe on the floor,” he warned.
“Who the hell put that spider in there?”
She rocked her body to rotate the chair toward the left. She was only a few feet from the desk.
“I can jump.”
“The chair will roll out from under your feet,” Noah said. “If it rolls into the shadow, it will disintegrate!”
“Yeah, but I won’t be on it!”
“The wardrobe is in the shadows, and it didn’t disintegrate!” Sam objected.
Rina carefully planted her feet on the cushioned seat and straightened her knees.
Bump.
She was standing at her full height—four feet nine inches—on a wheeled office chair. No one on the bed dared breathe, lest the exhaled air push her off balance.
“I’m gonna do it.”
“Rina, please don’t fall,” Ian begged.
She aimed toward the desk, feet firmly dug in the cushion, and started gently rocking her body back and forth, then a little harder, all the while focusing her strength on her legs, her heels, her toes, keeping the chair nailed to the ground while she achieved maximum momentum. One. Two.
She jumped.
The chair rolled in the opposite direction as she kicked off, but she had landed almost gracefully on the tabletop before the chair entered the shadow zone, unharmed, and smashed into the wardrobe. The impact made one of the doors open a crack.
And the springs helped it open more, creaking all the way, and the full moon waved at them on the inside of the door.
“Mirror!” Rina yelled, immediately hopping on two rungs of the bridge and diving onto the bed, crashing into Sam and Noah. “Don’t look at the mirror! Don’t let it look at you!”
But they couldn’t help it; they couldn’t shift away. The door kept swinging open, showing the foot of the bed. And Ian’s right arm. And Ian’s right arm—a moonlit, sickly gray, ragged version of Ian’s right arm—stuck out of the mirror, fingers clinging to the wardrobe door.
Real Ian pulled the quiltscreen into place and fell back with the others, in a bundle of limbs, screaming in terror.
“Light!” Ian shouted over the others. “Noah, light!”
“It doesn’t work!” Noah screamed, slapping the bottom of the flashlight.
The moonbeam sneaking over the upper bunk was now blasting off the mirror and backlighting the screen before them, and behind it they could make out the shadow—Ian’s reflection’s shadow—lurching toward the bed. Exactly like Ian—the lanky figure, the puffed-up curls bouncing with every sick loll of the head. Everybody recoiled, compressing themselves into the corner.
“Noah! Light!”
&n
bsp; Noah slammed the flashlight against the bedpost. It blinked on.
He aimed it at the quiltscreen, and Ian hand-shadowed a dog’s head. The dog shadow snapped at Mirror Ian’s shadow, and Mirror Ian screeched at the antimatter burn, its bright flak splitting the darkness like a strike of lightning. Ian even faked the barks as the dog shadow charged, biting off chunks of Mirror Ian’s shape, unraveling the atomic structure of its body in a few seconds, each bite accompanied by whipcracks of blinding light and the piercing screams of the creature disintegrating into bursts of energy and zero-charge elementary particles.
After the last flash of light, only Ian’s hand shadow remained on the screen. The audience panted.
“Is that all?”
BUMP.
The children jumped again, the pause after their collective yip allowing them to appreciate the sound qualities of that last bump: its consistency, its texture, its hint of crumbling wood or bone.
“What does she want?” Ian repeated.
“Nobody knows,” Rina explained. “She just stands outside people’s doors in the dark, and she bangs her head on them.”
Bump.
“Nobody who has had any further interaction with her has lived to tell the tale,” Sam added.
Noah asked, “How did those who lived to tell the tale deal with her?”
“They didn’t. Their doors just held.”
Bump.
“She actually has an interesting backstory,” Rina expanded, brushing the hair off her face. “Something involving a psychiatric hospital in the nineteenth century, but when you think it’s gonna be the typical story of a desperate mother losing a long-sought child, it turns out it’s not, because a strong female character doesn’t need her story to revolve around motherhood.”
“Oh, cool,” Ian appreciated. “So it’s not just your regular Slytherin evil shit—it’s woke Slytherin evil shit.”
“Excuse me?” Rina complained. “Hashtag Not All Slytherins, Mr. I’m-Gonna-Sprinkle-the-Room-with-Antimatter-Just-for-a-Laugh!”
“Wrong, smart-ass! The antimatter was his idea; mine was the trapdoor spider!”
“How does a trapdoor spider catch its prey?” wondered Sam. Her voice sounded strangely soft between the others’ quarreling.
Bump.
“I mean, I get it—it ambushes it, but how does it keep focused while it waits for the prey to come near? It can be hours. That’s an amazing attention span. If I were a trapdoor spider, I would be like, ‘Oh, shit—was that a cricket outside just now? Damn, and I was thinking of sexy scenarios with Tom Hiddleston.’”
Ian and Rina couldn’t find anything to say. Noah said something, bobbing up from his own thoughts.
“It’s a boggart.”
The other three turned toward him. The lady outside bumped the door again; she was already deep background now.
“A what?” Sam asked.
“Like in Harry Potter?” Noah explained. “A creature that takes the form of what terrifies you most. Think about it—the trapdoor spider is custom-made to terrify me. The antimatter is for you, because you’re the ultimate nerd.”
“Right,” Ian agreed, the thought of challenging that claim not even crossing his mind, and he turned to Rina. “The head-banging lady is your nemesis, because that’s some twisted shit.”
“Yeah,” she admitted, and pointed at Sam. “And yours is the mirror people, because you Gryffindors have a vanity problem.”
“No, we don’t.”
“Okay, they’re all boggarts,” Ian summed up. “So what? They can still kill us.”
“But you can neutralize a boggart easily, with the Riddikulus spell,” Noah reminded them. “You just think of something that causes you hilarity instead of fear, and the boggart will turn into that.”
“Right,” said Sam. “Does anyone have a wand?”
Ian showed his empty hands. “I’m in my jammies.”
“Me too,” Rina said. “And if I were in my dress, it doesn’t have pockets either, so once again, thank you, patriarchy.”
“Our wands are back in the garden, where we left them,” Noah muttered, looking out the window. “We’ll have to drop down from here.”
Four faces stuck to the glass of a second-floor window on a dark suburban street. Beyond the glass they saw a strip of sloped roof above the side porch, then the quiet lawn, way too far down.
“It’s suicide,” Rina said.
“We could use the ladder,” Ian offered.
“Too short,” Sam said. “But we can take the mattress from the upper bunk and throw it ahead of us.” She shrugged, querying the others. “It will stop the fall, somewhat.”
“There’s another problem,” Noah hated to point out. “We can’t open the window from here; the latch is all the way up. Someone has to climb on the upper bunk.”
“But it’s almost completely in the dark,” Ian reported. “There’s only a square of light.”
“And the mirror will see us,” Sam added. “Whoever leaves the safe space, their reflection will jump out and try to kill them.”
“Okay, then you go,” Rina told Ian. Noticing she’d struck the others as a little too blunt, she explained: “We just destroyed his reflection.”
“Oh. Right,” Ian nodded. “Wait, does that mean I can’t see myself in a mirror ever again? How will I shave?”
“You’ve never shaved!”
“Well, I have plans!”
A particularly loud bump on the door—one conjuring a strikingly vivid image of something splintering—called them back to attention.
“Look, we’ll deal with your puberty later—just go open the latch, before she breaks down the door!” Rina ordered.
“And beware of the antimatter,” Noah reminded him.
“And the spider,” Sam contributed.
“God, why do we even have sleepovers anymore,” Ian moaned as he crawled to the head of the bed. “I’m too old for this shit.”
Rina held the curtain open for him while Sam offered him the flashlight. Noah was on his knees on the pillow, ready to hold him.
“Don’t,” Ian told him. “Your hands could reflect in the mirror.”
Bump.
He put the end of the flashlight in his mouth, grabbed the edge of the upper bunk, and leaned outside. His face tilted toward something on the other side of the privacy curtain. He jerked away, grimacing.
“What?!” asked Noah.
Ian took the flashlight out of his mouth. “Nothing,” he lied. “I just learned how I would look if half of my body underwent nuclear fission and the other half lay fried in the resulting radiation.”
Bump.
He shook his head, trying to expel the lingering image. “Okay, here I go.”
He bit on the flashlight again and pulled himself up. They saw his feet scurrying up, and then followed his movements on the mattress above.
“Can you reach the latch?” Noah asked.
They heard a moan that they all wanted to interpret as an “Uh-huh.” Then some more fumbling, some knees steadying.
Then a bump.
Then, a clack near the window.
Then, an “Aw, shit!”
The flashlight came clattering down between the window and the bed, dead. The weight of Ian scrambled against the wall.
“Shit, I’m trapped up here! It’s too narrow! I’m burning! I’m burning!”
“Ian, the mattress!” Sam screamed. “Lift the mattress!”
All three gaped in awe as they saw the roof of the fort being literally peeled open as Ian wedged himself under the mattress and kicked it off the bed and out of the equation, hands clawing at the wooden slats of the bed base, his face haloed by the blazing ends of his curls. “Help me! Help me!”
The others sprang into action and power-punched the middle of a slat until it snapped—the crack coinciding in time with an awful bump from the door—and Ian squeezed in through the gap, screaming all the way, landing headfirst inside the fort. Noah and Sam and Rina dumped the bedsheet
s on top of him.
“We got you! We got you!” Noah assured him, trying to appease the thrashing bulk under the blankets while the girls slapped it to put out the fires. “Ian, calm down! We got you!”
Noah pulled the blankets off. Ian looked back at him, tears in his eyes, smoke billowing off his hair, hands frantically checking the atomic integrity of his body.
“You’re okay,” Noah soothed him, clutching his wrists. “You’re okay. We’re all okay.”
The door bumped them back to their grim reality.
Sam and Rina scrambled to the window and pulled up the sash. A cold breeze blew in, reminding them their clothes were soaked in sweat. All four peeked outside into the mockingly peaceful night.
“Right,” Noah said. “So now someone has to jump outside, take their wand, hit the circuit breaker switch—that should deal with the antimatter and the lady outside—and come up here to cast the Riddikulus spell on the spider.”
“You mean,” Sam corrected him, “someone has to jump outside, and then do all that on two broken legs.”
“Yeah, most likely.”
They contemplated the garden down below, beyond the porch roof, all of them instinctively caressing their own calves, pondering for the first time how nice their legs looked with the bones kept strictly inside.
Bump.
Noah, as the host, felt compelled to forward a suggestion.
“Rock, paper, scissors?”
They shifted to form a circle, girl facing girl and boy facing boy, all sitting in lotus, each one’s toes touching two other people’s toes. They hid their hands behind their backs.
Bump.
They contemplated the garden down below, all of them instinctively caressing their own calves, pondering for the first time how nice their legs looked with the bones kept strictly inside.
“On the count of three,” Rina said, wondering if her giving the signal would actually warrant her any advantage. She checked Ian’s face, then Sam’s, then Noah’s, the exact equal of her own. His should be the easiest to read; he’d always been the least capable of trickery. Could she actually read rock or paper or scissors in his expression if she squinted hard enough? And if she did, would it be what he planned to draw or what he wanted her to believe he’d draw?
There's a Giant Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed (Dark Corners collection) Page 2
