“One.”
“Wait,” Ian said. “What if . . . we let the lady in, but she sees herself in the mirror, so the reflection will kill her, and then we’ll have to deal with her reflection anyway, right, no, stupid idea, sorry.”
Everyone puffed, sighed, rolled their eyes. Rina privately tried to command her fingers to settle on a shape without her own face revealing which.
“Two.”
“I’m not into Sam, you know,” Noah said to Ian. “I’m into you.”
The girls looked at Ian, then at each other. They had both suspected it. Ian didn’t have a clue, of course, but it was far from the greatest shocker of the night.
“I love you,” Noah told him. “And all you do is put giant trapdoor spiders under my bed and set yourself on fire and come up with asinine plans, and yet I love you anyway.”
Ian shrugged Ianly.
“Thanks,” he said.
“Three.”
Four fists met at the center of the circle.
Three whole fists, really, tightly balled into solid rocks. All looming over the one rickety scissor.
Noah looked up from his own two betraying fingers into Ian’s eyes in front of him. They were big and black, and his beautiful curls tried so hard to hide them, but they were looking back, so heart-wrenchingly guilty.
“Okay,” Noah whispered. “You guys pray for me.”
He started withdrawing his hand. No one else did.
In fact, Rina still couldn’t take her eyes off the result.
“Sam?” she said, a suspicious frown on her face. “Why are you playing with your left hand?”
The boys looked at the three fists between them. Rina’s right. Ian’s right. Sam’s left.
They checked Sam’s face. Her chin trembled, stuck on a syllable.
Rina said, “The bathroom mirror. It got you.”
There was a split second in which all three noticed it—Sam’s silky features, the minute accidental additions and subtractions embellishing the symmetry of her perfect face, reversed. But that was all before it contorted into an earsplitting scream, crystal-blue irises rolling back into her skull, claws reaching to tear the boys’ faces off. Rina uncurled her legs and kangaroo-kicked her off the bed, through the quiltscreen.
Mirror Sam landed flat on the carpet—on the moonlit area, right next to the copy of Goblet of Fire.
And the giant trapdoor spider jumped from under the bunk bed, larger than Ian’s wildest guess, uglier than Noah’s most feverish nightmares, forelegs like colossal robot phalanges closing around its prey, body so vast—pincers so huge, eyes and brain so evilly small—that it lifted the bunk bed and tilted it back, and the three other kids rolled out of the window away from Mirror Sam’s scream as it went from feral malice to unbelieving terror.
Ian grasped the gutter before he fell off the roof, and Rina clung to his shirt and Noah managed to grab one of them just long enough to slow the fall and land painfully but whole onto the ground, his bones vibrating with the impact, but barely protesting any further when Rina and Ian dropped on top of him. His legs hardly resisted when Ian pulled him up, and all three stumbled to the garden, where they had been playing all afternoon, picked up their wands, kicked open the front door, slapped the circuit breaker switch back on, rushed up the stairs, ran to the end of the brightly lit corridor, swung open the bloodstained door, swished their wands, and cried, “Riddikulus!”
When Noah and Rina’s parents finally got up and stormed in to check the ruckus in the kids’ room, they found Noah, Rina, and Ian standing waist deep in a pile of some fifty thousand tiny Spider-Man dolls. A second later, Sam bobbed up from the pile, gasping for oxygen, little friendly neighborhood superheroes tangled in her hair.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edgar Cantero is a writer and cartoonist working in Catalan, Spanish, and English. In the latter language he is the New York Times bestselling author of Meddling Kids and This Body’s Not Big Enough for Both of Us. Born in Barcelona, he currently lives in Brooklyn.
There's a Giant Trapdoor Spider Under Your Bed (Dark Corners collection) Page 3
