Into the Weird: The Collected Stories of James Palmer

by James Palmer

  The creature came furtively into the light streaming down into the hole. It was a spider about the size of a small dog. Its body was smooth, black and shiny. It glistened wetly in the light. Eight eyes the size of coat buttons looked at him, while mouthparts as big as David's fist worked, their mandibles clicking together. It had legs like a snow crab, long and armored.

  David noticed something else. It was hurt. It dragged one of its eight legs uselessly in the dirt, and there was something jutting out from the injured leg, an old length of board that must have been used at one time to shore up part of the tunnel.

  David reached out, and the spider-thing backed away. It was scared. Of him. David couldn’t believe it. Then he realized it was afraid because it was hurt. He reached over quickly and, before the thing could get away, he yanked the giant splinter out of the spider’s leg joint.

  David held the board in front of him defensively for a long moment, but he spider just stood there and flexed its once useless leg. It stared at him for a minute, its mouthparts glistening with venom, then it slowly backed away into the darkness.

  Moab, Utah

  David squeezed under the loading door. Off to his left he saw the flare of headlights swinging around toward him, a full ten minutes too early. He was caught.

  No. The Dissemblers had taught him to never give up. They had also taught him to never surrender, and he had a hollow tooth filled with cyanide for just such an eventuality. But he hoped he’d never have to use it. He longed to see his friend at least one more time before the end comes. Not his end, but all of humanity’s. He wriggled free of the door—it felt like it took him twice as long to get out as it did to get in—and climbed to his feet.

  Twin shafts of light stabbed the darkness, and he crouched low again. They would be on him in an instant. Still crouching, he moved as fast as he could to the other side of the building, ducking around the corner and running off into the scrub. Hopefully the guards would be so busy inspecting the door they wouldn't notice him.

  “Hey!” a voice called, and a searching flashlight beam found him.

  No such luck.

  Dahlonega, Georgia

  His very own monster.

  The thought excited him. Sure, it wasn't a big monster, like Son of Johnson or one of the others. It wasn't iconic and dreadful like the monsters from history he had learned about in school, like the kraken that demolished Pearl Harbor, or the beautiful dragon that fought it off. But it was his, and that was all that mattered.

  He read everything he could find in the school library on spiders. He was sure there was nothing else like his spider in all the world. He went to visit it every day, and it would come out to see him, so long as he had something for it to eat. He brought it whatever dead things he could find at first—mostly small birds that had kamikazed into the sliding glass door of his house. But it didn't care much for those. Finally David build a snare trap and caught a small rabbit, put it in a shoe box with holes poked in it, and brought the tiny offering to his spider. Opening the box, David dropped the rabbit down the embankment into the hole, where it sniffed and cowered fearfully, as if detecting the horrible fate that awaited it. Finally, David's spider emerged, looking somewhat larger than it had when he saw it last, and snatched the rabbit in its mouthparts. It injected the animal with its venom and walked backward into its hole, carrying the paralyzed morsel with it.

  After a couple of weeks of this, David was certain his spider was growing. It was now as large as Mr. Cooper's Great Dane. David felt he had to try to find bigger things for it to eat, and that gave him an idea.

  Moab, Utah

  David ran as fast as his legs could carry him, but it wouldn't be enough. The Jeep was not shooting across the uneven scrub, its large spotlight shining directly onto his back.

  David spoke into the tiny radio attached to his left wrist. “Brown Recluse in motion. The package is in danger. Repeat. Package in danger. Please advise.”

  David waited, heart and legs pumping, the Jeep bouncing close behind him. He tongued the hollow tooth in his jaw, but he couldn’t use it. Not yet.

  Then he heard a throbbing hum. At first he thought it was the Jeep that chased him, but it grew louder and louder, until a dark helicopter crested the ridge that marked the edge of Genecore’s secret installation. Gunfire barked from the hovering hulk, strafing the ground between David and the Jeep and causing the vehicle to swerve and plow into an outcropping of rock.

  A ladder fell from the helicopter, and David ran after it, reaching into the dark. The helicopter hovered shakily, but it made no effort to land or to make it any easier for David to grab the ladder. If he wanted out of here, if he didn’t want to be captured and forced to bite down on the tooth, he had to do his best to escape.

  After a long moment he grabbed the ladder as it whipped about in the night air, steadied it while he gripped it with his other hand. He wound his feet around it and gripped it as tightly as he could as the helicopter lifted him off the ground. Behind him, the two unarmed security guards stared in disbelief and talked rapidly into their radios.

  The helicopter turned and veered off the way it had come. David saw the moonlit ground disappear as it fell away into a gently sloping valley, and his heart caught in his throat. He remembered he was afraid of heights.

  Slowly he felt the crude rope ladder being reeled in, until finally, he was lying on the cold deck of a battered Huey. He sucked in breath, happy to be on something solid, however much it shifted about in the air.

  “Hand it over.”

  Dahlonega, Georgia

  The spider needed food, and David was going to continue to feed it. So he did something he had never done before. He instigated a conflict with one of his bullies.

  “Hey, dumbass,” he yelled at Toby Wooten right after the final bell. The Wootens were the scourge of Lumpkin County Elementary. David estimated that there had to be at least ten siblings, all boys, ranging in age from their mid-twenties all the way to a kid who stole lunches from his fellow kindergartners. Each one was meaner and dumber than the last, and the teachers just passed them on to the next grade, lest they end up with two Wooten siblings to contend with the following year. Toby was the most backwards by far, and he hated when the other kids called it to his attention.

  He leered at David, his brown eyes narrowing to slits. David grinned at him before taking off out the door, hoping Toby would chase after him without waiting on his brother and their friends.

  True to form, the larger boy did just that, and David was running for his life yet another day, though this time he had a plan.

  Moab, Utah

  David released his death grip on the rope ladder and rolled over onto his back. Staring down at him was a woman dressed in the same black fatigues that he wore.

  “Where is it?” she yelled over the roar of the blades spinning somewhere overhead, a slight edge to her voice. She was beautiful: olive skin, brown eyes, and long dark reddish hair—obviously dyed; not natural like David's—twisted into a hasty ponytail. But her face was hard, severe, and carried the look of growing impatience.

  “Uh, here,” said David, reaching into the thermal pouch at his hip. He removed the metal vial, still ice cold. The woman reached down and snatched it up, holding it deftly with her long fingers.

  “Good work, Brown Recluse.”

  The woman turned to the front of the chopper, said something to the pilot David couldn't hear over the constant thwump thwump of the rotors. David climbed unsteadily to his feet, untangling himself from the ramshackle rope ladder.

  The woman turned, shoved a lumpy object into his chest. “Put these on!”

  David blinked at what had just been thrust at him. It was a set of olive drab headphones. He nodded quickly and fitted them over his ears. Now the roar of the rotors was muffled, and he could hear the conversation going on around him over the chopper's radio.

  “We're three klicks out,” said the copter's pilot, a black man in his early thirties.

 
“Roger that,” said the woman. She turned to David.

  “Good job back there. You almost didn't get captured.”

  “Uh, thanks.”

  She shook her head and placed the vial into a small cooler. “You're new, aren't you? My point is that it was a bit more showy than one of our usual operations. The Dissemblers are already on the government's domestic terrorism watchlist, but I think the boss will let it slide, considering we're almost at Endgame.”

  A chill crawled up David's spine. Endgame. It was code for the day every Dissembler had been waiting for. “Are you sure?”

  The woman shrugged. “That's what the controllers say. Who am I to question them? Why don't you have a seat? Get comfy. We'll have you off this ride in a few more minutes.”

  David sat on a little fold-out seat bolted to the side of the helicopter and tried to forget he was now hundreds of feet in the air.

  Dahlonega, Georgia

  All his life they had tortured him. Made fun of him. For his heavy layer of freckles and his thick red hair. For the fact that he was no good at kickball, and that he liked comic books. Now he would pay them back. All of them. Starting with Toby Wooten.

  David ran into the woods, careful to not let himself get too far head, but stay far enough away that Toby couldn't catch him and pound him into next week. Carefully and craftily he led the boy toward his goal, threading around trees and over piles of brush and debris.

  Finally, panting and sweating, David saw it. He had carefully disguised the hole he had fallen into with some brush and fallen limbs. Now he leaped over it, hoping Toby wouldn't notice the obstacle.

  David landed just shy of the hole. Toby Wooten was not so lucky. His heavy frame crashed through the fragile placement of brush, and he fell through, bringing broken limbs down with him.

  “When I get out of here, I'm going to kill you!”

  David looked down to see Toby trying to claw his way up, but the small space was clogged with debris. Every time he gained a little purchase, he pulled more brush down on top of him.

  David just stood there, staring.

  “OK,” said Toby. “Joke's over. You gonna help me out of here or not?”

  David looked around whistling, pretending he couldn't see the boy.

  “C'mon, man! I'm sorry, OK? I won't be mean to you ever again. I'll tell everyone to leave you alone.”

  David simply stared at him, saying nothing.

  Toby was frantic now. He tried harder to get out, but every time he gained a foothold he fell back down, dragging dirt, rocks and sticks down with him. David thought that Toby had probably had enough, that he probably wouldn't mess with him ever again. He could pull him out if he stuck a large enough tree limb down there that Toby could grab while David pulled him out.

  Then the spider appeared.

  David saw it first. It was bigger than it had been two days ago. Toby followed David's frightened, nervous gaze, and Toby screamed as the large black shape lunged toward him, latching onto the boy with its eight legs, mouthparts open and glistening with venom.

  The Wooten boy fought but it was no use. He squirmed in the creature's eight-legged grasp, then shuddered suddenly and was still. David turned his back as the spider dragged its large meal back into the shadows of its crevice in the earth.

  David was still and quiet for a long time. Then he recovered the spider's hole as best he could and went home.

  They searched for three weeks, but never found a single trace of Toby Wooten. And David's life eventually went back to his version of normal.

  Somewhere in Utah

  David waited patiently in the darkness, breathing slowly, his breath hot inside the black sack that covered his head.

  Suddenly it was pulled from him, and he was nearly blinded by the difference in the light. He was in a truck trailer going...somewhere. David didn't know or care where. He had hoped the beautiful woman who had rescued him from Genecore's security guards would be there to greet him, but instead it was a middle-aged man with close-cropped red hair going to iron gray at the temples, which he made no attempt to redden as other Dissemblers did. Instead of military fatigues he wore an expensive grey business suit and a matching tie that shimmered in the wan light shining down on them from the semi trailer's roof.

  “Sorry for all this cloak and dagger crap,” he said. “But you understand the need for secrecy.”

  David nodded. He had been keeping secrets all his life.

  “The other agents who lifted you out said that your last assignment was almost a fiasco.”

  David shrugged. “I got in and grabbed the vial without any problem. Somehow I tripped an alarm as I was leaving.”

  The man nodded, though his face told David that he didn't really care what the excuse was. It was the same face David had seen on every boss he'd ever had; cold, cruel and indifferent. You did what you were told, exactly how you were told to do it, without exception or you were gone. Only he didn't think the Dissemblers would let him go with a pink slip and a reference.

  “You are still here because of something you said you could do. I don't believe it, but I'm not high enough up the chain of command, such as it is, to do anything about it.”

  David swallowed hard. He knew what the man was talking about, but he said nothing.

  “You're young,” the man continued. “Smart, but just smart enough to know when to do what you're told and when to keep your mouth shut. You have no family, no friends, no lovers. No job. No religious ties. You also have a slight problem with authority. The perfect candidate for the Dissemblers.”

  David wasn't sure if he was being praised or insulted, so he simply sat there and said nothing. He didn't even know who this man was, let alone if he was in charge. But in the Dissembler hierarchy, indeed, in all of David's young life, there was always someone else in charge, someone he had to be subservient to or else. The bullies in school, his cruel stepfather, women. It didn't matter. David was content to simply let them be in charge. It was easier that way.

  “But there's something else about you. When you joined us, you said you had your own monster.”

  “Yes,” said David. “I did. And I do.”

  The man smiled at this. “We didn't believe you, but you promised to show it to us.”

  “That's right.”

  “Well,” said the man. “We believe you now. We did some digging into your background. Turns out people around you had a nasty habit of disappearing.”

  David sat up straight on the crate he was resting on, rubbed his sweaty hands on his black fatigue pants.

  “Oh, it's all right,” the man said, smiling. “Who would we tell? We'd have more to lose than you by going to the authorities. I'm sure you did what you felt was necessary to protect you and your, uh, friend. No, your assignment, while important, was merely a test of your loyalties. That vial you stole will set Genecore back at least six months, not that anyone on the planet has that much time left. No, what we really want from you is to harness this monster of yours.”

  The man, whose name was Stone, lead David outside the trailer they were in. They were in the middle of what looked like a swamp. It was growing dark. A group of armed men were busy unlocking a steel shipping container that hunkered on the edge of the Dissembler camp. David knew what was inside.

  “How could you?”

  Stone laughed. “It wasn't easy. Your friend didn't want to cooperate at first, but with a few electric cattle prods, we coerced it from its den and into this container, then brought it here. We've been tracking your movements for weeks. After every assignment you kept returning to the same out-of-the way location, out in the middle of nowhere. No house, no shelter. We knew you had to be telling the truth about your monster.”

  David watched as the container was opened by remote control, and the spider slowly tumbled out, stretching its long black legs. “I'm sorry,” he whispered.

  “Now,” said Stone. “How do you control it?”

  Dahlonega, GA

  David moved on to
high school. Some of the bullies were held back or moved away, but there were always more of them. David visited the spider at least once a week, sometimes more. It was growing larger, and David knew that soon its burrow would no longer be sufficient to conceal it. Other arrangements would have to be made.

  David read to the spider some afternoons. Mostly comic books—his favorites were Marc Spector: Moon Knight and Silver Surfer. He sat by the burrow's opening and imagined the spider toiling around down there, tidying up its hole and listening to the sound of David's voice. He wanted the spider to get used to his presence.

  Then David met Alyssa.

  They got stuck being each other's lab partners in biology class, and hit it off almost instantly. Alyssa was cute, but not overly pretty like the popular girls. She wore glasses and had long brown hair and a cute smile. And she seemed to like the bugs and things that their biology teacher Mr. Harris showed them. He had a praying mantis in a jar and Alyssa remarked on how neat it was. During the lesson on monster biology, she was just as fascinated with them as David was.

  They started sitting together at lunch, and holding hands on the way to the bus.

  One afternoon she invited him to her house, and they went up to her room, hand in hand. They sat on her bed and stared at each other for a long moment, then David kissed her clumsily. She laughed, but immediately kissed him back. It was electric.

  They groped one other, David's hands moving under her shirt and feeling her bra, the supple boundaries of her breasts. He didn't have a clue what he was doing, but neither did she, and they reveled in the discovery.

  David knew then that he was in love, and that he and Alyssa and the spider should run away together.

  “I want to show you something,” said David, taking her by the hand when they were done.