He ran his fingers through his wispy hair and tugged with grief at his scalp.
In God’s name, what have I done?
His mind raced as he fought with his aching legs, forcing them to carry him along the sidewalk. He hugged close to the closed-up storefronts and avoided the glass-filled facades, averting his face as he passed, so that onlookers might not spot him. He had little notion of what had transpired in the past few hours since he had survived the flood in the tunnels, but he knew better than to let himself be conspicuous. He was pious and simple, but not stupid. He had blood on his hands.
He fought hard to dredge up anything from the black pit in his mind beyond the flood. A dim memory trickled back. A remembrance of his making the cross-town trek to the suburbs, to the residence of a girl whose medical papers he had been given by a strange man in an alley.
The girl? Who was the girl? Why did I go to see her family?
Suddenly frantic, he stopped on the sidewalk and turned his back to the glass window of a 24-hour buffet as he dug in his pants pockets.
There was a paper, a medical record. What did it say?
But nothing came forth. He had dropped it somewhere, maybe? Left it with the girl or her family? Had he been returning the lost record?
He dug in his other pocket, hoping to find some shred of evidence, some clue to help him drag the hiding memories back into light. He could sense them there, in the back of his mind, lurking in the shadows. His fingers in his left pocket came upon something sharp, plastic. He pulled out a keycard, dark blue plastic emblazoned with the image of black pyramid and a brilliant white beam of light emanating from its point. The Luxor.
The memory from the tunnel flooded back. He remembered setting up the heater, opening the envelope given to him by the hooded man. The medical record, the Luxor matchbook, the keycard. He had taken the record to the child’s home, to return it. He was no murderer!
He looked around, nervous that someone might see, and then looked again at the card in his palm. His fingers shone red. Blood on his hands.
Salvatore needed answers. Something had gone terribly wrong. His migraines frequently caused him lost time, but never had he awoken in such shape as this. Never with blood on his hands.
Blood.
He quickly pocketed the card, looked around again, and then hunched himself involuntarily, making his small stature even smaller, terrified that someone might see him before he could learn the truth of things. He was a good man, a holy man. This was a challenge from the Almighty. He was not a murderer. He hoped the Luxor might have the answers he needed.
12
“WHAT WAS THAT THING?” SUSAN asked quietly. Then she gestured at Celia. “And how did she do that?”
Trent could barely hear her over the noise of the rumbling van and Celia’s choking sobs. “I don’t know,” he said. “A monster, right? You saw it too? Black, like a spider almost?”
Susan nodded.
“That Salvatore guy must have sent it.” Trent shook his head. “As for her,” he said, quieter than before, “I’m not even sure what I saw.”
“Monsters? Baby, I’m scared. What the Hell is happening?”
“I know. Just hold tight. We’ll get through this.”
Susan nodded at the teenager, who still had her head down and was shaking, crying. Susan whispered, “How can her parents protect her from this?”
Trent shook his head. “We gotta convince them to get out of the city.”
“They’ll never believe us.”
Trent sighed. He had no better answers. He just hoped the Cagills had seen the news; hoped that with their insistence, they would flee Las Vegas and the supernatural forces that had, for some reason, descended upon their teenage daughter.
Susan turned her attention back to the road. The van slid a little as she changed lanes. “It’s getting icy.”
Trent peered out the window and saw that thin sleet had begun to fall on the city. “Yeah,” he said. “Just be careful.”
“Where am I going?”
“To her house.”
Susan gave him a frustrated look.
“Oh.”
He tapped the back of Celia’s head. “Hey, kiddo.”
She looked up at him. Her face was puffy and red, and the crying had left strange, shimmering lines down her cheeks. Trent instinctively reached over to brush them off and realized the lines were frozen to her skin. Celia winced as his fingers brushed the ice away.
What the hell is going on with this girl?
“Celia,” he said, shaking away the questions swirling through his thoughts. “Can you give us directions?”
The teenager sniffled and ran the back of her hand beneath her nose. Her lips trembled as she explained, tersely, where her family lived.
Trent nodded and tried a forced smile that did not seem to make Celia any happier. His heart was breaking to watch the girl go through this. The world was an awful place; he’d decided that long ago. But for a child, he thought, it should never be this bad.
Luckily, the Cagills’ neighborhood wasn’t far–only a few miles south and they were already heading in the right direction. Trent hoped that they could convince the family to escape the city. He didn’t believe for a second that either the monster or the old man would stop hunting for the girl anytime soon.
They found the neighborhood with relative ease, and as they moved along the quiet streets, they marveled at the sudden change in weather. Where there had been icy rain before, now snow had begun to fall. It was a light snow, interspersed here and there with sleet, but it was definitely snow.
“It never snows here,” said Trent. “This is crazy.” But his sense of wonderment was subdued. He had seen crazier things already today.
He looked at Susan, expecting her to be awed by the strange sight. Instead, he saw a look a grim determination on her face. Her hands gripped the steering wheel like a vise, and she seemed almost oblivious of the weather. He felt awful for her. This was not the day she had been looking forward to for the past three months, ever since she got the offer letter from James. This day had turned from a dream to a nightmare, and Trent felt that somehow it was all his fault.
“I hate this fucking place,” he said, watching the suburban neighborhood react to the new weather.
Front doors opened and children, newly home from a cancelled school day due to the ice, poured onto their lawns, grinning widely as they twirled, faces upturned, watching the sky as the white fell. Even Celia’s tears had dried up for a moment. Kids who grew up in Las Vegas only ever saw snow on television, or in photos; almost never in real life.
Trent smiled then, for real this time, glad that the teenager had been distracted, if even for moment, from the terrifying events of the morning. But his smile faded fast as they reached the Cagill home.
Something was wrong. He could just feel it. The shades were all drawn. The cars were still there. A small child’s backpack lay unattended on the front porch. One of the front windows was broken, the shade billowing behind the irregular hole.
They parked their car and got out. Celia began to cry again and made a beeline for the front door. She tried the doorknob.
“It’s locked,” she said, her voice frantic. She tried the knob again, squeezing harder this time as she slammed her shoulder against the door.
Trent and Susan walked up behind her. Trent looked first at his wife, who had a hand over her mouth and tears running from her eyes. Susan knew too, somehow. Trent was afraid of what they were going to find.
He reached out to put a calming hand on the teenager’s shoulder. “Celia, there’s a broken window over there. I’ll go in and–”
“Don’t touch me!” she shrieked.
Trent felt the temperature around them drop in an instant and a chill shot up his spine. Icy tendrils stretched out from where the girl’s hand touched the doorknob. Celia let out a scream of anguish and wrenched the knob and there came a loud, metallic snap from inside the door. The knob turned and the door
creaked open and Celia stood in the doorway, sobbing, the metal knob dangling from the skin of her palm as though it had been glued there.
Trent’s jaw dropped open as he looked inside. Susan gasped, let out a clipped shriek and averted her gaze. She buried her face in her husband’s side.
A huge mass of sticky red had matted down the carpet in the center of the living room. A second red splash stained the wall next to the stairs. At the base of the stain rested a pile of broken picture frames, also spattered with blood. A path of crimson led to the kitchen.
“No!” shrieked Celia. “No!” She stood on the threshold, neck arched forward and screamed at the stain on the floor. “NO!”
Trent tried again to comfort her, but she pulled away and dashed into the house and up the stairs, still shrieking. A second later, they heard a door slam upstairs and her ghostly wails grew quieter. Trent and Susan stepped inside and gingerly shut the front door behind them.
Susan was crying too, her face still buried in Trent’s side. “What are we gonna do?” she moaned. “Goddammit, Trent. What are we gonna do?”
Trent had no answer. He looked down at the floor, half-expecting to find a solution there. Their plans for reuniting Celia with her family had been dashed.
Trent and Susan listened to the muffled cries of the teenager through the ceiling as they sat across from each other at the red-stained kitchen table. Susan’s tears had stopped, but her look of hopelessness remained. The pit in Trent’s stomach felt endless, cavernous in its dimensions, a source of growing nausea. He wondered idly where the bodies had gone, leaving behind all this blood.
“I don’t know,” he said and shrugged. “I just don’t know. There’s no options left. We’re stuck.”
Trent switched on the small, blood-spattered television on the kitchen counter. The news was filled with photos of Trent and Susan and Celia. The media had identified them as the kidnappers–judge and jury be damned. There was no mention of Salvatore, or the shadow-spider; just a famous ex-gambler gone evil and his crazy wife. They’d even dug up their old obstetrician in Chicago, who admitted that Trent and Susan had had ‘reproductive difficulties’ that might be ‘contributing factors’ in their crime.
Trent swore and punched the off button so hard that it knocked the small set off the counter and onto the floor, where its glass face shattered.
“We have to turn ourselves in,” said Susan, quietly.
“They’re gonna execute us,” Trent replied. “We’re cop-killers and serial kidnappers. They’re already juicing up the chair.”
Susan glared at him. “Stop it, Trent! Just! Stop!” Her angry expression melted, making way for tears, and she put her head down on the table with a thump and sobbed.
Trent took off his cowboy hat and dropped it on the kitchen counter. Then he got up and began to pace the large, luxury kitchen, hands gripping his scalp through his sweat-stringy black hair.
A distant scream caught his attention in mid-stride. The scream had come from outside, beyond the back porch. Trent grabbed his hat, jammed it on his head, and sprinted to the double French doors that opened from kitchen out in the backyard. He stepped out into a thin coating of snow.
Another scream echoed out across the suburban landscape. “Fuck,” he said, and turned to go back inside. Susan was looking up at him in alarm as he strode past her.
“What–?”
“Go get Celia,” he interrupted. “Then start locking doors.”
Susan shook her head. “I don’t–”
“That thing, that black thing is coming. We have to hold out until the cops arrive. Maybe they have enough firepower to take it down.”
“But the van–?”
He whirled on Susan. “We’d never get out of the suburbs before it caught us. Too many turns and short streets. This is our only chance, baby.”
Susan nodded.
Trent headed for the living room, but stopped in the hallway and looked back at his wife. An idea drifted through his racing thoughts. “Turn on all the lights,” he said. “All of them!”
“What are we doing?” yelled Susan, as she raced behind Trent into the living room.
“The thing doesn’t like light. So turn on all the lights. Fast as you can.” Trent ran to the front door and slammed it shut. He stared at the broken window for a moment. Nothing he could do about that. He flipped on the living room lights and dragged an upright torchiere lamp over by the window, as far as its cord would stretch. He hoped it was enough to deter the creature from coming too close. He looked at Susan and pointed up the stairs. “Get Celia, put her in the bathroom with all the lights on and shut the door. I don’t think it can move through walls.”
He hit another switch and the downstairs hallway came to life. Then a switch by the front door that lit up the cheap, faux-luxury Home Depot chandelier over the stairs. He could hear police sirens in the far distance, but they were still too far away. Trent wondered how long they could hold out against the spider.
A heavy thump sounded on the roof of the two-story house. Susan came running down the stairs.
“I put her in the–” She stopped midsentence when she reached the bottom of the stairwell and saw Trent staring at the ceiling. She looked up, too.
Another thump, louder this time.
“It’s trying to find a way in,” said Trent, quietly.
A series of crunching slams and then an even louder crash.
“The attic!” Trent yelled, and took off up the stairs. He reached the second-floor just in time to see the ceiling erupt, showering the hallway carpet with a column of white dust and drywall and plaster chunks. An undulating black shape dropped down through the debris and planted itself on the far end of the hallway from Trent.
It moved slowly, as though confused by the wash of light in the hall and from the open bedroom doors. The long, black appendages touched expanses of lit wall and pulled back sharply, as if in pain. But then one of the appendages found a long, thin shadow cast by a doorknob. Its leg made contact and the creature poured itself into a narrow line and it slipped into the black and vanished, like water down a drain.
Susan reached the top of the stairs and Trent could sense her approaching him from behind.
“Where is it?” she said.
“It’s here,” Trent whispered. “It’s hid–”
The black shape leapt from a shadow at the corner of ceiling and wall and dove down at Trent, front legs roiling with shadow-stuff. Instinct took over and Trent’s hand balled into a fist and came swinging forward, timed precisely with a painful thump in his chest.
He saw black, windswept plains and smelled ash and dust and his hand felt numb, deadened, and he opened his eyes wide as his fingers dug into the ethereal flesh of the spider. Its front legs waved awkwardly. It tumbled backwards into a pool of light beneath a hall chandelier. Its incessant humming became a wild screech. It slid up the side of the wall, became two-dimensional, and then fell clumsily to the floor and slipped back into the shadows cast by the debris from the ceiling collapse.
The house was silent again, the humming gone, but Trent knew that the creature had not left. “Get Celia,” he said, quietly. “Take her downstairs. Turn off the bathroom lights.” He moved forward as he said it, advancing on the pile of rubble.
Susan ran past him and then opened the bathroom door. After a moment, she emerged with Celia, still crying. She flipped the bathroom light switch, bathing the tiny chamber in darkness.
In an instant, the creature leapt from its hiding place and rushed down the hallway, screeching as it passed through the light. Susan and Celia ran for the stairs. Trent stood firm beside the dark bathroom, fists shaking. The creature came at him fast, and at the very last moment his chest hurt again and he ducked and the thing’s smoking spike swung over his head and crunched into the wall.
Trent stood quickly and reached out both hands to grab the spider. The smell of ash ripped through his senses again, and the deadening sensation nearly crippled his hands, but he hel
d firm. With a growl, he shoved the creature into the bathroom, where it slammed against the ceramic tub.
In the darkness, Trent watched for a moment as the thing reformed, its shape and size growing larger and more definite. It stood up in the tub, like a real spider in stature and pose, its glowing claws clacking against the ceramic. It leaned backwards and then lunged at him. Trent spun on his booted heels and flipped on the light switch.
The series of bright white globe lights above the mirror burst to life. Another mirror on the opposite wall from the sink reflected the lights back, catching the leaping spider in an illuminated crossfire. Trent turned, fist raised, and sent a powerful blow to the thing’s midsection. The spider crumpled back into the tub again, screeching and flailing wildly against the enameled surface, its body growing more and more transparent by the second. In its shrieks, Trent thought for a moment that he could hear voices, people’s screams, and he had to fight off a sudden memory of the plane crash and the panicked faces, mouths all set in the same open scream, like a frozen tableau that he was dream-walking through as he worked his way to the sucking hole in the side of the cabin...
He stepped out of the bathroom and back into the hall and slammed the door shut, and with it, the terrible memory.
He gripped the doorknob with both hands and braced his boot against the jam to keep the door tight as the creature inside struggled and crashed against the walls. He could hear its blade-like legs clattering across the ceramic tub and the sink and the wall tiles and its never-ending screeches. And then, suddenly, it stopped.
Had he killed it? He let go of the knob and waited, listening. No sounds issued from the bathroom; no screeching, no clawing, nothing. He reached out and turned the knob and pushed the door open, ever so gently. Nothing came lurching out. He peered inside and did not see the spider anywhere.
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