by Chad Morgan
He pulled out Anna’s diary. Looking at the worn cover, it weighed more than it did earlier. It had more answers in it now. What had the old woman said? Anna left it for him, so he would understand. He leaned back and began flipping through the pages.
“Talk to me Anna,” he said as he began to read.
“June 2nd,” the diary read, and in Daniel’s head, he could hear it in Anna’s voice. “I met a guy today. He was sweet and so handsome. His name is Daniel. Gave him my number. Maybe he’ll call.”
Daniel couldn’t help but smile. She was drinking coffee that day, wearing her hair back so her eyes shone. He sat there for a half hour trying to think of something to say to start a conversation with her, but the best he came up with was “hi.” As it happened, it was all he needed. He flipped the page.
“June 10th,” it read. “Went on my first date with Daniel. He was so nervous. It was cute. Then he kissed me goodnight. It was sweet. It was like time stood still.”
That kiss was under the light to the entry to her apartment building. They stood there for a long moment, making small talk, playing the should-I-shouldn’t-I game until he leaned forward to find her leaning up to meet him.
Daniel flipped ahead a couple of years. “April 23rd, I think Daniel might be thinking of proposing. He’s been dropping hints, trying to see if I’d say yes without giving it away. He’s adorable when he thinks he’s being clever.”
Daniel sneered on that one. For one, that damn engagement ring still sat in his sock drawer. He bought it before she disappeared, and he couldn’t bring himself to get rid of it. Getting rid of it meant giving up hope of ever seeing Anna again. Secondly, he thought he was being clever. The fact she saw through him should piss him off, but it was just so . . . Anna.
“May 29th,” the diary continued. “I’m more than a week late. Have a doctor’s appointment next week to confirm. I hope I am pregnant. I think Daniel will be happy.”
He flipped the page, then he leaned forward. The penmanship changed, more hurried and with heavier pressure on the pen. “June 3rd. I have to leave. Now. I think I’m crazy, but . . . Daniel would never hurt me. I know this. But the old woman, I don’t why I believe her . . .”
And Daniel read on, diving into the past, into Anna’s thoughts and memories.
Anna sat on the exam table wearing one of those patient gowns that were open in the back. Paper crinkled under her butt. She looked down at the impression her rear made on the exam table. If she was pregnant, how big was her ass going to get? Would she get her figure back afterward? Not that she would change it if she was pregnant, but she did like her ass. She thought it was her best physical feature. She’d do what she could, but if that was the price to pay, so be it.
The doctor had been out of the room for about fifteen minutes, fifteen long minutes, fifteen minutes that took way longer than fifteen minutes should. She dangled her feet, tapped her fingers on the side of the table, read all the signs on the walls over and over. Finally, the doctor came into the exam room caring her chart.
“Well, Mrs. Sloan, your tests came back positive,” she said, “you are in fact pregnant. Congratulations.”
Anna’s smile couldn’t grow any wider. “Thank you, doctor, and it’s Ms. Sloan. For now.”
“But this is still good news I take it?’ the doctor asked. “Your boyfriend, he’s going to be happy?”
Anna’s smile shifted to a sly grin. “Let’s just say I think it’s going to be Mrs. Burns before too long. I found the ring in his sock drawer.”
Years later, when reading these accounts in Anna’s diary, Daniel would palm his forehead and groan.
“Well, I’m glad,” the doctor said. “I’ll let you get dressed, but you should talk to the receptionist about scheduling your prenatal care. I’d like to see you again in about a month, okay?”
“Yes,” Anna said, nodding enthusiastically.
“Good,” the doctor said. “I’ll see you then. And again, congratulations.”
“Thank you,” Anna said. She watched the doctor leave the office, giving her privacy to get dressed. As the door closed, Anna caught a glimpse of an old woman standing still in the hallway. The way she drained Anna’s smile, there was no doubt as Daniel read the pages who it was. While Anna’s diary lacked any details of the woman, Daniel’s memory of the old woman was vivid and filled in the blanks.
Later, Anna drove through the rain, the harsh weather not enough to dampen her mood. She was pregnant. She was going to be proposed too, or at least she was pretty sure she was. Life couldn’t get much better, but whenever she was on the verge of being overcome with joy, the vision of that old woman popped into her head.
She pulled out her phone and dialed Daniel. It picked up on the second ring. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Daniel said.
“How are you . . .” she started to say, but Daniel cut her off.
“Look, I’m sorry about the other night,” he said.
“Daniel, it’s okay . . .”
“No, it’s not,” Daniel said. Years later, reading Anna’s version of the conversation from the pages of her diary, he kicked himself for not shutting up and letting her talk. For the first time, Daniel saw how close he was to knowing he was going to be a father. But the Daniel of the past were just words in a book, and the present Daniel could do nothing but read and remember. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have yelled. I wasn’t even mad at you, not really”
“Daniel, it’s okay,” Anna said. Maybe another time she wouldn’t have been so understanding, but she had good news and didn’t want an argument ruining it. “I get it. You have a stressful job.”
“No, it’s not okay,” Daniel said through the phone. “That’s too easy of an excuse. I promise it won’t happen again.”
“I believe you, Daniel,” she said, and she meant it.
“I need to go,” Daniel said.
“Can we get together tonight?” she asked. “We can kiss and make up.” Not to mention tell Daniel she was carrying his child.
“Sure,” Daniel said, and Anna could hear the smile through the phone. “I’d like that.
“Me too,” Anna said, smiling too.
“Okay, I gotta go,” he said. “I love you.”
“Love you too,” she said and hung up.
Anna parked her car in her assigned space, the carport blocking the rain as she turned her phone off. Pulling out an umbrella, she locked up her car and started walking to her apartment.
“The life of your daughter is in danger,” came a voice from behind her. As Daniel read this in Anna’s uncharacteristic and hurried handwriting, he could see the dread etched in the pages. Daniel could hear the old woman’s raspy voice as Anna froze and turned around to see her standing under a light.
“Who are you?” Anna asked.
“Daniel must never know about your daughter,” the old woman said. “If you care at all for the sake of your child . . .”
She had said her daughter was in danger. “I’m a month pregnant, even the doctor can’t know if it’s a boy or a girl . . .”
“It will be a girl, and she must stay hidden or her life is in jeopardy,” she said. “You must disappear. Hide from your friends, your family, but especially from the father.”
Anna turned to leave, ignoring the crazy old woman, but the old woman was now instantly in front of her, like a cheap jump scare from a vampire movie. “There is more at stake here than you know. Everyone you know is at risk. You must hide your daughter, just as your mother hid you.”
Anna shook her head. “My mother never hid me.”
“Your real mother did,” the old woman said.
“What . . . what do you mean, my real mother?” Anna asked. “Go away!”
Anna tried to back away, but the old woman moved with unnatural speed and grabbed her wrist. Anna could feel the bones in the old woman’s fingers as if she were literally nothing but flesh and bone. Her brown eyes pierced Anna’s, and Anna saw what Daniel had failed to see – the old wo
man’s eyes were the same as hers. The old woman said, “Your real mother died when you were an infant. She gave up her life to ensure you would be safe.”
Anna wanted to deny it. She knew who her mother was, and her father and brother. She had no reason to trust this old woman, but her eyes . . . “Why . . . why would she do that?”
The old woman said, “Because I told her too.”
“I don’t know why I believed her,” the diary read. “I still don’t know if I do, but I’m just so scared. If it’s a mistake, I can just apologize to Daniel and everyone else later, but for now, I need to run.”
Daniel closed the diary, his hands shaking with anger, his jaw clenched. There was more to read, much more, but he couldn’t stomach any more of it. Everything he could have had – a life with Anna, raising his daughter, ten years building a family – was taken away by her.
“You told her to leave,” he said. It wasn’t a question, it was a statement of fact.
He looked over the cover of the diary to see the old woman standing at the other end of the room. He knew she was there, not because he heard her or saw her but because she had to be there. When she spoke, there was almost regret in her voice. Almost. “Yes.”
Now his whole body shook as he willed himself to stay in his seat. “Why? You had no right!”
“It was important you knew nothing about Bethany,” she said.
“I would never had hurt my daughter,” Daniel said.
To Daniel’s surprise, the old woman replied, “That was never the point.”
“Then why?”
The old woman never flinched, never stepped back. “You will understand in time.”
“That’s not good enough!” he shouted. He held up Anna’s diary as if it were exhibit A. “According to this, you’ve been fucking with us for over a decade!”
“Oh, much longer than that, I’m afraid,” she said, and there was that regret again.
Daniel shot to his feet and screamed, “What do you want from me?”
“You will know what you must do in time,” she said. “The fate of us all lies with you.”
The old woman turned and left. Daniel chased after her, banging his shins on the coffee table. “Hey, get back here! I’m not done with you!”
As Daniel limped around the coffee table, the backpack on one hand and shoving the diary into it with the other, the old woman was already gone. He jumped back to grab the flashlight and lug wrench and ran out into the apartment hallway. He heard the hinge of the door to the stairwell creaking and spun in time to see the door falling shut. Daniel ran for the stairwell and, throwing open the first-floor door, saw the second-floor door close. He ran up the stairwell two flights at a time, bursting through the door on the second-floor landing.
The second floor was empty. Daniel aimed the flashlight down one hall then the other, but there was no sign of the old woman. “Where the hell did you go?”
The door to the stairwell slammed behind him, making him jump. He reached back and pulled at the door, but it wouldn’t budge. Daniel walked down the hall, trying the apartment doors, and failing to find an unlocked one. Before turning a corner, the flashlight beam shown on graffiti scrawled on the wall – Today’s Key is tomorrow’s Forge. “Key” and “Forge” were promoted to proper nouns on the wall, and Daniel wondered what that might have to do with Bethany. Wasn’t she the Key? That’s what the business suit man said on the tablet. So, what the hell was the Forge?
Daniel turned the corner and walked into sticky strands of web. Daniel waved it away with his hand, but his flashlight beam glimmered off thick sheets of webbing. Glued to the sides were what looked like cocoons. Huge cocoons. Human-sized cocoons. Daniel reached up and pulled a chunk off the nearest one, and a lifeless face stared back at him. The old man’s face was sunken, like one of those pouch drinks for kids after it had been stabbed by the straw and every drop sucked out.
“My God,” Daniel said, backing away.
He cast the flashlight up the hall, looking at the cocoons within the range of the flashlight’s dim light. They were stacked haphazardly and in various sizes, including a few that were too small to be a person. Daniel prayed they were pets, or at worst detached limbs or heads. He couldn’t brave finding out what was in the little cocoons. Daniel aimed the flashlight down the hall, and at the far end of its cone of illumination, something moved, something long and slender, like a sword the size of a person. The thing came down in front of him, piercing through the stray webs and sinking into the floor with a sound like an ax slamming into a tree trunk. The thing in front of him looked like it used to be a hand – Daniel could see the vestigial finger bones and knuckles – but it had been stretched and flattened into a flesh sword. Daniel followed the hand up with the flashlight and walked the beam up an elongated, slender arm to the creature rearing up in front of him. The monster had what looked like a human female form growing out of the carapace of an insect. The monster reached forward with the other sword hand, Daniel backing up as he realized the monster was walking toward him. He could hear the wood and plaster around him splitting as multiple legs punctured the hallway as it walked. The flashlight could just barely reach the fourth pair of legs at the back of the creature, and Daniel wondered if they were indeed the last.
Daniel ran back the way he came, heading back for the stairwell, but another of the spider creatures came around the corner. For the first time, Daniel saw most of the creature, and on the side of it was a second head, the skin stretched over a face silently screaming, and he realized the monster was two poor beings fused into one. Daniel could see two heads, two sets of shoulder blades, two sets of what were once hands and what had been human feet. The monster turned to Daniel as the other monster stalked its way around the other corner.
Daniel ran to the nearest apartment door, only to find it locked. He tried door after door, banging, screaming in desperation. “Help! Anyone! Please, help!”
The two spider monsters crawled at him, narrowing the gap until Daniel was down to a couple of doors in the middle. He bounced between the two doors hoping in vain that one would budge, but neither door would move. As they encroached closer, Daniel lay his head against one of the doors. He could hear the feet of the things coming closer, sinking into the wood and plaster with each step. Daniel turned around and leaned against the door, his eyes closed, waiting for the end. It wasn’t fair. He didn’t care about what they did to him, but Bethany was out there somewhere all alone with no one to look for her.
“Anna, I’m so sorry,” he said. “I failed Bethany, and I failed you. I’m so, so sorry.”
Daniel breathed hard, keeping his eyes shut tight and waiting for the death blow when the door fell opened behind him. He fell backward into the darkness as the door slammed shut in front of him.
14
Lisa heard noises outside her apartment door before. That was nothing new, though it had been a while since she heard the yelling of people. Her neighbors had been gone for a while now. Well, yes and no. Some were in the cocoons in the halls. She had no idea how many of her neighbors were rotting corpses hanging in webs in the hallways, but the ones that weren’t were now the spider things that killed them. But the dead didn’t scream, and while the monsters may screech and thump around they didn’t speak. Whoever was in the hall was screaming for help.
Lisa crept up to her peep hole as if the view into the hall went both ways and she was afraid to be caught. She saw the man run straight to the peephole shouting “Anyone! Please, help!”
Lisa jumped back from the peephole, startled. She could hear the man running around the hall like a fly caught between a window screen and a pane of glass, buzzing around and bouncing off the walls, desperate to find a way out. She had heard many people cry for help, beg for salvation, and scream when the inevitable came. Lisa let them die. She cried while they had screamed for help, curled up in a ball and covering her ears, but she never opened the door. None of them were safe, they were all potential monsters. She learn
ed that lesson the hard way. No one was safe. No one.
But as she heard the man banging on her door, she couldn’t remember the last time she heard anyone else. How long had she been in this apartment? What if that was the last person in the town? The last person in the world? Was she willing to be alone forever, until she died of thirst or starvation? But what if he wasn’t safe? What if he was one of them?
Her furniture was cannibalized to block out the creatures, large pieces of cheap laminated particle board nailed across the front door and over the windows. When she ran out of large pieces, she nailed smaller pieces together to bridge across the window panes, and when those ran out she used parts of her dining room table and her coffee table. The leaf of her dining table ran across the top of the front door, and the table legs went diagonally across the corners. Slowly, as if in a trance, she grabbed the claw hammer from the kitchen counter and began prying the boards from the door frame.
She heard the man thump his head against the door. Lisa went to the peephole and saw him, in the fisheye view, standing there. He was cute, from what she could tell from the peephole, but who was he? She didn’t recognize him, and she knew everyone in the apartment. It had to be a trick or a hallucination.
The man turned around and leaned against her apartment door. Muffled through the door, she could hear him say, “Anna, I’m so sorry. I failed Bethany, and I failed you. I’m so sorry.”
Lisa heard the resignation in his voice, the abandonment of all hope. The last person besides herself in the town and he was going to die. Lisa clawed at the nails frantically, ripping off the haphazard barricade and throwing open the door. The man spilled out onto the floor, dropping a bookbag and some iron thing. Lisa slammed the door shut, but before she could throw the deadbolt or the latch could catch, one of those spider monsters shoved a shoulder against the far side of the door. Lisa was shoved back, her feet sliding on her tile floor, but she pushed hard against the door. The creature looked at her through the gap in the door, and Lisa gasped. She knew those eyes, or had when the owner was still human. It glared back at Lisa with no humanity or recognition, only hunger and rage.