She remembered the feeling of the air rushing past them as they raced through the undergrowth of those woods, and the sounds of their laughter scraping at the sky. The most poisonous of those images was the way he’d cock his head just a little to the side and flash that arrogant smile at her, thumb raised cheerfully in her direction. No looking back, he’d always say. All her apprehension of those caves and hollows, shallow and innocuous yet terrifying for a mere child, vanished at those words of friendly challenge. The strain of guilt once again attempted to choke her, but she forced herself to continue.
“For a couple months, we hung out almost every weekend. Until one evening, just a couple days after my eleventh birthday. We were out on a rocky hill just outside of town, on the edge of the forest between there and Grantwood. We’d climbed it earlier in the day, and we were playing around in the tall grass. The sun was going down. And then, someone came. Quickly, from the forest. It was,” she halted, taking a deep breath. “It was a man in a dark yellow coat. He came so suddenly the two of us didn’t really know what to do, but before we knew what was happening he’d grabbed my arm and was trying to drag me off toward the woods. But before he could get me far, Will threw a rock at his head, and that got me free from him. What happened after is all kind of a blur. At some point I looked up and saw that Will had tackled him to the ground and was holding him in place, somehow.” She shuddered a little, the memory of the scene unfolding before her hazy eyes. “The man pulled a knife and Will told me to run. At first I was paralyzed, but . . . ”
She remembered the way he had turned back to her, stupid smile and gesture cocked, mouthing the words no looking back. At the time it had been the most heroic thing imaginable, but now that thought filled her with treacherous loathing. “I ran,” she said. “And I didn’t stop running until I’d come all the way back to town from Widow’s Creek.”
In the distance, crickets continued their evening performance. Spinneretta stared at the ground and waited, enraptured by Mark’s silence.
At last, Mark shifted a little where he stood. “And that’s it?”
She nodded.
He exhaled, in apparent thought. “And you never told anyone what happened?”
“No. I told my parents we had a fight.” She hugged her knees to her chest. “And after that, I just ignored his calls. Deleted his messages. Until they stopped coming.”
He closed his eyes. “Allow me to rephrase: why did you not tell anyone?”
She cringed. “Because I didn’t want to take responsibility.”
“Responsibility?”
“I could have helped him,” she said, remembering the strange adrenaline that had slipped into her bloodstream, turning the cold air to fire. “But I ran. I abandoned him to his fate at the hands of that yellow guy.” The details of that night, of that betrayal, would forever remain etched in her memory. The discordant way her choked sobs mixed with the sound of squelching mud and crunching leaves as she ran. The light mist that followed her from the edge of Widow’s Creek to her doorstep. And most memorable of all, the way the full moon had watched her, aware of and yet indifferent to her suffering. From that night on, she’d always thought of the moon as being an avatar of cruelty.
“And what happened to him?” Mark said.
She sighed, fidgeting with her anterior spider legs. “They found him later. He was alive, but beaten pretty badly. Both his legs were smashed.” She started to shake. She held back tears she swore she’d never let free. “I . . . couldn’t face him. I wanted to go and apologize. It was the right thing to do. But I couldn’t. Because I was a coward. Later, I heard they put him in a wheelchair. They said he’d probably never stand on his own again. How could I face someone I did that to? I know it’s not fair. But I can’t help it now. I was helpless then, and as time passed it just became harder to entertain the thought of apologizing.”
She had, for the sake of brevity and her own image, omitted the fact that she had thought she was in love with Will. Those thoughts were useless; it wasn’t her in those memories—it was a girl who had not yet realized her own stupidity. It was before she had retreated from all but her closest friends, before she had realized how unfair the world was, before she laid to rest the notion that anything good could ever come of others seeing her as so intriguingly unique.
“Is that the reason why you alone hide your legs from others? Because you think you are protecting them?”
She started at the way he seemed to read her mind. She averted her gaze. “No. I wish I could say I was that noble.” Her words caught in her throat. “I didn’t do it to protect anyone except for myself. The guilt just felt so heavy that I thought I’d rather die than have to endure it again. And if hiding my legs stops people from being unduly interested in me, then that’s a fine price.” Though she was looking at the dirt, Spinneretta thought she could feel the sympathy in Mark’s gaze.
“Forgive me for saying so,” he said. “but I expected something a great deal more severe, given your reaction. If your greatest sin is that somebody didn’t die because of your choices then—”
She snapped her head up toward him and scowled. “What would you know about guilt? Do you think dying is the only bad thing that can happen to someone? The fact is that it’s because of me, because he thought my legs were so damn cool, so don’t you give me shit about feeling responsible when it’s nobody’s fucking fault but my own!”
A grave silence fell upon them, and she immediately regretted the outburst. She groaned and pushed herself back to her feet with her lower appendages. “Forget it,” she said, pretending not to care. “That’s the end of my story, anyway. Let’s go. Don’t want to make Chelsea wait too long.”
They continued on, passing few homes in the forested suburb. When they were halfway to Chelsea’s, and the right side of the road broke into only scattered clumps of trees obscuring the lights of town, Spinneretta got up the nerve to break the silence. “Hey,” she said over her right shoulder.
Mark glanced up at her from the ground. “Hmm?”
“You said something about having suspicions about the color yellow, of all things. Apparently to the point that my story somehow seemed important. Was that you coming up with excuses to get me to talk, or . . . ?”
He was quiet for a moment, his eyes pinned to the distant lights of town. “It’s nothing more than wild speculation. There is no reason to put much faith in anything I say at this point.”
She didn’t much care for the deflection. “Who’s putting faith anywhere? Tell me what’s on your mind. It’s only fair after you made me talk.”
He hesitated. “Are you certain?”
“You’re the one who said this could all be important,” she said, slowing her pace to fall back in line beside him. She felt a little better about everything, but her stomach was still tight and unyielding. Her spider legs poked out from her olive jacket to cool down.
“When I was younger,” Mark said after a moment, “I read a book. If I recall correctly, it was entitled The Repton Scriptures. It was one of many books that existed in the library of the Vigil. At the time, I was not sure whether it belonged to the canon of their eccentric worldview or was simply a case study in obscure systems of folklore. At any rate, this is the story I found in that book. It’s been quite a while, so you must forgive me if I fail to deliver it properly.” He cleared his throat. “In the early days of the Earth, just as life was beginning to develop, it is said that the planet was visited by a god. That god seeded the planet with its children. The children of that god were tasked with spreading and multiplying across the surface of the world.” His eyes became cold and hard. “Those were the very first spiders.”
A curious twinge ran through her. “Spiders?”
“The god was described as a massive spider-like deity,” he said. “The text gave its name as Raxxinoth.”
Spinneretta shuddered as he spoke the name, as if it struck the chord of some strange and distant memory. She tried to ignore the chill running up
her spine.
“At any rate,” Mark continued, “Raxxinoth seeded the earth with the first spiders and then disappeared, as creation deities are wont to do. The spiders did as instructed: they multiplied, diverged, and spread. Over billions of years, those original parasitic proto-spiders evolved into all the shapes of spiders we know of today. The story went on to say that, after indeterminate numbers of generations, sometime in the geologically modern era, the proto-spiders gave birth to an avatar.”
“An avatar?” she asked, a sense of foreboding growing from within.
“It was written that they somehow birthed a human-spider hybrid. That creature became the high priest of the followers of Raxxinoth. He became known as the Yellow King, so named for the bright yellow robe he used to conceal his form.”
Yellow King. Ignoring the chill was now impossible. It seized its way up her back and radiated out along her extra legs. The words seemed to echo off the walls of her mind and reverberate down the corridor of her genetic memory, bound for forgotten time countless aeons ago.
“Allegedly, the cult of the Yellow King aimed to create a perfect hybrid race between man and spider. Although how they intended to accomplish this was, perhaps mercifully, omitted from the manuscript.”
Spinneretta’s icy dread threatened to choke her. The Yellow King, like the name Raxxinoth, had resonated on some basic level—perhaps within her very soul. The King of the spiders, and his ambitions for the human-spider race. There was no longer any question in her mind as to the reality of the tale; was she herself not living proof of its authenticity? She couldn’t explain how she knew it; that she did in fact know it was a thought not yet loud enough to warrant specific recognition. The evidence was undeniable. The spider-god, the Yellow King, her own hybrid form all pointed toward the singularity of that truth. Had that truth been in front of her eyes the whole time?
Mark chuckled. “Men in dark yellow coats abducting biologically perfect spider-girls. Feels connected, does it not? Obviously, trying to make direct links between reality and such a preposterous mythology requires a leap of faith. I wouldn’t even entertain the idea had I not seen an independent reference to the name Raxxinoth, as well as an allusion to the so-called Lord in the Yellow Robe, in a book called Al Azif years later.” He crossed his arms and let out a deep, contemplative breath. “For that reason, I must take it at least somewhat seriously. There must be a reason those names appeared where they did. The original account cannot simply be a piece of esoteric folklore.”
Spinneretta nodded mechanically.
“Well, that’s the end of the story,” he said, his eyes taking on an unexpected softness. “Obviously, I don’t know how much, if any, of the story is true. All I can say is that if these men in the yellow coats are interested in you and your siblings, then someone probably believes—”
“Do you think I’m stupid?” Spinneretta asked, stopping beside the road once more. It was too real. She was trembling. “Those stories are true. They have to be.”
“Why do you say that?” His tone was purely logical, but logic no longer held any sway over her thoughts.
“I don’t know. I just . . . ” She felt another racking chill come over her. “It just feels right. It’s kind of like a weird déjà vu or . . . something.” Not quite déjà vu. It was an echo, or an afterimage, or a memory. It was a reverse-premonition, an unprophecy.
Mark’s tone softened as he looked down at her. “Hey, are you alright?”
She shook her head, feeling a bizarre numbness beneath the chill. A dizziness. The reality, if it was reality, was still far away from her.
“Well, in any case, try not to take the story too seriously. As I said, I don’t know how much of it is—”
“You can’t just stand there and say you don’t know how much is true.” Had the implication only hit her then? Perhaps it was some sort of defense against the encroaching truth that was trying to pry open holes in her sanity. Mark must have known what she was the whole time and never said anything about it. An acidic indignation began to boil up from her stomach, and she had to fight not to scream. “You can’t stand there, so close to living proof, and say you think it’s all a damn coincidence.”
She expected a prompt rebuttal, but to her surprise Mark instead rocked his head back, letting his gaze drift to the faint stars now shining overhead. “For all I know, it could be a coincidence. But I know that answer won’t satisfy you. And frankly, it doesn’t satisfy me, either. Whether you assume it to be true or not, there’s a great deal that doesn’t make sense.”
“Don’t lie to me,” she snapped, surprising both Mark and herself with her conviction. “There’s no assuming involved here. Why else would we be like we are? My dad’s spider DNA story doesn’t make any sense. As unbelievable as it is, your story is more reasonable. More familiar.”
“You say that as though the Repton Scriptures explains your birth at all. Just because this supposed Yellow King character wanted to create a race of hybrids doesn’t mean that’s what happened. There’s no mechanism. There’s no reason. It’s dangerous to jump to conclusions with so much missing from the picture.”
“But how can you—”
“Listen for a second, would you? I’ll concede that it may have some basis in fact, but there are problems with directly connecting the myth to you and your siblings. For example, the fact that you have two completely human parents. I’m certain you remember your mother being pregnant with your sister, at least.”
He was right. As much as she hated to admit it, that fact did throw a wrench into her brand-new theory.
“Now, if you truly were the result of any kind of hybrid ambition,” Mark said, “then it stands to reason that there would have been some trigger or mechanism by which you would have been created. Though that doesn’t entirely rule out the possibility.”
“Possibility.” She shuddered. “And if you, in all your supposed culty wisdom, were to estimate how likely it is that the myth is true, what would you say the chance is?”
He considered it a moment. “Nonzero.”
She blinked at him. “Nonzero? What does that mean?”
“It means not zero.”
“I know that, you ass. I mean, how far above zero?”
He shrugged. “I have no way of knowing. I’d put it slightly above the probability of your father actually having spider DNA.”
Despite the gloom, she found herself laughing.
Mark seemed comforted by her response. “Obviously, I don’t have the answers. I just hope you understand that old legends, even if based in reality, rarely resemble the whole truth. Yellow King, spider DNA . . . whatever the truth is, what’s important is that right now somebody is a little too interested in you and your family. Even if the stories aren’t true, it looks fairly likely that we have a cult on our hands—and a dangerous one at that. And if the stories are true,” his tone darkened, “then we have much bigger problems.”
Spinneretta stared at him for a moment, letting his words sink in. She turned and started down the road again. “I think you bring out the worst in me, you know. I don’t think I’ve ever had to be convinced that an old fairy tale wasn’t true before you came along.” She tried to hide her embarrassment, but an unnatural heat still lingered in her face. He was right; there wasn’t much point in drawing rabid conclusions based off ancient superstition. The forbidden recognition she felt was probably just her mind reflexively latching onto a possible explanation to the eternal question of her origins.
That thought led to another. As she considered Mark’s apparent knowledge of such bizarre myths, she at last realized what it was that had bothered her about Mark since he arrived—an unease nearly erased since they became friends. “Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.”
She took a deep breath, thinking back to their first meeting. “Up until you arrived, Will had been the only person not to freak out to some degree when seeing my legs for the first time. He had his reasons, I guess. But wha
t about you?”
He gave her a puzzled look. “Why should I have freaked out?”
“Uhh, I don’t know, maybe because I’m half spider? Surely you don’t think these legs are normal.” She flourished her appendages under her jacket. “What’s the deal with that? Had you heard about us ahead of time and expected it, or . . . ?”
“No. It was a surprise.”
“Then why didn’t you act surprised?” And why do I feel so damn indignant about this? “I mean, for God’s sake, it took even my dad years to get over his aversion to Arthr and I. What makes you so damn special?”
He sighed, and again tilted his head skyward. “I’m afraid there’s no great secret. I’ve simply seen things far more startling than a teenage girl with spider legs. I may not be a qualified judge of normality, all things considered. But if you really must know, I suppose I don’t think of you as being completely normal. You’re definitely unique, and in life, it’s never the normal people you remember. Does that make you feel any better?”
She gave him a blank stare. “That’s a really lame answer. I don’t want any of your you’re such a unique snowflake canned advice. I want to know why it doesn’t bother you. There has to be more to it than just oh, forgive me, milady, but I’ve seen some crazy things before.”
“There really isn’t anything else to it.” He smiled in a decidedly unsarcastic manner. “I hate to disappoint you, Spinny, but you really aren’t that scary.”
The Spider Children (The Warren Brood Book 1) Page 12