More eager than ever for tomorrow to come, she hurried to catch up to him.
Chapter 25
Xanthophobia
The path meandered to and fro, snaking between preserved thickets of oak and pine. A few minutes beyond the bridge’s span, the path straightened out and widened into an avenue that ran along the river and was flanked on the other side by a wall of trees. The area was, like so many others in Grantwood, deserted. The sporadic street lights created small islets of illumination within the dark of the moonless night. It was here that Mark’s footfalls halted, and Spinneretta almost bumped into him. Before she had time to ask what was wrong, his left leg swung out before her and his stance deepened. Spinneretta looked up and squinted into the darkness before them. A claw of terror sank its razors into her stomach.
Bodies moved in the dark. She counted half a dozen shifting sounds. The fallout from the street light ahead glinted across something metal in the hands of one their number. The dim light continued to dance off the rustling clothes of the approaching men, and her initial fear of a mugging was laid to rest when she recognized the color of the coats the men wore. Her heart skipped a beat. Panic gripped her. All of them were wearing the same sick yellow coat as the man that attempted to kidnap her six years prior. It was a nightmare—they were specters out of time emerging to haunt her. But when her eyes fell upon the other figure that stood behind them, everything changed.
The seventh man, short and with a prominent hunch to his spine, was garbed in a yellow hooded cloak. This yellow was not the same mustard-yellow that his comrades wore—it was a bright, pure, obnoxious yellow. It was not the robe, nor the color that stopped her breath, however, but the face of the man beneath that hood. That face was old, its age multiplied by the deep shadows thrown by the strangled street light. The man’s brow ridge and jaw were covered in pointed, dark brown growths—growths that looked like they were made of the same chitin as her spider legs. Two four-tall columns of eyes stared out at her. Those eyes were nearly all dead. One was sealed by a trail of those spine-like growths, and two more were clouded over in a milky white stain. The remaining extra eyes may have been functional, had they not been rolled so far back in their sockets.
“You have come,” the horrible man-thing spoke, his voice raspy and bestial. “We have been waiting.”
“Spinneretta,” Mark whispered from in front of her, not taking his eyes off the leader of the group. “Do you trust me?”
She looked at him, and then back at the men in the road, her hair standing on edge. Every muscle shook, and her eyes sat glued to the sickening robed figure. “Of course.”
“Then I want you to run. Go back the way we came, all the way to that park we stopped at. Stay out of sight. If I’m not back there in fifteen minutes, I want you to go to one of your friends’ houses and stay there. Do not go home. Do you understand?”
Her mouth was dry, her heart slamming in her chest. She bit her lip. “No. I’m not going anywhere.” I can’t run away. Not after what happened last time. Not after Will.
Her conviction, however, waned when the closest of those coated men lunged toward her, his arms outstretched like a leaping panther’s. She jumped back clumsily, a shriek on her lips.
Mark threw his left foot out, the tip of his shoe scraping a shallow line in the dirt. A shimmer appeared in the air, like ripples of heat-distortion over desert dunes. A moment later, the lunging man hit that invisible curtain of air and disappeared into it with a baleful hissing sound.
Spinneretta started, her feet shuffling back away from that wall. Is this a hallucination? It had to be; the man had just vanished into thin air. But she knew it was no hallucination—it was magic. Overcome by fear, she took another unsteady step back, her spider legs pulled around her body by terrified magnetism. One step too close to that shimmer, and she too would be dragged through it into whatever hell awaited beyond that loosening of the veil.
The other men in attendance, witnesses to their comrade’s fate, all hesitated. There was an audible stir among them. The yellow-robed monster’s corpse eyes simply continued staring into nothing. “Interesting,” he spoke. “Then the tales of your gift are true.”
Mark snapped his head over his shoulder at her, a look of desperate fury upon his face. “Go!”
The spinning of the stars in the heavens became the background to the swirling fear that embraced her. Dulled by the surreality of the situation, that fear gnawed at Spinneretta’s mind. With that exclamation from Mark, her mind was made up. She turned from him, back in the direction they had come from, and began to run. What the hell is going on? Those words were surreal, insufficient. The grim recollection of the yellow man and Will. Kara’s kidnapping. The tales of the cult. And worst of all, that monster in the robe. I never wanted this. I just wanted to have a normal life, why is that so goddamn much to ask!? The desperation and fear enveloped her heart and lungs, spreading icy roots through her stomach, as she flew down the tree-lined path of the road.
And so she ran, as fast as her legs would carry her, leaving Mark and the yellow-coated gunmen behind.
A tear leading into nothing—that’s what it looked like, at least. And now one of Dirge’s men was dead, or at least gone. There was a stillness that set in among the hired hands; like so many of the Marauders, they were either ex-convicts or had no qualms about becoming one. But even those of them who were aware of magic had never seen a full-grown man obliterated in an instant. Dirge could see sweat on their brows and beneath unkempt mats of hair. “What are you doing,” Dirge growled. “Arachne is getting away. Stop her!”
One man, the small one the others called Big John, obeyed without hesitation. He dashed forward, his eyes set on the retreating shadow of the girl’s blue dress. The little man was fast, but not fast enough to escape the Warren’s veil-trick. The Warren drew another line in the dirt, this time with his right foot, and Big John, too, was swallowed up by a shimmering wall.
“I’m the one you’re dealing with,” Mark said to the shocked party of Marauders. He extended his right index finger and tapped it against his collarbone four times in quick succession. “If you want her, you have to go through me first.”
Palpable fear hung in the damp air. The two Marauders armed with rifles raised their weapons and took aim.
“If you pull the trigger I’ll split you apart!” Dirge howled at his men. “Your orders are to take him alive!”
The remaining men needed no further instruction. They’d seen what happened when Dirge became angry, after all. With a series of furious shouts that failed to hide their terror, the Marauders fell upon the Warren from all sides.
The evening was turning out to be a bitter one for Arthr. With Spinneretta on her way to prom and Mark out of the house, he was tasked with watching Kara. And because watching her always amounted to an impossible ordeal, he was instead working on his fighting-is-wrong essay while she played in her room. Last time he’d watched her, she’d climbed one of the trees in their extended back yard and jeered that she’d jump unless Arthr came and got her. She pulled that stunt three times that day, after which he’d begged their mom not to make him watch her alone anymore.
He sighed and leaned back in his chair, letting his arachnid legs dangle to the sides. After a momentary break, he let his chair fall flat and resumed typing at the keyboard.
What is a fight? A fight is a conflict whose resolution comes not through the medium of friendly debate or polite discussion, but through the unacceptable application of physical force or violence. I have, as you most certainly know, participated in a conflict of the physical variety for which there is no excuse. The fight in question, which was between myself and another, much older individual, had a poetically just end. For this, I have none to blame but myself, and I write now to speak about the damage that can be done by confrontations if they are allowed to escalate. I will present three reasons that violence cannot solve problems in a modern society: first, violence will inherently lead to more violence; s
econd, physical conflict is detrimental to American society due to its disregard for the basic principles of democracy; finally, I will set out to prove that violent conflicts statistically have a far higher cost to society than civil discourse as measured in dollars.
Arthr leaned back again, reading through the paragraph of complete, unapologetic bullshit. One hundred and sixty-six words, the word processor told him. How can I stretch this out to four hundred? Fifteen hundred words sounded so low on paper, but on paper it looked like it would stretch to the moon and back. Stupid Spinneretta doesn’t have to write one of these, and she didn’t even get the shit beaten out of her, he thought. Some justice. A knock at the door broke his train of thought. “Uhh, come in?” he said.
When the door creaked open, he found Kara with a nervous look on her face. “Someone’s here.”
“Someone’s here? Who?”
“I don’t know. Someone outside,” she said. She pointed behind her, down the hall. Puzzled, Arthr got to his feet, eager to take a breather from the life-sucking essay. Kara led him downstairs to the living room. The lights were off, and as they entered he reached for the switch. She stopped him with a quiet hissing sound. With the darkness intact, she led him to the great glass window and pointed out into the front yard.
Arthr squinted into the dusk, searching for whatever had spooked her. The evening’s shade was thicker than normal due to the hanging cloud layer. There was nothing but varying shades of dark blue and black. The hell is she talking about? She must’ve just seen a show about Bigfoot or something. But as his eyes adjusted, a shape came into focus. A yellow shape, slowly growing clearer. A man in a dark yellow coat.
Arthr’s heart leapt into his throat. “What the hell . . . ?” Then, another shape emerged, followed by another and another. The darkness held four men, standing just in front of the copse of trees across the road. A chill of terror raced through his bones. They carried what appeared to be rifles, of the sort that always appeared in war films about Vietnam.
Quivering panic engulfed his whole body. “Oh, shit!” he said under his breath, stumbling back from the window. For a moment, he could only shake his head in an uncomprehending stupor. The rational part of his mind told him that it must be a hallucination, some sort of waking dream, his mind playing tricks on him to ease the boredom of writing that damned essay. His breath grew frantic as the reality of the situation sank in. “Shit, we need to go!” He grabbed Kara’s arm and turned to run in the opposite direction.
“Where are we going?”
“We need to get out of here, now!” he said, dragging her behind him as he ran down the hall.
“But where?”
He looked over his shoulder, stomach quivering. “Out back. We’ll go out the back and head into the trees, they won’t find us out there.” He had articulated a fact that his mind was only tangentially aware of—the fact that the men were there specifically for them. It was the dirty yellow color of their coats that convinced him of that. The yellow-coated man had not been robbing Kara that day, and there was no God powerful enough to create a coincidence of this magnitude.
“There might be more, waiting for us,” Kara said, a note of fear ringing in her voice for the first time.
Arthr choked. It was possible. If someone was after them, then there was a real danger that they were just being smoked out into a greater trap. It was not a possibility that he was willing to bet their lives on. “Upstairs, then,” he said, breath short. He pulled Kara behind him up the stairs. His mind searched for an answer, but any escape route was ultimately a gamble. Hiding was out of the question; any room they could hide in would be torn apart if the men were thorough.
Then his mind hit upon something. “The roof! They’ll never find us up there!” Wishful thinking, but the odds were much better than jumping out a window and hoping they weren’t seen. They could get onto the roof through one of the second story windows. With the heavy clouds overhead and the cover of the light drizzle, anyone watching for them from afar would have to be looking at just the right place at just the right time. “My room, hurry.” His room had the best view of the trees in the back yard, and it would also be the most obscured. When they reached the top of the stairs, he spun to his right and pulled Kara down the hall. “Can you get up there from the window?”
“Of course I can.”
“Then do it! Don’t make any noise, be as light as you can on the roof. Stay in the middle, no one should see us up there as long as we stay low.” Arthr opened the door and slapped his light switch off—darkness was one of their only allies. He threw the window up until it clacked against its frame. “You go first,” he said in a rush, his heart pounding out of his chest.
Kara nodded and nimbly climbed onto the windowsill, her legs grasping at the walls. She stood, guiding her head and shoulders out the window while she steadied herself with her appendages. She flipped herself about, grabbed the wooden paneling above the window with her legs, and disappeared from Arthr’s view.
For a moment, he was too surprised by how naturally she moved to think straight, but that distraction melted beneath the fear of impending death. Following her lead, he hoisted himself onto the sill and let his legs hang off the side. He inched himself forward, easing his feet lower inch by inch until he felt the thin ledge of the extrusion beneath the window. His stomach began to quake. He ducked his upper body beneath the glass and stretched out his spider legs. The still-stiff healed leg creaked a little as he spread his appendages for balance. The wooden paneling groaned as he grabbed it with his hands. He thought he felt the whole side of the building shake when he began to stand upon that precariously thin ledge. Only when he had straightened out and was entirely outside the window did he, like Kara, turn himself about.
A crash came from downstairs. The sound of the front door banging open. Voices shouting indecipherable commands. Time was up. His legs went to work, and they soon felt the familiar weight of true exercise as he scaled the exterior wall. It was only a short climb before the lip of the roof was within reach. He held fast to the sheer paneling with his arms and six spider legs while the foremost two grasped at the ledge. The starting drizzle had already made the shingles slick. When he was sure his legs had purchase on the roof, he lunged upwards and grabbed the ledge with another set of appendages. His injured joint popped and tingled as he pulled himself up, but he ignored it and scrambled topside. The tiles rose to meet his face, and everything spun for a dizzying moment.
Kara had already moved to the center of the roof where the incline reached its maximum. The slant was shallow, but the central ridge would provide a rudimentary hiding place. Arthr got on the other side with Kara and pressed himself low against its surface, shivering at both the cold and the thought of the eyes that could be watching from just out of sight. At his side, Kara did the same, the rain already matting her blond hair.
Above, the low-hanging clouds continued to leak, spilling scattered drops across the grainy shingles of the roof. It could be worse, Arthr thought. If Kara hadn’t seen them coming, we’d be toast right now. While he could think of many things to complain about, he at least found a fragile comfort in the fact that they were safe up here. The men would scour the house, kicking doors and throwing stuff around, and when they didn’t find them they’d leave. Right? They didn’t plan on camping out, did they? Arthr was certain they hadn’t come for robbery; robbers tended to be sneaky, and didn’t run around with huge machine guns. So when whatever they came for wasn’t here, they would . . .
And then his mind hit a cruel revelation. The invaders would smash their way through the whole house, and they wouldn’t find them. But they would find the window of Arthr’s room thrown all the way open.
Shit, shit, shit, he thought, panic grabbing at him again. Okay, calm down, calm down, just because they find the window doesn’t mean they’re going to think roof, does it? We could have just dropped to the ground and run for it. But if they have others waiting, then they’d know we didn’t run f
or it. There’s nowhere else we could have gone, and they probably know that.
The rain began to fall harder, and Arthr’s string of rational thought began to break down. Drenched, he shivered both with encroaching dread and a physical chill. He had to remain brave for Kara. The only thing they could do now was wait.
They would not have to wait long.
Fleeing the yellow-coats, Spinneretta took a shortcut through a wooded thicket that, while densely packed with trees, would get her to the pavilion at Peninsula Park faster and more discreetly. And if any of the coats managed to come after her, they’d stumble over the snarling roots and stones more readily than she. But the coats were the least of her concerns at that moment.
She was no longer in that thicket, in that dress, beneath that empty sky. She was eleven again, in that grove, in that skirt, beneath a cruel moon. In terror, she’d left behind her pride and self-respect in a fantastic display of cowardice that night; wasn’t she repeating that same mistake? She’d fought against it, she’d bit her lip and stood her ground, only to be driven away in fear when faced with the shadow of mortality.
Mark told me to run, she thought. It’s not my fault!
Will said the same thing, a crueler aspect of her mind prodded. You left them both without so much as a goodbye.
Her eyes burned, and the trees opening before her faded into a blurred whirlpool of dark shades and laughing shadows. She remembered the smell of molding leaves in the undergrowth that night, near the banks of the river—the same river—where she’d fallen in despair. The scent of caked mud on her shoes returned to her nostrils. The tears that now ran from her eyes were the same tears from six years before; they had never dried.
The Spider Children (The Warren Brood Book 1) Page 38