Spider Legs

by Piers Anthony

  “Why did you do that?” Natalie asked, rolling her eyes in total incredulity.

  “I hate bugs,” the lumberjack replied.

  Natalie let it go. This was going to be a long night.

  “Wow,” the boy exclaimed, forgetting about the kaleidoscope. “Can I touch the knife, Mom?” He looked at the steak-knife in the wall and then back at his mother.

  Nathan exchanged glances with Bill, indicating they thought Bryan was off his rocker. “What a nut case!” Bill whispered.

  “Brenda?” Nathan said. “You look a bit pale.” His face was furrowed with genuine concern. “Let me get you a drink of water.”

  “I'm OK,” Brenda said as a single tear dripped from her nervous eyes. Nathan handed her a glass of water. She continued to run her finger around and around on a water spot on the glass.

  Bryan persisted in playing with his large knife. “Put it away,” Natalie said to him. Her fist slammed down on the Formica surface of a table. A bottle of ketchup in the center of the table teetered, rolled, and fell to the floor.

  “You mind if I stack a few chairs behind the windows?” Bill asked Natalie. “Might help if the spider shows up again.”

  She shrugged. “Go ahead.” She seriously doubted that chairs would stop the pycno, but if this made for greater confidence among the passengers, it was worthwhile. In fact, if it just got the freaky lumberjack settled, it would be enough. The sea monster was bad enough; panic would double or triple its effect.

  Bill began methodically placing chairs against the many windows in the coffee shop. Brenda watched him and then whispered to Natalie.

  “Think he's dangerous?”

  Natalie smiled, preferring to interpret the question as humorous. If it referred to Bill, it was; if to Bryan, it wasn't. “Probably harmless, but I'll have to watch him.”

  A beeping sound came from behind Bill. It was the microwave. “I made some popcorn,” he said as he gave a small dish to the little boy. The boy looked up from his puzzle and smiled. “Thanks,” he said, as his mother nudged him.

  Natalie looked at Brenda and the child and was surprised to find herself suddenly on the verge of tears. She turned away and walked to one of the windows that Bill had not yet barricaded, trying to get herself under control. If she broke under the strain, who else would keep the situation under control? She loved Nathan, but he wasn't the type, and Falow couldn't do it alone.

  She looked out into the darkness and a queer, all-consuming feeling of being watched stole over her. She pressed her face against the glass window and cupped her hands in order to see better, but nothing was visible out there. Nothing but heavy banks of clouds, which were coming in their direction. For a moment she thought she caught sight of some nearby movement, and she took a step back before realizing the movement was just the reflected blinking of her own eyes. She almost smiled a little at her own nervousness.

  “Everything OK?” Nathan asked her as he followed her to the window.

  “OK, considering what we've been through, and the fact that we don't know if it will attack again.” She was relieved to find that her voice sounded normal. The passengers would lose confidence if a police officer even sounded strained.

  She held Nathan's hand but rather than receiving comfort she felt as if she were doped with Novocain. Fear did that, sometimes. Fear was the drug which numbed touch. Still she required closeness, so she took his hands in hers and pressed the side of her face against his. There was, after all, no need for secrecy; they had become a couple, and if the whole world didn't yet know it, that was because the world was a bit slow on the uptake. Nathan was being careful not to interfere when she was performing her police duties, but right now was an interstice. Others would assume that it was merely affection she was showing for him; her own awful fear and need of comfort was being masked.

  “No,” she murmured. “This can't be happening. Real life is not like a science-fiction novel.” The words came out with a trembling moan. Tears filled her eyes. Nathan understood; just so long as no one else caught on to her weakness.

  With all the chairs blocking the windows of the coffee shop, Natalie was beginning to feel like a caged animal with claustrophobia. “I'm going to go out on the deck and grab a few minutes’ breath of fresh air,” she told Nathan, disengaging. “You should stay here, and let me know the moment anything starts coming unglued.” Her eyes flicked toward the lumberjack meaningfully.

  Nathan nodded. “Please stay away from the rails,” he said. He placed his hand on her arm comfortingly, a small kindness that seemed huge to Natalie. Her feelings for Nathan were still deepening. He stirred her heart with his little ways as much as his large ways. She felt her tears coming again, but then stopped herself.

  “You don't have to tell me that.” But of course he had been joking, in his sometimes ineffective way. “I'll stay right next to the coffee shop door. I just need a little fresh air to snap me out of this.”

  But at the door she hesitated. Thunderheads were stacking up on the northern horizon. Loud boomings muttered over the ocean waves from that direction. More trouble brewing. Unless the storm caused the monster to go away.

  She turned, glancing back at Nathan, changing her mind about going alone. She saw him nod, catching on immediately. Bless the man!

  “I think I'll go up to the bridge and see how Captain Calamari and Rudolph are doing,” Nathan said.

  “Don't go out there!” Bryan screamed. The five-year-old boy dropped his kaleidoscope and its glass shattered. Brenda and Bill turned around to see what the lumberjack would do next. Natalie thoughtfully evaluated the man's mental state. Could she afford to leave the coffee shop even briefly? She decided to risk it, because not only did she need to get out of here for a while, she needed to know exactly what the situation was outside.

  “Something's—out there,” Bryan repeated.

  As if that were news! “We'll be out just for a minute,” Natalie said reassuringly.

  “Don't go out there! I feel its presence. Walking death,” the lumberjack said, slurring his words as if he had been drinking something stronger than pop. An artery on the left side of his neck visibly throbbed. Brenda and Bill looked at him with impatience and irritation.

  “Why not keep your mouth shut,” Bill said. Bryan looked at Bill and kept quiet. The lumberjack might have weighed twice what the waiter did, but now had none of the youngster's poise. Natalie realized that the business with the chairs had helped Bill recover confidence in the safety of his bastion.

  The other teenager laughed, but then decided it was best to be quiet. The little boy began to cry. Yes, she had to leave now—and return soon. Before things came apart.

  Natalie opened the door to the coffee shop, letting in a gust of cold wind that spat drops of rain on the linoleum floor. Various gray mists rose off from the sea in big steamy columns, enclosing the occupants of the coffee shop in their own private world. The rumbles of the approaching storm cooled the air a few degrees.

  The sea grew choppy and seemed to be in the hands of demons.

  CHAPTER 33

  Snout

  NATHAN STOOD ON the bridge with Captain Calamari, Falow, and Rudolph while Natalie checked the decks. Outside thunder boomed as an occasional streak of blue-white lightning stabbed the ocean near the horizon. Mists flowed onto the bridge, making the ferry's steering wheel the only solid reality in a shifting world. To their left were several cigarette butts which had been crushed in the congealing gravy on mashed potatoes. Some of the men from the engine room had been smoking more than usual.

  “Uggh,” Calamari said. “My stomach’s killing me, and I'll be lucky if I don't get diarrhea. I don't need this.”

  “You do look tired, Captain,” Falow said. “Dark circles under your eyes.”

  The captain's face was white, his eyes listless. “You don't look so great yourself, Chief,” he retorted.

  “The weather is not helping matters.” The ferry seemed to be swallowed up in a murky olive-brown fog, sh
ot here and there with shimmering streaks of an ochre tint. Falow quickly grabbed hold of a life preserver that the wind had torn free and was about to toss into the sea.

  “How does a man as big as you move so quickly?” Calamari asked. He winced as a cramp evidently wracked his bowels but luckily passed. Outside there were little lines of lightning that reminded Nathan of a sparkler. The flickers continued.

  “Years of practice.”

  They talked about inconsequential, perhaps trying to distract themselves from the horror of their reality. Like most Newfoundlanders, the captain said, he usually enjoyed all the local wildlife—both the animals and the plants. He particularly liked the flowering plants. In Newfoundland, beautiful wild flowers bloomed, seeded, and died all in a rush; plants flourished and perished quickly in areas of short summers and longer winters.

  In northern areas of Newfoundland, he remarked, where flowers were less plentiful, the sea ice buckled into canyons of blue and turquoise pastel, and Eskimo women searched for crabs. A herd of reindeer would sweep across the tundra by the Labrador sea, food for the Eskimos and wolves. Bowhead whales were still caught and butchered. Their skin was cut into strips called muktuk, considered a delicacy. When a local entrepeneur had approached Calamari and the ferry line management to open a muktuk bar on the ferry, they declined, pointing out that muktuk would not appeal to the tourists or ecologically-minded tourists. Nathan understood how that could be the case.

  Suddenly Rudolph cried out, “Big object on the sonar screen, closing fast.”

  “Any chance we could be running into an iceberg?” Nathan asked.

  “Ice is a poor reflector of radar waves,” Calamari said. “Even with a strong signal, which we don't have, we can't definitely identify icebergs. I wish we had one of those microwave radiometers. That would have told us more.”

  “So it could be an iceberg,” Falow said. “Let's hope we don't run into it.”

  “On a clear day,” the captain said, “I can see a berg from this ferry more than ten miles away. Tonight of course, we couldn't see it until we had hit it.”

  Calamari picked up the intercom microphone and spoke just two words to the passengers, “Brace yourself.” He then turned toward Rudolph. “Tell the men to get the life-rafts ready.”

  The captain's orders rang through the ferry. Aft and forward, the small crew snapped into action. The ferry's clock chimed out 10 P.M. in nautical couplets. Calamari studied the incredible maze of gauges and dials before him—manometers, shaft revolution indicators, vent opening indicator boards and various levers glistening with elbow-grease. He looked so helpless. Nathan knew that there was little he could do without working engines.

  A small electrician crawled down into the battery pits under the compartment decks and was able to get some of the backup power restored to the ferry. As the dwarf Dutchman rose from the pits he sneezed from the acid fumes but gave Calamari the thumb's-up signal. The lights on the ferry's control panel lit up like a Christmas tree and then began to dim slightly.

  The captain turned on a nearby sodium-vapor light and aimed it at the murky ocean waves. A urine-yellow glare reflected from the waves, but there was no sign of the leviathan. Calamari's light penetrated into a gray fog that hid the ocean and made it seem to Nathan as if he could invent any shape in the water that he wished.

  The reports came to Calamari's control room over intercoms. Unfortunately all but one of the life-rafts had been destroyed. Simultaneously, the intercom poured out an incredible message: the engine rooms were flooding.

  Nathan saw Rudolph go into action automatically. He knew what a flood of water in the engine room meant. Time was of the essence. Rudolph opened the high pressure air pipes to the main ballast tanks. The air roared into the tanks with the force of a tornado, expelling the ocean water in a bubbling spray. The entire ferry shook from the inrush of air.

  The intercom signal was fading. Instinctively, Calamari pushed his ear near the speaker with a violence that must have made his ear ring, straining to catch any further information from forward and aft. “Ready the one remaining raft,” he barked. Nathan knew that the order was a formality. The men were already lowering the raft. The captain then turned to an Eskimo junior lieutenant. “Please gather some of the passengers towards the raft.”

  Rudolph had connected a radio transmitter to the batteries in the pits, and he tapped out word to the Newfoundland Coast Guard that the ferry was in trouble. He hoped that some of his S.O.S. message would go through despite the broken antenna. Forward and aft, the passengers and crew settled down and waited.

  The dwarf Dutch electrician drank a little brandy from a metal flask he carried in his hip pocket. He pulled a photo from his wallet. Nathan conjectured that perhaps now that the man thought death was knocking at his doorstep, he was beginning to wish that he had treated his beautiful wife a little better over the last year, that he had paid more attention to her, and had been a little more loving. Of course Nathan didn't even know whether the man was married, but it seemed reasonable.

  It was time for him to return to the coffee shop; Natalie was probably already there. Once they had gotten out into the open air she had felt better, and gone about her business efficiently, checking for lost or injured people, and for signs of the sea spider. Apparently having a definite task to do restored her; it had been the tense inactivity inside that had gotten to her. He hadn't wanted to hamper her; he wasn't a policeman.

  The first tiny drops of rain began to patter down on the glass windows of the coffee shop, whose occupants nervously waited for the approach of the pycnogonid. Inside there was little place to hide. Nathan was with them now, but Natalie was still outside on deck somewhere. He tried not to let it bother him too much. And he decided that the direct truth was best, for the people here. “The shaking of the boat was the pressuring of the ballast tanks,” he reported. “But there is something coming.” He looked around, trying to judge how they were taking it. Apparently they were OK; confirmation was better than doubt.

  He went to Elmo and Lisa, but they seemed to be all right, though both were pale. Someone had found them a blanket, and they were huddled together under it.

  Bryan was the first to hear a noise beyond the coffee shop door—a slurping wet noise accompanied by scratching. “It reminds me of the noise my mother's garbage disposal made after putting soft garbage inside,” he said. He seemed to have steadied down in the interim, which was a relief, and his analogy seemed apt: that was what it sounded like.

  “Can it get through the doors or windows?” Brenda asked. Nathan saw the front of her full blouse quivering rhythmically, and realized that it was echoing her pulse; her heart must be beating like a jackhammer. She reached inside her pocketbook for a tranquilizer to calm her escalating anxiety. After a minute of searching, she gave up. “I took the last pill weeks ago,” she muttered. Instead she began to pace back and forth but stayed very close to her son. That didn't do it, and soon she was back in her chair.

  “I checked a window,” Nathan said. “It's inch-thick plate glass. Maybe if we are quiet and don't move, the pycno won't know we're in here.”

  Now Nathan had the feeling that he was being watched. He quickly looked toward the windows but saw nothing. His heart skipped a beat because the dark windows reminded him of a row of black dead eyes. The door and windows were filling up with shadows, making his nervousness increase. But until Natalie returned, he had to put on the confident front, so as to keep the others calm.

  Suddenly the ferry began to tilt rapidly to stern. Brenda lost her footing as the angle of the ferry reached 30 degrees, and she was propelled from her seat, like a pellet fired from a shotgun. Salt and pepper shakers crashed to the vinyl floor. A quiet Inuit woman held onto a table, but then tumbled to the floor when the table began to slide. Elmo and Lisa were holding onto each other, seeming stable, physically and otherwise.

  The steady white noise of the air conditioner suddenly stopped. Water began to pour from the air conditioning v
ent in the side of the room, dousing Bill with bitterly cold salt water. Nathan knew what was happening: sea water was coming down the ship's air conditioning system, and the pipes that normally carried air out of the coffee shop to the outer deck were now alive with frothing ocean water.

  But understanding it didn't solve the problem. Several hundred gallons of sea water roared into the coffee shop, hitting Brenda full in the face, sweeping her across the floor and bringing her hard against the glass door. Even as the icy water cascaded into the coffee shop they heard some sounds coming from outside.

  “It'll stop in a moment!” Nathan cried. “Get out of the flow!”

  Brenda's white poodle, dripping with water, laid back her ears and whined. The rush of water slowed to a trickle in a few minutes.

  “Mommy, what's out there?” the little boy said. He started to tug nervously on his cartoon T-shirt. Brenda hugged him closer as she shivered in her wet clothes. Water continued to gush, churning up foam that refracted the light from the ceiling bulbs like garlands of silver tinsel.

  “Nothing we should worry about,” Brenda said bravely. “Let's read one of your books. How about Dr. Seuss's Green Eggs and Ham? You love that Sam-I-Am.”

  “How about The Cat and the Hat?” said her son.

  Nathan continued to gaze at the windows of the coffee shop, trying to shake the feeling that reality was on the verge of slipping out of control. Bill and Bryan followed Nathan's gaze around the periphery of the room.

  “OK,” Brenda said as she rummaged nervously in her bag of toys and books. The poodle wedged herself between Brenda and her son.

  Bryan carefully stirred the cup of tea in front of him. The sound of the fork bounced off the sides of his cup and grated on Nathan's nerves. But the last thing he wanted to do was set the lumberjack off again, so he ignored it.

  Seconds later the sea spider's large proboscis stuck its opening to a window as if it were searching for food. Right at the pinkish end of the proboscis were little shriveled black lips that pressed and flattened on the glass like two balloons. Green goo poured from the opening and dripped down the plate glass like a river of mucus. Several feet away from the window, Nathan saw the glittering black eyes of the proboscis. One eye swiveled toward Brenda as the incandescent bulbs of the coffee shop threw white rhomboids of light on the dark, shiny orb.