by Max Anthony
A mere three streets further, the monkey once more slowed to a sedate walk. Skulks was starting to recognize the signs of its behaviour and knew that they were close to their destination. He fervently hoped that this next stop wouldn’t be the scene of another one of his crimes. As it happened, the monkey led him to a street which had seen recent signs of Skulks’ criminal activities, though these were at the behest of the city.
“The Docks!” exclaimed Skulks as it became apparent where they were. This was the name of a very well-to-do street of huge terraces, where Tiopan Lunder had made his home when he was masquerading as a merchant in order to get up to mischief for his master, King Meugh. Lunder had lived at the most expensive end of the street, but Chibbles was leading Skulks towards the newer, slightly less affluent dwellings. The monkey walked up to No. 115, The Docks. Skulks checked his memory to see if he’d been here in the past or if he’d stolen anything from this house. His memory came up clean. If there had been any mischief committed here, it hadn’t been his own. Chibbles climbed into the small front garden and was still, looking directly at No. 115. They had arrived.
Seven
“I’m on my own, am I?” Skulks asked Chibbles. He was relieved - he didn’t really want a partner and even more so he didn’t want a partner that might give the game away by stealing fruit at an inopportune moment, or go zooming off for reasons Skulks didn’t know or was able to control.
The house looked empty, with no lights visible at any of the windows. Keeping himself hidden from the street, Skulks pressed his nose against the glass of a downstairs window and looked through. There wasn’t even a glimmering visible from rooms deeper within.
He sidled over to the front door, a large and solid affair of the kind meant to impress certain guests and intimidate others. Most of these doors had big, heavy locks which needed a key so large that many owners rapidly regretted buying the house simply on the basis of having to carry a foot-long metal key everywhere they went. Consequently, the key tended to be hidden somewhere only the owner knew about, so that it could be easily retrieved, rather than lugged down to the sandwich shop of a morning.
Skulks lifted the door mat and there it was - a thick, black metal key, so obtrusive that it lifted the mat clear from the fancy tiled entranceway. He dropped the mat back in place. He hadn’t really wanted the key, so much as to see how many guesses it took him to locate it. The door itself wasn’t magically guarded, but the mechanical lock was in place. Skulks used his Wielding powers to command it open and it dutifully obeyed, releasing not a squeak nor a squeal into the night air.
The front door drifted open. It was Skulks’ favourite trick to lure out people who might be sitting quietly in the room beyond. Generally, the act of a door swinging silently open would be dismissed as something mundane, such it being poorly latched, or whatever other excuse the observer needed to make in order to come to terms with a door opening of its own accord. The opening door to No. 115, The Docks brought forth no curious servant or owner to investigate why their door had behaved so inappropriately.
Skulks pushed the door wider and slipped into the expected lobby area. It was expertly tiled in polished red stone, which would be a terrible risk to the infirm when wet. Such floors were not laid with safety in mind, however. They were designed for the gentleman of the house to stride purposefully over, with his leather-soled shoes clacking crisply upon the hard surface. This sound was known to define a man of importance.
With the door closed behind him, Skulks walked cautiously over the tiles, without making any sound at all. If this defined him as a man of no importance whatsoever, he neither knew nor cared. There was only a single exit from the lobby and Skulks was heading for it when he heard a sound. It was not the expansive sound of leather sole upon hard tile, but a clicking, skittering sound. He stopped his progress and turned around, trying to focus on the direction it was coming from. The lobby had a number of coat stands and coat racks, some of which had garments hanging from them. There were also two low tables, upon which a lady or gentleman might prop themselves as they removed a winter shoe-cover.
The skittering noise did not make itself heard again, even though Skulks waited for a few minutes. He was not a man to pretend that a sound hadn’t happened and tell himself “Oh well, it was just the wind” when it clearly hadn’t been the wind. He relied on such tricks to get into places that people didn’t want him to get into, so he certainly wasn’t going to fall for them himself. Nevertheless, he hadn’t been quite sure where the sound had come from, so he decided to proceed with caution and continued towards the exit door, now on guard for the unexpected.
Even when one is expecting the unexpected, there is always a chance that the unexpected will out-fox the person who is trying their very best to expect it. So it was here.
“Urgh!” said Skulks in quiet shock as something grabbed his lower leg, just above his boot. He looked down and something was holding tightly to his leg, that something being a human arm. Human arms are normally accompanied by a human torso, which in turn might be expected to have a head and limbs sprouting from it. Not so this arm, which was entirely detached from the body it had once belonged to. Lacking the usual method of propulsion, this arm had a full eight spider legs growing from it, four to a side. Black, shiny and hairy these legs were, with two joints and a thickness of two fingers. Skulks now knew the source of the rustling and skittering sounds, though he would rather have remained ignorant.
The hand on his leg squeezed him. It wasn’t the gentle leg squeeze of a wife to her much-loved husband in order to show silent comradeship. This squeeze was of a sort meant to throttle the life out of someone, though Skulks’ leg was not especially vulnerable to strangulation. He grabbed the arm and pulled at it, but it was keen to retain its hold. The spider legs clicked softly on the floor as they slithered and slipped, trying to pull in the opposite direction. The surface was not a good one for grip and they failed to obtain any purchase.
Unable to prevent himself, Skulks spoke the redundant words, “Get off my leg!” He leaned over and pummelled at the hand, which ignored his powerful strikes. He took hold of the arm again and twisted it, hoping to tear it free from his leg. It felt cold, hard and lifeless. Lifted from the ground, the spider-arm’s legs kicked at the air. The hand was very strong - much stronger than a normal hand and Skulks felt his kneecap grate as it was squashed by the clutching fingers.
“You leg-stealing swine-arm!” uttered Skulks as he decided on a new approach. He took hold of the first spider leg and pulled it backwards and upwards. The hairs were bristly and unpleasant, but the leg snapped readily enough in his hand, tearing away from the arm it had never meant to be a part of. Though it left a socket hole behind it, no blood came forth. Another two legs followed the first, with Skulks throwing them across the floor, where they continued to flex and writhe. When only three of the legs remained, Skulks knelt down, putting a knee on the end of the arm, pinning it and its legs to the floor. Using one hand, he pushed three of his fingers beneath a digit on the clutching hand and pulled firmly. The grasping finger snapped and its ligaments tore, leaving it hanging limply, unable to enact further commands.
One at a time, the other fingers suffered the same fate. He’d managed to pull the hand from his leg when only two of the fingers had been snapped, but Skulks took happy satisfaction from snapping the other two and the thumb.
“How did you like that?” he asked the arm as it flopped on the floor. It bent and unbent at the elbow while its remaining three legs pushed it in a circle on the lobby tiles.
“I thought as much,” he said, responding to the unspoken answer from the arm that it hadn’t liked it very much at all, thank you for asking. He didn’t want the beastly arm to follow him on his coming endeavours, so he picked it up by one of the legs, holding it away from his body in case it tried any more of its throttling efforts.
“This is going to hurt you more than it hurts me,” he told it, pulling the remaining legs away with a trio of
popping noises. He dropped the arm to the floor and trod firmly upon the hand, hearing it crunch as his grinding heel did it further injury. Then, he kicked it into a corner where it continued to bend and unbend, though now without much vigour. Skulks dropped a pile of coats on it and left it to its own devices.
With the spider-arm’s threat nullified, Skulks carefully opened the lobby’s exit door and peeped out into the corridor beyond. There were more skittering and rustling sounds - many more skittering and rustling sounds. Skulks could see perfectly well in the dark and he looked in horror at the many shapes in the corridor. There were arms, legs, hands and heads, all with their own hairy spider-legs to propel them. They moved sporadically but rapidly, without any visible prompting. He watched as a head-on-legs stared at the wall for a moment, before it rotated fully around and charged over to the other wall, with its legs making a gentle click-click-click on the tiles.
“Good god,” thought Skulks to himself. “What have I got myself into?”
He considered leaving by the front door and letting himself into the house another way. He weighed the idea up but rejected it because here was a known quantity. If he broke in through an upstairs window there could be other, unknown, surprises awaiting him.
“Anyway,” he chided himself, “these spider-heads and spider-limbs appear to be stupid creatures, not knowing if they are coming or going.”
He drew one dagger-sword and pulled the darkness around him to conceal himself from sight and scent. Stepping tentatively out into the corridor, he prepared to make a dash for it if they decided to swarm him. The early signs were good and no savage horde of flailing body parts hurtled along the corridor towards him. He crept along, pausing every now and again as a hand or arm scuttled in front of his path.
“I’ll go upstairs first,” he told himself. “It’s where most people keep their valuables.” He thought about correcting himself - he was not here looking for valuables per se. Then he told himself that the vial was the occupant’s most valuable possession, therefore he was strictly speaking on the lookout for valuables. Also, he pointed out to himself, whoever lived here was clearly not the sort of person one would invite to a dinner party, so it would be tantamount to criminality if he didn’t steal as many valuables as he could lay his hands on.
“It’s what the owners of the body parts would want me to do,” went his self-justification.
Fortunately for Skulks, the stairs led upwards from this main corridor, so he didn’t have to engage in any difficult manoeuvres to find his way to the first floor. There were a couple of spider-hands to contend with as he ascended, one of which scuttled to and fro without cease. He took a large stride over it, missing out the spider-hand’s tread entirely. To his disgust, it chose that very instant to spring upwards onto the new tread he had chosen, where it ran over his unseen foot. While the hand evidently lacked a brain or sensory organs, whatever foulness had animated it knew that there shouldn’t have been a foot in the place where it had just scuttled. Before it could act, this unseen foot swept in a firm sideways action, sending the hand tumbling to the bottom of the stairs.
Once in the past, Skulks had observed carnivorous fish in a feeding frenzy as they tore a much larger fish to pieces. The result here was similar. As the hand landed upside down on the carpet below, it flipped itself upright and all of a sudden, the various limbs in the corridor joined it in a frantic and blind search for an intruder. They evidently couldn’t tell Skulks was there and they were certainly very stupid, for they ran this way and that, climbing over each other in the vain hope that they would bump into something of interest. Skulks looked down upon the tumult with distaste, pitying the dead for what they had become.
Eventually the activity died away and the creatures resumed their sporadic and random scuttlings, which now reached Skulks’ ears as a susurration, for he had completed his climb and was exploring the first floor. He was relieved to discover that there were no more spider creatures up here.
“Perhaps they are guard-things,” he suggested to himself. “Posted below to keep out intruders and give the owner some security for their belongings.” He cheered up at this idea - anyone who had gone to such lengths to protect their goods must have a very great quantity of goods to protect.
“Valuable goods,” he whispered, the words drawn from his mouth as he entertained a mental detour wherein his hand descended into an open jewellery box and withdrew numerous precious items.
This was a big house and the first floor landing had several doors leading into rooms unknown. The carpet underfoot was a rich green and with a thick pile. Skulks liked carpets of this ilk, knowing that a man or woman who could afford to cover their floor in a fine-quality material could usually afford to cover their bodies in expensive baubles.
None of the doors were locked or warded and Skulks wondered at this as he put his head around the first one. It was a bedroom, empty of anyone. The bed was unmade and a few pieces of clothing were strewn around. All appearances were that someone had left in such a hurry that they’d not bothered to pack. Or maybe the occupants were simply very messy.
“I have seen signs of magic in these foul creatures with their spider legs. I have seen my friends put to sleep by the effects of a green potion. Yet nowhere else is there a sign of magic,” he said, pulling the first door closed behind him.
His reverie was broken by a crunching underfoot. He looked at his feet and saw that he’d trodden upon a large frog, its colour perfectly matched with the carpet. In his distraction, he’d been fooled by its camouflage. Its hind legs were irrevocably flattened by his boot and the frog blinked its eyes in agony.
“Ribbet!” exclaimed the frog loudly. Skulks hardly had time to wonder what a frog was doing here when it exclaimed once more: “Ribbet!” The noise was uncommonly loud and Skulks was not reassured to hear sounds of frantic activity from below. He was even less reassured to note that these sounds were coming closer, as the spider-creatures sped upstairs to investigate the cause of the ribbeting.
To relate another of Skulks’ tavern experiences, he had once found himself discussing the significance of the number three with a man who had been driven almost insane by his certainty that this seemingly innocent number was the cause of all misfortune. “Think of it,” the man had said. “If I drink for another hour I might be sick. If I drink for another hour on top of that I might be sick and piss meself. But,” here he had paused for effect, “if I drink for another hour on top of all that lot I might piss meself, shit meself and be sick, all at the same time. Three bad things.”
Initially dismissive of the theory, Skulks had warmed to it and had spent the evening telling anyone who’d listen how wicked the number three was. For a time afterwards, he’d avoided buying food products in threes, worried that the third one would cause him a stomach upset.
Now the number three had returned to haunt him. Firstly, he’d trodden upon a hidden frog, which had secondly alerted a basket-load of horrendous spider-creatures. Then the power of three manifested itself with a third misfortune in the form of an unexpected gift from above. As Skulks wavered, a spider-head, a spider-hand and a spider-leg, dropped from a chandelier where they’d been patiently waiting. The hand halted its descent by grabbing Skulks around the back of his neck. The head was equally successful, biting the top half of his left ear off as it fell, before springing from the floor and using its teeth to fasten on to the seat of his trousers. The spider-leg was also moderately successful - though it had no means of gripping Skulks, it did manage to kick him in the balls as he was distracted by the hand and the head.
Not pleased, Skulks made a run for it along the landing away from the stairs, but not before he’d finished the job one boot had started, by standing venomously on the front half of the perfidious frog. Leaving the pile of entrails and burst green skin behind him, he picked the spider-leg up at the knee and threw it in the direction of the stair well, hoping it would cause a distraction for the approaching swarm. At this point, the pain in his
kicked testicles was telling him that it was time to drop onto all fours and start retching. His ear wasn’t faring much better and was stinging quite annoyingly, while the spider-hand squeezed at the back of his neck. To cap it all, the spider-head had a firm hold of his britches and was shaking itself left and right, making a growling sound as it did so.
“This won’t do,” said Skulks in dismay, feeling most set-upon. He completed his sprint along the landing, using one hand to try and pry away that which was strangling him. He hurled open a door, barged inside, slammed it behind him and used his Wielding powers to force it locked. Finding himself in another mundane bedroom and beset by a hideously re-animated hand and head, Skulks rolled over the floor twice in the hope of dislodging them. Neither were willing to give up their grip, but four or five spider legs were snapped off onto the floor, one of them stabbing Skulks in the thigh as he rolled onto the pointed end.
As he completed his rolling, he heard thumps on the bedroom door as the rest of the spider-pack tried to force entry. Skulks felt himself safe from them for the moment, as these houses were solidly built and their fixtures and fittings equally sturdy.
Giving his attention to the more immediate threats, Skulks punched the spider-head. Even though it was latched onto one of his buttocks it was more of a distraction than a threat, albeit a distinctly uncomfortable one. Skulks gave it a few additional punches in any case, just for having the temerity to bite him on the arse.
The hand still squeezed firmly at the back of his neck and worryingly, was trying to inch its way around so that it could squeeze his windpipe. At the moment, it was a stalemate between the tensed muscles of the Wielder’s neck and the unnatural strength of the severed hand. Skulks reached over his head and twisted the remaining spider legs away from the hand, hoping to weaken it somehow. The grip remained undiminished, but even in the gravest of danger a part of his mind took satisfaction from the meaty popping sounds as the legs were pulled from their sockets.