by Max Anthony
With a titanic heave, Skulks wrenched the hand from his neck, though not before it managed to pinch a quantity of the fluffy hairs growing from his neck which it brought with it, making his eyes water. As he held the spider-hand against the floor, Skulks punched the spider-head again, drawing from it another growl as it gnawed at his posterior. A chamber pot protruded from under the bed and Skulks used a foot to kick it out onto the bedroom floor. With the severed hand pinned, he flipped the heavy metal chamber pot on top of it. Something caught his eye, but he had no opportunity to pause, with his rump now bruised beyond measure and only his trousers preventing the spider-head from making off with a lump of his flesh.
Using one of his dagger-swords, Skulks reached behind himself carefully. Though visibility was poor, he managed to slide the blade through one of the head’s cheeks and out of the other. After that followed a vigorous sawing action, slowed down by Skulks’ lack of leverage. After a dozen backwards and forwards motions, the connective tissue which operated the lower jaw was cut and the head fell off onto the floor. Skulks plunged a dagger-sword through one of its eyes, out through the back of its skull and into the floorboard beneath, pinning the head to the floor. It made a few gurgling and choking sounds.
The head was not alone in making gurgling and choking sounds, for after performing a double-take, Skulks was also uttering similar sounds.
“What? It cannot be!” said he, looking again. His initial shock was confirmed - this was indeed the head of the wizard Tiopan Lunder, whom Skulks had so recently killed. Now a part of the wizard had returned to exact its revenge on Skulks by biting half of his ear off and chewing insistently on his buttocks.
“Will I ever be shot of this foul wizard?” demanded Skulks as Lunder’s head frothed and foamed quietly at his feet. The head did not appear to recognize him, so Skulks felt somewhat mollified to realise that this was nothing personal. In fact, though he had a high dislike of the now-deceased wizard he would not have wished this fate upon him - Skulks preferred the dead to remain dead. As he stared down at the former Lunder, the noises coming from it became gradually quieter as whatever forces commanded its action faded away. Eventually it stopped gurgling completely, even when Skulks gave it a series of progressively harder nudges with the toe of his boot. He pulled his dagger-sword free and re-sheathed it, drawn back to the present by a plinking noise from the chamber pot. Skulks lifted up the pot and stared at the hand beneath.
“This is not fair!” he cried, as recognition streamed in and the hand started to drag itself across the floor in his direction.
There, upon its sun-tanned little finger was a thin silver band, which Skulks recognized. He recognized it because it was his own silver ring which had been upon his little finger when the transformed Lunder-beast had taken his hand off a few short weeks previously. Skulks didn’t know what had happened to the hand, having fallen into a swoon at the scene. He’d assumed it had just been thrown away, for what other use could there be for it?
“What a woeful evening!” he said, stepping on his old hand to prevent it from fastening onto his ankle. “I have been strangled by my own hand and my rear end has been worried by the head of a wizard I thought I’d never see again!” With a tear in his eye, Skulks leaned over and stabbed at the hand repeatedly, cutting off fingers and chunks of the flesh. Eventually it stopped moving, leaving Skulks to sit on the bed in order to gather himself.
He was given little time to mourn his whilom hand. As welcome as a fight at a funeral, the remaining spider-creatures had found their way through an open window upstairs and a few of the more adventurous ones had managed to inch down the sheer brick wall of the house. Though they lacked the wall-scaling confidence of a real spider, the legs of these monstrosities were still capable of finding their way into the tiniest of nooks and crannies as they pursued the Wielder in their house.
Drawn to the window by the sound of a spider-head dunting against the pane, Skulks ran over to see what horror awaited him now. As he looked out, he saw a leg and an arm drop down into the yard at the back of the house, having evidently failed in their attempts to climb the wall. The window in this room was tall and narrow, necessitating the use of a hooked stick to open and close the uppermost pane. Skulks grabbed this stick and hoisted up the lower pane. Using the blunt end of the pole, he knocked the spider-head away from the wall, watching it scrabble at the air as it fell to the ground, breaking off a leg as it landed.
Skulks poked his head out of the window and almost wished he had not - the wall of the building was coated in these obnoxious spiders as they jostled their way down from above. More emerged from the upper story window, one of them falling in its haste.
Leaning out, Skulks used the stick to knock four of the creatures from the wall, ducking back inside as they fell in order that they would not be able to kick or grab him as they tumbled. Another three spiders moved to take the place of the fallen and Skulks swept these from the wall also. The pack advanced, slowly and stupidly, only to be dislodged by a waving stick. Soon, Skulks found that he was enjoying himself and took to striking the creatures a second time in mid-air, trying to make them land on their brethren below.
“What a fine game!” he said to himself, his old hand now all but forgotten in the simple happiness of knocking spider-legs and spider-arms from a house wall. It didn’t take long before the supply of spiders within reach of his stick dried up and Skulks was forced to climb out onto the wall, clinging there by use of his Wielding power as he swiped away, knocking the horrid things away into the gloom of the yard below. At this stage, there were no more of them coming through the window and only a couple of spider-arms remained on the wall. Feeling a slight disappointment, Skulks swept these last two free from their uncertain grip and threw the stick down after them. Looking below, he could see a writhing mass in the enclosed yard, though they already seemed to have forgotten about him and were scuttling randomly to and fro as he had initially observed them doing in the entrance corridor.
With a ‘forwards, never backwards’ spirit of adventure, Skulks scaled the wall to the open window above. He cautiously peeped over the sill into the room beyond and listened carefully. Everything seemed to be quiet, so he nimbly pulled himself over the sill and entered the room. It was a study. Smaller than the bedrooms below, this room had a desk with drawers, a comfortable chair and little else. The door was part-way open where the creatures had pushed their way inside. Skulks crept over to it and closed it, forcing it to lock. Then, not wishing to be surprised, he went back to the window and looked out. The spider-creatures were still where he’d left them and were not attempting to climb back up here. Truly they were stupid, albeit strong and stubborn. Skulks closed the window and went across to the desk.
There were eight Slivers here, which vanished into his pocket almost before his brain had noticed their presence.
“They’ll pay for Chibbles’ bananas,” he told himself absently as he scanned the couple of papers which had been left in view. The first paper was a shopping list for needles, a large quantity of thread and some stewing steak. The next paper was a recipe for a steak pie, including a detailed step-by-step list of instructions.
“These don’t tell me much,” said Skulks, leaving the papers and turning his attention to the desk drawers. The first drawer had a dried, brown apple core and a stale, half-eaten cheese sandwich in it. The second drawer had another sheet of paper within, torn diagonally from the top with one half missing. Skulks cast his eyes over the words thereon. The page appeared to have been ripped from a diary and the sentences were incomplete owing to the missing section.
…stupid hands…legs keep coming off…must work on joining...going into the basement to see it…got this craving for a steak pie tonight
“A basement, eh?” Skulks asked himself, looking idly into the third drawer, which turned out to be empty. He burped, the taste of flowers and cheese reminding him that he should make haste in his investigations, though he noted that the eructations were no
w coming less frequently. Unlocking the bedroom door, he looked out carefully. There was no sign of anything threatening - hairy-legged or otherwise. Hopeful that they were all playing happily in the yard, Skulks ensured he was concealed as he left the bedroom, this time inspecting the chandeliers as he proceeded. He went down two flights of stairs to the ground floor, seeing only a single spider-creature, which was the lower half of a leg. It appeared to be confused because its spider legs whirred away in a vain effort to propel it through a solid brick wall. Skulks ignored it and went to the rear of the house, wherein basement entrances were invariably found.
So far he’d seen no evidence that the house was occupied by a living person, but as he didn’t want to be caught off-guard he made cautious progress, soon finding himself in the kitchen. The kitchen was a long, narrow room and Skulks peeked optimistically into a cupboard or two, looking for the steak pie mentioned on the sheet of paper upstairs. The cupboards were disappointingly bare and bereft of baked meat products. There were a couple of withered apples on a bench, but they wouldn’t provide the sustenance he craved.
There was a door at the far end of the room, which if opened would doubtless lead to a swarm of spider-horrors rushing back inside, so Skulks disregarded it. There was a second door, stout, wooden and set into the right-hand wall. It had no locks or mage guards and there were no sounds coming from behind it. The door opened onto a set of steps leading down, with a faint glow visible. Fully on guard, Skulks headed down to the bottom. The light came from a series of glass balls embedded into the walls. These weren’t in themselves indicative of the magical prowess of the owner, with any lowly adept able to make them and vast competition meaning they sold for five Slivers apiece at any general store.
The basement was a large room and looked like the workshop of a mad wizard, though Skulks felt that most wizards were at least slightly unhinged. There was a huge wooden table in the middle of the floor, surrounded by crates, glass jars and other containers of the unknown. There was a smaller workbench on the far side of the room, upon which Skulks could see vials, pots, jars and papers. It was cold down here and had a most unpleasant odour of chemicals used in embalming and preserving.
“Could this be where those spider-things came from?” Skulks asked himself. To one side of the doorway was evidence of this likelihood - a large pile of body parts was resting there. Arms, legs, heads and torsos were tossed together in a mound, all of them pallid and bloodless.
“How many people must have died to make this pile?” he wondered. It was not small – nearly five feet high and eight feet across. “If I die, I hope I stay unmoving, rather than being chopped up and brought back as part of a madman’s dream.” He used the word ‘if’ in reference to his own death because he didn’t actually know if he’d ever die of old age. Certainly, Wielders had been killed, but as far as Skulks knew none of them had lived out a long and happy dotage before succumbing to death from old age. With the confidence of the living, Skulks had little expectation that he’d die from unnatural causes, though he’d come close on many occasions.
The basement had only the one entrance and betrayed no sign of movement or activity. Skulks made a single circuit of the room to ensure no spiders were loitering in places he didn’t want them loitering. The jars and containers held all manner of fluids, which he sniffed at gently, ignorant of the risk that he might become further infected by something as nasty as the flower-and-cheese sleeping burps. Skulks was not a chemist and was scarcely interested in the subject, but when one is nigh on a thousand years old one picks up knowledge.
Many of the fluids Skulks thought he knew, having once been employed by an embalmer. This hadn’t been an attempt to enjoy a long and fruitful change in career, so much as to enable the theft of valuables secreted in the body cavities of a recently-deceased nobleman in an area of the Treads Archipelago where it was traditional for the rich to take their money with them to the afterlife. Skulks did not believe in the afterlife, but he was later ashamed of his actions in robbing the dead and had distributed the precious jewels he’d recovered (from places he’d rather not think about) to the local poor. In doing so he had permanently improved the lives of thirty-two families and driven three beggars - who would otherwise not have been able to afford more than a mug or two of ale - to death by alcohol poisoning. Had he known this, Skulks would not have felt guilt, for he believed that all people have a choice in how they live.
With fluids sniffed, Skulks removed the concealing cloak he’d been keeping about himself, because it took a modest amount of concentration to maintain. He turned his attention to the workbench and picked up a couple of vials, tipping them this way and that as he examined the contents. He withdrew his own vial from its pocket and compared it to the ones here. The vial itself was an exact match to the others present, but the contents were a different colour to anything on the table.
“Hmmm,” said he, ruminating. “It looks certain that the vial came from here, perhaps stolen from this very table. Yet there is no other vial with contents of the same colour.” He picked up one of the small pots and removed the lid. The familiar odour of baboon droppings wafted upwards. Maybe the owner of the house had an itchy hand like Skulks did. He felt a momentary sympathy for them as he scratched at his own hand, before dismissing the feeling - the person living here certainly deserved no pity at all.
As he picked up vials, urns and jars, a noise caught his attention. It sounded like something heavy falling onto a pliant surface, with a low muffled thump. He whirled around, dagger-swords in hand. The room was the same as it had been when he first entered. He looked at the pile of limbs, unsure if something had disturbed it. Maybe the limbs were piled precariously atop each other and an arm or a leg had slipped down from the top. He looked back at the workbench and took the stopper out of a long glass tube which had caught his eye. The purple fluid started to bubble and spit, so he quickly put the stopper back in place and picked up a spool of strong, thick thread. It was at least three-quarters gone and there were five wooden pegs nearby which had formed the centre of other spools, now spent. There was a thick, long needle on the desk as well, as if someone had been sewing a very heavy cloth.
Behind him, the pile of body parts had started to move. If Skulks had paid it closer attention, he would have seen the rough stitching visible in each of the limbs, attaching them to those adjacent. Had he looked even closer he might have observed that all of the legs were at the bottom of the grisly pile. Now, these legs worked in tandem as they pushed the mound quietly upright. Arms flexed and eyes opened in heads long-since dead. The preserved muscles in two dozen torsos tensed as they provided power for the other limbs. It was this which alerted Skulks, for the tensing of muscles prompted the expulsion of trapped gases from two anuses.
Once more Skulks found himself turning at speed, this time to see the pile of body parts lurching jerkily but very rapidly across the floor towards him. He swept up the vial of frothy liquid and threw it at the mound. The container shattered and spread the purple fluid thinly over several of the mound’s constituent limbs, which immediately started to bubble and wither as the fluid burned into them.
Having no desire whatsoever to engage this vile scuttle-mound, Skulks attempted to run around and past it. He was very fast and highly motivated, but the mound was having none of it and sped in a reverse direction, blocking his path to the door.
“Let me by!” Skulks yelled at it, picking up a larger container of an unknown clear fluid from the floor and throwing it at the mound, which made no attempt to avoid it. The container broke, but the escaping fluid seemed to have no effect other than to soak one side of the creature. Up until this moment it had remained silent, but now a dozen heads started gasping and wheezing, the sound directed at Skulks. He stared at some of the heads and saw that they mostly lacked expression or thought, but at least one must have retained a memory of what it had been, its face looking dismayed beyond measure.
Skulks ran back to the workbench and started hu
rling the other jars and pots at the mound. Some of them bounced off the hard flesh unbroken, but most smashed, covering sections of it in liquids of many hues. Here and there smoke rose as caustic fluids burned into the mass and Skulks flinched as he saw the face on one of the heads melt away, exposing the bones beneath.
To his horror, Skulks discovered that he wasn’t the only one who could throw missiles. Some of the arms on the mound pulled and tugged, ripping free chunks of the greater whole, which they threw at Skulks. Shortly he found himself dodging a cascade of feet, hands and even a head, which were thrown with great accuracy in his direction. Each part, where it landed, did its best to cause him problems, with the hands flipping themselves on the floor, then using their fingers to jump a foot or so off the ground in their attempts to grab hold of him.
Their first efforts were in vain, with Skulks now on top of the workbench and out of reach of their upwards springs. His flurry of missiles meant the workbench was exhausted of hand-sized items for throwing and the body-mound showed little sign of debilitation, though it was damaged in several places from the fluids which had burned into it. In other places the threads had corroded sufficiently for a few limbs to fall from the whole, but the functioning of the mound seemed to be unaffected.
“Bugger off, you incredulous heap!” Skulks demanded of it, unsurprised when it paid no heed to his wishes.
Not wanting to play a game of cat-and-mouse for the remainder of the evening, Skulks stuffed the papers from the desk into a pocket and jumped down, clearing a number of wriggling extremities on the floor. He could see that he was faster than the body-pile, though it was much greater in mass and definitely not slow, with dozens of legs working in perfect harmony to cut him off every time he tried to get to the exit door.