by Ian Rogers
When the deliverymen had gone and Eddie had wandered back to his own house, Morris returned to the den and began the business of setting up his new television.
He loved the den. It was his place. He had installed shelves on one entire wall to accommodate his extensive DVD library. Framed movie posters—as beautiful as any work of art, in his opinion—graced every wall. Tall Bose speakers stood like sentinels in each of the room’s four corners. A glass-fronted cabinet held his DVD player and stereo system. The only furniture was a leather couch and a recliner, both of which had been strategically positioned to take full advantage of the surround-sound system, thereby ensuring a true theatre-going experience. Jude referred to the den as his shrine to the great god Hollywood.
As he was admiring the setup of television, sound system, and furniture, like megaliths in some postmodern Stonehenge, he noticed something out of the corner of his eye, near one of the speakers.
It was a spider, a little grey one, constructing a web in the corner near the ceiling.
Morris picked up a copy of Entertainment Weekly, rolled it into a tube, and made to brush away the web.
Then he remembered the crickets.
They had moved in sometime around the start of the summer. He didn’t remember exactly when because they didn’t bother him, but Jude started to complain about their incessant chirping. She claimed to hear them all through the house, though Morris was fairly certain they were located somewhere in the laundry room. That Morris couldn’t hear them in any place except the den didn’t matter. According to Jude, he usually had the volume turned up so loud he wouldn’t have heard World War III even if the first nukes landed on Alder Lane.
He figured the crickets were holed up behind the water heater, or maybe under the wash tub. Jude only went downstairs to put on laundry, but lately she was making him do it. The chirping, she said, was becoming too much to bear. She told Morris to hire an exterminator, but he had refused. Surely he was capable of taking care of a few crickets.
Except now he wouldn’t have to. The spider could do it for him. He had seen a program on the Discovery Channel that said spiders were the sheriffs of the insect kingdom. They were tough little rascals. The program had also said that spiders couldn’t die of natural causes, and if kept safe, a spider can continue to live and grow for a theoretically unlimited amount of time. Apparently there was a collection of “holy” spiders in China that had been hatched some 2,800 years ago. One of the geeks on the show said that a spider’s carapace, if sufficiently scaled, could adequately shield a nuclear blast.
It might take a few weeks for this particular spider to catch the crickets, but in the long run it would be worth the money he’d end up saving on an exterminator. And so what if Jude had to suffer a bit longer. She didn’t seem to care about his own suffering at having to leave Portland.
Okay, he thought, putting down the magazine, you’ve just been pardoned, my eight-legged friend. But he wouldn’t tell Jude. No way. She’d think the solution was worse than the problem.
Morris spent the rest of the day setting up his new television, adjusting the settings on his new television, and then playing with his new television. By nine o’clock he was beat and dragged himself to bed, answering Jude’s few, polite inquiries about the television, and then falling quickly into sleep.
He dreamed of Eddie.
His first thought when he saw him, coming down the stairs into Morris’s den, was: Don’t I see you enough when I’m awake? Now you’ve got to barge into my dreams?
He watched as Eddie, dressed in his plaid bathrobe and moose slippers, came over to the new television. Eddie smiled as he took a metal canister out of one frayed pocket. He held it up with both hands, displaying it like a prize on a television game show, and Morris saw it was a canister of starter fluid.
What are you doing here, Ed?
Eddie continued to smile as he upended the canister and poured starter fluid all over the television. It splashed across the black plastic housing and ran down the polished screen. Eddie produced a wooden kitchen match and scratched it across his thumbnail. Still smiling, he dropped it onto the console. A wave of flame leapt up with a whomff! sound. Morris stepped back, shielding his face from the bright flames.
Damn! Eddie bellowed. Was that thing flammable?
Unable to move, Morris watched as the fire ran down the screen in burning rivulets. There was loud pop and a fan of sparks exploded off the back of the console. The television screen blackened, cracked, and coughed glass onto the carpet. Acrid smoke billowed out of the hole.
Eddie danced puckishly before the quickly spreading fire. Oopsie! he said with a shrug, and ran up the stairs. Morris followed. He moved quickly, but when he reached the living room, Eddie was nowhere to be found. He looked out the big picture window and there was Eddie, outside on the lawn. He wasn’t alone. It looked like the entire neighbourhood had come out to watch his house burn. Eddie smiled and waved.
House is on fire! he shouted. It’s the antenna! It’s throwing off sparks like a sonuvabitch!
At first Morris thought he misheard him—then a shower of sparks came down from somewhere on the roof. But there was no antenna up there. The only thing he thought it could be was a downed power transformer. But there weren’t any that crossed over the house.
Morris heard a crash behind him, followed by a tinkling sound like the ringing of tiny bells.
As he was turning around, he woke up. For a second or two he thought he could still hear the tinkling, as if the sound had followed him into the waking world. But the house was dark and silent.
He picked up the glass of water on the nightstand and drained it in a single gulp. He looked over at Jude’s side of the bed, but it was empty. The door to the connecting bathroom was closed and he could hear muffled retching sounds from within. He wanted to get up and make sure she was okay, but he was so exhausted he could hardly move. All was quiet on the digestive front, but he felt weak and oddly used up. His body was slick with sweat. He pulled his nightshirt up over his head and tossed it on the floor. His skin was ghostly pale and there was a purple bruise the size of his fist under his left armpit. He didn’t recall hurting himself there. Maybe when he was moving the television? But that didn’t explain why he felt so drained.
Probably picked up a bug, he thought. In the bathroom, Jude made another heaving sound. Both of us.
A damn flu bug. And on a Friday, no less! He had the whole weekend planned out. He was going to clean the gutters, mow the lawn for what he hoped was the last time this season, and go to the hardware store to pick up a new set of hedge-clippers. His old set had vanished last year into the Bermuda Triangle that was Eddie Giles’s tool shed.
He heard the toilet flushed, and Jude came shuffling out of the bathroom, wiping her mouth. “I barfed,” she said unceremoniously. “Must’ve been those fish sticks.”
Morris gawped at her. She was pale as a ghost. “Maybe,” he said.
Morris didn’t bother showering the following morning. Instead, he went down to the den and put on a movie. Fifteen minutes into it, he started to feel drowsy. He found his attention drifting over to the spider, still building its web in the corner.
As he watched, the spider crawled up to the ceiling and skittered across to a spot directly above the television. Morris felt something move along his arm and brushed at it instinctively. But when he looked there was nothing there. The feeling remained for a moment—like a slight breeze blowing through the hair on his arm—then it was gone. He looked back at the ceiling and saw the spider floating down on a thin, almost invisible strand of web. The moment it landed on top of the television, the picture on the screen went out. There was no flash, no pop, no spark. It just went out.
Morris went into the laundry room and checked the fuse box. He replaced the blown fuse (a thin curl of smoke rose off the cooked end) and returned to the den.
The television was back on. He dropped back onto the couch and looked i
nto the corner. The spider was back in its web, racing busily back and forth.
Morris droned. Coffee break’s over, fella. Get back to work.
He slept.
The day drifted and so did Morris. Time dissolved into a grey mist that, in his mind, looked like a spider web in which his thoughts were caught like flies. He did none of the things he had planned for the day; he never even left the den. He slept, he woke, he shifted around on the couch, he slept some more. At one point he woke up and saw the spider on the armrest beside his head.
Howdy, sheriff? Catch any varmints today?
The spider remained still, legs curled up to its sides, which wasn’t grey after all but a deep, almost reflective, silver. Morris was struck by the crazy idea—it had to be crazy, didn’t it?—that the spider was watching the television.
“Too much of this stuff will rot your brain.”
He picked up the remote and put it on the Discovery Channel.
“You might as well learn something.” He looked down at the spider. It still hadn’t moved. “You’re a smart little fella, aren’t you?”
Morris shook his head and slunk down lower on the couch.
Then he drifted off again.
The next time he woke up the spider was gone and there was a test pattern on the television screen. He turned it off and went upstairs. He was so tired when he reached the top of the stairs that he made a proclamation to join a gym next week. This was starting to get embarrassing. He went to bed and slept through most of Sunday with Jude curled up beside him.
He dimly recalled going into the bathroom at some point, but the memory was distant and intangible. It might even have been a dream. A part of him hoped it was because he recalled looking into the mirror and seeing a face that was not his own. It was the gaunt face of a concentration camp refugee. His eyes looked like ice chips staring out of sockets that seemed much too deep; his cheeks were sunken and carved with dark lines of shadow; and his lips were bright red, as if he had been eating cherries. He didn’t look sick—he looked diseased.
The following morning—was it Monday already?—Morris tried to take out the garbage. He made it halfway to the curb before a wave of nausea came over him. It felt like someone was jabbing him in the stomach with a stick. He stumbled back up the driveway and and along the flagstone path to the front porch. For a brief moment he glanced up at the roof. He saw the new satellite dish and, next to it, a silver antenna.
Had the satellite people installed that?
For some reason he associated the antenna with fire, but he didn’t know why. It was just a silver rod, about eighteen inches long, with a ball-bearing on the tip. And yet something in his mind was convinced that wasn’t all it was.
He went back inside and picked up the phone in the kitchen. He had to call work and tell them he wouldn’t be in today, maybe not for a few days. As he put the receiver to his ear, a horrible screeching sound came out of the earpiece. He drop the phone and it smacked loudly on the linoleum floor. He picked it up, replaced the receiver, and went back upstairs to check on Jude.
She was curled up on her side of the bed. He crouched next to her and gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. When he let go, his fingers left dark impressions on her skin. Bruises. Morris shook her—gently at first, then progressively harder—but she wouldn’t wake up.
“Jude,” he said with a slight tremor in his voice. “Jude, wake up.”
She muttered something unintelligible and fell silent.
Morris raced back downstairs and grabbed the car keys off the cork board. He went outside and the nausea fell on him again. It felt as if his head was wrapped in a hot, wet towel. He stumbled down the porch steps and zigzagged across the flagstone path to his car. The early morning sun felt hot enough to burn holes through his skin.
He fumbled the door open and collapsed into the driver’s seat. He closed the door and stabbed the key at the ignition slot. It took him three tries to find it. He just couldn’t seem to focus. The nausea continued to close around his head like a bad weather system. His stomach clenched, suddenly and violently, and before he realized it, he had vomited all over the steering wheel. The smell was so awful he vomited again. Then he passed out.
When he awoke the smell inside the car was so bad it was almost miasmic. He opened the door and hauled himself out, breathing in great snatches of fresh air. He looked at his watch to see how long he had spent in that putrid sauna, but it had stopped. He shambled back to the house, his head throbbing with every step.
He saw the antenna on the roof.
It looked taller.
He couldn’t make it back upstairs to Jude. It seemed to require too much effort to go anywhere. He managed to slink down the stairs to the den. It was cooler down there. He flopped down on the couch and stared at the web in the corner of the room.
It was the spider, he thought deliriously. It was feeding on them somehow, draining them. A couple of days ago he would have laughed at such an idea. It was a regular Eddie Giles special. A spider that fed on life force instead of bodily fluids. But it didn’t seem so crazy now. When one’s mind was hanging by a thread (a spider-thread! he thought crazily), it was easy to accept all kinds of things that might ordinarily seem unbelievable.
It’s been working overtime, but the real web is this house.
Which made him and Jude flies.
Houseflies.
In the horror movies he sometimes watched, the killer insects were always huge, radioactive abominations. But this spider had not gotten big; it had gotten smart. Like the one in that children’s book, the spider that wrote messages in its web. Charlotte’s Web. Charlotte.
Is that who you are? Charlotte? A spider for the new millennium?
He wondered how long he had before he became as comatose as Jude. A week? A day? Maybe only a few hours? He knew he should have felt concern for his wife, but it just seemed like too much work. It was horrible to feel that way, but it wasn’t personal. He didn’t care about anything. He had never felt so apathetic in his entire life.
He thought back to Charlotte’s Web, specifically the ending, when Charlotte’s children emerged from the egg sac and flew away like dandelion seeds on the wind. He didn’t think this particular spider had flown in on a thread, but he had an idea . . . something about fire . . . and sparks.
He managed to muster his strength and go upstairs. He went out onto the porch and craned his head around so he could see the roof. Yes, the antenna had indeed gotten taller. He thought about getting the ladder and taking a closer look, but he’d probably fall off and fracture his skull. Besides, he didn’t really need to go up there. He knew in some unexplainable way that the spider and the antenna were somehow connected. He had to figure out what to do about it. While he was still able to do anything.
He went back into the house, found a flashlight, and went downstairs. The web in the corner of the ceiling was finished, but the spider, Charlotte, was nowhere to be found. He looked behind the television and saw something among the rat’s-nest of patch-cords and coaxial cables.
The spider had spun a number of threads from the wall to the back of the television and the other pieces of electronics equipment. They looked like very thin silver wires.
Morris reached out and touched one and his finger immediately went numb. He tried to bend it, but it wouldn’t move. He bent the rest of his fingers, and they worked fine. He put the paralyzed finger between his teeth and bit down on it gently. He didn’t feel a thing. He bit down harder and still felt nothing.
He picked up a magazine, rolled it into a tube, and brushed it through the strands of webbing. They were strong and tensile, almost like chicken wire, but they broke.
The lights went out.
Morris picked up the flashlight and made his way to the fuse box. Another fuse had blown. He replaced it—this one wasn’t just smoking; it had melted into the socket—and was closing the panel door when he noticed something.
In additi
on to the black insulated cables and other assorted wires, Morris counted six silver threads running into the fuse box. After the experience behind the television, he wasn’t as quick to touch them.
He tapped one with the end of the flashlight, and the bulb went out with a small pop. Morris shook it and heard the tinkle of broken glass. He dropped the flashlight on the floor and looked back into the fuse box.
The spider threads gave off a faint silver glow that pulsed slowly like respiration.
Morris went back upstairs to the kitchen, and then out to the main foyer and up the stairs to the second floor. By the time he reached the landing he was huffing and puffing like a man of seventy. He leaned against the railing for support and saw a row of bruises along his arm. His body was starting to look like an apple that had fallen off the tallest branch. He stumbled down the hall to the master bedroom and stood wheezing in the doorway, staring at Jude lying on the bed.
She was dead, of that he was sure. Her body was wrapped not in blankets but in a thin, translucent sheet of spider-web. It covered her from head to toe like a death shroud. He could almost make out her face, ghostly and insubstantial through the gauzy material.
Tears seeped out Morris’s eyes. It hurt to cry—in his heart and in his head. He felt a sudden, powerful resolve burning through the grey haze that had been fogging his mind. He was angry, and a part of him was glad to be able to feel something so strong and distinct again. And he knew exactly where to direct it.
He went back downstairs and went into the garage through the connecting door in the kitchen. The sledgehammer was leaning against the wall in the corner. He picked it up with an effort and carried it into the living room.
The wall opposite the wide picture window was as good a place to start as any. He took down the wall’s only decoration, a Rembrandt print Jude had bought at a garage sale, and leaned it against the couch. He had to work quickly. He could feel his strength ebbing away like the tide.
Spreading his legs, he lifted the hammer over his shoulder and swung it in a wide arc. It sank into the wall with a dull thunk. Drywall crumbled in a puff of plaster dust. Morris pulled it out and swung again and again, until the floor was littered with chunks of drywall and a thick cloud of dust hung in the air.