Klepsky returned to his stool, took another sip of water and regarded the sprawled body of Ed on the mat, lying face down with his long limbs. When he started moving again, he’d look like one of those four-armed starfish moving across the ocean bottom until all his senses returned.
The doorbell rang.
When he finally craned his neck to see who it was, Klepsky found Adrian standing ringside with Celine. “We interrupting something?” she said.
“Nah. Ed likes to nap between rounds.”
“We’ve been summoned to Golem Guy’s latest art exhibit,” Adrian said, averting his eyes from the ring.
“That’s damn polite, Adrian, trying not to take in way more information than you should in the sanctuary of my home. You might want to follow his example, girlie,” Klepsky said, pulling the ropes apart to climb out of the ring.
“Here, help me with my gloves,” he said holding them up to Celine.
Celine gave Klepsky and Ed a strange look as if she was trying to figure out the puzzle.
“She’s a chick, Klepsky,” Adrian said, growing impatient with Celine’s progress, and pulling his arms to him and helping him off with the gloves and the taping.
Celine just shook her head. “The last two sexist men on the planet, and I have the most unenviable relationship in the world with both of them,” she mumbled.
“I wouldn’t use that word relationship around Ed,” Adrian coached. “He might get jealous.”
“Hey!” Klepsky squawked. “I thought you were going to be polite enough not to notice.”
“Shit, like I’m in any position to judge.”
“No, you’re not!” Klepsky barked at Adrian, realizing that he was perhaps protesting too much.
Ed finally peeled himself off the mat. His boner tent-poled his pants, as Klepsky’s other two guests tried to look vacantly and compress their smiles. He took one look at the three of them and must have figured out what was going on. “Hey, can I come?”
“You’re not field trained, Ed. And you’re too valuable to risk out in the field, anyway,” Klepsky said.
“Ah,” Celine teased, “I think that means he loves you.”
Ed smiled, stood up straight, and saluted them. “Off you go then. I’ll just haunt you all with my virtual presence as I usually do.”
The three made their way to the door. With their backs to him, Ed let his composure and his hard-on drop. He was a lot more disappointed than he let on. When they were out the door he mumbled, “God, I feel sore all over.” Then it dawned on him. “Except for…” he pulled off the gloves with his teeth and a sense of urgency. Then he felt with his hands around his ass. “Except for there!” He screamed in frustration. “You didn’t violate me! We had an understanding!” he screamed not caring if he was heard or not out on the streets.
Ed continued snorting like a dragon waking to intruders in its cave as he peeled off the tape on his hands. “You thought Biyu was a misdirect. You just wait, Carl Klepsky.”
EIGHTEEN
“Look, before you judgmental, hateful, axe-to-grind people say a word…” Klepsky said, the three of them, him, Celine, and Adrian, just barely off his front door steps after witnessing the scene inside between him and Ed.
“Wasn’t going to say a thing, Klepsky,” Celine insisted.
“Besides the fact that you suddenly got a lot more interesting,” Adrian jibed.
The two of them snuck their snickers in at his expense. “Yeah, go ahead, yuk it up,” Klepsky barked. “I’ll have you know that we care for each other deeply.”
“How deeply, Carl, eight inches, ten inches, or just six inches?” Celine said, having to put her hand over her mouth before her laughing echoed down the street.
“Neither of you are the least bit funny,” Klepsky insisted.
“Relax, Klepsky,” Adrian said, firing up a cigarette. “We could use a little inappropriate humor to go with our inappropriate lives.”
“Speaking of…” Klepsky opened the door on the driver’s side, and all three of them climbed in the car more or less in tandem through their respective doors. “Where are we headed?” He was trying to reassert authority by taking control of a car that wasn’t his and by adding some gravel to his voice.
“I took the liberty of entering the location on Celine’s dashboard GPS already. Just let the car drive us unless you’re feeling some pressing need to man-handle the steering wheel,” Adrian said, both him and Celine reprising their snickering of earlier at his expense.
“I prefer to keep a tight grip on the situation, thank you very much,” Klepsky said taking the wheel as the car drove off, with him mostly holding on for dear life. It took him a while to catch on to what was going on. “Damn it, Ed! You ever expect to get that ass plowed, you settle this car down right now.”
The car mysteriously came under Klepsky’s control again. Both his passengers did their best to bite off their lips rather than let another laugh escape them.
“I’d feel better if someone had some moral outrage to throw my way. God knows I have a fair amount of my own,” Klepsky said.
“Give it time, Klepsky. You’ll get good enough with the self-recriminations, you won’t need us to pile on.” The tone of Adrian’s voice had Klepsky and Celine both throwing empathetic glances his way.
“That’s it, pull focus, just like you, you glory-stealing hound,” Klepsky griped.
Adrian smiled painfully. “What about you, Celine? I never see you spend a moment hating yourself. Talk about showing up late to the party.”
“That’s what I have my job for, to keep me too busy for crap like that. There’s not enough caffeine in the world to get you to crawl out of those hell holes.”
“Hear, hear,” Klepsky and Adrian said in unison.
They drove the rest of the way in silence. Their attention had shifted, in part to the crime scene awaiting them, out of respect for the poor bastard that had gotten caught in the psycho’s net. But if their thoughts were elsewhere it was also because the topic of self-recriminations had caused them to slip down Alice-in-Wonderland-like rabbit holes of their own choosing.
***
“We’re headed out of the city, Ed. This more payback for earlier?”
“I would never drag Adrian and Celine into our little pissing contest. Unlike some people I know,” the car speakers thundered back at him.
“Very well then.”
More silence.
The vigil wasn’t interrupted until they were pulling onto a farm with a rundown barn.
“Am I the only one getting a Stephen King vibe off this place?” Klepsky said.
“I was thinking more Dean Koontz,” Celine replied, “but close enough.”
“The fog creeping in doesn’t help,” Adrian chimed in.
“Or the glistening spider webs.” Celina’s eyes darted about as she slid from one side of the back seat to another to look out each passenger window and then out the rear windshield. “You ever get the feeling you’re safer in prison than out there, with all the crazy people running around?” She forced the locks down on both doors, her eyes returning to the giant cobwebs spread across the grass, the trees, the sides of the barn.
“The paranormal is the killer’s shtick. It doesn’t have to be yours,” Adrian coached.
“Too late for that. I’ve read all those books. Of course that was when there was a very big divide separating my world from the one on the page.”
She seemed to be looking for the spiders that went with the webs, squinting her eyes to make out what was going on at the edge of the woods. “I read about these Amazon spiders once, thought to be extinct… the babies have a leg span more than a foot long.”
“You read amazon jungle adventure stories too?” Adrian chuckled as the car continued edging its way up the gravel drive. “No wonder you can’t be bothered to give yourself nightmares. You’ve outsourced all of that hard work to your favorite writers.”
Klepsky brought the car to a stop. He and Adrian climbed out.
Both waited for the more faint-hearted Celine. “Now who’s being sexist?” Adrian said.
The remark prodded her to open the door and slink out. She grabbed her forensics bags as much for moral support as for added physical barriers between her and the demonic world she was entering.
The walk to the barn was uneventful, except for the goosebumps and the hairs at the back of their necks standing on end. “Hear anything?” Celine said.
“Nope,” Klepsky returned after checking. “Not even any animal or insect sounds.”
“Precisely. It’s creepy,” Celine asserted, pouring more fuel on the fires of her fears.
“No sounds of ravens either,” Adrian said. “Supports my theory that they were golems too, only with a longer life expectancy owing to their more primitive genetics.”
“That or their digestive tracts are a lot heartier, like snakes,” Celine said.
Adrian did a double-take her direction. The look on his face caused her to elaborate. “They’re vultures, so their stomachs can tolerate most anything.” His lingering expression had her thinking there might be more to what she was saying. And Adrian had arrived there ahead of her, despite anatomy and physiology being far more her bag than his. “I suppose it’s possible their saliva bolsters their immunity in ways that humans can’t match, and that does have something to do with how long the human golems last. I’ll look into it when I get back to the lab,” she said. “All I have is the video capture of the first golem’s physiological activity to go on at this point, but it might be enough.”
The squealing noise of the rusty railings as Klepsky slid the barn doors open brought the two of them back into the moment. Or so they thought. His next remark, brought them the rest of the way back.
“Holy shit!”
***
The rest of the threesome turned face forward and entered the barn alongside Klepsky.
The first thing Adrian noticed about the inside of the barn was the aquariums. He imagined that was the first thing they’d all noticed, being as there were body parts bobbing up and down inside them, kept from sinking all the way to the bottom by the voracious amount of bubbles inside each tank. The illumination coming from the tanks was a pale blue, and the body parts inside practically glowed a healthy pink, as if the spectrum of light inside the tanks had been chosen to highlight the beauty of the human form. And so the macabre scene was also strangely beautiful, like touring a museum, where similar thoughts ran through your mind at the pretty—if stuffed—animals.
The second thing to draw their attention as they went from tank to tank, taking in the exhibit was the sound of rattling cages overhead. They looked up in tandem and gasped in three part harmony.
“The amazon spiders I was telling you about,” Celine said, gulping. “Or some genetically altered version of them, more likely. Perhaps they were resurrected from a fossilized arachnid or a piece of one trapped in amber, or one that was similarly well-preserved.”
“You’re switching into clinical mode as a defense mechanism,” Adrian coached.
“Aren’t you?”
“Touché.”
They were all staring at the bugs doing their best to get at them, rattling those cages just hard enough to unleash their worst fears. “Clinical mode” was about the only shield they had to throw up right now. All except for Klepsky who’d reached for a garden rake. The tines looked big enough to skewer several of them at once, but then what? The realization had probably occurred to him too, explaining why he didn’t look any less shaken.
Suddenly, poor Puzzle-Piece Man had been all but forgotten.
Maybe by all except for Celine, whose face just happened to be pressed up against Puzzle-Piece’s face. She screamed.
By the time Adrian and Klepsky deigned to look away from the spiders, they’d missed the beat. But it was now clear why Miss Pissed-Scared-of-Spiders-herself Celine had forgotten about the arachnids.
The head was alive.
Adrian brought himself closer to the tank, face to face with the guy. “So our killer’s science has advanced yet again over the last killing. By a good bit, I’d say. Though I’m not the expert, Celine. What’s your verdict?” His tone indicated more sarcasm than someone reaching for more information.
“The solution they’re soaking in could have something to do with why the body parts aren’t decaying. It’s too early to tell if the killer is any closer to perfecting his back from the dead routine. Unless he’s looking to turn himself into Aqua Man and taint the entire ocean with his smart-water solution.”
Klepsky’s head craned up to the very attention-stealing spiders and their latest outburst of cage rattling. “So what now?”
“Now, we let the spiders out,” Adrian said.
“What?!” both of his sidekicks blasted simultaneously as they turned on him like rabid pit bulls.
“Their altered spider silk, I’m guessing, which goes with the rest of their altered DNA, is probably meant to stitch Puzzle-Piece Man back together. I suggest we let the scene play out the way the director intended.”
“I’m not getting any closer to those spiders than I am right now,” Klepsky said, speaking as if he’d be happy to back up his statement by shoving the pointed end of his hay bailer into Adrian’s gut.
“Just shoot off the locks,” Adrian suggested. “You’re a crack shot, as I recall.”
“Not at first. But the scarier people get, I find the better my target practice comes along.” He set down the rake and drew his pistol. Using both hands he positioned his gun and himself in a regulation stance. “Get ready to run like hell. If those are jumping spiders…”
“They are,” Adrian and Celine said at once.
“In that case, you might want to get your guns ready too.”
“Nah, I’m a believer in the power of a well told narrative. Our killer’d never rush the scene like that,” Adrian said dryly.
Klepsky shot off the locks. Sixteen locks. Sixteen shots. Four cages to a side of the balcony spanning all sides of the barn. That left both his clip and the gun barrel empty. He reloaded faster than the last human alive in a zombie movie.
The spiders burst out of their cages at once. Leaping onto the tanks.
They used the barbs on their legs to fish the pieces out of the water.
Then to drag the pieces down to the floor.
They worked in solo or in teams depending on the size of the body parts in question. The individual spiders spanned three feet across, about the size of a mid-size dog.
And Adrian was right, the spider-webbing had something to do with getting the parts to anneal back together. The spider bites too, as the spiders spent a fair amount of time biting at the edges of the raw exposed flesh that needed to be prepped for attachment to the next puzzle piece.
“Fuck Dean Koontz. Tell me those things aren’t possessed,” Klepsky said.
“Nah, Dean Koontz all the way,” Celine and Adrian said in concert.
“There’s more technical knowhow programmed into those spiders than I can explain away,” Celine said.
She dropped one of her bags, unzipped it, and came out with a Tommy gun.
Klepsky smiled. “Interesting medical approach, doc.”
“It’s modified. A tranquilizer dart gun. Meant for Golem Guy. But I say we use it on whoever turns on us first.”
“You’re making my dick hard,” Klepsky said.
“It would, you noir film reject,” she said, spitting on the floor and refusing to take her eyes off the spiders.
“Here, why don’t you let me cover you with the gun?” Adrian said, gesturing for her to hand it over. “We’re going to need you to take a closer look at Puzzle Piece Paul…”
“Paul?”
“Better alliteration,” Adrian explained. “I need an idea of how long he’s going to live.”
“What do you mean how long I’m going to live? I’ve died enough for one lifetime, thank you,” Puzzle Piece Paul said, able to speak now that his body parts had been sufficiently
reassembled. Adrian chalked up the raspiness in his voice to the crude stitching together with the spider silk.
He strode closer to “Paul”, ignoring the spiders, which just parted like the red sea for him. Adrian kept the gun hanging limply at his side. “We beg to report that whoever was experimenting earlier on you, well, he just did this to you to see if you’d live any longer than the last few prototypes.”
“How long was that?” Puzzle Piece Paul asked, unable to keep the whininess out of his voice.
“The last one lasted only a few minutes. It’s my guess you’ll last more like a few hours.”
Paul was crying.
Celine approached, grabbed the Tommy gun away from Adrian. “Your bedside manner leaves something to be desired, yes.”
“You’re the one pointing the gun at him,” Adrian said.
“Oh shit, sorry,” Celine said to Paul, before redirecting the gun barrel. She checked to confirm that the spiders had finished stitching him back together. “If you would please try standing up and walking outside the barn, away from these spiders.”
“Yeah, okay.” Paul’s eyes went to his limbs, but nothing happened.
“Keep trying,” she coached.
It took a while. At first just the fingers moved. Then the hands and the feet. Then the life seemed to return to him from the extremities, working its way up to his heart.
When he finally stood, he became conscious of standing in front of a woman in his soiled underwear. “Sorry,” he said, staring at her.
“You’re well hung, so don’t worry about it.”
He smiled at her. “How come you only meet nice people after you’re dead?”
“They’re around,” Adrian explained, “they’re just in hiding.” He took the Tommy gun back from Celine now that she was more focused on Dirty, Hunky, and Hung. Apparently, they were too early on in their relationship for Adrian to realize that dirty, smelly men were a turn on for her. You had to relish those moments life gave you to learn more about one another.
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