by Kaye, Rainy
I blinked, looking at Randall, and said in a low voice, “So, correct me if I’m wrong, but…isn’t it January?”
He nodded.
“And I know I’ve been hit in the head a lot lately, but—”
“Yeah, it’s not Halloween,” he said, and then pressed his lips together as he scowled at the party. “They do seem to be having a good time.”
“But why?” I said with exasperation. I straightened, no longer caring if they saw me.
This was madness. If I were Alice, this would be the tea party.
I stomped out of the shadows, into the yard. Randall reached for me, but I shook him off. He huffed and followed behind me. Even though I couldn’t see him, I knew his hand was already on his knife.
The partygoers smiled at us, as if we were invited guests, and continued with their conversations and eating.
The naughty nurse bumped into me as she backed up from one of the tables. She turned around.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” she said, grabbing my shoulder.
I squirmed from her hold.
“Your outfit is adorable!” She plucked a cookie from a paper platter sitting on the table and offered it to me. “Spooky ghost? They’re homemade sugar cookies.”
Fire rolled through me. I batted the ghost from her hand.
“Why are you doing this?” I asked.
She smiled at me, totally lost to reality. “Oh, are you cutting out sugar? I think there’s some—”
I waved my hands in front of her face. “Are you fuckin’ crazy? Why are you throwing a goddamned Halloween party in January?”
She shrugged. “Why wouldn’t I?”
Her tone was not that of someone who understood what was happening.
I spun in a slow circle, taking in the crowd. Two little kids in black outfits printed with the diagram of a skeleton were trading candy from plastic pumpkins. A Japanese man in linen pants and shirt sat in a chair, sipping a cup of punch. I didn’t know what he was supposed to be. The t-rex was dancing like he was the mascot for a high school football team.
Maybe he was.
I threw up my hands with a groan and turned to find Randall. A third skeleton-kid had come up to him and was insisting to see his knife. Randall suggested they try the cake pop ghosts, instead.
I scanned the crowd again, and the irrationality of the entire party fueled my irritation. I stormed toward the back door of the house to see what other nonsense was happening in there. As I passed Randall, I brushed against him and pointed to where I was headed.
He tapped his cake pop to the kid’s in cheers, then said, “I’m going to go check out the house.”
With that, he jogged after me and joined me by the back door.
“Ghost?” he asked, tipping the cake pop to me. “No mirrors required.”
I wrinkled my nose. “You really want to eat anything here?”
“What doesn’t kill me…” He bit down on the cake pop.
I shook my head and opened the back door. We stepped into the kitchen.
Music blared from a speaker on the counter. I reached over and turned it off.
Leftovers from the treat preparations were strewn across the kitchen, and baking pans and plates overflowed the sink. Several trash bags were tied up and stacked in the corner.
I listened for any sounds of people inside. Randall crept forward, toward the living room, and I followed behind him. I braced for impact as we entered, expecting something demonic and terrible to be sitting on the couch or spring out from the coat closet.
There was no one. Party supplies cluttered the coffee table, and a few open soda cans sat around on the end tables.
Nothing out of the ordinary.
“We could check the bedrooms,” Randall said, nodding towards the hallway on the left. “They’re so party-drunk, I don’t think they’ll notice or care.”
“What is even going on out there?”
“More magic contamination, I guess. Like the Mardi Gras demons.” He started down the hallway.
The floor shook. I braced myself, expecting it to stop, but the tremors grew. The soda cans knocked over, one by one, and spilled onto the carpet. I stumbled back and hit the couch, collapsing onto it. The room tilted, and the couch rocked, and then slid toward the window.
Randall gripped the wall to steady himself. The coffee table skidded across the room and slammed into the TV stand. The TV fell forward with a crash. The room continued to rock and then tip, like we were on a ship about to capsize.
Metal ground against metal, and the entire structure of the house seemed to groan. A cracking, shrieking noise filled the air.
I squished up in the corner of the couch, pressing into the back, and clung to the arm.
“I think it’s an earthquake,” I shouted to Randall over the chaos. “The mage in New Orleans caused a lot of them too.”
He shook his head from where he was nearly splattered on the wall. “The ground outside probably split open, like with the hag.”
My heart jerked against my breastbone. “If that’s the case, we’re falling into a pit. We need to get out of here.”
With effort, Randall peeled himself off the wall and half-walked, half-tripped his way to the coffee table. He braced one knee against it as he leaned over the broken TV and pushed aside the curtains behind it.
The room straightened. The couch bounced a little, and then the room leveled out. I pushed to my feet and tottered over to where Randall was staring out the window. He jostled with the motion of the room as it continued to sway.
I came up behind him and, pushing my chest against his back, peered out.
Something long and fuzzy swung by the window. I yelped, jumping back. Another one came by. Then another.
With a click of my tongue, I dared to lean forward and get a closer look as bristly black legs popped in and out of view in a strangely familiar rhythm.
“Um, are those…” I began.
“Spider legs?” he finished for me. He twisted around just enough to look up at me. “We were both wrong, it seems.”
I started to ask for clarification when I realized the street was moving away. The room shook ever so slightly as the house was carried off, with us still in it.
5
I braced my hand against the overturned broken TV as I twisted to take in the room, assessing my options. Even though the floor had mostly leveled out, the entire building jostled around us. Throughout the house, framed pictures and knick-knacks crashed to the floor. From the kitchen came the crash of pans and plates tipping out of cabinets.
“I have no idea where this thing is taking us, but I doubt it’s where we want to be,” I said, forcing myself to stand upright. I wobbled on my feet as I tried to find my balance. “We have to get out of here.”
I tottered across the room, toward the kitchen—and the back door. Randall clomped after me. The back door swung shut with a bang, then fell open again. The street outside bobbed up and down like it was the shoreline and we were rocking at sea.
My stomach churned, and I had to look away before I became motion sick.
Using the walls as support, Randall stumbled into the dining room. The chairs tipped and clattered, and he stepped over them as he made his way to the window. The curtains hung at an unnatural angle. He batted them aside and peered out.
“This seems to be tilted the lowest to the ground, but we’re probably close to two stories up,” he called.
Grabbing the doorway, I half-swung myself into the dining room. The chairs and table were collected against the wall where Randall was standing, so he was probably right—it was one of the lower points of the house.
“How do we get out, though?” I muttered as I clambered my way through the room to join him.
My foot caught on the leg of an overturned chair. I broke my fall against Randall, smooshing us against the wall. He pushed back and we stood with the curtains swaying beside us.
“We need rope,” he said, staring out the window.
“I’ll just run right out to the shed,” I replied with a snicker. “Maybe we can check the bedroom.”
He shot me a sidelong look.
I shrugged. “Hey, you never know what kinky things these people were into.”
His mouth tightened as he tried not to laugh.
I nudged his side, but as I took in the entirety of the situation outside—we were apparently on the back of a spider being carried farther and farther away from town, and our allies—my world clouded like a veil had been dropped over me.
“You know we’re going to die, right?” I said, words thick and barely fitting in my mouth. The growing coldness inside me pricked at my skin and eyes.
He nodded, stiffly.
“If it’s not this house, it’ll be the sludge monster, and if it’s not this town, it’ll be the next,” I said far too calmly. Even inside, I was icing over at the depth of what we had gotten ourselves into. “So many bad things have been happening. I want to pack up and go home.”
“We can’t,” he said in a way that made me think this wasn’t a new thought to him, either.
I sidled closer to him, but his heat didn’t melt the frost. “I think Fiona is dying. We can’t let her die in a place like this.”
“I don’t think so,” he said, but both his voice and his expression were bitter. “I think she’s going to wish she was, though.”
His words cut deep, straight to my gut. Not because they were callous, but because they echoed the sentiments I had been trying so hard not to think.
I focused outside the window, on the situation at hand. “How are we going to get out of here?”
“Well…” He took a deep breath and held it before continuing. “I think we need to be prepared that as we head down, whatever mutant arachnid is carrying this like we’re an egg sack might have an opinion about us leaving.”
I stilled. “Um, egg sack?”
“Yeah.” He turned to look at me, bracing his hip and one palm against the windowsill. “You know how sometimes spiders carry the eggs on them until the babies hatch.”
I shuddered, rubbing my hands up and down my arms.
“What if there’s eggs in here?” I scrunched up my face. “Randall, what if there’s giant spider babies ready to come out anytime now? Maybe they’re in the walls?”
He frowned, as if he hadn’t fully contemplated this yet and wasn’t finding the realization any more appealing than I was. “What if it’s bringing us back to its young, instead?”
“Uh, why?” I asked, and then we both concluded at the same time:
“Food.”
We turned and picked our way through the disarrayed dining room, and it felt like we were slogging through mud with each heavy step. I took the kitchen and Randall started on the living room. As the house continued to rock, I searched through drawers and cabinets and tossed through the pile of dishes and small appliances on the floor, looking for anything useable to aid our escape.
Nothing.
With a frustrated sigh, I inched my way into the living room. Randall pawed through the contents of a coat closet by the front door, the items tumbling out at him with each sway of the house. Jackets, board games, rolls of unused paper towels.
He turned to me, slamming the door shut. It popped back open and whacked him in the back.
He grimaced and shoved it shut, holding it in place.
“We could try to tie together bedsheets from the bedroom, I guess,” he said. “Not sure I want to try out how good my knot skills are on that, though.”
“Never a boy scout?” I asked.
The motion of the legs outside the window by the broken TV caught my attention again. I counted seconds between each fuzzy appearance. It was almost like clockwork.
Randall braced against the closet door and followed what I was watching. “What are you thinking?”
I pointed at the window.
“There. The legs come up every three seconds. Well, it’s kind of a knee, isn’t it? To the spider…Anyway, when it comes up, we could…” A shudder crept through me. “I don’t even like touching spiders when they’re the size of my fingernail. Point is, we could sort of throw ourselves out at the leg and grab it as it comes up.”
“That might piss it off,” he said, but I could tell he was considering the option. “Then again, if any of our escapes fail, we’ll land on the spider, anyway.”
Forcing away any further contemplation that I was about to wrap my entire body around a spider leg, I stepped over the clutter in the living room and approached the window. Randall kicked his way over to join me and then, reaching over the coffee table and TV and everything else that had stacked up in this spot, pushed open the pane.
Warm air rushed through the window and only managed to make me feel less comfortable. Pushing my hand against the wall, I climbed up the stack of furniture and leaned toward the open window. The legs came up at nearly perfect intervals. I couldn’t see the body underneath the house, but I figured the end with the head by the direction the house was moving.
I turned to look at Randall over my shoulder. “I’ll go and you follow?”
“The order of our death is not important,” he said.
“Inspiring,” I said and bunched my lips together. “This is all so great.”
With that, I turned back and launched myself out the window. I free fell, and I thought I might have missed the mark. The ground came up at me.
A fuzzy bent spider knee lifted into view. I reached out for it and caught the leg with the crook of my elbow. I swung around and, bending my arm, slammed my chest into the papery skin lined with thin hairs. I wrapped my thighs around the leg and hung on tight, trying to keep my face from making contact.
“Hey, move,” Randall shouted down to me.
I didn’t dare look up but made like an inch worm and crept along the leg until I found myself easing downward, head first. The spider turned into a field of brush, and I had no idea where we were just yet.
Randall slammed behind me. I could barely see him from nearly upside down as he swung from one arm. His legs flailed, then he found purchase and clung to the spider leg.
Gritting my teeth, I slowly unwound myself from the leg, doing an awkward side bend until I was hanging feet toward the ground, both hands gripping the spider leg. My fingers ached and the pain rolled through my wrists and down my arms to my shoulders as I bounced up and down with each step of the spider.
With little else to do, I walked myself down by hands until I was lower to the ground. I couldn’t hold myself up anymore. Doing a stomach crunch to help minimize the impact, I let go. I fell, and then my soles slammed into the earth. I toppled forward and caught myself on my elbows. Overhead, spider legs came up and down in a steady rhythm.
Something thudded behind me. I gasped, shooting to my feet, and turned. Randall rolled to a stop on the ground, then sprung up. He pulled his knife, and I realized I should have been prepared for an attack too. I grabbed for my knife and then remembered I left it in the naga’s chest.
The house continued on by, skittering away on spider legs.
A long silence filled the air as we stood watching it disappear into the darkness.
Then, Randall said, “I didn’t see a spider body.”
“Yeah, uh, I think the house…I think the house…” I couldn’t get the words out. “Well, the fuckin’ fork was walking, so why not the house?”
Growling, I turned to storm back the way we had come. We were in a field filled with wiry brush and an occasional jumping cholla, but the street was still in view.
To my left, something darted in the brush. I called up my magic as I scanned the ground. The vegetation shifted, and then something low to the ground darted toward the road.
I took off after it. The creature emerged from the brush, and it looked and moved almost like a hairless cat.
Almost.
My breath came in short, heavy bursts as I barreled across the road. The creature turned into an old self-serve car wash. It clamor
ed up the walls of one stall and pressed against the ceiling.
I slowed, staring up at it. Part of me expected it to drop down onto me and try to tear off my face, but somehow, it cowered away.
Randall pounded up behind me. I didn’t look at him as I flicked my hand toward the creature that was mostly lost in shadows.
“What is that?” I hissed, like he had any chance at knowing.
The creature hunched over with long thin arms and heavy haunches. Its face was long and vaguely humanoid, and I couldn’t help thinking of gargoyles on the old cathedrals.
It stared down at us with wide eyes, panting heavily, and seemed to be bracing to run.
“Well, if it wanted to rip out our brains by now, I guess it would have,” I muttered. “Let’s leave it alone. I think it—”
Sirens cut off my thoughts. Firetrucks whizzed by on the road, horns blaring.
I stepped toward the end of the carwash and gazed down the street, in the direction they had been headed.
“Well, I guess the town still has emergency services,” I said.
“I hate to say it, Saf,” Randall began, stepping next to me, “but everything bad in this town is going to be related to the monsters. We should probably go see what is going on.”
6
We hurried in the direction the firetrucks had gone. By the end of the block, smoke twisted up into the sky and we picked up our pace to a sprint as we headed toward it.
My heart sank as the street became familiar and the abandoned apartment complex rose up to greet us. Flames leapt from windows, illuminating the night and creating otherworldly shadows. Crackling filled the air. The smell of burning wood loaded my lungs, and for a moment, I felt like I couldn’t breathe.
The firetrucks had parked on the curb. Firemen dotted the front of the complex, long hoses extending behind them.
I broke away from Randall and came up to the nearest firefighter.
“Hey,” I tried to call, but I was breathless. I forced myself to breathe in deeper. “There were two people in there.”
He waved me away as he crouched next to the hose nozzle.