by Justin Bloch
The Stolen Karma Of
Nathaniel Valentine
Book One Of
The Books Of Balance
Justin Bloch
To Mary, my go-to gal, my Oz,
for many reasons, but these most of all:
she didn’t laugh at the idea for this book,
she knew it was Bertha before Peter,
and she gave me the best compliment I’ve ever received.
Table Of Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Epilogue
The Book Of Doors
Chapter I
The woman stood in front of him, silhouetted by the sinking sun, her face an Impressionist’s blur of shape and shadow. A long, disheveled spill of black hair fell nearly to her waist, and one corner of her blouse had come untucked from her skirt. She was breathing hard, having run across the rain-dark asphalt of the apartment complex’s parking lot to ask him for help. Nathaniel Valentine had no reason to think she might not really need it. It would never occur to him to be suspicious, even after the spiders started showing up. There was a girl talking to him, an experience which was not even near his wheelhouse, and he had become myopically focused on it.
“I’m sorry, I hate to bother you,” she said. “It’s just, I locked my keys in my car and I can’t get into the building to call a locksmith. Do you think I could use your phone?”
Quick, he thought frantically, say something charming. “Um.” He waited for his brain to offer him something useful. It didn’t. He stood there awkwardly for another three seconds, staring at her, panicking, then blurted, “No cell phone.” His mouth was suddenly very dry, and he resisted the urge to lick his lips. He needed to talk. Why wasn’t he talking? “I mean, I don’t have a cell phone. No reason to have one, you know, since I don’t really have anyone to call.” She didn’t respond, only stared at him, and his words gained inertia like a comet hurtling across the dark, frictionless void of space. “Just me, no friends really. There’s my cat, but he’s not very good at answering the phone. So it’d be a waste of money to have one, a cell phone. Um.” He paused, took a breath. “You could come up to my apartment, use the phone there.”
She laughed and nodded. “That would be great, thank you so much. I’m Vi.”
“Nathaniel.”
She offered him her hand and he stared at it for a moment, trying to determine whether his palms were sweaty, then plunged ahead, kamikaze-style. She gave a brief, firm grip and dropped his hand, and they started toward the building, walking side by side. She was attractive in the way a Mondrian painting was attractive, her features sharp and linear, her eyebrows two black slashes across an otherwise pale face. Her fair skin glowed against the dark cloth of her blouse. He searched his mind for some interesting topic of conversation but found himself focusing on the fact that she had actually noticed him when most people passed him without a second glance. He tried to think of a way to use that to break the ice but realized it made him sound desperate and crazy, and he definitely wasn’t crazy.
He held the building door for her, and as she moved past he caught the scent of her perfume. It was unlike any fragrance he’d ever smelled before, earthy and primal. He trailed behind her on the way to the elevator, the aroma pulling him hazily along. While they waited, his eyes kept wandering back to her, taking in the little details. She caught him checking her out and pinched her lips together in a playful smile. He glanced away, chastising himself. What was wrong with him? He wasn’t used to being around beautiful women (and she was beautiful, he could see that now; the most beautiful woman, probably in the world), but he felt like he was losing control. He took a deep breath and focused instead on a speckled black spider scuttling across the rough-weave beige carpet of the hallway toward her shoe. He was about to warn her when the doors pinged open and she moved inside. He followed her, pressed the “5.”
“I haven’t seen you around here before,” he said.
“I’m new to this area. I just moved into the building last week.” Her voice was smooth, strong, with the hint of some exotic accent that he couldn’t place. It was incredibly sexy.
“Do you like it so far?” He wondered if their children would pick up her accent as they learned to talk, and instantly hoped that their daughters wouldn’t.
“Mhmm, it’s nice. Closer to work.”
“What do you do for a living?”
She flashed a smile. “You could say I’m something of a headhunter.”
“Oh, the corporate world, nice. Nothing so exciting for me: Walmart.”
She made a noncommittal noise and looked away from him as the doors parted. He let her step out first, motioned to the right and said, “I’m down in 507.” He took the lead this time, unlocked and opened the door, stepped inside and held it for her. The apartment was a tidy mess. There were magazines strewn across the coffee table, but only on the coffee table. His half-full glass of sweet tea still sat on the end table, but there was a coaster beneath it. There were dirty dishes in the sink, but they were rinsed off and stacked neatly. The room was dominated by six wooden bookcases that stretched to the ceiling and overflowed with novels arranged alphabetically and stacked on top of each other when Nathaniel had run out of room.
His cat Robber Baron wandered out of the kitchen, a lanky brown tabby with black markings on his back like Rorschach inkblots. He took a look at the woman and flicked his ears back, his tail puffing, then darted forward, his claws tearing at the carpet. She danced backwards into the corner, surprised, but the cat stopped a few feet from her with something trapped beneath his paw.
Nathaniel leaned down and pushed Robber away. He meowed in a high, annoyed voice, and Nathaniel saw the cat’s prize, a small, yellow spider. The arachnid moved and Robber pounced again, snapped it up and swallowed it.
“Sorry about that,” Nathaniel said, grinning lopsidedly. “Cats…am I right, ladies?”
Vi cocked her head to one side, a bemused smile on her face, her brows knitted together. Nathaniel noticed her eyes for the first time, in the brighter light of the apartment. They were a soft purple color, like a Cattleya orchid. He wondered if she was wearing contact lenses; nothing like that could be natural.
He stepped further into the living room, shrugged out of his hoodie and hung it on the coat rack. There was another spider there, spinning a web between the hook and the wall, and Nathaniel frowned. He would have to call the landlord, although it probably wouldn’t amount to anything. The guy never returned his calls.
“Thank you again, for helping me,” Vi said from behind him.
He turned and there was a spider on her shoulder, a dark orange one. It was bustling along the seam of her sweater at a brisk pace. “Spider,” he blurted, pointing.
She glanced at it, raised a hand and put her index finger in the spider’s path. The spider climbed onto it and kept going across the joints. She lifted it up to
the corner between the ceiling and the wall and let it scurry off. Nathaniel watched it all, trying not to gape.
When she was finished, she noticed him staring. “I hope you don’t mind, I think that’s a hobo spider and I didn’t want to put it on the floor. I don’t want your cat getting sick.”
“Thanks,” he said slowly. He told himself to stop looking at her, but he couldn’t seem to make himself. That was not a normal thing he had just seen. Was it? He didn’t have a lot of social experience on which to judge.
“So…your phone?” she prompted.
“Oh, yeah, in the bedroom, through that door. Can I get you something to drink?”
“A glass of ice water would be nice,” she said, disappearing into the room.
He went into the kitchen and got a glass from the cupboard. He dropped a few ice cubes in, grabbed his Brita pitcher from the refrigerator, filled the glass and replaced the pitcher. He checked his reflection as best he could in the hazy blackness of the microwave door, smoothing down some hair that was standing up and baring his teeth to make sure there was nothing stuck there from his lunch of ice cream and Oreo cookies. It wasn’t the most nutritious meal, of course, but it was his favorite meal, and didn’t everyone deserve a special meal on a special day? There was a spider setting up shop beside the microwave, but he paid it no mind. All he could think about was Vi, and getting back to her. He could still smell her perfume lingering in the air around him. He narrowly avoided another spider as he crossed back into the living room, passing just under it as it descended on a strand of silk. “You know, if you ever needed anyone to show you around, I’d be happy to do it. I know most of the good places to eat in this neighborhood. Do you like Italian?” He pushed open his bedroom door. “I know a great place right down−”
He stopped, the rest of the sentence forgotten, his head cocked to one side. His bedroom was covered in some sort of white, gauzy material. Long, thin threads hung in delicate arcs from the ceiling, waving back and forth in the breeze from the open window. A curtain of fibers obscured the window itself, which Nathaniel remembered closing before he’d left. Light filtered through, shifting and dim, illuminating a stream of spiders spreading throughout the room. The wind gusted and a strand from the ceiling blew against his cheek and stuck there. It was covered in some sort of gummy film, and he swiped at it, the first fingers of alarm starting to work their way across his body. He got it off of his face, took a quick step back, pawing at his cheek. He could still feel it, pulling at his skin. A fat brown spider dropped down two inches in front of his face and he flinched backwards. It swayed on its length of silk, flexing bristly legs toward him.
“Vi, are you in here? Are you okay?” Nathaniel asked in a voice utterly unlike the heroic one he had intended to use.
“Just fine, honey.” His head spun in the direction of her voice, to the nearest corner of his room, and the perspiring glass slipped from his hand and splashed its contents out across the hardwood floor. His jaw plunged at the sight of the woman crouched in the corner, surrounded by spiraling funnels of the fibers, a terrible, hungry smile on her face. She pointed her hands at him and wiggled her fingers in the universally understood sign language for “I’m gonna tickle you,” although her gesture lacked the promise of a fun time to be had by all. Nathaniel spun and tried to make a break for the door, but he had hesitated too long. Threads of silk flew from her fingertips, tangled around his ankles, and tripped him.
She sprang from the corner and came down beside him. He lashed out at her, but she caught his wrists easily, bound them with silk, flipped him over and began enshrouding him, humming as she worked. He writhed against the threads, but it was no good, they were too strong and she was too fast. Her fingers danced above him like a pianist’s. His head was covered, then his mouth, and he became claustrophobic, frantic. She watched his struggles for a moment, then laughed and ran a fingertip down his cheek. He flinched, tried to scream and couldn’t.
“To think I had to be convinced to take you,” she said, still smiling. “Such a pretty little package, you look good enough to eat.” And she winked.
This was his worst birthday ever.
His peripheral vision picked out movement in the far corner of his bedroom, and his attention flicked to it: there was a man, stepping forward out of the shadows. The woman saw the question in his eyes, started to turn, hissing. The stranger seized her hair and yanked her head back, exposing thick cords of jaw muscles, and she twisted away. She coiled her body, pistoned up into his midsection and knocked him backward. She was screeching now, trying to blind the stranger with silk, snapping at his face. He shoved her away, flicked his wrist and revealed a long, shining straight razor.
“You have interfered in the karmic path of a Resident,” the man said as she tensed to attack him again. “For this there is no penance.”
She feinted left and came at him, fingers hooked into claws, but he sidestepped, grabbed one of her shoulders and wrenched her around. The razor flashed by and a thin, puckered red line appeared across her neck. A drop of blood swelled at one end of the cut, broke away and ran down her skin, tracing her collarbone. She made low choking noises, raised one fluttering hand to her chest, and then her eyes rolled back in her head and she slumped to the ground beside Nathaniel. He could just make out her face, dead eyes staring at him.
The man kicked the body away, peeled some silk from his cheek and flung it to the floor. He turned bright, angry eyes to Nathaniel, looming over him, and raised the silver blade again. One lip twisted up in snarling disgust.
Nathaniel thrashed wildly, trying to free himself. The threads loosened some, but not enough, and it was too late. The bright edge of the straight razor cut through the air toward him, cut the rest of the world away. It filled his vision, the last thing he would ever see. He tried to scream again, eyes wide, struggling back and forth. The stranger’s mouth became a hard, thin line.
“Stop it,” he snapped. “If you’re not careful, I might hurt you.” He bent closer, paused, favored Nathaniel with a nasty smile. “I believe you Residents call it neutering.”
Nathaniel’s breath caught in his throat, and he forced himself to be still. The razor came down on his Adam’s apple, and for an instant, with the cool point of metal against his skin, the panic gripped him again and he nearly jerked in spite of himself. He fought it back with some effort and the blade sliced down the center of his body and through the threads, splitting them and leaving him untouched. With his hands free, he stripped the rest of the silk from his head and scraped it onto the floor. All around him, spiders were fleeing, disappearing back through the window, in the cracks between the floor and the baseboards, into the heating vent.
The stranger rose from his crouch, closed the straight razor and slid it into a pocket of his long, dark jacket. Beneath that, he wore dark pants and dress shoes and a gray button-up shirt, undone at the collar. He was tall and fit, with a strong, Nordic face and bearing. Blond hair paler than corn silk swept back from his face, above eyes the color of thick ice over a winter lake. He was incredibly handsome, beautiful almost, illuminated from behind by the shifting beams of light coming through the window. He was the type of man who things happened for, who would never want for anything, who would never be alone if he didn’t want to be.
“Who are you?” Nathaniel asked quietly. When the man ignored him, he felt the fear that had been holding him surge into anger. “Who are you?” he demanded again. “How did you get in here?”
The man glanced at Nathaniel, one corner of his mouth ticking up in displeasure. “I’m a policeman.”
Nathaniel took a breath, soothed himself. A policeman, of course, that made sense. This was exactly the type of thing cops were supposed to prevent. Well, maybe not exactly, he was reasonably sure monsters weren’t a normal part of a police officer’s day, but then again, monsters didn’t exist. Which brought up an interesting point.
“And who’s she?” he asked, impressed with himself for sounding so calm.
“She is a vissika. A spider-demon.”
Nathaniel replayed what the officer had just said to make sure he had heard correctly. He wanted to laugh at the absurdity of that explanation but it seemed like a bad idea to antagonize the man. “There’s no such thing as demons.”
“Look around you, Resident,” he said, smirking. “Does this look like it doesn’t exist?”
“What exactly does something that doesn’t exist look like?”
The policeman’s lip curled. “You’re lucky I got here when I did. She wasn’t joking when she said you were…what was it? Good enough to eat.”
Nathaniel gave a short bark of a laugh. “That’s ridiculous.” There was an explanation, he was sure of it, and he thought it might begin with this: the cop was crazy. “I mean, what? She was going to eat me?” He laughed again. “Demons aren’t real, she was just…she was probably trying to rob me.”
Another smirk crossed the cop’s face and was gone. “It doesn’t really matter. By the time you get all of this cleaned up, you’ll have forgotten about the whole thing. Residents are so very gifted at the act of ignorance.”
“None of this is real,” stated Nathaniel firmly.
“I know,” whispered the cop, and leaned close. His breath smelled pleasantly of spearmint. “You told me that already.” He bent and brushed a tiny green spider off of the woman’s face, then slung her body over his shoulder. He stood and headed toward the door.
“This is a hell of a thing to happen on my birthday,” said Nathaniel, rubbing his temples. He could feel a tiny cerebral thunderstorm forming behind his eyes.
The policeman froze where he was, looked back over his shoulder. “What did you say?”
“I said this was a hell of a thing to happen on my birthday.” He paused. “Although I guess since none of this is real, it was a hell of a thing not to happen. A hell of a thing to dream, maybe.” Nathaniel considered this new idea carefully. “Yeah.” Then, with more force, as the notion took firmer hold, “Yes. I’m dreaming right now, that’s what’s going on.”