Songs From Spider Street

by Mark Howard Jones

  Then it dawned on him. He’d been brought along on this expedition to approve of it, to admire Jen’s excellent taste and to compliment her on her knowledge of modern design. And he’d be the poor sod who had to sit in that ‘chair’.

  “It looks uncomfortable,” was all he could think of to say in protest.

  Jen scowled, her composure dented for once. “I think you’ll find it wonderfully comfortable, actually. It’s a Mika Pentinnen chair – he’s one of the best young designers in Europe.”

  “Good for him.”

  Jen snorted softly and headed for the entrance, credit card appearing magically in her hand as she did so. “You’ve just got no idea, have you?”

  Mike felt defeated.

  Slowly their spacious living room began to fill with what Mike regarded as clutter. Expensive, up-to-the-minute must-have clutter. But still clutter.

  He often found himself carefully negotiating small table-top sculptures or oddly-poised angular lamps to make his way to the firm leather armchair that sat in the middle of the room. Jen smiled patronisingly at him when he flopped down into it after a hard day’s hack work; she obviously thought of it as his chair. Maybe that’s why it had been placed facing the large screen TV, the floor space around it left uncluttered.

  One evening she slid into his lap, pressed her breasts against him and kissed him on the mouth. “You do like what I’m doing to the place don’t you, angel?” she purred. Mike tried his best to maintain a passive expression and made a non-committal noise that could have been interpreted as ‘yes’ if the wind was in the right direction.

  “Good. You do look so at home here, “ she breathed in his ear.

  He knew she had good taste and connections in the art world, mainly through her brother, and he did like some of the things she chose, but he just didn’t want to live with them. He wanted a home, not a gallery. But how could he let her know that?

  One day he arrived home to find a large part of one corner taken up with a huge grey stone object. It was a featureless rectangle, smooth and uninteresting.

  He dropped his coat on a chair and stood taking in the sheer ugliness, the brutal uncaring weight, of the object before him.

  Jen appeared from the bedroom. “Hi, Mike. Do you like it?”

  Mike snorted. Surely she was joking, trying to push him to the limit, to see how much he would take before ordering a skip and asking his brother to help him empty the flat of the crap she’d accumulated in the past months.

  He turned to look at her. She smiled, her mouth pulling down slightly in one corner in that way that he used to find so sweet. He tried to keep his voice as calm and non-committal as his elevated blood pressure would allow: “What is it?”

  Jen laughed her brittle crystal laugh. “It’s a sculpture. By Massimo Chia. Isn’t it wonderful and primitive? It only cost me three grand; Tim helped me get it cheap because he knows the artist.”

  “But it’s huge!” Mike protested, making a mental note to have Jen’s brain-dead brother hunted down and killed as soon as he could scrape together the fee.

  She walked over to the object slowly and looked it up and down. “But, hun, don’t you see? It’s an investment, too. It’s perfect. You’ll get used to it in time.”

  Mike sighed heavily and trotted off to the fridge, hoping there was still some beer left and praying that the floor could take the weight of the monstrosity that his lovely rich little wife had just inserted forcibly into his life.

  Jen often read last thing at night, her designer glasses perched elegantly on her pretty little nose, while Mike buried his face in the pillow and tried to sleep.

  One morning she’d left early to meet one of her old school friends at an auction. God knows what monstrosity she’d bring back with her, thought Mike. Passing her side of the bed, he leaned over and picked up the book she’d read last night from her bedside.

  He looked at the cover: ‘Magical Sigils in Three Dimensions’. The title meant nothing to him and the few abstract squiggles on the cover did nothing to explain it. The blurb on the back didn’t make much sense to Mike either. God knows what they taught her in art college, he thought, but she’s not giving it up easily.

  Mike shook his head and went to clean his teeth.

  That evening, as he still sat in his work clothes, brain fried from another day of scribbling tabloid tedium, he noticed that Jen was acting oddly.

  She’d taken to standing in one corner of the flat, her blue eyes staring levelly in his direction, occasionally adjusting her position, with a satisfied little smile on her face.

  When he asked her what she was doing, she just said she was admiring the room layout. Mike sighed, reached for the TV remote and tried to find something normal to watch.

  Sleepless one night, he wandered into the living room seeking God knows what that eluded him. Not sleep but its equivalent somehow, somewhere.

  Everything was drained of colour in the little illumination seeping down from the skylights. He was unwilling to undertake the hazardous journey across the living space to the light switches, for fear of overturning a couple of thousand pounds’ worth of ornament or knick-knack and hating himself for it.

  Instead he stood trying to remember which of the strangely shaped objects in the room was a light. Eventually his clouded mind gave up the struggle and he reasoned that a hot bath might help him sleep.

  Just as he turned towards the bathroom, he became aware of something emanating from the corner of the room. It wasn’t a light or a sound exactly but closer to a feeling.

  Mike rubbed his eyes in an effort to invigorate his insomnia-dulled senses. Whatever it was came from the corner where that hideous thing stood.

  He turned away from it, hoping for some reprieve from the indeterminate throbbing or whispering or scuttling that he felt in his head. Not a sound, no, but something very like it; yet unlike anything he’d ever known before. The longer it continued, the more he was certain it had something to do with the block-shaped sculpture.

  Suddenly he felt a rush of fear. It was in his home. It was something unknown, that he felt threatened by and it was in his home. He felt very cold.

  Mike forced his feet to take him back to bed, his breathing tight as his heart hammered away inside him and his head filled up with the vibration. He crawled between the ridges of the sheets, ice floes in his personal Antarctica, and lay beside Jen with the material pulled close up about him, praying for it all to stop.

  He didn’t remember falling asleep but when he woke next morning, he was in no doubt that it hadn’t been a dream. He felt exhausted and unable to tell Jen anything, in case she thought he was losing his mind, or was inventing scare stories about one of her beloved works of art.

  He trudged out to the bus at the usual time, heavy and sluggish, and dozed in his seat, dreaming of a woman he used to know but had lost.

  Several times over the next week, the sensation occurred again. It was accompanied by a gripping fear inside him. Once, while he was in the bath, he plunged his head under the water in an effort to escape, to block the sensation, but it had no effect.

  One morning at breakfast Jen suddenly stopped eating and looked at him. There was an expression on her face as if she had suddenly divined what was happening. Mike quickly got up to make himself some more coffee.

  He was sure there was a smile on her face, even though he didn’t dare to turn and look at her.

  Every day he seemed to grow more tired. Energy became just a memory and not a state of being related to events or activities. He struggled to think and laboured over the keys of his computer.

  One day he felt so drained that he limped over to the News Editor’s desk and complained he was too ill to work. The man, whose wavy grey hair always reminded Mike of waves breaking on an oily beach, looked at him sceptically.

  “What’s wrong with you, then?” he groaned.

  Mike had no idea what he looked like but he felt pale. “I just feel so weak,” he muttered.

  His
boss snorted once. “Aye, you make me weak, too. Go on then, get home,” he said, jabbing his thumb at the door.

  The streets were crowded with grey figures whose faces seemed too alive for comfort. Livid mouths, working quickly around words or simply hanging vacantly open, sat below eyes as white and bright as a new sun. Mike’s head ached and burned. Finally, somehow, he managed to make it to his front door and negotiated the complicated business of putting the key in the lock and turning it. It only took him an hour or two to take the few steps he needed to get inside.

  Exhausted, he leaned on the door post for a moment before trudging the two more steps into the living room. Too tired to go all the way in, he flung his coat over the back of a nearby sofa and rubbed his eyes.

  After a few moments of blackness, he opened his eyes and felt as if he had been slapped in the face. Somehow, by accident, he must have stood in exactly the same spot that Jen had when she was ‘admiring the layout’.

  What Mike saw was a design made up of every piece of furniture and every single ornament in the room. They had all been positioned precisely to make up a pattern, as surely as if they had been drawn on a piece of paper.

  In front of him was a huge circle spanning the entire width of the room; the corner of an ornament lined up perfectly with the arc of a lampstand, which stood in neat alignment with the edge of a painting, which in turn formed part of a pattern with the wall hanging Jen had bought last week, and so on, throughout the width and height of the room.

  Only after a few more moments did another pattern emerge, inside the circle. The chair he usually sat in, his chair, the only comfortable one in the place, sat at the apex of a cone. And this cone in turn faced the great stone lump that had sat in the corner of the room for the past month.

  The bizarre image disappeared when Mike moved just a few inches one way or the other, breaking up into a meaningless collection of everyday objects. He suddenly felt light-headed. What on earth was Jen up to? What could this mean?

  He felt as if somebody had dropped a weight into his heart, his innards struggling hard to cope with the unexpected imposition. He had to sit down.

  Mike struggled over to his favourite chair. He realised it was part of Jen’s bizarre design but he needed its familiarity and softness.

  Almost as soon as he was seated, relaxing into its welcoming comfort, Mike felt the sensation begin. A scuttling or bubbling inside his head. Not a sound or a colour but something in between. He held his breath, expecting to feel the usual fear grasp him but he exhaled with relief after less than a minute.

  It came over him like a wave of relaxation and warmth. There was nothing in it that needed to be feared, he now knew. It was familiar and ancient and perfect. He laughed softly to himself.

  He sat and stared through half-closed eyes at the huge grey shape in front of him. The TV remote lay abandoned, the screen in darkness. Somehow the surface of the sculpture seemed suddenly to hold an odd fascination for him. Maybe Jen was right after all, he thought, as he studied the endless pits and marks on the surface of the stone.

  A soft, dull glow seemed to fill him from the centre of his head outwards, until his entire body overflowed with it. He was aware that the light was changing, the sky beyond the glass becoming dimmer, the day draining away slowly but it somehow didn’t matter now.

  He didn’t even look round when Jen came home, clicking the door shut behind her.

  A song of nothingness filled his head, thrumming in the space between his ears and filling his skull with an empty contentment. The nothingness at his core, called to and nurtured by the giant object before him, had grown to fill his entire being.

  There was an opening up, a lightness. Almost as if the weight of his body, his being, his being here, was no longer a part of the equation, no longer even necessary. He was only needed to finalise a design, to fit in as part of an aesthetic arrangement. He was no body at all, just a balloon of thin flesh and skin.

  He could hear Jen saying, from the other side of this room as big as infinity, “That’s perfect. Just as I’d always pictured it. You’ll get used to it in time.”

  HUNTER/ED

  He’s been stalking his foe among this crumbling old building for two days now. His eyes ache with the strain of staying awake and his brain rattles around in his dried-up skull, making his ears ring.

  The weight of the gun has started to cut into his hand. He’s convinced it will sink straight through his flesh and clatter to the floor at any second, betraying his position to his adversary.

  He has to go up. He knows that. Because that’s where the one he’s following will be – it’s the only place he could be. He doesn’t want to follow him but he knows he has to. He puts his foot gently, gently on the rotten wood of the first stair. When he’s sure it will hold his weight, he starts to climb, slowly.

  The gloomy, unlit stairway feels to him as though it is narrowing, conspiring to crush him before he reaches the top. He grips the loose banister for illusory support and steps quietly out onto the long landing, a corridor leading off to both left and right. Crouching low, creeping forward, suddenly, from somewhere above, he hears a piece of furniture being knocked over. He looks for more stairs.

  His legs begin to ache with the tension of two days of creeping around. He doesn’t want to do this. He desperately wants to escape. But this is for his two sons, now that their mother is gone. In his mind’s eye he sees their faces trapped behind stone. And that voice: “If you don’t succeed, they’re gone. You’ll never see them again, understand? So don’t fail!”

  At the top of the next set of stairs, he tenses and listens for the slightest betraying breath. After seconds of silence, he relaxes and the exhaustion leans its full weight on his shoulders.

  Wiping the sweat from his face, he puts out a hand to steady himself. The rain-soaked plaster slides away under his fingers and he almost loses his balance. He jumps away from the wall as something huge slams against the other side. Shying away from the sound of the impact, he scuttles quickly away down the corridor, imagining a rat the size of a bull, separated from him by just inches of rotten brickwork.

  In his flight he rounds a corner and there, dashing with equal speed, he glimpses his adversary’s legs fleeing up the stairs. Grabbing the banister to halt himself, he swings around quickly and launches himself up two steps, hand outstretched.

  He grabs the man’s ankle and pulls hard, bringing him tumbling backwards down the stairs. Rotten floorboards give slightly below him as his foe lands on top of him, throwing him onto his back. He grabs him around the shoulders, gun hanging loose by just two fingers, and rolls him over. Pinning him with his knees, he stares down into the most familiar face of all. Even the look of confusion and terror is identical.

  Looking suddenly into his own eyes, he gasps and a mirrored mouth joins him. His mind flips over as he grabs hold of a passing thought – he must do this for his children; otherwise they will die.

  He can feel the sweat spring, ice cold, from his exhausted body as he cocks the gun and slides the barrel into his own mouth. He presses his eyes closed and listens for the bang.

  BACKSEAT BALLET

  Carrie loved her car. Big, sleek and hard, it was the only thing in her life that had never blown a tyre and veered off the road.

  This baby was a beauty and she was going to drive it hard. Stuck in cement-solid traffic, Carrie tried to massage away her headache.

  Reaching over to the Buick’s big back seat she fished inside her bag for cigarettes. She noticed there was still a slight semen stain there from a week back. She chuckled as she remembered that arrogant bastard’s face – just because he hadn’t come didn’t mean she was going to ride him forever! He’d had to finish himself off. The shit had left his mess behind him; still, it’d been worth it to see the humiliation on his face. Her latest conquest, thoroughly conquered.

  She lit up, sucked in the smoke. Flicking buttons impatiently, Carrie chose the best driving music she had and dreamed about drivi
ng while staring at the rear light of the car in front.

  The city left behind, a few shabby buildings showing up here and there as its only reminder, Carrie put her foot down. She savoured the silky vibrations quickly smoothing out into a full body purr. She intended to enjoy the three-hour drive.

  Scrubby fields flashed by. A series of bends forced her to slow slightly and Carrie noticed three huge shapes off to her left. Slightly startled at first, she slowed. Visible only as silhouettes, they appeared to be giant unmoving figures. They had to be some sort of art project, she thought.

  Despite her suspicions over their ‘worthy’ origin, they still made a powerful impression on her. Anything that big could destroy her within seconds, if they decided to move in her direction.

  As she sped on the figures finally dropped out of sight in her rear view mirror. Shortly afterwards the fields came to an end, replaced by a curious flat moorland.

  She turned the music up, then pressed the accelerator pedal, ready to do some hard driving.

  After an hour-and-a-half’s driving Carrie needed a break. But she hadn’t seen anywhere to stop. Come to think of it, she hadn’t seen anywhere at all: just a long strip of black highway.

  Needing some air, she pulled over and stopped. She’d driven this way before and should have passed through a town by now. She reached in the glove box for a map. Yes, there it was; she should definitely have passed through Fordham. Where the hell had she gone wrong? The road was straight – no turn-offs for about another 20 miles.

  There was nothing for it but to drive. She was bound to reach somewhere eventually, then she could get her bearings before continuing.

  She pushed the pedal down hard, eager to get somewhere, anywhere. As the dial touched 100 the car complained loudly and rocked backwards. Carrie gripped the wheel, eyes flicking across the dashboard dials. A scorching white light flooded the car, surrounding the vehicle like an illuminated river.