Arcane

by Nathan Shumate

  Things were easier to live with after that. She and spider vowed to be best friends, no matter how many times those pills made campfires in her brain and destroyed documents that she held so dear. She shared her pudding with him at night and he taught her all about the art of web-spinning. They would pass whispers to each other on Movie Night, he cuddling in the nook of her neck as she shielded him from the nasty outside world. Then always at night he would hop back into her brain, sure to dodge the stomping boots of the faceless, soulless pills. It made it easier to sleep, knowing not all of her magical friends were destroyed.

  She made the mistake of admitting to one of the red-eyed monsters that a spider sometimes still visited her. The monsters decided this meant the pills weren’t doing a good enough job at shriveling her cells into raisin curds, and told her parents that electrifying her brain would be better instead.

  She told this to the spider the night before it was to happen, and he listened on, horrified.

  “What are you going to do?” he shrieked.

  “You have to hide,” she told him, stroking his belly. “You have to not be in my brain when the lightning comes to get me!”

  Despite his better instincts, the spider promised to hide under her mattress until the deed was done. Though he wanted to be there for his friend, he knew the lightning would kill him, and then his friend would be left all alone. He couldn’t bear the thought, so he crunched himself under the folds of her pillow in the morning and watched with tearful eyes as they dragged her away, needles bouncing in her arm.

  She used to see sunsets and chalkboards going squeaky clean. The shocks did whatever they could to erase all that sentimental nonsense. They pushed and prodded at her numbed, desensitized cranium, blitzing and blasting all unnecessary areas. Accidentally, they fried her short-term memory, but they didn’t consider this a great loss. Memories were a commodity, one that the shocks did not take much interest in. Their job was to find all the nasty chemicals shooting off the wrong signals and to destroy them on sight. When they decided this task had been completed, and all that was left of the mess in her brain was missing socks and burnt toast, they slithered out of her ears, and her fingers stopped twitching.

  Fuzziness dawned on her when she woke up, and she couldn’t remember where she had told the spider to hide. People whose names she used to know seemed unfamiliar and alien, but no one took any notice, and they ushered her back in her room. They shoved more nasty pills down her throat, and told her to sleep off the jitters.

  The spider had been waiting for her return for hours, and snuck back into her ear once she’d laid back down. He examined the recent damage that had been done and shuddered. Little synapses were burnt dry, writhing with a territorial pulse. He was glad he had not stayed in her brain to be smothered and burnt to a crisp, but wished that he could have been there for her.

  The spider wanted to wake her and ask her how she felt, but he wanted to let her rest and dream.

  Sadly for her, there would be no dreams, only stirs in the brain and kicks of the leg. The pills did their regular nightly patrol, but their numbers had been doubled this time, and soon even the toolbox became an area that they scoured with intensity. Thankfully, the spider had learned to be light on his feet, and avoided their metallic thunking throughout private worlds.

  The spider spoke to the girl about how most children got to play outside, and wondered why she didn’t. She told him stories about how she used to play like a normal little girl, but then the evil men found out about the spiders and said that she needed to be taken away. The spider considered this, and in between escaping the clutches of the pills and avoiding the attacks of the shocks, he got to thinking that the only way the girl could dance in rain and eat cherries off of trees again was if the spiders all went away, for good.

  But neither of them wanted him to leave. They liked each other’s company.

  So he decided the best solution would be to lie. Since they didn’t seem to understand that he existed or spoke, they wouldn’t know the difference if she lied and said that he wasn’t there anymore. Her mind was getting emptier, numbed and walloped by the pills several times a day and the shocks once a week, and he was worried that if things went on like this, there would be no place left in her mind for him to hide.

  He told her of his plan for her escape, and she agreed that lying was the only way to get out of these cold rooms with barred windows and restraints to keep her from scratching at scars. So she told the fanged doctors with their spindly claws and blood-red corneas that all the spiders had gone away, and she didn’t even hear their tap dancing in the night. The monsters liked this news, and told her the shocks were working. The more she lied, the more impressed they got, and soon they had called her parents and made arrangements to send her outside the dank, white walls, and out into the real world.

  The night before she was meant to go home, they gave her one more set of shocks. They just narrowly missed the spider, who had lingered a little too long in her brain that morning. Before she went to sleep, she and the spider cuddled each other on the pillow, with talk of water spouts and puddle leaping and spinning webs together in the fields.

  “No more numb brain,” she said, smiling. “No more dead cells.”

  The spider nodded eagerly with her, rubbing on her cheek.

  Her eyes flickered like a dimming lightbulb.

  “Go sleep now. Be in a better place tomorrow.”

  The spider nodded again, more slowly this time. Something looked wrong in the girl’s face, like something was out of place, like something had been moved in the wrong direction.

  When the nurse came to wake her up the next morning, she saw no reason why the girl should have died. But she had. Everyone took this as quite a shock, as she had appeared to be improving with her mental state. From the look of contentment on her face, it seemed the only thing that could have served to do her in was the peace of being able to go home.

  “Poor girl,” everyone said, wiping fake tears off their gloves, “so much potential to get better.”

  The nurse nodded along with the others, brow furrowed in concern. When she had first walked in, she had seen something strange, almost as soon as the shock of death had subsided. Now looking at the body again, she learned it hadn’t been a trick of the light. On the girl’s corpse lay the crushed body of an arachnid. An arachnid which, upon closer inspection, seemed to be clinging to the neckline of the patient’s nightgown.

  She wiped the spider off the girl and dismissed the thought.

  DESTINATION UNKNOWN

  Anthony J. Rapino

  A ’70s-era Dodge Challenger had been following Jackson since he left Manhattan at 2 a.m. He’d noticed the Challenger pull out behind him from the gas station, but thought nothing of it until he merged once, took an exit, and remerged onto 80 West. Forty-five minutes later and the Challenger remained six car lengths behind.

  He wondered if it could be Christie in the car. It’d been almost five months of her games. Five months since he’d last seen her. Her reappearance was long overdue. The radio, set to a city station, became more static than music, so Jackson fiddled with the knob until he found something palatable. He glanced for the hundredth time into his rearview mirror. Still there.

  Jackson shook his head and muttered to himself, “Is it you?” Under the circumstances, it was more likely a tail. Could he put anything past Christie? If there was anything she was more serious about than her games, it was making sure he didn’t cheat.

  The seat belt felt tight around his chest. He pulled at it and shifted. He cracked the window and let the night air cool him, but it only made him have to pee. A good reminder of why drinking an extra-large coffee during the first ten minutes of a long drive is a bad idea.

  The ever-present GPS said, “Continue straight on 80 West.” Jackson looked at the screen, which showed his current location, an arrow pointing straight ahead, and the ominous heading, “Destination Unknown.” Where was she taking him this time? More
importantly, would his participation continue to prevent the inevitable?

  His headlights illuminated a road sign indicating the Delaware Water Gap crossing ahead. Pennsylvania. How far was Christie going to take him? Another sign indicated that one mile ahead, before the toll booths, there was a pull-off. Jackson shifted in his seat. He could continue on for God knew how much farther, or he could pull over and empty his bladder. He shifted again. “Not much of a choice, really,” he said to the empty car. “Unless I want to water my pants plant.” He grinned, thinking Christie would have liked the joke.

  Jackson slowed. The Challenger slowed too, staying the same distance behind. Already a quarter mile had blasted by. Would stopping to pee break the rules of the game? Straight there, the rules said. No detours, the rules said. But was a pit stop a detour?

  Another quarter mile gone, but no closer to an answer. If that was Christie in the car, maybe she’d get out and come to him. Maybe she had come to her senses.

  Only a quarter mile left before the pull off. What if it wasn’t her in the car? What if it was a hired enforcer? Christie wouldn’t end it for such a small breach, would she? But if she would, wasn’t it worth pissing his pants?

  Jackson could see the exit ahead. What if the car wasn’t following him at all? What if it was all a coincidence? He let his foot off the gas. The exit loomed. He checked his rear view mirror. The car still followed.

  “Fuck it.” He jerked the wheel to the right, but his speed was too much for the tight curve and his tires screamed. He hit the brakes hard and fishtailed. Muscles tense, Jackson yanked the wheel left, then right, then left. He skidded but kept his trajectory, finally screeching into the parking lot of the rest stop.

  He pulled into a spot, exhaled, and dropped his hands from the wheel. “Jesus.” Jackson’s entire chest thumped as if his torso contained an enormous heart. He put the car into park, killed the ignition. Deep breaths.

  Tires crunched gravel. Jackson watched as the Dodge pulled into the spot directly next to his side of the car. Strange. Apparently whoever was following him—and certainly there was no longer any question about that—didn’t care if he knew. This close, he could see that the windows were tinted.

  Jackson got out of his car and waited. He balled his hands into fists and ground his teeth. Would Christie step out? If not, would he know the driver? Would they threaten him?

  No one got out. Not a soul.

  The bathroom called. His bladder had been put through an endurance test, and he didn’t think it’d hold up to the stress much longer. There was the car to consider. The Dodge that had followed him from Manhattan, that had something to do with his girlfriend and these twisted games. For those reasons and because he was frayed at the edges, lonely and tired, he pounded on the window and yelled, “Get out!”

  Silence answered him. For a moment he second-guessed himself. Some poor stranger could be sitting in the car scared out of his mind. This thought dissipated quickly, however. The car had been with him for over an hour. Jackson calmed himself and knocked more lightly this time. “Please. Would you please just step out of the car? Christie, are you in there?”

  Someone killed the ignition. Jackson’s skin went cold. Could it really be Christie? He’d gone months with no contact except for emails and text messages. Even then, only instructions for each new “game,” as she referred to them. Jackson didn’t think of them as games. Not at all.

  Sweet, disturbed Christie. Her crisp blue eyes looked at everything, saw everything, and somehow she was blind to her own salvation.

  “Baby?” Jackson said. “This is it, okay? This is enough. No more games. I love you, and there’s no way you can’t know that by now.”

  The silent car remained so. Jackson said, “Hello?” He walked around to the driver’s side and tried the door. It opened. Jackson started to smile, but never quite made it.

  The car was empty. No one in the front. No one in the back. No one.

  The engine started, and Jackson finally got to relieve himself. He muttered, “What?” When there was no answer, he said it again. And again. And again.

  His mind had frozen like a corrupted hard drive. A virus had wormed its way into the soft tissue of his brain. How else to explain it? And explain it his brain must. When he came up empty, the disks kept spinning, overheating: “What?”

  The GPS system inside the Challenger answered, “You cheated.”

  “I.” He stopped, his brain momentarily catching, telling him he was speaking to an electronic device. “I had to pee.” He said this, but he knew this wasn’t the rule he broke. He had opened the car door. He looked inside hoping to find Christie, hoping to put an end to the games.

  “Rules are rules,” answered the GPS.

  The car door slammed itself shut, and the Challenger backed out. Jackson shook his head. “What?” He ran after the car. “Wait! Christie! Where’s Christie?” The car picked up speed, headed for the on-ramp. “She can’t do it! She can’t!”

  He stopped and made a grunting, panicked noise that sounded animalistic. He turned and ran back to his car, still making the noise over and over.

  He jumped into his car and fumbled around, not sure what to do, forgetting where he was.

  Then the GPS system turned on. Only it wasn’t the normal screen. It was a video feed of a bathroom, and someone was in the tub.

  Jackson stared, and upon seeing her, he came back to himself. It was Christie in the tub, and she was alive. Still alive.

  “Don’t, Christie. I’m sorry; I’ll follow the rules. Don’t. Please, ple—” He stopped, but not because she spoke. He stopped because he noticed a date at the bottom corner of the screen. A date five months earlier.

  Christie looked at the camera. The video was grainy, black and white, and silent, but Jackson thought she said, “I love you,” right before dragging the razor down the length of one arm, then the other. He watched the grey water turn black. He watched as, five months ago, Christie’s eyes failed to see.

  The first thing his fractured mind thought—before questioning how he’d been getting directions from a dead woman, or how a car drove itself away—was, “She cheated.” In fact, she had cheated. She had promised Jackson that, if he proved his love by doing everything she said, she wouldn’t kill herself. If he played the games, she’d remain on this earth no matter how much she suffered, no matter how badly she wanted to end her life. Even though he’d done as she asked, she had still killed herself. She’d done it anyway.

  Jackson rubbed his eyes until they burned. She was gone. All these games she’d had him play—driving to different states to visit relatives, giving them pre-wrapped boxes with God only knew what inside, sending out letters, selling stuff for her—he could see now what he was really doing. Had an inkling the whole time if he was being honest with himself. She never planned on sticking around.

  The compass in his mind spun. Abandoned with no direction.

  His cell phone buzzed. He fished it from his pocket. It was a text message from Christie. He stared at the glowing screen, his finger hovering over the View button. An electric shiver ran over the surface of his skin.

  Gravel crunched in the parking lot. The Dodge Challenger pulled up behind him. His chest thrummed and thumped, all heart. What else could he do?

  He pressed View: “Time for the next game. Are you ready?”

  Jackson was.

  IN ONE THERE IS MANY

  Max Vile

  Fred’s ankle turned in a briar coil, as if the damned thing was set in wait for him, and he stumbled headlong into a thicket of blackberry bushes. The thorns scraped him raw in dozens of places but he ignored them and yanked himself free, leaving a bit of his flannel-checkered shirt and already bloody skin stuck along the vines. He rolled onto his back and froze.

  Behind him he heard the wail of the hounds in pursuit.

  He couldn’t see them yet but they sounded close. Half a mile, maybe. It wouldn’t take them long to close the distance and overtake him, even if
he kept moving full pace. Already he’d pushed himself the entire day to gain some distance, though it didn’t help shake them. When they found him, there’d be no discussion—none except whatever whispers a shotgun chided to a forehead, before it blew a final double-barreled kiss.

  With those dogs keeping the trail fresh, all he could hope was for another refugee to come along and steal their noses away. Of course, in this wilderness, he might be the only one for miles.

  Nothing left to do except pray. In his present condition, he held little faith that God would hear his plea. He did it anyway.

  “Lord, don’t let the devils find me… not yet. You hear me? I got to save them first. Tell him, Carol. Tell him I got to fix what I stole. From dust we came… to dust we return… not yet. There’s a miracle more.”

  The stars shuddered under his gaze. Neither they nor any heavenly spirit betrayed a hint of hearing his words.

  Ahead lay only night and more forest. Who knows how long before the trees broke, he wondered. Maybe never. He wasn’t sure he was even traveling in the right direction.

  No need to debate it now. He still had two God-given feet. They may be damned, but they remained his. With any luck he still had enough energy in reserve to finally discover his bearings, find some shelter, hunker down until his head settled to figure out a way to finish this insanity. Not much choice left either way.

  The dogs howled. Closer.

  With a second silent prayer on his lips, Fred shuffled between the trees, clawing his fingers into the bark to drag himself just another few feet.

  ***

  “I think God heard us, Carol,” Fred said. An overgrown field sprawled in front of him for a couple of acres. He raised his foot from a pile of something soft.

  Cow shit. Probably from a stray. It didn’t look like any herds had come through here in a while. The entire field was twisted with weeds and his beloved briars. Off to the far right, a small storage barn slumped on three and a half walls, the roof slanted, ready to collapse. A wall of shadows and trees encircled the empty space. Their forked branches melded into the black sky so it seemed the very heavens descended to surround him.