The Void

by Kivak, Albert

  “Fuck the bowl,” Meredith screamed, eyes engorged and spilling out with horror. “There was a spider. An enormous one!” She trembled at the thought of what had almost happened. She had almost swallowed a spider—a whole friggin’ spider—down her throat. The thought of drinking the same milk the spider had shared, skinny dipping in the white pool, made her nauseous. “Dear God, I almost drank it.”

  “Would you calm down?” Don headed to the upturned bowl. It hadn’t shattered, miraculously. “It was just a spider. You make it sound like you drank arsenic.”

  “It’s still alive,” she said in a hushed whisper. “Be careful.”

  Don stooped down to pick the upside-down bowl back right-side up. As he grabbed it, the bowl shifted to the right, hard, dragging Don with it. Don’s eyes bugged out of his head.

  “It moved me. Something’s under here.” Don said, incredulously.

  “I told you,” Meredith said. Beads of sweat formed on her upper lip. She licked them. “Watch out. Kill it as soon as it pops out.”

  “With what?”

  “With your hands, you pussy,” she hissed. “Your shoes. Anything!”

  “Christ,” he said, and gulped. He reached back down, touched the bowl, counted to three, and flipped it over. It clattered round and round on the wooden surface of the floor. They stared at the where the spider should be, but there was nothing.

  It was gone.

  II

  Four hours later, during lunchtime, Morgan played basketball with a group of school socialites at recess. He participated for a couple of minutes, but when he realized none of the other players were passing the ball to him, he grew bored of watching the rebounds and the shots smacking the rim, but rarely going in. Everyone sucked. They thought they were all hot-shots.

  “Here, here!” Morgan said, waving his arms. “Pass it here!”

  But nobody passed it. They ran back and forth on the court, rubber soles clapping on the gravel. They attacked the rim. The ball bounced passed him. Someone finally threw the basketball at him, but Morgan lost his grasp when his thumb became squashed, bending backwards pressed into an enjambment, since the ball came at a wrong angle.

  The ball bounced away, and he cursed under his breath. He swore the next time he got the ball, he’d make sure he’d shoot it through the net and aim high for the round hole. After another seven minutes ticked on the stopwatch, he stole the ball. The players crowded around him, attempting to filch it back in their hands.

  “Get away! No!” Morgan cried. He whipped his elbows in a fanlike eddy, swiveling his joints like a mallet. “Get off me!” One of the boys named Andrew Chauffer got a grip of the ball from behind Morgan. “Get away!”

  Morgan jabbed his elbow out, instinctively, and clipped Andrew in the mouth. Blood gushed out, running down the front of his t-shirt. Morgan dropped the ball and bounced it to the backboard. He shot it, springing up off his two feet, and the ball glided in the net, making the swishing sound. Morgan clapped and laughed.

  He went to another part of the court and acquired his hands on a hula-hoop. The girls stared, while, in the distance, Andrew howled with tears and pain—a wail that never stopped.

  III

  Meredith, stood wide-eyed, clutching an insect killer spray and trembling as she rounded a corner in the kitchen. She imagined spiders dancing on the walls and hiding in shadows. She remembered how large that black mass was in the milk, how, when it spread its legs, it expanded twice its size.

  Meredith felt sick it was midday, and she still couldn’t find the damn arachnid.

  “I’m telling you, it’s not there,” Don said, as she rejoined him at the table. She plopped down and sighed. “I checked everywhere. There’s nothing here.”

  “It has to be somewhere,” she said, fingers twitching. She set the canister down on the countertop.

  “Well if it is, it’s gone now.”

  “I swear to you, Don, it was huge…” she murmured, eyes rolling. “Like one of those Australian spiders I’ve seen on the internet.”

  “Surely, it can’t be that big.”

  “Oh, believe me,” she nodded her head vigorously. “It was, huge. You saw how it moved the bowl.”

  “Maybe it was the wind.”

  “The wind?” she laughed, cackling a strange choked-up peal. “Ha! The wind. Oh, please. Don’t even start with me, Don.”

  “What? What’d I do?”

  “You know what? Get out of my house.”

  “What? Why?” Donald pleaded. He stood back up and began to inspect the corners of the room.

  “Because you’re acting like a jerk.”

  “Look,” Don said, spreading his palms. “I know I haven’t been visiting you recently. I’ve been caught up with work. Please, you know my predicament and what I do every night.”

  “That’s not why I’m pissed at you.”

  “Then what is it?”

  “You come here last night and stay over, act all cuddly and shit, then have the galls to tell me I’m imagining shit?” Meredith growled. She flicked the crumbs of cereal with a backhand off the table. “Are you serious? You’re a real piece of work, you know that?”

  “I don’t understand,” Don said, clutching the mop that had been used to clean up the soggy mess. “I wasn’t here last night.”

  “You weren’t what?”

  “I said I wasn’t here last night. I showed up today because I was concerned for your safety. I wanted to make sure that sinkhole wasn’t going to end up swallowing your property.”

  “You weren’t here last night?”

  “No.”

  “You’re bugging the shit out of me. Tell me the truth, Don—are you telling me you weren’t with me last night?” Meredith’s voice wavered as she said it.

  Donald stared at her with a pale face. “No.”

  Just then, the telephone started to ring.

  IV

  She rushed to the school. The principal had called to let her know that her son was involved in an accident, which he had triggered, and he had split open a classmate’s lip.

  No, not her boy, Meredith assured herself. Morgan would never do such a thing.

  Yet, as she entered the principal’s office and observed her son sitting in a chair, head down with downcast eyes, she knew he was in a world of trouble. They shook hands. The principal’s name was Sandy Wilton. Clumps of mascara pasted on her eyelashes, eyebrows, and jowls like freshly pressed wallpaper. She dressed in a casual brown suit, and her skirt was hiked up just above her knobby knees.

  She sat across from Meredith behind a long horseshoe shaped desk, oval, a half semi-circle.

  “How are you doing, Mrs. Brewster?” she said, pulling in the chair.

  “Not so well. What did Morgan do now?”

  “Do you know why I called you?”

  “Please tell me what’s going on,” Meredith implored, glancing at Morgan and at Sandy. “If my son had done anything, you can be certain he’ll be disciplined.”

  The principal picked up a pencil and scratched something on a notepad. “I don’t think this can be fixed by punishing your son. I’m afraid your son cannot come to our school anymore.”

  “What? What did he do?”

  “He didn’t do anything, except cut another child’s lip.”

  “That can’t be the reason why he’s being expelled,” Meredith stood up. “Tell me, what happened here.”

  Sandy watched Morgan play with his fingers. He tapped his open palm, rattling his fingers like the legs of a spider. Sandy forced down the fear cracking to break out. Earlier the previous week, she had been infested with spiders under the skin. They worked their way into her blood veins, protruding the vessels as if they were boiling in hot water. The pain was unbearable—the same pain that was besieging her now. She stopped doodling and scratched her hands.

  “Your son is dangerous.”

  “Like I said, what did he do?”

  “Under penal code 860, it’s illegal for your child to cause harm o
r threaten the safety of others. If by any reason, the public’s safety is in danger, that danger must be removed.”

  “My son, a health risk to others?” Meredith asked in disbelief. “No, you’re wrong. This isn’t grounds for expulsion. You can’t do this.”

  “Mrs. Brewster. Your son was levitating. He was three feet off the ground. A number of teaching staff saw this. And so did I,” Sandy said calmly.

  She had something in her. She itched. She scratched her skin, running her long fingernails across, breaking the skin and spurting blood. A thin trickle sprouted like a flowing streamer. There was black infestation under that skin, burning up the arteries. It hurt, dear God. It was worse around the boy.

  Meredith gestured to Morgan. “My son is not dangerous. What you’re saying is beyond credibility, makes me wonder what kind of environment my son has to endure. We’re leaving now.”

  “Yes, you do that. And don’t ever come back.”

  “You’ll hear from me again,” Meredith warned. “And from the school board advisors.”

  The Brewster family left, and Sandy brooded. She would not leave the school premise tonight.

  V

  She hung herself. She looped a belt around her neck, tightened it, and knotted it around the ceiling fan. The assistant principal found her the next day, swaying, as though there was a light breeze in the room, but all the windows were closed.

  Inside the walls, between the insulation and plaster, she heard a skittering.

  Chapter four

  The noise from outside woke Embry, hazy snatches of his nightmare lingering in his mind. It was his wife falling in a hole, except… it didn’t feel like a dream. It felt real, an amalgamation of fiction and reality. His sister in law was missing and in his dream the woman who jumped shimmered between his wife and her sister, which added to the intensity of the dream. In reality, Embry’s wife was beside herself with worry and had been badgering the police, without success, to investigate the interior of the hole to see if she had happened to fall in. There were more lingering memories from his dreams, all of which seemed to revolve around spiders.

  He tried to recall specifics, but, as it always was with his dreams, it had faded away into frustrating obscurity. He coughed, reached over, grabbed his cigarettes, and upon finding the pack empty, began to poke around the overstuffed ashtray, looking for a decent sized butt worth relighting. Outside, horns honked and raised voices were heard. It was enough to make Embry forget his craving for nicotine for the time being.

  He climbed out of bed and walked to the curtain, pulling it aside, and squinting at the clarity of the day.

  The hole was bigger. His hedge and part of his lawn were gone.

  He looked at the scene and could read well enough what had happened. Somebody, it seemed had fallen into the hole, which raised gooseflesh on his arms as his nightmare flashed into his mind. The police had arrived and cordoned off the hole as fire crews pointed and gave orders. Men in camouflage jackets and boots directed the curious citizens to move back, making Embry wonder what the hell the army was doing getting involved.

  Down the street, beyond the blockade, were news vans, an ambulance, an unmarked RV, and beyond that, anxious news crews were assembling their equipment, hoping to snatch a decent piece to go on the evening news.

  Embry was trying to work out who was in charge when a jolt of electricity hit him. A sharp, agonizing heat in his stomach made him wince and double over in agony.

  His cancer was awake.

  He squeezed his eyes closed, and counted backward from ten, hoping the pain would pass. Often it did, but sometimes it would leave him incapacitated, curled up on his side and praying for death. Today was the worst it had ever been; it was ravaging his insides. His cancer seemed to be growing at the same pace as the hole. Embry continued his countdown.

  At the count of four, he could open his eyes. By one, he was almost back to normal. He looked out at the scene below. His wife’s coupe was out of the driveway, away at work. There was a teenage girl there with her father. She was crying—crying about someone called Isis.

  He sighed, dressed, and went downstairs to take a closer look.

  II

  “Okay, let’s go over this one more time,” Clifton said as he folded his hands on the table and watched Candy intently. James Clifton was an ex-marine who worked for the bureau, a secret investigative force who tackled terrorism and developed counterterrorism methods.

  “I told you already,” she replied, still shaking as she picked at the lip of her polystyrene coffee cup. “Eddie went into the hole. Then he never came back out.”

  “So, he fell?”

  “Yes, I think so. I don’t know. But I think that’s what happened.”

  “But you didn’t see it?” Clifton shot back, a faint ghost of a smile forming on his lips.

  Sporting a blonde crew cut, he was built like a tank and somehow squeezed his massive frame into his expensive black suit. Candy looked at him again. She thought he would look more suited in army khakis, clutching a machine gun and chewing on an oversized cigar.

  “Miss Robins?” Clifton pressed, fixing his cold gray gaze on her.

  “Yes— no— I mean…” she sighed and took a nervous sip of her drink. “ I didn’t actually see him, but I know he fell.”

  “I see,” Clifton said, giving her time to find the words.

  “Look, I didn’t make it up,” she blurted, wishing he would stop staring at her.

  “Oh, we found his rope, there’s no doubt he had every intention of climbing down there. I just happen to be of the opinion that he changed his mind.”

  “You should be searching for him. He could be dead or hurt or…” she trailed off and looked at her hands as if the answers were written there and would present themselves if she stared hard enough. She looked around the room. Windowless and small. Clifton followed her gaze and smiled.

  “This is called a MOCOM. Or Mobile Command Unit. It’s a place for us to operate in the field.”

  “Are you with the army?” she asked.

  “Government. I can’t say too much, and to be frank, it’s skirting the issue here. Now I understand you have explained and, for the record, I have no reason to disbelieve you. But I don’t think what you’re saying is the absolute truth.”

  “Why would I lie, what would I—”

  He silenced her protests by holding up a large, calloused hand, then smiled and leaned forward.

  “Miss Robins, please, calm down.”

  “I don’t understand why you’re interrogating me,” she said, sobbing.

  She banged the desk in frustration. Clifton smiled, a predatory expression that revealed his perfectly veneered teeth.

  “This is far from an interrogation, Miss Clifton. If it were, I would already have my answers.”

  There was no mistaking the threat in his voice, and the more frightened Candy became, the more he seemed to enjoy it.

  “Now let’s try again,” he said. Leaning back in his seat and cracking his knuckles. “Tell me what happened.”

  III

  Embry had trouble even leaving his own house. He had been forced to argue his way through the barricade outside his gate, and only once there did he consider it might be even harder to get back in. Although it had looked warm from inside, there was a chill in the air, and now that he was close to the sinkhole, he could detect a faint smell coming from it. It reminded him of the time he had left a chicken fillet in the fridge and forgot about it for two weeks, it had a putrid, ammonia-like smell. His stomach churned as he looked over the barricade into the pitch black of the hole where he was certain he had seen his wife throw herself in. He shuddered.

  “Deep, isn’t it?”

  “Jesus!” Embry spat as he whipped his head around. “Shouldn’t you be in school?”

  “I think so. My mom said I don’t have to today.”

  Morgan was looking up at him, his eyes darkly curious. Embry's eyes went from the kid to the jar.

  “
Holy crap, kid,” Embry said as he crouched down. “That’s some big ass spider.”

  Morgan grinned and held the jar up for Embry to inspect it. Inside was a large blue-green spider with a brown abdomen. Embry looked at the boy, then back at the spider. It was way too big to be a house spider, its proportions more like that of a tarantula.

  “Where the hell did you get that from, kid?”

  “Found him. His name’s Greeny.”

  “I’m not sure you should be messing with that. It could be poisonous.”

  Morgan shook his head. “It’s not. I read about him, it’s a…” Morgan furrowed his brow as he tried to ensure he got the pronunciation right. “He’s a Chromatopelma cyaneopubescens, but most people call them Greenbottle blues.”

  Despite himself, Embry grinned. “You know a lot about these things, huh?”

  Morgan nodded. “Yeah, I have lots of ‘em. You always have to be ready.”

  “Ready for what?” Embry asked, somehow knowing that the answer wouldn’t be one he wanted to hear.

  “To go down there,” Morgan said with a smile, nodding towards the sinkhole.

  Embry followed the boy’s gaze, and for the first time wished he was nowhere near the hole in the ground. Morgan’s mother rushed towards them, wringing her hands.

  “Morgan Brewster, in the house, please,” Meredith said, still flustered by the events at the school the previous day. The boy obliged, and stood beside his mother, who looked at Embry mistrustfully.

  “This is quite the distraction,” she said awkwardly, trying to force some conversation. Embry nodded, realizing that although they had lived across the street from each other for three or four years, this was the first time they had spoken.

  “It is,” he said, glancing into the sinkhole. “I just hope the thing stops growing before it eats any more of my lawn.”

  “Yes, I saw that. I’m sorry.”

  “Me too.”

  Embry nodded towards Morgan, who was staring into the jar.