Screaming to Get Out & Other Wailings of the Damned

by J. F. Gonzalez

  “I don’t know!” Robert said. He looked grave, concerned. “All I know is we’ve got to stop it. We’ve got to do something!”

  That’s when Cathy proposed lighting it on fire. It was a good idea. I had fantasized shooting it with my .22 pump-action rifle, but I wasn’t sure if I could kill it with one shot. A shotgun blast might be better, but what if that didn’t work? What if, after shooting it, it just got pissed off and came after me? Fire seemed to be the better solution—you can kill anything with fire.

  I wanted to call the police, but Robert, Mark, and Cathy firmly insisted the police wouldn’t do anything, and Cathy was afraid of getting into trouble with her dad. “Nobody’s going to believe us,” she said, staring down the hill at the town below. “And Mrs. Simpson isn’t going to want the police involved anyway. Besides, what if they don’t do anything? She’s going to find out and I know her...she’ll be curious about it and will want to see it and what if...” She let her question trail off but the three of us knew the implication of her question. What if the spider got Mrs. Simpson?

  So we did it. We went to Robert and Mark's house and waited while Robert siphoned some gasoline from his old Camaro, then we headed to my house. We snuck inside and I emptied out a spray bottle of laundry detergent and Robert filled it with the gasoline. While Robert, Mark, and Cathy did that, I swiped a box of long kitchen matches from one of the cupboards and then, armed and ready, we made our way to Mrs. Simpson’s house.

  It was just after noon. That day was oppressively hot. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest as we drew closer to the house. When we reached it, Cathy checked to see if the old lady was home. She knocked on the door, and after five minutes jumped off the porch. “Coast is clear,” she said.

  We traveled around to the side of the house and I checked to see if the water was running and there was a garden hose nearby. There was; Mrs. Simpson had one right against the side of her house.

  We approached the shed in a neat, huddled-together bunch. Robert reached out and opened the door quickly. We jumped back slightly, almost expecting the spider to leap out at us and I was a little relieved to see it hadn’t changed its position much. The creature was still poised over the kitten, which was not only dead and wrapped in silk, but looked completely desiccated. I couldn't believe it had eaten the kitten so fast.

  “How far will this thing spray?” Robert asked. His voice cracked; I’d never heard him sound so scared.

  “Guess we should have tried that before we left,” I said.

  “Spray bottles usually have a range of about three or four feet, maybe longer” Cathy said. A kind of hard reserve had set in her face. Her eyes were riveted on the spider. “It won’t need much. Just give it two or three squirts and that should do it.

  Robert looked at the spider. “Shit.” I felt my own resolve drop at the sound of his voice. Robert sounded on the verge of backing down.

  “Hey! What th’ hell you guys doing?”

  I didn’t have to turn around to know who that voice belonged to, but I did anyway out of reflex. When I saw Mike at the end of the block, walking casually toward us, I felt my stomach drop into my bowels. “Jesus, it’s Mike,” I said.

  “Oh no!” Cathy said, her voice trembling.

  “I thought he had a probation appointment,” Robert said, looking stunned.

  The arrival of Mike, whatever the reason, meant only one thing. If he saw what we were up to he’d do something to make us stop. And at some point Cathy would suffer for it. Either from her father, but most likely from her big brother who would no doubt find a way to trap the mutant spider and subject her to its awfulness.

  That decided it for me. I couldn’t let Cathy be hurt.

  I grabbed the spray bottle out of Robert’s hands and, in one swift motion, took three steps forward until I was standing at the threshold of the shed. I was perhaps four feet from the spider. I quickly sprayed gasoline over it, hitting it dead center. I don’t know how many times I squeezed the trigger of that spray bottle, but I know I must have got at least two or three good squeezes in there. By the time I stepped back—scrambled back with my heart in my throat is more like it—the stinging effect of the gasoline was having an effect on the creature. It raced madly up its web toward the ceiling.

  “Burn it!” I yelled at Robert. “Do it now!”

  Robert snapped out of his initial shock, then pulled one long wooden kitchen match out of the box I had taken from my house and got it lit with one stroke. He quickly took a step forward and leaned into the shed, tossing the match in a wide arc where it hit the giant web dead center.

  The flames rushed up, seeming to billow out. I had been watching the spider the whole time and it had stopped its ascent along the top corner of the shed. The flames traveled along its trajectory and then the thing was a blazing fireball.

  And then the spider jumped straight at Robert.

  Robert screamed and jumped back. He collided into me and we almost tumbled to the ground. As it was, the minute I saw the spider jump at Robert, its body set ablaze, its eight legs waving torches, I almost stopped breathing.

  The spider hit the floor of the shed about two feet from the door and ran into the outer wall. The four of us ran like hell away from the shed, screaming at the top of our lungs. Mike ran up to us, his stupid face bearing a what-the-hell-is-going-on look. And even though I didn't learn about this until later from Cathy and Robert, I thought at the time I was the only one who heard what was coming out of the shed as the flames grew stronger and everything in that shed began to go up in a great conflagration.

  What had I heard? It was so low and deep it almost felt like the bass note of a synthesizer. I felt it more than I heard it, but it was a sound. Of that I have no doubt.

  It was the spider.

  Screaming.

  Everything happened so fast, but I still remember everything so clearly, as if it happened in slow motion. I remember us running away from the shed, nearly colliding into Mike who noticed the smoke pouring out of the shed. "What the hell's going on? Are you guys burning down Mrs. Simpson's shed? Jesus Christ!" Robert grabbed Mike and spun him around, propelling him forward as we ran. I remember Cathy running next to me, her sense of purpose strong. I remember Mark having a good five-yard lead on us as he ran.

  I remember turning back to glance at the shed as we ran away from that nightmare, and what I saw will be forever imprinted on my memory. As that tinderbox of a shed went up in flames, fed by the old wood and boxes of books, I saw the spider try to climb back up its web, its body burning fiercely, and I could have swore I saw something else...something large and dark and shapeless, sitting along the top of the far wall near the roof. Whatever it was, the spider was trying to reach it, and it wasn't until weeks later that I began to understand what it was and I realized we probably saved the world.

  THAT’S HOW I got grounded and received a juvenile criminal record when I was thirteen.

  We called the fire department, of course. We didn't want the fire to hop over to Mrs. Simpson's house. The blaze was quickly extinguished and it was Robert who insisted we go over and tell them what happened. "They'll believe us," he stated empathetically. "There'll be evidence."

  Only thing was, there wasn't. The shack had been such a fire hazard that it burned to the ground within ten minutes. By the time the volunteer fire department arrived, the fire had pretty much burned itself out. A neighbor had spotted the blaze and was able to fight some of it from Mrs. Simpson's house (as it turns out, the old librarian's house only suffered minimal exterior damage). We watched as the volunteer fire department sifted through the ashes and we were later put under intense questioning by the fire chief and a policeman, who put the three of us in the back of his squad car. For once, Mike looked relieved that he wasn't going to be the one riding in the back of a police car.

  My parents gave me holy hell and forbid me to see Mark, Robert or Cathy, even when school started. I was also forced to give up the kittens we had hidden in my closet
— mom took them to the local SPCA and Whiskey was returned to Cathy. I felt my father's disappointment and have felt it ever since but I don't care. I know we did the right thing.

  Naturally, we told the police and the fire chief why we burned the place down. Robert insisted they look for evidence, and they made a half-hearted attempt to. But the fire had burned so fiercely that everything was destroyed. Had there been anything alive in that shed, it would have been reduced to ashes. Robert insisted they test the ashes and that's where the police drew the line. They told us to stop using this lame excuse and just fess up—we burned the shack down because we were bored, and it was summer, and we were just a bunch of stupid kids, right? The more we stuck to our story, the angrier the police and our parents became until finally they just threw their collective hands up and stopped arguing with us. I'm sure it didn't help that Mike supported our story—he claimed he saw the giant spider, that he'd even fed one of Cathy's kittens to it—but Mike was such a psychotic freak show that it destroyed any credibility we might have had. My folks and Robert's got together and made Mrs. Simpson a settlement offer to avoid the cost of a lawsuit, which she accepted. As for Cathy's parents, they figured it was inevitable their daughter was following in their son's footsteps and merely shrugged the incident off. Besides, they had more important things to worry about, like their Friday and Saturday night fights and their drinking.

  It felt like I was on probation and in hock with my parents forever, but in reality it was only for a year. And despite my folks’ order to stay away from Cathy, I couldn’t. We saw each other at school, and as much as I tried to resume our friendship, to be even closer to her, I could feel she was backing away from me. Maybe it was because we shared an incident that had so deeply wounded her she didn’t want to be around me anymore, because seeing me reminded her of it. Whatever the case, we drifted apart slowly, but I still loved her. I suppose I always will.

  Cathy never finished high school. By the time we were in eleventh grade, she had all but dropped out and was running around with the local chapter of an outlaw motorcycle club—I think it was the Pagans. Mike finally wound up in Lancaster County Prison on an attempted murder charge.

  As for me, I was afraid to go into the woods for years. Finally, I made a trek into the woods near the spot where what I just described happened. I looked everywhere for something out of alignment, anything weird, and didn’t find anything. I even ventured close to where the rumored toxic dumpsites were and found nothing. No mutant bugs, no giant squirrels, no oozing pits of vegetation, no purple bunnies for that matter. In short, if the area I explored had been used as a dumpsite for the nuclear plant, somebody had done a good job of cleaning it up.

  I left the area after high school but wound up back in town again after my wife wanted to move out of Philadelphia.

  I thought the passing of time had erased the threat. I was certain what we had done back then—destroying the spider by burning down Mrs. Simpson’s shack—had been the best thing to do.

  But something happened. I don’t know what, but...somehow...whatever it was that caused the creature we saw to mutate in the first place...whatever that was...it never went away.

  The day I saw the newspaper article was the first clue.

  New Case of Wasting Illness Discovered in Pennsylvania.

  The victim in this story was a minister of a church in a small town in central Pennsylvania about one hundred miles from where I live now. He’d lain down to sleep one night and was found by his adult son, who’d stopped by to pick him up for church.

  He was found completely wasted away, all the fluids of his body sucked out of him.

  Doctors are baffled. They don’t know much about the illness yet and they claim it’s rare, whatever it is, but they do know a few things about it. It can strike anybody at any time, without warning, and it leaves the victim completely desiccated. Usually the victim’s family finds them this way, their fluids sucked out of them, leaving lifeless husks. One minute they’re healthy, next minute they’re dead shells.

  Like the empty shell of that mouse I found in my driveway this morning.

  I’m writing this inside my house, on my laptop computer. I have my family inside with me. I think I’ve convinced my wife a little bit about what’s going on, especially when I very carefully took a second look outside and saw the other spiders—the first one I saw that I had mistaken for a garden spider earlier was still sitting in its perch. She realized something was up when I came back from my second trip around the house and asked her to very carefully take a look outside at the grounds of the house. “Look carefully,” I said. “On the porch, the side of the house, between the trees in the backyard and the garage. Tell me if you think it’s unusual for us to have that many spiders in one location.”

  She did, and when she came back inside she said, “So there’s a bunch of spiders. Big deal! It's summer-time!”

  “How many did you see?”

  “Ten or twelve.”

  I led her back outside and together we counted more than twenty spiders. They all looked like they were normal garden spiders, large, fat, ugly things with bodies as big as your thumbnail, with red-black bodies and long spindly legs, sitting in large webs. I could understand one or two in the general vicinity...maybe three...but over twenty?

  I’d never told my wife about that incident from so long ago, and I spent this morning telling her. When I got to the part about the shapeless mass I saw inside the shed shortly before it went up in flames, she saw the implication right away. “Its egg sack,” she said, her face going pale. “Oh my God!”

  “After spiderlings hatch, they release strings of silk that act as balloons,” I said, bringing up what I later learned from memory. “The breeze carries them away to new locations, where they spin their webs and start life. But some of them...some of the spiderlings stay behind and build nests close to where they were born. And they...”

  So we sit in the living room with our kids, wondering how fast it will all go down. I’ve since gone out and crushed all the spiderlings that were outside the house, but who knows how many more are out there? And who knows how many got away?

  I found their mother lying on the ground amid the grove of trees in my backyard. She was already rotting, hence the smell of spoiled meat that I noticed a few days ago. I left the body out there. I’m hoping the officials from the Department of Agriculture, who I’ve just called, will be able to do something, and I hope this time I’m not too late.

  Story Notes

  Years ago, back in the Stone Age (late 1980’s), William F. Nolan gave me some advice on writing short stories, especially horror fiction. He said (and I’m paraphrasing), “If you’re afraid of heights, write a story in which one of your characters is deathly afraid of heights. Or if your character is afraid of spiders, write a story in which your character is deathly afraid of spiders. Make that spider as scary as you can. Exploit that fear to its greatest, and when you do that you will have an effective horror story.”

  Twenty years later I took his advice in this story (actually, I’ve taken his advice on most everything I’ve written since that little pep talk. And if you haven’t read William F. Nolan’s short story collections, you should). Spiders creep me the hell out. They always have. I can remember as a kid being simultaneously awed by the size and beauty of an orb-weaver spider’s web, but there was no way I was going anywhere near the thing sitting in the center of it, waiting for its dinner.

  For whatever reason, spiders are one of my phobias. I don’t mind looking at pictures of them or seeing them on TV, but in real life, forget it (one caveat to this: I think tarantulas are pretty neat; it must be because they’re furry). I’ve destroyed things in my house and in my car trying to kill the goddamn things (the spiders, not the tarantulas). And yes, I know spiders perform a useful ecological function. However, they should perform that function outside and away from my house, not inside my house. Spiders found inside my house are fair game for getting squashed or eaten
by my dog. Plus, having been unlucky enough to have been bitten by a black widow spider, I am not looking forward to repeating that experience, nor am I looking forward to being bitten by a brown recluse and having the flesh melt off my body.

  Growing up in California I’ve had my share of spider encounters, but it wasn’t until I moved to Pennsylvania in 2001 that I realized that, for some reason, the east coast is home to more giant mutated spiders than the west coast. I’ve seen ugly mutated spiders with spikes sticking out of their bodies out here (the inspiration for the spider in this story). I’ve had the pathway off my back deck completely blocked by giant orb weaver spider webs and have had to use brooms and other implements to knock them down so I can leave the house.

  Needless to say, my arachnophobia inspired this story, especially my musing after one summer where we had a tremendous amount of garden spiders around our house. At one point we had a lot of field mice running around due to the farm across the road from us. The mice probably came from the barn. One time I found a dead field mouse that had been completely sucked dry, as if all its insides were drained. Weirdest thing I ever saw. I immediately thought a spider had eaten it, but realistically I knew that was impossible (some of the larger tarantulas would eat a mouse, but they wouldn’t leave it in the condition I’d found it in). This story came from those musings.

  Captivity

  “EXCUSE ME...RICK Sycheck?”

  Rick was on his way to his hotel room to hide out from the convention throng when he heard his name being called. He turned around, already formulating a response in his mind. Sorry, I’m going to my room to rest for a while. Instead of the expected gaggle of fans clutching armfuls of books for him to sign, two guys and a woman greeted him. While they were dressed rather casually, there was something about their demeanor that set them apart from the rest of the convention attendees. Maybe it was because they weren’t bearing books for signature.