Violet Eyes

by John Everson

  He got the hint. She had said that for the benefit of her mom. He walked back down the sidewalk towards the street, but then a few steps later, after darting a look at the windows of the house to make sure Mrs. Wilkins wasn’t looking out, he pulled Feral back off the sidewalk and ran down the fence line to wait in the grass on the side of Tracie’s house. He sat down against the back of a tree with thick clusters of small red flowers and waited.

  He didn’t have to wait too long.

  “Show me!” a voice said from behind. He’d been expecting her, but she still made him jump.

  “How did you get out here so fast?” he asked.

  “There’s a back door from the laundry room, which is right next to my bedroom,” she said. “I told mom I was going back to bed to take a nap like she asked, and she came back and tucked me in. I waited a couple minutes and then went into the laundry room. She’ll never miss me. I had the shades pulled in my room and put pillows under the sheets like I was laying there.”

  “Nice!” Eric grinned. “The house is this way.”

  He led her quickly and carefully along the wooden fence that separated the Wilkins’ yard from their neighbors, and once they hit the sidewalk, they both broke into a run to put distance between them and Tracie’s mom.

  “Holy shit,” Tracie said, when the reached the house. They stood at the base of the huge web, looking up towards the roof. Eric looked at her in a mix of shock and awe. His mom would slap him in the mouth if he swore like that.

  “This is Mrs. Haidan’s house,” she said. “And that is creepy as hell.”

  “You know them?” Eric asked.

  “Sure,” she said. “My mom talks to her sometimes after church.”

  “Shhhhhh,” Eric hissed, and pointed upwards. At Tracie’s voice, the black shapes spinning the web above had stopped moving about in their frenetic but methodical way. And as the two kids watched, the things began to move down the web. Following the sound of the voices.

  “You better go home,” Eric cautioned in a whisper.

  Tracie nodded, her eyes wide as she watched the spiders coming. “I don’t like the looks of that,” she whispered.

  “Me either,” he agreed. “See ya in school?”

  She nodded and turned back towards her house just as the first spiders reached the bushes. Eric watched them come, fascinated at how fast they moved…and how many of them there were. Their legs seemed to move faster than the eye could follow, but as the first ones leapt from the bush tops to the grass, he realized that he could make out the tiny glimmer of eyes at the top of their small black heads. And he saw that they all had the same purple lightning slash across their backsides. They spilled over the branches of the evergreens, and as the first ones hit the ground and began to scatter, Feral suddenly barked and yanked on the leash. The dog took off away from the house, pulling free of Eric, whose grip on the leash had gone lax as he’d stared at the arachnids.

  “Feral, come back here!” Eric yelled, and ran to chase the dog just as the first spiders began to climb unnoticed on his shoe. He looked back quickly to wave at Tracie. She waved back, and he turned his attention back to Feral, who had just rounded the next block towards home, barking all the way. Eric had never seen the puppy move so fast.

  “Feral!” he called and redoubled his pace. He chased the dog down two blocks, but by the time he rounded the corner to his own street, the dog was out of sight.

  “What the heck!” he complained, and looked up and down the street at the houses. He could still hear the short, sharp barks, but the dog was nowhere to be seen. He tried to follow the sound, and decided they were coming from the other side of the street.

  Eric ran along the sidewalk until he was right across the street from his house. He could still sort of hear the dog, but the sound now was muffled. “Feral?” he called. And then again. “Feral?”

  A screen door creaked open and then slammed. “What’s the matter?” His mom stood across the street on the stoop in front of their house, hands on her hips. “Where’s Feral?” she called.

  “I don’t know,” Eric said. “He pulled the leash away from me and ran really fast…and now I can’t find him…” His explanation suddenly choked off as Eric began to cry.

  Rachel ran across the yards. When she reached him, she took Eric in her arms and hugged her son. She could see the mix of shock and horror and guilt on his face from across the street. Inside she was already saying “oh shit”, over and over, but she tried to stay calm. She didn’t know if the dog had lived with them long enough to find its own way home. This could be serious. She instantly remembered the lost dog signs on the street posts leading out of their subdivision. She didn’t need Eric having to cope with losing anything else. Not now.

  “It’s okay, baby,” she said, holding him tight. She struggled to keep her voice calm to match her words. “We’ll find him. Do you know which way he went?”

  Eric shook his head and sniffed wetly. “He ran around the corner and I didn’t see him. I could hear him barking, and I tried to follow, but now…”

  He stopped speaking and listened for a moment, looking around. Rachel followed his gaze and then Eric looked right up at her, meeting her eyes. His own were watery and scared. “Now I can’t hear him anymore at all.”

  She nodded. “He’s probably still nearby. And probably just as scared as you. He’s never been away from his ‘people’ before. Let’s look for him. You go on that side of the block and I’ll go this way.”

  They split up, calling the dog’s name for the next half hour. They walked all around the block and then cut back through a couple neighbors’ yards without fences, trying to catch any sign of the puppy. But he was nowhere to be found.

  Finally, they went back home. But not to stay. Rachel got her car keys and together they drove the neighborhood in widening circles, with Eric calling out the window for the dog. But all they saw were long stretches of empty asphalt, and grass and palms already browning with the heat of early summer. Nobody was outside, it seemed. And particularly, no dogs.

  At last, Rachel called an end to the search. “C’mon, buddy, let’s go home for now. It’s getting dark, and he’s not answered us at all. If he was outside in this neighborhood, I think we would have seen him. I bet someone found him and took him in. We can go home and make up some signs to post on the light posts around here with our phone number, so whoever has him will see the signs and know how to find us.”

  Rachel cursed herself for not putting their phone number on the dog’s collar, but she hadn’t.

  “But we don’t even have a picture of him,” Eric said. He sniffed wetly, and she could hear another round of tears struggling to surface.

  “Actually, I think I have one on my phone,” she said. “We’ll get it done. But first, we need to eat something. And I’m betting the chicken I left in the oven is as dried up as an old shoe by now. Want some McDonald’s?”

  An hour later, brown and stringy chicken in the garbage and cheeseburgers in their stomachs, Rachel and Eric created a Lost Puppy. Please Call. sign together. Then they printed a few out on their home printer and then Rachel insisted that Eric had to get ready for bed.

  “That’s all we can do tonight,” she said. “I’ll post these on my way to work, and print out a few more at the office to post on my way home tomorrow,” she promised, as she tucked Eric in. “We’ll flyer the neighborhood. I warned you that having a puppy wasn’t always easy. This is one of the tough parts. Sometimes they run away.”

  “I just want him to come home,” Eric said. She could hear the lump in his throat.

  “I know, baby,” she said. “I want him to come home too.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Friday, May 17. 10:02 a.m.

  Aidan Richards pushed the sliding glass door open to step out on his patio with a long, extended effort.

  “What in God’s hell is wrong with you, man?” he berated himself as he struggled to move the door. He was old, but Jesus, he wasn’t that ol
d. But over the past few days…he just hadn’t been himself. His head was like a balloon no matter how many aspirin and sinus decongestants he took, and his bowels felt like they could loose at any time. Embarrassing! And now and then, he saw strange flickers of color across his vision. He knew he needed to go to the doctor, but he was afraid. Afraid of what they might find, and afraid of not being able to drive there without having an attack. Because periodically, his hands were trembling too.

  A week ago, he’d been old but hale, weeding his garden and fighting tomato worms. Now…he was creeping across his patio as if he needed a walker.

  “Fresh vegetables, that’s what you need,” he mumbled, but the prickling behind his eyes suggested he needed a lot more than that. Nevertheless, he shambled across the short back lawn and bent over to peer into the small garden, one hand on the right side fence stake. He couldn’t keep the worms out, but he could keep larger animals out of his crop, with a few stakes and chicken wire!

  The tomato plants were tall and struggling against the confines of the circular hoops he made them grow through, and that was a good thing.

  The bad thing was that the leaves were full of holes and yellow spots. Many of them were chewed so badly there was nothing left but a ragged splat of green attached to the center veins. Those leaves hung from the branches like skeletal fingers.

  “Damnit,” he said. “Soap didn’t do a blessed thing to those hornworms!” As he said it, he saw one of the offenders creeping along a tomato branch and he reached out to grab it. The thing was soft and squishy between his fingers, and he threw it on the grass outside the garden and stepped on it. It smeared the grass in a paste of green and orange. “One down,” he grumbled and reached a hand into the tomatoes leaves to search for more. He saw one big ripe fruit lurking midway through the plants, and went to grab it, but something pinched his hand. Before he could pull his hand back, he felt another prick.

  And another.

  “What in the hell…”

  Aidan yanked his arm out of the garden and it came back covered with small black shapes. They crawled across his skin like an army. “Jesus!” he cried and slapped at the insects. Well, not insects, he corrected himself. They were arachnids. Different than insects because they had a two-part, not a three-part body, and eight legs instead of six. Regardless of lineage, he smashed six small black spiders that had latched on to the soft skin behind his knuckles. As he brushed their body parts off his skin, he saw two pinpricks of blood.

  “Damn,” he said. “That’s some bite for a little guy. Must have put my hand right into a nest of ’em.”

  Aidan shook his hand, and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment, willing back the weird pricks and pokes that he felt behind his eyes, and inside his ears. That’s when he looked up and saw the Haidans’ house…

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Friday, May 17. 10:43 a.m.

  George Haidan struggled to push himself out of the recliner in the den. Daylight streamed in the window that looked out on the side yard. That meant that he’d fallen asleep in his chair last night and slept the whole night there. It had happened before; when you pushed the foot guard out and leaned back a bit, that chair was just about the most comfortable thing in the world you could rest your weary bones against. But it didn’t happen often, because Betty Anne Haidan was just about the most busy busybody there was. She never gave a man peace. Not if she could help it, anyway.

  Yesterday though, she’d been sick. More than yesterday, he had to admit. She’d been sick for the past week, complaining about headaches and spots in her vision and any number of other ailments that George had simply closed his ears to. He hadn’t paid it much mind; the woman was a hypochondriac from way back. He’d long ago given up taking most of her health gripes seriously. On Tuesday she had breast cancer, but on Thursday she’d likely have a brain tumor. By the weekend, it might have transitioned to something less terminal but more urgent… like appendicitis.

  He knew this time that something was ailing her though, because she’d barely said a word to him the past three days. And normally, when Betty Anne was on the sick wagon, she followed him around the house telling him how she was dying and then yelling at him if he was in the other room to get her some aspirin, or a bowl of ice cream or a cup of tea, or whatever other temporary feel-good she could think of.

  Now that he thought of it, yesterday, he was pretty sure she hadn’t said a word to him since before dinner. She’d been sitting in her dingy old chair in the living room, watching some game show when he got home from running errands. He’d poked into the room, and said something, and saw her turn her head a hair to acknowledge him. But she’d not actually answered him. At the time, he’d thought it was because she was so enrapt in the tube, but then he’d poured himself a tall Jameson and retired to his office to work on the computer. When she didn’t try to corral him to fix a light bulb, take out the garbage, kill a bug or pick up some piece of detritus he’d left in her line of sight accidentally—or anything else for the rest of the night—he didn’t question it. Never look a gift horse in the mouth. The quiet in the house was a welcome respite from the usual petulant jabber. And obviously it had allowed him to tilt back enough Jameson without complaint that he snogged out in his chair the entire night and half the morning. He looked at the clock and it said 10:43 a.m.

  He remembered refilling his Jameson tumbler at least twice, and that certainly hadn’t hurt his slip into the deep sleep. But what had kept Betty Anne’s cut-through-three-feet-of-concrete gripes from jolting him out of his chair this morning?

  George took two halting steps from the chair and then stopped to scratch at the bites on his shoulder. It was harder these days to reach those parts on his back. Sucked to get old. But he tried not to ever let it stop him. George had to use innovation these days to scratch—he pressed a hand on the elbow of his other arm in order to jam that arm farther down his back then it would go on its own. Far enough to push his fingernails back and forth across his shoulder blade to reach the itch.

  The bugs had been worse than usual this summer; Betty Anne had made no bones about that. She’d been complaining and showing off a couple dozen red marks across her body for the past couple weeks. George wasn’t sure what they were, but he knew they weren’t mosquito bites. The bumps just looked different. Kind of like tiny volcanoes, ready to erupt. Maybe they were chiggers?

  He didn’t know but they itched like a bitch.

  As he finally reached the spot, it occurred to him how quiet the house was. As if he was the only one home. The feeling was eerie. He was never the only one home. Betty Anne always was rustling around, banging pots and slamming closets and doors.

  Now there was nothing but the sound of air. And somewhere nearby, a clock ticking.

  And then he realized…there was one more thing.

  A steady, constant sound that at first blended easily into the haze of silence. There was always a bit of a buzz to the back of George’s hearing, but usually the sounds of the day obscured it. Now, he was hearing that buzz.

  But it wasn’t the buzz of tinnitus. It was the buzz of wings. A thousand tiny wings droning and moving somewhere not far away.

  It reminded George of the time he had visited a bee farm, and could hear the hives humming far in the distance from the kitchen of the farmer’s house.

  “What the hell?” he said.

  The screensaver on the computer was swirling around in a collage of abstract, colorful shapes, and as he passed it, he reached out and shuffled the mouse to kill the screensaver and bring up the normal background of his desktop. He hated the screensaver. It meant he’d been not paying attention for a while, and despite Betty Anne’s complaints, George tried to pay attention. He always wanted to know what was going on around him. Better informed, meant less surprised.

  But he had a secret suspicion that he was about to be surprised. He’d slept through something.

  Something bad.

  He stepped out into the narrow hallway between the
bedroom and the kitchen, and the buzzing sound grew louder. More present.

  George stepped slowly down the hall. Every step was an effort; he felt exhausted, even though he’d just awoken. Betty Anne wasn’t the only one who was feeling her age these days.

  As he entered the kitchen, a fly buzzed by his ear. Damn things had been everywhere lately. He swatted it away and walked towards the front room. Every step remained an effort, and George blinked again and again, trying to clear away the cobwebs of one too many Jameson’s. This was going to be a slow morning, he thought.

  That was before he stepped past the tile and onto the carpet.

  Betty Anne still sat in the same easy chair he’d last seen her in more than twelve hours before.

  The television was off; the remote lay on the floor next to the chair. A handful of dark shapes scurried away from the black plastic and disappeared under her chair as he stepped into the room.

  “Betty Anne?” he said. His voice trembled slightly as he said her name. He knew in his heart that something was wrong. Terribly wrong.

  A lock of her gray hair clung to the edge of her chair, and he could see the long slant of her nose. But she didn’t turn as he called. She didn’t do anything.

  She was just sitting there.

  “Betty Anne?” he said again, a little louder. But she still didn’t move.

  George stepped closer and closer to the chair. In the light that streamed across the room from the east windows, he could see a hair protruding from her nose. She would be mortified if she could see that, he thought.

  But then he realized the hair was moving…shifting this way and that. And then another hair joined it. A small spider crept out of Betty Anne’s nose, and her husband’s heart hitched. He stepped forward to shoo it away before she woke up and saw it and screamed.