by John Everson
The fingers did not squeeze her back. They were cold.
And Todd’s hands were otherwise engaged. One on her back and one on her thigh. He couldn’t be holding her hand around the tree…
Genny jolted upright again, banging her forehead into Todd’s with a smack.
“Wha…” he gasped as he fell back. But he never finished the sentence. Because a second after Genny jumped up, she screamed. A blood-curdling, “save me from the monster” kind of high-pitched scream.
Genny pushed herself away from Todd and the tree and settled on her knees a couple feet away. She pointed at the tree next to where they had been making out, and struggled to tell Todd what the matter was. Her voice came in stutters and hitches and that only made her point harder and faster with her hand. “Th’ th’ there is a ha’ ha’ hand b-b-b-by th—”
Todd started to move around the tree to see what had upset her so much and that only sent another bolt of fear through Genny’s chest. The fear for him overpowered her own and she pulled out of her paralysis to grab Todd by the shoulder.
“Don’t!” she warned.
But he did. And in doing so, he pulled her with him.
She saw the hand she’d just touched. It was white and small. It could never have been Todd’s; she couldn’t believe she’d been fooled for a second. The palm leaned against the tree as its fingers extended out from the trunk in a frozen gesture. As Todd peered around the side, Genny clutched her arms around him. She was afraid of what he’d see…and afraid to let him see it alone.
When they saw the owner of the hand, they sucked in air as one.
“Oh my God,” Todd said in a whisper.
“I touched her,” Genny said. Her voice was just one notch below hysteria.
Lying on the ground, hugged up to the back of the tree they had been making out next to, was the body of a girl.
The only reason Genny knew she was a girl was because she was wearing a pink bra. And her toenails were painted pink. Nothing else about her gave too much of a clue, because above the pink bra, there was not much left of her besides a skull and a mat of hair.
Her face was completely eaten away.
Genny stared at the red gristle and dark sockets where the girl’s eyes must have been and the blue-white fingers that she saw now were frozen beyond any hope of salvation. She had touched those…she kept saying that over and over in her head as she took in the body.
As her eyes took in more and more of the body, she realized that there were spider webs anchoring the dead girl to the ground. The girl’s ankles were almost covered in cotton, and thin silken strands stretched all along the bra to attach to the dark moss of the ground and the bark of the tree. Spider webs anchored the body to the ground like the strands of Lilliput.
The ghostly silk seemed to cover much of her bare legs, and Genny was reminded of nothing so much as a cocoon. But she knew that this silk was different. There were small shapes moving all around on the webs. Spiders eager to feed.
The girl was not some caterpillar, ready to transmute into a butterfly. The truth was far more base than that—she wasn’t transmuting into something beautiful beneath the “cocoon”. She was being covered in spider’s silk for one purpose—to serve as food.
And as Genny realized that, she also saw that the small but numerous spiders were moving about the girl’s head. She could see them filing in a double line along the girl’s forehead to a place right in the middle of her skull. The place Genny’s mom had always called “the soft spot”. As in, “Be careful when you hold the baby, honey, don’t jiggle its head. There’s a soft spot.” That place where the skull joined, and was still working on joining in an infant.
The spiders had opened that join in the dead girl. As she stared, Genny saw the spiders were running in and out of a gory hole in the top of the girl’s skull. She could also see the resulting gray and brown slop pooled around the body’s head on the ground. The spiders had eaten the girl’s head right through until her brain pooled out on the muddy earth.
“Todd,” she finally was able to whisper. “I’m scared.”
He nodded, and didn’t say a word as he reached down, grabbed and handed back her T-shirt to pull back on. Without a word, Genny slipped it over her head and pulled it down tight. Any thought of really making love with her boyfriend was gone now. Her only thought was that she had clasped the fingers of a dead girl.
A dead and half-eaten girl.
“We have to tell somebody,” Todd said. “We have to get the police.”
Together, they stood up from the ground, and backed up one step. And then another. The buzz of the swamp seemed to grow louder. There was something about looking at a faceless corpse covered in spider webs, and skittering, darting spiders, that made it impossible to turn around as they backed away step by step.
But when they reached the next tree, an ancient, four-foot-wide granddaddy cypress right along the main walking path, Genny didn’t feel frozen in place anymore. Her feet suddenly swiveled and aimed towards home. And Todd’s did the same.
Together, holding hands, they ran from the place that for the past few weeks had been like their dearest friend. The secret refuge of their love.
Something in Genny knew it would never be the same for them again.
Behind them, the buzz of the swamp continued to grow as small flies suddenly rose from the foliage in a black-and-purple wave. A swarm. They began to move towards the warmth that had invaded the swamp, but they were too late.
The teenagers had broken into a run that didn’t slow until they were steps from their homes.
They had escaped.
For the moment.
Chapter Thirty-Two
Saturday, May 17. 7:38 a.m.
“Nobody has called about Feral,” Eric said. Rachel took the opportunity to spoon another bit of breakfast cereal into her mouth before answering. Chewing gave her time to figure out what she was going to say. How did you break it to a kid that, more often than not, the things you like most in life washed away long before you were ready for them to be gone. The best things in life were usually killed by ignorance, ambivalence, age, wisdom and sometimes, outright malevolence. Whatever the reasons, the things you loved most always seemed to die long before you were ready to let them go.
This was not a lesson Rachel wanted to try to teach over a bowl of Rice Krispies. Especially on a morning when she had been asked to work overtime and needed to leave in ten minutes. She hated the idea of working on a Saturday, but God knows, she needed the money.
“I know,” she finally said. “But it’s only been a day. They might not have seen our signs yet. There are actually a lot of lost dog signs on the lampposts around here. You have to be patient.”
Eric did not look patient at all. He looked about to cry. “Can we drive around to look for him again today after you get home from work?”
Rachel swallowed. Driving around the neighborhood was not going to find the dachshund. If he was alive at all, someone had found him and taken him in.
“I’ll tell you what,” she said. “Hopefully I’ll only have to work a half day today. So I’ll photocopy a ton of our signs, and then we’ll drive around this afternoon and take them up to all the houses we can. If he’s staying at someone’s house in the neighborhood…they’re gonna get a flyer with his picture and our phone number on them!”
Eric’s face brightened. Rachel wished she could have felt that positive. Inside, she was trying to figure out how she was going to comfort Eric when he finally realized that Feral wasn’t coming home. The thought already made her feel empty and aching, and they’d only had the puppy a few days. It was just the kind of emotional torpedo she really, absolutely did not need right now. All she could think of as she hugged her forlorn son goodbye and watched him walk up the sidewalk to Jeremy’s house was that, after the past couple months, shouldn’t she deserve a pass? Wasn’t it time for something good to happen?
Rachel walked into the office and was immediately hit with so
mething not good. Ken Harold, the supervisor, called her into his office. He pointed at a stack of manila files on the side of his desk and asked her, “Does this look like a good place for files?”
She watched the fat beneath his chin jiggle as he said it and struggled not to laugh. Somehow, watching Ken Harold talk was like watching a rooster strut. There was a lot of ego, but on a close glance, not too much to back it up.
Carefully, slowly, Rachel shook her head. “I didn’t put them there,” she finally said, in a very small, don’t-punish-me voice.
Ken grinned. She hated it when he grinned. It reminded her of a giant slug with teeth.
“I didn’t say you did,” he offered. “But I would like you to help me take care of them today.”
Seriously? Rachel thought. Her bosses’ boss was going to reposition her solely to help file a bunch of crap that probably nobody in the world would ever read again before it ultimately ended up in the shredder? That wasn’t why they’d asked her to work a Saturday!
“Yes sir,” she said, instead.
For the next two hours, she had to endure his bad breath and even worse jokes as she helped him organize his office.
When she finally got to go back to her cubicle, Susan caught her before she’d even entered her cube. She’d been asked to work overtime too.
“Did you see this?” Susan asked.
She threw a copy of the Passanattee Times down on the desk. The first headline made it instantly obvious what Susan was upset about.
Spider Scourge Spreads:
Local Teen Found Dead from Bites
“My neighbor has been complaining to me for days about how she has all these spiders all over their street and on the sidewalks and they’re getting into her house and the village won’t do anything,” Susan said. “She had to call the exterminators.”
For once the beach blonde’s voice didn’t sound perky, Rachel thought.
“And that’s not the worst of it,” Susan said. “I was visiting at the Windsor Retirement Home the other night, and the place is just overrun with flies. The people there are getting bit like crazy, and they say the exterminators aren’t doing any good!”
Rachel skimmed the article about how two teens had stumbled on the half-eaten body of another high school girl at the edge of the woods. The article noted that this discovery followed reports of two other local children listed as missing, as well as several area pets. A local official was quoted as advising people to stay close to home and to carry insect repellant at all times while out-of-doors until the current migration of dangerous arachnids had passed.
How people were to know when the insects passed was another question.
“Creepy, huh?” Susan said. She was chewing gum, and popped it just then with a snap that made Rachel jump. There was the typical Susan showing through the anxiety.
“Yeah,” Rachel said. Her voice dropped. “I don’t think we’re going to get our puppy back.”
Susan stopped chewing and raised an eyebrow. “No,” she said, her tone now completely serious. “I don’t think you will.”
That didn’t stop Rachel from making one hundred copies of the missing poster of Feral before she finally was allowed to go home at three in the afternoon. And as soon as she stepped in the front door, Eric ran from where he sat on the couch with Jeremy to ask, “Did you make more signs?”
Rachel nodded, and fifteen minutes later, they were driving around the neighborhood. She hated to make him do it, but it made the most sense for her to drive from house to house and for Eric to run up the concrete or brick walkways to ring the bell and hand out a flyer with Feral’s picture on it to whoever answered the door. They could cover the most ground the fastest this way…but it meant that Eric had to open his heart again and again and again to strangers.
Only to have it trampled.
“Have you seen my puppy?” he asked at door after door, presenting the flyer with Feral’s picture.
Every “no”, no matter how gentle, had to have been a stab in Eric’s spirit. Block by block as Rachel saw doors not open to Eric’s knocks, and then those that did reveal shaking, negative heads, Rachel felt her son’s energy wane.
They had covered all of the east side of the neighborhood, and worked their way back to their own block to go the other way by 7 p.m., and Rachel was beginning to think it was time to call it a night.
“We are gonna have to stop for dinner soon,” she warned, but the threat only seemed to boost Eric’s dying energy. “We have to keep going,” he insisted. His face was flushed from running up and down sidewalks and explaining his mission.
“Another half an hour, and that’s it,” she said.
She turned the corner on Morningside, and stopped at the first house. As Eric ran up the walk and rang the bell, Rachel looked down the block. The street was silent; black asphalt un-cluttered by cars. The streetlights hadn’t gone on yet, but every parkway looked lush, low and green—the product of a wet spring. There were no kids on the lawns, and no cars in the driveways…the place looked deserted, though there were already some front porch lights turned on. It got eerily quiet around here after dusk, Rachel thought. Hell, sometimes it was eerily quiet at noon…but she was rarely around to witness it.
She looked farther down the street and frowned. It was almost as if one of the houses was cloaked in a cloud. The more she looked, the more she realized she couldn’t make out any details of the roof or sides. There was the vague shape of the house…and the white of cotton.
Eric ran down to the next house and the next, and she followed in the car, now watching the house ahead of them more than she was her son. The closer it loomed, the more she realized that something was terribly wrong.
At first she’d thought there was some kind of water spray in the air, or some equipment she couldn’t see spouting out steam. But now she could see the house appeared to be covered in something like cotton. Something thin, see-through, white, fuzzy…it was thick but not so thick that she couldn’t see the house through it.
But what was it…and why was it there at all?
She let the car coast a house, and then another. When they were two houses away, she put the car in park and rolled down the passenger’s window. Then she called out to Eric.
“Eric, come here,” she demanded.
When he returned to the car, she pointed at the house just down the block. “I don’t think we should go near that,” she said.
“Me either,” Eric agreed. “Tracie and I went there the other day. The place is crawling with spiders.”
“You went there?”
Eric shrugged. “Yeah, I saw it when I went to her house. It looked weird. But I don’t think anyone’s living there anymore.”
“No,” Rachel agreed. “I don’t suppose they are. And I think that this is probably a good place for us to call it a night. We can hit the rest of the neighborhood tomorrow.”
Surprisingly, Eric didn’t complain at all. She couldn’t tell if it was because of exhaustion, or depression that so far nobody had admitted to ever seeing Feral.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she said.
Eric dropped the remaining flyers in his hand to the car floor, and didn’t answer. He just looked out the window as she turned around one driveway before the spider-web house.
She thought she heard tears in a sniffle. But she didn’t ask.
There are some things that everyone wants to deal with alone.
Even when you’re just a kid.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Monday, May 20. 5:15 p.m.
On Monday, the flies attacked. They swarmed out of the swamp around Passanattee like a violet cloud. They attacked people as they walked from their cars on the way to the office, and they settled on people in the park playing ball or Frisbee. Their bites stung like fire. People tried to use OFF and RAID and other bug sprays, but nothing kept the things away. They attacked anyone walking outside without warning, like a cloud of hunger. By 2 p.m., the local radio and TV outlets were iss
uing special bulletins and warning everyone to stay indoors to avoid the swarms and to wear protective covering—like raincoats—if they had to venture outside. But not everyone stayed inside by choice. Some of them stayed inside because they couldn’t move anymore. Because the people of Passanattee had begun dying.
On her way home from work, Rachel heard sirens on virtually every block. And as she passed into the quieter streets of her own neighborhood, she saw three more homes completely covered in spider webs. Not only were the flies biting and stinging people to death from the air, but the spiders appeared to be taking over from the ground.
As she slowed down to pull into her driveway, she glanced across the street at Billy’s house. That’s when she noticed the reflection of the sun off the fine strands of silk that led from the home’s side gutters to the bushes below. She hadn’t seen Billy in days…and the fact that his house was now overrun with spiders didn’t bode well. She made a quiet “hmmm” to herself and shut off the car.
She didn’t realize how worried she had been about Eric getting home safe from school until she opened the front door and he jumped up off the couch. Then she took in a gasp of air and realized she’d been holding her breath since getting out of the car. He’d gotten home from school safely. Thank God. She hated it that she couldn’t be there when he got out, and now with all that was going on…