Violet Eyes

by John Everson

  “Mom,” he cried, running towards her. “It’s crazy out there. They told us at school that we couldn’t go outside for recess and maybe they might even close school for a couple days if they can’t get the flies under control. Principal McStevens said that it’s, like…Biblical.”

  Rachel’s heart grew cold at that word. It was the kind of thing Anders would have said. She thought just about the only book he ever read was the Bible. He didn’t seem to see any irony in the fact that he broke most of the Ten Commandments on a regular basis. She didn’t think he’d ever killed anybody, but he lied, cheated and stole, rarely went to church and she saw his eyes on other women all the time. She had no proof that he’d committed adultery, but she guessed he had. Certainly he had “coveted”. Still, Anders would quote the Bible as if he were a preacher to support the things he wanted other people to do for him. He simply ignored the parts that condemned most of his own actions.

  Rachel gave Eric a firm hug. “I heard at work today that they’re going to spray the whole town with insecticide tonight,” she said. “They’ve got planes coming in with it, and once it gets dark, they’ll fly over. Hopefully tomorrow, we’ll be cleaning up a lot of dead bugs, instead of hiding from them!”

  She thanked Jeremy, and told him to be careful walking home. Then she set her purse down on the kitchen counter. As she did, a handful of flies took off from the sink, and almost immediately came back down to land. She watched them walk across the Formica surface. They walked almost as one, slow, deliberate insect steps. Like they shared a hive mind. And they were walking towards her, not away. She watched them advance, and noticed their eyes. She tapped her fingers on the counter, but this time they didn’t leap into the air, as when she’d first startled them.

  Instead, they simply swiveled their black heads and watched her with glittery purple eyes.

  Eyes almost metallic.

  They looked exactly like the flies that Billy had described attacking them on the Key. “Violet eyes,” he’d said. She knew without a doubt that these were the same bugs that Billy and his friends had run into on Sheila Key. Maybe he had brought them back with him when he’d escaped. And they’d multiplied. In two weeks they’d multiplied into a deadly swarm.

  Rachel backed slowly away from the counter and picked up a newspaper from the other side of the room. She rolled it up, slowly, and returned to the sink, with her arm raised. When she brought the paper down, she managed to smash two of them at the same time.

  The other three droned around the room, and two of them settled on the kitchen window near the table. She followed them, and smashed one behind the drapes. The other she mashed to the table seconds after it landed. She wasn’t sure where the last one went, but she pledged now to comb the house for the creatures.

  But first, she had another mission.

  Thinking of Billy talking about the violet flies on Sheila Key had reminded her of the spider webs on his house. And the fact that she hadn’t seen him in days. Something inside her suggested that despite getting away from the flies on Sheila Key, maybe he hadn’t really escaped at all.

  “Eric,” she said. “I’m going to run across the street to check on Billy. Maybe he’s home by now.”

  “I’ll come with,” he said.

  “I’d rather if you stayed inside,” she said. But he protested, and at last she gave in. She didn’t really want him to go near the spiders, but she had to admit she also wasn’t keen about walking up to the house alone. She’d never been fond of spiders.

  Eric slipped on his sandals and together they crossed the street. The neighborhood was quiet for late afternoon. You could hear the hum of electric in the air, and the whir of air conditioning units working. But that was all. There were no kids’ voices or barking dogs or anything. Even the locusts seem to have stilled. Rachel cleared a silken web from the doorway and then opened the screen door and knocked three times on Billy’s inner wooden door. They waited for a few seconds for some kind of response. “I can’t believe he’s still not home,” Rachel said under her breath. They waited another few seconds and when there was no response, Rachel knocked again.

  “Maybe he’s working in the backyard,” Eric suggested.

  “We can check,” Rachel said, “But don’t get too close to the house.”

  “Why not?” he asked, as they cut across the lawn to the side of the house. Rachel pointed up at the roof when they rounded the corner.

  “That,” she said.

  “Whoa!” he said. “It’s just like Mrs. Haidan’s house. Only they’re not really in the front at all.”

  While the web wasn’t spun around the front entry to the house, the side yard looked like a cocoon. The closer they got to the backyard, the thicker it got. There were places where you couldn’t see the grass at all. Shapes moved inside the web, darting up and down the strands. Spinning more. Rachel looked up and saw dozens of the black spiders sitting still, taking in the sunlight. She also saw the web vibrate and shiver. There were a great many bugs trapped in it, grasshoppers and beetles and even a dragonfly. The more they tried to beat their wings to escape, the tighter the web held them fast.

  “Mom, look at this!”

  Eric was a few steps ahead of her, crouched down.

  “Stay back,” she warned.

  “I think it’s still alive,” he answered.

  Rachel crouched down beside him. The web was disrupted here—several inches had ripped away from the grass and thin silk threads moved untethered in the faint breeze. The broken web had still served its purpose, however. The ripped section had wound around and around a field mouse. Just like the bugs, the more the creature had tried to escape, the tighter the bindings had become. Now its hind legs twitched occasionally, but the front legs and head were almost invisible within the sticky trap. Black shapes were moving down the web towards the mouse, which already had several spiders crawling across its hindquarters. As Rachel looked closer, she could see the spiders had cut into the rodent’s flank. A small chunk of fur had fallen into the web next to the mouse, and a bead of red glimmered on the pink skin that was revealed. She could only see it for a moment as the spiders shifted, and then the back part of the trapped creature was completely covered in black legs and mouths.

  They were eating the mouse alive. And from the corner of her vision, Rachel saw that the spiders were now converging on this point from all around the web. Dozens and dozens of the things ran down the web and stopped, until there was a small army of black forms with purple lightning bolts all around the mouse… She realized that they were also poised all around the area that Rachel and Eric crouched in. The edges of the web were growing dark with spiders.

  “Come on, Eric,” she said, pulling him back. “Before they start biting us.” Already, she saw several of the arachnids had left the web, and were advancing on the grass towards their feet.

  They stepped away, and then walked around to the backyard. The house there was draped in heavy webbing, and alive with the movements of thousands of spiders. It was like a cloud hive of arachnids, all of them spinning and eating whatever touched the web. You could almost see the web growing thicker by the minute. Rachel noticed that a wave of the things followed them around from the side yard, moving across the web to keep pace as they circled the house.

  “There are so many of them,” Eric said. He gave a faint whistle.

  “That’s why you have to stay away,” she said. “They’re probably not a problem on their own, but when there are hundreds or thousands of them?”

  Billy wasn’t in the backyard, so they walked up the back patio to the door. The web covered part of it, but Rachel picked up a stick from the ground by a nearby bush and used it to brush some of the webbing away from the handle of the door, grimacing in disgust. As she did so, the web seemed to shake like a trampoline. Dozens of black-and-purple spiders scrambled to attack whatever was disturbing the web.

  Rachel curled the web like cotton candy around the stick and then threw it away into the yard. Then
she knocked on the door. But just like in the front, there was no answer. She put her hand on the handle, and tried to turn it. As she did so, six spiders leapt from the web to the wood of the door and began to run down it towards her.

  “Well, that’s not going to work,” she murmured, yanking her hand back just as the first spider reached her. Eric looked at the doggy door and had a horrible thought.

  “Maybe Feral is in there!” he said. “He was always running in through the door because there used to be another dog living here.”

  Rachel shook her head. “I don’t think so. Billy hasn’t been home in a while, and I don’t think Feral would have stayed there by himself.”

  She grabbed Eric’s shoulder as she realized that the web tethered all around the locked door had now turned dark with spiders, just like in the side yard by the mouse. There must have been thousands of them, and they were all hanging in a thickening mass of legs at the edge of the web. It was as if they were daring her to try brushing just one more swipe of silk away. Some of them had begun pooling on the stoop, and scrambled towards their feet.

  “I think we better go home now,” she said, and dragged Eric back.

  “But, Mom, what if Feral is in there?” he asked.

  “He’s not,” she said out loud. To herself she added, “And if he is, he’s not going to be coming out.”

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Monday, May 20. 5:36 p.m.

  Eric couldn’t get the thought out of his head. Some part of him just knew that Feral was in Billy’s house. Maybe the dog was trapped by the spiders and couldn’t get back to the kitchen door to escape. He was just a puppy. He would be so scared!

  Eric knew he had to try to get in to the house. But how? His mom would never let him go back over there. And then she gave him the perfect opportunity.

  “We’re out of eggs,” Rachel called from the kitchen where she’d disappeared to a few minutes before to start dinner. “I need them for the meatballs. C’mon, I need to run up to the store.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Eric said. “I can stay here.”

  A minute later she walked down the hall and poked her head into his room. “C’mon, I don’t want you home alone right now.”

  “I’ll be fine,” he said and pointed to the computer. “I’m doing my homework.”

  Rachel frowned. But Eric knew he’d won. She left him alone sometimes for a few minutes to run errands. It was just when he was going to be home for a couple hours on his own that she insisted that Jeremy or someone be there to watch him.

  “All right,” she gave in. “But I want you to stay here, in your room. I’ll be back in fifteen minutes.”

  Eric waited until he heard the car pull away, and then he leapt to his feet. He had an idea on how to see if Feral was at Billy’s, and he didn’t need a key.

  He ran across the quiet street and around the side of the house just as before. He stopped for a second at the mass of web where the mouse had been, and saw that the spiders had been hungry.

  All that was left was a few hunks of fur, and the white-picked bones of the mouse. Its tail hung a couple inches away, separated from the body, but caught from falling to the ground by the sticky web. The spiders had been busy since they had left just a half hour before. There was now a skein of web that stretched across the entrance to the backyard and connected to the house next door. The spiders wanted to know if anything tried to pass this way again.

  Following his mom’s example, Eric found a stick from a nearby shrub, and used it to cut through the web to open the way again to the backyard. The silk was instantly alive with black-and-purple forms, but Eric didn’t stick around to let them get near. He ran through the hole in the web and up the short walk to the back door.

  The back door was already partially covered in web again, but Eric didn’t need to disturb it and alert the spiders that he was now back here. He might not have a key to the door, but that didn’t mean he couldn’t get inside. Billy’s dad had had a German shepherd, and so the doggy door was fairly large. Certainly large enough to fit a ten-year-old boy.

  He got down on his hands and knees on the stoop, and pushed the doggy door open with his hand. He held it up, and called inside. “Feral?”

  His voice disappeared into the shadows within. No answer returned. But that didn’t dissuade Eric from his plan. He had to know for sure. Eric turned his body sideways and shimmied his way inside. His shoulders rubbed against the top of the doorway, but he had been right—the door was wide enough for him to slip through.

  The house was quiet, except for a faint buzzing sound. The place smelled bad; musty and sour.

  “Feral?” Eric called as he stepped through the kitchen. There were spiders on the walls; he could see them dart to the corners as he walked past. “Feral?” he called again as he passed the front room and then down the hall towards the bedrooms.

  The hum of beating wings colored the air here, and flies occasionally buzzed past his face as he walked slowly down the dark hall.

  “Feral?” he called again, and then thought, Maybe he really isn’t here?

  There was a muffled thud ahead. Was it Feral? Maybe he was trapped in a room?

  But the door to the room at the end of the hallway wasn’t closed.

  Eric called out ahead. “Billy? Feral?” There was no reply.

  His heart was pounding, but he pressed forward. As he stepped into the room, he realized that he could not see the ceiling. It was completely obscured by web, and dozens of spiders darted back and forth across the center. But even more appeared to be still. They looked pale. Almost like locust shells when the bug shed its skin. Eric thought maybe they were dead.

  He looked away from the ceiling and saw that the bed was not empty.

  The sheets were pulled up over the form, but Eric could see a head of hair on the pillow. He knew before he took another step that the body was Billy. And that Billy was dead.

  Eric walked around to the other side of the bed. Billy’s face was pale and bluish in the waning light. Parts of his friend’s head were gone; there was nothing left of his ear but a dark red tunnel into his skull. Billy’s mouth was open, but his lips were eaten away; his teeth were exposed in what looked like a hideous grin.

  “Gross,” Eric whispered.

  There was a strange smell in the room, and Eric gagged as he breathed it in. It was sweet but garbagey all at the same time. He found himself holding his breath, as much as he could.

  “Feral?” he called out again, turning away from Billy to look at the cocooned corners of the room. Something in here had moved and thumped when he’d been out in the hall. It had to be Feral. Maybe the puppy was stuck in a web.

  He squinted at the dark spots of the web, wondering if the dark cotton hid his puppy. Above him, the movement across the web stopped. It was as if all the spiders held their place, waiting to see which way Eric would turn.

  Eric shivered. “I need to get out of here,” he said to himself.

  He looked back again to Billy’s ravaged face, and saw that there was something moving under the sheets. It certainly couldn’t have been Billy, he thought. He put his hand on the lump where Billy’s leg should have been, and poked.

  The bulge beneath the sheets near Billy’s throat moved. It reminded him of when Feral had come to sleep in his bed. The dog had burrowed under the covers and snuggled in near Eric’s chest. Sometimes it would tickle, and Eric had to shove the puppy out from beneath the covers.

  “Feral?” he said, and yanked the sheets away from Billy’s throat.

  Lying on the bed in the crook of Billy’s arm was a mound of fur.

  It was Feral.

  For a split second, Eric’s heart leapt and a smile started to cross his face. He’d been right all along, Feral had run into Billy’s, just like he did on their walks. And apparently he’d found Billy here in his bed and tried to snuggle in with him.

  But just as quickly, Eric’s excitement ended.

  He had found his puppy. But he�
�d never get to play with him again.

  Because Feral was dead too. The dog’s body was just a stiffened lump of fur now. With a parade of spiders mining it for food. Much of Feral’s lower half was covered in silk strands, binding the dog to Billy’s corpse, and the bedsheets.

  Like Billy, the dog’s mouth and ears had been eaten away. And as Eric looked closer, he realized there was not much left of Billy beneath the sheets either. His neighbor’s chest looked as if it had been hit by a firestorm of shrapnel—the flesh was completely gone in spots, revealing the soft white curves of his rib cage amid the darkening gore that remained. Most of the skin of Billy’s neck had been eaten away, and the bedsheets beneath his pillow were stained with a grayish slime that might have been the slurry of what was left of Billy’s brain after the spiders ate their fill of his head.

  All of this was just barely registering to Eric when a buzzing began to grow in the room like an angry hive of bees. A cloud of flies leapt into the air from the bed, exiting the spaces between Billy’s ribs and the half-eaten skull of the dachsund in an angry violet explosion. It hadn’t been the dog that was moving the sheets…it had been the trapped hordes of flies.

  Eric couldn’t move. His eyes wouldn’t leave the bloody fur of his puppy, and for a moment, he ignored the cloud of flies as the tears began to flow. He was reaching out to touch what was left of his dog when the flies began to bite. He slapped at a few that landed on his face and arms. And then the swarm was all around him, circling and biting and landing on every inch of his skin. Eric cried out and began to run, slapping them off of him as he went. The buzzing behind him grew louder. He didn’t see them, but as he ran down the hall, the spiders on the ceiling of Billy’s bedroom began to move. They no longer waited for their prey to make a wrong move and stumble into the web.

  They began to chase their prey.

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Monday, May 20. 6:03 p.m.

  Rachel pulled into the driveway and turned off the engine. The sun was already getting low in the west, the blue of the sky overhead darkening in anticipation of dusk. She shook her head. They should have eaten by now, and she was just getting back from the store to start dinner. She exhaled and reached over to the passenger seat to grab the small bag. She’d really only needed eggs to make her stroganoff meatballs, but she’d gone ahead and picked up noodles and soup and fresh hamburger meat too since she was going to use up what they had. If she hurried, they could be eating by 7:30 or so. Still late, but…