The Spider Ring

by Andrew Harwell

  No, Maria needed to bring Claire off her fairy-princess pedestal, so that she’d never be able to bully her the same way again. She needed to do something that no one would be able to forget.

  After at least ten minutes of watching the party unfold, during which Derek kept looking anxiously at the clock on his phone and asking Maria when the surprise was going to happen, Maria finally saw Claire’s mom coming out of the house, carrying a birthday cake with thirteen candles lit on top.

  The crowd parted to let Mrs. McCormick through, and after the music was brought to an abrupt stop, the whole party joined in on a loud rendition of “Happy Birthday to You.” Maria could almost feel the force of their voices on her skin, and it made her want to hurry, to stop the singing. She clasped her hands together, twisting the spider ring around her finger. She spoke to the spiders in a frenzy, under her breath — asking, then begging, for them to come and help her.

  Mrs. McCormick reached the table that held the rest of the food and set the cake down next to Claire. Smiling thinly, Claire moved her hair behind one ear and bent over the cake.

  The party sang for Claire. Wishing her a happy birthday.

  Then three things happened all at once:

  The seventh-grade chorus hit the last to you like a train crash, a cacophony of notes and at least three animal noises from the sillier boys in their school.

  Claire took a deep breath and prepared to blow out her candles.

  And a brown mass of spiders skittered quickly up the table onto the cake and Claire’s dress.

  Chaos erupted. Claire screamed like Maria had never heard anyone scream before. Other people screamed, too, some because they were in the front and could see what was going on, the rest because they couldn’t see at all and were afraid of what must be happening just out of sight.

  Through all the shouting, Maria could hear the steady undercurrent of another sound, distinct and distinctly not human. It was the spiders talking. They sounded eager, proud.

  “No way,” Derek said, no longer bothering to be quiet. “Maria, how did you know — oh my gosh, Maria!”

  Derek grabbed her by the shoulders and shook. The force of his grip registered as if from a dream. She blinked and tried to focus on him, realizing that her vision had gone blurry.

  “Maria, your eyes were black,” Derek said. He sounded more angry than scared.

  “That’s crazy,” Maria said, but she was hardly paying attention to him. She walked around to the side of the pool house — she couldn’t see well enough through the windows.

  The screaming had stopped. Claire was lying faceup on the glass floor, and for a second, Maria’s heart stopped. She couldn’t be …

  But no. Maria distinctly heard Mark Spitzer say the word “fainted,” and Mrs. McCormick only looked mildly worried as she shook Claire’s shoulders. Maybe this had even happened before, some other time when Claire had seen a spider. At least, that’s what Maria was telling herself now, so she wouldn’t feel so panicked.

  “You did that,” Derek said. “Claire’s brother wasn’t even outside.”

  Maria’s attention snapped back to her friend, and she realized that he wasn’t just angry — he was furious.

  “What are you talking about?” Maria said. “I didn’t have anything to do with it.” Her voice was so confident in this deception, it made her a little queasy.

  “It’s the ring. Somehow you used that ring and you made that happen. Your eyes were totally black and you were — you were whispering. Talking to them.”

  “Come on, Derek. You don’t really believe that.”

  “You’re right,” he said icily. “I can’t believe you just dragged me all the way here so I could watch you ruin someone’s party. And I can’t believe that now you’re trying to lie to me about it.”

  Maria felt tears collecting at the corners of her eyes. Derek had never talked to her this way, and it made all the bad things that had happened in the past week even worse. Or maybe it was just that all the hurt of the week hadn’t fully caught up to her yet, but the shock of her best friend yelling at her made the reality impossible to ignore.

  “No, Derek, listen —” she said, but he’d already turned around.

  “Find your own way home,” he said, stomping away. “Maybe your spiders will help you.”

  The spiders are your friends. Do not abuse their friendship.

  Tonight, the spiders weren’t the only ones whose friendship Maria had abused. She hadn’t meant to let things get this far. Or, no, she had meant to — she’d just wanted a happier outcome.

  Go away, she thought, seeing that a number of the spiders, her spiders, still lingered around Claire and the cake. Now.

  She waited behind the pool house long enough to see that they obeyed her, and to see that Claire was waking up. Instantly, people crowded around her to ask if she was okay. Maria couldn’t believe it: Even her humiliation was a cause for sympathy, another reason to worship her. If Maria had passed out at her own birthday party, people would be laughing behind her back — and to her face — for weeks.

  Before anyone could see her, Maria hurried back down the gravel path through the woods. She didn’t need the spiders to tell her where to go, but they appeared to lead the way anyway, scurrying in and out of her feet as she ran. She made sure not to step on any of them, even though it would have been so easy to. They were what Maria deserved. They were her only friends now.

  Maria was so distracted staring at her feet, she didn’t notice the man in the black silk suit until she ran right into him.

  She landed on her back. Quickly, she scrambled backward on the palms of her hands and tried to get a good look at the man in front of her.

  With trembling lips and a face like a frightened rabbit’s, he seemed to be even more surprised than she was.

  Maria realized that she had seen this man before, at her grandmother’s funeral. He’d been the one who’d disappeared in a cloud of shadow. There in one blink, gone the next.

  He did it again now — poof, like magic — and the shock was so great it left Maria stunned. She had no idea how this man kept vanishing, but she was starting to have a pretty good idea of who he might be.

  Getting to her feet, she brushed herself off. Her mom would be worried when Maria got back so late, but without a phone, she didn’t really have a choice.

  She put one foot in front of the other, and began the long walk home.

  The spiders watched her as she went.

  As long as the walk was, Maria would have done it all over again, right now, with her eyes closed, if it meant she didn’t have to open the front door. But her legs ached and her eyes stung. If she wanted to get to her bedroom, she had to pass through the living room first. Maria took a deep breath and opened the door.

  “Where in the world have you been, young lady?” her mother shouted, jumping up from the couch as if she’d been shot out of a cannon. She was fully dressed, even down to her hiking boots. Normally she’d be in sweatpants and a T-shirt by now.

  “I had to walk all the way home from Claire’s party. Maybe if I had a cell phone —”

  “Oh, no, you are not blaming this on me. You were supposed to be at the store, and then you were supposed to come home. Derek’s dad called me in a fit at seven because you two were supposed to have walked straight to their house. And then, he called me to say that Derek showed up with no idea where you were.”

  “That’s because he left me,” Maria said quietly.

  “Left you where?”

  “I told you, at Claire’s party.”

  “Don’t you lie to me, Maria! I know for a fact you were not at Claire’s party. I had to go pick up your brother from her house after there was some kind of accident. He’s back in his room now, and if you’d like to bring him out here and ask him whether you and Derek were at that party, be my guest.”

  “What, so you and Rafi can gang up on me, like always?” Maria said, her voice rising in a shrill crescendo. She felt ridiculous now in her bla
ck party dress, torn and dirty from her trek through the woods. It suddenly seemed like she was playing pretend, wearing the costume of an older girl from one of her stories. Right at this moment, she felt like she was eight years old.

  “This has nothing to do with your brother,” her mother said. “This has to do with you not being where you were supposed to be and not telling anyone where you were.”

  “You have no idea where Rafi is half the time! ‘He’s just over at Rob’s house,’ or ‘Oh, he’s outside, playing in the park,’ which could mean anywhere. You’re just mad at me because you think I’m weird, just like you thought Grandma Esme was weird. You think if I’m gone, I must be up to something bad.”

  Her mother sighed and slumped back down onto the couch. She rubbed her temples like Maria was giving her a headache. Finally, in a voice that was quiet but no less severe, she said, “Go to your room. You are grounded until I say otherwise.”

  “Good!” Maria shouted, now trying to sound unhinged on purpose. “I love being grounded!”

  She stormed down the hallway, stopping when she found Rafi peeking his head out of his room. He looked scared.

  “Where were you?” he asked.

  “What do you care?” Maria snapped. She threw open her door and slammed it behind her. She paced back and forth in front of her bed, which usually calmed her down but now only worked her into more of a rage. She came to a halt in front of her mirror and glared at her reflection. She cut quite a frightening figure in her ragged black dress. There was a smudge on her face that looked like ash.

  She wasn’t playing dress-up. She really was the shadow queen, evil powers and all. And shadow queens didn’t let mothers or brothers tell them what to do. What did Mom and Rafi know about being an outcast? What did they know about being abandoned by their friends?

  Maria’s thoughts continued down this spiral until her exhaustion finally caught up with her. She lay down on top of her comforter and fell into a sleep riddled with nightmares. Over her head, the spiders kept spinning, adding rows and layers to their web, unnoticed.

  The whispers in her head finally woke Maria up, rising and rattling over one another like distant rain. She’d gone to sleep wearing the ring again. The correlation seemed obvious. If she took off the ring now, she would stop hearing the spider voices.

  She didn’t take off the ring.

  The whispers were growing steadily louder. The closer Maria listened, the more she could make out individual voices from the cluster. None of them were speaking in words, exactly, or at least no words Maria knew. But their meaning was clear. They wanted Maria to follow them.

  Stepping down from her bed, Maria found an unbroken line of them, crawling up and down the wall, in and out of the bedroom, so that they looked like a stream with currents flowing in both directions. It didn’t matter that it was after midnight and completely dark; Maria could see the spiders as if they carried their own kind of light.

  She got dressed quickly, then tiptoed down the hallway and into the kitchen. The spiders had found a crack in the wall by the sliding glass door that led into the backyard and the park beyond.

  So that’s how they’ve been getting into the house.

  Quietly, carefully, Maria slid open the door and followed the spiders outside.

  She reached the imaginary line where her yard ended and Falling Waters began. When her mom had forced her to play outside as a little girl, she used to pretend that this was the boundary between the good kingdom and the evil kingdom. Tonight, she wasn’t half as afraid as she used to be. It was like she was walking under a spell — a spell that made her brave. Whether it was a good spell or a bad spell didn’t seem important.

  In no time, Maria was crossing the gravel path near the stream that fed the waterfall. Her feet crunched on leaves and palm fronds as she stepped off the main path and into the dense woods. The ground grew damp, and the spiders led her downstream to where the water was faster and more treacherous. Maria hardly noticed that her black flats were getting ruined. She was too focused on following the spiders to the very lip of the waterfall, where she found a progression of worn, smooth stones she’d never noticed before. Taken together, they almost looked like a staircase, leading down the rock face behind the waterfall and into the sinkhole far below.

  The spiders showed her the way.

  The rock steps were slick and uneven, but Maria took them confidently, one at a time. She followed the stairs down until the waterfall rushed over her head, then blocked the outside world altogether. When she reached the last stair, she lifted her eyes from her feet, and there, cut into the rock face, was a hole that looked like the mouth of a cave. Even her mom probably didn’t know about this.

  Maria followed the spiders deeper into the hole, her eyes taking in the dark details of the cave without a problem. Faded graffiti filled the walls, with letters and hearts spelling out a history of brave or reckless people who had discovered the cave before her. Tiny animal bones littered the ground, all of them completely covered in spiderwebs. The voices in Maria’s head reached out in hunger.

  Finally, Maria could walk no farther. The cave had narrowed into a dead end, where she found a collection of boxes and debris. None of it was covered in the dust and cobwebs that smothered everything else, and there was a plate of half-eaten meat sitting atop one of the boxes. If it had been here awhile, it would have already decayed.

  All of this junk stirred a feeling in Maria, a feeling that crystallized into a memory. It was like she was back in Grandma Esme’s living room, and she just needed to figure out the pattern to the chaos. There were even books and papers scattered about. Maria had half a mind to check for secret compartments.

  The spiders began to gather around her. At first, she thought they were going for the meat. But no, they were forming a circle around one of the books — one already in the center of a crate, set apart.

  The book was bound in leather and looked quite old. Picking it up, Maria saw that the cover was adorned with little beads of glass arranged in a symbol. Many of the beads had fallen off over the years, and some of their edges were rough to begin with, but if Maria squinted hard enough, she could make out the shape of a spider inside of a circle. She might have guessed.

  The pages inside were yellowed with age. Corners and edges were ragged and torn, and some of the pages had been ripped out completely. Every page was filled with scribbles, sketches, and diagrams. There were detailed drawings of animal anatomy next to arcane weapons and mysterious plants. Maria could tell that the handwriting surrounding these drawings belonged not to one person, but to a countless many.

  Some of the writing was in English, and some of it wasn’t. Some of it looked neat and deliberate, while some of it looked hurried, even desperate. Either the many authors of this book had all worked on it together, or it had passed from one person down to the next through the years.

  Maria came to a drawing near the back of the book that she recognized immediately. The voices in her head became a frantic buzz. There, in black ink, was her spider ring.

  There were seven other spider rings drawn on these two pages, and each of them looked just a little bit different. One of the rings bore a spider whose legs and sternum were drawn in outline, and under that ring was written, The Mirror. Another ring had a spider that was shaded in around its four front legs. Under that ring was the label, The Orb.

  The spider on Maria’s ring had what looked like two lima beans on its back. She never would have described it that way before, but now that she saw the drawing, it was impossible to miss.

  Maria’s ring was labeled The Brown Recluse. The voices in her head said that this was right.

  There were more interesting things about Maria’s ring. For one, hers was the only spider that had six eyes instead of eight. For another, it was the only ring for which there were two drawings. One showed the ring exactly as it looked on her finger. The other showed the ring with the spider flipped open, revealing the secret container Maria had discovere
d. There was even a little arrow pointing to it. Next to the arrow, a long list of words had been written and crossed out, with different-colored inks suggesting that whenever a person wrote a word down, that person crossed out the one before it. The words included hemlock, cyanide, arsenic, and nightshade.

  Maria gulped. They were all types of poison.

  She turned the page, hoping for something more pleasant, but at that exact moment, what sounded like a falling rock echoed from the cave entrance. Maria had seen enough.

  Against the will of the voices, she closed the book and yanked her hands from the cover. The book hit the crate on its spine, and Maria hurried to catch it before it toppled and crushed a cluster of spiders scrambling to get out of the way. That’s when Maria realized — some of these spiders were brown recluses, with lima-bean backs and six minuscule eyes, but more, many more, of these spiders were not. Most of these spiders had the bulbous silver bodies of the mirror spider.

  … Arturo would do the most unbelievable things with just a handkerchief and a mirror …

  Oh, no —

  Maria turned to rush out of the cave, already telling herself that when she got home and went to sleep, she would wake up and realize this had all been a terrible dream.

  But she didn’t make it out of the cave.

  She’d taken all of two steps when a black shadow appeared and blocked her way.

  The shadow flickered and swirled into the shape of a man — a man in a black silk suit who wore a spider ring of his own.

  “They told me you’d be here,” the man said coldly. He didn’t look scared like he had in the woods. He looked like he was in total control.

  There was no mistaking it. Maria had been caught.

  Maria took a step back, the heel of her foot catching the corner of one of the boxes.

  “The Amazing Arturo,” she said, unable to mask her wonder. He was unmistakably the man from the poster. It looked like he’d hardly aged since then; his slicked-back hair and severe eyebrows gave him the look of a black-and-white-film star. But unlike the dashing magician from the poster, the man standing before her wasn’t smiling. The man before her had sharp, cruel eyes.