The Spider Ring

by Andrew Harwell

  “If you kill that spider, we will only pay the price later. Now, I’m sorry, but at the moment, what I really need is to go save my family, and I need your help. Will you come with me? Please?”

  Her spiders hesitated. It seemed to Maria that they didn’t care about the price — they wanted to eliminate their enemy. Maria hoped she wasn’t abusing their friendship by telling them no. But then, a real friend sometimes was the one who told you what you didn’t want to hear but needed to.

  Finally, her spiders backed down, and the red in the back of Maria’s mind became a much quieter blue. The black widow pulled itself up to the top part of the web, and it, too, looked at Maria, as if it was considering what to do with her.

  “You can go now,” Maria said, none too warmly. “But if I find you doing anything to my mom or brother, I’m not going to stop them next time.”

  The black widow fled, and the brown recluse spiders waited at attention.

  “I’ll meet you by the front door,” Maria said, and as they left her alone, she took a deep breath. She was happy to have them with her, she thought. Now that she’d seen what they were capable of, she knew it was better than having them against her.

  Maria changed into a pair of jeans and a T-shirt. It was after three in the morning, and she had reached that point in being tired where she was actually dizzy, as if she might fall asleep standing up. But no good could come of waiting. And the exhaustion was making her braver than she would be in the daylight.

  She threw on a hoodie — one with a sewn-on sword patch that always reminded her of Agatha at Sea — and in this armor, headed out into the night.

  The historic district was deserted. Maria had been here at night plenty of times before, with Derek’s family or for town festivals, but usually there were cars parked on the street, and other people around. Now the old streetlamps cast pale oranges and yellows on all the empty shops and restaurants, and the wide-open road looked like a set for a movie about the zombie apocalypse.

  Maria stepped out of the shadows and hurried across the street before she could think better of it. Even the spiders trailing at her feet were nervous. Their energy crackled like a radio in her brain.

  She reached the door to the shop at a jog, but the creepy doll in the display window stopped her cold. Its wooden horse mount was rocking back and forth as if it had only just been pushed. Maria could swear the doll was looking back at her.

  Over the doll’s shoulder, a picture caught Maria’s eye. It was one of many old photographs on a corkboard in the display window. All of them had something to do with the history of the shop, and Maria had never paid them much attention before. But one of the photos was a family portrait from when Derek’s great-grandpa Vic was a little boy. And now Maria noticed a girl next to Vic — a girl who looked so much like Aunt Luellen that they could be twins.

  But they weren’t twins, were they? This must be Luellen herself, already a teenager almost a hundred years ago. Maria had guessed that the rings had something to do with Arturo’s and Grandma Esme’s remarkable youth. But if this picture proved what Maria thought it did, the combined power of the rings had kept Luellen from aging hardly at all in a century. Perhaps with all eight rings, she’d become immortal.

  Maria tried the door. As she expected, it wasn’t locked. She pushed it open quickly. The sudden, frantic warnings of her spiders came a moment too late.

  She ran headlong into a heavy black coat, which enveloped her even faster than she could scream.

  Maria was thrown back outside, and she heard the door slam closed behind her. When the coat was yanked off, she was face-to-face with Arturo, who in this strange light looked like an alien, and not the friendly kind, either.

  “What in the world is wrong with you?” he said, clenching his coat in his fist. “Did you really think you could just barge your way in there and take down the Black Widow by yourself?”

  “I’m not by myself,” Maria said defiantly. Her spiders twittered.

  Arturo ran his hands through his hair and breathed an exasperated sigh.

  “You’re every bit as stubborn as your grandmother. I hope you know that. But even she would have approached this problem with a bit more forethought. You can’t help your family at all by rushing in and getting yourself killed.”

  “Oh, so you’re trying to help me now?”

  “In my own way, yes.”

  He gave off the faintest hint of a smile, not devious or deceitful but perhaps a bit playful, as if to acknowledge just how peculiar his way was. In that smile, Maria could see the young man Grandma Esme had known.

  He loved her, Maria thought. He really did.

  “All right, then,” she said. “So what now? I didn’t see anyone else in the shop, and this was my only lead.”

  “Oh, someone’s in the shop, all right. The light was on in the basement. My mirrors should be here any” — he cracked open the shop door, and a trio of shiny mirror spiders slinked out — “moment.”

  The spiders crawled up Arturo’s leg, all the way to his shoulder. He squinted his eyes as if listening to a faraway sound.

  “They say the boy is down there. Derek, it sounds like. But your mother and brother, too. The two of them are … asleep. My mirrors caught no sign of Luellen herself. I expect she is still out looking for you.”

  “Then what are we waiting for? Derek won’t be a problem. He won’t. I know it.”

  “Maria, I don’t think you understand how dangerous a person without a mind of his own can be.”

  “Sure I do,” Maria said. “This girl in my school, Claire, has turned practically the whole seventh grade into followers.”

  “If you don’t take this seriously, you’re going to get us both killed.”

  “I’m sorry, but look: You might know more about spiders, but I know more about Derek. If you just let me talk to him, I —”

  “No. I have a better plan.”

  Every moment they spent talking in the street was a moment they weren’t rescuing Rafi and Mom.

  “Fine. What’s your plan?”

  “Well, part one is that we hide your ring.”

  “What?”

  “Your ring. If you take it right to her, you have nothing left to bargain with, and she’ll kill you immediately. If you hide it, you have the power to negotiate.”

  Maria winced. She hadn’t thought about that. But there was one small problem.

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t trust you all the way. The Black Widow kidnapped my family, but you tried to kidnap me, too, you know. Esme gave me the ring, so the ring stays with me.”

  Arturo narrowed his eyes at her, visibly unhappy.

  “Fine,” he seethed. “Then on to part two.”

  And with that, he turned and swept back into the shop, not even bothering to make sure Maria was following him. Fine by her. She was getting the hang of this Order thing. You just had to accept that everyone was trying to trick you at all times, and the only safe bet was to trick them back.

  “Are you ready?” Maria whispered to her spiders. She could almost feel their anxious twitching in response. “Me neither,” she said.

  Arturo was waiting for her at the checkout counter inside. The light from the basement filtered up and speckled the main room with just enough slivers to see by. The same old trinkets that had looked so harmless and familiar earlier now looked like the possessions of ghosts.

  “They say Derek is guarding your family on the far side of the room,” Arturo whispered, the trio of spiders still perched on his shoulder. “I’ll go down first and keep him occupied while you sneak around and free them. And whatever you see down in the basement, you mustn’t stop moving. Do you think you can do that?”

  “How are you going to distract him?”

  “Do you think you can do that?” Arturo repeated.

  Maria nodded. She dreaded to think what the mirror spiders had seen that Arturo was so afraid to tell her now.

  “Then do it, and don’t worry about how I’m going to d
istract him. Just count to ten, then follow me down the stairs.”

  With that, Arturo disappeared through the door.

  One, two, three, Maria counted, listening for movement from the basement but hearing nothing.

  “Stay close to me,” she whispered to her spiders.

  Four, five, six. Still nothing. Maria went to the door.

  We will, her spiders whispered, and the ring grew warm.

  Seven, eight, nine. She took a deep breath.

  “Here goes nothing.”

  Ten.

  She raced down the stairs to the sound of shattering glass.

  The scene in the basement took her totally by surprise.

  It was all the same junk from before, but it had been reconfigured — organized, somehow, though into what Maria couldn’t say. Across the room, Derek appeared to be strapped into a makeshift suit of armor comprised of pots, pans, and deconstructed furniture. The clock he’d been “repairing” earlier was now on his chest plate, counting time. He was wielding a fireplace poker like a sword, and the reckless anger in his movement as he struck out at Arturo was the only thing that kept the whole image from being comical.

  Maria breathed in sharply as the poker connected with Arturo’s chest, but the sound of her gasp was drowned out by more glass shattering. It hadn’t been Arturo at all, but his reflection in one of the many old mirrors. By the looks of the shattered glass on the ground behind Derek, this had happened before.

  She was still standing there, agog, when Derek started to turn his eyes in her direction. She’d been given one instruction — don’t get distracted — and already she’d blown it. She was about to ruin the entire rescue.

  Arturo appeared farther into the room, and he shouted, “Hey! Junk heap!” Derek whirred around in rage.

  Maria ducked behind a nearby dresser, scrambling to take in the rest of her surroundings. She needed to find her mother and Rafi and get them out of here fast, before the Black Widow returned.

  Then, in the corner, she saw something ghastly — something that robbed all the air from her lungs. It was the spiderweb to end all spiderwebs, strewn between the wooden beams that seemed to hold the whole foundation of the old building in place.

  Mom and Rafi weren’t just strung up in the web — they were wrapped from neck to foot, so that their faces were visible and visibly distressed. As the spiders had warned, neither of them appeared to be awake, which was probably a good thing. If Rafi were awake, he’d be hysterical. He never liked small spaces or being forced to keep still.

  Maria made her way from one hiding spot to the next in a low crouch, dodging left and right as Derek turned with his weapon. Arturo was clearly trying to lead him away from the web, but he was limited by the placement and number of mirrors — a number that was getting smaller as Derek demolished one after another.

  Finally, Maria reached the web. Up close, she could see that Rafi’s lips were tinged with blue, and the color had drained from Mom’s face. They couldn’t be gone. They couldn’t. Whatever was keeping them unconscious must have sent them into a kind of shock.

  “Aha!” Derek shouted, parrying once more with the poker. The glass of one more mirror crashed with the resounding cascade of a chime, and a cuckoo clock somewhere in the rubble echoed in the silence that followed. But that was the last mirror, and when Derek spun on his heel, he was standing face-to-face with the real Arturo. Over Arturo’s shoulder, Derek saw Maria, and he knew he’d been had.

  “Maria, hurry!” Arturo called. She’d failed his orders again. She was just so tired, disoriented, and scared.

  But she pushed on because she had to. She clawed at the web until it was thick in her fingernails. When her hands started to get stuck, she used her teeth.

  “Help me,” she pleaded, and her spiders went to work immediately. But this was no ordinary spiderweb; it was thick like plastic and almost as strong. If only she’d thought to bring a knife.

  Meanwhile, Arturo struggled to keep Derek away using what looked like the leg of an old table. It was stranger than any duel Maria had ever imagined, and clumsier, louder, and more dangerous, too. Maria didn’t want either of them to be hurt, but it was finally sinking in that this wasn’t her best friend — the Black Widow’s power had seen to that.

  “Wake up, Rafi,” Maria said desperately. “Help me get Mom down. Please, wake up.”

  But Rafi would not wake up. And even as Maria tugged and bit, and even as her own spiders struggled alongside her, she heard a scuttling sound, and she knew she was already too late. The enemy spiders were here, and they were out for blood.

  In droves, they rushed over her hands and arms; they swarmed her face, knocking her glasses askew. Forced to let go of the web, Maria flailed about, trying to rid her body of the onslaught. But for every spider she shook off, two more appeared. Bulbous spiders, brown-and-red spiders — there were even bright yellow and glassy green spiders — all of them crawling on her skin with legs like little needles. And then there were black widow spiders, with their poison-red hourglasses.

  In the moments when she could see her surroundings through the maelstrom of fear and color, she realized that the spiders were turning on Arturo as well. Arturo was stomping on the spiders left and right; he didn’t seem to have any of Maria’s qualms about hurting them. With each spider Arturo killed, the rest of the swarm became angrier and angrier.

  When Maria finally felt the spiders moving in the same direction, and the direction was down and away from her body, she entertained the hope that they had changed their minds once more and decided to help her. But if that were the case, her own brown recluse spiders wouldn’t sound so panicked. And what’s more, she couldn’t move her arms or legs. The enemy spiders had wrapped her in a web so tight, she could hardly breathe. Arturo looked to have suffered the same fate, and he was beyond miserable. After decades of successfully evading capture, he’d finally been caught, thanks to Maria’s stupidity.

  Derek was winded. He clutched his sides and gulped down air, and for a fraction of a second, he looked like the boy Maria knew. But then he stood upright and glowered at her, as if she had done something to him and not the other way around.

  “Derek, help us out,” Maria pleaded. “You don’t have to do this, you know. This isn’t who you are. We can get away from her.”

  “No. We can’t.” His voice was monotonous, impossible to interpret. “There’s no escaping her. The Black Widow is everywhere, in us and around us.”

  And, as if fulfilling a prophecy or obeying a command, the spiders began to pool at Derek’s feet, pouring out of the walls and the ceiling and the heaps of antiques. They scrambled to climb on top of one another, a mountain of spiders that grew higher and higher.

  The teeming pile became tighter and denser, until it looked almost solid, and Maria couldn’t distinguish one spider from the next. Then the pile began to take shape, squeezing in at the bottom and expanding out at the top, the very peak separating into long, thin bands like hair.

  Finally, it wasn’t a pile at all. It was a woman. It was Luellen.

  Only it wasn’t Luellen — there were a few key differences.

  This woman had eight eyes and two terrible mandibles. The mandibles clacked together in a grotesque imitation of speech, and whether it was because words actually came out or because Maria was wearing her ring, she knew this was the Black Widow, and the Black Widow was hungry.

  The Black Widow surveyed the room with those eight horrible eyes. She took her time, too, gloating in her victory.

  “I have waited many years for this moment,” she said. “But I knew the rings would come to me in the end.” She turned to Arturo. “I think I will take the Brown Recluse first, so that I can savor killing you afterward. I have spent too much of my life hunting you down, oh amazing one, but it will hardly matter when I have all eight rings.”

  “You don’t need to kill the girl,” Arturo said. “Look at her — she’s hardly a threat to you.”

  “She’s as cunning
and ruthless as I am, as we both well know. Besides, I don’t do anything without doing it thoroughly.”

  The Luellen-like creature sauntered right up to Maria, its legs quivering with each step so that Maria could almost see the hundreds of spiders in its veins. Maria’s terrified face was reflected back at her eight times.

  “Don’t worry, little one. This will only hurt for a second.”

  She raised her arm across her chest as if she was going to backhand Maria. Maria saw the lights glittering off all six rings, one on each finger except her middle finger, which had two. Luellen’s fingers were long and sharp, like tiny daggers. There was no telling which of the rings produced that effect.

  In the split second before the blow landed, Arturo disappeared with a pop and reappeared right before Maria. Luellen’s hand came down with a sickly slice. Just like that, Arturo was dead.

  “No!” Maria shouted, her voice breaking like a wave. Her anguish seemed finally to pierce Derek’s armor. His eyes opened wide and he noticed the iron poker in his hand as if for the first time.

  Luellen prodded Arturo’s body with her foot, then leaned over to remove the Mirror Ring as if she were picking out a diamond from a pile of trash. She slid the ring onto her middle finger so that it now bore three. As soon as it did, Luellen’s eyes glazed over with veils of red. Her transformation was nearly complete.

  Luellen stared at her hand, then blinked all eight of her horrible red eyes at once. She turned her attention back to Maria.

  “Symmetry, my dear, is everything in life. Balance, order, what-goes-around and all that jazz. There’s nothing quite like a perfect circle, except perhaps a perfect story, which exists always in a loop, the infinite present. When you are gone, I will be the story. When you are gone, the Order of Anansi will begin and end with me. I am sure you can see the beauty in that.”

  Maria’s spiders screamed their protest in her mind. They didn’t think the Black Widow’s vision for the future was beautiful. They were as frightened and appalled as Maria was.

  “The Order won’t end with you,” Maria said. “You don’t really control the spiders. They make the circle. You’re just a cog.”