“Hope you don’t mind.” He blindly plucked a matchbook and his final cigarette from his breast pocket. Years of practice allowed him to perform the act both one-handed and without glancing down, and therefore not take his eyes off of the hideous, fanged face twenty feet away from him. The flame caught, and Mickey felt his lungs fill with the sweetest tasting tobacco he ever remembered smoking. Maybe it was the adrenaline, or the blood loss, or the fact that for the first time in as long as he could remember, he actually felt true fear while on duty. But those cheap, processed cigarettes had never tasted so good. They steeled his nerves, brought him calm. After a few deep puffs, his heart was no longer even racing. It was probably the effect of blood loss, and having just flooded his system with nicotine.
Mickey tossed the match out into the main room. It burned for a few seconds atop the flickering mosaic of broken glass, and the spider twitched a few inches further away.
He didn’t hear any sirens on approach, and his head had begun to feel light. The dust motes in the flashlight beam drifted in a lazy upward haze. For a moment, Mickey had trouble focusing his eyes on them. It was becoming painfully clear that help was probably not going to arrive in time, before blood loss and fatigue led him to a gossamer grave.
Mickey spat the cigarette aside and tried to clear his head with a curt shake.
“If you were a pal, you’d kick that Smith and Wesson over here to me.” How the hell had he managed to drop his gun, anyway? He remembered having drawn it, but not when. In only a few short minutes, the world had begun to soften around the edges with shadows. His memory lagged. If he’d had the gun, he’d have blasted every one of those shining eyes out with a .45 caliber bullet.
“But no, all I’ve got is fucking hot sauce in a can. And Gladys, of course.” But, if it came down to it, he’d probably only get one good swing in before the baton became useless. He tapped the rough, black piece of wood against his leg, hard enough to be painful. It served to clear his senses for a moment. He nestled the nightstick alongside the flashlight in his left hand, and maneuvered his right behind him. Mickey worked his fingers at the clasp of the pepper spray pouch, just to the rear of the empty gun holster at his hip.
The spider edged forward with a few hard clicks of spiny chitin on bare concrete. It watched as Mickey fumbled to remove the canister from his belt. A few inches further in the tottering beam of light, and its head was exposed from the shadows. If the head of that patient predator was any indicator, its body was black as tarpaper, coated with long, matte hairs of the same tone. Its lacquered eyes were arranged in a pair of opposing triangular columns, which funneled down toward a pair of slowly twitching fangs the size of steak knives.
“Easy there, cowboy,” Mickey said as he brought the can of pepper spray up and flicked the safety button off. He rolled the canister, narrow and cold, between the fingerless tips of his gloves. How far did this stuff spray, anyway? He’d be damned if he would have remembered even if he wasn’t in the process of bleeding to death. Ten feet, maybe fifteen, was all he needed. A few steps out of the office and he would let it rip, for better or for worse.
The spider must have sensed the weakening state of its prey, because it edged a few inches further out of its hole in anticipation.
Mickey groaned. The three pound flashlight, along with the baton, was getting harder to hoist with his left hand. It was now or never. He planted the elbow of his flashlight arm against his waist for support as he lifted the silver canister and prepared to fire.
But he stopped.
Something emblazoned across the bottom corner of the pepper spray can called out to him just as his thumb started to depress the lever. It was the symbol of an open flame, with a prohibitive crossbar drawn through it in red.
His thinking had started to go fuzzy—there was no doubt about that—and, perhaps it was this that should be credited for the absurd thought that occurred to him just then. With the same hand, he reached gently toward his breast pocket. When it emerged again, Mickey realized that his juggling act was drawing nearer impossibility. He would have to make a sacrifice.
With a deep breath, he took an experimental step forward. Glass crunched beneath the thick heel of his tactical boots. His balance wasn’t great, and his head now felt as if it were a fleshy balloon, too light and full of slippery thoughts.
The night of his brother’s death, Mickey reluctantly returned to the barn loft with his father and a spray bottle full of ammonia. On the underside of the wooden girder where Paul had been attacked they found a tumescent web the size of a baseball. It was torn at one side, broken open like a cotton pustule, and a trickle of tiny spiders still crawled around it. Paul had burst the nest, awakened the hatchlings. Mickey’s father did not speak, but hosed the thing down as he choked back tears. The spiders scurried and fell, finding their death in the fumes. At the last, a fat brown mother spider slid from the nest and plonked to her back on the floorboard, legs writhing as she suffocated. For a moment, Mickey thought he would be sick. He pictured Paul, cold and white, face distorted by pain and pustules as he lay on the floor of Doctor Brannigan’s. He had a vision then of the monstrous thing crawling across his brother’s neck, and pure rage tore through the nausea. Mickey had stomped his foot. He ground the deadly thing beneath his shoe, shuddering with hate. Hot, anguished tears stained his cheeks red. There had been no justice that day. But there had been vengeance.
Mickey shook his head. The spider moved forward in unison with him, now fully emerged from its hiding spot beneath the car. Its body was lithe and spindly, save for the bulbous abdomen. Each segmented leg, when unfolded, would have been two feet long. Like a nervous tap dancer, it rattled back and forth on them in the wavering spotlight.
“That’s it,” Mickey said with another step that nearly cost him his balance. “Just a little closer.”
The spider made a bold jump forward.
For a second, Mickey felt his throat close and prepared to shoot. But, the giant spider stopped at half the distance between them. It was waiting. It knew he was injured, could probably smell his imminent death in the air with all the blood. And the thing was waiting for him to just keel over.
There was ten feet left between them now. No more time for bullshit. He wasn’t going to get another chance at this. With the matchbook in his right hand, along with the pepper spray, Mickey folded out a few matchsticks and took a deep breath to prepare for what came next.
The flashlight tumbled from his hand and winked out with a clatter. As soon as it did, Mickey heard the feverish clicking beat of the beast’s legs as it tore through the darkness.
And then there was a flash of light. The entire matchbook was aflame in an instant. In its fiery orange glow, Mickey saw the form of the spider as it lunged for him. Shadows trailed its body, stretching the black, eight-legged horror into a fanged, flying visage of Death himself. With its nozzle two inches from the flame, Mickey sighted the pepper spray and squeezed. A flaming javelin erupted from his hands.
Mickey screamed as the fingertips of his left hand were scorched.
The spider reared at the jet of fire, taking the full blast of it on its underside from only three feet away. Its scream was piercing: a shrill howl that tore at Mickey’s eardrums. The spider rolled, lashing about in a blazing mess of legs, before bolting into the depths of the warehouse.
Mickey had long since dropped the pepper spray and patted out his burning glove. Now he knelt to retrieve Gladys, and stumbled. Pain rocketed up his spine and his fingertips were badly burned, but that was still the least of his problems. If the agony of his body did anything to serve him, it kept him conscious, and told him that he needed to get outside. He looked up.
The flaming spider had finally quieted and succumbed to death. But, not before it climbed to seek safety in a corner of its sprawling web, which conducted the flame like wildfire. Above Mickey, the entire ceiling was ablaze. At the center of it all, the writhing nest of hatchlings was consumed as well. Their once elaborate bi
rthplace became an incinerating death shroud. In a few minutes, the whole place would be a tinderbox.
Mickey stumbled for the makeshift entrance at the loading dock. The way was no longer dark, now lit from above as if the clouds themselves had become kindling. Chunks of flaming silk fell from the ceiling like hellish snow. Mickey’s vision wavered. He stumbled, fell to his knees and crawled out the door. With Gladys in hand, he slumped over the edge of the dock and rolled into a small drift of snow, which did little to break the fall. But Mickey was beyond feeling the pain now. Black blotches edged into his vision, and out of the darkness swam the freckled face of his brother. Mickey reached out with his burned fingers, tried to touch Paul’s cheek. The image faded into the night sky among the clouds of smoke that now chugged their way free from the burning warehouse.
“I got her, Paulie. You’re safe now.”
Mickey tried to laugh, but it boiled into a haggard cough. A crimson stain inked the snow beneath him. It spread quickly. Mickey could no longer feel his arms or legs.
“You’re safe.”
The last sound Mickey heard before losing consciousness was that of approaching sirens.
A View from the Top
Prior to her month-long trip to Europe, Elsa had never seen an actual castle. After the Laurio family had finished touring their ninth stone-walled residence, however, the bespectacled little girl felt she had seen enough of them to fill her lifetime quota.
“As you can see, a painting of Henry VII still hangs here in the hallway…” The lanky and balding tour guide droned on. In actuality, he was one of the better ones that Elsa had encountered thus far, but she had long since surpassed her interest in structures of antiquity.
“Mom, I’m bored,” Elsa’s little brother whined.
“Stop it, Alex. Listen to the man,” their mother scolded, “you might learn something.”
“—it is a well-known fact that he had the castle completely renovated for his first wife, Catherine of Aragon.”
“It is boring,” Elsa agreed quietly. “If I have to look at one more painting of a dead guy, I’m going to hurl.”
Alex giggled and made a motion to hang himself from an invisible noose, eyes going crossed and tongue lolling.
“Ahem.” The tour guide, in his immaculate gray coat, stared with annoyance at Elsa and her seven-year-old brother. “Perhaps now would be a good time to move on to the final leg of the tour?”
Elsa’s mother blushed, grabbing both of her children by the shoulders and pulling them back in line. Elsa’s backpack slipped off her shoulder and fell to the floor. Her face reddened at drawing the attention of the rest of their large tour group.
“If you will follow this way, it will be my utmost pleasure to present to you the finest hedge maze the world has ever seen.”
Elsa and Alex were led forcefully out of the stone goliath and down the steps to the courtyard. Their mother pulled them behind the rest of the group.
“Listen up. Your father and I paid good money for this tour. So we’re going to get our money’s worth, you got it?”
“But dad’s not even he—”
“Stop it, Alex. Not another peep. Just because your dad ate some bad food doesn’t mean that the trip had to be spoiled for the rest of us. Look, they’ve got a garden maze. That’s cool, right? Now, go.”
Alex looked up at the towering spires of the Leeds Castle and groaned. He whispered to Elsa, “I don’t think it was the food that made him sick.”
“I heard that.”
Much to Elsa’s surprise, the hedge maze was almost as impressive as the guide had promised. The emerald walls were made of fourteen-hundred ornately trimmed yew trees, and stood a few inches taller than most of the men in their group.
“Can we do it, mom?” Alex asked excitedly.
“Yeah, please mom? We’re really sorry for being…um, bored.”
Although annoyed at their behavior, she could not bring herself to deny her children this bit of fun on what would likely be the only family vacation overseas that the Laurio’s would be able to afford in the near future.
She said finally, eyeing the security guard at the entrance, “Alright, I’m going to be waiting for you at the end. Don’t leave your little brother alone, Elsa. And Alex, be-have.”
The siblings gave each other excited looks and made their way to the front of the group.
After waiting what seemed an eternity for the guide’s explanation of the many rules of conduct for the maze, Elsa and her brother were finally allowed inside.
“Whoa, cool,” Alex said, admiring the smoothly trimmed walls. “How do they do it?”
“With clippers, dork. And it probably takes them forever, so maybe you should get your hands out of it.” Elsa pushed him playfully away from the manicured hedge and further into the gravel-floored maze. The sun was near setting, and the guide had told them that theirs would be the last group admitted, as the life-size puzzle generally took anywhere between twenty and forty minutes to complete.
That was precisely fifteen to thirty-five minutes longer than Alex’s attention span.
“Ellie, I wanna go back. Can we go back?”
Elsa looked around. She could hear the voices of their fellow tourists calling to each other across leafy barriers and caught flickers of movement between the branches every few yards.
“I don’t think we can do that, Alex.” She scanned the area again. “I mean, I don’t have a clue where we are now. I think we’d better just keep going until we get to the center.”
“But, I’m tired,” he whined.
“Well, maybe you should have th—hey, what was that?”
Elsa brought her face closer to the rounded surface of the wall. “Did you see that?”
“Don’t fool around, Ellie. I’m not stupid.” He stood with crossed arms, obviously immune to his sister’s attempt to shift attention away from him.
“Sshh…stop talking, Alex. Did you…hear that?” She leaned in closer to the wall, bending down onto her knees at the edge of the sculpted shrubbery. Bits of gravel dug into her knees.
“Come on. Let’s go,” Alex said. He shifted away from her uneasily. “Elsa, you’re scaring me.”
“Really, Alex, there’s something in there. I just saw it…and heard it, I think. Maybe it’s a rabbit. Here, bunny, bunny…”
The wind offered a small gust that rattled the branches enough for Alex to catch glimpse of a tiny blue eye from within the hedge. “I see it. I see it!” He bounced forward, thoughts of a family of rabbits replacing any prior reservations. “Move, I wanna see it.”
Two fish-white arms reached out from the depths of the greenery, seizing each of the children by an arm and pulled them into the bristly hedge.
Elsa had hardly begun to open her mouth to call out before she realized what had happened. She reached out for her brother and found nothing but empty space as a pale, thick fog ran coolly over her exposed skin. The ground beneath her gave a squishy bounce when she rocked on her heels. It looked and felt as though she was wading blindly through a cloud.
“Alex!”
Elsa grabbed wildly through the hazy mist until, at last, she heard her brother calling from a distance.
“Alex, where are you? Stay still. I’ll find you.”
She took a few unsteady steps forward before she lost her balance, causing her to swipe uselessly at the crisp, white air.
“I would certainly suggest placing my steps a little more carefully, dear.”
The smooth and friendly man’s voice startled Elsa, and she rocked unsteadily backward.
“It will take your eyes a moment to adjust. Just stand still and you won’t go tumbling off the edge. What a pity it would be for you to lose before the game even began.”
“Who are you?” Elsa asked, readying herself to pummel the man to whom the voice belonged. “And where are we? I want to go back right now.”
The man chuckled. “My, aren’t we the demanding sort? I suppose you’ve not been taught much
in the way of proper manners?” A shadowy silhouette slowly edged into her vision, taking a human form in the fog.
“I know it isn’t polite to kidnap children,” Elsa spat angrily. “Don’t come close to me.” She hefted her book-laden backpack in preparation for defense.
“Don’t be silly, child. I wouldn’t dream of hurting you or your brother.” The man emerged from the thick air and bowed deeply. He was still surrounded by a dizzying aura of mist, but Elsa could see that he was wearing a suit of long-forgotten fashion, and of dark material. His face remained hidden by swirling wisps of fog.
“I simply wish to play a game with you. I do get quite bored here, you see. I’m afraid that my confinement to this man-made grass sculpture is a far cry from interesting. Therefore, I must entertain myself.”
“How? Where’s Alex?”
“Oh, good heavens.” He clicked his fingers and the fog lifted instantly.
Elsa gasped.
Only inches away from her foot, the ground dropped off into cloudy nothingness. The air above remained a glowing gray-white, as if she were stuck inside a storm-ridden snow globe. She stepped back carefully and looked across what appeared to be an uneven field of grass, where she saw Alex waving to her excitedly from atop a circular, stonewalled structure. Examining the green path underfoot closer she saw the familiar bristles of neatly trimmed yew. She was standing atop the hedge.
“It’s the maze.”
“Very clever of you,” the man said. His face was still obscured by mist, even though most of it had lifted. “You’d be surprised at how many folks must actually have that fact pointed out to them. It’s a view that most never get to see. You should consider yourself privileged.”
Elsa peered over the edge. “And down there?”
The man chuckled, but did not answer.
“Are you a ghost?”
“Of sorts, I suppose. Perhaps you can think of me as a sort of spiritual caretaker of the garden. That sounds nice, doesn’t it?” Again, he chuckled. “Now then, let’s get right to it, shall we?”
“To what?”
Chasing the Sandman Page 2