Gossamer: A Story of Love and Tragedy

by Thompson, Lee

  The boy said, “Relax. They won’t hurt you.”

  But it wasn’t just the arachnids she was worried about.

  Catching a glimpse of his face, she saw death, knew it down in her bones. And his death had been horrible. The vast empty lived inside him, somehow gave him power, and that power had latched onto her shoulders, was holding her prisoner, and as hard as she fought she knew that it was like one of those spiders trying to move a mountain.

  “Be still,” he ordered.

  “No!” Natalie cried.

  The army of spiders scrambled forward, over each other, against her shoes. She kicked, trying to keep them off her but felt their tiny limbs, what seemed hundreds of them, brush against her bare legs.

  The boy squeezed her shoulders hard and said, “Don’t hurt them!”

  He threw her and she stumbled, arms outstretched trying to catch herself, but landed in the dirt alley behind the shops. She wiped the hair out of her face, tried to get her bearings, on her hands and knees.

  It was hard to regain control of herself. She dusted off her shirt and her shorts and thought she felt something crawling on her scalp. She tried to smash it, tried ripping it free, but whatever it was, it was stuck to her.

  Then she noticed her mother leaning against the wall, sobbing.

  Natalie crawled for her, dragging her feet, hoping she’d freed herself of any spiders still clinging to her clothing.

  “Mom,” she cried.

  Brooke didn’t hear her at first. She still heard Bill saying, I want you to suffer, and she had been suffering, for years, for not knowing how evil he was, how selfish and how monstrous. It was all on her head. She took responsibility. And it made her angry too, because she knew that he did want her to suffer, not this hallucination that masqueraded as Bill, but the real Bill. He’d never blamed himself. He’d blamed her for not understanding, he had never hesitated to point out that she had chosen to be with him...

  She buried her head in her hands. Then she heard Natalie close to her, felt her breath on her face, ragged, hot, quick, her hands pawing at her shoulders, her daughter shaking her, saying, “Mom!”

  It was quite a shock for Natalie to see her mother so shook up. Moments ago it seemed they’d been in the store, gathering water, planning to make their escape, kill whoever they had to kill to do it, but that wasn’t the reality.

  This was the reality… they were screwed. They knew it.

  A human body can suffer ten times more damage than the human psyche. It’s a fact, in all the ancient torture manuscripts that have survived.

  I watched them from above. My once-sweet son Peter, reborn now and in the throes of what he was becoming, watched them from the doorway. It hurt, in a way, to see so much suffering. I whispered, “It will be over soon. All your pain. All my pain.”

  Below, Natalie shivered, tight to her mother’s side. She’d dropped the water somewhere. She’d lost her cane. She watched the back door, knowing that any moment now the boy and his spiders would step into the alley, his ghostlike face full of pity and something inhuman.

  Death, she thought. He is death. It’s on his lips. It’s in his grip. He’s the one who put the Explorer on top of the building. He’s the only one that could.

  Something clicked off in the distance but she refused to turn her head from the back door. If death was going to come for them, she’d face it, and she’d go out holding her mother tight to her chest.

  But we didn’t need her sitting there waiting to face death bravely.

  We needed her on the carousel.

  *****

  Angel watched the sky darken. It was barely noticeable at first. Maybe not noticeable at all to someone who hadn’t had their eyes opened. He noticed again that I was gone. He stood, naked, feeling that clothes were too restricting. It felt wonderful to let it all hang out in the hot desert air. He ran a hand over the smooth floor, on his hands and knees, scurrying about, smiling at his reflection. The carousel’s platform distorted his image a bit, which deep down, slightly unnerved him. But he shrugged it off easily, thinking that this was what he’d been meant to do, from the day of his birth to this moment in time, and the next moments to come, nothing could convince him otherwise. God had planned this. For him to find a Fountain of Youth in this desert oasis. It would make him rich the world over. It would make him one of the greatest names in history.

  He hadn’t tested the device, yet he had no doubt that it would work. It had to.

  And such are the failings of men.

  Angel had never been a believer in destiny, but those who find life to be one unfortunate event after another, seldom do. Every time he’d heard the word preordained, he felt repulsed by it.

  Funny, he thought, how our perspective can change once we feel destiny happening to us.

  It, feeling destiny happen to you, from moment to moment, felt like a lightning bolt of an orgasm. It rocked him from sole to forehead. It flowed through him, out of his fingers in bright colors, and from his toes in shades of black and white. It tore him open in the most pleasurable way, revealing a genius inside him that even he never knew existed. This carousel could cure cancer, AIDS, heart disease, miscarriages, hell, any damn thing that living caused.

  The carousel’s very structure seemed to swell beneath him and lift him above the crestfallen town that had no idea how great he would make its name.

  It all came to him in a flash, the way brilliant ideas do, a rush, unstoppable.

  He foamed at the mouth, overcome with emotion, and bearing the constant pain of a relentless erection.

  *****

  Brooke said, “Are you okay?”

  She threw an arm around her daughter and pulled her close. Natalie cried for a few minutes, never taking her gaze from the shop they’d been in. Brooke understood, and she feared that if her daughter hadn’t remembered what had happened when she was just a small child, this horrible place had shown it to her.

  She choked on her grief, on her child’s grief.

  It was easier not to talk about it, for Natalie to realize that this place, whatever it was, played tricks. That’s all it was, tricks based on your deepest fears, but only tricks.

  They stood, Brooke unsure if she’d initiated it, or if Natalie had. They held hands. The butcher knife was no longer there. Neither was the bag of water she’d carried out.

  She said quietly, “I don’t think we can move things here. At least not for long.”

  “No,” Natalie said. “I noticed that.”

  Her daughter’s face was very pale, and beyond her the red rock wall to the west seemed as if on fire.

  Natalie said, “What are we going to do? We can’t stay here and we can’t carry water out.”

  “I know,” Brooke said, sobbing suddenly.

  To stay could be to wait for greater trouble, but if she and Natalie hiked out, she may collapse of dehydration or exhaustion before help ever arrived or before they ever made it anywhere. And she didn’t want to be up there, the two of them lying next to the highway with nothing but black dots high in the sky, coming closer every hour until the buzzards were right there on the ground, ten feet away, flapping their wings to see if their prey was too weak to fight back. She didn’t want to be alive when they came in and she didn’t want to feel their beaks, or see them tear into Natalie, who would merely whimper because she didn’t have the strength to do anything else.

  “I don’t know,” she said.

  “We have to do something,” Natalie said. “I’d rather get out of here, take our chances getting back to the highway.”

  “We’ll die,” Brooke said. “We’ll watch each other die.”

  Natalie squeezed her hand, hard. “We’ll die worse here, mom! That room was full of those fiddle back spiders, and…” Brooke didn’t think her daughter’s face could grow any paler, but it did. It was pure unadulterated ivory, like stone, the brow wrinkled like she’d lived a hundred hard years. “There was a boy, only he wasn’t alive.”

  “Another one
in a coffin,” Brooke said, shaking her head.

  “No, Mom. He was alive. Dead, but alive.”

  “It can’t be, honey.”

  “It is whatever it is and I am not staying here whether you do or not.”

  “You can’t leave me here,” Brooke said.

  “I will.”

  “Then we go. I don’t want you out there on your own. Whatever comes we’ll face it together.”

  “And what about Angel?”

  “We’ll ask him to come. If he says no, then… we’ll leave him.” It hurt her to say it. It hurt deeply. In her mind, in her fantasies, he was the one she’d been waiting for her whole life, the one Bill was supposed to be.

  She had imagined Angel there to share Natalie’s accomplishments through school, college, and marriage. She imagined having a child with him before they grew too old, and she imagined a thousand wonderful scenarios where they hit their golden years together and hand in hand they’d look back over the decades and together they would decide that they’d lived the exact life they’d wanted without any regrets.

  But it was a wash. She knew in her gut that Angel wasn’t going to come with them. He would stay. And she also knew that it wasn’t his fault. The place was corrupting his mind, it was influencing him somehow. Dorothy had hypnotized him or used some kind of charm that hadn’t worked on her or Natalie. And she didn’t want to hate him for something that wasn’t truly his fault. But it was hard not to when she needed him more than she figured she’d ever need him again.

  Her daughter squeezed her hand and said, “Okay, so let’s get out of here. Maybe we can find the highway before dark.”

  “Before dark,” Brooke said, looking from one house to the next. She said, “Do you think more of them will start moving around once it’s dark?”

  “Who?”

  “The ones in the coffins.”

  “We don’t know that there are any others.”

  “But if there are… do you think they’ll be like the boy you saw?”

  “The boy and the spiders.”

  Natalie shivered.

  Brooke rubbed her back but it didn’t help either one of them.

  “He’s death,” Natalie said. “I could feel it in his touch and his breath, and hear it in his voice.”

  “He might have been just a hallucination. I had one too.”

  “Of the boy and the spiders?”

  “No, something worse,” Brooke said, looking away. “For me at least.”

  *****

  Natalie noticed that the sun had made its trek westward rather far since they had first went into the shop and found the water. It hadn’t felt like a couple of hours, but it could have been. She didn’t want to stay in Gossamer one more minute and she felt bad for telling her mom she would leave her behind if she didn’t want to come, but she meant it, whether she lived to regret it or not. It was stupid to stay when what they’d already seen had shown them that the desert was by far the best place to lay their bet for safety, a return to the life they’d known, all of that.

  Of course, she also knew that if they did survive there was a good chance they’d have to talk to someone about what they’d experienced, and anyone in authority would think them crazy. She could see it all so clearly: Her and her mother being picked up by some old man in a beaten Ford pickup, the hospital so white and cool, the IVs in their arms, the recovery, the police asking them for their statements, their story coming out bit by agonizing bit, the police and reporters and Angel’s family wanting to know what had happened to him… and they’d expect the worse, the way people do, that her and her mother had killed him and left him in the desert because the story they were telling was surely a bunch of bullshit.

  She blinked, the sweat cooling on her skin.

  It was getting dark way too fast.

  But her train of thought made her nervous. They wouldn’t be able to prove that they hadn’t killed Angel. They wouldn’t be able to prove anything in any way. Still, it was better than this. It was better than seeing the boy and the spiders again, up close, right in her face.

  She blinked again.

  The funnels spun out past the house they’d went into and found the corpse.

  Her mom said, “Are you ready?”

  Natalie bit her lip and nodded. “As I’ll ever be.”

  “Let’s just hope Angel will come with us.”

  “He’s not going to or he would have been with us all along,” Natalie said. She hugged her mother around the shoulders. “You have horrible taste in men.”

  Brooke laughed and wiped a tear away. “I know it.”

  “But maybe he’ll prove us wrong.”

  Natalie took her mother’s hand again, feeling the strength and hope, and Natalie felt it too. Maybe, just maybe, Angel would prove them wrong.

  *****

  I held his head in my lap. He was still naked, and he felt more free than he’d felt since he was too young to understand that the world consisted of pain upon trouble upon pain. To the silly boy-man, my dress smelled like sunlight warming barren places. Dusty yet pine scented.

  I whispered, “They’re coming. At last.”

  “Brooke?”

  “Yes.”

  “We can run this, take the ride.”

  “Yes. And just in time.”

  “Why?” Angel said.

  “My lover wakes at dusk. And all the children that were mine and are now his, they’ll wake with him. It’s a little terrifying, to see them blot the sky, all black clothing, all white faces filled with sharp teeth, hands like claws, bodies lost in spasm until they feed. And there are none left for them to drink from but you.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Angel said.

  “It doesn’t matter. It only matters that you’re still here. And that you use that rope to make sure Brooke stays.”

  “This place is going to make us all rich,” Angel said. “This carousel.”

  “You would think,” I said. “And you wouldn’t be the first.”

  “I know. It all came to me in a flash. There’s nothing else like it in the world.”

  “That’s true.” I stroked his back. My fingernails were sharp. They broke the skin a little, which didn’t hurt Angel very much, and truth be told, he couldn’t tell the blood from his sweat, they mixed together in a wonderful concoction.

  He heard something click in the distance.

  He looked up and saw Brooke and Natalie down the road near the last building, at the mid-point between himself and where they’d parked his Explorer.

  He grinned. “Here they come.”

  “Maybe you should get dressed before they get close enough to see.”

  “Why?”

  “You want her to trust you, don’t you? Will she come up here if you’re naked? She’ll surely think you’ve lost your mind.”

  “I found it,” he said, confidently. “Finally, after all these years.”

  “Dress,” I said softly. My voice was so sweet. He pulled his pants and shirt on but left his underwear and socks lying in a small pile near their feet. The rope was coiled and he held it gently at his side. He wondered if this is what Indiana Jones felt like sometimes. This incredible power churning through him, the joy of a discovery so amazing that it would change the entire world. He stepped forward, looked down at me, and to him I appeared so patient. But the lines around my mouth were very deep and my back was ramrod straight, because I knew that they were down to their final breaths.

  He said, “What if someone tries to take it from us? How will we protect it?”

  “I have ways,” I said.

  He believed me, it shone from his eyes, this incredible confidence and alarming faith. Angel knew the carousel had been here for god knew how long, maybe since the beginning of time, unscathed, undiscovered, until he drove down here and walked right up to it like he owned it.

  And he did own it, he knew, it was his.

  Brooke and Natalie shuffled forward. They looked dead tired, sunburned,
their clothing dirty and torn in places, their hair mussed and frizzy. The sun kept on its track, a beautiful pendulum of blood red light.

  He waited, not as patiently as myself, but with more restraint than he’d felt a moment ago.

  This is fate, he thought. Nothing will mess that up. Nothing can…

  *****

  Brooke released Natalie’s hand as their shadows speared the road leading between the buildings of Main Street. Angel was on the carousel, standing there near one of the centaurs, casually, but I was not in sight.

  Smart woman that she was, she thought, She’s somewhere close by.

  She glanced to the motel, then back to the carousel.

  Natalie stepped tentatively next to her, as if she expected the hard earth to crumble beneath her shoes and reveal itself as nothing more than a hollow crust over a barren and black emptiness. Her tan, from the time spent at her grandmother’s, looked faded. Her eyes, when she glanced at her mother occasionally, appeared faded as well.

  Brooke said, “I’m sorry.”

  Natalie shrugged, the two of them fifty feet or so from the carousel. Her daughter said, “None of this was your fault.”

  Brooke wanted to cry but there wasn’t time for it right now and she needed to be strong.

  Ahead of them, Angel slid his hands behind his back like an officer at parade rest. His eyes, even from the distance separating them, appeared like beacons blazing from the hollow and white face.

  Brooke said, “I think she is messing with his brain somehow.”

  “Probably.”

  “I don’t want to leave him. If it’s her, then it’s not his fault.”

  “If we stay, she might start affecting us,” Natalie said. “What then?”

  “I’ll talk sense into him,” Brooke said, meaning to sound reassuring, but her words were an empty promise, and she knew it.

  Thirty feet away, the sun directly behind them, hot on the nape of her neck, her clothing sweat-drenched and flesh itching as if a thousand invisible desert mites covered her, she knew nothing was going to convince Angel that they were in danger. He stood so perfectly still, so innocent-looking, naïve, and happy. He smiled, called her name, and the normal vagueness of his tone, which she sometimes took as a sign of weakness, and other times admired, had been replaced by confidence.