And then the boy appeared at the foot of her bed. He looked her straight in the eye, both hands tucked behind his back.
She returned his look just as steadily, her right hand creeping beneath the sheet.
“Scott,” she said evenly. “Thought we talked about this.”
The boy said nothing.
“Rules are rules, son. A proper guest knocks on the door. A proper guest waits to be invited. A proper guest does not sneak into an old lady’s home in the middle of the night, scaring her nearly half to death!”
The boy still didn’t say a word.
Rita sat up. She knew she must look a sight. Thin gray hair sticking out like twigs, wool cap askew on the top of her head. She wore her customary green plaid flannel and yellow-stained long johns. She dressed for warmth and comfort, not to entertain impertinent young men.
The boy still didn’t move or speak. So she kept her gaze upon him. She let him know she wasn’t as frail as she looked.
“Show me your hands, Scott.”
Nothing.
“Boy, I’m only going to ask you one more time. Show me your hands!”
For the first time, he trembled. Once, twice, three times. Then abruptly, he jerked his hands out from behind his back. He showed her his palms, and declared in a voice nearly shrill with panic, “I just need a place to stay. One night. I won’t be a problem. I swear!”
Rita took advantage of his uncertainty, throwing back the covers and swinging her legs out of bed. Her bones ached when she stood, but she felt better. Stronger. In control.
“Where do you live, Scott?”
He thinned his lips mutinously.
“Do you have parents I should call? Someone who worries about you?”
“I could sleep right here,” he whispered. “On the floor. I don’t need much. Honest.”
“Nonsense, child. No guest of mine is sleeping on the floor. You fixin’ to spend the night, we might as well do it right. Come on, I’ll take you to Joseph’s room.”
She set off in her shuffling gait, passing by the foot of the bed, brushing the boy’s shoulder. He fell back, assuming the submissive. Encouraged, she led him down the hall, to her brother’s room, where dusty football trophies still lined one dresser, and the quilt had been hand-sewn by her grandmother from pieces of their baby blankets. As the oldest son, Joseph had been given the quilt to pass along to his children one day. Instead, he had perished in the same war that had cost Rita her husband. Stepped on a land mine in France. There hadn’t been enough body parts left for a proper funeral. Her parents had buried his dog tags, her father retreating to Joseph’s room, where he had stayed for months on end.
Her sister Beatrice should’ve taken the quilt, but it had remained in Joseph’s room, where from time to time, each of them would visit, trying to say goodbye to Joseph in his or her own way.
Rita drew back the old quilt now. She smoothed back the flannel sheets, cold and musty from disuse. She drew the young boy forward and helped him onto the bed.
He was passive now, nearly limp to the touch, his slight frame collapsing into the bed. She brushed a lock of dark hair from his forehead, and he flinched.
“Rita,” he whispered. “I’m tired.”
And the way he said the word, she understood. He wasn’t tired, he was tired, a condition of the mind as well as the body. A state of the soul.
She pulled the covers up, tucking them beneath his chin.
“Stay as long as you need, child,” she said and meant it.
Then she shuffled back into her bedroom, where she felt along the far wall until she found the kitchen knife the boy had let drop to the floor. She picked it up, and placed it in the nightstand beside her.
Then she reached beneath the covers, finding her father’s old Colt .45. She’d cleaned it yesterday; armed it last night. A beautiful piece of machinery, old, but still capable of getting the job done.
Now she clutched it in her hand as she made her way painfully down the stairs, left hand gripping the railing tight.
In the kitchen, the unlocked back door banged lightly in the wind. She opened it wide, peering into her backyard, cursing once more the lack of moon. She saw shadows above and below. Not a wink of light from a neighbor’s house, nor the glowing eyes of a tomcat.
So she shut her eyes and focused on the feel of the night instead. She and her brothers used to do this when they were young. Camp out in the backyard, pretending they were in the wilds of the Amazon. Don’t look with your eyes, their father would tell them in his hushed baritone. Look with your mind, seek with your hearts.
It always made her wonder if Joseph should’ve shut his eyes that night he’d gone on patrol. Maybe, if he hadn’t been looking, maybe, if he’d been feelin’, that land mine never would’ve gotten him.
And then she did sense it. Strong. Cold. Powerful enough to make her recoil.
Something was out there in the night. Hungry. Hunting. Hating.
Rita scrambled back inside her kitchen. Got the door shut, found the bolt lock. But for the first time in ages, she was aware of just how rickety her old house had become. Back door with a big glass window perfect for shattering and a brittle wood frame easy enough to pry apart with a crowbar.
I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down….
She was trembling now, tasting the fear like bile in the back of her throat. The gun felt too heavy in her hand, her arm too weak. She could barely walk half the time, how was she supposed to lift this sucker, let alone take aim….
Then, in the next instant, her own cowardliness shamed her. She was not a fool. She was a survivor, last of her family line. This was her home. By God, she would take a stand.
She went from room to room. Checking all nooks and crannies, inspecting all locks. Perhaps in the morning, when she was fresher, she could rearrange some of the furniture. And she had some wood outside. She could hack it into sticks, use them to reinforce the windows.
And bells. From the Christmas decorations. Hang ’em here and there as her very own security system.
Yes, sirree, she had some tricks up her sleeve yet.
That made her feel better, so she shuffled to the stairs, starting the laborious process of pulling herself back up.
When she finally made it to her bed, she collapsed on top of the covers and slept like the dead. First few hours of sleep she’d had in weeks.
When she woke up, her bedroom door was open, and her own gun was placed neatly on the pillow beside her.
The boy was gone.
She wondered if she would see him again.
TWENTY-ONE
“Recluse spiders are six-eyed; their legs do not extend sideways. They weave a sheet of sticky silk in which they entangle insects.”
FROM Spiders and Their Kin,
BY HERBERT W. AND LORNA R. LEVI, A GOLDEN GUIDE FROM ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, 2002
HENRIETTA WASN’T DOING WELL. LAST NIGHT, HE had squashed a cricket between his finger and thumb, exposing its internal organs, then placed it in the dark shelter of the ICU next to Henrietta’s fangs. He had checked first thing this morning. The mashed insect remained in plain sight. Henrietta herself had retreated an inch, laborious progress given her mangled legs.
He reminded himself that older tarantulas often went weeks without eating after molting. Once, he’d heard a story of a tarantula that had gone an entire year without food and still recovered.
Starvation was not the danger. Dehydration was.
He would help her. They had come this far together. He would see her to the bitter end.
He didn’t turn on the light. Instead, he moved around the darkened master bath with the practice of a man used to adjusting his eyesight to the gloom. He’d already brought up a saucer from the kitchen, sterilized in boiling water. Now he filled it with a few drops of water, then propped up an edge on two cotton balls, tilting the saucer enough to pool the water at one end while forming a slight incline. Perfect.
Now the tricky part.
Contrary to what people thought, spiders were notoriously fragile. Even the most impressive-looking tarantula was really a relatively small, poor-sighted creature of limited speed. They were easily crushed if improperly handled. Let alone the dangers inherent in molting, pesticides, parasites, and spider-eating wasps. No wonder tarantulas preferred to live in small, dark places all alone.
But Henrietta couldn’t hide anymore. She needed water.
Reaching into the container, he cupped his hand over her body as if she were an egg, careful not to squeeze too hard in order to protect his skin from the discomfort of the urticating bristles. His fingers enclosed the legs on one side of her body, while his thumb covered the legs on the other side and his index finger came down and over the top of the chelicerae. In one smooth motion, he turned his hand palm up, with Henrietta nestled lightly inside.
He swung her over to the prepared water dish, where he positioned her with her chelicerae and fangs immersed in the water and the rest of her body uphill. He let go, studying her closely to ensure she didn’t slide down into the shallow pool and drown.
After a few minutes, when she remained firmly in place, he rocked back on his heels with a satisfied nod and glanced at his watch. Forty-five minutes ought to do it. Then he’d move her back to the ICU with a freshly disemboweled cricket. Hopefully, that would do the trick.
Now he had other pets to tend.
The master bedroom was large. Two sides of huge bay windows, a charmingly vaulted ceiling. Once upon a time, this would have been the sunny crown jewel of the expansive summer home. Covered farmer’s porch that wrapped around two sides. A front parlor with stained glass. Three chimneys, six bedrooms, a sunroom.
Time had faded the heavily flowered wallpaper just as years of neglect had led to peeling paint, broken boards, sagging foundation. In the downstairs, certain windows wouldn’t close. Other doors wouldn’t open. The entire house tilted to the right, giving the place a drunken feel.
And yet, it was perfect. Filled with nooks and crannies, twisting staircases, old cupboards, exposed rafters. When the man had first seen the abandoned property, the ceiling of the entire master bedroom had been a tangle of cobwebs. In the course of his walk-through, not one but two spiders had dropped from the rafters onto the shoulder of the startled real estate agent. She had screamed both times. And he had known instantly he would take it.
He had divided his collection among the rooms upstairs. Tarantulas in the master bedroom, recluses in the adjoining nursery, combfooted spiders down the hall. They lived in terrariums or cobweb frames, cleaned once a month and refilled with adequate water. Room-darkening shades kept the sun at bay. Humidifiers kept the spaces at proper levels of moisture. In some of the rooms, he had brought in soil to cover the floors. Good old-fashioned dirt, filled with leaves and detritus and night crawlers. The earthen layer helped insulate the drafty floors and provide a whiff of death and decay. Ambience for arachnids.
The man himself hated dirt. The smell of it. The feel of it sliding between his fingers, sifting between his toes. He might say he was afraid of it, except he did not allow himself to feel fear. Instead, he surrounded himself with the very substance whose smell sometimes roiled his stomach and sent him to the bad place in his mind.
He respected these spiders. He studied them, nurtured them, used them to find the spider in himself.
In return, his collection provided him with sanctuary. A place where he came to brood when the bad spells hit and everyone knew better than to make eye contact. He would lie on the dirt-covered floor, remembering all the things he wanted to forget until his rage bubbled to the surface. Then he would strip off his clothes and open the tops of the fish-tank terrariums, watching colonies of brown recluses pour out. He would dare them to do their worst. He would beg them to do their worst.
But spiders remained shy creatures at heart. The brown recluses might walk across his feet, climb up his hairy legs, explore the veins on his arm. But mostly, they disappeared into the cracks and crevices of the old house, until he was forced to put out glue sheets to capture them.
The glue sheets killed them, of course. Because that’s what he did best—destroy, even the things he loved.
He started with the tarantulas now, moving methodically from rectangular glass enclosure to rectangular glass enclosure, lined up neatly on the metal shelves along the walls. Each terrarium was labeled with the species of spider and an index card where he recorded the day’s feeding. A new captive might eat a dozen crickets a week, while the average was six to eight crickets a month. Before and after molting, some tarantulas wouldn’t eat anything at all.
There was also the matter of variety. Some tarantulas ate only crickets and mealworms. The larger species, however, preferred baby mice and rats, dead but at room temperature (he bought them frozen and ran them under warm tap water; he had learned the hard way never to nuke a dead mouse; it had taken him forever to get the smell out of the kitchen). When he had first started out, he had caught insects in the garden—grasshoppers, cicadas, cockroaches, moths, caterpillars, earthworms. Wild insects, however, were an unsafe food choice—they could be contaminated with pesticides, inadvertently poisoning his pets. Now he bought most of his food from online pet stores, dividing his purchases among several different establishments so as not to call attention to himself.
His collection contained over one hundred and twenty specimens now, not counting the brown recluses whose delicate brown bodies probably numbered close to a thousand. He had spiders he’d caught in the garden, spiders he’d purchased abroad, spiders he’d bred himself, and, of course, a nursery filled with young spiderlings.
And like any proper enthusiast, he was still adding to the collection.
He was at the last terrarium. Even in the half-dark, he could feel the eyes watching him, feral, calculating, predatory.
It made him smile.
Theraphosa blondi. The world’s largest spider, with a leg span in excess of ten inches. He had imported this male just last week from South America. The tarantula had arrived, rearing back on its hind legs and hissing loud enough to be heard across the room. With extremely large fangs and a body covered in irritating bristles, it was a lean, mean fighting machine, known to take on anything from rodents to small birds.
The majority of tarantulas were gentle giants. The T. blondi, on the other hand, was famous for its bad attitude, with a bite capable of costing the unwary collector a finger, or even a hand.
He could feel the spider watching him late at night. Had watched it in turn as it roamed its new home, delicately tapping on the glass as if testing for possible weaknesses. He had the impression of a wild, churning intelligence. The spider was studying, waiting, plotting.
If the man presented the opportunity, the tarantula would strike.
The man bent over now, studying the dark mottled spider, crouched in the far corner of its cage.
“Hey,” the man said. “Want a mouse?”
He dangled the dead white mouse, waited to see what the spider would do. A few legs arched out, tested the air.
“Here’s the deal,” the man said. “Behave, get breakfast. Attack, and starve. Got it?”
He waited a heartbeat more. When the tarantula did not rush the glass, or rear up in a hostile display, the man straightened, put his hand on the top of the weighted mesh-screen lid and readied himself.
One, two, three. He popped up the corner, dropped the mouse, and watched as ten inches of tarantula sprang from the corner and caught the corpse midair. Both dead mouse and spider landed with a thud, the mottled dark body already wrapped fiercely around its new treasure. Then the tarantula’s head came up, fangs exposed…
The man dropped the top more hastily than he intended, falling back.
He caught himself at the last minute, steadying his pulse, eyeing the T. blondi with fresh respect.
He rapped a knuckle against the glass.
“Welcome to the collection,” he said, then, feeling that he’d had the last
word on the subject, sauntered downstairs.
Boy was in the living room, playing video games. Boy was always holding a remote, eyes glazed over, sullen look on his face. Teenagers.
The man watched him from the doorway, contemplating.
Time was winding down now. A week, maybe more. It surprised him to feel a rush of nostalgia, a teacher for a student, a father for a son.
He walked in the room, shut off the TV. Boy opened his mouth to protest, then thought better of it. The boy hunkered down, waiting.
“Can’t you say good morning?” the man demanded, standing next to the sofa.
“Good morning.”
“Hell, think a few manners wouldn’t hurt. Haven’t I taught you anything?”
Boy looked up now, eyes hot, sulky. “I said good morning!”
“Yeah, but we both know you didn’t mean it.” The man backed off, making some calculations of his own. “You heard from her?” he asked abruptly.
Boy looked away. “Not yet.”
“Think she’ll do it?”
Boy shrugged.
“That’s about right,” the man agreed. “Nothin’ good ever came from trusting a woman. So, you gettin’ excited, boy? Come on, we’re talking graduation! That doesn’t happen every day.”
Boy shrugged again. The man wasn’t fooled.
He grinned, but it wasn’t a pleasant look on his face. “Tell me the truth, son. You think she loves you, don’t you? You and Ginny, sitting in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g. Gonna get married? Raise the baby? Live in a house with a white picket fence?” Man waved his hand. “Pretend none of this ever happened?”
Boy said nothing.
“I’ll tell you, son, I’ll tell you exactly what’s gonna happen. You’re gonna graduate, I’m gonna offer you a big hunk-o-cash, and you’re gonna want to throw it in my face. But you’ll swallow your pride. You’ll take my money. You’ll tell yourself you’re gonna pay it back later. When you’re what? Gainfully employed as a male hooker, a pimp, a drug runner? ’Cause, you know, elementary-school dropouts don’t exactly go to college, or qualify as electricians, or auto mechanics.