Every House Is Haunted (36 page)

He fumbled the door open and collapsed into the driver’s seat. He closed the door and stabbed the key at the ignition slot. It took him three tries to find it. He just couldn’t seem to
focus
. The nausea continued to close around his head like a bad weather system. His stomach clenched, suddenly and violently, and before he realized it, he had vomited all over the steering wheel. The smell was so awful he vomited again. Then he passed out.

When he awoke the smell inside the car was so bad it was almost miasmic. He opened the door and hauled himself out, breathing in great snatches of fresh air. He looked at his watch to see how long he had spent in that putrid sauna, but it had stopped. He shambled back to the house, his head throbbing with every step.

He saw the antenna on the roof.

It looked taller.

He couldn’t make it back upstairs to Jude. It seemed to require too much effort to go anywhere. He managed to slink down the stairs to the den. It was cooler down there. He flopped down on the couch and stared at the web in the corner of the room.

It was the spider, he thought deliriously. It was feeding on them somehow, draining them. A couple of days ago he would have laughed at such an idea. It was a regular Eddie Giles special. A spider that fed on life force instead of bodily fluids. But it didn’t seem so crazy now. When one’s mind was hanging by a thread (
a spider-thread!
he thought crazily), it was easy to accept all kinds of things that might ordinarily seem unbelievable.

It’s been working overtime, but the real web is this house.

Which made him and Jude flies.

Houseflies
.

In the horror movies he sometimes watched, the killer insects were always huge, radioactive abominations. But this spider had not gotten big; it had gotten smart. Like the one in that children’s book, the spider that wrote messages in its web.
Charlotte’s Web
. Charlotte.

Is that who you are? Charlotte? A spider for the new millennium?

He wondered how long he had before he became as comatose as Jude. A week? A day? Maybe only a few hours? He knew he should have felt concern for his wife, but it just seemed like too much work. It was horrible to feel that way, but it wasn’t personal. He didn’t care about anything. He had never felt so apathetic in his entire life.

He thought back to
Charlotte’s Web
, specifically the ending, when Charlotte’s children emerged from the egg sac and flew away like dandelion seeds on the wind. He didn’t think this particular spider had flown in on a thread, but he had an idea . . . something about fire . . . and sparks.

He managed to muster his strength and go upstairs. He went out onto the porch and craned his head around so he could see the roof. Yes, the antenna had indeed gotten taller. He thought about getting the ladder and taking a closer look, but he’d probably fall off and fracture his skull. Besides, he didn’t really need to go up there. He knew in some unexplainable way that the spider and the antenna were somehow connected. He had to figure out what to do about it. While he was still able to do anything.

He went back into the house, found a flashlight, and went downstairs. The web in the corner of the ceiling was finished, but the spider, Charlotte, was nowhere to be found. He looked behind the television and saw something among the rat’s-nest of patch-cords and coaxial cables.

The spider had spun a number of threads from the wall to the back of the television and the other pieces of electronics equipment. They looked like very thin silver wires.

Morris reached out and touched one and his finger immediately went numb. He tried to bend it, but it wouldn’t move. He bent the rest of his fingers, and they worked fine. He put the paralyzed finger between his teeth and bit down on it gently. He didn’t feel a thing. He bit down harder and still felt nothing.

He picked up a magazine, rolled it into a tube, and brushed it through the strands of webbing. They were strong and tensile, almost like chicken wire, but they broke.

The lights went out.

Morris picked up the flashlight and made his way to the fuse box. Another fuse had blown. He replaced it—this one wasn’t just smoking; it had melted into the socket—and was closing the panel door when he noticed something.

In addition to the black insulated cables and other assorted wires, Morris counted six silver threads running into the fuse box. After the experience behind the television, he wasn’t as quick to touch them.

He tapped one with the end of the flashlight, and the bulb went out with a small pop. Morris shook it and heard the tinkle of broken glass. He dropped the flashlight on the floor and looked back into the fuse box.

The spider threads gave off a faint silver glow that pulsed slowly like respiration.

Morris went back upstairs to the kitchen, and then out to the main foyer and up the stairs to the second floor. By the time he reached the landing he was huffing and puffing like a man of seventy. He leaned against the railing for support and saw a row of bruises along his arm. His body was starting to look like an apple that had fallen off the tallest branch. He stumbled down the hall to the master bedroom and stood wheezing in the doorway, staring at Jude lying on the bed.

She was dead, of that he was sure. Her body was wrapped not in blankets but in a thin, translucent sheet of spider-web. It covered her from head to toe like a death shroud. He could almost make out her face, ghostly and insubstantial through the gauzy material.

Tears seeped out Morris’s eyes. It hurt to cry—in his heart and in his head. He felt a sudden, powerful resolve burning through the grey haze that had been fogging his mind. He was angry, and a part of him was glad to be able to feel something so strong and distinct again. And he knew exactly where to direct it.

He went back downstairs and went into the garage through the connecting door in the kitchen. The sledgehammer was leaning against the wall in the corner. He picked it up with an effort and carried it into the living room.

The wall opposite the wide picture window was as good a place to start as any. He took down the wall’s only decoration, a Rembrandt print Jude had bought at a garage sale, and leaned it against the couch. He had to work quickly. He could feel his strength ebbing away like the tide.

Spreading his legs, he lifted the hammer over his shoulder and swung it in a wide arc. It sank into the wall with a dull
thunk
. Drywall crumbled in a puff of plaster dust. Morris pulled it out and swung again and again, until the floor was littered with chunks of drywall and a thick cloud of dust hung in the air.

He rested the sledge on his shoulder as a coughing fit came over him. He covered his mouth and when he brought his hand away it was sprinkled with blood. He was running out of time.

He had made an enormous hole in the wall, revealing pipes, wires . . . and half a dozen silver threads.

I don’t know whether to call an exterminator or an electrician
. He started to laugh, but it quickly dissolved into another fit of coughing. The sledgehammer slipped out of his hands and landed on the floor, narrowly missing one of his feet. The coughing stopped and he was laughing again. A stomach cramp doubled him over. He dropped to his knees thinking,
It’s over, that’s it, it’s too late.
He squeezed his eyes shut, and when he opened them again, he saw her.

Charlotte.

She came out of the hole in the wall and went scrambling up toward the ceiling. Morris managed to get his legs under him once more.

One more swing, that’s all I ask, just one more swing
.

He picked up the sledgehammer, drew it back, and swung. He felt something pop in his chest, and a burning sensation raced up his left arm.

The sledge struck the wall and went through it. Morris let go of the handle and fell to the floor. The sledge hung there, embedded in the wall, like a piece of modern art.

Did I miss?
he wondered. He didn’t know. He had closed his eyes at the last second.

Then the sledge fell to the ground, and Morris saw the small stain on the head.

He did it. He killed her. Charlotte was dead.

The heat in his arm had moved into his chest. It felt like his heart was being clenched by a hand made of fire. He crawled over to the picture window that looked out on Alder Lane. He was wondering what the neighbours would think of all this when he heard a sound behind him. The tinkling of tiny bells. He turned back to the wall.

Spiders—thousands of spiders—were coming out of the hole. Silver spiders. Charlotte’s children. They looked like a river of ball-bearings pouring out of the wall, some of them crawling up to the ceiling, the rest moving across the floor. The ringing sound of their tiny, marching legs filled the dusty air.

Morris thought they would come for him, swarm him, devour him. But they didn’t even go near him. They moved across the floor to the stairs, then went up the steps. A glimmering silver waterfall flowing up instead of down.

He knew where they were going. And why. They were Charlotte’s children, after all, and they had to fly. Places to go, people to see. Morris turned back to the window.

They were going up to the roof, to the antenna, where they would take flight—not on kites of thread but on a radio wave, or a satellite signal.

Spiders for the new millennium, transmitted through the air on their own special frequency.

Morris stared out the window and waited for the sparks to fly.

Eddie knocked on the door again. He stood on his tiptoes, trying to peer in through the fanlight, and dropped the stack of plastic-wrapped newspapers cradled in his arm.

“Oopsie,” he muttered to the empty yard, and crouched down to pick them up.

He gave the front door a final concerned look and started back to his own yard. On the way he stumbled over the trashcan Morris had left in the driveway and dropped the newspapers again.

Across the street a kid on rollerblades yelled, “Hey, stupid! First day walking?”

Eddie shot the kid a dirty look and continued on his way. He wasn’t stupid. A lot of people thought he was, but he wasn’t. He was a little slow sometimes, sure, but that didn’t make him stupid. Sometimes he just didn’t notice things. Like that time with Morris’s barbecue and the hedges. Or just now with the trash can.

Or the silver antenna on the roof of his house.

Ryerson pulled over to the curb and watched as Jonathan Marchand stepped out of the taxi in front of an establishment he assumed was a bar of some kind. It was hard to tell for certain. The windowless façade was dark, crumbling brick, and the only adornment was a plank-board hanging on a pair of hooks above the oaken door. The two words burned into the grain seemed to glare out of the dark like mad eyes. Al Azif.

Ryerson checked his watch. It was a quarter of one in the morning. He jotted the time on his notepad and tossed it on the passenger seat. He had been following the Blue Fairy’s husband for over fifteen hours.

The day started at nine o’clock when Jonathan left the Park Avenue brownstone he shared with his wife and went for breakfast at Sorrento’s. Afterwards, he went for a manicure and massage, strolled through Central Park, and met a female acquaintance for lunch at the Crystal Cave Restaurant. Ryerson doubted if this was the fabled mistress, seeing as how their only physical contact over the course of the meal was a kiss-kiss on the cheek before they sat down to eat. After lunch, Jonathan went suit shopping at Landry’s on 42
nd
Street. Then he played racquetball for two hours at the New York Fitness Club, took in a three-hour dinner at The Hartencourt Bistro, and met a pair of suited gentlemen who looked like members of the Hair Club for Men for drinks at the Biltmore. Jonathan stumbled out at 11:40
PM
, hailed a taxi, and came here, to Al Azif.