Nightweb

© 2002 Jan Matthews
All rights reserved.

Standing hip-deep in the overgrown lawn of late summer, Lucy stared at the glassed-in porch. Windows so murky the sunlight remained outside, daunted like her, she thought. She got a better grip on the broom handle.

The sign on the door said OFFICE. The place was as welcoming as a waiting room in Hell and the door, warped by age and damp, opened with a bone-jarring squeal.

Bloat-bellied spiders clung to their webs, blocking the windows like knotted and matted hair. Despite the crawling sensation under her clothes, she kept at the webs, sweeping and destroying. Once on the floor, the spiders rolled into defensive balls—dull brown, moon pale, luster black, and green. Squashing them, revolted by the crunching under her thin-soled shoes, she watched them run for the cracks and crevices along the floor. Lucy tried not to think about ancient Aunt Rose. Rose's desperate condition—home and business deteriorating over the last few months as Rose herself slid closer to the grave. Lucy had received the phone call in Oceania, Florida, only a week past, getting off the bus here in Racine, New Hampshire, three days ago.

Now her tin can of a trailer and its disreputable AC were far away.

The bus had dropped Lucy off just down the road from the White Pines Motor Court, where Rose had spent most of her life. Old Route 3, straddled by motels and restaurants, stretched north and south. Surrounding this area was the National Forest and a broad bowl of low-browed mountains encircling the whole valley.

While Lucy had simmered and steamed through another Florida summer, broken only by fast rides on her motorcycle along coast roads, Aunt Rose had collapsed in her driveway in her dirty, tattered bathrobe. Once-blonde hair gone creamy white became dark with dirt and the debris of last year's leaves, fallen from the trees. They had smothered the yard, nearly covering her. A hiker found her, but when he'd tried to feel for her pulse, she had risen up and bitten him hard enough to require stitches.

Aunt Rose had made some statements to the EMS folks, giving her new caretakers a window into her mind. Seeing the state of decay in her brain (and why not, Lucy thought as she scrubbed a clear spot on a filth-laden window, living with this spider forest, dense and dark?) as well as her home, they had whisked her away to a place where it could be assumed she would be well taken care of. Tubes brought nutrients and fluids to her and flushed her toxins out, but still she failed.

Lucy scrubbed angrily at a cache of spider eggs beneath a slight overhang in the wall. How long had she been like this? Why hadn't anybody noticed—even though Rose was semi-retired, a crew of girls came in during the summer to work the small cottages across the driveway—surely she'd bought groceries, received mail, paid bills? In memory, a vital Rose stood before her in rolled-up jeans and an inside-out sweatshirt, a cigarette dangling from her lips while she did accounts or scrubbed toilets.

The porch began to look less like it belonged to a haunted house. Lucy pulled scallop-backed chairs outside and hosed them down. She beat seat cushions and twin braided rugs of brown and gold. The musty odors mingled with pine cleaner, reminding her sharply of her only childhood visit here. Then the lawn had been cut and trim, the rose bushes tame, the paint fresh and clean.

They had fought, her mother and her aunt. At first a low buzz of disagreement, escalating even as Rose tried vainly to quiet her sister Rita. But Rita had been drinking all that afternoon (hah! when was she not, Lucy thought bitterly, giving the last rug a final whack), in the vortex of a binge, Lucy suspected, and had taken them both to the safety of the White Pines until the binge had spluttered out.

Belly growling, Lucy straightened from the work one last time with a crack of bone and a groan. She ate two jelly sandwiches and drank a pot of coffee in front of the television. A little later, she picked up a pencil to sketch with half a heart, then quit. During the slow winter season, Lucy thought as she leafed through her drawings, maybe she would put some pieces together to sell.

Too tired to pull back the bed covers, she lay fully dressed on the nubby chenille. Three days of straight-out cleaning, in order to inhabit the place, had left her body boneless. Without another thought, Lucy dropped into sleep.

Her dreams were as busy as her days. The spiders climbed the bedspread, singing and keening for her ears only ... dancing on her chest while her body lay inert, poking into her ears, tasting the blood from her stinging lips.

Spinning and weaving. A moon-pale cocoon enclosing her while the spiders bit and sipped as they worked. They left drops of fluid beneath her skin, burning like falling stars.

Friends and enemies. The keening and wailing went on in the webs for the murdered brothers and sisters, children and lovers. Combat to the death took place on her sleeping body, opposition nipping at the threads, sabotaging the work—quickly put down as passion overcame strategy. The work went on.

Aunt Rose stood close, in shadows from which she wove her own form. Close to the next world, Lucy understood, or she could not have made this journey to oversee the night's work. Lucy tried to call out, to tell the shadow-Rose her mother was wrong in that long-ago argument she could barely recall, and her mouth filled with the desiccated bodies of flies.

In the morning, feeling vague and befouled, Lucy stumbled into her jeans and a black T-shirt. Plucking tacky afterthoughts of yesterday from her overcast mind, she stretched and worked tight muscles.

While she made coffee and toast, the sun streamed through the clean windows in the kitchen, tumbling onto the white counters and spilling to the well-scrubbed floor. The night's dream returned unexpectedly and the toast became dry and brittle in her mouth. Abandoning breakfast, she pulled out her sketchbook to recreate the world pushing into the light of day.

The setting sun raised her head, both hands cramped. Stretching them brought both relief and renewed pain. Lucy could not believe what the kitchen clock told her, though the sour, empty complaining of her belly was as much a measurement of passed time as any.

Mindlessly, she stuffed what came to hand from the refrigerator into her mouth—cold chicken stripped from the bone, boiled potatoes, wilted broccoli branches, and baby dill pickles, until the dizzying hunger abated.

Going back to the drawings, she rubbed her stiff hands. The King and Queen of the Spider Kingdom dominated, first in black and white, then kaleidoscoping into a polychromatic calliope. The technique was beyond her.

"Frankly," Lucy said aloud.

She had the strangest feeling that she'd used both hands. Excited yet disturbed, Lucy murmured praises to the inner muse breaking out. But a commotion on the porch made her heart leap in sudden bright fear. In the faded light, she looked across and through the sitting room, to the hall leading to the porch in front of the house. She hoped it was a trick of her still-spinning imagination, but she felt someone out there, something moving the air between them. Maybe someone attracted by the vagrant air of the place.

Moving slowly, step after step in sweat-damp moccasins, sweat beading under her nose and salting her lips, she entered the porch.

Webs filled the windows Lucy had cleaned just yesterday, making them blind again, all her hard work undone.

Her body sagged against the door frame and she leaned her head against the wood. Bright color caught her eye, there, on a small wooden table. A bunch of August wildflowers, still damp from the ground, a few wild roses scattered with them. When she raised her eyes again to the webs, each one mirrored the images she'd captured that day—in spider silk, now, and tiny moon-like pearls beading the outlines of shape and form. Gone beyond their natural beauty to something just—out—of—reach.

Flooded with fear, Lucy grabbed a broom and attacked the uncanny webs, knocking them down yet again; her breath rasped hot, dry and brittle, flailing wings in her throat. Fueled further by her escalating panic, she dropped the broom and ran to the single bedroom, throwing her few belongings into a pack. She was out the door, into the overgrown yard before she could stop and ask herself what she was afraid of.

Once outdoors and on the other side of panic, the relentless fear loosened its grip. Recalling she had bounced more stubborn and scary fellows out of the bar-room of her last job than these few spiders and webs, she almost laughed.

Dream creepers, she thought. Child alone in the dark, the wood. Saying good-bye to mother again, echoing Aunt Rose's imminent passing. And they fought. They fought about me. Who would keep me, who was the better mother.

And neither of them wanted me.

Later Lucy filled a tumbler with whiskey. The creative state had sunk beneath a wave of self-pity and self-loathing that she could usually shake off. Before stumbling to bed, she looked again at the webs and sighed. They didn't really do anything more than spiders usually do, Lucy thought, and that's all.

In the dream Lucy wore a moon-pale gown of spider silk, clinging with tiny claws and teeth to her skin. The train of the dress was an intricate net she wore over her head like a veil. She heard a steady thrumming, a voiceless guitar, yet it had an undeniable power. She felt her own resistance leave her, become assent, along the lines of spider silk, to meet the supplicant. She saw him in the wood, carrying the moon in a lantern, and went out to greet him.

The phone's intrusive ringing jolted Lucy from sleep. Her clouded eyes told her it was the middle of the night, but time and the sun streaming in cleared them.

Rose had gone, passing in her sleep. There were papers, the anonymous voice informed her, naming her sole heir. Lucy returned to her bed, tired beyond anything she had ever endured.

The late afternoon sun dragged her out of bed. A hot shower reduced most of the muscle ache, but a dullness remained in her limbs, an unshakable heaviness. In fresh jeans and T-shirt, barefoot, she headed for the kitchen to eat. And though the need was there, the sight of food revolted her. Revolted her so much that she threw up in the kitchen sink. Bright red blood splattered the bleached porcelain.

Her body shook with fear and with a need she could not name; the setting sun brought some relief. Thoughts slow and sluggish, Lucy could only conclude she had some weird strain of the flu, an ulcer, maybe, as she sat wrapped in an old quilt in the summer heat. She shook, feeling pale and leeched out, the couch hard against her bones. On the coffee table in front of her was a list of things to do, the exterminator's name at the top. But she found she could no longer move forward in space and time.

Sharp knocking at the door forced her up. Lucy glanced out the window and saw a police car sitting in the driveway, saw the growing night surrounding it.

"Come on in," Lucy told the woman in uniform before she knocked, shuffling out of the way as the door swung open.

"Ma'am. I'm Officer Dawn Bravo. I don't want to disturb you, but we've got a missing person. A hiker. They get lost on the trails in the National Forest summer and fall. Is Rose around? You must be Lucy. ...Are you all right, ma'am?"

"The flu, I think. Some summer bug. I feel like shit. I am Lucy. And—Rose passed away."

"How long?"

"This morning."

"I'm sorry." Officer Bravo meant it. "I remember her. A neat lady, but she kept to herself."

"Your hiker," Lucy reminded her, thinking of red on white.

"Mind if I look around outside? His friends reported him missing. They said he was confused and wandered off. The same guy who called in the 911 on Rose." Her radio squawked at her and she lifted it from her hip, answering it tersely.

"Look all you want, but I'm not up to it." All she wanted to do was curl up into the cool darkness. "I don't know much about the cottages; I haven't been out there yet to clean them up."

"Not a problem. You need your rest. Drink plenty of fluids, right?" Dawn Bravo grinned, white teeth in a healthy, tanned face, a long brown mane of hair in a French braid against her neck. "Maybe you got a little heat stroke."

"Maybe," Lucy muttered, barely out loud, fighting the lightness of her head as the couch gripped her body again. She heard Bravo go out, hardware jangling.

Lucy could not have said how much time passed before Dawn Bravo returned, but she saw the flashlight cut through the darkness, dancing up the driveway and to the porch again. The officer knocked and stepped in, holstering the flash.

"I did find this," Bravo held up a single hiking boot, fresh green grass caught in the laces and seams. "Yours?"

In an absurd Cinderella twist, Lucy felt if she said yes, Dawn would make her try it on.

"No." Lucy struggled to sit up.

"One of the cottages is padlocked. Have you got the key?" Her tone remained friendly, though the edge of command crept in.

"Key?" Lucy could not recall. She had the keys to the house, but there was no padlock key on the chain. "Maybe a kitchen drawer." Lucy led the way and they searched together drawers in the kitchen, the little desk in the office area and the telephone table.

"He couldn't have got in," Lucy said, "if the door is padlocked."

"You're right, but I've got to check, right? They were a kind of rough crowd, might have been trespassing, and you're here alone."

"I used to be a bartender in south Florida," Lucy told her. "I've bounced some beasts in my time."

Dawn Bravo laughed at that.

"Well, we're done for the night, anyway. We'll be calling in Search and Rescue if he doesn't show. Don't be shy about dialing 911 if you've got to. 'Night, now."

Lucy stood on the porch until she was gone. She put her hands in her pockets and felt something hard and sharp against her knuckles. She pulled it out.

A single padlock key.

Even by the dim porch light bulb, moth-wings beating against the light in their haste to both flee and immolate themselves, Lucy could see the bright teeth of the key against her pale palm. The panic in the hard sound of wings and moth bodies, an embattled tattooing, followed her into the yard. Her heart tried to point her feet in the direction of the driveway, the long slow curve out and south where palm trees waved and whispered and the moon swelled in the heat. But her soul, consumed and shared amongst her spider kin, gave her the last push across the drive, the yard and its darkening blanket.

Hungry. She was still so hungry.

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