Stephen Irwin - The Dead Path

Nicholas looked at her.

“Maybe that’s why she’s so mean,” she continued. “Because she’s sad. Everyone she loved is dead and left behind.”

Nicholas stopped. The trees around them now were more shadow than substance. Even Hannah’s face was a gray mask, as featureless as the sandy bottom of a deep pond.

“I think we have to turn back.”

Hannah blinked. “We can’t. If we don’t get her today…” Her voice trailed off with a shudder.

Nicholas nodded.

“Hannah?” A voice as thin as smoke wended from the dark belt of trees up ahead. Nicholas watched Hannah’s eyes widen and her face tighten like a fist. His own heart began to gallop.

“Haaaannahhh?” A girl’s voice. A pained voice.

Hannah’s eyes darted between the woods and Nicholas.

“It’s Miriam,” she whispered.

Nicholas saw goosebumps on his arm. He shook his head. “It’s not.”

“It is! She’s not dead! They were wrong!”

She started forward. Nicholas snatched her arm and wheeled her round. He grabbed her chin and made her focus her wild eyes on him.

“It’s not your sister, Hannah. Think about it.”

Hannah blinked. She nodded.

“Okay,” he said. “Stay here.”

He looked around to orient himself, then cocked the shotgun and stepped into the deeper gloom.

“Haaannnahhh? Help me, Hannaaaahhh!”

The voice was a keening tapestry of pain and sorrow. It made Nicholas’s skin crawl. What was it doing to Hannah?

He moved as quickly as he could, but the trees were wide and old and huddled tight as conspirators. The spaces between them were filled with even older stumps that rose from the rustling ground like the broken teeth of titans. It was growing so dark. Nicholas suddenly realized what a stupid thing he’d done. He’d left Hannah alone.

“Hannah?” The voice was no longer scared. A shadow shifted between the gloomy trees ahead of Nicholas.

“Miriam?” he asked, carefully swinging the gun barrel up toward the movement.

“Hannah!” replied the voice delightedly. And suddenly the shadow jolted forward.

It was a spider at least the size of Garnock, a widow with gloss black and hairless legs, each as long and thick as a broom handle. They moved a shelled body as big as a water-filled black balloon. Yet the spider jumped from tree to tree with amazing speed; one moment swaying like a ready boxer, the next leaping and landing with eerie silence, so fast that Nicholas barely had time to thumb the hammer back.

“Hhhaaaaaa!”

The voice changed from human to something utterly alien as the spider pounced. Nicholas pulled the trigger. The blast was loud but was squashed instantly by the disapproving trees. The spider jerked, but its momentum carried it right at him-he scrambled sideways and the spider hit the tree behind him with the wet crack of a giant egg smashing. It slid lifeless to the dark leaves, its long finger-bone legs quivering in death palsies.

Nicholas turned and ran.

“Hannah!”

He sprinted downhill, dodging between trunks and jumping over spiny branches, sliding and falling and rising and running. Ahead, he heard Hannah scream in terror.

“Hold on, Hannah!”

He thumbed back the shotgun’s other hammer and jumped over the last log into the clearing.

Hannah stood shaking, eyes locked on something hidden from Nicholas’s sight by a wide trunk.

“What is it?” he asked.

She pointed, and he stepped closer to see what she faced.

He felt his own legs turn light as dust.

If the last spider had been big, this one was huge. Its body was the size of a sheepdog, squat and dense, bristling with sandy brown hairs. It was reared up on six legs; its front two pawed the air, tasting it. A cluster of red eyes stared out from a nest of ugly gray hair. Its fangs shuffled noiselessly.

“Kill it, Nicholas.”

He raised the gun, and squeezed the trigger.

And as he did, he noticed the straps tucked in the folds where the spider’s tubelike legs met its thorax. Hannah’s knapsack! As the hammer fell, he jerked the gun aside. The blast shook a sudden hole in the bush beside the spider, which jerked in silent pain. As it moved, its horrible appearance melted away, becoming Hannah on her knees, her hands tied behind her back, and a tiny red circle of a single shotgun pellet hole in her calf. Her mouth was gagged with rags.

Nicholas whirled, nauseated that he’d been so stupid.

The other Hannah stood behind him, grinning. She stepped forward lightly and Nicholas felt a sting in his arm. He dropped the gun and blinked. The smiling Hannah held a syringe in her hand and, as she stepped back, her limbs lengthened and her hair grew. Rowena Quill, young and blond and beautiful, stood in front of him, smiling as only one truly pleased with herself can.

“Hello, my pretty man.”

T hrough the folds and curtains of sleep, Laine heard the dry squeal of a hinge. Her eyes drifted open. The bedroom door was silently swinging open. And into the room stepped one long, bristled leg, placing its hooked foot stealthily on the floor. Then another followed it, moving with completely inhuman fluidity. The legs belonged to a squat, solid spider as large as a fox.

Laine’s heart began hammering, gulping fistfuls of blood; she felt her exhaling breath flute down to a whisper as her throat tightened with terror.

At the sound of her gasp, the spider hunched and adjusted itself with unbelievable speed to face her. Two large, black, hemispherical eyes were orbited by six smaller ones, all sitting on a gray-haired bump of a head that would feel, Laine knew, as hard and alien as a bristled watermelon. Between the spider’s two front legs was a pair of fangs, sharply pointed and hard as polished ebony. The fangs curled in, wet themselves on the glands tucked under its crablike mouth, then extended again, glistening wet with poison.

She was on the cliff edge of total panic, wanting to shriek and keep screaming, but no sound came out of her dry mouth. Her jaw spasmed.

But her left hand was farthest from the spider, and she sent it shaking out from under the bedsheets, hunting for a weapon.

The spider, low to the ground, took an incredibly slow, very careful step forward. It raised itself slightly on its legs and Laine heard a faint hiss as it drew in air. The spider let out a whisper that set the hairs on the back of her neck hard.

“Aaiiide.”

Oh God, she thought madly. It’s trying to say my name.

Her sneaking fingers found the alarm clock. Useless-she could grab it but every chance was that the cord plugged into the wall would stop her swinging it. She kept hunting for the other object she knew was there.

The spider steadied itself on its feet, tensing its legs and reminding Laine deliriously of how a golfer wiggled his feet and hips, positioning himself for a clean swing. Again, she heard air drawn in and released in a controlled hiss: “Maaaie maaaiee.”

She understood the bastardized words: Bye bye.

Her fingers finally touched what she wanted: the smooth, round steel of a spray can. But as she grabbed, her sweaty fingers slipped and the can clattered across the floor and rolled impotently into the corner.

Laine’s eyes widened.

Garnock’s mandibles parted. A smile. Then it leapt.

But the spider only moved a fraction before it was slammed back down to the floor with a hard ring of steel on wood. Two tines of a pitchfork had speared through its bony shell and pinned it to the pine floorboards.

Katharine turned and spat.

The impaled creature let out a horrible hissing wail, and its horned feet scrabbled against the floor, gouging the polish. Its fangs pistoned up and down like thresher blades. It was pulling the fork out of the floor.