Warren Murphy: Feeding Frenzy

Remo crouched in the fireplace as the whining grew closer.

He began to recognize the sound for what it was and was not surprised when Pearl Clancy entered the room in a motorized wheelchair.

She was seated in the wheelchair like a corpse that had been left there to dry up and shrivel. One gnarled hand clutched the control stick, a silver pen in a universal socket.

Her eyes, like two wicked buttons, swept the room.

Seeing nothing, her hands fumbled for a button on the armrest and the overhead lights came on.

Remo kept still. He was still in shadow.

Then her gaze fell on him and her mouth made a grimace of surprise.

Remo came out of the fireplace too fast for a healthy person to react, never mind a stroke-debilitated old woman. Pearl Clancy's hand was on its way to the control stick when Remo intercepted it. He detached the stick and tossed it out of reach.

"Sorry," he said softly. "Can't have you causing problems." And Remo reached around for the battery cables. He pulled them. The electric motor cut off.

"Remind me to plug you back in on my way out," he whispered.

Pearl Clancy only bugged her eyes out at him. She seemed to be trying to stare him to death. Lifting her forefingers to her slack mouth, she began making animated wriggling motions.

"Crazy as a bedbug," said Remo, closing the door behind him.

He eased up a long corridor whose walls were decorated with oil portraits of previous generations of Clancys. Remo could tell he was starting at the older end because the further along he moved, the more bloated and dissolute the Clancy clan faces became.

At Senator Ned J. Clancy's portrait, he took a left without thinking. It was as if he were being drawn toward a specific goal.

There was something in the air. He recognized it. It was Nalini's scent. The fruity smell was coming from somewhere in the corridor ahead.

Remo found himself quickening his pace without realizing it. He paused at each door. The scent wasn't coming from any of them. He moved unerringly toward the end of the corridor door.

The scent was definitely coming from the other side of the door now. His heart started beating faster. He willed it to calm down. What was wrong with him? Was he afraid of what he had to do?

Remo took the knob and with infinite slowness, turned it. The lock tongue coming out of its groove made no sound. He eased the door in. The hinges were quiet. He expected that. It was an old house but well maintained.

The room was dark except for a slice of moonlight slanting in through a curtained window, and Remo slipped in, closing the door behind him.

Eyes and ears alert, he oriented himself. The fruity scent was all around him. And he zeroed in on it.

It was coming from a big four-poster bed in the center of the room.

Remo moved to it, walking on the outsides of his soles. He made no more sound than the curtains waving in the open window.

Nalini slept under a quilt coverlet, her dark hair a spray of ebony on the big white pillow. She breathed through her open mouth, and her lips were as red as when Remo had last seen her. Moonlight gleamed on the hard edges of her perfect white teeth.

And as Remo watched, he was overcome by the urge to lift the covers and see her perfect brown body one last time. Before he took her out.

Remo's hand drifted out. He snagged the hem of the quilt. Nalini slept with one hand tucked under the pillow and the other resting on the exposed sheet. She would not feel the quilt move.

Remo, surprised at his own curiosity, drew away the quilt.

He saw her perfect body lying there, rounded breasts rising and falling with her breathing, dark nipples like flat unseeing eyes. He noticed something he had not noticed before-a wealth of thick black hair under each armpit. They seemed to stir.

And the hairs on the back of his neck lifted.

Crouched in the shadowy hollows of Nalini's exquisite body, dark shapes crawled and squirmed. And all at once, myriad black eyes winked open.

There were fumblings coming from the main section of the house. The Master of Sinanju crept in that direction.

Surprisingly, there were no guards. Once, he encountered a clod-footed man making the floorboards creak under his feet as he passed through the darkened house, his breath reeking of alcohol.

The Master of Sinanju eluded him easily. It was less trouble to fell him with a blow to the back of his neck and leave him where he fell than to concern himself about where to hide the overweight carcass.

The fumbling sound came from a door that was closed. There was a keyhole and Chiun bent to put his eye to it.

He recognized the seated figure of Pearl Clancy, her arms flopping in her wheelchair, as if trying to goad it into life.

The Master of Sinanju saw the soot-smeared severed battery cables and the fireplace beyond, and deduced how his pupil had gained entry.

Chiun nodded to himself. It was a serviceable approach. There was little art in it, but the Master of Sinanju expected no art from his adopted son, who although practiced, was white and therefore congenitally graceless.

He left the woman to her helplessness. She was not important.

He walked along, seeking the familiar scent he knew would lead his unfailing senses to the last Spider Diva-and a reckoning that was long overdue. There was no hurry. Remo had had time to find the Hindu harlot by this time-and face a test of his ability to meet the difficult demands of a Master of Sinanju in training.

The jumping spiders began leaping at him from the moist hollow places in Nalini Toshi's brown body.

Remo used his hands to fend them off. There were too many of them for him to do otherwise. They leaped for his face, his hair, and his arms.

And encountered an invisible barrier that was Remo's flashing hands. They bounced back, not always whole.

The jumping spiders struck walls, bedclothes, and Nalini herself.

Her eyes snapped open. They fixed on Remo, and on the shattered, squirming rust-red body segments accumulating on the white sheet.

"My children!" she shrieked.

Immediately, she hugged her nakedness, trying to locate still-living spiders on her person. She seemed to find none.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

Remo batted away the last two attackers and said, "Forget me already?"

"Remo!"

Her voice was dull with shock.

"Surprised?"

She pulled the sheet over her breasts. "What-what do you do here?"

"I came for answers."

"To-to what?"

"To why you tried to kill me. To why you're killing people with spiders and blaming a virus that doesn't exist."

"I-I harm no one . . . ."

"Can it. I know everything. How you murdered Magarac, Parsons, and for all I know Lee Esterquest."

Nalini's eyes became wary slits. "If you know so much, you would not come seeking answers to questions."

"I know about the Spider Divas," Remo said.

Nalini just stared. "Who are you?"

"Not who. What. I am Sinanju."

And Nalini hissed like a cat in the darkness. Her eyes became hot. She flung off her sheet to reveal her splendid body anew. "If you are truly Sinanju, then I am helpless before you," she said submissively.

A cool, musty breeze was coming from under the door. The Master of Sinanju detected other smells mixed in with the mustiness. Sweat. Fear. He opened the door and descended unpainted steps.

A heartbeat in the cool darkness, muffled and sluggish. Great lungs labored for air. The Master of Sinanju sought those sounds.

There was a steamer trunk standing on end near the cold furnace. He went to it, knowing the sounds of life came from within.

The trunk was closed with padlocks but they surrendered to fingers that understood their strengths and weaknesses.

The Master of Sinanju pushed the halves of the trunk apart, and a great form rolled out and stopped at his feet.