Ellen Datlow - The Best Horror of the Year. Volume 4

But we developed a sort of affection for our lone wolf. Or fascination, at least. The way one might for a house ghost. Some nights, before sending me to bed, my mother would bring me to the front couch, draw back those bay-window curtains, flick on the porch light. And there she’d be, gray and translucent and hairy, scuttling back and forth seemingly in mid-air between the columns of bougainvillea, floating on her milky white egg-sac as though it were a balloon. Every morning, we took a broom, said we were sorry, and brought the web down so we could get out of the apartment. But we left the spider herself alone.

“Ry?” says my mother, startling me by brushing a fallen curl out of my eyes. She’s never touched me, much. Not since I was very young. “What are you thinking about?”

I catch myself leaning away and feel bad, but too late. My mother has already withdrawn her hand. I try to smile, get some nostalgia into my voice. I’m surprisingly close to feeling some. I gesture toward the front stoop. “Our furry-legged friend.”

She looks at my hands. Then the front of the apartment. Then she bursts into tears.

“Sorry,” she says fast. “Sorry, sorry, sorry.”

I reach to comfort her. But it never did any good when I was a kid, and it doesn’t now. The sobs grab her by the shoulders and shake her.

They stop sooner than usual, though. And when my mother lowers her hands from her face, there’s a steeliness in her jaw I don’t remember seeing. “I’m just being stupid, as usual,” she says. “It wasn’t really that. It wasn’t real. Obviously. It was just that time, those moans. I hadn’t slept in so long, and those things were crawling over the place, and I missed your fucking asshole father, and…” her voice drops into its murmur. But lo and behold, it climbs back out. She looks at me. “It wasn’t real,” she says. “I want you to know I know.”

I have no idea what to say to that. “We should get you home,” I say eventually.

“Evie came down a few times that week after Stan died. Mostly in the evening, just to sit. You and I used to steal lemons off the trees by that condo complex around the corner, and I made lemonade, and the three of us would come right out here. Right about this time. We’d watch the spiders dancing up the walls and the sun going down and that turtle nosing around in the grass. Mr. Busby was away, I think his daughter’d taken him to Bermuda or something, and it was so quiet around here.

“I kept trying to ask Evie how she was doing, but she wouldn’t talk about it. She talked about maybe going to see her sister in Maine, but not like she was really planning to do it. You showed her our wolf spider. She said there were lots more up under the eaves. She claimed she could hear them on the roof at night, and that she had a resident, too, who hung out by her bedroom window. An even bigger one. She didn’t like its eyes.

“One night, later than usual — I was in a robe, and I’m sure you’d already gone to bed — she knocked on the door in tears and asked me to come out. She was in a robe, too. This horrible cream thing with blue lilies all over it. She was grabbing her arms to her chest.

“‘They’re biting him,’ she kept saying. ‘They’re biting him. My poor Stan.’ Then she showed me her hand. It was all purple on the back, she had this huge spider bite. Really nasty.

“‘Evie, my God, you’ve got to treat that. Come in,’ I told her. But she wouldn’t. She said she had to get back. That they kept climbing on Stan and running around on him. She wasn’t making much sense. Mostly, she was sobbing.

“I do remember one thing. At some point, she just started saying the word ‘Gone.’ And when I’d gotten her some lemonade and held her for a while — and I swear, Ry, she was thinner than you, it was like holding a garden rake except that she was so soft —she stuck her fingers under her glasses and wiped her eyes and said it again. ‘Gone. What do people even mean when they say that? How can someone go ? Go where? To me, he’s as here as he ever was. He’s right in the next room.’

“Know the worst part, Ry? What I remember thinking was that that was true. The guy’d been gone for ages. Months and months before he died. In a way, she was right.

“And somehow, between comforting her while she cried and getting her lemonade and wrapping her poor, old, squishy hand, I missed that part about the spiders biting him. I didn’t think a single thing about what that meant until later that night, when Mr. Busby came home from his trip.”

The silence seems almost peaceful at first, an organic lull in the conversation. But it lasts too long. My mother’s staring up toward the windows of the upstairs apartment, and her mouth has formed an O. Her shadow stretches out long beside her on the grass, like a web she’s spun, or gotten stuck in.

“Mom. Seriously. I don’t need another moan-demonstration.”

She blinks as though I’ve dumped water over her head. As though she has no idea what I’m talking about. Yet again, I feel horrible. But this has gone on for so many years.

“I didn’t know he was back,” she says. “I mean, we were friendly, he even had me bring in his mail sometimes. But it wasn’t like with Evie. He kind of kept to himself.

“If I’d known he was back, I would have warned him. But I didn’t, and right on time at about 2:40 a.m., Evie went off. It was particularly horrible that night. God, Ry. Lying there in the dark, I think I started doing it along with her, under my breath, just to keep from going crazy. Only then — remember, I hadn’t slept through the night since Stan died, so for maybe eight days running — I started thinking maybe it was me making the sounds, and that really freaked me out. And then the music exploded.”

And there it is again. A surprising wisp of smile floating over her face. “His choice was inspired , in a way. I mean, he must have put some thought into it, after the moans woke him up. All of a sudden, these fat, thudding drums boom out his windows. And this bass. Buum, buum, buum-bumm, dugga-dugga. Rattled that picture of you on the Griffith Park merry-go-round right off my wall.

“I could hear him yelling, too. Mr. Busby. ‘Hear that?’ he was shouting. ‘Cause I’m sure hearing you, Old Bat.

“You know, you slept through that, too? I swear, Ry, sleeping through the Northridge quake must have trained you, because you never even moved. I jumped up, threw on my robe, and ran around to Mr. Busby’s. He was holding one of his stereo speakers out his living room window, aimed straight up at Evie’s. Every time the bass hit, his whole body quivered like the windshield of a car.

“Well he saw me. I’ll never forget it, he was wearing these flashy green pajamas, I’m pretty sure they were the most reflective article of clothing I’ve ever seen on anyone. And he was having the time of his life. Grinning ear to ear. He was kind of irresistible that way, like a big overgrown lab. In reflective green pajamas. And he shouts to me, ‘Evening, Girl. Think the old woman knows I’m home?’

“‘Stan died,’ I told him.

“Sorry,’ he yelled. ‘Lot of moaning going on. Can’t hear ya.’

“I told him again. That time, he understood. ‘Ah, shit,’ he said, and quivered when the bass hit him. He ducked inside and shut off the music. There were lights on halfway down the block, and Madolyn was out on her lanai, yelling.

“Mr. Busby stuck his head back out, shouting, ‘Yeah, yeah, go back to bed’ to the whole world. Then he threw his hands up to his hair, and he started rooting around and saying ‘Goddamn. Is it on me? Can you see it?’

“I helped him get rid of the rest of the web he’d stuck his face through. Then I got lemonade, and he got a box of Wheat Thins. And we just stood together at his window, all night. Him and me. He kept looking up at Evie’s windows. Sometimes he’d say, ‘So she’s been doing that a lot? That sound? Every night?’ And sometimes he’d say, ‘Poor old bat.’ Finally, sometime around dawn, right when I told him I had work and got up to go in, he said, ‘Hey. Want to see my wheels?’ And he took me around to the driveway to show me the car his daughter had bought him.”