Jim, you crazy fucker. I’m starting to think we could have been friends.
“Come on,” she said. “Over here.”
She went through a short doorway that John had to duck through, a corner of the basement that may have been a coal room decades ago. She knelt down and plugged in a yellow extension cord, bathing the room in a harsh glare of light. Two halogen work lamps stood on thin metal stands, illuminating a small work space including two folding metal tables and dozens of jars and tubes, dye and latex and plaster and every other thing. White five-gallon buckets were piled high in one corner.
Amy said, “He had boxes and boxes and boxes of sketches and notes. He used to write these science fiction stories, really bad ones. He wouldn’t let me read them but I’d sneak looks and the hero would always wind up tied up and naked and at the mercy of these beautiful female alien princesses who would ‘torture’ him. Jim, you know, he kind of went a long time without a girlfriend.”
She was kneeling over a stack of cardboard banker’s boxes. She pulled the lid off one and brought up a series of sketch pads.
“He was doing something bigger, a novel or a screenplay. I’d tell him that they wouldn’t let him do his own props and write the movie both. He said James Cameron did his own designs and models for the robot in Terminator, though. You know that scene in The Matrix where they’ve got a shot of Keanu reaching out to open a door and you can sort of see the reflection of the camera crew in the doorknob? Jim saw that the first time he watched it. Just a total expert. He had all these plans, always talking about selling the house and moving and…”
She shrugged, cutting off the words, I think, to keep tears spilling out with them. She handed me a bundle of four or five art pads. I flipped through them, saw sketches of joints and muscles and hands and claws and eyes. I flipped further and saw something that caught my eye.
It was a group of men, walking with three beings that were not men. They were pure black, their limbs represented on the paper by heavy swaths of charcoal. Drawn like they were men made of shadow.
The men in the picture were in a small room, at a doorway. One of the dark creatures was reaching out as if to open the door.
I flipped more pages. I saw another sketch of a doorway; this one was familiar. I had just seen it an hour ago. It was the abandoned balcony door upstairs.
I glanced back at the broken sculpture and said, “All this, that thing back there, Jim said it was for a story he was working on?”
“He never talked about it. But I saw his notes. You know, after. He kept a journal with all that stuff and I had to sort through everything.”
She wiped at her cheek with her sleeve and I felt like an ass for asking. We didn’t ask another question, but she said, “It was parallel-universe stuff. Typical sci-fi, alternate reality and all that. I think his story was about the people on an Earth, a parallel Earth, you know, that was real close to this one and they were trying to build some kind of bridge between the two. Then they would… you know-invade.”
“And that creature back there?” I asked. “How did that figure in?”
She shrugged. John said, solemnly, “I’m gonna guess that was the thing that tied him up so the naked alien women could interrogate him.”
Amy laughed and I suddenly remembered why I keep John around. I glanced back again at the one-armed creature and said, “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
I COULDN’T HAVEknown at the time, right? That maybe all of our answers were there, in Jim’s stuff? That maybe he had pieced the whole thing together?
At that moment, on that night, I just wanted out of there. The rotten smell of guilt hung over every thought. Especially on the subject of Jim.
So, yeah, we clomped up the stairs and flipped out the lights. All of Jim’s materials were thrown under a blanket of darkness, never to be seen by human eyes again.
I never went back down there, from that day until the day we burned the house to the ground.
BACK UPSTAIRS JOHNasked Amy if she had ever seen a jellyfish-looking thing around the house or a huge bag full of what looked like butcher trimmings. To my complete lack of surprise, she said she had not.
She also said that she had never caught anything on the webcams, that they were set to click on at the sign of movement.
“It’s always just me rolling over,” she said. “I move around a lot in bed because of my back and all that.”
“The other times you went missing,” John thought to ask, “how long ago was it?”
“It happened for sure Sunday night, then Tuesday night. Then last night, you know.”
“Every forty-eight hours,” John observed. “As far as we know.”
“But it’s not usually as long. The most time I had lost up until now was about six hours, from midnight until early morning. This is the first time I lost a whole day.”
“Is it always around midnight?” I asked.
“Yeah, I guess.”
Amy declined our offer to help her stay and sift through her webcam photos from last night. I was desperate to see what would show up but this was her bedroom and I suppose she had a reasonable fear of two creepy males clicking through shots of her dressing and doing the things girls do alone in their bedrooms. Lighting farts or whatever.
She promised to look through them and let us know. I told her that I was pretty sure I had moved the photos to a folder buried in printer drivers. On accident. John volunteered to stay the night and stake the place out, but Amy recoiled at that idea and said the night was mostly over anyway.
And so, feeling like men trying to work a jigsaw puzzle blindfolded and using only our butt cheeks to grip the pieces, we left.
I CAME HOMEto see 3:26 A.M. on my wall clock. I turned on every light in the place, checking every room for any damned thing at all. I finally collapsed into a chair, thinking there was no way in hell I was getting to sleep that night. Too much adrenaline, too many nasty dreams waiting for me behind my eyelids.
I fell asleep.
THE ROOM CAMEback into focus. How much time had passed? I tried to move my arms, found that I could not. Somebody here. Footsteps behind me. Tried to move again. Limbs not responding.
I’ve had this dream before. Just got to-
OH SHIT.
A thin face appeared, leaning down in front of me. Huge nose. My friend Robert North, from my Bronco.
He asked, “Can you hear me?”
I couldn’t answer. I was paralyzed, a brain inside a statue.
“Blink your eyes. Blink if you can hear me.”
I blinked, not to answer him, but to see if I could blink. I could. Is there a way to kill a man using only your eyelids?
He said, “Good.”
He walked out of view, then came back and extended his palm to me. On his palm, something was moving. He held it up to my face.
A spider.
Huge, a body the size of a chicken egg.
Black legs with yellow stripes.
It looked to have been bred for war.
North offered it on the palm of his hand and said, “I want you to eat this.”
I was able to move my lips enough to say, “Fuck you.”
“I’m going to say some words. I need you to listen very carefully. Tractor. Moonlight. Violin. Clay. Thumbs.”
This went on for several minutes, North rattling off dozens of words. Maybe over a hundred. He held the arachnid up, legs twitching.
“Red. Sandstone. Trombone. Stain. Linger.”
And just like that, I was dying. I could feel a poison living in my body, shutting me down, rotting my guts, burning my veins. And there was only one cure-the thing in North’s palm. Suddenly the spider was my salvation, the narrow, bright window out of this dark room. I gathered every ounce of strength and leaned forward with my head-my hands still numb and useless-and then I sucked the spider into my mouth with greedy lips. I chewed through rigid, wiry legs and felt a hot, salty fluid burst into my mouth when I bit through the body. I quickly choked down the bitter bundle of legs and gristle and-
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