Emily Mitchell - Viral - Stories

In her voice I heard the rising swirl of panic, the trembling frantic sound that used to come before she went into full-fledged hysterics. I had not heard it in the last few months. I could see that her shoulders had gone rigid and her fists were clenched down by her sides. In a moment, I thought the tears would start gusting through her like a storm. But then, instead, she stood up from the table and ran upstairs.

I let her go. I sat and listened to her small footsteps climbing the stairs, then pattering down the hall. I heard the door of her room open and slam closed. All right, I thought, I’ll leave her for a few minutes, let her cry. Then I can go upstairs and try to talk to her again. I cleared away her bowl of melting ice cream. I started the dishwasher. A strange feeling came over me and I realized that of course Spider was up there in her room, perhaps waiting at the center of its web over her bed. I felt suddenly on edge, though I could not have said exactly why. I listened for the sound of sobbing, any sound that might be coming from upstairs. But I heard absolutely nothing.

I climbed the stairs two at a time and strode down the hallway. I banged on Lisa’s door and called her name. No reply came and so I pushed the door. It moved an inch or so, but then it stopped and would not open any farther.

Through the gap between the door and the frame I could see a thick crosshatch of sticky, pallid threads so dense they were preventing it from opening.

I called my daughter’s name again. I pushed against the door and it moved this time, but only a few inches. I got scissors and tried to cut the threads but the scissors just got stuck. All the time, I called to Lisa and heard nothing in reply.

Finally, exhausted, I sat down on the floor. I thought: I’ll call the fire department, the police. They’ll know what to do. I stood up and was about to go downstairs to get the phone when I heard, quite close to me on the far side of the door, Lisa’s voice.

“Mama,” she said. “Mama?” She sounded small and young. I came and put my face against the door to get as close to her as possible.

“Lisa, sweetheart. I’m right here. Are you okay?”

“Yes, Mama, I’m okay.”

“I’m going to call the firemen to come and get you out,” I said.

She was silent for a moment. Then she said: “No, mama. Don’t do that.”

“But we have to get you out of there.”

“You don’t have to call the firemen. Spider can fix the door,” she said. “He didn’t mean to make it not open. He was just making more webs to cheer me up.”

“Well, in that case, tell Spider to make it open right now.”

There was quiet for a moment and inside the quiet, the sound of whispering.

“He doesn’t want to do it,” Lisa said, “unless you promise. ” She trailed off.

“What? Unless I promise what?”

“All you have to do is promise that he doesn’t have to go away. He can stay with us forever.”

“Sweetheart, I don’t know if. ”

“Mama, please!” I thought she sounded suddenly afraid. “Just say that he can stay.”

What could I do? “All right. Your Spider doesn’t have to go away.”

“Promise?”

“Yes, I promise,” I replied.

On the far side of the door I heard what sounded like somebody snickering with mean, dry laughter, but as I listened more I realized that it was the sound of many legs moving back and forth across the wooden surface. What was it doing? I could picture it: scuttling this way and that, gathering the threads up and consuming them, taking them back into its gut, material to be stored for later use. Finally the door swung open. Spider scuttled over and perched on the windowsill. Lisa was sitting on her bed looking little and bereft. I gathered her into my arms and hugged her and she hugged me back, but not with the enthusiasm or relief that I’d anticipated. She pulled away after a moment. I looked at her and now, instead of seeming young, she looked very old and tired.

“Why did you get so scared, Mama?” she asked. “My Spider would never do anything bad to me.” She sighed. “If you want to take him back to where he came from, that’s okay I guess.”

I looked at her astonished. She sounded so sad that suddenly I could not bear to do it, not that night anyway.

“All right,” I said, “but not today. We’ve all been through enough already.”

That night I woke to find myself swaddled in a pale and sticky substance that made it difficult to move or breathe. I struggled to free myself but the more I struggled, the more tightly bound I got. Something was moving above me in the dark, back and forth, but I could not see well enough to know for certain what it was. I panicked and woke myself for real this time and found that it was morning. Light was slanting in between the blinds. Everything in the room was as it had been when I went to bed.

As I lay in bed, I decided what I was going to do: the next time that I found Spider on its own, when Lisa left it by itself at home or when it crawled out of her room one night, I would drop something heavy on it, a cast-iron pan or our big dictionary. I thought with satisfaction about the crunching sound its shell would make when it collapsed, the sight of it, cracked and broken on the ground, looking finally like the machine it always was.

That would be expensive, though. Since Companions are leased monthly, I would have to give the full cost back to the company, which would mean we could probably not get a replacement. It was going to be difficult enough helping Lisa to adjust to Spider’s loss. Maybe, instead of breaking it, I could just trap it underneath a mixing bowl and take it back undamaged. That should not be so difficult, I thought. I could buy one of those cardboard pet carriers to use to take it back to the facility.

That was now three weeks ago — or is it four? I am still waiting to carry out my plan. Lisa has been keeping Spider close to her a lot. There have been a few times when I thought I could catch it, but each time there has been some reason that I hesitated too long and lost my chance: Lisa had a bad day at school the day before and I wondered if this was quite the right time; it was late at night and the noise might wake the neighbors. But I will do it sometime very soon. I just have to wait for the right moment.

Through these past few weeks, Lisa hasn’t spoken to me much. It’s not that she’s been sulking or obviously upset. She kisses me goodbye when I drop her off at school, she kisses me goodnight. She helps around the house. She is the same polite and placid child she’s been since we first got her spider. But there is something perfunctory about the way she treats me, something dry, like it would not make much difference to her if one day I went away and did not return. Or at least, I think there is. Sometimes I find myself watching her and she seems to be unnaturally still, as if she has learned from her spider the art of infinite patience. I had a dream in which I saw her walking on all fours, her legs and arms arched up in angles that would be impossible for a human child, so she could scuttle forward at a rapid speed.

Since that one occasion, Spider has not made another web, at least not one that I’ve found. It is as if it learned its lesson, although I don’t think it can learn. It acts exactly like it did before, and in fact there are times when I wonder what it would be like if I did nothing at all and we went on the way we are. Of course, I cannot let that happen. Sooner or later I will have to act. But there are evenings when I’m reading a bedtime story to my daughter and she is leaning against me and Spider is perched up on the wall above her bed and I forget that I am planning to get rid of it. For a moment, it is almost comforting to have another. I was about to use the word “person” but that does not make any sense. It is almost comforting to have another — what? Another someone in the room.