It was a simple phrase, painted in crimson red: THEY’RE BEHIND YOU NOW.
I turned around.
“This is one of my favorites.”
Sabine panned her light to a brick wall on the far side of the street. There were black shapes covering its surface, and at first, I couldn’t tell what they were. Burn marks? Mud? But they were far too intricate, too regular… too planned. And, as my flashlight beam joined Sabine’s, the marks seemed to move.
A cold chill rocketed up my spine. Spiders. There were spiders all over the wall, climbing out of a hole in its center.
I took an involuntary step back, remembering the feel of spider legs crawling up my thigh. Feeling it again, this time on my back, on my shoulders, on my neck. I dropped my flashlight and started to brush at my clothing. For a moment, I lost myself, transported back to that empty apartment building, to the feel of those spindly legs, to the fear of being trapped and vastly outnumbered.
“Relax, Dean,” Sabine said, a note of perplexed amusement in her voice. “It’s just spray paint. Just fucking art!”
I forced myself to stop, clenching my hands down at my sides. My fingers ached, shaking as I fought the urge to brush at my neck and face. I closed my eyes for a brief moment and took a deep breath. There are no spiders. Not here, not now.
But the painting was so close to my memory. Spiders swarming out of a hole in the wall. It was like the mural had been plucked straight from my head, a moment from my past, sketched out line for line.
I moved forward, crossing to the middle of the street. Then I stopped. I wanted to study the image up close, to look for a single stubby-jointed spider leg amid all of those crudely drawn figures—something that might represent a human finger—but I didn’t want to get too close.
I took the camera out of my bag. It was a comfort, moving through these well-choreographed motions—setting my backpack down, unzipping the topmost compartment, lifting my camera out, popping off the lens cap, raising it to my eye—and it settled me into a calmer state of mind. I had a task to perform, and it was a task I enjoyed, a task I wanted to do well.
“Fix the flashlight beams, one on either side of the hole.”
Sabine complied. She grabbed my flashlight from where I’d dropped it to the street and moved the two beams into place.
I took a couple of shots with the flash on, but I was afraid all the subtle colors would be lost in that artificial glare, and I had no idea how the glossy paint would react to the light. I played with the camera’s settings—switching the flash off, increasing the ISO, cranking the aperture as wide as it would go—then took a couple more shots. Even with the adjustments, I had to use a fairly slow shutter speed, and I fought to hold the camera steady.
They don’t have to be perfect, I reassured myself. Mostly, I wanted to compare these images with the ones I’d taken back in the abandoned apartment building. I wanted to compare the two sets of spiders.
What would I see, I wondered, when I held these fake spiders up against the real ones? Would they match up? Would the number and placement be the same?
Impossible.
“How long has this been here?” I asked, lowering the camera.
“At least two weeks,” Sabine said. “Probably longer.”
I grunted and continued to stare.
Sabine moved the flashlight beams back and forth across the wall, finally focusing on the deep, dark gash in the middle of the mural. It was the focal point of the entire piece: the nexus, the birth canal, from which all those spray-paint spiders emerged. The flashlight beams failed to illuminate anything inside. Nothing but inky black.
If I stuck my head in there, what would I see? A dim blue light? A face, staring back at me, fixing me with accusing eyes? Maybe a spray-painted face—a bright yellow smiley face, mocking me.
“Let’s get out of here,” I said, once again storing my camera. “This place gives me the creeps.”
“And go where?” Sabine replied. The smile was back in her voice; I could hear it playing at her lips. “We’re already here.”
She raised her twin flashlight beams, casting the spider-infested wall back into darkness. Three floors up, I could see a square of light trickling out around the edges of a boarded-up window.
“Welcome to St. James Tower,” she said. She laughed and started toward the front door.
12.1
Photograph, 1990. Joyous Iraqi soldier:
A brilliant sun, beating down on hardscrabble desert. Sand-colored grass sprouting out of sand-colored earth. And a soldier, walking toward the camera.
The soldier’s dark Middle Eastern features are contorted in a joyous smile—radiant, beaming—and there are tears spilling from his eyes, etching dark rivulets all the way down to his jaw. He is dressed in military brown, but his shirt hangs open, and there’s a sweaty red cloth wrapped around the top of his head, protecting him from the brilliant sun. There is an automatic rifle lying on the ground behind him, abandoned in the sandy dirt.
The soldier’s arms are raised. A white cloth dangles from his left fist.
He is surrendering. Joyfully.
12.2
After entering St. James Tower, we plunged from a dark foyer into an even darker stairwell. We found both doors—the door to the stairwell and the door to the street—propped open with stacks of books, volumes from a timeworn set of the Oxford English Dictionary. Despite a cold breeze from the street, the air inside was thick with the smell of rot; I made an effort to breathe in through my mouth, trying to keep that horrible stench out of my nose. Sabine swung her flashlight across the width of the stairwell, revealing a mound of trash bags stuffed into the space beneath the lowest flight of stairs. Some of them had split open, spilling a litter of apple cores, coffee grounds, animal bones, and soiled paper to the concrete floor.
“Fuck,” Sabine said. “I think it’s time to call the health inspector.”
She started toward the base of the stairs, then stopped abruptly.
There were twin glowing lights up on the second-floor landing, small metallic orbs floating about a foot off the ground. They winked off for a moment, then started moving forward, sliding noiselessly through the air. Sabine jerked the flashlight up and let out a relieved laugh.
The light revealed an orange-striped tabby perched on the edge of the landing. Its bright eyes narrowed under the flashlight’s sudden glare, and it stared down at us for a moment, its tail swishing angrily. Then it resumed its descent. It stayed close to the wall, watching us with suspicious eyes, and when it was about five feet from the ground, it suddenly leaped forward. It bounded down the remaining steps and out the sliver of open door.
Sabine let out another shaky laugh. “There aren’t too many animals left,” she said. “They fled even before the evacuation. I haven’t seen a dog or a cat in months.”
“Yeah?” I grunted. I clenched my bandaged hand as if trying to refute her claim, if only to myself. Already, my wounds felt better. The antibiotics were doing their job.
“Hell, they’re smarter than we are,” she said with a laugh. “They took the hint. They left when it was time to leave.” Then she started up the stairs.
There was light creeping from beneath the door on the third-floor landing. A hand-lettered sign had been duct taped over the doorknob. It read, in giant block letters: FUCK OFF!!!