It was then and only then that she screamed.
22
Just before Soo-Lee screamed, Creep felt something in the air around him, too. Almost like energy that moved over the backs of his arms in prickling waves like static electricity. Whatever it was, it was building, moving toward some critical mass and that’s what he feared the most: what form it might take and if he’d be able to withstand it because he was right on the edge of a full-blown panic attack and he knew it.
Something dropped into his lap and he flicked it nervously away with his free hand.
Something else fell.
It hit his head and tumbled onto the back of his hand. With a small cry, he swatted at it, feeling a bulbous body about the size of a marble smash beneath his palm with an eruption of goo that felt hot against his skin. He wiped it off on his jeans. His entire body was oily with sweat by this time. Another object dropped onto his knee and when he made to swat it, it ran over his arm on tiny, bristly legs before dropping to the floor. He immediately drew his feet up, his left hand gripping Soo-Lee’s in a crushing embrace.
You know what they are, he told himself. You know damn well what they are.
Yes, they were spiders. The one thing he was completely terrified of and, of course, whatever ruled this graveyard of a town knew it. Spiders. He knew it made no earthly sense. There were no bugs in Stokes. There was no anything. Everything was meticulously sterile like a town kept preserved under a glass dome in a museum. Insects and other crawly things were not allowed. He’d noticed it earlier. It was a warm summer night and there was not so much as a mosquito to be found. Even when the lights went on at the diner, no moths were drawn to them. They should have been crawling over the glass and circling in crazy loops as they did.
But there had been nothing.
And there are no spiders either. Believe that. There are no spiders.
But belief did not come easily. His phobia eclipsed it. There were more spiders now. They were dropping on him and he squirmed and thrashed and knocked them away. He wanted to get up and get away, but Soo-Lee held tightly to his hand. It was like a séance, he thought, where people weren’t supposed to break the circle, even if theirs was more of a line than a circle. But there was power to it and he knew it. He could feel it. If he pulled his hand away, it would be like unplugging himself from them and he was afraid to do that.
No more spiders dropped on him.
But he could hear them moving around him, hanging on tiny threads and rubbing their many legs together. And something more: a high, barely audible squeaking that he knew were the sounds they made when they communicated with each other. Ordinary spiders probably didn’t do such things, but these were not ordinary and the squeaking noises he heard were their voices.
They’re plotting and you know it. They’re discussing you and what they will do to make you let go of Soo-Lee’s hand. They will cover you. They will bite you. They will do whatever it takes because they know you’re afraid of them.
Next to him, Soo-Lee tensed and screamed.
It was unbearably loud and felt like a needle piercing his ear. She was going through something, too, but he doubted it was spiders. One of them dropped into his hair and he cried out. Another crept down the back of his neck and got inside his shirt. Others dropped onto his arms. He felt tiny creeping legs move over his face and a smooth, round body settle at his lips, trying to force itself into his mouth.
He screamed, too, as they began biting him and more dropped down on him. He jumped up, scratching and swatting them, crying out with disgust as their swollen bodies went to mush under his hands and smeared him with their oozing guts. He crawled along the floor, nearly out of his head, and fought at them, rolling and slapping at his own skin. He tore and pawed at himself. Given time, he would have scratched off his own skin such was his mania.
Then something grabbed him.
He felt hands take him and throw him flat against the floor and with such force, the wind was knocked out of him. Fingers like cables pinned him. He tried to fight, to squirm away, but it was no good. He clawed at the face of what held him and he felt his fingers slide into it. It was like breaking the skin of a soft brown apple. As he pushed out at it, hitting it, he realized the face itself was not soft… but what was attached to it: dozens and dozens of pulpous, bulging growths that broke apart under his hands, spilling rank fluid into his eyes.
The growths were alive.
He could feel their tiny wiggling legs.
The thing that held him was parasitized with egg sacs, spider ova that were hatching. He destroyed many with his thrashing hands, but many more were born, tearing free of the sacs and dropping on him until he was covered in the wriggling spiderlings that were biting him, sucking his blood, trying to force their way into his mouth and up his nostrils, more and more crowding all the time until he could not breathe.
Until he could do nothing but scream his mind away.
23
Lex took hold of him and yanked him to his feet.
Creep fought him like an animal, hitting and kicking and clawing, and Lex finally slapped him across the face and with enough force to put him right back down. Though he could not see Creep, he could feel him cowering at his feet, moaning and sobbing, utterly broken by whatever the puppet master had thrown at him, which must have been considerable.
“We need to stay calm,” Lex said, channeling some B-movie hero and knowing exactly how foolish he sounded.
Soo-Lee was at his side, practically clinging to him and Creep was shivering at his feet. They had both gone through something, but he had been aware of only the utter blackness and things moving in it. Then Soo-Lee screamed like she was being skinned alive and Creep had hit the floor, crying out and squirming, unable to even speak.
So now what? Lex asked himself. Now what? You seem to think you’re the guiding light here, so what next?
He almost laughed at that. If he was the guiding light then he had a very weak bulb. Soo-Lee helped him get Creep to his feet. Lex put questions to both of them and the answers were barely coherent.
“All right,” he said. “We stand together and we fight together.”
More B-movie wisdom, but he had no other frame of reference for something like this. They held hands in the darkness and waited for what came next and when it did, it was not what any of them expected. The lights began to come on. Not in a flash, but very slowly like mood lighting. The glow was orange like that of candles, dim and wavering, slowly brightening.
As it suffused the room, they saw that they were no longer alone and Lex had to wonder if they ever had been.
Soo-Lee gasped.
Creep made a pained sound.
And Lex just sighed. What now? What the hell now?
He knew the room he was seeing was not the room they had originally been in. There was no bookcase or antiquated TV set or console stereo. All that was gone. They were in some sort of workroom that looked like it was part doll factory and part Frankenstein’s laboratory. Two of the walls were hung with hairless doll heads and smooth unpainted doll faces, limbs of assorted sizes, the torsos of children right up to the torsos of adults. None of them looked as lifeless as they should have. He sensed movement in the faces… subtle, secretive, impossible… but there, a slow and yet deliberate crawl of facial muscles beneath waxen skins. Even the limbs were shifting, fingers unfurling, the chests of the bodies rising and falling with measured respiration.
The flickering orange light only enhanced this and made Lex’s skin feel like it was going to inch right off his bones.