“Hey, is there some kind of Persian cultural center in San Jude, George?” I asked.
“Persian? Like Iranian?”
“I guess. But the people I’m thinking about—the person I’m thinking about in particular—would look a bit farther back in history. So I’m particularly interested in Persian stuff. Libraries, archives, historical stuff. Newspaper and magazine articles, too, I guess.”
“Don’t know—that’s a big search area. I’ll check. Anything else?”
“Just the stuff on your voicemail. Have Javier make sure all your doors and windows are secure, okay? And call me again if anything else happens.”
“You’re a good man, Mr. D, even if you aren’t really a man.”
“That’s what she said, George my friend. That’s what she said.”
At least I could make him laugh. That had to be some help on a bad night, right? Because otherwise I felt pretty fucking useless.
• • •
I wasn’t sleeping all that deeply, because subconsciously I was probably listening for that weird noise at the window again. When I came very sharply awake at 4:19 in the morning I heard noises, all right, but they definitely weren’t the same as the muffled thumps I’d investigated earlier. No, this was the scraping noise again, the one from the earliest days of my “haunting”, but this time it sounded like it was inside my apartment. My heart was beating pretty darn fast.
Barefoot, gun in one hand, flashlight in the other, I went looking for my nighttime visitor. At first I thought the sound was coming from my bedroom because it seemed to get louder as I got nearer, but by the time I reached the bedroom door it sounded like it was behind me. But once I had crept back to the living room the noise was behind me again.
The hall closet. Mine was a shallow affair, just about big enough to hang a few coats and pile up other stuff that was only needed every now and then, umbrellas and gloves and hats. A healthier guy than me could probably have hung his expensive mountain bike on the wall in there.
I paused beside the pocket doors and held my breath as the scraping noise started up again. It had been bad enough as a mysterious noise in the wall; up close it was much creepier. For a moment something primal in me, something that must have predated angelhood and almost everything else, told me very urgently don’t open that door. But whatever version of me that might have been, some child frightened by a bedtime story or by a stern sermon about what happens to sinners, it didn’t have anything to do with who I was now. Scared by noises in the closet or not, it was my job to open that door. So I did.
As soon as the door started to slide I heard a scrabbling, then a thump and quiet clatter, as if something had fallen into my pile of umbrellas and cold-weather gear. I yanked the door the rest of the way open and shined my flashlight inside.
Nothing.
Well, not quite nothing, I saw a moment later. At the top of the closet, on the side wall over the shelf above the coat rack, a board had been dislodged and pushed to one side. It was far too small an opening for an ordinary human to get through, but I had been in the business long enough to realize ordinary humans weren’t usually my biggest worry.
Well, I thought, at least I know how the fuckers are getting in.
A movement that might have been coats and other junk settling at the bottom of the closet caught my attention, and almost without thinking I flicked some of the clutter out of the way with my foot. I had about a half-second to see something crouched in the corner, something the size of a small dog but with long, hairy legs. Then it leaped past me and skittered off toward the living room. I probably made some noise when it jumped. Might have even shouted a bit.
Since it was running from me, I decided I had the advantage and went after it. It stayed just out of my reach and mostly out of my sight, a gray-black shadow with spidery legs, dashing from hiding place to hiding place while I scrambled after it, always keeping my gun in front of me. We made a lot of noise—at one point I tipped over the couch in a failed attempt to trap it in a corner—but nobody pounded on the ceiling, or the floor either, for that matter. The neighbors were either deeply asleep or had moved out, or just given up.
Or maybe they hadn’t: just about then, someone started knocking on my apartment door, firm and loud.
I had a moment of indecision, as you can probably guess. If I ignored whoever was at the door, it might be the police, and they’d kick it in. Then again, it might be the neo-Nazis, and if I opened the door the party might really get going. Or it might just be some of my suffering neighbors.
The thing had disappeared into the living room again, but the hall closet was now closed, so it wasn’t getting out that way. I decided to chance a quick trip to the door.
To my surprise, what I saw on the other side of the spy hole was not anyone I’d expected but one of the two young women from down the hall, the taller one with short dark hair. She looked very intent. I opened the door a crack.
“Excuse,” she said, trying to see me through the narrow opening, “but so loud noise! Just come home and . . .” She spread her hands. “Worried.”
“Sorry, sorry,” I said. “It was a mouse—squeak squeak, right? It surprised me, and I tried to catch it.” I faked a laugh. “You know . . . chasing it, knocking things over, bang, bang, bang!”
“You are sure?” She bent and took something from her pocket, scribbled something on a small piece of paper. “Here, phone to call. I am good with mouses. Call if I and Halyna will help you.”
Yeah, I thought, you’ll just love helping me exterminate a nest of devil-spiders. But I opened the door a little wider to accept her number. It was, even for me, a pretty weird way to meet women.
I heard the slightest whisper of movement behind me, then suddenly a knot of hair and legs pushed between my ankles and shoved itself into the space between door and frame. I tried to lean on the door to close it, but the young woman’s arm was still there, and I didn’t want her to have to make her way in a big bad foreign city minus a limb. While I hesitated, the thing I’d been chasing squeezed out at the bottom. Like a cat, it was clearly able to go through much smaller openings than it appeared to need.
“Oh, no, your pet get away!” she said, and ran after it.
This was rapidly becoming a very bad scene. I chased after her, but she was already following whatever-it-was down the dark stairwell and into the entryway where all the recycling bins had been piled to go out to the curb. The outer door was shut, though, so the thing had nowhere to go. The neighbor woman stopped and looked around, but it was pretty clear to both of us there was only one place it could be.
“Behind,” she said, and before I could stop her she leaned over and dragged the plastic bin out of the way, exposing my uninvited visitor as it froze in the glare of the flashlight.
It was horrible.
The resemblance to a spider was obvious, because the thing had four long, hairy, black and gray limbs that joined in the middle as if they had a single common joint. It had no eyes I could see, or mouth either, but the worst thing about it was that each of those legs—arms, I guess you’d have to say—ended in a small, mottled human hand. A child’s hand.
As I stared in shock, it scurried behind one of the remaining cans.
“It go nowhere,” said the young woman. She sounded astonishingly calm, under the circumstances. “Now you move other.” She pointed to the can. I must have looked at her as if she were insane, because she said, “Really. You move it.”
I pointed my gun, then reached out with the flashlight hand and grabbed the handle of the recycling bin. When I yanked it away, the thing cowered back from the light again, but my neighbor had been right—it had nowhere else to go. It backed against the wall, then climbed slowly upward a few feet, clinging like the spider it resembled. It flexed in the cradle of its long, jointed arms, ready to run again or perhaps this time to attack.