Bad Glass (12 page)

Its leg, I saw. It was damaged or stunted. Congenitally deformed. I scrolled forward, looking for a better view. And I found it. Right there, protruding from the spider’s body: a limb, much smaller than its other legs. But it wasn’t a leg.

It was a finger. A human finger, pale and white.

Something touched my pant cuff, and I glanced down to find a spider climbing up my leg. My skin erupted in prickles of heat—an intense, instinctual revulsion—and I shook myself violently. The spider hung on, somehow managing to continue its ascent. I swept my camera down, striking the spider from my stomach. In that brief moment of contact, I felt bristles scrabbling against my hand, and I almost fell over backward, trying to get away.

I caught my balance and looked around.

I was surrounded. While I’d been lost in the camera, the spiders had continued to swarm from the hole. And now they were everywhere: on the walls, on the floor, swarming around my feet. They were coming right at me, moving with a purpose, a goal. I took a step back and heard one crack beneath my boot. I lifted my foot and saw its legs waving wildly; a greenish ooze leaked from its fractured body. There were more—dozens, hundreds—circling around my feet, hemming me in, moving closer.

“Dean!” Taylor cried, storming into the room. Her jacket was off, and she was thrashing it against the floor, knocking spiders back against the walls. “Your leg!”

Two spiders had detached themselves from the crowd, and they were frantically climbing my right pant leg. One had just passed my knee, heading up toward my crotch, while the other scampered up over my hip. I quickly swatted aside the one on my hip, then swung my camera down, smashing the other against my thigh. I could feel it quivering through the fabric of my jeans, and I quickly swept it back down to the floor, leaving behind a wide streak of spider guts—a sticky, jellylike substance that spread across my jeans, the heel of my palm, and the underside of my camera.

Taylor continued to sweep the floor with her jacket, holding it like a matador taunting a swarm of small, ground-hugging bulls. The spiders kept scurrying, but their movement seemed unfocused now, still fast but aimless.

I noticed a spider crawl back into the hole, clambering up over the wave of traffic still fighting to get out. Then, suddenly, the whole swarm reversed. The spiders on the floor paused briefly, then retreated back to the hole, as if summoned by an inaudible command.

After the rest of the horde was gone, a single spider remained. It was the spider with the finger. The weight of that out-of-place limb kept the spider off balance, and it had to struggle to keep to a straight line, swaying drunkenly as it left the floor and climbed up the wall. The finger flexed along with the spider’s legs, a feeble arthritic parody of those graceful movements. It had a long yellow nail, fractured and jagged at the tip.
It could use a manicure
, a voice cackled behind my eyes. I shook my head and pushed that voice back down into the murky corners of my skull. It was a bad voice; it was the voice of hysteria. If I listened—if I gave free rein to all the thoughts and words and images tumbling unexamined inside my head—I’d probably break down laughing. And I wouldn’t be able to stop.

Finally, the spider with the human finger pulled itself into the hole and disappeared.

“Did you see that?” I asked Taylor. “Did you see the … 
spider
?”
I used the word
spider
instead of
finger
. Right then,
finger
was something I just couldn’t say, not without giving in to that wave of hysterical laughter.

Taylor was panting with exertion, her chest rising and falling. Her response was hushed, breathless. “Yeah. I saw the … spider.” I heard the word
finger
there, too, left unspoken.

“And there’s something in the wall. Something I can’t …” I shook my head, unable to continue, unable to describe the face.

“I’ll take your word for it,” she said, shivering visibly. “I
hate
spiders. I’m not getting anywhere near that fucking hole.”

I bent down and examined one of the crushed arachnids. Its legs were still moving, tracing tiny shapes in the air. It was big and its limbs seemed ridiculously long, but there was nothing terribly odd about its structure. It was just a spider.

“And what the fuck did you think you were doing?” Taylor asked. She started to put her jacket back on, then stopped, remembering what she’d been using it for. She shook it out violently, then folded it over her forearm. “You see shit like that, you leave! You don’t stick around taking pictures!”

I shrugged my backpack off my shoulder and set it on the ground next to the crushed spider. I carefully wiped my camera against my leg, adding to the smear of greenish-black guts already there, then set the camera back into its padded compartment. A thin, sticky film remained on the butt of the camera, but a more thorough cleaning would have to wait until we got back to the house.

As soon as the camera had been put away, I collapsed back to the floor, slumping into a boneless sitting position. I could feel the blood rushing out of my head, a cold sweat popping out on my cheeks and forehead. I was exhausted.

That face
. Was it alive? Had it seen me? At the end, right before the spiders had come, that eye had swiveled up toward me, and there had been something there, some type of intelligence, maybe. But without a corresponding facial expression, it was
hard to interpret. Was it conscious of its situation, pleading for help?

Impossible.

“Dean?” Taylor crouched down at my side. “Whatever it was, it’s over now. It’s just the city. It’s what the city does.” She draped her jacket over my shoulders, trying to comfort me. I almost laughed. Almost.

I took a deep breath and forced myself to sit up straight. “What are you doing here?” I asked. “Did you follow me?”

“I didn’t even know you were up here. Charlie wanted me to help look for his mom, and this is the first building I came to. I heard you cry out from the ground floor.”

I didn’t remember crying out, but I wasn’t surprised. Maybe when that first spider had touched my cheek—my head in that hole, bristles brushing against my face as I stared up into the moving darkness. After a few more deep breaths, I shrugged out of Taylor’s jacket and got back to my feet.

“Are you okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I grunted, shaking my arms, trying to work blood back through my body. “It’s just the city,” I said, repeating her words. “Just the city.”

I noticed the throbbing in my palm as we walked back to the house.

We moved slowly. Amanda and Taylor were trying to comfort Charlie as we walked, flanking him on both sides, bracing him with gentle hands and quiet, indistinct words. His shoulders were slumped, practically radiating a sense of defeat. Mac and I stayed off to one side, trying to give them enough space and silence.

We’d spent nearly two hours going room to room through those abandoned buildings, but there had been no sign of his mother. No hint that she’d ever been near the corner of Second Avenue and Sherman Street.

Just that photo.

I flexed my left hand and felt a burst of fire beneath my fingers. I looked and found a line of raw flesh bisecting my palm. The outer layers of skin were gone—a bloodred line stretching from beneath my pinkie all the way to the web of flesh bridging fingers and thumb.

I stared at it for several seconds before finally placing the wound. Back in the apartment. I’d had my head in the hole, and when I’d pulled back, I’d felt my hand ripping free from the wall. But how? This was no cut, no abrasion.

I flexed again, feeling the throb.

The skin is gone
, I realized.
Left behind
, inside
the wall
.

Had it begun to take me? The wall? The city? If I’d stayed in that position, focused on my camera, would I have pulled back to find my hand sunk all the way through, my fingers poking out from drywall, joining the face—that horrible, conscious face—inside that claustrophobic prison?

Again I flexed, and again I felt that throb.

Is that what this is?
I wondered, my stomach churning, upset with dread and revelation.
Some type of dissolution of form? Boundaries fading and merging, absorbing and consuming?

But how? And why?

I continued to flex my hand, flexing and releasing all the way home.

Photograph. October 19, 08:35
A.M.
The warren:

I dreamed about the face and the spiders. Not the reality of the situation—I didn’t find myself back inside that apartment, seeing these things for the first time—instead, I dreamed about the photographs I’d taken. My precisely cropped, color-corrected images. The same ones I’d spent hours and hours tweaking and adjusting the night before.

The pictures weren’t great—the light was too dim, the focus too soft—but I managed to salvage a trio of interesting shots: one taken between the walls, capturing the line of electric blue and that eerie face (the face just barely visible after extensive masking and gamma correction); a wide-angle shot showing the horde of spiders swarming out of the hole, cluttering the surrounding wall; and finally, a close-up of the spider with the human finger. In that last shot, the bizarre subject matter had to make up for a bad angle and weak, muted colors.

After I retired for the night, these static images followed me down into sleep, changing and multiplying in my dreams.

I spent the entire night tweaking dream photos, watching as spiders took life, stepped out of my pictures, and crawled across the computer screen while I tried desperately to capture and freeze them in place with my trackpad. I was trying to create the perfect photograph, I knew, the one that would make me famous,
the one that would save me from a life of accounting. But the spiders refused to hold still. And as the night wore on, I grew increasingly frustrated.

When Amanda touched my shoulder, I jolted upright, coming fully awake.

“Shhhhh!” Her pale skin and blond hair glowed in a trickle of predawn violet. “It’s early,” she said. “Everyone’s asleep.”

I nodded and stifled a cough, then scooted up into a sitting position.

I was still camped out on the living-room sofa. The photo of Charlie’s mother had brought the entire house to a screeching halt, filling the rooms with a funereal stillness and putting my move on hold.

It had been a difficult evening. As soon as we got back home from Sherman and Second Avenue, Charlie had retreated to his room upstairs. The rest of us—including Devon, Floyd, and Sabine—had gathered in the living room, unsure how to respond to Charlie’s pain. Should we offer him comfort? Give him time to think and heal? Ultimately, we decided to just let him be.

There was no pot that night and no laughter, and dinner proved a rather subdued affair. After we finished eating, Taylor disappeared upstairs with a plate of food. She stayed up there for the rest of the night.

I, for my part, made my own retreat, cracking open my notebook computer and immersing myself in Photoshop.

“What time is it?” I asked Amanda. My sleep had been fitful, and I was still confused, disoriented. It took me a moment to place my location.
Not California … Spokane. The city
.

“Seven. Seven-fifteen.” Amanda sat down on the sofa and turned toward the window. In profile, I could see the skin hunched up on her forehead and the worried downward curve of her lips. “Just before sunrise.”