He was just so bored. The world was out there, strange and violent and beautiful in its chemical spill way, but he was never going to see it unless he got out. College wouldn’t happen unless he got a scholarship, but no one was going to give a full ride to a white male. He just wasn’t special enough. Hell, even the rich kids were getting turned down by schools they could pay for because they weren’t black enough, Native American enough, handicapped enough, etcetera.
T.R. sat back and stared at the ceiling. The smoke from his cigarette rose in a dirty vine and coiled. He could still make out the ghost of old glow-in-the-dark stars, long painted over, from when he was little. When he was seven, he’d taken hours to lay them out in a night sky that was an analog to the real one, using the star map that came with the package. He’d lie in bed and look up at those green radium stickers, imagining what life would be like on other planets. Or, what another life would be like on this one. Now, they were just outlines under a layer of yellowing latex paint.
Who would it be? Who would it be? His parents were just too cliché, besides part of T.R.’s motivation for the act would be the horror it caused. He wanted to see the looks on the faces of the other shitburgers after they found the savaged corpse, especially his parents. And it would be savage. No mere disappearance would do; we’re talking evisceration and creative flesh arrangement. The act itself was as much a symbol as an outlet. T.R.’s kill would be a sacrifice to the universe, a payment for his escape from Shard. He would send a body into the void so that he might be delivered out of this one.
He stubbed out the cigarette and rubbed the heels of his palms into his eyes. It just wasn’t coming to him here. His bedroom wasn’t the right environment; probably the stupid-rays emanating from the rest of the house. Well, he had a place. Shard was full of unused corners and caves. When his subconscious threw up the victim’s name he would drag the supplicant to his own special cathedral, and T.R. Dalton would take his time. No one would hear the screaming or disturb them. He’d give Shard one thing: when you wanted to do evil, it didn’t get in your way.
* * *
“Darwin, you dumb dog!” Childe shouted. “Loraine’ll totally dee-stroy me if I go into the woods.” The last statement had been to himself as Childe watched the dog disappear into the trees.
Whatever he had scented where the sidewalk ended and the smoking meadow began had gotten into the beagle’s brain and set him off. Darwin had shot across the hummocky field, zigzagging around plumes of yellow smoke and shot into the forest on the other side. Childe shifted from tennis shoe to tennis shoe and stared at the useless length of close line, the knot at the end unraveled. He bunched it up and shoved it in his pocket. The air was acrid with sulfur and the sun slammed down, shimmering the air over the meadow. Darwin barked a single happy yap, muffled by the trees and distance. “Crap,” Childe said, and trotted off after him.
He knew better than to be in this field. The seam wasn’t far below and you never knew when the ground would give way. One minute you could be strolling along looking to collect your annoying dumb beagle who always gets you in trouble, the next a flaming mouth could open beneath your Keds and chew you right up. Except it wouldn’t be chewing. You’d cook.
When Childe first met Constable Will, he had warned the boy to stay away from any area where there was a lot of smoke. Aside from the dangerous fumes, a heavy amount of venting meant the seam was close and burning hot. Will had told of a young girl back from Shard’s earlier days who had fallen through the thin crust in such an area. She’d had survived by clinging to a tree root, but when they pulled her out, her poor legs had blackened and shriveled to sticks. And now here he was.
Childe looked up from his footing. The dark edge of the woods didn’t seem any closer. He imagined he could feel the crackling of the fires below, vibrating just below the soil. A tuft of grass compressed under his foot and he let out a little yelp. Not falling, dummy, it was just soft there. He let out his breath. His eyes stung and watered. Why did they move here again? Oh, right, so he could grow up somewhere safe in a real American town, not in Psychosexual Sin Farmtonville—one of Lorain’s favorite names for Hollywood.
Darwin let out another volley of doggy shouts. They were playful, excited. He barked like that when he and Childe were playing chase, but they were getting farther and farther away. Childe started to jog, sweat rolling down his face. A minute later he crossed the threshold into the gray-green halls of oak and maple. The air was at least ten degrees cooler and stripped of most of the steel mill smells. It took his eyes half a minute to adjust to the gloom. As they did, an old deer trail materialized, cutting through the undergrowth and Childe set off again.
The forest closed in and rushed past in flickering antechambers. Other deer trails branched off, but Childe kept to his original path. Darwin was this way. He just knew it. In fact, it was almost as if a voice in his head were telling to keep on straight, he was almost there.
He stopped short at a wall of holly bushes that was so regular and impenetrable it could have been part of a hedge maze. Childe panted his breath back and walked along it left then right. The holly wall ran in a rough circle for a long way, a couple of hundred feet he guessed. That meant—he scrunched up his face—it was at least sixty feet or so through the middle. Man, this thing was weird. A big stand of one kind of bush or tree wasn’t so off but all perfect like this? Darwin barked again and something rustled deep in the center of the spikey mass. “Darwin?” The beagle yapped back, but in a “come and play” tone.
How was Childe going to get through this? It seemed he had had forgotten his chainsaw again. The same voice in his head (Was it his? It sounded like his, but felt… apart) told him to get down on his hands and knees. He crawled around a short way to the right. A tunnel. Clear as day and as perfectly formed as the rest of this crazy thing. It was just big enough for a slim boy of twelve to wiggle through on his tummy. Just like playing commandos. Keep yer’ head down, dogface! Halfway through he saw a flash of doggy legs go zipping by and a smile rose on his face. A second later, a clutch of what looked like those dominatrix boots from the shop windows back in Hollywood, or like varnished walking sticks clattered by.
Childe froze. He couldn’t tell what those things had been, but it couldn’t have been good. An image of the giant web came to mind and something deep below his rational mind tore loose and started to scream. He dug his elbows into the dirt and began to scramble backward. His feet plunged into spiky growth. The tunnel had closed behind him. He tried to push through, to heck with some scratches, but the holly was too dense. In fact, he could feel it advancing up his calves. No, this wasn’t possible. It was sealing off the way out! If he didn’t move forward the thorny bushes would encase him. Childe shot forward, but his feet were caught in a tangle of sticks and roots. The panic rose up in his throat and he made a little mewling noise. That’s what did it. He heard himself and was disgusted with the weakness in that sound, the early surrender. He yanked and tugged, the dusty soil filling his nostrils. With one great explosive jerk he shot forward, losing his shoes to the tunnel as it healed up behind him.
Childe tumbled into a large clearing about fifty feet across. And before his mind could process anything else, he felt a ridiculous moment of pride in himself that his math had been right when you took the thickness of the walls into account. An instant later he was mashing his back into the holly, scratching the hell out of his shoulders and not caring, trying to move as far from the scene in front of him as possible.
A spider. A spider the size of a horse. A spider as black and shiny as one of Loraine’s old vinyl record albums. A spider with twin clusters of crimson eyes and slashing mandibles as big as your forearm. A spider balancing on jointed, graceful spike-legs… was playing with his dog.
It was unmistakable. Darwin was down on his front legs, his ears forward, his beagle butt and wagging tail high in the air. The spider moved in jerky little dodges, then froze, then moved back, the javelin points of its le
gs thudding into the ground with a staccato Childe could feel in his sock feet. Darwin followed, jumping in and then back. Every now and then he would give a delighted bark. Childe played with him like this all the time.
Childe whispered, “Darwin, c’mere boy,” as if by keeping his voice low he could somehow hide from the monster. Darwin wasn’t interested. They had begun a new game. The spider would gently knock him to his belly with one outstretched leg, and Darwin would roll over, then jump up and run around and around the hulking arachnid barking with joy. Childe put an edge in his whisper, “Darwin! Come!”
The dog looked over and obeyed. Had Darwin been a human kid he would have slumped his shoulders and dragged his toes in the dirt as he walked over to his master. Childe crouched down and pulled the dog to his chest. He ran shaking hands over his dog as if searching for the terrible wounds those legs and jaws must be capable of rending. The spider stared at them, reflecting the boy and his dog in those eight red spheres.
Fear tears began to cloud Childe’s eyes. Never hurt you, boy. Came into his mind. Again in his own voice, but different, apart. Darwin is my friend. He fought the coyotes until the last. He’s a good, brave dog. Are you a good, brave boy?
Childe squeezed his eyes shut and whimpered, “Mom.”
Darwin whined. Childe opened his eyes and Loraine Howard was standing across from him. Her eyes were as big as saucers and full of blood. She blew him a kiss. Childe sucked in a gasp as she twisted and melted back into the spider. The monster turned in a dainty circle and sort of hunched down on its front legs. Childe blinked. Had it just bowed? What the hell was going on here? Was he dreaming? Darwin licked his face. Uck. No, way. There wasn’t any dog breath in dreams. The spider was looking at him again. “What do you want?”
Are you a good, brave boy?
“Is that you? Is that you in my head?”
Childe’s mouth dropped open as the spider pulled in four of its legs, the other four turning into human arms and legs—familiar arms and legs. An instant later, Childe was staring at himself. The spider-Childe touched a finger off his brow and spun back into the spider a second later. Darwin barked and wagged his tail. The spider’s mandibles scissored, a decidedly creepy sight, but Childe got the impression it was laughing. And like reaching into your pocket and finding an unexpected twenty-dollar bill, a laugh bubbled up from Childe.
You are a brave boy.
“That is you! You’re talking in my head, aren’t you?”
The spider affected another bow.
“Did you help Darwin the other day, when he got hurt?”
The spider morphed into a perfect Darwin, right down to the wagging tail and jaunty doggy grin. It changed back just as fast.
“Holy shit.”
Its mandibles scissored.
A hundred stories raced through Childe’s head. Hans Christian Andersen and the Brothers Grimm wrestled with Tolkien for space in his mind as he tried to classify and clarify. Andersen won. If it had been Tolkien or the Grimm boys, that big sucker’d be picking Loraine Howard’s boy out of its garden shears by now. “So, like, what are you? Like a fairy or a goblin, or something?”
Something. Old One. Djinn. First One.
“You don’t look so old.”
The spider flashed into a quasar about five feet across, burning and rotating in the air across from Childe before morphing back. Childe who had grown up with visions of Star Trek holodecks and holographic computer displays found this easier to process than his mother would have, but it was still a little jarring.
“I get it,” Childe said. “I think.”
Darwin rolled over showing his belly, allowing Childe to stroke him into a lazy doze. These were the dog days of summer after all. Childe stared at the spider. Now that he wasn’t as afraid, his curiosity began to hammer. Once, he’d caught a great big house spider (although “great” and “big” were now terms he would no longer apply to this particular memory) under a water glass and had stared at it close-up. This what-ever-it-was (First one. Djinn) seemed pretty much the same… just, uh, huge. Well, the house spider had been brown with a couple of black stripes on its back. This thing was as black as coal.
“Do you live in the woods?”
The spider stabbed a leg into the soft earth.
“Underground?”
It bowed.
“Like a gopher?”
The spider began to morph into a gopher with great buck teeth but kept its legs. The spider-gopher ran around in a little circle then frantically buried itself in a hole. It changed back, mandibles blurry with scissoring. Childe laughed, too.
“You’re funny.”
The spider bowed.
Childe’s brow screwed up. “What are you doing here?”
The spider didn’t move for a moment, then just as Childe was about to ask another question, it morphed into a clanking suit of armor, then halved and became two identical suits. Each had a poleaxe at its side. Childe’s mouth opened and the armor crossed their poleaxes in a tall X. “You’re a guard?”
The spider changed back and bowed.
“Hey,” Childe asked. “How come you don’t just tell me stuff in my head? How come you show me everything?”
Hurts to talk.
“Oh, sorry.”
It raised a foreclaw.
“So what’re you guarding against, or from, or whatever?”
The spider fixed Childe with those multiple eyes and for a moment fear raced up his veins like liquid nitrogen. This time it took its time on the change—slowly melting into a lanky human figure. Its black carapace flowed into black leather. Its multiple red eyes merged like drops of magnetized mercury into two black lenses. Its bristles condensed into long greasy hair. When it was finished, the killer from Montana stood motionless before Childe. The boy looked for a long time, taking in the sharp bones and sunken cheeks, the long fingers and ragged nails, the fish-belly skin. He found himself whispering again as he asked, “Who is he?”
The man’s arms split up the middle, becoming four as his legs elongated and thinned. His back humped and his sunglasses compounded. His waist narrowed to a thread and chitin shears punched through his lips. Delicate, veined wings sprouted from his shoulder blades. The crotch of his leather pants bulged then burst through with a cruel obsidian stinger. A moment later a seven-foot wasp hung a couple of feet off the ground under twin blurs that blew and tossed the holly leaves. The wings buzzed low and made Childe want to cover his ears. Just as it was becoming too much to bear, the spider returned.
Childe just breathed for a moment, one hand over his chest like an overwrought debutante. Darwin peeked out from under his paws. “So, he’s like you? He changes.”
The spider raised a foreclaw.
“But he’s bad. I could tell that. He’s bad.”
The spider morphed again, this time into an old-fashioned, ornate scale. One plate dragged the ground, piled high with bones, the other high in the air. The spider returned.
The Pompiliad comes.
“What? Here?” Childe suddenly wanted a stick or a rock to hold. “Can you keep him away?”
The spider just looked at him.
“So what do…” Childe began and stopped. Darwin lifted his head and cocked an ear. “What is that?” A humming not unlike the sound the great wasp had made, but smaller, harmonized was growing near. The light grew dim. Childe looked up. The air over the little clearing was dark with hornets. There were at least a thousand, each as big as a man’s thumb. The swarm whirled, moving in and through itself like sentient smoke. The spider crouched.
Go.
Childe felt the holly give behind him as a new tunnel opened. Darwin was growling low in his throat; he felt hot and his muscles were tense and hard under Childe’s hands. “No, boy. No!” But Darwin wanted to move in close to the spider. He wanted to fight. The buzzing from the swarm had become a din. Childe began to feel it seep in between his ears, making him sleepy. It was such a hot day. He could just lie out on the cool earth
here.
CHILDE HOWARD, RUN! GO!
Childe’s head snapped back so hard it felt like being smacked. The spider had reared up on its back four legs, it’s mandibles dripping fluid that steamed and sizzled as it hit the ground. The swarm coalesced above it like a storm cloud. A tentacle of wasps rode the air down and wound around the spider. The great arachnid batted it insubstantial but the wasps regrouped. Two more tendrils smoked across the clearing toward Childe. He wouldn’t get through the tunnel in time. Even if he did the wasps would follow and have him. They would sting him to death in that tight, dark space. Childe saw his own frantic face reflected in the crimson eyes of the spider.
Suddenly, the spider was all red, covered with hundreds of bright little black eyes. Triangles of bright red were everywhere. Even the legs were made up of patches of red, dotted with black eyes. Childe blinked and the spider exploded into a flock of cardinals. A cloud of flickering blood enclosed the dog and boy. The cardinals wheeled and dove, snapping at the wasps, crushing their heads and thoraxes in their smart little beaks. There were nearly as many birds as insects, but their flight was so coordinated they never so much as brushed a feather against each other. A cardinal fell to the ground in front of Childe, a wasp riding its belly, digging in its stinger again and again. Another fell and another. The voice came again to Childe, but different now, shattered. Run while I dance with them.
Childe didn’t need to be told again. He shoved Darwin through the tunnel, feeling it close up behind him as went. When he reached the other side of the holly wall, he picked up Darwin (the solid beagle seemed to weigh nothing) and pelted down the deer trail, sure that he trailed a pennant of buzzing, poison needles. He burst into the bright sun at the meadow, the heat and fumes plowing up his nose. He put Darwin down and they ran together for the buildings across the grassy, smoking expanse. Perhaps they could find shelter inside.
When they reached the sidewalk, Childe couldn’t run anymore. A wicked stitch seared in his side and his breath whistled. Black spots danced in front of his eyes. He doubled over and threw up what was left of his breakfast. Darwin stopped a few yards up and barked at him to get a move-on. Childe straightened and looked back. No wasps. He listened. Other than the roar of his own blood there wasn’t a sound. Not even the chirp of a cardinal.