Childe stopped. A moment later, Loraine pelted up next to him, breathing hard. She planted her hands on her thighs and leaned over, heaving for air. “What were you… thinking?”
“Mom?”
“Running away from me like that?”
“Mom.”
“Not listening when I called after you. If you ever do that again, young man—”
“Loraine!”
She opened her eyes and straightened up.
“Oh. My. God.”
Slung between the trunks of two large oaks was the biggest spider web Loraine had ever seen in her life. It was easily twenty feet across and the strands were thick. They shone in the shifting sun like cables spun of pewter-silver alloy. Their dog was suspended in the center. His little tummy moved in and out with his breath in a peaceful sleep. There was more web around a patch on his lower back leg. “Darwin?” Childe asked. The beagle opened bleary eyes and began to wag his tail. The whole web shimmered with the motion.
Chapter 4
The man in black fled across the desert... Will Two-Bears McFarlan closed his eyes and saw the great white hardpan stretching to meet a cloudless blue—a perfect binary of land and sky. He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. The next line of text swam into focus.
And the phone rang.
Will looked at the plastic box studded with lights and numbers on the corner of his desk. When it made that annoying chirping noise, he was supposed to stick the horn-shaped thing with the cord up against his ear and say “Shard Police. Constable McFarlan here.” Instead, he quick-drew his .357 and pointed it at the phone. “Do that again,” he said. “I dare you.”
The phone rang again.
Will pulled back the hammer.
The phone rang again.
Will pulled the trigger and got an unsatisfying click as the hammer fell on an empty chamber. He only loaded the huge revolver when he was on the firing range. Said firing range was an empty quarry just outside of town. Will leaned forward and used the end of the barrel to push the “speaker” button.
“Shard Po-leece. Constable McFarlan here.”
A smirking female voice filled the room. “Howdy, Prisoner. It’s Amy James.”
“Oh, hiya, Amy.” Will clunked the pistol down and grabbed the handset. The image of the petite punk-rock-girl with blue hair and tattoo sleeves flickered just under his consciousness. “What can I do you for?”
She had rolled into town during George’s last bender—some kind of geological survey specialist. Amy had shown Will permits granting her access to the mine and given him a quick tour of the RV she rode in on. It was half mobile laboratory full of equipment and monitors and half living space. Doctor James (she was as Ph. and Deeded as you could get) explained to Will and George (who had staggered into the office proper to make coffee and listen in) that she was in Shard at the bequest of an energy company called Blackstone. They wanted to know if the seam and remaining gas pockets under Shard were viable, and if so, was there a way to get at them.
At first, Will had trouble wrapping his mind around this twenty-something woman with the wild hair and body art as any kind of scientist, but once she showed him the RV and started talking in a manner reminiscent of his old geology teacher, he bought it well enough. Besides, like any good cop (even small town ones, maybe especially small town ones) Will possessed an uncanny lie detector. She was on the level about her reasons for being there. And, blue hair aside (hell, maybe because of it) pretty darn cute to boot.
Her permits were in order and so he gave her directions to the old mine headquarters building on the ridge above town. He promised to check in on her every now and again and was considering asking her to have dinner with him if the first “check in” went well. He had been planning on heading up there the next morning but here she was calling him.
“I have a little problem, Will.”
He could get used to her saying his name. “What’s the situation?” Situation was a cop word. He rolled his eyes at himself. “What’s up?”
“A woman and her son wandered out of the woods a few minutes ago. They had their dog with them, but the dog’s been hurt. She says her name’s Loraine Howard?”
Will sat up. “Yeah, you said her son’s there, too. Kiddo?”
“He said his name was Childe. Like the poem I guess?”
Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came. Will smiled. He’d liked Loraine right away when he learned that she had named her kid after the inspiration for Roland of Gilead. And Amy James knew that poem, too. “So what’s going on?”
“Well, I guess they got a little lost looking for their dog and,” she paused, “saw something that shook them up pretty badly.”
“Are they okay? They’re not hurt?”
“No, no, they’re fine.”
Will heard the papery rasp of a hand pressed down on the receiver and then Amy’s voice was back. “Will, Mrs. Howa—okay, Loraine—wants to talk with you for a sec’.”
“Put her on, Amy, thanks.”
“Loraine?” he said. “Y’all okay?”
Will listened as the tinny voice leaked out between his ear and the phone. Every now and again Will added a “Yup.” or a “Nope.” and a series of “Okay, what else?” A square of orange sun had crawled an inch across his desk by the time he said, “I better come out there. Stay put.”
* * *
Amy leaned against the RV, a hand-rolled cigarette hanging between her lips. She smoked and watched the boy pet his dog while the beagle lapped from the bowl of water she’d fetched for him. Loraine sat on a folding chair under the RV’s roll-away awning next to a plastic table strewn with rock samples, each sporting a tiny white tag—evidence of Amy’s first three days of work. The cup of tea Amy had brewed for her sat un-sipped next to a sample of low-grade anthracite shot through with a vein of some lighter colored stuff.
Amy didn’t know how to talk to either of them. It wasn’t that they didn’t have anything in common. Matter of fact, they had plenty in common. Amy had gotten her Ph.D. at the School of Mines in Colorado and then had taken a job with Blackstone at their So. Cal. offices. Turned out they were practically neighbors when the Howards still lived in Hollywood. As a rule, Amy wasn’t terrific around kids, but they didn’t freak her out or anything. And Loraine seemed pretty cool. Writers, if anything, tended to be more accepting of the blue-haired, tattooed set. She’d known a couple from L.A. and they were all at least a little punk rock down deep, even the ones who didn’t know it. Small talk should have been easy. It was just that Loraine and her kid were completely fucking crazy.
An hour earlier, Amy had been swabbing off the samples she’d collected with ethyl alcohol so the spectrometer in the RV lab could get a cleaner reading. The sun had swelled into a huge orange ball just over the tree line. The parking lot outside of the abandoned mine headquarters building was crazed with cracks and fissures bleeding up fountains of weeds. The August cicadas were scratching out their ree-ree-reeeeeee serenade and the air was infused with cool, organic smells. The big square states out west where Amy had grown up and spent almost all of her life didn’t make smells like this. The Appalachian forest was verdant and peaceful in a way even the mountain woods outside Durango were not—older, secret.
Loraine and Childe (cradling the beagle like it was a baby he’d just rescued from a tenement fire) had come stumbling out of that emerald verge and called out to her. A startled shriek had spiked Amy’s sternum, but she’d held it back, feeling the burn and tingle of stress chemicals distill in her muscles. A moment later, she was offering them a chair and listening to a deluge of babble about giant spider webs, coyotes and strange feelings of being watched. She’d nodded through it all, getting the water for the dog and tea for the human, finally giving up and calling Shard’s version of Andy Griffith.
Now, she stood and thought about rolling another nail even though she was only three drags into the first one. The smoke was a fragrant, thick blue in the deepening gloom. Amy’d been thinking abou
t firing up an altogether different kind of hand-rolled cigarette and smoking the sun down before the woods belched the Howards and their Scooby-Doo meets Tales From the Darkside story. It could have been such a nice evening.
The silence was punctuated only by the undulating cicada opera and the slurp of a thirsty dog until Childe finally broke it. “I like your hair,” he said.
Amy blinked, focused through the smoke. Good looking kid, a little gawky, tall for twelve, but he’d bloom okay she guessed. “Thanks.”
“Why blue?”
Amy glanced at the boy’s mother. Loraine was smiling into her tea and keeping out of it. In fact, Amy had the distinct impression that she was somehow recording the scene. She tugged a short hank over her forehead and crossed her eyes to look at it. “Dunno,” she said finally. “Guess I just dig on the Smurfs.”
“Like instead of Smurfette you’d be Punkette?”
Amy could feel the smirk rising. She already liked the little smartass. “Maybe I’d be more like the one who had the tattoo, though, right?” She flexed a painted biceps and a respectable bulge rippled through a section of vines and jungle birds.
Childe’s eyes widened. “Handy,” he said. “His name was Handy-Smurf, but he only had the one heart tattoo. You got like a million.” He looked thoughtful. “Naw, I think it ought to be Punkette.” He stuck out a tennis shoe and nudged his mother’s foot under the table. “What do you think, Mom? Punkette?”
Loraine threw a wink at Amy. “I think you’re pushing it is what I think, Kiddo.”
Amy dropped her cigarette and stubbed it out under her boot. She leaned forward and grabbed a baseball-shaped hunk of gray rock off the table that sat a little away from the others. It had a rubber band wrapped around the middle. “Check this out, bud.” She underhanded it and Childe snatched it out of the air.
“What it is?”
“Ooh, I know what that is,” Loraine said. “Take off the rubber band, right Amy?”
“Yep. Just don’t drop it when you do.”
But instead of a simply ripping open the mystery, Childe paused and held the rock up to this nose. He inhaled and then stuck the tip of tongue out, tasting the lunar-like exterior.
“Childe Howard!”
“No, no, it’s okay,” Amy said through a half-smile. “That’s how the pros do it, too. Go ahead, Kiddo.” It was an easy nickname to roll into. And then to Loraine, “It’s been cleaned already anyway.”
Childe slipped the rubber band off the rough sphere, but held the two the halves together in his fist. He turned over his shoulder and placed the rubber loop on top of Darwin’s head like a little crown. The beagle shifted his eyebrows, but left his weary head on his paws. Childe turned back and split the rock. “Awwwwwwesome!” In each hand he now held the hollowed-out half of a geode. Spiky clutches of crystal reflected the light in a mellow Beaujolais. “This is so cool.”
“It’s amethyst, right?” asked Loraine.
“Yep. Pulled that guy out of a creek about a mile back into the woods.” Amy threw a glance into the inky edge of the parking lot. “I guess you’d call it a crick out here, though, right?” She looked back at Loraine. “Actually, from what you said you two probably had to cross it to get here.”
Loraine tried to remember their panicked flight through the woods after pulling Darwin free of the giant web or whatever it had been. (She was now questioning herself even more than their new friend must surely be.) They’d lost the trail almost immediately in spite of her careful lipstick trail blazing. Ridiculous, ignorant risk to have taken with her boy. She could hear Jordan in her head yelling his disapproval for such an air-headed stunt. Shouldn’t someone who spent so much of her time ignoring her husband in favor of writing and research have more common sense? They had come to a shallow creek (crick) after some time—perhaps had even been drawn by its chuckling—and splashed through it like runaway slaves evading the hounds. It stuck in her memory mostly because of the sense of relief she’d felt after crossing that liquid line. Vampires weren’t supposed to be able to cross running water. Maybe it worked for all kinds of beasties. Foolish, her rational mind told her, but nonetheless, she’d felt safer after they’d crossed.
“Old stories,” she muttered, “old tales, old wives.”
“Sorry?”
“Oh, nothing. Just babbling,” Loraine said, now finally tasting her tea. Orange something or other. Sharp in her stress-dry mouth. “We did see the creek, but didn’t stop to pan for geodes.”
“Crick,” said Childe.
“Cricket,” said Amy and rubbed one shin against the other. “Reet-reet, reet-reet.”
Childe looked at her. “You’re weird.”
Loraine was staring into her tea again.
“Yeah, well, you’re short.”
“I’m almost as tall as you!”
“Almost, shorty.” She fake-scowled at him. “You can keep that alien asteroid if you want.”
Childe beamed. “Really? Awesome! Thanks, Amy.”
“Yep.” Amy caught the doggie lifting one ear just as a low rumble began to overpower the cicadas. “Sounds like a motorcycle,” she said.
“That,” Loraine said, “would be our dear Constable Ursa-Duo.”
“Ursa-Duo?”
“Greek for Two-Bears,” Childe said, eyes crackling over the geode. “Mom likes to show off.”
“He’s right, I do.”
“He’s got a scoot, huh?” Any lifted an eyebrow not unlike Darwin a moment before. “I likes me some motorcycles.”
Loraine threw her another wink.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, the sun was down, the mosquitos were fierce and the RV was full of people. Amy was scraping at samples in the back, the ruck, ruck, ruck of her work hypnotic background music. Will had just finished questioning the Howards in the driving area, sitting on a short stool between and behind the two swiveling captain’s chairs. Childe was planted behind the steering wheel. Will couldn’t imagine a greater terror than this twelve-year-old boy, clever as he may be, piloting a vehicle the size of a small house. Will was looking over the scrawl in his pocket-notebook when Loraine spoke up.
“Will, I know how it must sound.” She laughed. “Jesus, that’s bad dialogue.”
“Sorry?”
“That sentence would never survive a first edit if it were in one of my scripts.”
Will sighed and closed the notebook. “You’re okay, Loraine. I don’t think you’re nuts. I think you and Kiddo here just had a real bad scare and maybe got a little confused. I’ve lived around here my whole life and these woods, especially when it’s starting to get dark, can get massively freaky.”
Childe sat forward. “So you don’t think there’re any coyotes?”
“No, no.” Will held up a hand. “I know there’re coyotes.” He pronounced it KY-oats. “Since the mine closed they been creepin’ back more and more. And even when Shard was in its glory days, they’d still snatch the odd chicken or randy tom out on the prowl.”
“But the other stuff,” Lorain said.
Will pulled off his cap and a fall of hair so black it was almost blue belled around his head. Loraine tried not to giggle at his horrendous hat-hair, but it wasn’t all that hard. Young Constable McFarlan was plenty easy on her eyes. Were those eyes and everything below them ten years younger—well, Amy James wasn’t the only woman in this RV who liked her some motorcycles. He ran his hand through his hair and looked at the stars on his shoes.
“The other stuff,” he started. “I’ve been thinking a little about that as you went over everything. Here’s what we know: Neither you nor your son’re crazy or taking hallucinogenics, right?” Loraine had the urge to make a joke about writers and magic mushrooms, but let it go. Will went on. “We also know that you two have only been in this part of the world for a few months, i.e. you’re not terribly familiar with the flora and fauna.”
“What’s that mean?” Childe asked.
“That we don’t know jack about those
woods or what’s in ‘em,” Lorain offered. “Right, Constable?”
“Right. And finally: the spider web. Now, I’ve seen orb weaver webs back in the woods this time of year and even into early fall that are near as big as you describe.” His eyes sparkled. “They’re really neat, actually. Scare the bejesus outta’ me, but cool in a Discovery Channel kinda way.”
“You’re not suggesting a little spider caught a forty pound dog?” Lorain said.
The scraping from the back stopped.
“No, what I guess happened is that Darwin was really caught up in some vines or something like that and this big ol’ orb weaver web got all dragged into it. You two were a little freaked out already what with the coyotes howling and being a little lost, right? Isn’t it possible your brains just kind of supplied the scary details?”
Loraine stared down at this handsome young man with the Kentucky accent like honey dripped over his words and wanted to give him a good whap upside his head. Sure, sure, the wacko writer from the “Other Coast” and her imaginative little boy had themselves a little episode in the woods. Sure. Bullshit.
She took a deep breath. “Constable, I don’t believe in giant spiders outside of bad horror flicks from the fifties and Peter Jackson movies. I am not prone to hallucinations, mass hysteria, belief in alien abduction or Sasquatch.”
“C’mon, now, Loraine. I wasn’t saying—”
She pointed at him and he sat back on his stool. “My son is not prone to hallucinations, mass hysteria, or belief in alien abduction.”
It was out of Will’s mouth before he could stop himself. “What about Sasquatch?”
“Oh, I’m totally tight with Big Foot.” Childe beamed. “But Mom’s right. It wasn’t vines, Constable Will. It was a big Spider-Man spider web. We didn’t just think it was, or whatever, because we were scared.” He leaned down and stroked Darwin’s velvet ear. “And besides, what about this bandage thing on his back leg? It’s spider web, too.”
“Kiddo, I’m guessing that he just ran through part of that big, but normal web and got a bunch of it on his leg.” Will squinted and leaned forward. “How come you didn’t take that off him?”