Wayne Patrick

pwbracken@cox.net

Chapter 58

A quilt of sagging cobwebs draped the cave's passageway and a bouquet of decaying earth drifted through as Foster waved the torch around the borders. Spiders scattered back into the darkness, their pregnant egg sacs abandoned and left bouncing on sticky webs.

He tuned his ear to the pitch of a kind of scratching. A drop of water fell on his head, then another and another. He pulled out a handkerchief and tried to brush off the liquid. 

He sensed a presence. With the torch above him, he swung it in an overhead arc across the room. In the quiet darkness, the torch revealed six mirror-like images of its flame against a reflective black background. As he studied the images, he discovered they were not mirrors, but gleaming eyes. He moved the torch lower and found two monstrous pincers as big as his thighs, drooling with saliva, their tips clicking together with a threatening clack. Behind these sat darkness framed with fur-covered appendages, swinging out and retracting in a fuzzy blur. Foster moved the torch closer. The gigantic brown spider reared up on its hind legs in an effort to avoid it.

Foster held the torch higher. The creature screamed. The shuddering screech punched at Foster's eardrums with the force of a hammer-driven ice pick. He raised his gun and fired off two rounds at the spider's face. Unfazed, it let out another earsplitting scream.

Swells of advancing spiders emerged from the dark. Foster watched the floor of the cave come alive with a rippling carpet of them: shiny black ones, shaggy gray and red ones. Layers of the creatures crawled over each other in a race to find his tender flesh, the clitter-clattering of their diligent legs echoing off the rock walls.

They leaped on his boots and crawled up under the cuff of his pants. He shook his legs, trying to knock them free from his ankles and out of his trousers. He dropped the gun and grabbed his scrotum. The sting and burn of pincers injecting their venomous loads into his testicles had him doubled over in pain. The hordes on the floor advanced, but his stomping couldn't keep up with their numbers. His boots became a tangled mass of thousands of busy spiders in a stinging frenzy. 

Something crawled through his hair. The sharp tips of the Black Widow's legs dug deeply into his scalp. He tried to brush it off, but before he could, another one dropped and crawled into his left ear. His inner ear seared as the sensitive skin yielded to the assault. He tilted his head and with the palm of his hand, pounded his temple repeatedly, but to no effect.

He shook his body violently in a fit, trying to shake them off. They would not be moved and continued to march up his legs and fall from the ceiling, landing on his head and crawling under his collar.

He raised the Colt and took another blind shot at the looming giant above. It screamed and then retreated into the blackness again. 

He revived his attempt at shaking off the poisonous arachnids, but they refused to dislodge. A few crawled over his lips and into his nostrils, stinging the soft tissue of his nasal septum. A tiny hatch-ling crawled over his eyelid and into the tear duct of his right eye and commenced a biting and chewing. He rubbed his face and eyes, trying to squash it. A thick coat of angry spiders covered his entire body. He dropped the torch and revolver.

The gargantuan eight-legged creature advanced again from the depth of the cave. It reared its body up on its hind legs. Its bushy front legs splayed out, kicking in the fetid air and scratching frantically at the rock walls. 

Despite his pain, Foster managed to pick up the Colt. With spiders marching relentlessly over his unsteady hand, he fired three more rounds in the direction of the beast. The spider was unfazed.

He backed up, one step at a time in retreat. The aqueous black eyes stalked his every move, his every step-by-step. 

His boot heel snagged an exposed tree root and he fell backwards, landing on his side. The gun flew from his grip with the impact. His adrenaline-flooded bloodstream triggered a spasmodic jerking of his limbs, the raw nerves testing the limits of his fight or flight response.

The spider reared up, then fell forward with all its weight, pinning Foster to the ground. Its silvery drool fell on him as the mouth hovered overhead.

Foster covered his head with his arms, but it did little to deflect the spider's caustic spittle. He dug his heels into the ground, blindly kicking at the loose dirt, gaining little traction to push himself away.

He craned his neck upwards and froze. Clearly reflected in the depths of the spider's coal-black eyes was his image. His glimpsed his reflected face. It showed tears running down his cheeks in a salty river of utter and hopeless terror.

His quivering mouth mumbled petitions for his deliverance. "Lord, hear me now, your humble servant..."

The spider's eyes inched ever closer, swaying back and forth in a wide arc, side to side and up and down in a deathly hypnotic lullaby. 

"Deliver me, oh Lord. Remove this cursed devil. Remove this..."

Foster slipped into a trancelike state. His nerves settled and his breathing relaxed.

He smelled rancid breath spilling over him and his bladder emptied. The spider's hairy maw descended, appendages flailing wildly with hungry anticipation. He looked deep into the void of the mouth. Held within its hollow emptiness lurked every terror that had ever haunted the depths of his imagination. 

Foster's breath left his lungs in a shriek. 

The exquisite pain came to the doctor as the spider sank its venom-drenched fangs deep into his warm intestines. A plume of steam rose from Foster's freshly opened abdomen as his small intestines spilled over his sides. The spider's fluttering mouth appendages extended and dipped into the mound of fresh pink flesh. They pulled out a length of the intestines and tossed the tender meat back into the deep mouth. Not wanting to completely devour its fresh kill, the spider retracted its bloodied fangs. 

Foster was only faintly aware of his weakening pulse. Semi-conscious, but paralyzed, his impaired brain function found the clarity to pray again earnestly for deliverance.

With practiced precision manipulation, the spider commenced spinning a webbed shroud around him. It turned his body over and over with its front legs. Its spinner glands crisscrossed Foster's body with layer upon silky layer of its downy soft web. Foster quickly became effectively cocooned, awaiting final consumption as he finally gave in to the inevitability of the end. 

Frank Foster's chest rose and then fell for the last time. 

Nidawi entered the cave after hearing the doctor's screams. She held her hand up and motioned the giant spider, away. The spider retracted into the depths of the cave along with its army of other eight-legged siblings. Frank Foster's web-encased body lay at her feet.

Foster's still wide open, but lifeless vacant eyes, stared back up at her. The mask of terror on his face shone through the webbed veil with a petrified permanence. She kicked the body, picked up the torch and revolver and left the cave.

Chapter 59

A tinge of suspicion struck Sheriff Stiles as he looked up from his game of checkers with Barada. He asked the old woman standing before him, "Where is he?"

"He is in a cave behind my house," Nidawi replied.

Deputy Barada's hand froze in mid-move. His quivering fingers lost their grip on the checker. It dropped to the board with a muted clack, scattering a few of the pieces.

Stiles' eyes moved from the rigid wide-eyed deputy to Nidawi. What the hell? He cocked a quizzical eyebrow. "You say he's dead?"

Nidawi stood stoic. "Yes, he is dead," she replied.

Stiles turned to Barada. "Didn't know he got back from Kansas City, did you, Dale?"

"Nu...nope," Barada replied, his gaze locked on the floor. 

The sheriff stood up and grabbed his hat from the wall. He looked at Barada and said, "Suppose we oughta go have a look-see. Let's go."

Nidawi, on foot, led the men on horseback up the trail to her home. She lit a torch and escorted them into the cave. She held the torch over Foster's body.

The sheriff and deputy stopped in their tracks, their horrified eyes riveted on the web-encased body. "What the hell...?" Stiles said.

They found the doctor lying on the dirt floor, bundled in diaphanous folds of spider webbing. His bloated face displayed his still open but inanimate eyes. A Black Widow crawled out from Foster's open mouth and disappeared.

Stiles took the torch and knelt down next to the lifeless body. He twisted the ends of his mustache. It became painfully obvious to Lucien Stiles that what he was seeing was not a natural occurrence of death. His narrowing eyes focused on Nidawi. "What on earth happened to him?"

"I do not know," she replied. She folded her arms. "I found him here this morning and I want the body removed."

"He'll be removed immediately," Stiles told her as he looked up at his jittery deputy. "It looks as if a whole lot of spiders did some web spinning - and biting."

"Sure duh...does, Lucien," Barada said, as his roving eyes traced the confines of the dark cave.

The sheriff stood up. "Well, let's get him out of here. Go get the tarp from my horse, Dale."

The deputy brought the tarp into the cave and they wrapped Foster's stiff body. They carried it outside, hoisted and roped it to the sides of Barada's mount, much to the deputy's displeasure. 

Stiles was now certain that a form of skullduggery of a supernatural kind had caused the death of Frank Foster. For him, there was no other explanation, no matter how irrational. Since he had no reason or right to arrest Nidawi, he refrained from asking her any more questions.

He and the deputy started down the trail. They came to a fork and took the lower path that led to the back alley on the south side of Main Street. Stiles was emotionally drained from the parade of corpses he'd been escorting to Foster's morgue; a morgue that was for now lacking a mortician.

They reached the alley and came to a stop behind the mortuary. The locked back door was easily kicked in and they carried Foster's body to the tin tub. The sheriff found two blocks of ice buried under the sawdust in the storage area.

As he had seen the now-deceased doctor do many times, he laid the last few remaining blocks of ice on the body.

They walked back out into the alley. "Well, since the town's mortician is dead, we gotta get him to the mortuary in Troy," the sheriff said. He turned to the deputy. "Barada?"

"You want me to drag his sorry dead ass all that way? Jesus Christ, Lucien, that's a long...that's an all day trip. Can't we, just, you know...?"

The sheriff clenched his teeth. "We...can't...very well...just...bury...him up in Olive Branch this very minute or throw him in the river, now can we?"

"Ah, hell," Barada said, kicking the dirt with the toe of his boot. ”It would have been a lot easier.”

Stiles held his scowl on the deputy. "I might consider doing it if I thought I could get away with it, but that ain't gonna happen. He's got kin in Kansas City. They'll want some kinda service. Sure as hell can't bury him lookin' like this anyway - open casket or open pit. He's not in presentable shape - and that's gonna take some serious work. Unless that mortician in Troy can perform a Jesus-on-the-Water, nobody's gonna see his remains. I got a feeling everyone will be wondering if it's really him in that pine box."

Barada's shoulders slumped. "I'll ride out to Jake Duncan's place and see if I can borrow his wagon."

They secured the mortuary's back door. The sheriff walked up the alley to the jail and Barada mounted his horse and started for Jake Duncan's.

Two hours later, Barada arrived back at the mortuary. He and the sheriff loaded the body in the back of the wagon.

 Two horses were hitched to the wagon, but it would take at least four hours to make the trip to Troy. Barada hopped up on the seat and left discreetly from the back alley.

Sheriff Stiles stood at his desk and lit his pipe. The jailhouse's front door slowly opened and Antoine Poulet quietly walked in.

"Ah, Mr. Poulet," the sheriff said, squinting through the wisps of smoke. "I was just on my way to see you."

"Well, then, I saved you a trip up the street," Poulet said as he pulled up a chair.

The sheriff took a long draw on his pipe and blew smoke rings to the ceiling. He calmly stated, "Frank Foster is dead."

Poulet cocked his head and asked the sheriff to repeat what he had just said. Stiles did, and Poulet said, "How did this come about?" 

"Nidawi came here this morning and said she'd found him in her storage cave," the sheriff replied. "Me and the deputy went up to her place and brought him back."

Poulet scratched the bridge of his nose. "And the cause of his death was . . ."

The sheriff's eyes darted back and forth over the room for a moment and then focused on Poulet. He leaned in and whispered, "Spider bites."

"Uh, spider bites?"

Stiles puffed on his pipe, expelling clouds of smoke as thick and fast as a runaway train. "We found him wrapped in cobwebs. His body was...it was, uh, swollen with countless spider bites." He went on to tell Poulet the details of the discovery. 

Poulet was left with a blank stare and a slackened jaw. He looked out the front window, but he took no notice of the busy street full of people walking by. He turned back to the sheriff. "This," he said, "is sorcery in the highest degree."

Stiles got up from his chair and walked over to the woodstove. "I suppose there is no other explanation, as much as I hate to admit it." He heaved a chunk of walnut on the dying fire and kicked the iron door shut.

A troubled silence settled between them, the only sound being the crackle of the burning walnut.

"Nidawi did this with her conjuring," Poulet finally said.

"Could be," the sheriff replied, sitting back down at his desk, "but there's nothing I can do to warrant her arrest."

"Somehow, I'm not convinced this is the end of the killings. I'm still not comfortable."

"Why's that, Mr. Poulet?"

"We must yet deal with the spirit Itopa'hi. I'm going into the woods this afternoon with Reverend Tutwiler and Jake Duncan. We plan to, uh, for lack of a better term, eliminate this minion of Mephistopheles."

The sheriff continued to puff on his pipe, not taking his eyes off Poulet. "Do what you gotta do, but don't ask any help from me. Don't want people around here sayin' I was crazy, too - uh, no offense intended. Ya know, I have a reputation to uphold and all." Stiles' pipe went out and he tapped out the ashes on his boot heel. "Just exactly how will you find this, uh, Itopa'hi?"

The Frenchman grinned. "It won't be hard." He stood up and turned to leave. "I will see you tomorrow, sheriff. I hope to bring good news. Tonight we shall close the gates of hell forever."

"Well, whatever gates you gotta close, make sure you lock 'em up real tight." Stiles settled back in his chair. 

Poulet walked out of the jail and found Emily walking his way.