A Mischief in the Woodwork Read online

  I would strip it off and eat him alive.

  *

  That night, I slipped while chopping vegetables for the stew pot. A hiss sizzled on my lips as blood welled from my finger, and I dunked it quickly in the washing water that sat stagnant in the sink. It eddied out in a dark halo, mixing with the ink-blot comets of blood that had dripped first. Carrot tops and onion peels sloshed on the surface of the water.

  A spider sprang from his crack in the wall over the sink, emerging to sit on the wallpaper and watch me. I flinched, childishly, and eyed him as I rinsed clean the cut. He seemed content to watch me, so I turned my attention to my finger as I drew it out of the sullied water. A deep nick graced my fingerprint.

  A hazy motion distracted me, and my finger blurred as my focus shifted to the backdrop of the wall. The spider was moving, crawling down the wall toward the sink. He alighted on the ledge that separated the wall from the sink, coming to its edge as if to taste the bloodied water – but instead, he jumped the whole sink entirely and was on me in an instant.

  I jumped back, swatting at him, but he slipped into the folds of my clothing and ran along their lengths, finding his way safely to my arm. I brushed at him hastily, but he dodged around to my wrist and then ran up my finger, where, as I raised it in horror to shake him off, he set to work winding a swift web around the cut.

  Horror stayed, I paused to watch, oddly fascinated now. The creepy-crawlies still pulsed inside me, but I put a conscious hold on instinct in order to let this odd twist play out.

  The spider's spindly legs worked fast and purposefully, knitting a snug, invisible bandage around the last digit of my finger. I swallowed my aversion to the little creature, bemused but intrigued by his handiwork.

  Then, abruptly finished, he crowded around on the tip of my finger and reached toward the counter.

  Feeling obligated, I moved him closer, and he hopped across and scurried back to his hole in the wall.

  Blinking as if I had surely imagined the episode, I stood there, alone in the kitchen. Then, brow furrowed, I leaned across the sink, hesitated, and peered into the crack.

  My perspective was wrenched then, and suddenly it was as if I was the spider looking out. It was dark, and I was surrounded by rotting wood and filmy web, a great, jagged keyhole of light streaming in like a halo around a giant eye.

  My eye.

  I blinked the warp of perspective away, my eyelids stammering furiously, trying to quench the unbidden vision as I stumbled back. What had possessed me?

  I eyed the wall, keeping a wary distance. Then I saw it: the perfect, frosty fingerprint pressed into the wallpaper next to the crack, where I had braced myself to peer in. Had the web transferred from my finger?

  I held my finger up to my eye, finding it shimmery with the threads that still held my cut closed.

  But when I glanced back to the wall, the fingerprint was growing. It was spreading like a crystal weed, its texture thickening as its pattern crawled outward. Then it was met by the same stuff coming out of the crack in the wall, and I recognized it – web. It was spider's web, but lots of it, and growing seemingly of its own accord, but with all the intricacy of the artist creature it belonged to.

  It grew thick and white, spilling from the crack in the wall and spreading over the wallpaper, leveling onto the counter and the underside of the cabinets – as if the room was freezing over with a deviant manner of frost.

  I grabbed the knife before it was overtaken on the counter, and backed away. My blood still shone on the blade, and I could see the reflection of the morphing room in the slight piece of metal. My grip tightened on the handle, ready to brandish it, preparing to cut through the stuff that was quickly taking over. I held it up, poised, and then saw in its blade the reflection of the wall behind me, where threads were spewing from another crack. I spun, feeling cornered, holding down a quizzical sense of panic. This wasn't happening.

  Hadn't Tanen warned it could get worse? I recalled his words where they hovered in the back of my mind.

  The web drew itself across the wall, quick like a pencil sketch, crafting itself into intricate, snowflake-like patterns. It dodged between a few small ones at once, then bolted to a free section of wall where it began a large web of the spiraling variety. It spent more time on this one, round and round, cutting across every now and then with connectors.

  I became dizzy, watching this. The room spun in conjunction with it. My stance faltered, and I swam back – catching myself, but it did little good as I would have named the wall as what was under my feet. Then it pitched again, and I stumbled further, tipped overboard. But there was a tug at my finger, a small sense of anchorage. I drew it up in confusion as I stumbled about, and found that the bandage wrapping my fingerprint had a long tether that strung me to the wall, to the web that was morphing there. I hadn't noticed it before, but I was stuck fast, shackled to this frightening transformation overtaking the kitchen.

  I couldn't get out.

  Would it overtake me too?

  The next instant, I buckled, and the floor was quick to introduce itself. My head cracked against a patch of concrete. Everything steadied, then, but my vision began to grow dark-skinned. A trickle of blood pooled past my eye, tickling my lashes. It was warm and inviting, and my eyelids fluttered progressively closed as the kitchen was overrun completely by sheets of web.

  When it was all finished, there was a terrible stillness. The webs had gone limp, the crystal-texture of their prime decaying and drifting down like ash to coat the floor as if years' worth of dust. What was left was only a room full of cobwebs, and my blood making a trail through the dust.

  But also making a trail through the dust: a set of fingerprints, as if from a pair of invisible fingers, tip-toeing through, slowly, so slowly, making their taunting way toward my body.

  T w e l v e –

  Fever Chains

  “Avante?”

  The word was a chiming echo in my head, drawing me out of the place I was sinking into. My eyes swam dizzily open, searching. I saw only a room pitched on its side at first, covered in draping, swaying webs. Then I saw him: Dashsund. A faint guise of him pushing through the web toward me.

  No, he wasn't pushing through it. He was walking through it, as if it didn't exist at all. I saw the strands strain against his body and snap, fragile wisps that drifted to broken compliance in his wake, but he did not seem to know they were there.

  The soft steps of his boots pounded on the ground as he approached, reverberating in my head, and I clenched my eyes closed again, an ocean of stars and vertigo swirling sickly inside me. The lump on my head pounded in rhythm with his steps, continuing even as he stopped and crouched by my side. It grew louder, wetter – a heartbeat in my head, thwapping against my skull.

  Then, abruptly, the cobweb tether pricking my finger went taut and strong, and jerked me senselessly out of proportion. My shoulder cracked from its socket as I was whipped around and reeled across the room, and deliberately rammed head-first into the cabinets there.

  And it was then that the deed of rendering me completely unconscious was fulfilled.

  *

  I had feverish dreams of spinning and playing with puppets, then weaving spider webs out of the puppet strings. I became a master web-spinner, a possessed puppeteer going wild with the strings, putting on a great drama in front of nothing but a wall for an audience, where the story manifested in scads and scads of webs splashed across the wallpaper. The little crosses of wood clacked in my hands, soaring and swooping, as I danced like a ballerina, a jester, a phantom.

  Then I lost control, and got caught up in the strings. They wound around my throat, but I kept dancing. Wilder and wilder, until I began to spin, to soar, to fly.

  And then I slipped.

  With a small gasp, I felt the strings constrict around my neck. But I wasn't afraid. I was weightless, suspended in the air. I was flying. It was a beautiful thing, to fly.

  To die flying.

  Strangled, th
e web lowered me slowly to the ground. It set me to rest, there, the frames for the puppet strings still woven with my limp fingers. I stared into the floral pattern of the wallpaper as my awareness faded, and it was like looking into an endless spectrum of mirrors within mirrors. A garden in the wall, deepening into infinity. Paradise, beckoning. Waiting for me as I faded.

  When my eyes had turned glassy, a spider crawled across the floor, stopped to inspect me. I saw this from an out-of-body perspective, for the me of the dream had perished. I watched as the spider probed my chin, then climbed through my parted lips. My glassy eyes did not change.

  Swooping closer, the out-of-body me peered through my lips, much the same way I had peered through the crack in the wall in the kitchen. And again, my perspective became that of the spider's, and I was the spider spinning a web in my throat. It was a thick one, sure to make breathing a hindered task.

  But I was dead, so I need not worry.

  *

  When I opened my eyes again, it was into a higher realism, something lush with grit, much more vivid in every sense even though it was dim and shadowy around me. It was Manor Dorn as it always had been, and there was an anchor of belonging inside me that named this reality, despite the disorientation that came with it. Some weight that had a name.

  I turned my groggy head, slightly, and regretted it. When I swallowed, I regretted that too. There was a filmy lining to my throat, a tickle that filtered my breathing, and I erupted into a fit of coughing.

  Letta was at my side. “Hush now, minda,” she urged, stroking my hair and laying me back to rest.

  I remembered something about a web in my throat. Surely not...?

  I took a tedious breath, and formed a word around the hindrance in my throat. “What–?” It was a rasp, and I fell silent.

  “It seems you've caught something, finally,” Letta said, looking un-concerned. “It's about time, with all that exposure.”

  Suddenly I remembered the kitchen, and its transformed state. “The kitchen...”

  “Yes, you fainted in the kitchen.”

  Fainted?

  Letta took up a cloth and began wiping clean my finger. I blinked at her work, brow furrowed, and gave her a confused look.

  “You've got something sticky here,” she explained.

  My hackles rose. “I cut it...”

  She inspected it more closely at that, looking for evidence of my claim. “It looks fine to me.”

  But it was sticky.

  I asked if it was spider web.

  Letta considered. “It looks as if it might be. Were you getting at the cobwebs while chopping vegetables?”

  Apparently the kitchen was not overrun by demon web.

  At my striving perplexity, Letta smiled. “Don't strain yourself, Vant. There is confusion in you. A bit of fever.”

  Had it all been the result of feverish fancy, then? Except that there seemed to be web spun around my finger.

  My unscathed finger.

  Clearly, I was completely disoriented, like she said. I relaxed, letting it all seep out of me. There was no point distressing myself over it.

  “Johnny was sick,” I said, my voice working a little better now.

  Nodding, Letta put her cloth aside. “A sense-worthy place to pick it up.”

  Something occurred to me then. “Who sang for the weedflowers?”

  “We had to sing all night – all of us – to even keep them flickering. There's really so little security in it, with us. They just wilt like sad lovelies. We are all ghosts of ourselves, this morning.”

  I took that in, feeling responsible.

  “Tanen offered his services, and was most agreeable about the whole thing. He even offered to keep watch, you know, but there's really only so much a watchman could do against a wardog. Dashsund volunteered to join forces with him – the two of them seemed to think they boasted enough manpower to be reckoned with – and they were all set to recruit Henry, too. I suppose three watchmen might account for a decent array of coverage, but then... Henry with his old bones... All he can do is watch, and a pair of eyes won't fend off fate. They'll only see it coming.”

  Letta had a way of shirking concern, at least its appearance in her demeanor, but surely she couldn't be without worry in the face of these complications. I waited for her to tell me I had to sing tonight, but she didn't.

  So I said as much myself.

  “No faith in our men and their noble endeavors either, I see?” she asked.

  “Tanen is not one of us,” I recited tirelessly, too stubborn to let that slide, even once. “And I've no desire to put Dashsund in the path of a wardog, capable or otherwise. And with Henry's old bones... He shouldn't even be watching.”

  With decency, Letta turned more serious. “The wardogs haven't gotten us yet,” she reminded me encouragingly.

  “But they're out there. Just waiting for a whiff of vulnerability.”

  Letta placed her hand on my forehead. “Rest, minda. If you are needed to sing, recovery should be your top priority.”

  She left me, then, frustrated and alone on my cot in the small room that adjoined to the back of the kitchen. But it became clear she was right as weariness overtook me, creeping over me with the distinct feeling of bare feet being sucked deeper and deeper into the sludge of a swamp. Mud squelched through my toes. Murky water lapped at my chest, rose to my chin, steaming into my senses with tepid, rank, drugged power. My eyelids drifted shut again, turning my surroundings gray and lifeless as awareness dimmed. The last thing I saw as I fell asleep facing the kitchen doorway was a ghostly trace of cobwebs there – but really, it was impossible to say if they dwelt beyond the threshold or if they were nothing but a taunting mask infesting my very lashes.

  *

  I tossed and turned, in and out of fever, for another night. I could not have risen to sing if I'd wanted to. I was not aware as that next night came and passed, until I awoke again to the sunshine of another day.

  I groaned. Coughed. Laid back to tame the pounding of my head. On top of the bodily havoc wreaked by my fever, I was stiff now from idleness. My body ached twice over.

  I forced myself to sit up. The room spun a moment, but steadied as I cradled my head in my hands. I rubbed the cobwebs from my eyes, and then hoisted my head upright. With a deep, rattling breath, I pulled myself from the cot.

  On my feet, I quivered. I was weak as a sapling. A colt on its legs for the first time. I grasped the wall for support.

  Slowly, I made my way through the door, into that treacherous kitchen – which was suspiciously ordinary in its state – and through the other doorway. The house was quiet.

  Creaking my way across the floor to the fireplace, I lowered myself on shaking legs to the hearth, resting a moment before reaching out to warm my chilled hands on the coals. Not a moment later, though, and their radiant warmth was too hot on my cheeks, flushing down my neck in a most strangling manner. Feeling ill, I drew myself dizzily away, recognizing the remnants of a fever in my system.

  I made the painstaking journey to my regular pallet, where I retrieved Lady Sebastian's diary and took it back to the sitting room to read. I did not know if I would appreciate her accounts while in this state, but I had to do something.

  As suspected, intake of her ill-natured stories only made me moody. They were repulsive to me today, rank and hopeless and undesirable in their strangeness. They were too much like fever dreams themselves.

  I cast the diary aside, restless.

  But when the others came in later, they found me sleeping, curled up in the old chair against the wall. They did not disturb me, but they gathered there and soon awoke me anyway. It was evening again, too soon, and the room was lit by a gentle fire and lantern light. Dinner was passing around.

  Letta brought me some when she saw that I was awake. I ate what I could of the stew, but was unable to finish it.

  And then Dashsund came in, purpose in his appearance. I hadn't noticed that he wasn't with us – but of course, he had t
o keep watch. With Tanen. Tanen, who in turn was also not here with us. The thought made me giddy. I drooped in my chair.

  Dashsund's eyes went to Letta after taking me in. I wasn't much for being addressed. “She has to sing,” he said, and the room fell into a grim expectancy, waiting for him to voice the cause that had carried him. “We've spotted them.”

  No one had to ask what 'them' referred to. Even I became more alert in my state of absence.

  Letta took this in, and then nodded. Standing tall beside me, she turned to remove my bowl from my idle hands, and then helped me up. In the back of my mind, I knew the situation had a dire sense about it, and I fought to shake myself out of my drowse.

  Letta lent her support out of the house and down the steps. We passed Tanen where he was set up as a sentry against the house, and she led me right out into the field, her grip firm on my body. I could only hope the others had gathered to sing and guide us back, because I hadn't noticed them behind me.

  I coughed quietly, a gentle, self-induced clearing. It by no means cleared the debris, but after another try it seemed I had at least tamed the tickle. I steadied myself with a few breaths, and then carefully engaged my vocal chords.

  The song was not pretty, but I managed to voice it. Only a few times was I interrupted by coughing. Letta had let me lower to my knees, where I could use my strength for my voice rather than keeping my body up. But as I opened my eyes to the dimmer-than-usual peak of the glowing weedflowers and found myself there on my knees, exhaustion pulled me under. I finished the song, and then simply lay down in the grass, and curled up, and drifted into sleep.

  T h I r t e e n –

  Pale Song

  The fever dreams had dispersed, but my throat remained a nest of obstruction. And now there was a new factor: contagion.

  “My, minda – I think you've given it to me,” Letta lamented, resting against the doorframe the next day and holding the back of her hand to her forehead. “My head is spinning about the room, and I'm seeing strange things.”