The German shepherd looked back at Wade with begging eyes.

There were two other people in the lobby, with two other dogs. His anxiety wouldn’t let him be embarrassed. Still, he moved his head close to the dog’s and whispered.

“Daddy loves you. I talked to the ones in the sky.”

The dog looked away from him and around the room. She was nervous. This was the place where strangers stabbed you.

Wade was nervous too.

His eye glimpsed a van pulling up. A woman got out with a bundle wrapped in her arms.

“Here comes a kitty so pretty,” Wade said absently, seeing the little, striped head bobbing outside the bundle.

The woman carrying the kitten came inside and went up to the counter. Wade didn’t notice she was crying until she spoke.

“I ran over him.”

Moans filled the room. Wade hadn’t known its condition; he had attributed its loosely bobbing head to the antics of a playful kitten.

“Dr. Lane!” the receptionist shouted as she made her way to the back. Dr. Lane came to the front, a practiced expression on her face.

“I think he’s dead,” the woman said. Dr. Lane led her into an examination room.

Wade looked around, exchanging sympathetic gazes with other pet owners, then he looked back at Pita, who pushed herself into him and whined.

Wade waited, making small talk with a lady wearing a Bon Jovi T-shirt and holding a poodle, trying to forget the poor kitten, trying to forget why he was here.

Dr. Lane soon came out, leading the woman, who was now carrying a closed bundle. She walked her all the way to the van. They exchanged a few words there before the doctor came in. For the first time, she seemed to notice Wade.

“Why are you here?”

It took Wade a few seconds to answer. “Your assistant called last night. She said the results were positive.”

She seemed confused. “I don’t think so.” She moved behind the reception counter, pulled up something on the computer, studied it for a few seconds, then shook her head.

“Pita’s fine. There’s been some kind of miscommunication.”

He lit up inside, but tried to hide it, given the scene they’d all just witnessed. There were a few guesses as to how the mishap occurred. The vet took full responsibility and apologized. Wade accepted graciously and left.

He was in his car, Pita in the backseat, no doubt thrilled she’d escaped the evil place without a single stabbing, when he remembered the conversation with his wife last year.

“You’re not going to believe this.”

“What, was there some kind of mix-up?”

“Someone else’s test results were in my chart. My results were negative. How did you know?”

“Lucky guess.”

Wade drove off the lot with a healthy dog, wondering about the price.

It had been a month since Kyle left home, and she was hoping that this time he would not come back. She had long since thrown out his things.

But he paid no mind to that.

Standing in the doorway of her bedroom, he nodded to her in acknowledgment. She could not see his dark eyes in the shadows, but she knew well the gleam that was in them.

Sometimes his eyes reminded her of a wolf, expectant and confident that he had his prey where he wanted her. He came and lay down on the bed beside her. She wrapped her arms around him and let him pull her tight against his chest. This was weakness on her part, she knew. This man was bad for her, always had been.

Resisting him had always been a problem, and tonight would probably be no different. He smelled sweet, like spring grass. His lips were dry but smooth, his kiss gentler than she remembered.

She put up with his behavior because she loved him, because he made her feel a way that no one else did. She ignored his indiscretions. He told her once: “I always come back to you, no matter what. I love you and I can’t stay away.”

“There is only so much that I can take,” she’d told him one night over dinner. That was the last night she remembered spending with him, before he went away. “There’s only so much time you can go on like this.” He’d looked up from his plate, still holding his steak knife firmly in his left hand. And he grinned, a crooked smile that made her blood boil.

It was like he was sneering at her… I’ll do whatever the hell I want. And you’ll let me.

She remembered so little of that night. And now, she found herself struggling to remember.

Still holding him, she let her fingers glide over his chest. It was a habit that she no longer even thought about. He sighed, and at first she thought this was a sound of pleasure. But then, her fingers found it: emptiness, wetness. The wound between his second and third rib. “Baby,” he whispered, his lips pressed against her forehead. “We cannot keep doing this. You have to let me go.”

“You cheated,” she said, tears springing to her eyes. “I told you to stop.”

These words were her explanation for why she’d stabbed him. She had made this wound, this gaping wound that was large enough for her to place her fist inside it. Now the memories that always were shrouded when he was near her came roaring back.
She could not imagine how this could be happening. He’d died weeks ago, by her own hand.

“ It’s my penance, maybe,” he said softly. But the anger was there. “Just let me go.
I don’t want to stay like this. I’m here because of you. I’m supposed…” His voice seemed to fade. “I’m supposed to rest now. But you keep holding me back. I can’t stay away.”

“What do you want?” She bolted upright, and fell off the edge of the bed. She pushed herself backwards until her back hit the wall. He sat up then. “Do it,” he said, taking a knife from his pocket. It gleamed in the dark like a sword. “Finish me…”

“I can’t…!”

“You have to. You think I haven’t tried? What do you think I’ve been doing when I wasn’t here? Please! Just end it.”

She stood. And she took the cold knife in her hand, ready to do what he asked.

A month later, he came home.

Lying down on the bed beside her, he held her close in his arms. “I told you I’d never go far,” he said. “I can’t stay away.”

It went perfect in her new Santa Fe-style house in Rio Rancho, New Mexico, and people would visit and ask her about it.

“Stacey, that is amazing. Where did you get that?” they would ask upon seeing it on her shelf in her spacious living room.

And it was perfectly understandable to inquire about.

It was centuries old, nearly perfect with a few nicks and minor cracks but other than that it was perfect.

To make it even more alluring were the petroglyph-like drawings of what appeared to be a mother holding the hand of a child, and in the background were buffalo and deer.

“We’re not supposed to remove these things from Anasazi ruins because it’s against the law but I had to get this because it was perfect,” Stacey would say.

Her younger son, Jeff, was a typical 14-year-old boy who hadn’t grown fond of things like that.

Much less had he learned any appreciation of the Native American cultures in New Mexico. It just wasn’t important.

And then one day Stacey was sitting in her living room looking at the pot when she remembered the Navajo sheepherders who were there with her that day when she found the pot.

“Don’t take those. They belong with the dead. Us Navajo stay away from those things,” they were telling her.

Of course she asked the typical white man question of why.

“Because they’re gone and their lives on this Earth are broken. If you take these home with you your life will break or much worse.”

She paid no heed to the superstitions and the warnings and took it home anyway.

And as she sat there that day looking at the sensual, heartwarming scene of the mother holding the child’s hand she noticed another figure beside the child. It was a light inky type of spot then it became a child shape.

She was horrified and ran to her son’s bedroom to tell him about it.

He wasn’t there.

She searched all over the house, called his friends, and drove around the neighborhood looking for him.

Nothing.

Then she realized that maybe he was the one on the pot. Horrifying as it was it made sense.

That night she dozed off after a tremendous cry and dreamed of an old Indian lady talking to her in her living room.

“You must take it back then I’ll give you your son back. I made that pot for my child long ago after he died. I put his heart in it and I could see him still when I looked in it. Please bring it back or you’ll become twisted and your son will stay lost.”

Stacey woke and realized that she could get Jeff back anytime she wanted.

“We’ll give it a week,” she figured.

The boy was a burden to her and she never loved his father in the first place. Now he was an irritating liability who had turned on her.

“Let him learn a lesson from this,” she laughed.

And at the end of the week she thought about it once more.

Life was so much easier and free now without the ungrateful son of a bitch.

Suddenly she felt a tug in her chest. Feeling her pulse she discovered there was none.

She raced to the pot and looked in it.

Her heart was beating in it then it began to disappear.

As horror raced in suddenly she began to laugh.

“Oh, to hell with them all,” she hissed and left to go to a bar with a friend.

“That pot is worth more than him and all them Indian traditions.”

Skeet awoke and looked around the room. His wrists and ankles chafed. A single electric bulb hung from a wire over his head and it swung from side to side casting shadows which crept and danced in the silence. The only sound was his own breathing, and that was labored. He heard a slight whistle with every inhalation and grimaced with pain. He thought to scream, but couldn’t get any sound around the sock duck-taped into his mouth.

Blood trickled. Body trembled.

His eyes better able to focus after a few seconds of consciousness, he looked to his left. He saw her sitting at a table. A lit candle flickered and she dabbed at her mouth with a dainty gesture. She hulked in the semi-darkness. A mound of rippled flesh that appeared to weigh in at half a ton. Three empty pizza boxes were spread out on the floor at her bloated white feet. Her once white gown was stained by what Skeet hoped was tomato sauce from the recently devoured pizzas he had delivered.

He hoped. He prayed.

He sniffed at the air and smelled a familiar scent. Body odor perhaps? He saw sweat glisten on the bare flesh of the large woman’s arms. Skeet felt her eyes light upon him, and he turned away, closing his eyes. Was it her he smelled? He doubted it. A childhood memory flitted through his mind. He remembered poking the bloated corpse of a dead cat on a riverbank. Maggots poured out of the nose, mouth, and ears with the slightest compression. He remembered that smell.

Death smelled. He poked.

The memory sickened him. Why the fascination? He had poked and explored that corpse. Despite the stink, despite his twisting stomach and active gag reflex, he had poked. He peeked over to the woman again and saw her eyes. There was a glimmer, a reflection of his twelve-year-old self poking at the dead cat. She managed to stand. She used a walker and began creeping towards him. Skeet shook uncontrollably. She looked at him, curious. The woman held a knife tight in her hand. Skeet looked away as the blade glinted while the light bulb swayed overhead. He saw into the shadows where dead eyes reflected the light.

She poked. He screamed.

Of course, being seven-foot-tall, with spindly, bent legs, claw hands, a ratty mass of hair, a lumpy, misshapen body and a face that missed being attractive by oh, just a kilometer or two, didn’t help either. And this was when I was still a child, my supposedly “cute years.” Some kids grow like a weed; me, I grew like a deformed, noxious one in some forgotten corner of the devil’s garden. My hygiene wasn’t good either, and the circle of flies that hovered around me all the time didn’t help my popularity in school.

Kids can be so cruel, you know. Calling me horrid names became an art form for them, each brat trying to outdo the previous one. So what could I do? I killed them all on the playground one cloudy afternoon at recess. I mean, they shouldn’t have made fun of me during my awkward adolescence; even a monster has his limits. To hide my crime, I ate as many and much of them as I could hold (they were delicious in a steak tartare sort of way).

Well, school and police authorities are so quick to judge, although as the only one left standing and covered in their blood, I guess the evidence did sort of point toward me, so I took off to hide in the nearby swamps until the scandal blew over and everybody forgot about it.

Which no one did, so I remained in the swamps, growing up alone (except for my nut job of a mother), just another nasty and vengeful young punk with a taste for senseless violence and human flesh. My mother blamed it on the heavy metal music and Internet porn.

One day, while tooling through the swamps, I discovered a fancy castle on the edge of the bog, which turned out to be just full of tasty warriors and handmaidens (I had been working out daily in my room, lots of time on my hands you know, so I was dangerously powerful by then and even taller I think; hygiene and appearance remained about the same). Nighttime was the right time for my little search-kill-and-gorge missions.

I was finally happy for the first time in my life, hitting my stride as a tough young punk (well, tough young punk monster), tasting the good life (pun very much intended), and scaring the hell out of the castle dwellers. I was finally somebody, respected (well, feared) and noticed (actually reviled, but still, some attention is better than no attention after years in the swamp).

Then, just when things were rocking along, this pretty-boy Geat comes striding in and decides to play hero, casting me as the monster in his little melodrama (no surprise there).

So one night as I’m tiptoeing around the sleeping warriors (as best I can tiptoe) and peeking under the handmaidens’ bed clothes, this self-deputized Geat (I prefer to call him Geek), leaps up like some undercover cop and proceeds–now get this–to rip my arm off! (What kind of fighting strategy is that? And this guy is the hero?)

Now if that doesn’t just ruin your day, I don’t know what does, and, get this, while I’m bleeding like crazy, he’s beating on me mercilessly with the bloody stump of my own arm! And they call me a monster.

So there was nothing left to do but run like hell and tell my mother on him before I pass out and boy, will he ever be sorry, because my mother is a real monster.

“They seem to appear overnight,” she thinks to herself on her way back to the kitchen with the broom.

She returns to the bedroom and climbs into bed. The bedside lamp goes off. Thoughts of cobwebs dissolve into the random chaos of a middle-aged woman’s mind at bedtime. The covers are pulled up and her body is tucked into the fetal position. The wind through the leaves of the almond tree outside her window lulls her to sleep and soon she is dead to the world.

It hasn’t even occurred to her that something built that web

In a dark corner between the drawers and the wall something stirs. At first it is disoriented. It untangles its legs and scuttles back up the wall. For a long while it waits for another attack, alert and seething. Then, when the attack does not come, it turns around and looks down upon its sleeping foe.

Creeping across the ceiling it casts a monstrous shadow across the patches of moonlight which steal in through chinks in the bedroom curtains. One furry leg in front of another. A quick scuttle and then it stops. It is now directly over her. It can hear the slow and steady sounds of her gentle snoring.

The back end of its abdomen kisses the plaster of the ceiling, attaching a small dot of glue. It waits a moment and then descends towards Chloe’s open mouth on a thin strand of silk. Its eyes are filled with images of the woman’s face. Its legs twitch with impatience.

Not even a full minute has passed before the tips of the spider’s legs touch the pale skin of Chloe’s cheek. One leg slips inside her open mouth but the spider quickly retracts it. Instinct tells the spider that if the victim can’t see, it can’t fight.

So it starts with her eyes, weaving a fine mesh over each lid which sets hard and closes them forever. The strands are continuous. Its back legs work like pistons to pull more and more fine threads from its abdomen. As it scuttles around Chloe’s head it takes the thread with it. Minutes turn into hours but the spider works tirelessly to exact its revenge.

And soon it is joined by others. From corners and gaps in the plaster they come. The room is alive with movement and Chloe sleeps obliviously. Her head is soon off the pillow, suspended by a hundred strands of silk which have been attached to the ceiling. Back and forth they go, and bit by bit Chloe’s body is lifted from the mattress. As each hour passes there is less of Chloe’s body and more silk.

One brazen arachnid deposits a sack of eggs in Chloe’s mouth. The sleeping woman brushes the tiny silk sack aside with a flick of her tongue so the spider bites it. It doesn’t pay to mess with Miss Black Widow.

Chloe wakes up only she can’t open her eyes. She panics. She tries to move but can’t. Within her silken cocoon she wriggles and twists, but her body is suspended, her arms and legs held together by the silk of a hundred spiders.

The sun is ready to make its debut and the spiders have finished their work. They are all looking at the one that started it all. When it feels it has their complete attention it injects its poison.

Chloe wriggles frantically. The pain is fierce, her movements become more erratic. She can feel something happening inside her body. It feels like her insides are melting.

The spiders are in for a long wait.

But the meal at the end of it will be well worth the wait.

The kids showed up halfway through. John Barker, Andy Bumble, and Kelly Bobo. Five, six and seven years old. Like a tiny gang of candy-white spoiled brats.

“What’cha doing, Ms. Bobble?”

Helen had learned to ignore their taunts.

“Growin’ sidewalk flowers?”

The children’s faces and names altered. Their insults did not. In her seventies, Helen taunted back, “Can’t think of anything original to say?” This wit was lost on the little demons. Now, in her pragmatic eighties, she generally let them prattle on, like broken records, saying the same thing every day.

Then Andy Bumble said something she hadn’t heard before:

“Why are you too lazy to use a broom?”

Helen stopped, looked at her frail body, her tiny arms. Long after her friends had been placed in retirement homes, long after everyone she knew throughout her life had passed away, she still had the strength to take care of herself. How could this little brat not see that?

“You should be ashamed of yourself,” she said, then quickly stopped herself. She had broken her own rule.

Andy stuck his tongue out at her.

That was enough. Helen picked the hose up and showered all three of the children with water. They screamed and scattered in different directions, coming together once more across the street.

“I’m telling my mom!” John shouted.

Helen smiled and continued watering her sidewalk.

As soon as their parents went to sleep, all three snuck out and met across the street from Helen’s house. The only lights came from the lamps lining the sides of the road. They crept across it, opened Ms. Bobble’s creaky gate, and slipped inside her yard.

All three failed to notice a quiet rumbling rising from the sidewalk in front of her house.

John placed the bag in front of Helen’s door. Andy got the lighter going, held it to the bag. As soon as it caught on fire, Kelly rang the bell. The kids ran as fast as possible for cover by a tree across the way.

As they approached the sidewalk, Kelly saw that the patch Ms. Bobble watered every morning was opening, like a giant mouth.

“Jump!” she cried.

Kelly and John managed to hurtle the sidewalk. By the time Andy got there, a claw had formed from the concrete. As he jumped, the claw reached up and grabbed him.

“Help!” he screamed.

Ms. Bobble’s front door opened and the old woman quietly poked her head out to see who had the indecency to ring her bell at ten o’clock at night.

Andy put his hands out to her, cried her name, “Ms. Bobble! Help me!”

Ms. Bobble’s eyes glowed from the flames bouncing off the burning bag on her porch. She made no effort to help the child being devoured by her sidewalk or even extinguish the fire before her.

John and Kelly saw nothing. They had gotten home before Helen had even opened her door.

The kids decided to make their morning rounds, beginning with testing Ms. Bobble while she watered her sidewalk.

“What’cha doing?”

The old woman had a tiny smile on her face.

“Growin’ sidewalk flowers?”

Helen chuckled to herself. The children didn’t even notice how the water turned slightly red as it brushed debris into the grass and dirt.

“Scott,” he hollered. “I thought you did zombies last semester.”

“Those buggers in the closet are for Jordon,” Scott answered back from under the shower.

“You doing his work for him?” Leo asked.

“He gives me twenty percent of his salary.” Scott came into the living room, wrapped in a towel. “It’s more than I can make swinging a mop.”

The doorbell rang and Leo opened it to a grinning Jordon, who was holding an apple.

“Got my babies?” Jordon asked.

“Over there.” Leo pointed at the closet door.

Jordon looked in and nodded.

“Great work, Scott,” Jordon said. “The whole department has been trying to get those bastards to confess for a year now. Did you program them like I said?”

“You bet,” Scott answered. “Just drop the apple and they’ll own up to everything.” Scott snapped a mysterious tune on his fingers, and the two zombies opened their eyes and walked out the front door to Jordon’s car.

“Good,” Jordon said. “I’m taking them to the boss right now.”

Jordon handed Scott a piece of paper. “Here’s a description of the B&E suspects I was talking about. Call you tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure,” said Scott.

Leo closed the door behind Jordon and looked at Scott, his hair still dripping.

“How long are you two going to keep this up?” Leo asked.

“Until Jordon gets promoted to Detective,” Scott said.

“What will your cut be then?” asked Leo.

“Forty percent, plus use of his apartment on weekends.”

Leo nodded. He himself had used the zombie technique during his years as a soldier of fortune, but had assumed Scott was uninterested.

“You’re doing well, Scott,” he said.

“Thanks, Dad.”

The clerk inside looked up as a blast of cold, damp air entered the building along with a figure in a trench coat and broad-brimmed hat. “Good evening,” he called before returning to the balance sheets on his desk.

The figure moved in and out of the display racks, slowly hovering along the floor like fog. It perused the looks of city officials and policemen, dancers and would-be debutantes. Finally stopping in front of a simple accountant.

“Not particularly flashy,” the clerk said as he walked up behind the customer. “But I imagine you could blend in just about anywhere in this.”

Though he could not see the customer’s face beneath the upturned collar and wide hat brim, he could feel the malevolent grin as it oozed out with the rainwater in small puddles on the floor.

“Of course,” he added quickly, “we’ll take care of any cleaning as well as tailoring at no extra charge.”

The customer silently offered his arm and, with that, the clerk began peeling off the trench coat so he could get at the shirt and skin beneath and begin his real work. Meanwhile, the accountant stared back, silent, in wide-eyed horror.