A Mischief in the Woodwork

CHAPTER 11

Spidery Demons

I didn't feel like myself as I stood before Manor Dorn with Tanen at my side. I'd brought him back.

Curse me.

“Are we to go in?” he prompted after stewing silently about beside me, when giving me a moment to process doorway protocol didn't do the trick.

There was nothing else I could do to prolong this stalling act. I had held his instatement at bay as long as I could over the course of our journey back, but now there was nothing left standing between us and that frightful position I had laid out for him. My betrayal stood at the precipice of being put into motion. All I need do was kick it off the cliff.

I wished I could kick it off the cliff altogether.

But it was time to admit to myself what I had done.

Perhaps I shouldn't have been so quick to lay out the rules and conditions of his stay as we made our way back from the city, so I would have that to do now, before admitting him. But I had been unable to keep from drilling them into him as we commenced together, lest he get the idea that I was entirely too impressionable, too easy. I was not some gullible mot he could take for a ride. He would not be taking advantage of my hospitality, certainly. I had assigned a grueling number of tasks to his responsibility, to make sure he understood he would bloody well be earning his keep. To his credit, he had accepted them without any protest.

And now we were here, with nothing more I could hold against him. I had half hoped he would put up some spoiled fuss regarding everything I charged him with taking over, so I could toss him back out on a failure to qualify for a position in our house. But he hadn't given me anything else to latch onto.

Sucking in a steadying breath, I reached for the door and cast it open.

The hinges creaked inward, baring the homey shadows of the interior. I could scarcely bring myself to step over my own threshold, and face those who would pay the price of my actions, even though I knew they would be nothing but welcoming.

Curse them too. Tanen did not deserve their indulgence.

But the weight of the corset was symbolic under my arm, pressing into me with the promise of advantage. He would equip us with what he promised, I swore. He would make this worth it. And if he didn't, I would revert right back to the primitive savage I knew how to become in the face of desperation, and he would taste the wrath of the Albino way he thought he knew how to channel. He may have charmed me with the armor I carried under my arm, but by no means had he harnessed me with it.

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.