Mrs. Reppler screamed "Ware!" again, and we turned toward her. Another of them had come out of the mist and had wrapped its legs around Dan Miller in a mad lover's embrace. He was striking at it with his fists. As I bent and picked up Buddy's pinchbar, the spider began to wrap Dan in its deadly thread, and his struggles became a grisly, jittering death dance.
Mrs. Reppler walked toward the spider with a can of Black Flag insect repellent held outstretched in one hand. The spider's legs reached for her. She depressed the button and a cloud of the stuff jetted into one of its sparkling, jewel-like eyes. That low-pitched mewling sound came again. The spider seemed to shudder all over and then it began to lurch backward, hairy legs scratching at the pavement. It dragged Dan's body, bumping and rolling, behind it. Mrs. Reppler threw the can of bug spray at it. It bounced off the spider's body and clattered to the hottop.
The spider struck the side of a small sports car hard enough to make it rock on its springs, and then it was gone.
I got to Mrs. Reppler, who was swaying on her feet and dead pale. I put an arm around her. "Thank you, young man," she said. "I feel a bit faint."
"That's okay, 'I said hoarsely.
"I would have saved him if I could."
"I know that."
Ollie joined us. We ran for the market doors, the threads falling all around us. One lit on Mrs. Reppler's marketing basket and sank into the canvas side. She tussled grimly for what was hers, dragging back on the strap with both hands, but she lost it. It went bumping off into the mist, end over end.
As we reached the IN door, a smaller spider, no bigger than a cocker spaniel puppy, raced out of the fog along the side of the building. It was producing no webbing; perhaps it wasn't mature enough to do so.
As Ollie leaned one beefy shoulder against the door so Mrs. Reppler could go through, I heaved the steel bar at the thing like a javelin and impaled it. It writhed madly, legs scratching at the air, and its red eyes seemed to find mine, and mark me ...
"David!" Ollie was still holding the door.
I ran in. He followed me.
Pallid, frightened faces stared at us. Seven of us had gone out. Three of us had come back, Ollie leaned against the heavy glass door, barrel chest heaving. He began to reload Amanda's gun. His white assistant manager's shirt was plastered to his body, and large gray sweat-stains had crept out from under his arms.
"What?" someone asked in a low, hoarse voice.
"Spiders," Mrs. Reppler answered grimly. "The dirty bastards snatched my market basket."
Then Billy hurled his way into my arms, crying. I held on to him. Tight.
Chapter X. The Spell of Mrs. Carmody. The Second N
It was my turn to sleep, and for four hours I remember nothing at all. Amanda told me I talked a lot, and screarned once or twice, but I remember no dreams. When I woke up it was afternoon. I was terribly thirsty. Some of the milk had gone over, but some of it was still okay. I drank a quart.
Amanda came over to where Billy, Mrs. Turman, and I were. The old man who had offered to make a try for the shotgun in the trunk of his car was with her-Cornell, I remembered. Ambrose Cornell.
"How are you, son?" he asked.
"All right." But I was still thirsty and my head ached. Most of all, I was scared. I slipped an arm around Billy and looked from Cornell to Amanda. "What's up?"
Amanda said, "Mr. Cornell is worried about that Mrs. Carmody. So am I."
"Billy, why don't you take a walk over here with me?" Hattie asked.
"I don't want to," Billy said.
"Go on, Big Bill," I told him, and he went-reluctantly.
"Now what about Mrs. Carmody?" I asked.
"She's stirrin things up," Cornell said. He looked at me with an old man's grimness. "I think we got to put a stop to it just about any way we can."
Amanda said. "There are almost a dozen people with her now. It's like some crazy kind of a church service."
I remembered talking with a writer friend who lived in Otisfield and supported his wife and two kids by raising chickens and turning out one paperback original a year-spy stories. We had gotten talking about the bulge in popularity of books concerning themselves with the supernatural. Gault pointed out that in the forties Weird Tales had only been able to pay a pittance, and that in the fifties it went broke. When the machines fail, he had said (while his wife candled eggs and roosters crowed querulously outside), when the technologies fail, when the conventional religious systems fail, people have got to have something. Even a zombie lurching through the night can seem pretty cheerful compared to the existential comedy/horror of the ozone layer dissolving under the combined assault of a million fluorocarbon spray cans of deodorant.
We had been trapped here for twenty-six hours and we hadn't been able to do diddlyshit. Our one expedition outside had resulted in fifty-seven percent losses. It wasn't so surprising that Mrs. Carmody had turned into a growth stock, maybe.
"Has she really got a dozen people?" I asked.