The Spider Pt. 17

Anna stood far from the other mourners, out of sight unless any of the crowd attending Steven Longstreet's funeral would have turned around to look.

None of them did.

Anna watched as family and friends said words about what a great man Steven had been, how valuable his work was, how he was a tireless warrior for truth and an implacable enemy of injustice. Anna looked on as they cried, and comforted each other, as they laughed, and they remembered the man they loved.

She didn't hear a word of any of it, but she didn't need to. She knew all of it anyway.

Slowly, as the winter clouds gathered overhead, the crowd began to disperse, dropping flowers into the grave, pouring bourbon into it, saying their goodbyes for the last time.

Still she stood and watched.

Finally, she saw one of the mourners she recognized, and she lifted her hand in greeting from across the cemetery. James Candy raised his as well, popped his collar against the wind, and made his way over to her.

"Hello, Anna," he said. He hesitated for a second, and then pulled her in for a close embrace. He felt good, she thought. It was nice not to be alone with her grief. She held him as well, silently.

Finally, he pulled away.

"We lost one of the good ones," he told her. She only nodded.

Officer Candy looked around the graveyard quickly.

"I pretty much told him everything I ever knew about the City," James went on. "I wasn't the only cop that did that. But I certainly made it a point to. There's a certain... corruption problem on the force, and the only way I could fight that was to tell everything I knew about the City."

"I know," Anna replied.

"I like to think it helped in some small way."

She took his hand in hers.

"It did, James. You are a good man... a good cop."

It was his turn to nod silently.

"How did he die," she asked, her voice only a whisper.

"His neck was broken. Murdered."

This didn't surprise Anna.

"Who killed him?"

"Well..." James trailed off.

"James..."

He looked around furtively again.

"It's not that I won't tell you, Anna. You know I will. But I don't want you... I don't want the Spider anymore. I don't want you doing that."

She just looked at him.

"Steven was killed, sure. But he was killed by a human, which doesn't quite make sense."

"What do you mean?"

"That thing... Red Eyes, was also found in the park next to the river. It was, well, dead I guess you'd call it. We were able to keep that out of the press so far. But Red Eyes didn't kill Steven Longstreet. I mean, it was a monster... much worse than I had imagined from the reports. Huge. Evil. Nothing of this... world, I guess. I don't know how else to say it."

Anna pulled her coat more tightly to her.

"I mean, it looked like a killing machine. Fangs, claws, poison. Could have killed a man any number of ways. But not how Steven was killed."

"Can I see it?"

"What?"

"The body... the creature's body. Where is it? Can I see it?"

James was surprised.

"I don't know... I don't know where it is. They took it." He frowned at her. "Why would you want to see it? What business is it of yours?"

"James-"

He cut her off.

"No. You need to stay home. Stay out of it. Stay with that woman... Heather? Make a life with her. Make a home with her. Whatever is out there in the City is nothing that the Spider can deal with."

"How did Red Eyes die?"

"No," James shook his head. "That's not important. That's my business. I get paid to deal with that. Every day, I get up, and I put on my badge, and I step out into the City and I try to make sense of it, and sometimes I can't. But it's my job to. I don't get to just put on a tight uniform and play games at night."

"That's not fair."

"Fuck it isn't. You don't know. You don't."

"I told you that I wouldn't ever give up being the Spider. I told you what it meant to me."

"I know you did," he said, buttoning his coat. "I know. I fell in love with you, and all I wanted was for you to return that love. And you wouldn't. You couldn't. Whatever it was you said-"

"That's not fair."

"- and I accepted it. I did the best I could with it. Night after night, I listened to the radio, and heard about you. Night after night I rushed to wherever you had been last, hoping to be able to get there in time to help you once you found something that you couldn't handle again."

Anna just shook her head.

"But I always accepted it. I tried to accept it! Not anymore, Anna. You are just a woman- just a human being. You can beat up run of the mill muggers and rapists and drug dealers but there's nothing you can do about this. You didn't see Red Eyes. You haven't seen its victims. Seen them ripped apart, like so much meat. You haven't seen their eyes, Anna, you haven't seen the pain and terror in their dead eyes..."

"James!"

He turned away from her.

"Don't make me come to another funeral, Anna. Don't make me weep at your grave. I might not ever be able to stop."

******************************

A sliver of light reached her eyes. Her eyes twisted in her sockets, looking for the source. She was unable to open her eyelids.

She reached her hands up, slowly, painfully. Her eyes had crusted shut. She used her stiff fingers to scrape it away.

The effort exhausted her. Finally, she opened her eyes.

She was on a hard mattress of some kind in a windowless room. The walls appeared to be some kind of dark stone that absorbed what little light there was. There was nothing else in the room, except a single wooden chair, and a bucket on the store floor next to it.

She grunted in pain as she struggled to sit upright.

It was too much. Her head spun.

She fell back unconscious.

******************************

She woke later, in deeper darkness. Something moist was pressed to her cracked lips. She sucked on the moisture.

"You are coming around," she heard a voice say in the darkness. "I think you are going to live."

She moved her head to the side, and looked uncomprehendingly at him. He lowered the sponge into the bucket of water, and pressed it against her dry lips. Again she drank in the moisture.

"I think I can heal you," he went on. "I didn't know I could, but I can. That's good. But I need you to sleep, it's only when you sleep that I can get inside and make the changes that I need to make. I need you to sleep, please- I need to force myself back into some kind of presentable shape so I can go out in the real world again. I'll be back soon to take care of you some more."

Again he pressed the wet sponge to her lips. Again she drank from it.

Where am I, she wanted to ask. What are you doing to me? How did I get here?

Again she slept.

******************************

Lynda looked at her watch.

Five o'clock. Time to go home. It was Friday, the weekend was about to begin, the work week had passed once again.

She logged off of her computer, and powered it down. A lot of people just left their computers on overnight, she knew, but she liked to power it down completely. No reason to have it sitting there drawing electricity if it wasn't in use.

And it basically wasn't ever in use.

She turned off the lights, and put her key in the lock on the way out. She locked the door, and turned towards the elevators.

She didn't say good bye to anyone. There was no one to say good bye to.

She also hadn't said hello to anyone. The phone hadn't rung in days... weeks? No emails came in.

Each day, she arrived for work promptly at nine, and checked her messages. There weren't any. She checked the company email. There wasn't any. She unlocked the door, and waited to see if there were to be any visitors.

There weren't.

She brought her lunch each day, and ate it promptly at 12:30. By one o'clock sharp, she was back at her desk, ready to work.

But there wasn't anything to do.

Lynda figured that John would contact her at some point with some work that needed to be done, or at this point to tell her that she was fired, or something.

But that didn't happen. Every Friday, her check was deposited in her account, same as always. Not one penny short of the staggering amount that John had always paid her, far more than any other administrative assistant in the City had ever been paid.

Lynda went down the elevator, floor by floor, and got off at the ground floor. She made her way to the parking lot, and put her key in the car.

She started it up, and drove herself home.

*****************************

Lynda lived in a nice split level house in the suburbs. She'd bought the home outright after a year, owned it free and clear. It was a nice and modern home, on a leafy and curved subdivision, a nice broad lawn tapering into a quiet creek.

She let herself into her home, and entered the code onto her security box that turned off the automatic alarm.

Happy hour, she thought to herself, and she went to her kitchen and poured herself a glass of Riesling. She took a sip of it, and glanced at her phone on the wall. She wondered if maybe one of her friends wanted to see a movie, maybe, or get some dinner at some point.

Maybe she'd just stay home.

The doorbell rang.

Lynda put her glass of wine on the counter and went to get it.

John and Amanda were on her front porch, a couple of bags resting on her porch swing.

"Hi," Lynda said, surprised. "Long time no see, boss."

John smiled.

"Hi, darling."

Lynda stood there for a moment, just a brief moment. There was something about his smile... something there that she hadn't seen for a while. Something natural, and unforced. Like when she had first met him, all those years ago.

"Can we come in, do you think?"

Lynda laughed nervously, yes, of course. Of course.

She led the couple into her house.

Amanda looked very tired, Lynda noticed. John looked refreshed, alert, but Amanda clearly needed some rest.

"Are you two hungry?" Lynda asked. "I have some makings for a salad, if you like, I can get that together pretty quickly. Pour you two a glass of some nice Riesling."

"Sounds great," John said. He put his hand gently in the small of Amanda's back, pulled her in slightly. The three of them headed to Lynda's kitchen.

She poured the other two glasses of wine, and pulled out the butter lettuce and began to tear it apart.

"What brings you two by," she asked finally.

"We kind of... need a place to stay for a while. Indefinitely. I don't know how long."

"OK."

John drained half his glass.

"I really appreciate this, Lynda. You were the first person I thought to come to. There's no one else I would trust to help me more than you, you know."

Lynda smiled.

"I know, John." She flashed a reassuring smile at Amanda, who looked about ready to drop. "What happened to your house?"

"Well, we burnt it, Lynda!" John laughed. "We burnt it right to the fucking ground. It's a funny story."

****************************

She opened her eyes again. More strongly, this time. She stretched out slowly.

"Here," he said, and handed her a glass of water.

She was able to sit up, with some effort, swinging her legs over the side of the simple bed. She took the glass.

"Just sip it," he warned. "You don't want to get sick, and vomit. Your body is healing but it's been through a lot. Keep that down, and we can get you some soup tomorrow or so."

She drank from the glass, slowly, letting the cool water roll past her dry and cracked lips.

"Why didn't you let me die," she asked.

He shrugged.

"I thought about it. I decided that I was being rash, and that you were too valuable- potentially too valuable- do just let die for some kind of revenge."

She drank more water.

"What's wrong with your eyes?"

His black orbs.

"Oh, that," he said. "I kind of... change a lot these days. I spend my time on our home planet, and a lot of time in this place. I don't know how I'm able to get here and I don't know how I'm able to survive it. But it changes me, it makes me kind of, well, elastic in some ways. The more time I spend here the more time it takes me to force myself back into my planet Earth shape, if you will."

"Where is this place?"

"Like I say, I don't really know. I just come here. I'm kind of a ghost here, just like I always was on Earth, also. But my ghost nature here gives me a lot of power to change things. Nothing here is very fixed, unlike on Earth. Things here are fluid, and I'm able to change things here. That's how I was able to take a creature like Red Eyes, a vicious little predator, and change it into being my Earthbound killing machine. It took a lot of effort, though... so when you killed it, you cost me a lot of time. I'm not looking forward to having to go through all that again."

She drank more water.

"Easy, easy," he cautioned her, not unkindly. "Your body is very dehydrated, you vomited a lot when I first brought you out of the paralysis, trying to purge the venom. You don't want to get sick again."

"I'm your prisoner, then? What do you want from me?"

"No, no. You are actually able to go if you want to, I won't keep you here. But there's nowhere for you to go, and you'll find that out, even though I expect you'll need to find out on your own."

"OK." She took another sip, and laid back down.

"That's good... you really do need to rest. I'll help you more while you rest."

"Do you have a name of some kind?"

"Of course, I'm... I'm... I'm the Detective." He frowned. "I mean, I have a name. I have one. It's just... hard to remember it sometimes when I'm here."

"OK."

"And you? You just go by 'the Power'? Is that really what I'm supposed to call you?"

But the Power was asleep again.

"I don't know if I like that," the Detective said to no one, and placed both of his hands on her sleeping head, gently, so as not to disturb her sleep. He caressed her flaxen hair with his long and distended fingers, straightening it. Her hair was limp, oily. He would need to wash it for her again soon, give her a bath again soon.

He put her water glass on the floor, and went to work on her. He had a lot of changes that he needed to make.