A Better Life, page 11
Pete pulled a frown. “Oh, shit, baby…sorry. Pardon my manners. I got myself a little carried away just then.”
He loomed over her, grinning like the very Devil himself.
“Curt’s dead, baby. He’s with the angels now.”
“You’re lying,” Jess cried.
She wished she could believe it.
“I’m afraid not, hot stuff. I’m afraid not. Now if you don’t mind, I’m gonna have you clean your ass-juice from my cock. I want you to lick it good. And if you try to bite it, I’ll cut your eyes out and use them on you like pleasure eggs.”
As he spoke, his erection grew stiffer. Each word he uttered seemed to excite him more.
“I’ll bite it off anyway, you piece of shit.”
Pete looked momentarily disappointed. Then he smiled that dumb, self-satisfied smile. “Well then, in that case, let’s just get down to the cutting, shall we, bitch…?”
He slipped an arm behind his back. When it came back into sight, he held a hunting knife. It shone in the soft light, its blade smooth and deadly.
From behind Pete, Jess heard a voice; soft and lilting, yet wreathed in anger.
“You’re a very, very bad man…”
Pete had heard it too. He twisted his neck around, looking in the direction of the doorway.
“Well, if it isn’t the little lady. Come to get a piece of me yourself, have you, rich kid?”
Jess realized she wasn’t breathing. Amidst all the madness, all the horror, she’d had no time to think of the girl.
Now, though, Emily was the only thing on her mind.
Emily…and the promise the girl had made.
To open doors. To do what she had to do.
For Jess, time froze.
Pete grinned at the girl. “I had to take Jess in the ass, kid…I like the tightness, you see. But you…hell, you’re young enough for the other hole. Why don’t you come over here and say hi to Uncle Pete…?”
“I’m not afraid of you,” Emily said. She wore a frown, deep and furrowed.
“And nor should you be, darlin’. I’ll look after you good.”
Jess met the little girl’s eyes. Saw the hurt there. And was that shame she saw there too?
“I know what you’re afraid of, though,” Emily said softly, tearing her eyes from Jess and affording Pete her full attention.
Jess swallowed hard, remembering the horror Emily had shown her upstairs in the bedroom; a nightmare ripped straight from the deepest recesses of her very soul.
“And what’s that, pretty girl?”
Emily shrugged her shoulders.
“You’re afraid of spiders.”
“Spiders?”
Her emerald eyes, brimming with warmth only seconds ago, filled with a stark, barren coldness, endless and cruel.
“Yes…” A smile touched the tight, angry snarl on Emily’s lips.
“Big. Fat. Spiders…”
25
Pete took two purposeful steps towards the girl, towering over her. Emily stood her ground, her face flushed with fury. Jess watched from the floor, lost in a world of hurt and dark anticipation. Her face burned from her wounds, her stomach cramped tightly. In other more intimate places, the hurt ran deeper. A hurt she understood would never heal.
“Don’t you hurt her!” she roared at Pete.
She tried to get up and found she hadn’t the strength.
Pete laughed. “Hurt her? I’ll do a lot more than hurt her, bitch.” He spoke to Jess, though all his attention was fixed on the small girl stood in the doorway. Defiance and fury burned in Emily’s eyes.
Jess twisted her head to the side and looked at Lisa. The big woman was still out cold. Jesus, the damage he’d done to her. Her face was a bloody ruin. Jess prayed she was still alive.
And what of Curt?
There was no time to even consider the things Pete had said, and had there been, they were too terrible to imagine.
With an agonized grunt she fought to sit up straight, reaching with her one good hand for the table leg, hoping to hoist herself up. She’d do what she could. She’d fight for the girl till she had no fight left.
Sooner be dead than have him hurt little Emily. Than have him…
She’d wrapped her trembling fingers around the wooden leg, blood causing the wood to slide from her grip.
Then she heard the sound.
Pete heard it, too.
He stopped in his tracks.
His head cocked to the side, listening.
Emily, Jess saw, wore a full, bright smile.
Yet in the child’s smile, she saw a malice that distorted the girl’s natural beauty, marring her innocence.
“What the fuck is that noise?” Pete asked, still emboldened but curious. He seemed more agitated than shaken.
Jess froze. All the air seemed to be sucked out of the room. Unreality washed over her as Pete’s head swung left and right. He was trying to make sense of what he was hearing.
It sounded like heavy rainfall.
The tiny pitter patter of a thousand million tiny drops of rain. It was coming from all sides. They were on the bottom floor of a two-story house, yet it sounded like it was raining directly above her head.
In the room above, and even against the very walls.
Impossible.
Even from beneath her in the basement, the sound rose, as though it were somehow raining upward from down there.
No…
Not rain.
Something else.
Jess’ heart seized, her mind reeled, as she realized what was making the terrible, unnatural sound. Every hair on her body stood on end as she listened, heard, felt the cause of the all-encompassing sound, moving behind the walls, the ceiling, on the lower side of the floor, beneath where she lay, crumpled and bleeding.
Oh, dear god…
Pete’s wicked grin was gone. His face pallid, bled of color. He looked close to fainting as he began to realize that what he was hearing was not rain, nor was it anything natural.
“What the fuck are you doing!?” he demanded of the girl.
Emily said nothing. She met his increasingly frantic stare with a cruel smirk.
“What is this!?”
Jess knew.
In the name of all things unholy, Jess knew…
The sound grew in volume until it seemed to bore into her soul.
She followed Pete’s line of sight as his head snapped to the kitchen window. Beyond the window, there was no desert night. Beyond the window, there was nothing.
The window was covered, every millimeter, every tiny area of glass, from top to bottom…
…with spiders.
They scuttled madly across the glass, seeking purchase, determinedly searching for a way inside the house. They were all sizes; some as small as a fingernail, some fat and swollen, as large as the palm of her hand.
A primal dread seared away her reason as she watched them madly crawl across and over each other, a thousand of them on the glass alone, a hundred thousand. She sensed their baleful eyes, black as night, soulless, abominable…
Ravenous.
When she heard the scream, it took Jess a second to realize the sound hadn’t come from her own throat.
It came from Pete.
He stood in the center of the kitchen, spinning wildly, his eyes darting from ceiling to floor, then back to the window again. Always back to the window, where the hungry horde of arachnids scurried and crawled, separated from him by nothing more than fragile glass.
Jess struggled to rise, managing only to position herself upright. From her left, a new sound, still like rainfall, though now as though the heavens had vented their fury on a roof of metal or tin.
It was coming from the sink.
Wide-eyed and barely comprehending, Jess allowed herself to look. Though she couldn’t see the plughole from her position of the floor, she could see the taps up there.
The taps, old and worn, rusted around the edges, were pouring what looked like a thick black liquid into the sink, and the sink was rapidly filling up.
The black substance had legs.
It had eyes, it had limbs, all fighting for purchase as the spiders poured from the taps into the basin. In seconds, the sink was overflowing. The spiders crawled from the sink’s metal confines and made their way to the kitchen floor, some crawling down the woodwork, some slowly descending on webs. Others, larger ones, fell from the sink and landed by her side, where they quickly righted themselves.
Behind her, the rear door to the old house swung open with a slow, dreadful groan.
Rooted to the floor by his own stark terror, Pete let out a choked scream. His head shook from side to side, his mind unable to grasp what he was witnessing as, from the open door, a million more eight-legged, black and bristling nightmares scurried into the kitchen, their bodies shivering with anticipation. They moved as one, quickly navigating the kitchen floor till they covered all corners. Jess shivered as the bristling, living tide scurried around her sides, avoiding her, but close enough that she could see the light glint in their cold, dead eyes. With horrified wonder, she marveled at the spiders’ terrible grace as they flowed like a stream, deftly scuttling around her hands, bypassing her legs and always, always with their cruel intent fixed on the panting, near-hysterical Pete. He was saying something to himself under his breath, over and over and over again.
Jess wondered if he was praying.
It wouldn’t do him any good.
Looking up from the disgusting carpet of legs, eyes and fangs, Jess saw that the hallway to Pete’s rear held the same horrors. A million more spiders covered every inch of the hallway’s walls, floor and ceiling, forming a living tunnel. As she watched, a faded painting fell from the hallway wall, forced from its peg by the thick, broiling mass of arachnids. It fell to what had been the floor silently, the crash of its fall muted by the climbing, scurrying, agitated layer of spiders beneath.
There was no way out.
Pete knew it, too.
Behind him, Emily stood by the door, her face etched with a cold fury. As they had with Jess and, she noticed, with Lisa, the crawling mass moved around her feet, ignoring her completely. The girl stood there like a general amassing her armies. Within ten seconds more, the river of spiders had filled the entire floor.
Having covered the linoleum, they moved as one, crawling up the kitchen walls, climbing the table legs and covering its mass, spreading out like deadly shadow till the walls and table, too, were deepest, living black. The old grandfather clock that stood just within the threshold of the room disappeared as the spiders swallowed it in their relentless tide. The roof was next. Before she could properly digest the sheer horror of it all, Jess found herself utterly surrounded by the arachnids. She half-lay, half-sat on the floor with Lisa by her side, both untouched, both human islands in a hungry sea.
The spiders moved onward, towards their prey.
Pete had backed up into a corner of the room, his mind clearly unravelling as his phobia gripped him in its terrible power. On the walls to his rear, the spiders shifted in agitation. On the floor, they stopped just before his feet.
As sudden as it had begun, the terrible sound of the roiling spider army ceased. The room descended into a terrible silence. Jess blinked blood, sweat and dizzying terror from her eyes, watching as Emily’s army - from the smallest spider to the largest – settled into a terrifying stillness.
Nothing moved.
The room held its breath.
Pete was whimpering.
“What is this!?” he shrieked, his eyes flitting from wall to wall, floor to ceiling. “Make it stop, cunt!” he begged more than demanded.
Emily turned her head towards him.
As one, the legion of spiders turned towards the petrified man in the corner, shuffling on a million bristling legs.
Countless cold, shining eyes fell on Pete, silently appraising their meal as he babbled madly to himself.
Jess, shocked into silence, shuddered in revulsion as the endless sea of eager horrors studied him.
“You shouldn’t hurt people,” Emily whispered, breaking the deafening silence that clung to the house.
“Please…” Pete whined through hitched breaths.
“You made my friend hurt. You’d make me hurt if you could, too…”
“Make it stop…please…I’ll leave…! I’ll go…!”
“You will go,” Emily agreed. “You’ll go soon. And you won’t like it when you get there…”
“What are you!?” he half-growled, half-cried.
Emily cocked her head to the side, appraising the terrified, pathetic rapist, walled in by his own nightmare.
“Does it matter?”
Pete tensed. Jess could sense the bastard willing himself to flee. Fear gripped him like a fever, but instinct would soon override it.
He’d flee.
He’d try.
Emily met Jess’ eyes, momentarily. In them, Jess saw concern. “Are you okay?”
Jess nodded slowly, too terrified to make a sound or move a muscle, fearing that the stone-still legion of spiders would turn their attention from the miserable bastard in the far corner and onto Lisa or herself.
That wouldn’t happen, though, deep down she understood it.
This nightmare was all Pete’s.
Impossible as it was, they’d sprung from the seeds of his darkest terror like wraiths.
And they’d come for he and he alone.
Jess knew it.
And Pete knew it.
With black fascination, Jess waited, her heart hammering in her chest.
“You’d better start running…” Emily said sweetly.
As one, the living ocean of fanged horrors bristled with purpose.
Then they made for Pete.
26
The moment the uncanny stillness was broken. The black wave of spiders pressed towards him as Pete’s paralysis finally broke. Terrified, he ran blindly, with no idea of where he was going. The room, the house, was a living, writhing thing, eager to feed. He could no longer tell where the kitchen door was. It could have led him outside of this hellish place, but it had vanished, buried behind the trembling horde. It was simply gone, obliterated by an inches-thick swamp of the vile arachnids. That left only one option, one exit…
The hallway. Then, from there, the front door, wherever the hell that was.
Pete made for the open doorway, frantically brushing spiders from his hair as they descended on silken webs from the ceiling, pouring over his face, tangling in his hair, exploring every available orifice, seeking a way inside. He brushed them from his nostrils as they pushed and probed and dug.
Was he still screaming? He couldn’t be sure.
He moved fast and was soon passing by the child…
…monster…
…who stood, untouched, still as stone amidst the black sea. He stumbled madly down the living hallway, feeling her vengeful gaze upon him as he lunged towards the living, crawling hallway. With each step, sickening crunches filled his ears, as dozens…hundreds…of the spiders flattened and burst beneath his boots, spewing internal organs from bulbous, swollen bodies.
He wailed as he slipped by the doorway, almost going down, only managing to save himself by grabbing the doorframe. More repulsive popping, crunching sounds rang in his ears as the spiders covering the doorway broke apart beneath his fingers, oozing thick, purplish fluid between his fingertips. The dead were quickly replaced, as those surrounding their obliterated family immediately began scuttling over his hand and arm. In seconds, Pete was wearing a sleeve of arachnids.
They began to bite.
With a shriek that only seemed to energize the spiders, he smashed his other hand down on his arm, squashing scores of the vicious little monsters into his skin. He pushed himself clumsily from the wall and desperately tried to brush off the surviving spiders. Where he cleared them, he could see the mass of tiny red puncture marks where the hideous creatures had sunk their fangs into him.
He’d been lucky.
The spiders that had found purchase on his skin had all been small. No larger than a house-spider.
Had they been the larger ones…
He had to keep moving.
To stop would be the end of him.
Pete moved down the writhing, breathing hallway, crushing the hungry fiends as he ran their hellish gauntlet, praying to God for an exit. When he made it through the churning, black corridor, he found no relief.
Instead, Pete’s horror only intensified.
The single doorway leading to the living area was shut. Crawling over it were thousands more spiders.
And these ones were huge.
He’d seen videos of horrible arachnids that haunted the desert sands of Iraq, terrorizing the troops over there. They were enormous, abominations against all that was good in the world. The spiders scuttling across the wooden door looked even larger.
They moved with a terrible grace and will, their fangs visibly dripping with a clear fluid that could only be venom.
There was no way through.
Yet staying still was not an option.
On seeing the doors dreadful wards, he’d paused in his flight for only a second, and already the spiders that claimed the floor beneath his feet were scuttling up his boots, covering his ankles, scaling his jeans. Pete could feel them beneath the fabric, exploring the tender flesh of his legs.
Insane with panic, he smashed his fists into his jeans, mindless of the pain as he pummeled his own thighs, crushing the spiders as they dug and bit and fed.
One of the huge spiders on the door leapt from the throng.
Pete shrieked as the massive predator hurtled toward his face with the underside of its black, mottled belly exposed and its long limbs spread out like welcoming hands.
Screaming, he batted it from the air, horrified by the contact. It landed amidst the moving, black carpet, only a foot from where he stood. Then, at an alarming speed, it rushed towards him, moving atop the smaller spiders, crushing its brothers and sisters beneath its terrible weight.
With no sense of where he was going, Pete hurtled himself to the left, skidding on the sticky mulch beneath his boots.
