Curse of the Spider King (16 page)

She sat back in her chair and listened to the water trickle over the layers of rock and splash into the pool. Her eyes closed as the melody of the water mixed with that of the air and of the birds singing above her. It was in this place that she could escape the endless lessons and performances, demands, tests, and reviews. No more Beethoven, no more Haydn. It was here that the music of man died, and the music of life resumed.

She opened her eyes, laid the case across her lap, and unlatched the lid. With violin and bow withdrawn, she let the case slip onto the ground. She tucked the instrument under her chin, took a breath, closed her eyes, and began to play.

All at once she felt her spirit carried away on the wind, countless shapes and colors prompting her onward through a myriad of settings, each with its own mood, its own shades of light and feeling. No one could possibly write this on staff paper or record it in a studio, the way she saw it now. The Master Conductor was at work here, crafting the song of life without being seen . . . without any accolades . . . without any recognition. He was far greater than any conductor she had played under to date.

Here there was no one to critique her, no one to judge if she was living up to her potential. The music that poured from her violin soaked her soul and soothed the tension in her hands. Her arms relaxed. Here Kiri Lee was sure she could fly.

She allowed the melody to fly her far, far away. She slipped into a thunderous crescendo, imagining storm clouds around her. She could feel herself floating among them. But a sense of a lurking menace assaulted her. Brilliant flashes of light ripped through the sky and made the billowing cloud formations glow. Yet strangely, the ominous feeling in her chest did not seem to come from the storm; it was something below the storm . . . something that gave cause to the storm.

But what?

It was then that the melody of the rains came. The music of each droplet rose in harmony with the orchestration of the piece, as if the Master Conductor knew the placement for each one. Kiri Lee tried to drop below the storm, but the winds would not let her. She wanted to see . . . wanted to know what was down there. The music built in her head—swirling shapes and colors all poised on creation.

Then a flash of light.

Kiri Lee opened her eyes. There, only a few yards from her, was a strange-looking man leaning against a tree. He was wearing a trench coat, his wide-brimmed hat pulled down over his eyes. She blinked to get a better look, and he was gone. The sun was dipping below the cityscape. She sat up abruptly, looking at her watch. It had been more than forty-five minutes since she had sat down by the fountain. Her mother and father would be waiting for her at the dinner table by the time she ran back to the apartment.
Not good
.

Sophie had heard the rumbles of thunder and stopped drawing. She glanced toward the sky and then looked around. She saw a tall man leaning against a tree on the opposite side of the sidewalk. Sophie didn't think she had seen this man before, though the shadow of his wide-brimmed hat hid his face almost completely. Like the twin serpents carved into one of the nearby statues, the man's eyes gleamed now and then—but he never turned his head.

Sophie wondered who he was watching. It might be any number of kids in the area. A blur of boys and girls sat cheering from the merry-go-round even as it made them too dizzy to walk, while others jumped rope, played on the monkey bars, and some preschoolers sat learning a song in English.

Eency weency spider went up the water spout,
Down came the rain and washed the spider out,
Up came the sun and dried out all the rain,
So the eency weency spider went up the spout again.

The man remained motionless, Sophie intently watching him. Something floated down from the tree limb a few feet above his left shoulder. It was a big spider—one of those orange and black ones that built the big webs in the eaves of the apartment! The spider dangled on its web, descended past the brim of his hat, and stopped very close to the man's ear . . . as if it were talking to the man. The man nodded and tilted his head this way and that . . . almost as if he were answering back. Sophie giggled and quickly started sketching the man and the spider. Only minutes later the rain began to fall.

“Come along, Sophie,” her mother said. “Get your chalk. A storm is coming.”

“Mais Maman!” Sophie said. “That man, he talks with spiders!”

“What?” Sophie's mother asked. “A man who speaks with spiders?”

“It is true, Maman! I saw him.”

Sophie's mother nodded to her friends and was leading her imaginative daughter out of the playground, when a police officer approached.

“Pardonnez-moi, Madame.”

“Oui?” said Sophie's mother.

The policeman explained that he had received a call about a strange man loitering around the playground and was investigating. Had they seen anything? No, her mother answered, they'd seen nothing unusual.

“Oui, Maman. That was the man I told you about. Come look!”

Sophie walked her mother and the policeman to her unfinished sketch of the man. It was all deep browns, blacks, and grays, a very dark image of a ghostly figure. “He is the one who speaks with spiders! I saw him there,” Sophie said pointing to where the man had been standing.

The policeman and her mother laughed. “A man who speaks with spiders? I'll make note of that,” the policeman said as he walked away.

16

The Tartan and Tiger

RAINING AGAIN. It almost always rained in Ardfern. And when it wasn't raining, it was about to. But that didn't bother twelve-year-old Jimmy Gresham. Quite the contrary, he felt a kind of kinship with the waterfront of Craignish Loch in the Scottish Highlands. The turbulent sky—jagged clouds, some white, some gray, some deepening blue, churning and drifting high and low, at different speeds and even different directions—was part of it. Sailboats tied to their mooring balls rose and fell in the changing tides like giant swans paddling in a ship's wake. Now and then a ship's bell rang, its melancholy tone hanging in the air seemingly forever. That was part of it, too. Even the lush green hills that ran up from the town of Ardfern were—like Jimmy—quiet, alone, and perfectly sad.

It is better than being back in England,
Jimmy thought as he sat, dangling his legs off a rock ledge and tossing pebbles into the sea. Each toss, each splash, brought more life to his hesitant smile. Ardfern wasn't so bad. Sure, his adopted parents seemed to despise him. Oh, they never said it outright, but they didn't have to. Jimmy knew. But anything was better than St. Jerome's Home for Orphans on Paddock Street. Nothing would make him go back there. Nothing.

Thunder announced its presence with a slow, angry roll that rumbled down out of the foothills. Its deep voice penetrated flesh and bone, and Jimmy felt suddenly very strange, almost nauseated. There was a flash of light. Or at least that's what Jimmy thought. But in that briefest of moments, Jimmy saw something, almost like a superquick movie clip in his mind. He had seen himself pick up a large, flat stone and sidearm it into the water. It skipped seven times. Jimmy blinked and shook his head. The nausea was gone. He waited, but there was no thunder.

The rain came down in earnest now, and Jimmy pulled his slicker tight around himself. He didn't mind that it was a couple years old. He sure hadn't grown much. The slicker still fit.

Of course, Geoffry got a new one.
Geoffry.
Jimmy made a clucking noise in the back of his throat, twisted loose a melon-sized rock, and heaved it into the loch. It landed with a deep
SPLOOSH
. When Mr. and Mrs. Gresham were told they couldn't have children, they decided to adopt. That had been six years ago, and Jimmy's arrival to the cobblestone house overlooking the loch had been a happy one.

They picnicked together on the hillside above their house, took car rides on the weekends to Oban, and frequently rode the ferry to Iona. New shoes and clothes seemed to come every other week, and nothing could have stolen his joy. Then came the news that Mrs. Gresham had miraculously become pregnant, an event that baffled the doctors and the family alike. Jimmy was ecstatic. A little brother to show the ropes to, go for walks with in the highlands, and fishing in the loch. Then Geoffry was born. Their “natural” son, as his parents liked to say.

In the blink of an eye, Jimmy went from the apple of their eye to the core . . . barely more than a tolerated houseguest. Mr. and Mrs. Gresham never blatantly mistreated Jimmy. They met his basic needs for food, clothing, and shelter. Love was another thing entirely. Jimmy just could never compare to a blood son. A “legitimate son,” the grandparents had whispered. They, too, favored Geoffry.

Jimmy was almost thirteen now, Geoffry five. The only pleasure Jimmy seemed to take was in the fact that he could wander down to the docks alone while Geoffry whined endlessly to his mother, demanding to tag along. Being doted upon came with a price, and that was Mrs. Gresham's terror that anything should ever happen to Geoffry.

“H'afternoon, wee Jimmy,” said a tall man, snapping Jimmy out of his thoughts. The man carried two crates of soiled paint cans. He wore blue coveralls stained with grease beneath an open yellow rain slicker much like Jimmy's. A thick wool hat adorned his head, and he perpetually clenched a pipe between his teeth.

“Hello, Mr. McDougal,” said Jimmy as he picked up a rather perfect stone—round and flat, fitting perfectly in the C of his thumb and forefinger. He flung the stone and looked up to the visitor. Jimmy never saw the stone skip seven times.

Mr. McDougal stared down at Jimmy, a bit of blue peeping out between bushy gray brows and the wrinkly, weathered bags earned in a lifetime working on the water. He owned one of the two marinas in Ardfern. But unlike the upscale one with nice yachts—even one or two of the royal family's grandchildrens' sailboats—Mr. McDougal's establishment was for those who lived in the area. Hardworking and never sitting idle for a moment, Mr. McDougal was a diligent soul, even if a bit hard at times. “Yu're workin' to catch a cold there, Jimmy boy?”

Jimmy stared out over the water, watching the rings expand from his last throw. “Think anyone would notice if I did?” He instantly regretted speaking his raw feelings like that.

“There now, we cannot have one of Lochgilphead's finest students absent from the annual science fair, can we?”

Jimmy turned and looked up. “That's kind of you to say, but I'm barely gettin' by with me marks.”

“Don't yu be skirtin' the issue now, lad. I know you're a smart one.”

“But me marks are—”

“Yur grades are not a reflection of what I know's inside yur head there, lad,” he said tapping a finger to his own greasy forehead and then quickly reaching for the crates again so they wouldn't fall. “Keep yur chin up there, Jimmy. Yur best days are commin'.”

“Thanks, Mr. McDougal.” Jimmy looked up, and the tall man just smiled and went on his way.
Perhaps Mr. McDougal would miss me
if I were gone
, Jimmy mused.

Jimmy glanced at his wristwatch. It was time to go fetch his father at the ul and then head home. His mother hated when his father was late, and she would take it out on Jimmy. He stood up and threw his remaining pebbles. For a heartbeat, they dimpled the surface among the raindrops and disappeared into the murky loch.

Rather than walk around a large puddle swirling with oily rainbow lines, Jimmy chose to splash through it feeling the cold water soak his socks. He walked past the general store and continued on down the main street until coming to the hotel, home of Ardfern's only ul: The Tartan and Tiger. While the locals stayed clear of the establishment in the summer months, they returned in force after the tourists were gone. And Jimmy's dad could be found there every evening, laughing with his friends and always good for a game of darts.

Jimmy opened the old wooden door and slipped in unnoticed. Short for his age, not many people ever saw him coming or leaving a place. Just once, he wished everyone would notice he'd entered and say, “Hey, Jimmy boy!” or “Look who it is! Jimmy Gresham!” or even “Join us in a game a' darts, me boy.”

He took a look around the ul and pulled off his hood to reveal a damp tuft of red hair above matching brows and hazel eyes. A quartet of men sat around a table drinking their pints, while another pair threw darts. The lights were low, and only a dim gray light seeped in the narrow windows. A few more men sat at the bar, but Jimmy's dad was nowhere to be seen. He walked over and hopped up on one of the empty bar stools.

Behind the bar was Regis McAuliffe, raven-black hair cut just below her jaw line and beautiful dark eyes. Regis always noticed him. But then again, it was her job to notice people when they came in. “Lookin' fer yur da?” Regis asked.

“Aye,” said Jimmy, slightly blushing. If he were ten years older, Jimmy would propose to Regis on the spot. Why she wasn't married was anyone's guess.
If someone didn't propose to her soon,
Jimmy thought,
I could afford a ring by my sixteenth birthday.