Every House Is Haunted (35 page)

He figured the crickets were holed up behind the water heater, or maybe under the wash tub. Jude only went downstairs to put on laundry, but lately she was making him do it. The chirping, she said, was becoming too much to bear. She told Morris to hire an exterminator, but he had refused. Surely he was capable of taking care of a few crickets.

Except now he wouldn’t have to. The spider could do it for him. He had seen a program on the Discovery Channel that said spiders were the sheriffs of the insect kingdom. They were tough little rascals. The program had also said that spiders couldn’t die of natural causes, and if kept safe, a spider can continue to live and grow for a theoretically unlimited amount of time. Apparently there was a collection of “holy” spiders in China that had been hatched some 2,800 years ago. One of the geeks on the show said that a spider’s carapace, if sufficiently scaled, could adequately shield a nuclear blast.

It might take a few weeks for this particular spider to catch the crickets, but in the long run it would be worth the money he’d end up saving on an exterminator. And so what if Jude had to suffer a bit longer. She didn’t seem to care about his own suffering at having to leave Portland.

Okay
, he thought, putting down the magazine,
you’ve just been pardoned, my eight-legged friend
. But he wouldn’t tell Jude. No way. She’d think the solution was worse than the problem.

Morris spent the rest of the day setting up his new television, adjusting the settings on his new television, and then playing with his new television. By nine o’clock he was beat and dragged himself to bed, answering Jude’s few, polite inquiries about the television, and then falling quickly into sleep.

He dreamed of Eddie.

His first thought when he saw him, coming down the stairs into Morris’s den, was:
Don’t I see you enough when I’m awake? Now you’ve got to barge into my dreams?

He watched as Eddie, dressed in his plaid bathrobe and moose slippers, came over to the new television. Eddie smiled as he took a metal canister out of one frayed pocket. He held it up with both hands, displaying it like a prize on a television game show, and Morris saw it was a canister of starter fluid.

What are you doing here, Ed?

Eddie continued to smile as he upended the canister and poured starter fluid all over the television. It splashed across the black plastic housing and ran down the polished screen. Eddie produced a wooden kitchen match and scratched it across his thumbnail. Still smiling, he dropped it onto the console. A wave of flame leapt up with a
whomff!
sound. Morris stepped back, shielding his face from the bright flames.

Damn!
Eddie bellowed.
Was that thing flammable?

Unable to move, Morris watched as the fire ran down the screen in burning rivulets. There was loud pop and a fan of sparks exploded off the back of the console. The television screen blackened, cracked, and coughed glass onto the carpet. Acrid smoke billowed out of the hole.

Eddie danced puckishly before the quickly spreading fire.
Oopsie!
he said with a shrug, and ran up the stairs. Morris followed. He moved quickly, but when he reached the living room, Eddie was nowhere to be found. He looked out the big picture window and there was Eddie, outside on the lawn. He wasn’t alone. It looked like the entire neighbourhood had come out to watch his house burn. Eddie smiled and waved.

House is on fire!
he shouted.
It’s the antenna! It’s throwing off sparks like a sonuvabitch!

At first Morris thought he misheard him—then a shower of sparks came down from somewhere on the roof. But there was no antenna up there. The only thing he thought it could be was a downed power transformer. But there weren’t any that crossed over the house.

Morris heard a crash behind him, followed by a tinkling sound like the ringing of tiny bells.

As he was turning around, he woke up. For a second or two he thought he could still hear the tinkling, as if the sound had followed him into the waking world. But the house was dark and silent.

He picked up the glass of water on the nightstand and drained it in a single gulp. He looked over at Jude’s side of the bed, but it was empty. The door to the connecting bathroom was closed and he could hear muffled retching sounds from within. He wanted to get up and make sure she was okay, but he was so exhausted he could hardly move. All was quiet on the digestive front, but he felt weak and oddly used up. His body was slick with sweat. He pulled his nightshirt up over his head and tossed it on the floor. His skin was ghostly pale and there was a purple bruise the size of his fist under his left armpit. He didn’t recall hurting himself there. Maybe when he was moving the television? But that didn’t explain why he felt so drained.

Probably picked up a bug
, he thought. In the bathroom, Jude made another heaving sound.
Both of us.

A damn flu bug. And on a Friday, no less! He had the whole weekend planned out. He was going to clean the gutters, mow the lawn for what he hoped was the last time this season, and go to the hardware store to pick up a new set of hedge-clippers. His old set had vanished last year into the Bermuda Triangle that was Eddie Giles’s tool shed.

He heard the toilet flushed, and Jude came shuffling out of the bathroom, wiping her mouth. “I barfed,” she said unceremoniously. “Must’ve been those fish sticks.”

Morris gawped at her. She was pale as a ghost. “Maybe,” he said.

Morris didn’t bother showering the following morning. Instead, he went down to the den and put on a movie. Fifteen minutes into it, he started to feel drowsy. He found his attention drifting over to the spider, still building its web in the corner.

As he watched, the spider crawled up to the ceiling and skittered across to a spot directly above the television. Morris felt something move along his arm and brushed at it instinctively. But when he looked there was nothing there. The feeling remained for a moment—like a slight breeze blowing through the hair on his arm—then it was gone. He looked back at the ceiling and saw the spider floating down on a thin, almost invisible strand of web. The moment it landed on top of the television, the picture on the screen went out. There was no flash, no pop, no spark. It just went out.

Morris went into the laundry room and checked the fuse box. He replaced the blown fuse (a thin curl of smoke rose off the cooked end) and returned to the den.

The television was back on. He dropped back onto the couch and looked into the corner. The spider was back in its web, racing busily back and forth.

Morris droned.
Coffee break’s over, fella. Get back to work.

He slept.

The day drifted and so did Morris. Time dissolved into a grey mist that, in his mind, looked like a spider web in which his thoughts were caught like flies. He did none of the things he had planned for the day; he never even left the den. He slept, he woke, he shifted around on the couch, he slept some more. At one point he woke up and saw the spider on the armrest beside his head.

Howdy, sheriff? Catch any varmints today?

The spider remained still, legs curled up to its sides, which wasn’t grey after all but a deep, almost reflective, silver. Morris was struck by the crazy idea—it had to be crazy, didn’t it?—that the spider was watching the television.

“Too much of this stuff will rot your brain.”

He picked up the remote and put it on the Discovery Channel.

“You might as well learn something.” He looked down at the spider. It still hadn’t moved. “You’re a smart little fella, aren’t you?”

Morris shook his head and slunk down lower on the couch.

Then he drifted off again.

The next time he woke up the spider was gone and there was a test pattern on the television screen. He turned it off and went upstairs. He was so tired when he reached the top of the stairs that he made a proclamation to join a gym next week. This was starting to get embarrassing. He went to bed and slept through most of Sunday with Jude curled up beside him.

He dimly recalled going into the bathroom at some point, but the memory was distant and intangible. It might even have been a dream. A part of him hoped it was because he recalled looking into the mirror and seeing a face that was not his own. It was the gaunt face of a concentration camp refugee. His eyes looked like ice chips staring out of sockets that seemed much too deep; his cheeks were sunken and carved with dark lines of shadow; and his lips were bright red, as if he had been eating cherries. He didn’t look sick—he looked diseased.

The following morning—was it Monday already?—Morris tried to take out the garbage. He made it halfway to the curb before a wave of nausea came over him. It felt like someone was jabbing him in the stomach with a stick. He stumbled back up the driveway and and along the flagstone path to the front porch. For a brief moment he glanced up at the roof. He saw the new satellite dish and, next to it, a silver antenna.

Had the satellite people installed that?

For some reason he associated the antenna with fire, but he didn’t know why. It was just a silver rod, about eighteen inches long, with a ball-bearing on the tip. And yet something in his mind was convinced that wasn’t all it was.

He went back inside and picked up the phone in the kitchen. He had to call work and tell them he wouldn’t be in today, maybe not for a few days. As he put the receiver to his ear, a horrible screeching sound came out of the earpiece. He drop the phone and it smacked loudly on the linoleum floor. He picked it up, replaced the receiver, and went back upstairs to check on Jude.

She was curled up on her side of the bed. He crouched next to her and gave her arm a reassuring squeeze. When he let go, his fingers left dark impressions on her skin. Bruises. Morris shook her—gently at first, then progressively harder—but she wouldn’t wake up.

“Jude,” he said with a slight tremor in his voice. “Jude, wake up.”

She muttered something unintelligible and fell silent.

Morris raced back downstairs and grabbed the car keys off the cork board. He went outside and the nausea fell on him again. It felt as if his head was wrapped in a hot, wet towel. He stumbled down the porch steps and zigzagged across the flagstone path to his car. The early morning sun felt hot enough to burn holes through his skin.