Hangman's Curse (20 page)

“Norman?” she called.

“Elisha!” her radio squawked.

The sound was so loud and sudden it made her jump. “Hello? Mom?”

“Where are you, honey?”

Elisha swallowed. “We might have an emergency, Mom. Norman went down the shaft first and disappeared. I'm in the shaft now, looking for him.”

Apparently her mother had pressed the talk button but then paused to listen to someone else. Elisha could hear another voice in the background—it had to be Professor Wheeling—going absolutely nuts. “—near Blake's locker! The female has a nest back there. Get her out of there right now! She's going to . . .” She couldn't understand the rest. Finally her mother's voice came on. “Elisha? Listen to me. You're in serious danger where you are. You have to get out of there!”

“But what about Norman?”

“We'll get some help, don't worry. Just get out of there right now, do you hear me?”

Just looking around, Elisha was quite convinced. “Okay. I'm going back the way I came.”

“Call me when you get out.”

“Okay.”

She turned quickly. A board snapped under her foot, she went off balance, put out the other foot to catch herself—

It broke open a hatchway and she fell through it, her skull smacking against the hatch frame. Stunned and limp, she tumbled through empty, black space, landed belly-down on a large, metal heating duct, slid off, fell, landed on another duct, rolled off, then tumbled down a slope of rubble to an old concrete floor where she finally came to rest, still and unconscious.

Her radio remained attached to her belt, but the line to her headset had pulled loose, so it was silent. The radio's tiny red power indicator light was the only thing visible in the total darkness— until something covered it.

11
dollars and
scents

A
lgernon was packing up
his gear, throwing everything back in the cases. “We've got to get down to the school right now. They have to close that place! They have to get everybody out!”

Sarah warned, “That may not be easy.”

He looked at her, his crooked eyes now crazy with alarm. “Oh, there is no choice in this matter! What happened in Kenya could happen here!”

She grabbed his arm. “Algernon! What happened in Kenya?”

“You don't know?” Then he wagged his head and began correcting himself. “No, of course, she doesn't know, you dummy! You think everybody cares about bugs the way you do?”

She still had hold of his arm, and now she jerked it violently. “Algernon!
What happened in Kenya?”

He scrambled to the Springfields' computer. “Do you have Internet access?”

“Answer my question!”

“I AM answering your question! Internet access, Sarah—oh, and pardon me for raising my voice!”

She tapped out the steps for going on-line.

While the computer chirped and warbled over the phone lines, Algernon looked at Sarah as directly as he could, his eyes wild, and gasped it out. “It happened in 1932. An American vessel loaded goods and fruit in Kenya, then sailed for America. Perfectly normal commerce. Happens all the time. But some spotted wolves got on board, hiding in the fruit, and . . .” He looked off into space as if viewing the whole story on an invisible movie screen. “And there were brown recluses aboard the ship. No one knows how many.” He sniffed a little laugh and added, “Of course, all you'd need is
one.”

The computer was on-line. He tapped out a Web site and hit the enter key.

As the first image downloaded, he continued, “The ship went off course, then totally adrift. It was missing for weeks, and wouldn't answer any radio calls. A Japanese freighter finally sighted it out in the middle of the Indian Ocean and pulled alongside.” He looked into space again, staring at the images racing through his brain. “All the crew were dead—horribly dead. They'd torn the ship apart, destroyed every room, smashed all the equipment, savagely beaten and stabbed each other—and the ship was crawling with spiders.”

The Web page was on-screen, some kind of technical page with links to various insects and their habitats. Algernon clicked a link, banged some keys, and found another image. “With
this
spider! The brown wolf hybrid.”

Sarah thought the other images were gruesome, but they were tame compared to this one. This spider was large, covered with bristles, coal black with yellow stripes along its belly, with glistening rat's eyes—at least seven—and what looked like silvery tusks.

Algernon shook his head in wonder. “Just look at the fangs on that thing.”

Elijah took Mr. Maxwell through the front door and through the metal detector, and by now he was drawing enough stares from the students filling the halls that he felt stark naked. He could only hope this had all been cleared with Ms. Wyrthen and Officer Carrillo.

Plenty of kids wanted to greet Max and give him some pets, and of course, Max was more than happy to receive them.

But that's when it started. A girl came up, her hand extended. “Hi, nice doggie! How you doin'?”

Max didn't mind getting a pet, but he smelled something on her hand. Alerted, he looked at Elijah, fidgeting, whimpering.

The girl jerked her hand away. “Oh, does he bite?”

“No, not at all,” Elijah answered. “But—”

A boy saw what happened and told the girl, “Hey, that's a drug-sniffing dog!”

That scared her. “Is he?”

Elijah tried to answer, “Well, yeah, but—”

“Good-bye.” She turned away.

Max tried to follow her. Elijah held him back on his leash.

Then he sniffed a tall senior walking by and alerted again, sniffing at the young man's carry bag and whimpering.

The young man jerked his bag away. “Hey, what is this?”

Elijah was just as startled. “Uh, nothing. Max, are you—”

The guy was mad. “Well, I'm not carrying any drugs, so keep that dog away from me!”

The talk was spreading. Elijah could hear it as he and Max moved down the hall. “Drug dog!” “It's a drug-sniffing dog!” “Springfield's a
narc?”

Talk about the Red Sea parting before Moses! The bodies in the hallway moved aside, ran ahead, made room, as if Max had an invisible bumper ten feet all around him.

But Max was acting crazy, whimpering, racing one direction and then another, his nose along the wall, then up against the lockers, then up against anyone who still came close enough. A cute little freshman girl walked by, smiled at Max, and said hello. He sniffed her handbag and alerted, looking at Elijah excitedly.

But Max was acting crazy, whimpering, racing one direction and then another, his nose along the wall, then up against the lockers, then up against anyone who still came close enough.

“Max, are you sure?” Elijah asked.

Max only whimpered and nudged the girl's handbag again.

Someone called, “Look out! That's a drug-sniffing dog!”

The little girl was perplexed. “But . . . I don't use drugs.”

Elijah gave Max a pet to calm him down. “Uh, sorry, I think he's a little confused.”

She gave Max a friendly wave and walked on.

Max smelled something across the hall and tugged at his leash again. Then another student passed by and he lurched nose-first in that direction. He was getting too upset to handle.

Elijah had a terrible thought: What if he
isn't
confused?

Marquardt was getting brash, as if he enjoyed upsetting this stranger in his office.

“You have to realize, kids like Norman Bloom attract this kind of treatment. Maybe it's nature's way of bringing us all up to par. Tod Kramer picked on him, Jim Boltz picked on him, Blake Hornsby picked on him . . .”

Nate glanced at the clock on the wall just above Marquardt's head. Soon the bell would ring and classes would start. The school would be filled with kids. Elijah had no doubt arrived with Max, and Nate hadn't even asked if Max could sniff out the locker room.

He saw something.

Marquardt was still talking. “There was Doug Anderson and—who was that other kid?—Baynes. Yeah, Leonard Baynes. Craig Forbes, a few others. Hey, even
I
picked on him, if that's what you want to call it.” He laughed to himself. “I've chewed him out quite a few times, but believe me, he'll live.”

If the tiny dot had not descended across the white face of the wall clock, Nate probably would not have seen it. But Nate only needed a second look to discern the oval-shaped body and the outstretched, groping legs, the silvery, vertical web line, thinner than human hair, by which the spider was lowering itself directly toward Marquardt's head.

“So if you ask me—” Marquardt was saying.

“Excuse me,” Nate said as he grabbed Marquardt by the arm and yanked him forward.

Marquardt cursed and jerked his arm loose, ready for a fight.

“I'm very sorry,” Nate said, looking into Marquardt's face. Marquardt could see no fight in Nate's eyes and relaxed a little. Nate pointed. “Take a look.”

Marquardt followed Nate's gaze just in time to see a thin, spindly, brownish-red spider alight on Marquardt's chair. It began scurrying around the chair in circles as if searching for something.

Nate spotted an empty water glass sitting on Marquardt's desk. He reached over, grabbed it, and placed it upside down over the spider, trapping it.

Marquardt sneered. “Oh, brother, you're going to get all upset over a little spider?”

“Just bear with me a second.”

“Why, what's the matter?”

Nate looked up at the flat, rectangular light fixture above Marquardt's chair. A broken strand of web line still dangled from it, waving in the moving air. The spider had come from up there. Nate climbed up on the desk.

“Hey!” Marquardt exclaimed, and then, seeing the serious, intense expression on Nate's face, said nothing more.

Nate peered into the narrow space between the fixture and the ceiling. There, amid the dust and dead bugs, lay a soda straw, the sugar plug half chewed and lying just to one side. He came within inches of touching it—

He could hear a frantic, rustling sound just above his head, like hundreds of tiny, crackling fires—like thousands of tiny claws
tick, tick, ticking
inside the ceiling.

All across the ceiling.

Behind the walls.

He got down from the desk, his eyes never leaving that corner of the room. He looked again at the tiny spider under the glass. “Mr. Marquardt, has Norman Bloom given you any money?”

Marquardt couldn't believe the question
. “What?”

“Has Norman Bloom given you any money recently?”

The gym teacher was intrigued if not alarmed. “Yeah. Five dollars for a basket fee.”

“Was it in paper dollar bills?”

Marquardt was already digging in his hip pocket. “Yeah. I've got 'em right here.”

“Put them on the desk, please.”

Apparently Nate's manner was serious enough to convince Marquardt to comply. He pulled out five one-dollar bills and tossed them on the desk.

Then he stood back.

The spider under the glass became frantic, clawing at the sides of the glass, climbing the sides, falling, climbing again.

And it began to sound like there was a fire inside the ceiling.

Marquardt was becoming a believer. His voice had lost its gruffness when he asked, “What's going on? What is this?”

“Better stand back,” was all Nate could say.

Something began to emerge from the cracks between the ceiling panels and where the ceiling met the walls: tiny black creatures scurrying in frantic, erratic patterns like ants on an upside-down anthill, so many that they dirtied the ceiling panels from white to gray to a coarse, boiling black. They dropped from the ceiling on web lines like storm troopers and flowed down the walls like thin black lava. They reached the top of the desk and raced toward the dollar bills. Within moments, the five bills were covered, alive and twitching like strips of bacon in a frying pan.

Nate and Marquardt were already backing toward the door.

“The dollar bills,” said Nate. “The pheromone was on the dollar bills.”

Sarah was frightened, truly frightened. “I've . . . I've never heard of this, this Kenyan thing.”

“Oh, who has, other than bug nuts like me?” Algernon clicked on some more links with the mouse. “Come on, come on . . .” The Web sites flashed by, the menus, the lists of further links. “It's here somewhere.” He found it. “Here's an article about it. I never thought we'd be dealing with this . . . but then again, it's just so unthinkable!”

Sarah leaned down and studied the computer screen, scrolling down as she quickly scanned the fine print and technical details.

Algernon recapped the article. “The American and Japanese navies both converged on the scene and decided there was nothing else they could do but set fire to the ship with all the dead men—and the spiders—on board, and then sink it with artillery fire. Now Kenya and several other tropical countries have import and export restrictions to keep it from happening again.” He stared at her. “Sarah? Sarah, what is it?”

She'd scrolled down to an old news photograph of the ill-fated ship with what looked like navy ships floating nearby. The photograph was vague and fuzzy, but the prow of the ship was close enough, big enough to make out the ship's name painted on its side.

The ship was named the
Abel Frye.

Talk about the drug-sniffing dog was rippling up and down the halls. Some kids were running away, some were running to have a look. Mr. Maxwell just kept running in crazy circles as if being pulled by his nose.

Elijah jerked his collar, commanded him to sit, and took out a small vial. He uncorked it and let Max sniff it—again. “Okay, boy, now
this
is what we want. Sniff for
this,
okay?” It was a sample of the female pheromone, and Elijah was hoping to get Max redirected.