Itsy Bitsy Spider (Emma Frost #1) (12 page)

Astrid had
prepared everything.
Sebastian was still asleep while
she opened the cans. She was going to use one of the cans with tuna, since it
was a special day and since they were Sebastian's favorite. Those and the ones
with fruit cocktail. She opened one of those as well. Then she placed a small
piece of chocolate next to the cans that she had opened. It was their last one
and she had saved it for this day.

Astrid walked over and stroked Sebastian's hair
gently, and then she kissed him and whispered in his ear.

"Wake up sleepyhead. It's your birthday."

Then she sang the Danish birthday song and
slowly Sebastian opened his eyes. "Good morning sweetheart. It's your big
day today. Four years old. You're a big boy now."

Sebastian smiled and threw his arms around his
mother's neck. She leaned over and kissed him smiling feeling overwhelmed by
her love for him. Her boy. Her entire world.

Ever since he had been born life had completely
changed for Astrid in the bunker. Suddenly she wasn't alone and suddenly she
had no time to feel sorry for herself or think about her situation anymore. It
had been a great relief for her but it had also been a rough couple of years.

The woman had brought her magazines and books
about having a child and every Wednesday she listened to a radio-show where
some expert answered questions about having a child and bringing them up. That
helped her along the way but there were days she would break down and cry,
thinking how much easier it would have been if she had someone to ask, someone
to help her when things got rough, when the sleepless nights were too many and
the room too small. She cursed the fact that she had nowhere to run when the
baby had cried for hours and she couldn't escape it. Some days she would bang
at the iron door again, in desperation and frustration. Those were the really
bad days. Other days turned out to be absolutely wonderful. Those were the days
when she never even thought about being locked in, when all she could do was
stare at her baby, while breastfeeding him, stroking him gently across his soft
hair, smelling him, loving him like no other she had ever loved before. This
was unique, she had realized and she had never thought it was possible to love
someone this much. But she did. And as the years went by, they grew very close
and like any mother Astrid started dreaming of giving him the world. She wanted
him to be able to go for a swim in the ocean like the boys in the book the lady
had given them to read, the one he cherished so much and wanted her to read to
him every night. Astrid wanted him to have everything a normal kid had and it
tormented her that she couldn't, that she was unable to give him everything he
wanted. As he grew older, the questions multiplied.

"What's beyond that door, Mommy?"

"Why can't we go out of it?"

"Who's that lady giving us food?"

And on and on. Every year it grew worse. Soon
Astrid couldn't avoid them any longer. Soon she would have to tell him the
truth. She knew that and had decided that today was the day. It was his fourth
birthday and he was beginning to understand more and more. So far she had been
just teaching him letters and numbers and talking about the world outside,
naming the countries and showing maps of where they lived. She had begun
teaching him how to write and read and some math and he was really getting good
at it. He was a smart kid and he deserved to know the truth.

"So Sebastian," she said while they
ate their food. Sebastian wasn't looking at her. He was playing with one of his
spiders. Ever since he had been able to walk he had been catching spiders in
the bunker, keeping them as pets, playing with them like they were toys. They
were the only animals he had ever encountered. The only animal able to get in
and out of the bunker either under the door or through the ventilation shaft.

"Sebastian?" she said again.

Finally he looked up. The spider sat on top of
his hand. Astrid had never liked spiders much and it always made her jump when
he had them on his body. Sometimes he would even have them sitting on his face.
It was natural for him.

"Yes, Mommy?"

Astrid sighed deeply and looked at her boy. That
beautiful creature that had changed her life completely. The only light in her
darkness. She exhaled again and then she told him everything. She told him how
they were being kept from the world, trapped by that lady who brought them
food, she told him about his father and how she had loved him and about how he
should try to escape if she ever died and the door was opened.

 "If the door opens and you have the
chance, you run." She grabbed his chin and turned his head to have him
look at her. "Do you hear me? You run, Sebastian. Run all you can, don't
let anyone stop you. And don't talk to anyone, don't tell them who you are or
where you're from. Do you promise me that, son?"

"Yes Mommy."

Pastor Gotfredsen
sighed, annoyed.
He was sitting at the dinner table,
reading his newspaper that was filled with stories about the death of Irene
Justesen, the Queen of Fitness.

"Like she was ever queen of anything,"
he mumbled to himself and used his fork to pick up another piece of steak. It
had been cooked too long and tasted horrible. The pastor shook his head while
trying to chew the dry piece of meat.

"Melody!" he yelled.

The small woman came running through the door
and stood with her head bowed in front of him. "You called?"

"You called
sir
," he corrected her.

"Excuse me, excuse me, you called
sir
."

"Yes. Well, this meat is not edible. I
doubt it is even suited for humans anymore the way you cooked it. Is that the
way you cook your meat in the Philippines, Melody?"

She shook her head. "No sir. Had no meat,
sir."

"Very well then, but you need to do a
little better from now on. I have my eyes on you, Melody. You don't want to go
back in the hole now do you?"

Melody shook her head heavily with a wimp.
"No sir. Not the hole sir. I'll be better. Promise, sir." The small
dark woman kept bowing as she walked backwards out the door. Pastor Gotfredsen
snorted. He was sick of that woman. Could never manage to get the meat cooked
right, or the shirts ironed properly. He would have to replace her in the
morning. About time someone else had the chance to wait on him. Pastor
Gotfredsen finished his meal, even the meat since it was a damn waste to just
leave it there. He tried to read his paper without reading the stories about the
Queen of Fitness. But it was impossible. Almost everything was about her, her
life, her career, her death that the police thought was a murder, but said they
had no leads, not yet.

Pastor Gotfredsen didn't care who killed that
woman. He was thrilled she was dead. Got what she deserved. But it did worry
him slightly, all these deaths on the island. He couldn't help thinking that
...
no that's just silly. Just an old man
and his paranoid thoughts. Stop doing this to yourself.

Pastor Gotfredsen got up from his chair with a
sigh, then walked to the living room where his coffee and brandy waited on the
table next to his favorite chair. Just the way she knew he liked it. He sat
down and drank some of the brandy to try and drown out his worrying thoughts.

You old fool. You're happy
that Mrs. Heinrichsen is gone. Now you have it all to yourself, don't you?

It was the truth. He was happy she wasn't there
anymore. She had been too powerful for many years. And he had let her, hadn't
he? It was in some way his own fault. He was after all the pastor in a Lutheran
church, but people from Home Mission had been too widely represented in the
church back in the day when he arrived here, and little by little they took it
all over, didn't they? As soon as Mrs. Heinrichsen put her fat butt in the seat
of the Parish Council and she was made a chairman, pastor Gotfredsen never had
much to say anymore. She even corrected his sermons. Went through them with a
freaking red pen every Saturday night.

But you never asked her to
stop, did you? You never refused her the right to do it, did you?

Mrs. Heinrichsen had a way to make people do as
she told them to. No matter what. It was in her voice, her look, such
authority.

Pastor Gotfredsen hadn't been strong. He had
given up resisting her power and found his own niche working for God. He was
helping poor asylum seekers who were being kicked out of the country. He had
taken them in, given them a home and hid them from the government. Not only
that, he gave them a job. They worked for him.

Pastor Gotfredsen sipped the coffee. Then he
exhaled deeply. "MELODY!"

The small lady stormed through the door. She
bowed heavily and looked at the floor.

"This coffee is too cold!"

"I'm sorry, sir. Let me warm it up for
you."

"No. This is it Melody. I've had it with
you." Pastor Gotfredsen grabbed the woman's arm and pulled her through the
door into the kitchen. She was crying and pleading.

"Please no sir. I be better. I be better
now."

But Gotfredsen had heard that too many times
before. It was all about setting an example, teaching them, disciplining them,
how else were they ever going to get by in this world? Those people coming to
the country were so stupid, so naive and undereducated.

Pastor Gotfredsen opened the hatch in the
kitchen floor. There was turmoil, someone yelled. Hundreds of brown faces
looked up at him.

"Please no!" Melody cried but it
wasn't enough. Pastor Gotfredsen threw her down to the others, and they grabbed
her. Many faces stared at him with expectation. Pastor Gotfredsen pointed at
one.

"You. You there. Come up here."

A set of bright white teeth in a dark and dirty
face lit up in the darkness. Pastor Gotfredsen reached down and gave her a
hand, then he pulled her up and closed the hatch behind them.

The woman looked at him, then at the floor.
"Thank you, sir. Thank you."

Pastor Gotfredsen snorted. "Go and clean
yourself up, take a shower, then come into my bedroom."

The new girl
tasted
good. After her shower Gotfredsen had taken her
to his bedroom and tied her down with rope. Her eyes were kindled with fear.
Her lips shivering with angst. She was from Ethiopia. Been in Denmark two years
in one of the camps where they waited till they got the answer from the
government whether they got to stay or not. Her entire family was killed in her
home country. Nothing there for her to go back to. Only death. But it didn't
matter. Anisa still got rejected. She had to go back, they told her. It didn't
matter that she had spent the last of her money to be transported in a
container on a ship for weeks just to be put in a truck with hundreds of others
and transported through Europe almost being killed trying to get here.

Gotfredsen remembered when she arrived at his
house. Like most of them it was in the middle of the night. It was the same
story. She couldn't go back because she would be killed. Gotfredsen understood
that and told her that he would take care of her, while giving her a Coke and a
smile in his kitchen. The people bringing her in their van were workers at the
Red Cross asylum center. Gotfredsen knew most of them by now after all of these
years helping these poor people out. They trusted him and he trusted them. The
people they brought to his house he would keep safe for a couple of years, then
smuggle them across the border to a man he knew in Germany who would take them
in and ... well Gotfredsen didn't actually know what happened to them after
that, but at least they weren't sent back.

He smelled Anisa's skin again and started
licking the inside of her leg. She was moaning carefully, like she expected him
to get rough with her any moment now.

"It's okay," he whispered and put a
finger inside of her. Still a virgin. Gotfredsen smiled satisfied. It was rare
he got them this young, what was she fourteen? Fifteen? Who knew. It was hard
to tell with their brown faces. It didn't matter.

 But this one was special. He was going to
keep her with him for at least a couple of weeks. Maybe even months. It was
rare to get such a pure girl just for himself.

"Please mister," she said.

He lifted his head and looked into her eyes. The
rope was hurting her hands, he could tell it had scraped off some of her skin
on the wrists. It turned him on. The way she was lying in his bed completely
defenseless, turned him on so much he could hardly bear it. She tried to speak
again, but Gotfredsen put his hand over her mouth. She tried to scream but
there was nothing but muffled grunting.

"There, there," he whispered in her
ear while licking it. "I'll take good care of you. Just relax and
enjoy."

His words made her fight even more. Gotfredsen
watched as she tried to squirm out of his arms and pull her hands from the
ropes. She was kicking and screaming underneath him. Then he laughed. He
enjoyed watching them fight for it, it was one of his greater pleasures.

She was tight, even tighter than expected and
Gotfredsen closed his eyes in delight as he made her a woman. When he opened
his eyes again to better look at her while she was fighting him, he noticed a
small spider sitting on the wall behind her. He groaned and moaned as he
pressed himself further inside of her and she screamed muffled underneath him,
but he found it hard to enjoy it properly. The spider irritated him. Gotfredsen
growled and tried to close his eyes so he didn't see it. It didn't help. Just
knowing it was there annoyed him.

He had always hated spiders. Ever since he was a
young kid he had detested them. He used to pick them up and peel off their legs
one after one. Sometimes he would only peel off the legs on one side of it and
watch as it tried to run afterwards. They were stupid animals that deserved to
be killed.

Gotfredsen grabbed a pillow and threw it at the
spider on the wall. The spider fell to the ground, then ran across the wooden
planks towards the door to the bedroom.

"Stupid creatures," Gotfredsen said
and was about to turn to face the girl again, when he heard the door behind him
open. For a second he thought it was the spider, but how could it be?

He turned and saw the spider. It was crawling on
a shoe. The man in the door bent down and picked it up in his hand. Then he let
it crawl up his arm until it sat on his cheek.

Gotfredsen gasped. His body went numb. He
crawled off the girl, who had stopped screaming.

"You? It's you?" he asked.

"My identity doesn't really matter, does
it?" the man asked. "You know who I am."

Gotfredsen saw the butcher's knife in his hand.
He gulped. "Can't we talk about this?" he asked.

"It's kind of late for that, don't you
think?"

The man lifted the knife high into the air, then
swung it and cut the ropes holding the girl down to the bed. "Get out of
here," he said to her. "Get your clothes and run. Get away from
here."

The girl did as she was told. She picked up her
clothes one by one while whimpering. Then she ran out of the room without
looking back.

"You're not gonna kill a man of God,"
the pastor said. "You're making a fool of yourself. You'll go to
hell."

"Been there and back," the man said.

"Please. I'm just a pastor. I didn't have
anything to do with it. I didn't make the decision. Mrs. Heinrichsen did. You
were right about killing her. She did it. She was the one. She made the
decision and talked the rest of us into it. Said it was the only way."

The man swung the knife at Gotfredsen with a
wide grin like he was enjoying watching him plead for his life. Gotfredsen
jumped off the bed and stood in the corner of the room. He climbed the chair
and screamed.

"I'm gonna get you," the man said
wiggling the knife in front of him like he was joking, kidding around with a
child. But this was no joke.

"I assure you, I pleaded with her to not
follow through with it," Gotfredsen continued.

"But you knew. YOU KNEW!"

As the man said those last words he swung the
knife again and sliced Gotfredsen under the kneecap. Gotfredsen screamed and
fell forwards.

"You bastard!" he yelled. Blood was
gushing out onto his hand. Gotfredsen felt anxious and started sobbing.
"Can't we just find a solution for this? Isn't there another way
out?"

The man burst into laughter. "I could lock
you in the cellar and release all your servants you keep down there. How would
you like that, huh?"

Gotfredsen shook his head. "No. No. Please
don't do that. There has to be something else I can do. Something,
anything?"

The man laughed manically. Gotfredsen lifted up
a lamp and threw it at him, but the man ducked down, still grinning.
Gotfredsen's heart pounded hard in his chest. He looked at the door. Could he
make it if he jumped and ran? Could he? He wasn't exactly young anymore and it
would take quite the jump to get past the man, but maybe?  After all he
used to be a high jumper in high school. But still. His knee was bleeding badly
and hurting like hell.

"There is one thing you could do for
me," the man said.

"Really?" Gotfredsen looked at him
with a grain of hope growing inside, but the man's face told him it was too
early to be hopeful.

"Yes."

"What?"

"Come to dinner tonight. Well I don't
really need all of you, just small parts and pieces. Mostly your insides,
really."

Gotfredsen whimpered, then glanced at the door
again. Then he made a jump for it. He drew in a big deep breath and leaped
through the air, his eyes fixated on the door to freedom in front of him. But
as he was floating in the air he suddenly felt something penetrate the skin
just above his crotch. He looked down and saw the knife's handle sticking out
from his abdomen, blood spurting out in the air.

Gotfredsen landed on the floor with a thud and
never managed to get up again.

I can't move my legs. Oh my
god, my legs!

Gotfredsen knew he had become paralyzed by the
stroke of the knife through his spinal cord and could do nothing but watch as
the man started cutting him open.

I can't even scream. Please
take me home now, Lord. Please have mercy on my sinful soul!