Professor Gargoyle (12 page)

“They’re spiders.”

Robert laughed. “Did you say
spiders
?”

“It’s not funny.”

“Karina, don’t take this personally, but you’re a ghost. Spiders should be afraid of
you
!”

“There’s a lot of them, Robert. Tillinghast knows I’ve got arachnophobia, so he keeps a bunch of them waiting behind that door.”

“Then you just need to stand up to them,” Robert told her. “The best way to face your fear is to deal with it head-on. Do you remember giving me that advice?”

“I do,” Karina said, “but it was a lot easier to say it than to mean it.”

The attic was quiet as they contemplated their choices. It was Glenn who finally broke the silence.

“We can wait here for Goyle, or we can stomp on a few creepy-crawlies.” He placed his size-twelve boots on the table. “And I’ve got really big feet.”

Glenn found an old hammer in the corner of the attic and quickly went to work. The nails squealed as he pried them from the wooden planks, as if to warn him he was making a terrible mistake. The first board clattered to the floor, then the second. Glenn was halfway finished with the third when he stopped to ask a question.

“These gates,” he said, “what do they look like?”

“Picture a vortex floating in the air,” Karina said. “Black water flushing down a black toilet. You just dive right in.”

“What if the monsters follow us through?”

“Tillinghast has strict rules against that,” Karina explained. “No one’s allowed in your dimension unless they’re properly disguised. Anyone revealing their true form is punished by death.”

“We can talk more later,” Robert said. “Let’s get out of here before Azaroth returns.”

Glenn wrenched the last board off the door.

“All right, everybody ready?”

Robert twisted the handle and pulled. The door opened inward with a loud squeal. Huge swaths of gray cobwebs clung to the back of the door. Robert aimed his flashlight into the darkness.

Ahead of them, a narrow stairwell descended into the darkness; it appeared to be cocooned in a tunnel of fine white silk. Robert placed his foot on the first step, testing the web.

“Is it sticky?” Glenn asked.

“No, it’s fine,” Robert said. “Come on.”

They advanced single file: Robert first, then Karina, then Glenn. It was like walking on a staircase spun from cotton candy. Robert kept his hands at his
sides to avoid touching the webbing. He was close enough to see strange white clumps tangled up in the silk. Some of these clumps twitched as he walked past.

“Egg sacs,” Karina whispered. “Female spiders can lay up to three thousand eggs at a time.”

Robert didn’t see any of the grown-up spiders, but he wasn’t trying hard to find them. There was no point in frightening Karina. He kept his flashlight trained on the steps, one at a time, all the way to the bottom.

They found themselves at the end of a long corridor. There were doors on either side, spaced every twenty feet or so, and light fixtures on the walls. It could have been a hallway in a fancy old hotel—except for the white spiderwebs spanning the length of the floor like a thin layer of fog.

Robert switched off the flashlight.

“Well, I guess that’s the worst of it,” Glenn said, brushing a few loose silk strands from his clothes. “That wasn’t so bad.”

“You’re right,” Karina said, taking a deep breath.
“I’m sorry I was being such a baby.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Robert said. “Now how do we find one of these gates?”

“This is the fourth floor of Tillinghast Mansion,” Karina explained. “These doors are all guest rooms and bathrooms. A gate could be waiting in any one of them. The problem is, so could anything else.”

Glenn looked to Robert. “Do you want to go first, or should I?”

Robert reached for the nearest doorknob and turned it. Inside, the bedroom was draped in dust and more cobwebs. It had a large canopied bed, a chest of drawers, and a dressing table. He stepped inside and scanned the room, searching for signs of movement. “This one’s empty,” he announced. “All clear.”

“Any gates?” Glenn asked.

“Nope.”

Something dripped on the back of his neck. It reminded him of Glenn’s half-chewed gummy worm from the first day of school. Robert reached up to wipe it away and found his fingers coated in a slimy green mucus.

“Uh, Robert?” Karina called from the hallway. “I think you should come out of there.”

He turned to leave and more mucus dripped on his arm. He craned his neck, looking up at the ceiling—and the ceiling looked back. It was covered with a quivering green jelly that was spotted with dozens of eyeballs. The jelly began peeling away from the ceiling and Robert ran out the door, pulling it closed behind him.

“I’m not going to open any more of these,” he said.

Glenn went to reopen the door, to see for himself, but Robert pushed him down the hall.

“Try the next one,” he said. “We need to find the gate.”

Glenn opened the next door. Robert didn’t see what was inside this room. He just saw all the color drain from Glenn’s face, and that was enough.

Glenn pulled the door closed. “I’m not gonna open any more, either,” he whispered. “Let’s just follow the hallway and see where it goes.”

After another fifty feet, the hallway curved to the
left, revealing more closed doors and another long carpet of cobwebs.

And there, at the far end of the hallway, was a swirling black vortex, just like the one that appeared inside Robert’s locker.

“That’s it!” Karina said. “That’s a gate!”

“Perfect,” Glenn said. “Let’s go.”

But Robert noticed it had become increasingly difficult to walk. As if his legs were growing heavier. “Do you guys feel that?” he asked. Simply putting one foot in front of another required a tremendous amount of energy. “It’s like gravity’s pushing down on me.”

Glenn tried to raise one foot off the ground. The webbing clung tightly to the bottom of his boot; he could barely lift it more than a few inches.

“That’s not gravity,” he said. “It’s these cobwebs. They’re sticky here.”

Glenn tried yanking the silk from his boot but it just clung to his hand. It stretched from his boot to his hand like pulled taffy. He was completely tangled in it. “Help me get it off, all right?”

But Robert was stuck in a mess of his own. The webbing stuck to everything—clothing, skin, sneakers. The more he messed with it, the less he could move.

Karina was the only one not caught in the strands. She might as well have been walking on the beach. She glanced nervously behind them.

“Um, guys?”

Robert looked back. At the far end of the hallway a shadow was spreading across the walls and ceiling. Beneath it, lumbering down the center of the hallway, was a giant black figure. With six furious eyes, a spiked abdomen, and eight legs with bladed tips. It took Robert a moment to realize the thing was, in fact, a spider. And the shadows were thousands of baby spiderlings, following their mother toward dinner.

“What is that?” Glenn yelled.

“I warned you!” Karina said.

“You told us
scary
spiders. You never said
giant
spiders!”

“What’s the difference?!?”

Robert glanced ahead to the gate. It was just five feet
away but it might as well have been a mile. He was stuck, hopelessly stuck. “Pull me out,” he asked Karina.

“I can’t.” She reached for his wrists and her hands passed right through him. “I wish I could help you, Robert, but I can’t.”

Somehow Glenn was making more progress. He’d
managed to inch his way through the muck until he was even with Robert. Then he reached down and yanked Robert’s foot from the goo, allowing him to take one halting step forward.

“Hurry up!” Karina called.

“Slow them down!” Robert shouted back.

“How do you expect me to slow them down? I can’t touch them!”

“And they can’t touch you, Karina. Remember that. Now do something!”

Glenn took another step toward the gate and dragged Robert along. By now they were surrounded by spiderlings, all over the walls and ceiling, thousands of them, in all different shapes and sizes. Some were as small as a nickel. Others were bigger than Robert’s fist. All of them looked ready to leap off the walls and pounce on them.

Karina turned to face the mother spider. The creature stepped gingerly across her webbing, instinctively knowing which strands were safe to walk upon.

“Stay back!” Karina warned.

The mother spider bared her fangs and hissed. Karina screamed and the spider reared up on its hind legs like a horse, kicking with her forelimbs. Karina willed herself not to move, to let the legs swipe through her body. The spider seemed angered by its inability to harm her. It began to make a loud spitting noise.

“What are you doing?” Karina asked. “Why are you spitting?”

She realized too late that it was a signal. All at once, the spiderlings leapt from the ceilings and walls. There were hundreds of them, falling on Karina’s face and hair, falling upon a girl who was and wasn’t there. She closed her eyes and screamed until she heard Robert calling her name.

“We made it!” he shouted. “Come on, let’s go!”

Karina opened her eyes and saw Robert and Glenn standing beside the gate. She began to run, and all three of them jumped into the vortex at the same time.

Suddenly Robert was falling, and when he landed he found himself face-to-face with a grinning skull. He was lying atop a life-size human skeleton. He
screamed, flinging the bones away from him.

It took him a moment to realize he was no longer in Tillinghast Mansion. Somehow he had reemerged in Professor Goyle’s classroom. So had Glenn and Karina. The gate had ejected them through the chalkboard at the front of the room; it was already disappearing, swirling away like water down the drain, leaving just a fine trace of white frost in its wake.

Glenn helped drag the skeleton away from Robert. “We did it!” he said. “We made it out.”

“Did you see that spider?” Karina exclaimed. “Did you see how big it was?”

“You were incredible,” Robert said. “That was the bravest thing I’ve ever seen. You totally saved our lives.”