And Crawling Things Lurk

“One Lincoln eighteen, Cedar City.”

Don picked up the radio mike and responded, “One Lincoln eighteen. Go ahead.”

“Don,” the dispatcher said, “contact Doctor McBee’s office code two for information, their request.”

“One Lincoln eighteen, ten four.”

Code two, police jargon for ASAP, was typically used if she wanted him someplace right away, such as if the mayor was complaining again about someone parked in his reserved parking space, but not urgently enough to justify using a red light and siren. But, unless the patients were attacking the doctor, he couldn’t imagine what would call for code two to the vet’s office – anyway, that’d be code three. Maybe Laura couldn’t wait for their date tomorrow night. He grinned. That’d rate code three, too.

Just to be sure he didn’t encounter Miss Farr again, he parked out back and went in that way. Jim was in a treatment room with a young man holding a snow-white husky on a leash that was eying the syringe in Jim’s hand. He glanced up and said, “Hi, Don. Kinda tied up, right now, but check with Laura; she’s the one who called. Carl’s back.”

In the reception area, Laura was occupied with a woman at the counter doing her best to contain a cat in her arms. The cat was apparently not pleased that a man sat over in one corner with a Border collie on a leash, and she expressed her displeasure in a low, feline growl. The dog kept its eyes on the cat but made no attempt to go after it.

“Really, Missus Rochester,” Laura stressed, “Sheba will be much happier in a box.” When she turned to pick a cardboard, cat carrier box up from the floor behind her, she spotted Don and smiled with a wave, then set the box on the counter. “Just slip her in here. Would you like for me to do it?”

“Oh, no! Sheba wouldn’t like that. No, if she must be confined like a felon, I’ll do it. Although,” with a not-so-furtive glance across the room at the well-behaved dog, she added, “I don’t see why she should be the one penalized.”

“Honest, she won’t feel like she’s being penalized. She’ll just feel safer in there. And she will be.”

“Humph! Very well.”

Sheba went into the box, and, as soon as Laura closed it, she quieted down.

“Thank you. Now, if you will have a seat I’ll be with you in just a moment. There’s plenty of space on this end. Okay, Oliver,” the man with the Border collie came forward, “I think Rio is here for his rabies booster, isn’t he?”

Don eased back out of the reception area and stood in the hall outside the treatment room. He could wait.

Less than a minute later, Laura came past leading Rio and his person to a second treatment room where Jim’s part-time assistant prepared a syringe. After closing the door, Laura came back and stopped beside Don. “Hi. Carl’s back, and he’s already checked Be-Be. Jim said he wouldn’t get into much over the phone, but he really sounded excited. He said he wanted to talk to you as soon as he gets here. Oh, yeah, he’s on his way, so, stay if you can.”

She turned towards the reception room again, but paused for a deep breath before going through the doorway.

Jim came into the hallway ahead of the man with the husky. He was saying, “...cause a bit of thirst. Just make sure he’s got access to plenty of water and outdoors. Let me know if things don’t change after a week.”

The man kept the husky on a short leash and held back while Missus Rochester followed Laura into the hallway carrying Sheba’s box. Missus Rochester glanced down at the dog and, with wide eyes and flared nostrils, raised the box higher out of the ravening dog’s reach. The husky looked up at his person as though to ask, “What is it with this woman?” The man looked down at the husky, smiled and ruffled the top of his head. After the man and dog walked out, Jim followed Missus Rochester past Laura standing at the door and into the treatment room. As Laura pulled the door closed and turned back to Don, Missus Rochester was telling Jim, “...such a hard time doing peepee and poopoo.”

A grin twisted Laura’s mouth sideways when she said, “Well, she is an animal lover—as long as it’s a cat, and as long as the cat is Sheba.”

“You can be quite persuasive, at times, can’t you? How’d you like to be on call for our hostage negotiating team; or, better yet, pay raise negotiations with the city?”

“There are times when it comes in handy, for sure. Although, there are times, too, when I’d rather have a whip and chair. Cup of coffee? Jim shouldn’t be too long, but I’m not busy, now. How can I entertain you?”

He continued to lean against the wall, and a grin spread across his face. “Uh, well, let me give that a bit of thought.”

“Uh uh, too long,” she said after about two seconds and reached up to touch the tip of her finger to the tip of his nose. “You blew your chance, buddy. One cup of coffee, coming up.”

Fifteen minutes later, Jim was still occupied with Sheba, and Laura was on the phone back at the reception counter. Don had just poured himself a second cup of coffee back in the hallway when from the outer room he heard a deep, powerful voice, “Hey, Laura, darlin’, it’s good to see you again. I swear, if you get any prettier, I’m going to stop traipsing around the world and come a courtin’. Is the doc in?”

“Carl!” Laura called out. “Welcome back, you big ol’ hunk o’ love. Jim should be out in a bit. Come over here and give me a hug.”

When Don stepped out of the hallway, he saw the woman he had been swapping barbecue techniques with for the last year wrapped up in the arms of a man big enough to barbecue a bison. When he set Laura back on her feet and they got daylight between them again, and then both turned towards Don, the man’s size was even more apparent. He looked like a father standing beside his ten-year-old daughter. His well-worn fedora and the shoulder spread of his well-worn leather jacket brought Indiana Jones on steroids to mind, and the full mane of white hair didn’t strike Don as an indication of decrepitude.

“Don,” Laura said, still holding onto Carl’s arm and beaming. “This is Carl Sanders.” Then, to Carl, she said, “Don is the officer that found Be-Be.”

“Then, you, Don, are the one I’m here to talk to.” He dropped Laura’s hand with a couple of pats and extended his hand to shake Don’s.

Although Don’s hand disappeared like it had been engulfed by a ravenous beast, the firm grip was gentle.

“If you two want to use Jim’s office, I don’t think he’d mind.”

“Thanks, hon, that’d be great. Coffee pot still in the hallway?”

With his own cup still half full, Don followed Carl into the office after a brief stop at the coffee bar. As soon as he closed the door and turned to the room, Carl began, “Tell me what kind of place you found the dog in – forest, cave, whatever. The information Jim left at my place didn’t give me much. Even the time element has to be wrong. He said the dog had been missing for a week. Surely, he meant a month, or more likely, a year.”

“No, it was a week.”

“But, that’s...no, I was going to say impossible, but I always told my students to never say something is impossible in nature.”

“Well, at this point, we can’t say it was nature and not some human action. Our inspector suggested he was dognapped by some college kids for a prank. Can’t say I appreciate their sense of humor, but that could still be what happened.”

Carl rubbed his chin for a bit while he gazed at the carpet then the ceiling, and back to the floor again. After long seconds of pondering that theory, he said, “It’s possible, I suppose. Perhaps it could be done, but they’d have to be very knowledgeable and precise in their formulations. A level I wouldn’t expect of even post-graduate students – or their professors, come to that. To achieve that level of precision would take years, I would think. I can’t see a person with that kind of knowledge and experience resorting to such childishness. In fact, I can’t even think of anyone capable of doing it. Certainly not me. And, anyway, that would be only if the material was available in such quantity, or, lacking that, a method of creating it even if the complete formula were known. After all, it’s not like it was something you could select off the shelves of even an elaborate laboratory. The production of the stuff isn’t something that can be done, to my knowledge, outside of nature’s own factory, the glands of the beast, itself. So, unless they harvested it, a mind-boggling task...no, I’m going to take it back. It’s not possible.”

“What stuff are you’re talking about? The filaments covering him? Whatever it was causing the stink? And what the hell killed him?”

Carl looked at Don with puzzlement lining his face. “Why, spiders, my boy, spiders. He was injected by spider venom, enough to kill him, or at least immobilize him fast enough that he couldn’t get away, and then he was wrapped in spider silk, injected with a vast amount of digestive enzymes, and consumed. I do hope he was dead by that time.”

“But how could that have happened? He had just gone out through the little girl’s bedroom window after someone who was trying to break in. If he chased them away from the house, he never barked, so he must have been immobilized there and carried away.”

“Oh, my! That’s – I wasn’t aware of that part. Is the little girl okay?”

“She’s fine. She didn’t even wake up until Be-Be was out the window. Her parents said they heard one long yelp then nothing. They got to the room within seconds, and the dog was gone.”

“Maybe someone did take him, then. Describe where you found him.”

“He was in an old, abandoned building on the riverfront.”

“Well, that could fit. If he was left there, unconscious but not dead, spiders may have moved in. I can’t believe they went after an animal so large, but that is the best explanation. Did you see any when you found him? Webs? Other web covered carcasses like insects and even small mice? There were probably many.”

“Nope. Just lots of dust and grime. Cobwebs in the corners, but nothing else.”

“Hmmm. I’d like to take a look before heading back. It’s not likely, but always possible, that we have a new or previously unobserved species or behavior. In any case, I don’t think the police have reason to remain involved.”

“I’m afraid there have been further developments. A woman’s body was found in that same building. It was a little over a month after Be-Be. Then three weeks after that, a man was found in a dumpster downtown. They were both in the same condition as Be-Be.”

Carl just stared for a moment. “You mean wrapped in webs and desiccated?”

“Not just desiccated. When the coroner opened them up, they were hollow, like they had been melted inside and drained. I don’t know if Be-Be was like that, but I remember he was pretty light weight.”

Again, Carl paused before answering. “I’m afraid you described Be-Be pretty well. Would it be possible for me to see the bodies of the dead man and woman? They’re not buried or cremated, I hope.”

“They’re still on ice with a police-hold at the mortuary. If you think you can make sense of any of this, let’s go.”

When Don called the department for clearance for Carl to examine the bodies, De Leon gave it only on the condition that he be present. When Don and Carl arrived at the mortuary half way across town, the inspector was waiting. Don made the introductions as they followed the attendant to the morgue room.

After the attendant pulled the two trays out of their refrigerated cases, De Leon stepped forward and pulled the covering sheets away, and Carl stepped up beside him with Don. Most of the webbing had been removed, but enough was still there to get an idea of how extensive it had been. The torsos had not been closed up again, so he spread them apart and looked inside, leaning over so his head was almost in the gap. He played his penlight beam about as he muttered hmm’s, umm’s and uh-huh’s like an old, family doctor on a house-call. He made particular close work with the single bullet-hole-like openings each one had, checking and measuring them from inside and out, even peering at them with a magnifying glass ala Sherlock Holmes. After spending much time with those, he went to the twin punctures on the backs of their necks, probing them with instruments provided by the attendant for depth and angle, even verifying their curvature by inserting a plastic, coffee stir stick bent into arcs of varying tightness of the bends. Finally, he stood up, stepped back half a pace and nodded to the attendant.

Turning towards the exit, he nodded to Don and De Leon and said, “We can go now.”

Outside, back in the warm sun, he mopped his brow with a large, red kerchief he pulled from his back, pants pocket.

“I’ll send you a written report. But, I can tell you right now you’ve got a problem.”

De Leon glanced over at Don and smirked. “Yeah, well, we already figured that out all by ourselves.”

Carl gave De Leon a quick look, then turned his gaze back to Don. “No, I don’t think you have. Not sufficiently, anyway. In my eagerness to locate what I assumed had killed the dog, something that could very well be a new species even if not all that different from others of its kind, and basing it upon my own biases in a way I always tried to warn my students against, I let myself be confined within my own preconceptions. I failed to take the time to conduct a proper examination, one that might have revealed what I have discovered here with these additional victims. I told Don earlier that Be-Be had been killed and consumed by spiders. I will modify that statement to this extent; change spiders to spider, from plural to singular.”

“One spider?” De Leon was incredulous. “How the hell could one spider do that?”

“By being very large, my friend.”

“Oh, come on.” The inspector made an impatient half turn and back to express is disbelief. “A giant spider? This isn’t Hollywood, you know.”

“I’m well aware of where this is, Inspector. I am also well aware of what a spider kill looks like. I’m about as close to an expert on the subject as you’re likely to run into.”

Don didn’t want to alienate the one man who might be able to provide the answers they needed, so he held up his hand between the Inspector and the much larger man. “And we really do appreciate any help you can give us. We’re really up against a wall, here. We can see it isn’t the work of a run-of-the-mill axe-murderer. Please, what are we dealing with?”

Carl eyed De Leon for a moment then turned and winked at Don. “Spiders are very specialized animals. They aren’t your common predator that pounces on its prey and gobbles them up, leaving nothing but a few bits of bone and fur-covered hide. Well, some spiders might, like tarantulas and the wolf spiders, but they are a whole different beast. This one, the type that uses webs for catching prey, is very restricted in what it eats because of how it has to eat it. They have no teeth, you see, especially the type of spider I believe we are dealing with here. I don’t mean fangs, because the fangs on spiders aren’t teeth at all but specialized instruments for injecting venom into the prey – like stingers.

“Our particular spider kills or paralyzes its prey with venom from its fangs. Then, when it has wrapped it up in web strands and is comfortably away from any disturbances where it can dine in peace and at leisure, it inserts a tube into the prey through which it injects enzymes. Remember those holes that looked like bullet holes? They weren’t. I’m afraid in my haste I missed that detail on Be-Be, but with all the other similarities, I have no doubt that he has an identical hole, as well as large, twin punctures in the back of his neck where they would be concealed by his fur. These enzymes are powerful enough to predigest the tissues, reducing them to a liquid that can then be sucked into the spider’s stomach through that same tube.

“I’m surprised it hadn’t dissolved the hide somewhere. I suppose it was re-ingested before it had a chance to go beyond the inner layer of fatty tissues. You saw how the inside walls of the torsos seemed almost wiped dry? The enzymes dissolve everything, even bones, eventually. Remember how the woman’s thighbones were almost gone? Although that might take longer than the spider would care to remain with the carcass if there was a chance of danger, such as being caught by comrades of the prey that didn’t like the idea of being prey.”

De Leon stared at Carl with his eyes as wide as a child who had just been enthralled by a tale told around a campfire in the densest forest. “B – but where would a thing like that come from? Where could it live without being discovered?”

“Not around people, that’s for sure. Unless it was wily and cleaver enough to restrict its menu to creatures whose absence would not be noticed, its predations would certainly bring it to the attention of any nearby population. I can’t imagine how it could exist near humans without their knowledge.”

“How about if it belonged to someone, like a pet or something?” Don asked. He hesitated to mention a possibility of that someone being a little old woman. “Maybe someone was in control of its hunting, like if someone had a wolf and took it out now and then to run down a deer, then back into hiding.”

Carl considered for a moment. “I don’t see how. A wolf has a level of intelligence that might allow a human to control it, whether through affection or fear. A spider doesn’t have that kind of intelligence. They probably understand fear, but something like affection or loyalty would be more foreign to it than spinning a web and climbing it on eight legs would be to you. They operate strictly on instinct; although, possibly instinct coupled with enough intelligence to allow it to learn from experience, but only to a very limited extent. Compared to trying to control something like that, herding cats would be a breeze. No, from my rough estimation of the size of this thing, something on the order of a large dog or wolf, I sure wouldn’t want to be on the other end of the leash.”

De Leon asked, “Could it have been someone’s caged beast that somehow got loose?”

“Now, that’s a possibility. It would still be a brain-buster to figure out where a spider that size came from. You know, no animal is an island, isolated from the world. It has to be part of a population.”

“But couldn’t it be a mutation and just bigger than the rest of the population?”

Don almost made a wise answer to De Leon’s stupid question. But, then, maybe it wasn’t so stupid. He picked up the line of thought and injected, “Yeah, even if it couldn’t breed to pass on its size, once it existed it would live and eat, wouldn’t it? And who knows where it came from or when?”

“Giant mutations never survive...well, hardly ever, and then only up to a point. If it grows much over the natural size for the species, things start to go terribly wrong for it. Picture a thousand-foot-tall man and the problems he would have long before he reached that size. Nope, giant mutations, DNA and gene mixing, crossbreeding…all that’s stuff of fantasy. It’s great in monster movies, but it doesn’t work in the real world. No, I’ll put my bet on a previously undiscovered species – this world is full of them, you know. There are probably more undiscovered ones than discovered. Although, I’m afraid there are very few large species yet to be found.”

Don said, “Wait, now. You said hardly ever…like possibly two or three times? Well, this is only once.”

Carl paused, and then nodded at Don with a smile added. “Hmm, okay, a possibility. That’s a point for you. So, then the question is, where did it come from? Where has it been that allowed it to grow to its present size? I don’t know if a deep cavern would do it. It had to have had a regular source of food, one that didn’t alert the human populace of its presence. Deep caverns are not a likely place for large food sources. Not unless it subsisted on mushrooms and bats. But they wouldn’t be in deep caverns, only shallow ones. Possibly deep forest – there’s plenty of that north of here.”

“So how did it get here, and how do we track this thing down?”

Don seconded De Leon’s question. “Yeah, if this thing is getting a taste for people, we’ve got to stop it.”

“I don’t really know, my friends. This is so different from anything I’ve ever encountered. If it’s okay, I’d like to hang around for a while, maybe look over the sites where the three victims were found. Also, spiders don’t eat all that often. They can, but they don’t have to. Let’s see, it was five weeks between Be-Be and the woman, then just under five weeks until the man. Unless there have been others you aren’t aware of, we’re looking at better than a month interval between feedings. If we’re lucky, we’ve still got a couple of weeks before it hunts again.”

Don looked around at his town before replying, “If we’re lucky.”