Spiderstalk Read online

  SPIDERSTALK

  By D. Nathan Hilliard

  This book is dedicated to my wonderful and trusted circle of proofreaders. Without their help this work would have been a horror-show of an entirely different nature. I want to thank…

  April Rood

  Claire (Charlie) Paul

  Santanita Grogg

  Sheridan Hilliard

  Stephanie Hilliard

  And, my lovely wife Karla…who heroically allowed herself to get roped into proofreading a novel with big spiders in it.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Prologue

  1: Out of Nowhere

  2: Onslaught

  3: Four Meetings

  4: Hellos, Farewells, and Gunfire

  5: Uneven Alliance

  6: Visitations

  7: Queens, Pawns, and Wildcards

  8: The Road

  9: The Witch and the Catspaw

  10: Explanations over Breakfast

  11: Revelations and Phantoms

  12: Risks and Legends

  13: Carpe Diem, Carpe Corpus

  14: Movie Night

  15: The Morning After

  16: Interlude

  17: Deals in the Dark

  18: Renegade Diplomacy

  19: The Battle of Morlin Farm

  20: Aftermath

  Epilogue

  PROLOGUE

  June 6th

  “Okay, David. Admit it, we’re lost.”

  “We are not lost. We are conducting recon, that’s all.”

  “Oh great!” Karen Sellars chuckled. “That’s what I’ll be sure and scrawl on our dust covered windshield for whoever finds us a hundred years from now.”

  They sat at the T-junction of the dirt road, and considered the options before them. Both led off into leafy tunnels as far as the eye could see. Not a trace of civilization showed in either direction. On the bright side, Karen thought the scenery had potential and pulled David’s cell phone from the dash and activated the camera.

  “You’re going to use my phone to take a picture of a road?” David snorted. “Then you’ll forget about it and I’ll have a picture of a road on my phone I can’t get rid of.”

  “Fine,” she sighed. At least he was focusing on simple current stuff instead of worrying about his brother back in Houston. “One of these days you’ll learn how to actually use technology and delete a picture…or maybe even call the right person, perchance. But until then I’ll be sure and be careful what I put on your precious phone. Like a group portrait for instance! Smile, Tucker!”

  She held the phone up under the rear view mirror and snapped a photo of both her and David, with their seven-year-old giving a bored roll of his eyes in the back seat. Oh well, at least he hadn’t held up Brandy to block the camera.

  C’mon kiddo. Be good for me today. Dad is worried about Uncle Adam and he needs a nice day with his family.

  Karen tried to banish the thought of Adam’s still form lying in the intensive care ward, covered with bandages and tubes. It had looked so bad. So very bad. They had spent most of the last week hovering by his bedside, fearing the worst. Then yesterday, the doctor had announced Adam had briefly woken up the night before and it appeared he was out of danger. They didn’t know if he would ever walk again, but the key words were, “Out Of Danger.”

  She had promptly declared today would be a holiday spent anywhere but near a hospital. The doctor said Adam would be so full of drugs he wouldn’t really be lucid even if he did wake up again, so Karen saw no reason not to take a break in the vigil. She decided a trip out into the countryside was just the thing. Dewberries would be ripening and she hadn’t picked those since she was a little girl. And she would bring her pencils and art pad on the off chance they encountered something interesting.

  Now they were hours away from Houston, and up to their necks in countryside.

  “Left feels right,” David quipped. He made the turn and the car moved silently in the soft dirt. “Although I would feel better if I were driving on roads that appeared on the map. We’re so far off the highway they aren’t even using gravel anymore.”

  “Says the man who refuses to buy a GPS.”

  “Meh! Technology makes you weak. I prefer to blaze my own trails.”

  “Right,” she sighed. “I’ll start writing that note for the people who find us one day. ‘Dear people of the 22nd century, have you developed a man who asks for directions yet? I hope for’…oh wait! There’s something!”

  “I see it.”

  David slowed the little Toyota and they rolled to a stop in front of a pair of black, wrought iron gates. They were large and ornamental, with heavy vertical bars running their entire length. Karen ducked her head to look up through the windshield at the scrollwork on the archway above.

  “Weyrich Cemetery” she read aloud. “Waitaminute, wasn’t Weyrich the name of the little wide spot in the road we passed right before we left the highway?”

  “I think so. But it only had a gas station and a couple of houses. This place looks pretty big.”

  “And look at those tombstones!” Tucker enthused from the back seat. “They’re like right out of Dracula or something!”

  Karen shook her head at the comparison, but understood where it came from. The new cemetery near their house insisted on the flat grass markers popular with many modern graveyards. It made it easier to mow, and gave it an almost park like ambiance. What tombstones she could see through these vine covered gates were the polar opposite of those.

  And that gave her an idea.

  “You know what, David? I bet Weyrich used to be a bigger place a long time ago and this cemetery used to serve the entire area. I bet it’s really old and full of a bunch of old statues and stuff like that. I could use some sketches and pictures of some of those if I ever decide to branch out into doing covers for ghost stories.”

  “You sell two book covers and you’re already ready to broaden the portfolio,” he laughed.

  “You’re darn tootin. Pull in.”

  Karen had a fledgling online business doing book cover art for small presses and indie writers she was trying to get off the ground, and a couple of recent sales had her enthusiasm running high.

  “Sounds good to me,” David agreed and turned in. There was a little parking area in front of the gates and he nosed the car up against the fence. “I suppose I could stand to do a little walking and stretch my legs.”

  As it turned out, he would get his chance.

  “Brandy! No!” Tucker yelled from the backseat as David opened his door.

  There was a reddish brown blur and the dog had squeezed herself out the door. She hit the ground running and tore across the dirt road to the tree line opposite of them, barking furiously. Karen had never seen the little dog run so fast. A split second later the Cocker Spaniel reached the line of trees, ducked under the fence, and disappeared into a thicket of mesquite trees in the pasture beyond.

  “Mooommm! Brandy ran away!”

  David’s shoulders slumped and he gave Karen a look of sardonic weariness.

  “It’s okay, son,” he soothed as he stepped out the door. “She probably saw a rabbit and had to try and catch it. I’ll go find her.”

  “You sure?” Karen asked as she tied a scarf around her head.

  “She’s a city dog, honey. Whatever she catches out here would probably make her regret it. I better go fetch the princess before a cow eats her.”

  “Mom!”

  “It’s okay, Tucker,” she sighed and gave David an exasperated glare. “Cows don’t eat dogs. But somebody is heading for the doghouse if he doesn’t quit teasing and get moving.”

  “This is me, getting moving.”

  He gave her a wink before closing the door and setting off across t
he road. In his Hawaiian flowered shirt and tan khakis, he looked as out of place out here as he claimed the dog was. He reached the fence, found a place where the barb wire hung low, and managed to ease his way over to the other side. Then he disappeared into the thicket after the dog.

  Karen watched him go as she stepped out of the car.

  The summer heat hit like a wall as she stood up, and she gave silent thanks for all the trees. And June had barely started! The hot air vibrated with the cry of locusts. Their buzz rose and fell in one long, continuous drone. In Karen’s mind, this was the sound of summer at its fiercest.

  Fortunately, the road was a shady green tunnel, and the graveyard itself was like a giant arboreal cathedral on the other side of the gate. These trees were old, and vines crept up their trunks and covered large portions of the bark with leaves of their own. All the plant life made her think of poison ivy and she pulled on a pair of cotton gardening gloves she had laying on the dash. She would need them if she found dewberries in there, and could always remove them if she ended up drawing instead.

  “C’mon Tucker,” she urged as she opened the gate. “Don’t forget your gloves and berry bucket.”

  “Berries in a cemetery?”

  “They’ll be along the fence,” Karen murmured as they stepped through the entrance. She stopped and sized up the graveyard once they were inside the gate. “Wow. Will you look at all those tombstones? They sure liked them tall.”

  The gravestones were an interesting collection of obelisks, columns, and statues. They varied in height from four to seven feet. Karen had seen these types of grave markers in old cemeteries before, but never so many of them. They were usually the exception, yet here they were the rule. Maybe it was a local taste, or merely the style of whoever made the tombstones in this area.

  Whatever their cause, being surrounded by them began to make her feel small and slightly uncomfortable. They seemed to crowd around her. But she had come in here for a reason, and she almost immediately spotted a statue that had “book cover” written all over it.

  “Stay close, Tucker,” she muttered as she moved among the stones. “And no climbing.”

  “Aw, Mom…”

  “This isn’t a playground, honey,” she lectured. “Real people are buried here, and we should show respect.”

  Tucker didn’t answer and she hoped she hadn’t just scared him. This place certainly gave her the creeps. But the statue was exactly what she wanted and she needed to at least get some good sketches of it before leaving. It depicted a grieving angel, and the artwork was fantastic. The date at the base said 1910, meaning this had to be the product of an individual artist back at the turn of the last century.

  Karen studied the granite piece, and started a slow orbit of the statue to try and catch the best angle. She kept her eyes glued on the angel as she moved…which was why she almost fell when Tucker yelled at her.

  “Mom, stop! Don’t move!”

  Karen froze, with her heart in her throat.

  What was it? A snake? Nightmarish visions of a copperhead slithering around her foot filled her head. This part of the state was thick with them. Only Tucker wasn’t looking at the ground. His eyes were fixed on a point directly behind her.

  “Mom,” the boy whispered, “Take a big step forward, and then it will be okay to turn around.”

  Karen stepped as instructed then did a cautious turn. She didn’t see anything at first, then her eyes refocused and brought the threat into view.

  “Oh gross,” she groaned. “I forgot about those!”

  A large yellow and black spider hung in a web stretched between two tombstones. Its ebony legs stretched a good three to four inches, and the vivid markings on its abdomen made it appear to glower at the world around it.

  “What is that thing?” Tucker gushed with enthusiasm, demonstrating the typical seven-year-old’s fascination with all things horrid and loathsome. “Is it deadly?”

  “When I was a kid, we called them corn spiders. My brothers used to catch bugs and throw them in the web to feed them…something I don’t want to catch you doing! And no, they aren’t deadly, but they can give a painful bite.”

  “Cool!”

  He turned to race off, probably to look for more spiders. Apparently the berry hunting would have to wait.

  “Hey, be careful,” she warned. “Sometimes it’s hard to see those things unless you’re actively looking for them. And even then, you don’t always see them until you’re right on top of them. You don’t want to walk through one of their webs!”

  She knew this from firsthand experience.

  At the age of eight, her older brother had been chasing her with a squirt gun when she ducked around a rose bush and ran straight through an occupied web. One second she had been playing, and the next she had a nightmare on her that seemed to cover half her little face. It had crawled up over her eye and into her hair, causing her to tumble screaming into the rosebush. She couldn’t tell the thorn pricks from the spider bites as she tore at her head, and it was a completely hysterical, bloody little girl her mother pulled out of that bush. It took almost a quarter of an hour to pull all the thorns and pieces of spider out of her hair.

  The nightmares would follow her for years.

  Karen shuddered at the memory, then forced herself back to the task at hand.

  The weeping angel still captured her imagination. The artist had been a true craftsman, and the emotion he captured had endured over a century of weathering. She only wished the light were better. The diffuse glow coming down through the leafy canopy made all the shadows soft and indistinct. The moss on the stone didn’t help either. She continued her orbit of the statue in hopes of getting an angle with more dramatic shadowing.

  Karen had nearly settled on an angle when Tucker’s voice cut through the din of the locusts.

  “Mom!? Come here! You’ve got to see this!”

  “What is it, honey?” She tilted her head and studied the detail of the fingers on the hand covering the angel’s face.

  “It’s another spider. It’s even bigger. It’s huge!”

  “That’s nice, dear,” she grouched.

  “No really, Mom! You need to see this!”

  “Tucker, I’m bu…”

  “Mom, please!”

  “Okay, okay,” she sighed. “I’m coming. I wish your dad would hurry up and get back. I’m sure he would enjoy the Great Spider Tour a lot more than me.”

  Karen spotted the boy about three rows over and fifty feet away. He was pointing at something out of view and practically jumping with excitement. She gave a brief grumble and slogged in his direction. The ground was ill kept, and there were vines, ivies and weeds for her to contend with.

  “Okay, Tuck,” she puffed as she arrived alongside the boy. “What’s all the…Oh my God!”

  It was another spider. And it was indeed bigger.

  The arachnid glaring back at her from between the two obelisks spanned at least ten inches across. Its ebony legs were thick as nails. The fact its web didn’t even bow under its weight gave evidence of its strength.

  “What the hell!” Karen gasped as she gazed up at the beast.

  It made her feel small and childlike again, and not in a good way. She pulled Tucker behind her and tried to wrap her mind around what she was seeing. Like many people, she had once studied the things which terrified her, and what she saw now didn’t align at all with what she had been taught.

  “Argiope aurantia,” she recalled. “A common orb weaver with a leg span of 2 to 3 inches.”

  Only this one measured three times larger…maybe more.

  And the pair of silk wads near the center of its web were too large to be the grasshoppers her brothers were fond of feeding their spiders of yore. A couple of feathers protruding from the cocoon showed this spider to have a completely different kind of diet. One of them appeared to have been a large crow.

  “Okay, now hold on a minute.” Karen swallowed and forced herself to breathe. “This isn
’t right. They aren’t supposed to do this. And they don’t get this big. They aren’t supposed to get anywhere near this big.”

  “Mom?”

  “Shhhhh…” she cautioned and did a slow scan of the area, now looking specifically between the tombstones instead of at the grave markers themselves. It didn’t take her long to spot two more of the big spiders, one of them maybe an inch or two longer than the creature before them.

  “Mom? I’m getting scared.”

  She didn’t blame him.

  “It’s okay, son,” she whispered as she checked behind them, and then started backing away from the hateful thing. “They don’t like leaving their webs.”

  “I wouldn’t be so sure,” Tucker’s voice rose, “Look at that.”

  She followed the direction he pointed and saw the silk wrapped bundle at the bottom of one of the spider’s obelisks.

  Oh shit! This thing eats small animals too!

  “Okay, Tucker,” Karen soothed the boy now clinging to her arm. “We’re just going to slowly go back the way we came and return to the car. We’re going to keep our eyes wide open, and not go between any tombstones until we’re sure it’s clear. And watch out for all the ivy on the ground. I don’t want either one of us to trip.”

  Karen tried to keep her demeanor calm as they moved. Choosing a clear path mattered more than moving quickly, and she did a constant scan around her as they moved through the tombstones. She managed to pick out three more of the large spiders, although none were close, and none as large as the beast they faced earlier. Still, they were much bigger than normal and she had no desire to encounter one.

  Tucker had a death grip on her arm, and she could see him trying to fight back tears. She couldn’t imagine how frightened he must be. At the moment, her only goal in life was to get him safely back in the car.

  “C’mon,” she gently urged the boy as they moved through gravestones. “We’re almost there. We…whoops!”

  She focused in on a big spider hanging in the space about three rows ahead of them.

  That wasn’t there before, dammit! This is the way I came and it wasn’t there before…I think…no wait…I was a row over…damn, I walked right past that thing coming in…