Spider Legs Read online

  CHAPTER 8

  Nathan

  ST. JOHN'S, THE capital of Newfoundland, was a few miles south of Bonavista Bay. It was a port, a commercial and cultural center, and it served a population of 170,000. After Elmo and Nathan reported the grisly death on the schooner Phantom to the St. John's police, Elmo had the film in the camera developed.

  Nathan paced back and forth around a large oak table in the corner of a mahogany-paneled police conference room. Elmo sat on a chair, resting his large arms on the table in front of him, as they both waited for a meeting with officials from St. John's police department. On the table, spread out in an array of seven photos, were large color prints made from some of the negatives in the camera they had found on the destroyed schooner.

  Nathan looked at one corner of the genteel room that contained a brown-lacquered cabinet with oriental panels. “Nice furniture,” he said. In another corner was an all-glass fish tank containing about fifty Zanclus cornutus fish, better known as Moorish Idols. On each of these marine fish were two black bars crossing a white and yellow body. Their caudal fins were black. The most prominent part of their anatomy was a long, trailing dorsal fin that protruded many inches beyond the fishes’ tails. Nathan got up and wandered over to the tank.

  “Beautiful fish,” he said. “But isn't it kind of strange for a police department to maintain such a beautiful tank?”

  “Not for Newfoundland,” Elmo said. “We're all fond of fish here.”

  “I always wanted to have a big tank like this at home but my ex-wife always objected,” said Nathan. “She said it was too much trouble. Too much money. Said we didn't have enough room in the house. Why is it that most spouses object to, or merely tolerate, the aquarium hobbies of their husbands?”

  “I don't know. But I think you're right. Maybe that's why I never married.”

  Nathan smiled faintly, sure that the man had more substantial reasons to have missed marriage, such as the length of his fingers. But of course he wouldn't remark on that. “These Moorish Idol fish are pretty difficult to keep. They're reluctant feeders and never breed in an aquarium. Whoever is in charge of the aquarium must be pretty good with fish.”

  “Why thank you,” said a woman who had just walked into the room.

  Policewoman Natalie Sheppard and Police Chief Joseph Falow shook hands with Elmo and Nathan. Natalie had anthracite eyes and hair as black as Manchester coal. She was currently out of uniform, wearing a watermelon-colored cotton sweater dress. Nathan wished immediately that he had some pretext to get to know her better. But of course he concealed this, and turned to the other. Police Chief Falow had iron-brown eyebrows, thick sandy hair, and a lanky frame without an ounce of spare flesh. After shaking hands, they took seats around the table. Falow's thick hand pinched a cigarette. His other hand drummed the table top with a pen.

  “OK, gentlemen,” Falow said. “Why did you call me? What news have you got for me?” He had a masculine force about him, a great presence born of certainty.

  “Take a look at these,” Elmo said to Falow and Natalie. He handed the prints to the officers.

  “Look like icebergs,” Natalie said as she held the photos in her hands. Her voice was soft and eminently reasonable. Falow looked at the photos, but withheld judgement. He sat with the ramrod posture of a British brigadier.

  “We got these from a camera we found on the Phantom," Nathan said. “Take a look at the dark area at the lower left.” He rose from the table and pointed at the photos.

  “You shouldn't have taken the camera from the boat,” Falow said with irritation. He then looked at the photos. “Looks like a crab or a spider.” Falow spoke in a flat, inflectionless voice as he carefully examined an iceberg photo. “What's this have to do with the deaths on the schooner?”

  Nathan said just one word: “Pycnogonid.” He sat with his sneakers angled on the floor like frog's legs. There was a brooding quality about his voice.

  “What's that?” asked Natalie.

  “Pycnogonid,” he repeated. Now there was a certain thrill of alarm in his voice. “PICK-no-GO-nid. It's a spiderlike marine animal. Pycnogonids occur in all oceans, especially the arctic. They usually dwell on the bottom.”

  “How big is it?” Falow asked.

  “We couldn't tell just from looking at the photos,” Nathan said. “So we went back out to sea to take a look at the berg firsthand to estimate the scale of the features in the photo. This sea spider is big.”

  Natalie seemed to be listening with rapt attention. Even the air seemed to be holding its breath. Falow stripped off his jacket, and the brown leather straps of his shoulder holster stood out like large suspenders on the starched white of his shirt. They were all beginning to appreciate the magnitude of the problem.

  “Today there are more than six hundred different species, and we have fossils of these creatures which demonstrate they also lived during the time of the dinosaurs.” Nathan took a drink of water and continued. “They usually range in size from four millimeters in such forms as the littoral Tanystylum to about sixty centimeters in deep-sea species of Colossendeis. Little is known about the deep-sea species, but larger sizes have been hypothesized. . . .” His voice trailed away ominously.

  “Don't keep us in suspense, Doctor. How big?” Falow spoke in a powerful editorial voice. He stroked his cheek with great tender fingers. Nathan didn't speak, trying to gather his words. “Get to the point,” Falow said with the temperament of an underfed grizzly.

  Well, he had asked for it. “This one was as big as an adult elephant,” Nathan said. “It killed the people on the schooner. Tore them to shreds. We also think it was responsible for the death of an Inuit family a week ago several hundred miles north in Nain on the subarctic Labrador coast.” Nathan went on, blithely ignoring the sudden silence in the room. “We think it will kill again, although there's a slim chance it will leave the coast and go out to the deep sea and leave humans alone.”

  “Sounds like a bunch of crap,” Falow said. His cheek muscles stood out as he clenched his jaw. “Is this guy some kind of nut?” Falow turned to Natalie expecting her to say “yes,” even though she knew as little about Elmo and Nathan as Falow did.

  “We're not nuts,” Elmo said. “Look at the photos yourself.”

  “Those photos are so fuzzy you could see anything you wanted in them.”

  “Then look at this,” Nathan said. He withdrew a six-inch spine from his pocket and held it out to Falow, who did not take it. “We found this on the boat. I know it's from a pycnogonid.”

  “Hey, how dare you remove more evidence from the scene of a crime?” Falow got to his feet.

  “What do you suggest?” asked Natalie. “Can we capture or kill it?” She turned to Falow, who was calming himself. “Whatever we do, we don't want to alarm the public, the tourists, the fishermen.”

  “You had better alarm someone,” Nathan said. “It's fast, strong. It has a voracious appetite, and it's smart. It would probably be killed if someone fired enough gunshots at its head and brain. The hard part is to catch the creature in the act before it retreats back into the safety of the sea.”

  “What do you mean probably be killed?” Falow demanded.

  “The nervous system of a pycnogonid is composed of a supra-esophageal brain or ganglion and a chain of six ventral ganglia,” Nathan said.

  “In plain English, Doctor,” Falow said with a suspicious, sideways squint.

  “It has more than one brain,” Elmo said, a cold hard-pinched expression on his face. “Destroy one brain and the others may take control of its body.”

  There was a momentary silence. They were beginning to understand the nature of the problem.

  “How does it attack?” Natalie asked.

  “If we can extrapolate from what we know through observations of smaller specimens, the pycnogonid will grab its victim with its front legs and claws and bring the victim toward its mouth,” Nathan said. “Its triangular-shaped mouth is at the end of a long sucking appendage,
a proboscis. It sucks out the body fluids of its victims. It drains them alive. Like a spider.”

  “The question now is,” Natalie said, “how should we respond?”

  “How about offering a reward for its capture?” Nathan suggested.

  Falow stood up and slapped his fist into his other hand with a thud. “That's the worst idea I can think of. It would cause a panic. It would turn into a media event. I can just see the posters now: $1000 Reward For Killer Sea Spider!” Falow paced back and forth for a few seconds. “Looks like we should set some traps and wait to see if it attacks again. Let's just hope the media don't get wind of this. We don't want panic in the streets.”

  Nathan nodded. He didn't much like the police chief, but the man was right. Panic would accomplish nothing worthwhile. So it was best to go along with Falow's dictate. But Nathan hoped that his future contacts with the police would be limited to Natalie Sheppard. She seemed reasonable as well as being attractive.

  CHAPTER 9

  Hospital

  NOW, ON HIS way to the hospital, Elmo had time to ponder personal matters. He was sorry his sister still refused to make up with their mother, but he really couldn't blame her. He just felt obliged to keep trying, lest Mrs. Samules die without a rapprochement that he might have arranged. If she lived through this siege, he would try again next time. Martha was not a bad woman, she was just isolated from her own kind, and the most likely wedge to begin the ending of that isolation was their mother. A hopeless cause, probably, but still worth pursuing.

  He had been tempted to tell Martha about the gruesome discovery on the sea, but something had held him back. Of course the news wasn't supposed to be given out yet, but Martha could keep a secret as well as anyone. Her input could have been valuable, because of her extensive knowledge of the creatures of the sea. But maybe he hadn't wanted to mix that in with the subject of their mother, lest the gruesomeness somehow be transferred. So he had tried to stay on the one matter. He had delayed his departure from the store, trying to find some avenue, but none had offered. Then he had encountered Lisa, only in passing, and—

  She was beautiful, even ethereal, with a musical voice. Her eyes were somewhere between hazel and dark aquamarine, like the sea on a rainy day, and strangely soothing. She had reminded him of a lost college love—who had never known he existed, because he had known better than ever to approach her. He had learned early—very early—about the effect his appearance had on others. It had been years since he had so far forgotten himself to smile openly at any other person, and he normally kept his hands to himself, their fingers curled into loose fists. He had learned to get along.

  Indeed, he had gotten along well, in every respect but socially. Others appreciated his memory and abilities. But women—however polite they were, however they masked it, they remained absolutely off-limits, emotionally. So it would be completely foolish of him to suppose that a creature like Lisa would ever see him as other than repulsive.

  Yet he could dream. He had known of Lisa before, and had seen her on occasion in the shadows of the store. But this time it had been different. Her sudden lovely smile had caught him offguard, and struck through to his fancy. Cupid's dart, finding the momentary crevice in his emotional armor. He would have guarded against it, as he routinely did, had he not been distracted by his problem with his sister. Now he had been wounded in the heart. He would survive it, but it was too bad it had happened right now, when he couldn't afford to be distracted. But that was a full circle; his distraction had allowed the wound.

  But perhaps there was a positive aspect to this situation. He was about to endure a negative experience. His idle fascination with a girl whom he had met, literally, in passing, might help take the edge off what was to come.

  For after his meeting with officers Sheppard and Falow, Elmo was visiting his 85-year-old mother in the local hospital at Petit Forte, a few miles west of St. John's. He hated hospitals. He'd spent too much time in them as a child while doctors struggled to cope with his ulcerative colitus. Surgery had cured him, but even after all these years hospitals continued to make him feel like a nervous child.

  Elmo's mother suffered from polycythemia vera, a disease in which the bone marrow mysteriously began producing large numbers of red blood cells. As a result, her blood was unusually viscous. Elmo had personally hand-delivered requisitions to get the best blood specialist in the hospital to consult on her care.

  “There's not much we can do,” the doctor on call told Elmo. They stood in the white corridor outside Mrs. Samules's room. “When the red cell count skyrockets, we insert a needle into a vein and simply drain blood into a bottle on the floor. This helps a little.”

  Of course she was old, he reminded himself. Everybody had to die sometime, and old age was the best way to go. But he was discovering that it wasn't any more pleasant this way than when it happened to a younger acquaintance. He owed so much to her, and he didn't want her to go.

  Elmo went inside the room. “How you doing, Mom?” he asked. He hid a thick swallow in his throat and turned away from all the nearby IV bottles. On the wall were some framed posters of tropical fish amidst lush freshwater vegetation: tiger barbs, cardinal tetras, and firemouth cichlids swimming among an almost comical over-abundance of duckweed, Java ferns, and giant Indian water stars. Evidently the hospital administration thought these natural scenes would have a calming effect on patients. On each of the posters were the word's “Martha's Tropical Fish Store.” If only Martha could have been here to see this! But of course she probably knew all about it. It wasn't that Mrs. Samules was trying to surround herself with evidences of her alienated daughter, but that the hospital had this ready source for anything relating to fish.

  Martha's store—where he had met Lisa. A girl he knew almost nothing about. Except for her brilliant smile.

  “Could be better. There's a pain in my left side,” his mother replied. It took Elmo a moment to reorient; in the time she had taken to answer, he had suffered a lapse of proper attention. He resolved to correct that immediately.

  Mrs. Samules was an unstylish, soft little woman. She leaned forward, grasping her legs just above the knees. As they talked for the next half hour, the pain got worse and she said that she felt she was going to pass out. Elmo called for the doctor.

  “Mrs. Samules,” the doctor called, and shook her slightly. “It's Dr. Carter; remember me?”

  Mrs. Samules's eyes lifted just a little and she spoke in a whisper. “I feel lousy.”

  As Dr. Carter lifted her hospital gown, Elmo saw that something inside her was bulging, visibly stretching the skin of the upper abdomen.

  “Am I going to die?” Mrs. Samules asked with apprehension and anxiety.

  “You'll be just fine, but we have to remove your spleen.” As the doctor left, Elmo followed him into the corridor and pulled him aside.

  “What are her chances?” he asked.

  “Unfortunately her chances of dying on the operating table are 70 percent.”

  “And if we choose not to operate?”

  “Then she will be dead in a day.” The doctor brought out a medical pamphlet on the spleen by the renowned Henry Draper, M.D. The book was illustrated with impressive daguerreotype microphotographs showing various diseases of the spleen. As Dr. Carter explained Mrs. Samules's condition to her son, most of the words simply went in one ear and out the other. The moment was filled with so much grayness and unrest. First the horror on the sea, then Lisa, and now the likely death of his mother. Elmo could not concentrate, so just shook his head as the doctor spoke.

  Then he was alone in the hospital, though others were constantly going back and forth. He wished Martha had come, not merely for their mother, but for himself. His sister was one tough woman, but she would understand the ache of this awful business. As it was, unbidden mental images of his mother's wizened face alternated with those of Lisa's lovely one, and of the decapitated woman. Individually, each was disturbing; overlapping like this, they were horrible. It wa
s as if old age illness could suddenly convert to lustrous beauty or horrible death. But his imagination refused to let the pictures go.

  He had given his permission for the surgery, of course. But had he merely hastened his mother's demise? What choice had he had? Martha could have helped ease the burden of decision, had she attended. Yet suppose the two of them had differed on this, too?

  Within 45 minutes Mrs. Samules was in the operating room. The doctors removed her spleen. The surgery went well, but in the recovery room she began to bleed. For the next few hours the doctors tried to stem the bleeding, but to no avail. She was slipping into a coma.

  As Elmo paced back and forth in the waiting room, his attention turned to a red TV playing near the back of the room. A group of newspeople were pouring out of a dark van with WNBT CHANNEL 9 ACTION NEWS written on its side. The object of their interest was a group of witnesses standing on a stone jetty by the pounding surf. Just hours before, a group of teenagers had disappeared from the jetty at Terra Nova National Park. The group of witnesses reported supposedly seeing a huge spider.

  “How can you be sure it was a spider?” a red-haired news-woman asked one of the witnesses. “Did you actually see it?”

  “Yes I saw it. Actually I just saw a few of its legs. Looked like a spider or a crab. Big as an elephant!”

  Local fisherman were organizing search parties for the spider. One tall man in a zip jacket with military insignias shouted into the TV camera.

  “We're going to get it.” He held up a rifle and waved it around like an oversized phallus. As Elmo watched the TV, he noticed an old lady in the hospital's waiting room tracked the rifle back and forth, her eyes bouncing like a metronome in a strange mixture of excitement and fear. The TV camera then panned to another member of the search party, a teenage boy in a long robe with a fractal pattern on it. He held a crystal in his hand. He gazed at it for a second, then held it up to the TV camera, and mumbled something about the end of the world and God's divine wrath. The news story ended, and a commercial with a comely actress selling shampoo blasted onto the screen. It made an odd contrast with the boy's shtick about divine wrath.