In Seven-Eights Time

Okay, since we passed a thousand on the Fake Believe kickstarter (and if you haven't checked it out, you might want to, if nothing else than acknowledgement that putting up fiction for free on the internet is totally insane and doesn't get you anywhere. But I'm honoring tradition by doing so) I'm posting a free horror story for everyone to read. This is from a couple years back, and (you know this part) never found a home with any outlet. So it has a home now. Right here. Enjoy.

Matt Maxwell copyrighted and all that jazz.

Toby twisted the lid of the glass jar off and the biting scent of the nail polish remover boiled out invisibly. He turned the jar and tipped its contents onto the felt mat. The now-dead mantis danced out a little, stiff in rigor. It was frozen now, robbed of the grace and aloofness that had animated it moments ago.

He tasted the last bits of the chemical perfume from the now empty jar. At his left hand sat a collection of needles and hatpins he’d bought for all of a dollar from that junk store in Santa Fe. He told them he’d needed some long pins or something. He’d just caught an amazing bug and he needed to keep it. The clerk pulled out the old Skippy jar filled with pins and sharp junk. They asked him if that would do. Toby said yes, because it had clearly been fate.

That was the first one. The very first. That night of dry thunderstorms and electric charge in the air when he’d seen that kid hitchhiking lit up by the headlights and the chaparral strewn out behind him like stacks of fish bones. That kid had his thumb out and freckles on his face and hair like a surfer bleached out in the sun. He saw Toby stop and asked for a lift, the cold making him sad and little. Toby said yes, because it had clearly been fate.

When he and the boy were done with one another, Toby dragged the body (much lighter than he’d thought) out over the scrabbling dirt and rock and sticking brush to a place where maybe he’d be found and maybe it wouldn’t be for a long time. Not a lot of traffic. Probably even fewer people looking for that lost boy and his freckles. The wind kicked up and threw a faint veil of pebbles at Toby, getting only laughter in reply.

“Should have stopped me before I’d even done it,” he said to whatever force had been behind the wind, if there was any. “Should have stopped me before the idea was even in my head.”

The wind said nothing to that.

Toby swung the flashlight down to a dark motion that he’d seen at the boy’s chest. He was entranced by a slow and skittered trundling of legs on a spider bigger than his hand. The tarantula hunkered down possessively on the boy’s body. Toby could hear the denim rubbed by arachnid hairs, furtive between the irregular gales. The critter was dusted over with desert sand that it looked like a ghost, a thing meant to ferry souls from one world to the next. But now it was pinned in the light.

“Yeah, you’re not going anywhere,” Toby said. He took the red bandana from his back pocket and fingered the spider into the center of it, then tucked the fabric into a bindle.

After Toby got the pins and cotton balls and nail polish remover and a tarnished sliver picture frame with a red felt backing, he took the spider back to the motor court room he’d rented and turned the glass into a killing jar. He then carefully speared the spider in two places and pressed those pins into the felt span between the etched metal edges. His first. He later went to the library to learn its name: Aphonopelma chalcodes, a name even bigger than the spider itself. But it wasn’t just a spider. It was a guardian. It was there to take that boy’s spirit home and that was too bad. Not everyone gets to go home.

Toby kept that totem and the sole it bore with him.

It was only the first. The first of so many souls.

The praying mantis took some work to trick into the jar. It looked so fragile and delicate that the fear of ripping it to pieces kept Toby slow and tentative. Its legs flicked as it picked its way across the woman’s floral-print blouse, stopping at the dark stickiness as if that were a gulf it could not cross. It tasted the air with its forelegs but went no further. Maybe it knew what was coming.

The night had been heavy, thick with another oncoming storm. The clouds were under-lit with spill from the city of Charlotte off in the distance. Night was the texture of black mud all curdled and congealed. Toby could all but see the hands of whatever was above them all set to wring the clouds dry, bringing a flooding rain with that. He shouldn’t even have to bury her. The sky would do it for him.

But he didn’t have long to capture that mantis. He’d done it all the other times and it wouldn’t do to break the streak now.

Even if his collection was getting harder to haul around now, what with the pop-out plastic shells covering the bugs so that he could move them safely. He’d learned his lesson with that tarantula, breaking one of the legs after taking it down while leaving Cincy. After that waitress. The leg lay there on the stained floor like a withered string of fingerbones, each knuckle slightly contracted.

So he had to be more careful. All those souls. Fragile things. Maybe even trapped in those dead shells. It was a sacred weight, measurable only by forces greater than him.

The mantis was all legs now, twiddling in place as Toby ushered it into the glass jar. It played legs off the glass, shining with the distant light and the first drops of rain spattering against it. The bug jumped as a raindrop big as a dime smacked into its abdomen. The wings were orange in the light and marked in a pattern that somehow reflected that blood-marked flowered blouse. Toby was dazzled by the similarity, falling into it and frozen as the insect leaped up into the air with a snicking sound like a knife opening. Exactly like it.

He mouthed a curse but only got a syllable in.

A gust of wind blow the bug back to him, whisper gentle. It picked its way up his chest, raindrops weltering off the shell and he captured both it and the errant soul it was bearing.

Then he drove home whistling a tune nobody else knew but him, whistling it the whole time. Fate. It was fate.

He’d been so diligent, so careful to keep one for every assay out into the world that he’d carved out for himself. He never took a souvenir, not like some others he’d read about. No evidence. Just what the earth had seen fit to give to him by way of a keepsake, jars for souls in all different shapes.

He flicked the trailer light on and looked up at the wall in the back of what pretended to be the living room. The plastic and glass squares of his collection all gleamed. Something seemed to move behind one of them, but he rubbed his eyes and wiped that away. Just comedown after.

He’d lost count of these trophies. Maybe one for every state in the lower forty-eight, not that he’d been to all of them. Counting your winnings, though, that was just rude, still in the middle of the game and all. Toby wasn’t sure who he was playing it against. But someone not him was keeping track and that was good enough. They could weigh souls and keep count both.

He brought the mantis in the jar up to his eye level and watched the bug try to paw its way out of the place where it was going to die.

“It’s okay, friend. Your labors have come to a close. Mine continue.”

A blast of wind shouldered into the trailer, rocking it linebacker-hard. One of the frames fell from the wall and clattered to the floor, plastic facing tumbling off in another direction. Toby set the jar down and went to see what had dropped. One of the bigger pieces.

Oh, he remembered her. She had black hair and skin ruddy as the dirt she’d died on. Blue eyes that saw everything but not soon enough. When he’d finished, her DON’T MESS WITH TEXAS shirt would never be white again. And then, all in dream, this moth with a pair of eyes on the backsides of its huge wings alighted on the bridge of the woman’s nose and spread those wings. The moth’s eyes became the woman’s in echo. Toby had taken the creature with trembling hands. It rested on his knuckles patiently as he edgingly stepped back to the truck and the toolbox he kept there. It was barely big enough. He’d dumped out its contents, placed a couple of nail polish-soaked cotton balls in the bottom and closed the lid as gently as kissing his mother goodnight.

He remembered the moth and thanked whoever was listening that it was still intact and whole, wings spread and those eyes making it seem like an owl or other predator. But it wasn’t that. It was only pretending.

The wind lashed and wet leaves smacked against windows heavy as drunken birds. There were other sounds beneath that. But Toby was far too old to be scared by them. Man on his path couldn’t be made jumpy by much and expect to stay in the game long.

He sat down with the forceps and took a cotton ball, dripping bitter stink, and snuck it under the lid of the jar that he’d been handed so long ago. Then he just waited for the legs to stop twitching so much, for that curious exploration to dissolve away to something a little more pliable.

The storm continued.

He pierced the thorax of the mantis just as the wind hammered his home once more. Tired, he flinched and thought he saw a twitching of limbs, maybe a final death throe. But insects weren’t that complicated or possessive of their own lives. Many people weren’t, when it came down to things. They’d given up or fled or shut down or maybe in honor of Toby’s capture of everything that they’d ever held or would hold dear. Insects fought more but didn’t rattle or wheeze once it was done.

But the mantis hadn’t moved, cleanly impaled. Toby was tired enough that he simply pressed the needle into the cork ball. The insect hung there like a titan king of some doomed place. Toby dragged himself to rest at the couch, shoes on, tired as a child.

And he slept without dream or trouble. For a time.

He awoke beneath a thin and tired blanket that he’d pulled across himself in his sleep. Something danced across his bare hand, pulling him from dreamlessness with little prickings, little leg tips grabbing and plucking then releasing as something made its way across his knucklebones.

He pulled his hand away and looked. Nothing. Nothing there.

Night wasn’t over yet. The ring of lights strung between his trailer and Mrs. Travis’ had fallen during the storm, which still lingered hangover-heavy. There was a trail of weak luminance leading from the road where they’d fallen, directly to his window. Leaves stuck to it like spots on a dog. Between them, lit from the ground and behind, were little insects, lightless fireflies maybe. They flit between leaves, between the black splotches, only for a second at a time. Toby had never seen their like, but he hadn’t been here forever, either.

The room was washed in dark and barely picked out in whatever was falling through the window now. His fingers bracketed the switch and he snapped it. Instead of an unobstructed bath of light, there was a mottling, almost a leaking of electricity and incandescence that crept out from interlocked fingers or jagged bodies crushed together on the surface of the bulb. That persisted for a second or two before a sizzle, snap and then pop as the bulb blew. He snapped the switch once. Then once more. Nothing. He snorted.

“That fuse again. I’ll fix it later.”

The shape and quality of the light tugged at him, something about how it wept, as if pushing past a clinging obstruction. Just like the leaves smacked onto the window, only these didn’t move. He had the feeling of a hand closing around the light fixture, snuffing it surely as a candle between calloused fingertips. That sensation settled around him and he realized he needed distraction, any kind.

He went to pull something from the fridge. The greenish and underwater light poured out and he grabbed the last can from the wire shelf. Leaving the door open, he used the refrigerator to illuminate the room.

“Huh. Not the fuse.”

His eye caught on a gleam of light on top of the galley table, in his work space. A naked strand of gold shone back at him from a copse of tarnished and silver and bronzed needles. It was tall and proud. And unladen.

“The hell?”

The mantis was gone. The can, unopened, thudded to the floor, solid. Toby pressed his fingers to his eyes and rubbed hard enough to make them tear.

The golden sliver gleamed, not even a sheen of residue left behind. There came a prickling like a thousand cockroaches running underneath his shirt starting at the base of his spine and spreading outward from there. Something twisted beneath his ribs, a sensation he hadn’t felt since he was a child.

He wondered aloud where the thing had gone, standing there sweating in the drafty chill of the trailer. Then his sight fell across the collection of mismatched frames and glass on the back wall. Or where it should have been. Instead, they lay in a careless litter on the floor. Every single one of them was down and dumped in a jumbling of angles and planes of reflection in the fluorescent spill.

Cursing, he swatted the cork ball and bare needles from the table, taking with it the felt mat. The crawly sensation stuck to him like summer sweat. He tried to retrace his steps, to figure out what would have made him forget to kill the mantis or not mount it properly. The image of it stuck behind his eyes, jointed legs straining and pulling the insect body free over the head of the long needle. He shook his head until stars danced in his eyes.

“Crazy. This is crazy.” Toby stared at the upended pincushion. “Just didn’t kill it and it wiggled off. Just wiggled off. Now it’s dead.”

Unless it wasn’t. He imagined the mantis sucking the last breath of that woman. He imagined that charge lingering like static in the air. Wasn’t electricity life?

The refrigerator fired up, compressor huffing and chugging to maintain the chill. His heart wrung itself out at that and then he had a good laugh. Until he heard the first loose scuttling, something bigger than a cockroach. Somewhere.

As he pivoted to reach for the refrigerator door, there was another sizzle then snap and the door light went out in the same moment as the compressor giving out.

“That’s the fuse box. Pfft.” Canting his head, he tried to get a look out the window and a guess when dawn might roll around. Outside, the rain dripped from uncounted trees and overhangs but at least the wind had stopped. Or just held its breath.

Resigned, Toby went to pick up the upended pincushion. Shouldn’t be sloppy, and stepping on that in the dark could have been an unpleasant surprise.

He wondered if the swelling riverbank and wind had done its job on the broad with the flowered blouse. Not that it made any never-mind. He wasn’t fool enough to leave a trace easily found, and that CSI garbage only works on television. He crouched and reached for the glinting of the needles, stuck out at uneven intervals like jackstraws.

“Come here, you-“

Something bit his hand. He could see the outline of it glistening and pale like a string of bones ripped from a child. The stinger was dug deep in the flesh, pouring out a permeating burning, feeling like his hand had been laid open right at the webbing between forefinger and thumb.

“No scorpions around,” he said before swallowing the next words.

Of course not, he thought. They’re not from around here. But I brought one with me. That woman outside Tucson, someone’s mother maybe, gray hair and spectacles and waiting by the bus stop. And after, that fat yellow scorpion had crawled up her arm and all but dared him to pick it up. It had stood, front end lifted up towards the woman’s head like it was breathing. It had tried to sting him then, but only got him now.

Toby brought his hand up and the scorpion dangled from it, legs and pincers grabbing air, abdomen swinging like a pendulum in the moist light from the matted window. He stared at it despite the biting pain, like it was a tumor he’d sprouted one morning or a new scar that he’d gotten on a drunk without the faintest idea as to how it had come about.

“Fun’s fun, but enough.” He snapped his wrist and forearm in a single motion, hard enough to send the scorpion flying. His hand throbbed with the pain of a gunshot wound. He then pressed his thumb and forefinger of the opposite hand onto the wound. It was hot as a stove burner, but the pressure helped, or at least distracted him from the pain.

Fumbling through the toolbox, Toby came up with the little LED light no bigger than a key head. It came on and he passed a watery circle of light about the room. The scorpion was nowhere to be found. But there was another sound, more clatter. This time around the ruin of frames strewn at the base of the wall. It was a sinuous sound, pair after pair of legs with a motion rippling through them like a lazy surfline.

The tail end of the centipede disappeared into an aggregation of corners, sliding out of the light. Toby moved in closer to get a better look and realized that something was missing. There was the glass and the metal, the frames were all there. But the things that had been framed, they were nowhere to be seen. He tried to think of the centipede and who he’d found it on, remembering the pretty black waitress who was broken down on the roadside. How the centipede drank her in, legs flicking in waves.

A choking croak escaped his lips. Every inch of his skin now was crawling with phantom limbs, exoskeletons and chitin and bristling hairs all dragging over the surface of him. He swept his hands up and down his body, finding nothing there. His own touch banished the sensation, pushing it deeper inward.

He knew that he shouldn’t be counting, but that was all he could do. The scorpion, the tarantula, the black widow and Jerusalem cricket, the locust and moths, that black butterfly with its wings chased in gold, the June bugs that shone electric green and the firefly that continued to glow for three whole nights even after it had been spiked. None of them were to be found, only suggestive emptiness between borders, sometimes the needles left embedded in the backing, sometimes torn out. He wondered how many of them still scuttled around with the needles slowing them down.

The throbbing in his hand crept up past his wrist and he could feel individual nerves in his fingers flaring and pulsing with a beating that was not his own heart.

The wind pushed the trailer around and knocked his collection off the wall. He was lucky it hadn’t happened already. He passed the light around the room and saw no glistening of carapace or hunched clutch of legs. Something had gotten in the trailer and stung him. It wasn’t a scorpion he’d taken from one of his victims near all the way across the United States ago. That wasn’t a thing that could have happened.

Toby cursed at the pain in his hand and then took a couple steps to the kitchen and the sink.

“Just wash this out and I’ll be right as rain. Clean up later.”

The faucet gurgled like it always did and then spit up body-temperature water. He passed his hand under the stream and didn’t feel any relief.

He bent down to look for the dropped beer, weakly feeling around with his bad hand, penlight in the good one. He swept the light past his feet and something red and black with long legs crawling over one of his boots. Without thought he yelped and tried to kick the centipede free. Maybe he even did.

His weight thrown out of balance, he tried to set his loose foot down, only to find not the floor, but the aluminum can of beer that he’d been seeking. He crashed backwards, shoulder and base of his neck smacking into the countertop and then sliding down the cabinet on the way to the floor. Nerves pinched, his good hand went dead and the edges of his vision went torn technicolor as he slid to a stop, staring upwards at the ceiling which was catching the first lightening of dawn.

His good arm refused to move when he willed. The scorpion-stung hand throbbed uselessly. He tried rolling onto his side and then knees. He’d be fine if he could do that. It was futile as trying to pull a pickup truck out of a bog one-handed.

Then he laughed at the stupidity of all this, a hollow chuckle that rang throughout the closeness of the trailer. He kept laughing until the wings of the moth bigger than his hand flapped erratically, bouncing along the ceiling like it could batter its way out. He heard the scuffle of the insect on the greasy surface, but more than that, he heard a metallic tinging or scratching noise dragged along with it.

Then the moth dove and hovered above him, early sun catching a glint of the needle embedded in it, point still sharp and facing downward. He dared not look away. There was a blur and a swoop as it didn’t flutter but dove. He felt the needle enter the skin at the bridge of his nose, right where it met the skull. Something else heavier than gravity was behind this, pushing it in a finger’s length or more until it came to rest on a structure that Toby didn’t want to name nor could he at that moment. There was impossible weight behind it. Maybe even heavier than a soul’s. More things than he could name went numb. He could feel sensation but not move a limb or even close his eyes.

The moth wrenched and pulled itself free of the needle, flapping madly and all Toby could do was suffer through it, unable to flick it away or turn his face or even scream for it to stop. For a second he thought he could not just smell the perfume of that woman, but her, the sweat and skin of her.

The huge moth hovered for a moment and alit on the countertop, just watching with beaded eyes that still glittered somehow like wet rubies in the morning light.

The sound came next, resonating along the floor of the trailer, the whole thing becoming a drum head for countless delicate fingertips and legs. It scraped with ruined bodies, and most of all a heavy scuttling that came in a 7/8 time, undergirding the whole song. Its unevenness scratched at Toby made him impatient for what was coming.

“G… Go ahead,” he mumbled, dredging up strength enough for defiance.

But they did not go ahead. They would have all day. And the day after that. And then some more.