Night Film(130)

Suddenly, I accidentally kicked the leg of a wooden table and it collapsed at the center. It was piled with tarnished skeleton keys, chrome car-hood ornaments, a dirty crystal chandelier, and it all started to spill off, a loud cascade of crystal drops, chains, hundreds of metal keys clattering stridently onto the floor. Clutching Sam—who mashed her face against my shoulder—I managed to catch the chandelier with one hand and right the table legs with my knee.

Hopper snapped his fingers.

He pointed at the back wall, where there was a cruddy skylight and a narrow door with frosted glass.

A human shadow had just moved directly behind it, though, as if sensing we’d spotted it, it froze.

It looked like a man, elongated head, broad shoulders.

“Anybody there?” Hopper called out again.

After a slight hesitation, the door opened and a man poked his head out. It was too dark to see his face, but he had a full head of orange-blond hair.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t hear anyone come in.”

The voice was husky yet delicate—oddly so. With a sharp intake of breath, the man stepped inside, closing the door behind him. And yet, facing us, he remained exactly where he was, his arm tucked behind him, his hand probably on the doorknob, as if considering escaping back through there in a matter of seconds.

It had to be him. The Spider.

He was a massive presence—at least 66″—with a hulking, muscular build. He wore all black, the only interruption in his black attire a priest’s white clerical collar.

“How may I help you?” His voice came out in a rush, followed by silence, almost as if the words accumulated in his mouth like pebbles in a drain, then suddenly burst out, giving him this strange, jarring cadence. “Are you looking for something in particular?”

“Yes,” said Hopper, stepping slowly toward him. “Hugo Villarde.”

The man went absolutely still.

“I see.”

He said nothing else, didn’t move a muscle for at least half a minute. Yet I could see, even from where I was standing a fair distance behind Hopper and Nora, his shoulders rising and falling.

He was afraid.

“Don’t bother making a run for it,” Hopper said, stepping toward him. “We know who you are. We just want to talk.”

The man lowered his head in submission, his hair—an unnatural bronze color—catching the light.

“You’re police, I take it?” he asked.

None of us responded. I was surprised by the assumption. I was, after all, holding a child in my arms.

Yet perhaps he hadn’t noticed me. He was staring at the floor.

“I—I actually knew you’d come,” he whispered. “Eventually. So you found it all up there, is that it? At long last, it’s all coming out.”

He whispered this with evident fear—again, in that low, eerily female voice.

“How many were there?” he asked.

“How many what?” I demanded, stepping toward him.

He raised his head, noticing me for the first time.

He then turned to stare pointedly at Nora and then Hopper, slowly gathering that he’d misjudged the situation: We were not police. And though he did nothing specific, I was somehow aware that as this dawned on him, his shoulders relaxed, his head rose an inch, as if he no longer was deflating himself or tucking himself away.

When he finally looked back at me a chill of unease shivered through me. I was certain he was an even blacker form hovering there by the door, as if extreme confidence were slowly returning to him and it made him swell slightly, come more darkly into being.

What was it Marlowe Hughes had said?

You see, that priest—he was still there, hanging on, silently waiting at the perimeter. An oily shadow always around.

Though the man’s face remained immobile, his eyes—what I could see of them—flicked curiously around Sam.

I needed to get Samantha away from him. Now.





91


I moved with her back down the narrow pathway toward the front of the shop. I needed a safe enough distance but close enough where I could keep an eye on her. About ten yards away I found a large, plum-colored velvet armchair, the seat worn white. Beside it was a table with a stack of magazines and a yellow plastic horse, nothing of any danger.

“Noooooo,” Sam whined as I placed her in the chair. “I don’t want to.”

“Honey, I need you to wait right here.”

“It’s enchanted.” She stared up at me, her face distraught and crumpled. She was on the verge of tears.

“Not anymore, honey. It’s fun.”

She shook her head and clamped her arms around my leg, burying her face against my knee. I picked up the horse.

“Great Scott. Do you know who this is?”

Keeping her forehead glued to my thigh, she craned her face back an inch to eye the toy sideways.

“It’s Hi Ho Silver. Incredible. He’s a thousand years old, and if you’re nice to him he’ll tell you his secrets. Now, I’ll be right over there. Do not touch anything. I’ll be right back. And then you and I are going to have huge ice-cream sundaes, okay?”

There must have been something intriguing about the horse—he looked to date back to the forties, his saddle and reins painted on—because she took him, sullenly turning him over in her tiny hands.